Approaches to Improving the Delivery of Social Services in Difficult ...

Approaches to Improving the Delivery of Social Services in Difficult Environments50. The mapping is necessarily crude, and is certainly not meant to beprescriptive. It gives an indication of how entry points and approaches areaffected by the type of context in which the international communityoperates. Environments that exhibit both capacity and will (what might betermed ‘good’ performers) are included for comparison purposes. Onecountry context may exhibit all four characteristics simultaneously (see V.3below). Annex 2 summarises the key characteristics of each of these typesof environment.51. Tools are needed to derive relevant contextual information and to agree onways to pool and share it. In order to programme effectively, managersneed a consistently excellent understanding of the context in which theyare working. Arriving at an understanding of the capacity and willingnessdimensions of any particular context will require the development ofindicators and a methodology for applying them. There are a number ofefforts currently underway to develop assessment tools that can be usedin difficult environments. These will need to be refined, field tested, and ifpossible shared between different agencies.V.2 Making trade-offs explicit52. Difficult environments force trade offs between short and long-termobjectives. The short-term objective of the international community indifficult environments is to relieve immediate humanitarian suffering byproviding life saving support, including delivering services. In the longerterm, the objective is to facilitate social and political change that results inan environment where poor people are empowered to demand their rightsand the state is responsive to the voices of the poor. These objectivesfrequently conflict with each other. Many of the trade-offs currently madeare not recognised, or not made explicit. Having a framework for makingthe trade-offs explicit would improve transparency and the rigour ofanalysis.53. The mapping in figure 2 shows that where there is political will, then thereis significantly more space for working to strengthen state oversight forservice delivery. The kinds of approaches that are suggested in the top leftquadrant clearly show that these environments are closer to ‘business asusual’ than either of the situations where there is a lack of willingness. Themost difficult of this group of environments are those that are emergingfrom conflict and where the international community is seeking tolegitimate a nascent government. One of the key issues here is to findways to rebuild the system in ways that do not simply reproduce andreinforce previous inequities, or replicate dysfunctional alignments andinstitutions. Finding the right balance between ‘upstream’ reforms andmaking sure that services reach people on the ground is also a key issue.This is why the role of non-state providers is potentially so important.54. In situations where there is government unwillingness but there is strongcapacity, then finding an entry point for service delivery interventions inpartnership with the state is extremely challenging. This situation isThis working paper is intended to stimulate public discussion. It is not necessarily DFID orUK Government policy26