What Is Development?8/16/12Owen Barder

This is the first of three blog posts looking at the implications of complexity theory for development. These posts draw ona new online lecture by Owen Barder, based on his Kapuscinski Lecture in May 2012 which was sponsored by UNDP and the EU. In this post, Barder explains how complexity science, which is belatedly getting more attention from mainstream economists, gives a new perspective to the meaning of development.View presentation in PDF formThe Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen has twice changed our thinking about what we mean by development. Traditional welfare economics had focused on incomes as the main measure of well-being until his ground-breaking work in the 1980's which showed that that poverty involved a wider range of deprivations in health, education and living standards which were not captured by income alone. His capabilities approach led to introduction of the UN Human Development Index, and subsequently the Multidimensional Poverty Index, both of which aim to measure development in this broader sense. Then in 1999 Sen moved the goalposts again with his argument that freedoms constitute not only the means but the ends in development.Sen's view is now widely accepted: development must be judged by its impact on people, not only by changes in their income but more generally in terms of their choices, capabilities and freedoms; and we should be concerned about the distribution of these improvements, not just the simple average for a society.But to define development as an improvement in people's well-being does not do justice to what the term means to most of us. Development also carries a connotation of lasting change. Providing a person with a bednet or a water pump can often be an excellent, cost-effective way to improve her well-being, but if the improvement goes away when we stop providing the bednet or pump, we would not normally describe that as development. This suggests that development consists of more than improvements in the well-being of citizens, even broadly defined: it also conveys something about the capacity of economic, political and social systems to provide the circumstances for that well-being on a sustainable, long-term basis.Mainstream economics has had a difficult time explaining how economic and social systems evolve to create this capacity; and, in particular, our economic models have struggled to explain why some countries have experienced rapid economic growth while others have not. In part this is because economists have generally stuck to models which can easily be solved mathematically. In the meantime, there has been a growing movement in physics, biology and some other social sciences, often called complexity science. Some economists notablyEric BeinhockerandTim Harford have started to make a compelling case for bringing these ideas more centrally into our analysis of economic and social systems; and a new volume of essays from IPPRlater this month will call for complexity to be taken more seriously by policymakers. But with the honourable exception ofBen Ramalingam, who has a book coming out in 2013 and has published on this topic for ODI, there has so far been very little work specifically on how complexity theory might be useful in development economics and policy.MyKapu?ci?ski Lectureearlier this year was an effort to explore the implications of complexity thinking for development economics and development policy. I've made this talk available as anarrated online presentationwhich lasts about 45 minutes.You canwatch and listen online; listen to the audio only - for example in the gym - bydownloading it from Development Drumsorvia iTunes; or you candownload the transcript and slides.

Complex does not mean complicatedIt is not news to anybody working in development that the problems are complicated in the sense that making progress involves tackling lots of different problems. But saying that the economy is a complex adaptive system implies something rather specific about its dynamic properties. We are using complex adaptive system here as a term of art to describe a particular kind of non-linear system which turns up everywhere in nature from waterfalls to ant colonies.The presentation begins with the charming story of a British design student, Thomas Thwaites, who tried to build a toaster from scratch. It turns out that this is very difficult to do: to build something even as simple as a toaster requires a lot else to be already in place in your economy and society. An economy consists of a series of people, firms, products and institutions which interact with each other, each adapting to their changing circumstances as they do so. In the presentationI explain how this network of adaptive agents interact with each other to create a complex adaptive system of the kind studied in biology and physics.The mainstream economics profession has been slow to take up these ideas, but fortunately scientists have been studying complex adaptive systems for at least thirty years and they have made considerable progress in describing their properties. Despite the huge diversity of these systems in nature, they have some important characteristics in common, by virtue of their underlying mathematics. There are good theoretical and empirical reasons for thinking that economic and social systems might share these characteristics, and the real-world trajectories of economic and social systems appear to fit the properties of complex adaptive systems better than they fit the simple, linear models of mainstream economics.Development as an emergent property of an economic, social and political systemOne of the key lessons from complexity theory is that complex adaptive systems can have system-wide properties which do not correspond to the properties of individual components. (This is only possible in non-linear systems, since linear systems are by definition a weighted sum of their parts.) For example, we think of consciousness as a characteristic of a human brain; but it makes no sense to say that a particular brain cell or synapse is conscious. A thunderstorm is a characteristic of the weather, but we cannot say that a particular molecule in the air is, or is not, stormy. These phenomena which are called emergent properties are not the sum of characteristics of individual parts of the system: they are consequences of the way that the different parts of the system interact with each other.In the talk, I argue that development is an emergent property of the economic and social system, in much the same way that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain. This seems obvious, and yet it is a surprising departure from the way most economists have normally described development as the sum of economic output of all the firms in the economy, or the sum of human well-being of the citizens of a nation.Development is not the sum of well-being of people in the economy and we cannot bring it about simply by making enough people in the economy better off. Development is instead a system-wide manifestation of the way that people, firms, technologies and institutions interact with each other within the economic, social and political system. Specifically, development is the capacity of those systems to provide self-organising complexity. Self-organising complexity in an adaptive system is never designed or deliberately built: it comes about from a process of adaptation and evolution. It follows that if we want to accelerate and shape development, we should focus especially on how the environment can be made most conducive for self-organising complexity to evolve.This view of development as an emergent property of a system fits with the common-sense definition of development described earlier. Development is more than improvements in peoples well-being: it also describes the capacity of the system to provide the circumstances for that continued well-being. Development is a characteristic of the system; sustained improvements in individual well-being are a yardstick by which it is judged.This has important implications for development policy, both for developing countries themselves wishing to put their economy and society onto a path of faster development, and for outsiders who want to help that process. We are at an early stage of exploring those implications. In my next blog post I will look at one particular implication of the application of complexity theory to development: it has both positive and negative implications for the UK Governments emphasis on a golden thread of institutions which they claim runs through all successful economies.

All That Glisters: The Golden Thread and Complexity8/26/12Owen BarderDavid Cameron co-chairs the UN Panel on the future of the development agenda, so his 'golden thread' view of development is likely to have a global impact. In the second of three blog posts looking at development policy through the lens of complexity thinking,Owen Barder asks whether the British government's golden thread is good development policy. He concludes that though it has much to commend it, it also has significant weaknesses.TheBritish Prime Minister, David Cameron, wants usto stop talking simply about the quantity of aid we give, and:start talking about what I call the golden thread, which is you only get real long-term development through aid if there is also a golden thread of stable government, lack of corruption, human rights, the rule of law, transparent information.This is not a new wheeze: Mr Cameron has been talking about the golden thread sincebefore he became leader of the Conservative party.Given that he is aco-chair of the UN High Level Panel on the global development agenda after 2015, we can expect to see some of this thinking in that panels recommendations.Mr Cameron's approach resonates with the thinking of other world leaders. On stepping down as the British Prime Minister,Tony Blair saidthat he believed that:Open v closed is as important today in politics as left v right. Nations do best when they are prepared to be open to the world. This means open in their economies, eschewing protectionism, welcoming foreign investment, running flexible labour markets. It means also open to the benefit of controlled immigration.Similarly, US President Obamas administration has given firm support to the Open Government Partnership, a voluntary alliance of 55 countries which are committed to making themselves more open, more accountable, and more politically inclusive. At its inaugural event, President Obama said:the strongest foundation for human progress lies in open economies, open societies, and in open governments. And I challenged our countries [sic] to come back this year with specific commitments to promote transparency, to fight corruption, to energize civic engagement, and to leverage new technologies so we can strengthen the foundations of freedom in our own countries.Though theviews expressed by Mr Cameron, Mr Blair and Mr Obama are not identical, they have in common the idea that societies and economies are more likely to develop when they are more accountable and open.There is no single, complete statement of the golden thread policy, but Mr Cameronhas describedinvariousspeecheswhat he calls the 'enablers of development: transparency, openness, accountability, empowerment, freedom, rule of law, property rights, absence of corruption, free media, free and fair election, trade, flexibility and civil society.Critics dismiss the golden thread as a nave restatement of economic liberalism: that is, the largely discredited view that developing countries are poor because they have bad policies and institutions which trap them in an inefficiently low equilibrium far away from the economic frontier. In the 1980s this thinking led to a set of policy prescriptions known as the Washington Consensus, which is generally regarded as having been a failure.But it would be unfair to confuse Mr Cameron with Marty McFly, getting into his DeLorean to return to the 1980s. In his2005 speechMr Cameron made it clear that he was advocating economic empowerment, which he explicitly contrasted with theeconomic liberalism which was the intellectual underpinning of structural adjustment programmes. So what's the difference? Economic liberalismis a set of prescriptions intended to remove obstacles to enable firms to be more efficient and so increase economic growth;economic empowermentas defined by Mr Cameron is a set of ideas about what is needed for the economic and social system to improve itselfmore rapidly and more fairly. This is not merely a semantic difference: the golden thread focuses on openness, transparency, accountability and a free press, none of which was ever part of the Washington Consensus. That gives grounds for optimism that the golden thread heralds a new and welcome focus on how economic and social systems change.

To the extent that the golden thread focuses on what it takes for systems to change themselves, it fits comfortably within the mainstream development consensus which emphasises country ownership that is, the hard-won lesson that lasting change comes from within developing countries, rather than through policies imposed from outside. With its emphasis on transparency and accountability, the golden thread approach can be interpreted as looking for ways to strengthen and accelerate those internal evolutionary processes, rather than imposing new policy prescriptions. (SeeAlan Hudsons work on open developmentfor more about the importance ofopen governance.)Furthermore, though this is not the basis on which the golden thread has been explained, the focus on how systems change is consistent withthe idea that development is the emergence of self-organising complexitywhich brings about vast improvements in human well-being. In complex systems successful transition happens more rapidly and more successfully when economic and social systems are able to adapt and evolve, and when that evolution is driven by an evolutionary fitness function which reflects societys values and priorities. (For more explanation, see my online presentation about complexity and development.) The enablers of development described by Mr Cameron, Mr Blair and Mr Obama are all very plausible candidates for the kinds of system properties which might accelerate the emergence of self-organised complexity.So the golden thread has much to commend it. But as it is currently articulated, it has three important shortcomings, which will be fatal if they are not addressed.First, as currently articulated the golden threadtalks more about free markets, jobs and growth than it does about other ways to encourage social and economic change, such as reducing inequality, tackling the power of vested elites, providing social protection and safety nets, or ensuring a strong voice for civil society. There is a streak of laissez faire in the choice of policies which does not do justice to the idea that we can and should shape evolutionary processes. In biological evolution we have had to accept survival of the fittest as our fitness function; in economic and social evolution we can be more deliberate about shaping the fitness function to take us in the direction in which we want to move. People on the right tend to focus on the need for innovation and selection to accelerate evolution, but often pay too little attention to the need for society to shape the direction. People on the left, by contrast, tend to pay too much attention to determining the destination and too little to nurturing the dynamism and creative value of the evolutionary process which will get us there.Second, the golden thread as it has been articulated so far does not say anything at all about the need to make changes to the global system as well as within developing countries. As several people commentingon thefirst post in this seriesrightly observe, the interdependence of systems does not stop at national borders. Global systems and institutions, and the policies and behaviour of rich countries, have an important influence on the evolution of economic and social systems in developing countries, and the principles of the golden thread apply just as much at global level as they do at the level of the nation state. For example: If open, legitimate and accountable institutions are important, this also applies to the institutions which set international economic rules such as on tax, trade and corruption (in contrast to the secret negotiations on ACTA, for example); rich countries should stop stitching up appointments to top international jobs; encourage their companies to pay the appropriate level of tax in developing countries (as recommended last week by an influential committee of the British House of Commons), so that a social contract of domestic accountability can emerge; and continue to reform aid to make it less likely to undermine domestic accountability. If trade and economic openness are important, wealthy nations should to more to open their own markets to trade from developing countries and get rid of agricultural export subsidies which deprive developing country food producers of the ability to compete. If property rights are important, then rich countries should recognise that the people of a country, not their illegitimate leaders, own their own natural resources, and so treat everybody who buys oil or minerals from unelected governments as as handling stolen goods. If transparency and fighting corruption are important, the OECD countries could require their companies to publish all the details of the payments they make to developing countries (the new US rules announced are a good start which Europe should follow). The UK could also join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, to demonstrate that it takes seriously the idea that a nations resources belong to its people (again, as recommended by the International Development Committee.) The UK has given a commendable lead on aid transparency, but there is still a lot of work to do before all the resources within developing countries, whether raised locally or provided from outside, are fully transparent to their citizens, and rich countries have a big role to play. If due process and the rule of law are important then wealthy countries could tackle financial havens and improve information exchange between tax and law enforcement authorities to enable them to enforce their tax laws and to prevent criminals from laundering stolen assets. If openness and exchange of ideas are important then rich countries could make it easier, not more difficult, for people from developing countries to study abroad in schools and universities: astudy by Spilimbergoshows that developing countries which send more students to study overseas in democratic countries tend to become more democratic themselves; the UK could improve its immigration policies for people from developing countries; and rich countries could stop the gradual erosion of technology transfer through more and more excessive enforcement of intellectual property rights.Third, and probably most important, the golden thread has more to say about desirable dynamics in society than it does about how to bring them about. We have had more failures than successes trying to bring about institutional and political reform in other countries. There is a danger of going straight back to failed efforts to transplant institutions from one situation to another. (Section 5 of the presentationdiscusses the danger of isomorphic mimicry, a term coined by CGD Fellow Lant Pritchett to highlight the repeated failure of this kind of intervention.)Understanding economic, social and political change through the lens of complex adaptive systems should make us more modest about our ability to change those systems directly. It is generally impossible to design and engineer change in a complex adaptive system. As I point out in the conclusion of the presentation, it follows from a complexity view of development that outsiders would do better to think about whether they cannudgesystems towards having the right kinds of dynamic properties, including greater capacity for experimentation, feedback and learning,so that systems can evolve these kinds of institutions on their own. That humility seems to be largely missing from the golden thread narrative, which seems to be presented as a universal blueprint for success. It is those questions of feedback to which I will turn in my third blog post in this series.Mr Cameron's golden thread fits well with the view that we should do what we can to help change occur from within, not impose it from outside. It emphasizes the importance of institutions and policies which may strengthen and shape change. In this respect, it fits well with a complexity view of development. But to be a credible basis for a development policy, it will need to embrace a broader understanding ofhowsocieties change (e.g. attacking privilege, not just further liberalising markets), recognise the need for changes in global systems and in the behaviour of rich countries to improve opportunities for change in the developing world, and display greater humility about the role that outsiders can play.An edited version of this article appears on the Guardian Global Development website.Authors:

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Complexity, Adaptation, and Results9/7/12Owen BarderIn the last of a series of three blog posts looking at the implications of complexity theory for development, Owen Barder and Ben Ramalingam look at the implications of complexity for the trend towards results-based management in development cooperation. They argue that is a common mistake to see a contradiction between recognising complexity and focusing on results: on the contrary, complexity provides a powerful reason for pursuing the results agenda, but it has to be done in ways which reflect the context. In the 2012 Kapuscinski lecture Owen argued that economic and political systems can best be thought of as complex adaptive systems, and that development should be understood as an emergent property of those systems. As explained in detail in Bens forthcoming book, these interactive systems are made up of adaptive actors, whose actions are a self-organised search for fitness on a shifting landscape. Systems like this undergo change in dynamic, non-linear ways; characterised by explosive surprises and tipping points as well as periods of relative stability.If development arises from the interactions of a dynamic and unpredictable system, you might draw the conclusion that it makes no sense to try to assess or measure the results of particular development interventions. That would be the wrong conclusion to reach. While the complexity of development implies a different way of thinking about evaluation, accountability and results, it also means that the results agenda is more important than ever.Embrace experimentationThere is a growing movement in development which rejects the common view that there is a simple, replicable prescription for development. Dani Rodrik talks of one economics, many recipes. David Booth talks of the move from best practice to best fit. Mirilee Grindle talks of good enough governance. Bill Easterly has talked of moving from planners to searchers. Owen Barder has called for us to design not a better world, but better feedback loops. Sue Unsworth talks of an upside down view of governance. Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock aim to synthesize all this into their proposal for Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation.These ideas are indispensable in the search for solutions in complex adaptive systems. In his 2011 book Adapt, Tim Harford showed that adaptation is the way to deal with problems in unpredictable, complex systems. Adaptation works by making small changes, observing the results, and then adjusting. This is the exact opposite of the planning approach, widely used in development, which involves designing complicated programmes and then tracking milestones as they are implemented.We know a lot about how adaptation works, especially from evolution theory. There are three essential characteristics of any successful mechanism for adaptation:1. Variation any process of adaptation and evolution must include sources of innovation and diversity, and the system must be able to fail safely2. An appropriate fitness function which distinguishes good changes from bad on some implicit path to desirable outcomes3. Effective selection which causes good changes to succeed and reproduce, but which suppresses bad changes.These principles are reflected in the six principles for working in complex systems which Ben set out in a Santa Fe Institute working paper with the former head of USAID Afghanistan, Bill Frej. They also run through the ideas in the must-read recent paper by Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock which sets out four steps for iterative adaptation in the case of state-building and governance reforms:1. focus on solving locally nominated and defined problems in performance (as opposed to transplanting pre-conceived and packaged best-practice solutions);2. create an authorizing environment for decision-making that encourages positive deviance and experimentation, as opposed to designing projects and programs and then requiring agents to implement them;3. embed this experimentation in tight feedback loops that facilitate rapid experiential learning (as opposed to enduring long lag times in learning from evaluation);4. engage broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate, relevant and supportable.So there is now some convergence around these ideas, all of which focus on the importance of experimentation, feedback and adaptation as ways of coping with uncertainty and complexity.The role of results in adaptationAndrew Natsios, a former Administrator of USAID, fired a celebrated shot over the bows of what he calls the counter-bureaucracy (the compliance side of the US aid system). He says:Let me summarize the problems with the compliance system now in place: Excessive focus on compliance requirements to the exclusion of other work, such as program implementation, with enormous opportunity costs Perverse incentives against program innovation, risk taking, and funding for new partners and approaches to development The Obsessive Measurement Disorder for judging programs that limits funding for the most transformational development sectors The focus on the short term over the long term The subtle but insidious redefinition of development to de-emphasize good development practice, policy reform, institution building, and sustainability.The reason for most of these process and measurement requirements is the suspicion by Washington policy makers and the counter-bureaucracy that foreign aid does not work, wastes taxpayer money, or is mismanaged and misdirected by field missions. These suspicions have been the impetus behind the ongoing focus among development theorists on results.These arguments made with particular authority by Natsios resonate strongly with the views of the growing movement for more experimentation, adaptation and learning. But does that mean as is often implied that it is inappropriate or impossible to pay attention to results?If anything, the opposite is true. All three steps in the adaptive process variation, a fitness function and effective selection depend on an appropriate framework for monitoring and reacting to results. Natsios himself calls for a new measurement system. But as Ben argued last year we must ensure that the results agenda is applied in a way which is relevant to the complex, ambiguous world in which we live.Results 2.0: thinking through a complexity-aware approach A meaningful results agenda needs to take account of the diversity of development programmes, and the need for a more experimental approach in the face of complex problems. A good place to start is to borrow some approaches from academia, civil society and business strategy. This work suggests that a complexity-aware approach to results needs to get a better handle on need to be based on:(a) the nature of the problem we are working on,(b) the interventions we are implementing(c) the context in which these interventions are being delivered.This gives us three dimensions ranging from simple problems and interventions in stable contexts through to complex interventions in diverse and dynamic contexts.

Between a rock and a hard placeDown in the bottom left-hand corner are simple problems and stable settings. This is where Plan and Control makes most sense. Tradition results-based management approach, the more conventionalunit-cost based value for money analyses and randomised control trials workespecially well. (Classicists among you will recognise the hard rock of Scylla.)At the top right we have complex problems, complex interventions in diverse and dynamic settings. (A lot of donor work in fragile states and post conflict societies are in this corner). Here the goal is Managing Turbulence. In this space, everything is so unpredictable and fluid that planning, action and assessment are effectively fused together. To deliver results in this zone, we need to learn from the work of professional crisis managers, the military and others working in highly chaotic contexts. (This is the whirlpool of Charybdis.)In between is what we have called the zone of Adaptive Management. Here we may find ourselves managinga variety of combinations of our three axes. In our view, the vast majority of development interventions sit in this middle ground.In this messy, non-linear world the challenge is to tread a careful path avoiding narrowly reductionist approaches to results without surrendering to excessive pessimism about our ability to learn and adapt. In practice this means a more adaptive, experimental approach, trying out multiple parallel experiments, monitoring emergent progress, rates of success and adapting to context. Real-time learning is essential to check the relative effectiveness of different approaches, scaling up those that work and scaling down those that dont. It is a learning process which is essential for donors and more importantly for the governments and institutions of the developing world.Adaptive management must engage the three drivers of evolution:1. Variation which means participants must be given space to experiment and engage in positive deviance. The key is to liberate people implementing programmes from the conventional requirements to follow a preconceived plan, while retaining accountability of donors to their domestic constituencies. Development agencies and their partners can be given room for manoeuvre and experimentation if they are held to account not for their activities and spending according to a plan, but for the results they achieve or fail to achieve.2. An appropriate fitness function which means that socially-useful changes are distinguished from ineffective or harmful changes. This in turn requires society to agree either in advance or at least in retrospect what constitute useful changes, and to assess whether those changes are coming about. For five decades the development industry has been inconsistent about what constitutes success, has failed to measure overall progress, and has eschewed opportunities to learn more about effects of different interventions through various kinds of rigorous impact evaluation.3. Selection which means that changes that bring about improvements according to the fitness function are reproduced and further adapted, while bad changes, policies or institutions are either reformed or brought to an end. This requires a greater focus on evidence-based policy making, and that decisions about programmes and interventions must be more strongly linked the results they produce. The development industry has traditionally been insufficiently effective at taking success to scale, and insufficiently ruthless about failure.Getting REAL with Results-Enabled Adaptive LeadershipTracking results (and linking money to results) are often considered most appropriate for the simple stable situations in the bottom left hand corner of the cube. This is where it is easiest to attribute impact to the intervention. It is in this corner that we find piece rate systems: the manufacturer knows full well what the production function looks like for sewing machines and machinists and uses the piece rate system to motivate greater effort from staff.But in the complex world of development, we do not know the production function and we cannot readily attribute progress to any particular intervention. Furthermore, we often do not know where we are in the cube. We sometimes have reliable evidence about the value of a particular technology (say, a nutritional supplement or a bednet) which suggests we are down in the bottom left hand corner of predictable and attributable results. But when we introduce the messy reality of needing to inform people about the product, overcome resistance to change, of managing production and distribution and creating incentives for effective delivery, we rapidly find ourselves in a much more complex world.So most of what we do to promote development is not in the bottom left hand corner: our interventions operate in the world of adaptive management and complexity. The main value of a results focus in development not squeezing greater efficiency out of current service providers: rather it is in enabling people to innovate, experiment, test, and adapt. The challenge here is to ensure that we have a focus on results which supports, rather than inhibits, effective feedback loops which promote experimentation and adaptation. This requires a new and more innovative toolkit of methods, and most importantly an institutional and relational framework which uses that information to drive improvement. We call this results-enabled adaptive leadership (because it has a nice acronym: REAL).What might results-enabled adaptive leadership look like in practice? The Center for Global Development is currently exploring two specific ideas which we believe fit well with an adaptive, iterative and experimental approach to development : Cash on Delivery Aid and Development Impact Bonds.If you believe that development is a characteristic of a complex adaptive system then both of these ideas are attractive because: They explicitly focus on independently verified, transparently reported outcomes and impact that is, appropriate measures of what society is trying to achieve rather than inputs and outputs which are thought to be correlated with progress (but may not be, especially in a complex system). They avoid the need for an ex ante top-down plan, log-frame, budget or activities prescribed by donors. Because payment is linked only to results when they are achieved, developing countries are free to experiment, learn and adapt. There is no attempt to follow money through the system to show which particular inputs and activities have been financed; it is important for governments to learn about whether certain activities are working, but it is futile for donors to speculate about the extent to which those changes would happen without them. They automatically build in a mechanism for selection by shifting funding to successful approaches and bringing failed approaches safely to a close (something which development cooperation which has traditionally found it difficult to do).In a recent talk at USAID, Nancy Birdsall issued the following rallying cry: Its time to stop worrying about getting what were paying for, and start paying for what we get. This principle also underpins another initiative with which CGD is associated, TrAiD+, which calls for the creation of a market of global results in which investors could choose what type of projects to fund, based on results achieved. Given the growing role of business and philanthropy in development, this approach may well prove to be attractive to many funders.These are examples of how a focus on results could help, rather than hinder, the process of adaptation and experimentation in development. That does not mean that these are the only or even the best approaches (though CGDs Arvind Subramanian teases his colleagues for offering cash on delivery as a solution to every problem).ConclusionThe growing movement towards experimentation and iteration is driven by a combination of theory and experience. Though these argument have rarely been explicitly framed as a response to complexity, as a whole they are entirely consistent with the view that development is an emergent property of a complex system. We in the development community have much to learn from other fields in which thinking about complexity is further advanced.Many development interventions operate in the space between certainty and chaos: the complexity zone which in which we believe that adaptive approaches are not only effective but essential. This is often presented as a decisive argument against results-based approaches to development. We argue that, on the contrary, a focus on results is an indispensable feature of successful adaptive management. The challenge is to do this in a way which avoids simplistic reductionism and promotes an approach which focuses on outcomes rather than process, monitors progress, and which scales up success.We are conscious that this falls well short of a detailed blueprint for how this might work in practice. As they say in the world of tech: that is a feature not a bug. As Alnoor Ebrahim of Harvard University, one of the leading authorities on development accountability, puts it: there are no panaceas to results measurement in complex social contexts. A nuanced approach to results must be based on a thorough assessment of the problems, interventions and contexts. Our point is that there is no contradiction between an iterative, experimental approach and a central place for results in decision-making: on the contrary, a rigorous and energetic focus on results is at the heart of effective adaptation.Consistent with our view that success is the product of adaptation and evolution of ideas as well as institutions and networks we look forward to comments, improvements and corrections to these ideas so that we can get past simplistic extremes on either side and build a shared understanding of how to make this work.This is the last in a series of three blog posts based on Owen Barders presentation on complexity and development. The first blog post asked What is Development?. The second blog post looked at the UK governments golden thread approach to development through the lens of complexity.Ben Ramalingams book, Aid on the Edge of Chaos, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2013.Authors:

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