Behaviour of the boundary spanners

Capacity development support is often offered as aid, with a donor and a recipient. How does the behaviour of the people involved influence the effectiveness of such efforts?

A critical feature of relationships within the aid system is the notion of ‘boundary spanners’. These are people who straddle the border between their own and another organisation. In a way, they represent the behaviour of their organisation rather than their own behaviour. Their role normally involves renegotiation across boundaries, and that requires flexibility, adaptability and adjustment from both sides.

On the donor side, that person is often a programme officer who represents his or her organisation’s position, and who has a significant influence on whether or not any necessary adjustments will be accepted internally. They know, given the rules of the game, how much elasticity there is. They can be risk averse in their behaviour, and inclined to go back to the original contract without allowing any variation. Or they can say ‘Well, we have moved on, now we know more and we have to adjust; we have to change the time frame within which we can expect results’.

The roles of the boundary spanners, on both sides, are much more subtle than most people realise. It is rarely the case that people who play those roles were selected on the ground that they have negotiation skills as a core competence. Within the aid system the ability to negotiate is vital, but it is one requirement you seldom see in recruitment adverts.

What is more, there is often a power disparity in aid partnerships. The boundary spanner on the donor side is often about three or four levels down their organisation’s hierarchy. Meanwhile, the counterpart on the recipient side is often far higher up their organisation’s hierarchy. You might have a permanent secretary dealing with a programme officer at GTZ, for example. So you get power disparities built into the relational system. This doesn’t help when negotiating partnerships, because it can really interfere with achieving mutual understanding. That’s where personal behaviour becomes so important, but that is something that we don’t talk about very much.

Negotiation and partnership. Doesn’t that sound like a contradiction?

Well, as you probably know, I don’t like the word ‘partnership’. I think it has become a something-and-nothing word. It emerged with ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’ and other fashionable terms that are actually used to hide power differences. The aid system seems to be implying that you can be partners with everybody, all the time and with regard to everything. This is not true in any other walk of life. I only have one partner and that is my wife, and I have friends and acquaintances. But not every relationship in life can be a partnership in the sense of what I call an authentic partnership of equality, of mutual respect – basically, partners who share the consequences of success and failure.

Development programmes tend to overemphasise the need for partnerships, and they seldom deliver. By and large, partnership is a word that serves to hide tough negotiations. I think it is a stick that the aid system created, and with which the aid system will be beaten, because it doesn’t deliver.

We need to start using other words and phrases, such as ‘we are part of a coalition’, ‘we are part of an alliance’, ‘we are part of a platform or a network’. We should not say ‘we are in a partnership’ all the time. I think saying you are in a contractual relationship is perfectly acceptable, so why not be honest about it? When you negotiate an agreement with USAID based on a competitive tender to provide a service in, say, the Horn of Africa, you don’t need to say that you are in a partnership with USAID. It is a contractual relationship.

What behavioural attributes should a facilitator have?

Well, the answer is almost contained in the word itself. What does facilitation mean? Its Latin root means ‘to make easy’. You cannot facilitate by dominating. You have to facilitate by trying to connect. That means being able to speak multiple languages: to understand World Bank-speak on the one side, and to understand NGO-speak on the other when negotiating a relationship.

A facilitator requires a healthy degree of empathy without an excessive degree of subservience, together with a certain critical stance in order to avoid being manipulated, but also without manipulating others. It can be described as a brokering-counselling type of role. You try to counsel the relationship, and counsellors tend to be non-directive. They try to avoid being too normative. So these are the sort of attributes you are looking for in an effective facilitator.

An important precondition for boundary spanners to consider is: who is paying you to perform this role? Someone is financing you and, rightly or wrongly, other people will see you as being in allegiance with them. How do you deal with that? How do you express and try to keep a positive neutral position when you want to be a broker or facilitator?

Would you say that it is inherently impossible to facilitate capacity development and hold the purse strings at the same time?

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say it is inherently impossible. But I would suggest exercising caution if you can’t avoid being in that situation. There is a psychological relationship between the giver and the receiver. To be given something is to be beholden to someone. It is imprinted as a mother–child relationship, but this needs to shifted to an adult-to-adult position of mutuality. We live and work in a world permeated with situations of latent post-colonialism, latent racialism and other historical conditioning that underpins inequality. What does it take to engage in adult–a dult relationships in this setting? It is very difficult. It may not be impossible, but it is tricky to achieve equity in any system based on giving.

Adult-to-adult behaviour in aid requires more than just skills. It often needs critical self-reflection, which can sometimes be helped with a bit of mentoring and professional support. And if I look at the good facilitators I have worked with, I think many of them have a background in social work and adult education. It is partly because these professions attract a particular type of person, who learns the skills of the facilitation trade, including empathy, didactics and pedagogical skills. Teachers or social workers are already predisposed, through self-selection, to becoming facilitators, and is not difficult for them to adopt an adult–adult stance that is authentic.

It takes two to tango. What about the behaviour of boundary spanners on the recipient side?

Well, I would offer the usual advice. Don’t play the victim. Don’t, when things go wrong, simply attribute problems to forces outside of you. Try to accept co-responsibility for what has happened and not simply say ‘well, if they had funded me differently’, or ‘if the government had done this, that or the other’. When things go wrong, a lot of people look to displace the causes to someone else.

It is also important to respect your own sovereignty in decision making. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you can’t say no, because then you negotiate from a vulnerable position. You have to be careful not to be driven by your own growth as the proxy measure of performance; doing so creates a self-chosen role as a supplicant. Sovereignty often means having governing bodies that fully appreciate the quality of the work, not just quantity.

And quality speaks for itself in attracting support in an adult–to-adult way from the outset. That is a relational key for capacity development, and it is mutually respectful. Because, paradoxically, the capacity development of givers cannot properly take place outside of their relationship with recipients. Capacity, and the competencies needed to relate, are found ‘between’ organisations as much as within them. In capacity development, it takes at least two to tango.

Interview by Heinz Greijn.