so near and yet so far: values and mental models along the aid chain in ethiopia

SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR: VALUES ANDMENTAL MODELS ALONG THE AID CHAIN

IN ETHIOPIA

VIRGINIA WILLIAMSON*

University of Bath, Bath, UK

Abstract: Exploration of the perception and practice of participation, particularly in evaluation, elic-ited a range of values expressed by respondents along the aid chains of three bilateral donors withprogrammes in Ethiopia. The paper is developed from doctoral fieldwork, which sought to under-stand the mechanisms that constrain or enable participation. It raises three issues arising from analysisusing a ‘shared mental models’ framework: differential values, ability to access and utilise informationand conceptual (and physical) proximity/distance. During the research period (2004–2005), Ethiopiawas a pilot country for aid harmonisation and these findings have implications for the congruenceagenda (harmonisation and alignment) of the New Aid Architecture. The paper calls for a deeperunderstanding of the role that values and contextual information play in development managementpractice. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: New Aid Architecture; shared mental models; values; participation; evaluation; harmo-nisation; Ethiopia; bilateral aid

1 INTRODUCTION

The paper is based on research which explored participation, particularly in theevaluation process of development activities, within the complexity of the aid chains ofthree bilateral donors’ programmes in Ethiopia. The research sought to understand howdifferent actors understand participation, how they participate in evaluation processes,both formally and informally, and the extent to which this reflects donors’ claimsfor the role of participation and accountability in aid effectiveness. In so doing, theunderlying objective of this paper is to explain variations in the use of participation inaid evaluation.

*Correspondence to: Virginia Williamson, University of Bath, Bath, UK.E‐mail: [email protected]

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal of International DevelopmentJ. Int. Dev. 23, 823–835 (2011)Published online in Wiley Online Library(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jid.1812

When fieldwork started in March 2004, Ethiopia had recently been selected by the Orga-nisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development’s Development Co‐operation Direc-torate (OECD‐DAC) as a pilot country for aid harmonisation (OECD‐DAC, 2005a). TheDonor Assistance Group (DAG) was trying to establish a joint monitoring and evaluationframework with the Government, and thus harmonisation and alignment were the back-drop against which the research took place. The research shows that embassy staff had lit-tle understanding of the Government’s ideological position or the cultural and politicalinstitutions affecting each community, whereas participation and evaluation were clearlyunderstood within government–community relations. During discussions, respondentsrevealed distinct and different values in relation to participation and evaluation, whichare explored here with particular reference to contextual information on the social andpolitical economy of northern Ethiopia.The paper starts by setting out the New Aid Architecture (NAA) and the research context

and methodology before summarising the findings. These are subsequently analysed interms of relative development values, mental models, spatial and conceptual proximityand the effect of these on donors’ access to, and use of, contextual information.

2 PARTICIPATION, EVALUATION AND THE NAA

The NAA evolved from the International Development Targets (Farrington and Lomax,2001) originally outlined in Shaping the 21st Century (OECD‐DAC, 1996), which alsoset out principles for improving aid effectiveness. The key ‘new’ aspects of aid architecturewere identified as follows: poverty reduction strategies (PRSP), harmonisation, alignmentand ownership, management for results and mutual accountability, pooled funding and ‘abroader set of international relationships’ including global security (DFID, 2006). Theseprinciples were enshrined in the Rome Declaration on Harmonisation (2003) and the ParisDeclaration on Aid Effectiveness (2005).Discourses on participation are wide ranging, multi‐disciplinary and contested. This

ambiguity means that they often are adapted to changing vogues in development practice(White, 1996). Academic discourse tends towards a normative conception of participationas the exercise of individual agency, but the NAA conceives participation as a collectiveexercise: the individual exercises agency through multi‐party democracy, but is assumedto delegate authority to Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), who act as proxies for thewider public, as in the PRSP process. However, CSOs may lack representative legitimacybecause their staff often are urban, cosmopolitan and professional, and their engagement inmonitoring is ‘too often viewed as consensual and apolitical’ (Lucas et al., 2004). In com-parison with Western conceptions of agency, African customary mechanisms of discussioninvolving all participants in village assemblies allow the individual to enjoy ‘personal free-dom, independence, and respect for his property rights’, but ‘individual rights are subser-vient to those of the community as a whole’ (Ayittey, 2006).The two most frequently stated purposes of evaluation are accountability (‘whether aid

is effective’) and lesson learning (‘why aid is effective’). There is an extensive, largely crit-ical, literature which questions the purpose and conduct of evaluations highlighting thetechnical methods used, their mechanistic use and objectivity and legitimacy. Althoughdonor rhetoric suggests that lessons learned through evaluation should inform develop-ment strategies, it is the lack of demand for information which allows adoption of aid‘fashions’ (Picciotto, 2003; Gordillo and Andersson, 2004). Because development is only

824 V. Williamson

Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 23, 823–835 (2011)DOI: 10.1002/jid

one objective of aid, other strategic considerations ‘may introduce a race to the bottom asdonors lower their standards for foreign policy reasons’ (Ostrom, in Sida, 2002). By trans-ferring responsibility for evaluating donors’ policies of harmonisation, alignment and own-ership on to their intended beneficiaries via the PRSP and ‘mutual accountability’, theNAA replaces an earlier rhetoric in which local participation in donors’ evaluationssupposedly increased aid’s effectiveness and legitimacy.

3 ETHIOPIAN CONTEXT AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Ethiopia has long been perceived by the West as ‘a Christian island in a sea of Islam’. Thegeo‐political history of the Horn of Africa continues to connect Ethiopia to Israel, Somaliaand Eritrea. From 1960, Ethiopia received aid on a relatively even trajectory throughoutthe reign of Emperor Haile Selassie and following his overthrow by the Derg in 1974.Aid was increased following the famine of 1984, declined after the Ethio‐Eritrean war in1998 but rose again significantly in 2002. In June 2009, the Obama administrationdescribed Ethiopia as ‘a strategic partner of the United States in the Global War onTerrorism’1

Meles Zenawi, leader of the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front in the overthrow of theDerg, headed the subsequent Transitional Government in 1991 and, as leader of the Ethio-pian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), won elections in 1995, 2000,2005 and 2010. Revolutionary Democracy is based on Marxist‐Leninist principles inwhich the party acts as a vanguard political force, mobilising the peasantry through publicmeetings. The Government was assertive in its dealings with the international community,both in relation to the Eritrean border issue2 and to the harmonisation/alignment agenda. Atthe Rome High Level Forum on Harmonisation, Ethiopia urged donors to align with itsmanagement and reporting systems and continued to challenge donors to commit to har-monisation/alignment (OECD‐DAC, 2005a).Research design was informed by analysis of earlier data including village studies

undertaken in 1996 and the Well‐being and Ill‐being Dynamics, Ethiopia (WIDE) researchin 2003.3 This indicated that associational life was structured by rules regulating contribu-tion, reciprocity and performance, which were enforced by elected association officials,who were accountable to the membership and could be dismissed. Oratory was highlyregarded, as were strong leadership skills. Descriptions of these dynamics are found inthe historical, political and anthropological literature on Ethiopia. Semi‐structured inter-views focused on individual perceptions of participation and evaluation and those under-stood to be held by others in the aid chain. They also provided opportunities tocomment on development activities and their performance, who spoke up in public meet-ings and what happened when there was disagreement.The three donors who agreed to take part in the research {the Canadian International

Development Agency [CIDA], Irish Aid [then Development Cooperation Ireland (DCI)]and the Swedish International Development Agency [Sida]} had programmes in the

1US State Department June 2009. Available at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2859.htm [accessed 9 June 2009].2Donors who withdrew aid at this time found it difficult to re‐establish relations with the Ethiopian government.3WIDE was undertaken under Wellbeing in Developing Countries research at the University of Bath and formedpart of a series of village studies by the Centre for the Study of African Economies, Oxford. See http://www.wed‐ethiopia.org/research.htm#wide.

So Near and Yet So Far 825


Amhara and/or the Tigray regions of northern Ethiopia.4 Each donor’s programme was fol-lowed from agency headquarters to embassy and their local offices, regional and sub‐regional government staff, district bureaux of agriculture, local leaders and developmentagents (DAs) at village/hamlet level. Community level interviewswere held beneath this for-mal government structure, inwhichhouseholds are organised into groups of 30 (developmentgroups), which are themselves sub‐divided into six ‘cells’ of five households. The fieldworkwas conducted in three districts (woredas) in Tigray and three in Amhara (Table 1).

The findings indicated the need to identify an analytical model which incorporatedideology and culture. Denzau and North (1994) argue that mental models are formed byculture and belief systems, and this formed the basis of the analysis. Learning, or changetowards ‘shared mental models’, takes place slowly and incrementally through regularencounters and sharing of information. Rapid change only occurs when A’s mental modelfails to make sense of a crisis, whereas B’s mental model provides an effective explanation.These alternative trajectories reflect discourses about sustainable development and donors’political priorities for rapid ‘change’.

4 PARTICIPATION AND EVALUATION: FINDINGS

The practice of participation and evaluation, and awareness of the concepts underpinningthem, were strongly shared in government–community relations in northern Ethiopia.5

They were consistent with customary practice and, in some respects, more demandingand stringent than those of the donors. In contrast, donors’ knowledge and understandingabout participation and evaluation in Ethiopia were partial and conflicting.Interviews revealed a strong degree of congruence among government and community

members about the meaning and practice of participation and evaluation. Government offi-cials, at regional and village level, local leaders and community members consistentlydescribed participation as the annual ‘contribution’ of 21 or 22 days’ labour for develop-ment activities by each able‐bodied community member. Participation was organised bycell and development group leaders, who could apply sanctions for failure to participate.Government officers specified development activities at public meetings held in churchcompounds, and community leaders and model farmers used oratorical skills to persuadetheir neighbours to support government initiatives and to motivate them for developmentactivities. This was described both as ‘persuasion’ and as ‘contributing ideas’, and senior

4CIDA’s primary modality was federal budget support, but it had technical assistance projects in both regions;DCI was giving budget support to the Tigray regional government and Sida had an area‐based project in Amhara.5Consistent, despite areas of political tension (more in Amhara than in Tigray, the heartland of the EPRDF).

Table 1. Number of interviews held

Category of respondent No. of respondents

Donor staff (international and national) 22Government staff (including DAs) 37Community (farmers and local leaders) 46Other key informants 11Total: 116

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government officials were aware that this form of participation had some resonance withdonors’ ideas for civil society. Participants could disagree with points being made by theleaders, but it was customary for persuasion to continue until everyone was ‘included’ inthe decision. Majority voting had been introduced in some places, but minority views werenot always tolerated and could result in denied access to resources.In contrast to these public meetings, informal institutions which structured associational

life (burial associations, religious associations and rotating saving schemes) providedspace away from government influence. Whereas burial associations had broader member-ship, in small associations such as saint’s day associations, membership was selective,based on familiarity and trust. Although the government had re‐categorised mass organisa-tions, such as farmers’ associations, as CSOs, community respondents continued to regardthem as part of the government sphere.The practice of evaluation (gemgamma) combined elements consistent with customary

practice—public meetings and monitoring of performance—with self‐criticism, absorbedfrom Maoist practice adopted in Tigray during resistance to the Derg. Respondents atevery level of government said that gemgamma was used regularly. Cell leaders6 anddevelopment group leaders described evaluating each other fortnightly, and being evaluatedby DAs on their performance in mobilising the community for development work. Farmerssaid that they could criticise DAs’ performance, and a teacher described being evaluated byher students. Although some district officials said that poor performance was no longerpunished, others gave examples of demotion or referral to a disciplinary committee. How-ever, the aim was for gemgamma subjects to acknowledge their mistakes and remainwithin the group.Donors’ international staff either claimed to have no knowledge of gemgamma or dis-

missed it as anecdotal, although their national colleagues were fully aware of the practice.International staff had greater awareness of, and interest in, local data collection because ofits connection to the PRSP policy matrix but, when asked to explain the conceptual linkbetween specific performance indicators and intended outcomes, they seemed less confi-dent, describing it instead as an evolving process.DCI regarded its joint monitoring and evaluation framework with the Tigray govern-

ment as an alternative information source (a ‘reality check’) and as a vehicle for capacitybuilding, but its embassy staff were having to re‐negotiate access in Tigray following ashift in modality to regional budget support. Sida’s long‐term area‐based programme inAmhara was approaching a third phase; staff were concerned about progress and werefunding additional evaluation expertise. Despite their long‐term engagement in Amhara,Sida staff felt inhibited in what they could discuss with its government, defining theirown role as facilitation without ‘interfering’. CIDA staff saw no need to seek alternativesources of data to government statistics7 and also were more sanguine about the opportu-nities for CSO engagement in the PRSP process. For example, a scheduled evaluation of aCIDA technical assistance project was omitted because the project monitoring reportsappeared satisfactory. Although CIDA was the only agency of the three to have a perfor-mance management system, its staff were unable to align their results‐based managementcycle with the Ethiopian government timetable.

6Cell leaders were also responsible for collecting monitoring data, which was then passed up the governmentstructure.7This changed after the 2005 election violence.



In contrast to northern Ethiopia, where the ‘rules of the game’ were clearly understood,donor staff’s understanding of participation was partial and uncertain. Synthesising indi-viduals’ views was difficult because of variation between and within agencies. Themajority described participation as a vehicle for aid effectiveness and the creation of po-litical space as embodied by civil society. However, international staff were unable to explainhow this happened in practice or describe the extent of local government–communitystructures and institutions. Indeed, some national staff appeared to find discussion ofparticipation difficult when exploring the gap between their employers’ and the localperspective.The arena in which international staff most frequently participated was structured by the

‘dialogue architecture’ of the NAA. The Federal Government restricted direct dialogue tothe donors who gave budget support and to the representatives of the DAG’s sectoralworking groups. Respondents described inter‐donor dialogue as a contested arena withshifting alliances. International staff had to work hard to promote their agency’s compara-tive advantage in specific areas of expertise, to network to gain information and to accom-modate differences in priorities and values.

5 DEVELOPMENT VALUES

The Ethiopian government’s long‐term development strategy, Agricultural DevelopmentLed Industrialisation, has been implemented via extension and mobilisation along the for-mal and informal structures described above. The Tigray government’s community parti-cipation manual described development as a collective activity, done ‘with fullownership spirit of the peasants, to eradicate poverty’. Ethiopian respondents were consis-tent in their understanding that the government was directing development, with onefarmer suggesting that ‘the government wants us to develop so that we are no longerdependent on foreigners’. The WIDE data (op cit) indicated that cooperative behaviourwas highly valued but could be threatened by non‐participation which not only reducedthe common pool resource of effort but threatened social cohesion. Community‐levelrespondents confirmed that participation, whether in contributed labour or associationalactivities, was regulated to reduce the ‘greedy’ behaviour of the free‐rider, which theydescribed negatively as ‘individualistic’.The strongest level of congruence of development values among all respondents was by

nationality. Although the Ethiopian literature indicates that this was likely to be the caseamong Amhara and Tigrean respondents, the variation in responses among internationaldonor staff was marked, particularly so among CIDA’s international staff who includednon‐Canadians; this contrasted with the similarity in responses from international staffwithin DCI and within Sida. Donor documents current in 2005 and country‐specific litera-ture (summarised below) reveal values similar to those expressed by their staff.Canada positions itself as a leading member of the international donor community, com-

mitted to multilateralism and, thus, to harmonisation (CIDA, 2002; GoC, 2005). As ‘amulti‐cultural country where diversity is celebrated and immigration is a constant reality’(Berger, 2006), Canada has three foreign policy objectives: jobs and prosperity, commonsecurity and promoting Canadian values and culture (Pratt, 1999). The 2003 Peer Reviewwarned that Canada risked placing ‘socio‐economic interests ahead of responding to theneeds of developing countries’ (OECD‐DAC, 2003a). The key principles which driveIreland’s development programme include effectiveness, value for money, transparency

828 V. Williamson


and coherence with other aspects of Irish foreign policy; Roman Catholic missionary workhas provided a ‘template’ for Irish aid (Ireland Aid, 2003). Peer review identified thatIreland set ‘high standards for its official development co‐operation programme’, notingthat ‘Ireland’s own experience of colonisation, poverty, famine and mass emigration hasprovided a basis for a long tradition of solidarity with the poor and dispossessed’(OECD‐DAC, 2003b). Discussion of values permeates Sida’s documentation. Sweden’s‘solidarity with the underprivileged is regarded as a moral responsibility’ (Hook, 1995),but Sida’s characteristically self‐critical review of its own performance concluded thatthere were ‘no clear linkages between the overall goals of development cooperation andthe activities for which Sida is responsible’ (Sida, 2005a). Jantelagen, the ‘law’ of humi-lity, produces an egalitarianism apparent in Sida policy: ‘no party can claim superiorknowledge that should be superimposed on other parties’ (Sida, 2005b).

6 SO NEAR AND YET SO FAR: SPATIAL AND CONCEPTUAL PROXIMITY

Despite political and social tensions, farmers in Amhara and Tigray have a shared habesha(‘Abyssinian’) history and culture. A farmer might be a cell leader, also the leader of hisdevelopment group, or he may be a member of the hamlet or village administration.Beyond that, farmers have an ethnic, regional and habesha identity.8 The young profes-sionals who work around them, such as teachers, DAs or junior government staff, hadexperienced urban life by attending college. They described themselves as ‘outsiders’ inthe remote locations where they were sent to work, particularly if they were unmarriedas this isolated them from associational life. Remoteness, lack of electricity, roads andtransport effectively segregated rural communities from access to information other thanthat from the Government, and separated young professionals from familiar channels ofcommunication.For international donor staff, there was a spatial and conceptual gap to be bridged

between embassy and donor headquarters. The reporting schedule for both DCI and Sidahad been curtailed at their headquarters’ request, and reports were directed to the politicalrather than to sectoral ‘desks’. Within CIDA, embassy reports were treated as ‘political’and vetted before dispatch. Reports from its technical assistance projects, which couldhave provided embassy staff with contextual information, went direct to headquarters. Afurther spatial element was donors’ conceptual relationship with the OECD‐DAC, revealedby their use of the word ‘Paris’ when discussing harmonisation and policy. CIDA staff,who were the most supportive of the NAA, mentioned ‘Paris’ most frequently. Sida’s pol-icy staff also referred to ‘Paris’ and acknowledged the political strength of the harmonisa-tion agenda and their reduced use of Sida’s own knowledge base for policy‐making.A link between professional background and the importance that international staff

ascribed to participation emerged through discussion of career trajectories and agencies’recruitment policies. CIDA respondents tended to be career civil servants, mostly contentto describe participation as CSO involvement in the PRSP. DCI interviewees cited theirNGO experience and academic background, distinguishing themselves from foreign affairsstaff being seconded to work in development cooperation. Most Sida respondents weresenior technical specialists and tended to differentiate themselves from policy colleagues.

8None of the female farmers interviewed had positions in the leadership/administrative structure.



These ‘development specialist’ identities among DCI and Sida respondents came acrossstrongly in discussion of the importance of local knowledge and of the politicisation ofaid.9 They described a decline in their individual agency as a result of the reduction in tech-nical reporting, the requirement for greater political skills and organisational changes giv-ing policy departments responsibility for formulating practice.10 A number of theserespondents had chosen their posting specifically to undertake operational work, eitherin Ethiopia or more generally within Africa. Most believed that rotation to other embassies,usually every 3 years, was counter‐productive, wasting recently acquired knowledge. Thepolicy of rotation (to avoid staff ‘losing perspective’ by ‘going native’ (Pomerantz, 2004))suggests that agencies regard contextual knowledge as a threat rather than a valuableresource.

7 INFORMATION AND MENTAL MODELS

The strategy of harmonisation implies that donors have relatively synchronous develop-ment values and practices, but the interview responses, the three donors’ policy documentsand country‐specific literatures revealed three distinct ‘primary’ values. Reflection bydonor staff on participation and their level of local knowledge coalesced around the themesof ideology and empathy, what they knew or were prepared to admit to not knowing; howor if information could be used and ultimately whether knowledge of local context andfeedback from interventions was necessary. Interviews and documentary analysis showedthat CIDA gave more weight to ideology, indicated by its support for the global securityagenda and the NAA; DCI proclaimed that its aid programme was driven by empathy;and Sida’s values were based on empathy (solidarity) and the importance of knowledge.11

However, neither empathy nor political focus was sufficient to provide knowledge of, oraccept the reality of, structures of power which suffused government influence down tothe lowest community unit. Because of the structure which has a leader, or effectively agovernment agent responsible for collecting information, for every five households, therewas very little information that the government could not collect. Donors’ assumptions thatEthiopia would accept democratic pluralism in 2005 demonstrated a failure to use existinginformation about the Ethiopian context. This suggests that, unless pegged to information,empathy, ‘knowledge’ and ideology, although interlinked, are relatively free floating.Information could ground them to the reality of the development context (Figure 1).The use of information is central to Denzau and North’s concept of shared mental mod-

els, its transmission through regular contact effecting improved congruence of mentalmodels. They argue that meanings adapt via iterative exchanges so that congruent mentalmodels permit verbal ‘shorthand’ using tacit knowledge. The research shows that mean-ings assumed to be synonymous can be interpreted differently if mental models are notshared.12 Gould describes the use of ‘buzzwords’ such as harmonisation and partnership

9Kaufmann (1997) found that the rationale and career paths of individuals’ entry into the professional arena ofdevelopment affected their aims, objectives and the manner in which they worked.10King notes the trend among donors to reduce sectoral departments, centralising resources on policy departmentsand recruiting staff with ‘political’ skills (King, 2004; see also OECD‐DAC, 2005b).11Sida’s aid policy shifted in 2003, following a change of government, to greater concern about global security.12Ethiopian students are taught in English from the 10th grade, and English is widely spoken by government staffas well as donors.

830 V. Williamson


as ‘consensualism’, that conceals divergences of interest and subverts the meanings ofwords so that they become politically emollient (Gould, 2007). Because the ‘partnershiparchitecture’ meant that donors interacted largely with each other and modality restrictedtheir interaction with the government, there was less need to explore ambiguities of termi-nology and, consequently, differing values and objectives. Differences with regard to ‘gov-ernance’ emerged when donors were trying to forge a concerted response to thegovernment in December 2005, following the post‐election violence.The methods which the donors use to effect change under the NAA include dialogue,

influencing, cash transfers (budget support) and voluntary secession of power. In Ethiopianpolity and culture, these methods translate as follows. Oratory and persuasion are skillscharacteristic of habesha identity. Cash or other resource transfers are couched in notionsof entitlement and controlled by reciprocity and sanctions. In traditional concepts of lead-ership, power, once gained, is maintained by expressions of strength; defeat results in mar-ginalisation. After the elections in 2005, the Government dealt with the challenge to itsleadership by suppressing opposition with violence and incarceration. This accorded withthe historical trajectory and with rural communities’ expectations (cf. Abbink, 2006;Lefort, 2007).The shared mental models approach affords a structure for thinking about the roles of

culture, belief systems and the exchange of information in the pace and the trajectory ofchange. The exploration of relative values and differential meanings revealed that, despitedisjunctures between donors’ and Ethiopian perceptions and practice, there were areas ofboth congruence and ambiguity, which offered constructive opportunities for informationsharing (Figure 2).Both ideological approaches employed a rhetoric about the importance of citizen

participation in the provision of government services and the evaluation of governmentperformance—voluntarily/individually in liberal democracy and obligatorily/collectivelyin revolutionary democracy. Effective verbal skills were important for both. For donors,communication skills were vital for negotiating with and influencing other donors as wellas the Government. Such skills had to be learnt, whereas verbal skill was customary andvalued in Ethiopian culture. Public meetings in Africa are traditionally geared towards con-sensus, to ‘keep the person in the community’ (Ayittey, 2006), and the findings supportthis pattern in Ethiopia. The literature on social capital suggests that maintaining consensus

Information

IDEOLOGY(belief systems)

KNOWLEDGE(discourse)

EMPATHY

Figure 1. Linking relative development values to information



also has been valuable in the donors’ societies: it was important to minimise tension inCanada’s multi‐cultural society (GoC, 2005); in rural Ireland, expressing different opi-nions was considered socially divisive (Edmondson, 2001); and in Sweden, social mechan-isms existed to avoid confrontation (Rothstein, 2002).The clearest disjunctures between donor and local conceptions gathered during field-

work related to the purpose and practice of evaluation, and to the nature and role of process.In Ethiopia, evaluation is immediate, routine, based on performance and theoreticallytransparent. Despite claiming that monitoring was important as a regulatory mechanismagainst the PRSP policy matrix, some donor staff felt that ensuring the internal logic ofperformance indicators was ‘mechanistic’; for them, process was more important. Processapproaches, or adaptive administration, necessitate the freedom to experiment using cultu-rally acceptable practice; this requires contextual knowledge (Rondinelli, 1993). Rework-ing the concept of process as ‘work in progress’ allowed an optimistic assessment ofchange, for example, towards democratic pluralism.

8 CONCLUSION

This paper has explored values and mental models which emerged through explorations ofthe perceptions and practices of participation and evaluation along the aid chains of thethree bilateral countries with programmes in Ethiopia, a pilot country for harmonisation.The implications of congruence in the concepts of harmonisation and alignment threw intorelief the variation in responses between donors and between donors and the EthiopianGovernment, with its complex structure reaching deep into community life.Through a discussion of how values can be researched empirically, this paper contri-

butes to recent interest in the role of values in development in a number of ways. First,values surfaced when respondents were asked to relate abstract concepts to activities andparticularly when they compared rhetoric and reality. Second, the values expressed duringinterviews show continuities over time as is evident from past development literature from

Congruence DisjunctureDisjuncture

Mental model A Mental model B

Figure 2. Congruence, disjuncture and ambiguity in mental models

832 V. Williamson


all four countries (Canada, Ethiopia, Ireland and Sweden), confirming that values have along evolution and are relatively resistant to change. Third, values are linked to ideologyand culture, which were recurring themes emerging from the interviews and which,according to Denzau and North, form mental models. Their argument that, other than inexceptional circumstances, change in mental models is effected over time through iterativeencounters and exchanges of information challenges the rapid change often presumed/desired by donors to accord with their own political priorities. Fourth, using shared mentalmodels as an analytical tool in this case encouraged reflexivity, so that comparison ofdevelopment values identified areas of congruence, ambiguity and disjuncture which offeropportunities for learning. A reflexive lesson learned from the research process was thatthe necessity to explore literature explaining polity and participation in the donor countrieswas only recognised after the interviews, whereas the historical, anthropological and polit-ical science literature on Ethiopia were reviewed prior to fieldwork.Although the values described by donor respondents (ideological support for the NAA,

empathy and desire for knowledge) might be assumed to motivate them to gain contextualinformation, in practice the values appeared to inhibit them from utilising available litera-ture or power analyses and from exploiting potential sources of information from their ownprogrammes and even from their own employees.This paper further contributes to discussions on the role of values in development man-

agement, which have been developed through, for example, the work of Alan Thomas,Derick Brinkerhoff and others (Thomas, 2007). Discussion on the practical applicationof values, such as improved understanding of the multi‐faceted and shifting nature ofdevelopment management practice (Mowles, 2010) and of the role of politics in the devel-opment process (Unsworth, 2009), are helping to expand the discourse. This research iden-tifies three areas for further exploration: the relative weight given to differential values inthe policies and practice of existing and emerging donors; ways in which national staffnegotiate the role donors place on them to act as proxies and as reservoirs of institutionalmemory; and the role which values play in aid relationships under different modalities,including technical assistance.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper is based on doctoral research funded with a university research studentshipfrom the Centre for Development Studies, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, Uni-versity of Bath.

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so near and yet so far: values and mental models along the aid chain in ethiopia

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