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HOW CAN
DEVELOPMENTAL
LEADERSHIP BE
SUPPORTED?
CHRIS ROCHE
LISA DENNEY
4
The Developmental Leadership
Program (DLP) is an international
research collaboration supported by the
Australian Government.
DLP investigates the crucial role that
leaders, networks and coalitions play in
achieving development outcomes.
dlprog.org
dlp@contacts.bham.ac.uk
@DLProg
Developmental Leadership Program
International Development Department
College of Social Sciences
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, B15 2TT
United Kingdom
This publication has been funded by the Australian Government through
the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The views expressed in
this publication are the authors’ alone and are not necessarily the views
of the Australian Government, the Developmental Leadership Program
or partner organisations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHRIS ROCHE
Chris Roche is Director of the Institute for Human Security and Social
Change, and Professor of Development Practice at La Trobe University
and Deputy Director (Impact) of the Developmental Leadership
Program. Chris has worked for International NGOs for nearly 30 years
including 8 years with Oxfam Great Britain and 10 years with Oxfam
Australia and has a particular interest in understanding the practice of
social change and how it might be best catalysed and supported. His
recent research includes a study of gender and politics in practice, an
exploration of social accountability innovations in International NGOs,
the politics of evaluation, and the future of International NGOs.
LISA DENNEY
Lisa Denney is a Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Human
Security and Social Change at La Trobe University. Her work in
international development focuses on issues of governance, security,
justice, gender and organisational practice. Lisa has worked for a range
of development organisations, including the Australian Department
for Foreign Affairs and Trade, the United Kingdom Department for
International Development, Irish Aid and The Asia Foundation. She has
undertaken research in academic, think tank and consultancy settings,
including ve years with the Politics and Governance Programme at the
Overseas Development Institute. Lisa has a PhD in International Politics
from Aberystwyth University.
PREFACE
Over the past 10 years, the Developmental
Leadership Program (DLP) has explored the vital
role of leadership in making change happen.
Our key findings are summarised in ‘Inside the Black
Box of Political Will: Ten Years of findings from the
Developmental Leadership Program’. In it, we argue
leadership relies on three interconnected processes:
•First, on motivated and strategic individuals with the
incentives, values, interests and opportunity to push
for change.
•Second, on these motivated individuals overcoming
barriers to cooperation and forming coalitions with
power, legitimacy and inuence.
•Third, coalitions effectively contest the ideas
underpinning the status-quo and legitimise an
alternative set that can promote change.
Together, these ndings form a working theory of
change on developmental leadership, and a set of
testable assumptions about how leaders emerge, how
they work collectively to create change, and how this
process can be supported.
The next phase of research will examine these
assumptions. It will focus on four research questions
that emerged out of the synthesis of DLP’s earlier work.
As part of the process of planning the next phase,
DLP has produced a series of Foundational Papers to
provide a conceptual foundation and guide our empirical
approach to addressing each of the questions above.
DLP’s Foundational Papers aim to interrogate both the
theoretical grounding and wider evidentiary basis for
DLP’s assumptions about how change happens. They
start from what we think we already know, but aim to
challenge our thinking and ground future research in
interdisciplinary theory and cutting-edge debates.
Each paper aims to situate DLP’s key ndings in the
wider state of knowledge on this topic, review key
themes from the best existing research on our questions
of interest, and suggest key theories and bodies of
literature that can be harnessed to address them.
Together, the papers will form an intellectual road map
for our continuing work on developmental leadership,
helping us to build a coherent intellectual agenda around
our core interests.
DLP’S RESEARCH QUESTIONS
RQ1: How is leadership understood in different contexts?
RQ2: Where do leaders come from?
RQ3: How do leaders collectively inuence institutions?
RQ4: How can developmental leadership be supported?
3
© Dikaseva l Unsplash
4HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
CONTENTS
Preface 3
Contents 5
Executive summary 6
Introduction 7
Part one: How do organisations think about and support leaders and coalitions? 8
Individual leaders or collective leadership? 10
Agency or structure 11
Are leaders born or made? 12
Bias towards Western leadership styles 13
Leadership as managerial, rather than political, cross-sectoral and multi-level 14
Implications for how change happens 15
Part two: What might this require of development agencies? 16
Contextual understanding and relationships 18
Locally-led problem solving 18
Expanding and nurturing the space(s) for change 19
Convening and brokering relationships 19
Learning, adaptation and Monitoring & Evaluation 19
Flexibility 20
Authorising Environment 20
Part three: The challenge of systemic change 22
Part four: Future research 25
Conclusions 27
References and/or Endnotes 29
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
If we know that leadership is important to developmental
change, but programs to support it are not clear about
what leadership is or how supporting it contributes to
achieving change, then they may be missing important
opportunities or simply be taking the wrong approach.
Development agencies have important resources at their
disposal that can be used to support developmental
leadership – although the impact of such support varies
considerably. All too often the support from development
organisations does not match what we know about how
developmental leaders emerge and how collective action
takes place. Moreover, development organisations are
often not set up to provide support in ways that are most
effective. At the same time, there is much to be learnt
from existing programs that have successfully supported
developmental leadership. As a framing paper for a pillar of
research under DLP III, this paper aims to capture what is
known, and what the gaps in our knowledge are, in relation
to this issue.
Drawing from the literature, we explore the generic
attributes or features of programs that seek to support
developmental leadership, the features of particularly
successful examples of such programs, as well as some
of the systemic challenges agencies and the sector more
broadly face in working in these ways. From this we set out
a range of potential research avenues to guide this area of
research under DLP III. These include exploring:
•how individual and collective leadership support might
be combined more strategically;
•how programming might focus on shifts in the
wider enabling environment in order to support the
emergence of developmental leadership;
•what mix of support might be required to augment
the multiple resources that leaders can develop and
strategically deploy in different contexts, and for
different groups or issues;
•how leadership support might need to differ when
supporting prototypical, as opposed to atypical,
leaders;
•what leadership support can learn from the political
leadership of women’s organisation, coalitions
and Disabled People’s Organisations as well as
intersectional initiatives, particularly regarding non-
elite leadership pathways, and how multi-level, cross-
sectoral leadership functions and is best supported;
•an extension of the Gender and Politics in practice
research to explore how successful programs have
navigated and adapted business practices, HR
policies, contract management and MEL processes
to effectively support programs seeking to promote
developmental leadership;
•the strategy and practice of leadership in development
agencies, and the degree to which this enhances their
effectiveness to support developmental leadership.
It is suggested that this long list can be used to a) initiate
further discussion with DFAT about potential areas of
focus, and b) as a ‘menu’ for potential case studies which
emerge under the other research questions to select from.
Finally, we suggest that there are a number of disciplinary
lenses which might be usefully considered in this
area: new and feminist institutionalism; elements of
management/ organisational theory such as contingency
theory; and complexity thinking.
The general lack of
specication about what
is meant by ‘leadership’
means that we must
trace the implied
understandings in
order to tease out the
assumptions underlying
much leadership
support.
6HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
INTRODUCTION
The first three Foundational Papers developed
under the third phase of the Developmental
Leadership Program (DLP) have sketched out
a nuanced, and at times complex, picture of how
leadership is understood and practiced. They ask how
leadership is understood in different contexts; what
influences leaders and the choices and paths they take;
and how leaders collectively influence institutions
and achieve collective action outcomes. The papers
offer a rich basis for further research under the third
phase of the DLP into these matters. For development
organisations – both official donors and non-government
organisations (NGOs) – however, a lingering question
remains: given this complex picture, what role can they
play in supporting developmental leadership? This fourth
and final Foundational Paper seeks to provide a framing
for answering this question and to propose potential
research avenues for phase three of the research
program.
Development agencies have important resources at their
disposal that can be used to support developmental
leadership. From nancial support, to training, to
educational or professional opportunities, networking,
diplomacy and policy dialogue, development agencies have
resources and inuence that can assist developmental
leaders to strengthen their skills or networks, or more
effectively leverage their skills to achieve change.
In addition to directly supporting potential leaders,
development partners can also contribute to creating an
enabling environment for developmental leadership to
emerge. Yet the quality of this support varies dramatically:
from support that astutely enables local leaders to achieve
developmental change; to support that more modestly
improves knowledge or skills; to support that results in
little sustainable change. Part of the problem is that all
too often the support from development organisations
does not match what we know about how developmental
leaders emerge and how collective action takes place (see,
for instance, Lyne de Ver and Kennedy 2011). Moreover, as
we discuss in the nal section of the paper, development
organisations are often not set up to provide support in
ways that are most effective. As a framing paper for a
pillar of research under DLP III this paper aims to capture
what is known and what the gaps in our knowledge are in
relation to this issue.
The paper begins rst by asking how development
organisations think about and support leaders and
coalitions, setting out the range of strategies relied upon
to support leaders and coalitions and what this can tell
us about how leadership is framed and understood. We
use the three levels of individual, collective and societal
leadership developed in the DLP (phase two) synthesis
paper to tease out how these forms of support might
contribute to changes at these levels (DLP, 2018). Second,
the paper explores what these ways of thinking about and
supporting leadership require of development agencies.
In this section, the paper highlights the implications for
how agencies might effectively support development
leadership, revealing internal organisational practices
as themselves an important focus of study. In the third
section we explore some of the systemic issues and
challenges that development agencies face in working
in ways that support developmental leadership. Finally,
section four sets out a range of potential research
avenues to guide this area of research under DLP III, which
essentially asks the ‘so what’ questions about the role of
development organisations in supporting developmental
leadership, and which will therefore be central to all the
research projects which will be established.
7
PART ONE: HOW DO ORGANISATIONS
THINK ABOUT AND SUPPORT LEADERS
AND COALITIONS?
It is commonly recognised by development organisations
that for developmental change to occur, leadership is
needed. The 2017 Australian Foreign Policy White Paper
notes that emerging leaders in the Indo-Pacic must be
‘supported to enable those countries to address their
development challenges’ (2017: 99) and ‘to prepare them
for the challenges of modern governance’ (2017: 103). The
World Bank argues that to achieve its goals of ending
extreme poverty and promoting shared prosperity, ‘it is
essential that we collaborate by pooling our knowledge and
efforts in many areas, including the support of leadership in
countries’ (2016: v). And Oxfam supports transformational
leadership to address inequality and give greater voice to
marginalised groups such as women (2013). Indeed, the
number of development programs supporting leadership
has mushroomed in the last twenty years (Lyne de Ver and
Kennedy 2011: 1). Yet as Lyne de Ver and Kennedy (2011:
6) note in their synthesis of 67 development organisation
programs that focus on supporting leadership (and which
remains one of the most comprehensive overviews of
the topic), what precisely is meant by leadership varies
and has historically been rarely dened. Moreover, few
of the 67 programs reviewed had an explicit theory of
change, explaining how the support provided by the
development organisation led to the impacts they claimed
to be contributing to (Ibid.). Indeed, Lyne de Ver and
Kennedy’s headline nding is that it is not clear whether
many leadership development programs in fact deliver
developmental benets.
This raises the problem outlined above: if leadership is
important we need to be clearer about what it is, and how
supporting it contributes to achieving developmental
change. By unpacking the kinds of support that
development organisations commonly provide to contribute
to developmental leadership, we can tease out the ways
that development organisations think about and understand
leadership. That is, we can clarify what their implicit
understandings of leadership are and their theories of
change, whether stated or unstated. This then provides us
with a basis to determine the extent to which this thinking
connects with what we know about how leaders emerge,
operate and cooperate to achieve developmental change.
COMMON FORMS OF DEVELOPMENT
ORGANISATION SUPPORT FOR LEADERSHIP
AND COALITIONS
From a review of project descriptions of a number of
development organisations and drawing on the secondary
literature, a range of strategies emerge as commonly
relied upon to support developmental leadership or
coalitions. As there are different ways of studying
leadership (see Jack Corbett’s Foundational Paper in this
series), so too are there different ways of supporting it.
While there is signicant variation in terms of the aims
and forms of many leadership support programs, and of
course many programs combine multiple strategies, in
the table adjacent we aim to capture some of the most
common forms of support. Furthermore, we recognise
that these forms of support can be directly, or indirectly,
targeted at changes at the individual, collective or
societal levels as described in the DLP synthesis paper
(DLP, 2018) and therefore map program strategies against
these levels. The table is, of course, a neatening of reality
and – in practice – many programs incorporate different
forms of support and a range of levels. However, on the
whole, the table assists in highlighting that the majority of
development organisation support falls at the individual,
or perhaps collective levels – with little focused at the
societal level.
WHAT THESE FORMS OF SUPPORT IMPLY
ABOUT UNDERSTANDINGS OF LEADERSHIP
AND COALITIONS
While the specic understandings of leadership vary
from program to program, some general impressions
emerge across programs. Moreover, the general lack of
specication about what is meant by ‘leadership’ means that
we must trace the implied understandings in order to tease
out the assumptions underlying much leadership support.
This provides us with a basis to then consider how these
assumptions t with existing knowledge about leaders, how
they emerge and cooperate to achieve change.
8HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
TABLE ONE: FORMS OF SUPPORT TO INDIVIDUAL, COLLECTIVE AND SOCIETAL
LEADERSHIP
FORM OF
SUPPORT
INDIVIDUAL COLLECTIVE SOCIETAL
Scholarships Promotion of individual knowledge,
skills and experience through
educational opportunities either
domestically of internationally e.g.
Australia Awards.
Support to the building of and access
to networks that can be crucial to
future networks or coalitions for
change e.g. Women’s Leadership
Initiative, Alumni networks.
Contributing to the emergence
of elites or a middle class with
particular values and ways of
working that are developmental.
Training Individual classroom-based
teaching focused on skills and
qualities associated with effective
management or leadership. e.g.
PNG Training Precinct.
Workshops and events designed to
provide organisations, coalitions,
networks or alliance with the skills,
knowledge and networking to promote
developmental leadership e.g. Pacic
Leadership Program’s (PLP) adaptive
leadership work in the Pacic.
Institutional reform to reposition
the skills system to align with
employment demands, to integrate
them into national structures
and attempt to shift public ideas
and beliefs about the value of
vocational training vs. university
qualications e.g. Vanuatu Skills
Partnership and Australia Pacic
Training Coalition.
TA/mentoring/
coaching
Formal technical assistance to
support things like legislative
drafting. Mentoring and advice to
identied leaders on navigating
reform processes e.g.: The Asia
Foundation in the Philippines &
Timor-Leste.
Ongoing support to organisations,
coalitions, alliances etc. in building and
maintaining their collective resources
and capacities to promote change e.g.:
The Asia Foundation in The Philippines
and Timor-Leste.
Shifting attitudes towards, and
legitimacy of, particular groups or
issues in the eyes of the broader
public.
Exchange and
learning
Promoting individual events, study
visits or exchanges designed to
enhance personal leadership skills.
Convening events and creating spaces
to bring together potential allies
and partners to develop ideas and
networks. Twinning arrangements
between communities, institutions,
industries.
Exposure to different ideas,
norms and values as a means to
extend the options for what might
be deemed possible in a given
situation.
Financial
support
Financial support for individual
training, mentoring and coaching.
Financial support (often core) to civil
society organisations and coalitions;
support for events; cross-sector
dialogue; policy fora etc. e.g. PLP, the
Indonesia Development Forum.
Financial support for social or
mass-media, popular campaigns
designed to shift norms and values
on leadership.
Demand
side work:
awareness
campaigns,
triggering
demand
Building skills of community/civil
society leaders, researchers and
advocates to collect data, engage
service providers, government
etc. and advocate for change
e.g. Indonesia Knowledge Sector
Initiative (KSI).
Building knowledge and capacities
of communities and civil society
organisations to form and maintain
coalitions and alliances to engage
service providers, government etc. e.g.
Empowering Indonesian Women for
Poverty Reduction (MAMPU), various
social accountability initiatives.
Building demand for evidence and
recognition of civil society voice
as important and legitimate in the
policy process. Promoting human
rights which can be ‘drawn down’ by
civil society groups.
Supporting
an enabling
environment
Building skills of policy makers
to engage with research and
evidence, as well as their ability
to engage in dialogue with
civil society, private sector,
development agencies etc. e.g.
KSI.
Creating an enabling environment
in which civil space, contestation,
leadership etc. is possible. Creating
institutional environment in which
leaders are held to account etc. e.g.
policy dialogue around establishment
of anti-corruption commissions; public
service standards; laws protecting civil
society space, media development etc.
Promotion of norms which value
negotiation, dialogue and inclusion
as opposed to conict, and
exclusion. Inuencing channels (i.e.
formal and social media) through
which perceptions of leadership
are shaped.
9
INDIVIDUAL LEADERS OR COLLECTIVE LEADERSHIP?
Much support by development organisations treats
leadership as an individual skill or quality, rather than a
group process (i.e. it focuses on the rst column in table
overleaf). In the literature, this is often talked about as the
difference between focusing on ‘leaders’ and on ‘leadership’
(Corbett 2019). In Lyne de Ver and Kennedy’s study, ‘over
a third of the programmes surveyed concentrate on
developing the personal skills of individual leaders, study
“heroic leadership gures” (O’Connor & Day, 2007: 70), and
place an emphasis on leadership styles or traits’ (2011: 4).
Training, mentoring or scholarship programs, for
instance, generally select promising individuals who are
deemed to demonstrate leadership qualities, or take
a cohort performing particular functions in the public
service, parliament or other institution, and focus on
improving their own skill set through the achievement
of qualications or exposure to personal development
processes. These individuals are then inserted back into
their local context with newfound knowledge or improved
skills, strategies and qualities that are assumed to
increase their likelihood and quality of leadership. This
approach tends to see leadership in highly individualised
forms (the idea of there being ‘great leaders’ who push
forward change, for instance), unless there is also
an emphasis on the skills needed to foster collective
leadership. This is in contrast to approaches to leadership
that view it as a much more negotiated or collective
process (see column two, on the previous page), focused
on the relationship between leaders, wider coalitions and
followers. Lyne de Ver and Kennedy (2011: 7; 8) explain this
as the difference between training leaders by enhancing
the knowledge and skills, condence and personal
development of individual “leaders” versus:
bring[ing] together a group of people from the same
context who will continue to connect, interact, relate
to, and work with one another in their real lives, in
order to create ‘leadership’ within that group and in
their context.
This characterisation of support as focusing more
strongly on individual rather than collective leadership
appears to be less true in relation to gender and disability.
In these elds, we nd more support is focused on
building advocacy networks and coalitions, rather than on
pinpointing and investing in individual promising leaders.
Potential reasons for this difference are discussed below.
Potential research avenues: What can other leadership
programs learn from women’s empowerment efforts,
or disability initiatives in terms of moving beyond an
individualised approach? What kind of combination of
individual and collective support might be required in
different contexts, and on different issues?
© Christian Joudrey l Unsplash
10 HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
AGENCY OR STRUCTURE
Connected to the above, support to leadership often
emphasises agency (i.e. the role that individuals or
organisations can play in promoting change), but
downplays structure (i.e. the political, economic or
societal forces or constraints which inhibit agency).
Programs thus focus on the potential of individuals or
groups of individuals to overcome structural constraints
to change. In part, this reects the belief of most
development assistance in the ability of people to achieve
change. As Corbett notes in his Foundational Paper, the
rst phase of DLP’s research was premised on the view
that ‘development theory had paid too much attention to
structure and not enough attention to agency’ (Corbett,
2019: 10). Yet this emphasis can risk assuming away the
obstacles that make change dicult to achieve. This
includes structural constraints within the wider society
(for example, patriarchy or patrimonialism that inhibit
gender equality or accountable governance from taking
hold) but also the effectiveness of the institutions within
which potential leaders work and live (Lyne de Ver and
Kennedy 2011: iv), including development agencies
themselves. Leaders are not islands. They exist within
institutional and cultural contexts that shape them and
what it is possible to achieve. A sophisticated and highly
skilled potential ‘leader’ sitting within a ministry beset
by corruption, under-resourcing and weak political
clout will struggle to achieve change even with the
best organisational management skills, without also
understanding these structural constraints and having
skills and strategies to navigate them. Understanding the
potential of agents within these structural constraints is
important to supporting them with the right strategies,
skills and networks to achieve change within their
particular context.
At the same time, a range of programming options do
exist that seek to support a wider enabling environment
in which developmental leadership can emerge. Yet this
programming is rarely explicit about developmental
leadership as an aim. This is an area that may warrant
greater exploration. Furthermore, as Corbett points
out in his Foundational Paper (Where do leaders come
from?), taking an approach which seeks to discover and
compare how leaders perceive the constraints they face,
and how and why they make different choices than others
as a result, potentially allows us to not only overcome
some of the limitations of a structure versus agency
conceptualisation, but also undertake more comparative
analysis (Corbett, 2019).
Potential research avenues: How does programming that
takes into account, or focuses on, the wider enabling
environment contribute to supporting the emergence
of developmental leadership? How do programs that
support individual and collective leadership contribute to
overcoming structural constraints and therefore broader
societal change?
We nd more support
is focused on building
advocacy networks and
coalitions, rather than
on pinpointing and
investing in individual
promising leaders.
11
ARE LEADERS BORN OR MADE?
Most of the leadership programs that development
organisations support seem to be premised on the implicit
assumption that, at least to some degree, leaders can
be made through supporting them with skills, education,
networks, resources and other opportunities. Yet subtle
distinctions in approach are still apparent with some
programs focused on ‘teaching’ leadership to those that
might not otherwise possess those skills or resources,
and programs that aim to facilitate existing leadership
potential. As Lyne de Ver and Kennedy explain, if a
leadership program:
conceives of leadership largely as a set of skills,
knowledge and capacities possessed by individuals
or groups of people, learned through education and
practice, such as public speaking ability, management
techniques, and the ability to process complex ideas,
then these are all skills that can be taught. Such a
programme will, therefore, likely have a large class-
room component involving skills training, knowledge
development, and capacity building … If, on the other
hand, …[it] conceives of leadership as being derived
from experience; as being a process rather than a skill;
or as something that cannot be directly taught but can
be ‘brought-out’ in potential leaders, then the process
of leadership-learning is less straightforward.
The nature of support provided by development
organisations would thus be different, depending on
whether they view leadership as innate or learned.
However, as Jack Corbett notes in his Foundational
Paper (Where do Leaders Come From?), this distinction is
arguably false in that all leaders are made up of ‘a unique
combination of attributes and resources they were born
with, and the experiences and choices they have made to
maximise them’ (Corbett, 2019: 18). As such he argues that
future research should focus on how leaders accumulate
and leverage existing resources and capacities, including
education and technical skills and political or relational
capital, as well as the strategies they employ to maximise
these resources relative to opponents, and the outcomes
of their choices. If this was better understood then this
might provide development agencies with a more nuanced
picture of how they might augment these different types
of capital or resources.
Furthermore, as argued in the rst Foundational Paper
(How is Leadership Understood in Different Contexts?)
leadership is also a process shaped by the interaction
between leaders and followers (Hudson and Mcloughlin,
2019). It is in this sense distinctly relational. Being clearer
about this would assist development organisations in
tailoring their support to leadership to better deliver
developmental outcomes. In particular, it would recognise
those aspects of leadership support which might be
provided by teaching and training (i.e. more analytical or
cognitive processes), and those skills and capacities that
can only be developed through practice and feedback (i.e.
relational skills).
Potential research avenues: Given the multiple resources
that leaders can develop and strategically deploy to
achieve their goals, what is the mix of support which
might be required to enhance these resources in different
contexts, and for different groups?
12 HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
BIAS TOWARDS WESTERN LEADERSHIP STYLES
Training curricula tend to be based on leadership and
management skills found to be important in Western
institutions. While some of these skills and values may well
be transferrable, as Lyne de Ver and Kennedy note, they
also ‘overlook the importance of learning about networks
and coalitions and are universalist rather than specic to
the context of the participants’ (2011: vi). Similarly, study
visits and twinning arrangements are frequently based
on the implicit assumption that institutions in developed
country settings have practices or arrangements that
are relevant to developing countries – although there is
an increasing recognition that more relevant learning is
likely to come from middle income settings, or countries
with similar political, economic or cultural histories, than
from high income donor countries. At the same time,
much leadership research is based on a Western-centric,
and gendered understanding of leadership (Hudson and
Mcloughlin, 2019).
This Western-centric bias has been critiqued as highly
normative (Storberg-Walker, 2017). That is, leadership is
understood in the context of values-based beliefs about
what is, or seems to be, effective in western organisations
and societies. This has seen the emergence of values-
based subjects like ‘leadership integrity,’ or ‘ethical
leadership’ (Waddock 2007). It is suggested that this is
probably connected to the problems or challenges which
leadership support is often deployed to address – such as
corruption and lack of accountability. Drawing on values
such as integrity, ethics and accountability can thus be
seen as a way to ensure leaders that emerge have the
kind of normative bent that development organisations
believe to be necessary for developmental change. The
problem is, as a number of DLP case studies have noted
(see for instance Denney and McLaren, 2016; Rousseau and
Kenneth, 2018), not that these values are not appropriate
in developing country contexts – the West does not have
a monopoly on integrity! But the way that these values
are presented, explained, and assumed to operate are not
necessarily culturally attuned.
More non-prescriptive approaches to leadership recognise
that different value systems exist and that notions of good
leadership may differ from place-to-place. As Lyne de Ver
and Kennedy (2011: 9) note:
This does not necessarily mean that such programmes
ignore morality, values and ethics altogether.
Instead these kinds of programmes might encourage
discussion of these concepts but tend to emphasise
the need for a better understanding and representation
of one’s own values in the practice of leadership
without attempting to teach or set out a particular
normative vision of leadership.
As Foundational Paper One, Where Do Leaders Come
From? illustrates, however, there may be consistent
patterns of ‘prototypical’ leadership – that is, common
ways that communities in different contexts value leaders
who reect the identity and characteristics of the group.
Furthermore, this suggests that this identity also provides
a buffer against failure, as well as providing leaders
with more space to promote change. On the other hand,
non-prototypical leaders seem to face a glass ceiling in
terms of how far their success can build perceptions of
their trustworthiness and capability. In this sense, what
leadership means in any given setting is an empirical
rather than a normative question (Hudson and Mcloughlin,
2019).
Potential avenues of research might therefore include
further work on how leadership support may need to
be different when supporting prototypical leadership
(as opposed to atypical leadership), and in particular
exploring what kind of support might enable such leaders
to go against the group’s interests while retaining
their legitimacy and support base. This in turn might
provide useful clues as to what kinds of non-western
conceptualisations of leadership development and
support might look like, as well as how they might be
harnessed for developmental ends.
13
LEADERSHIP AS MANAGERIAL, RATHER THAN POLITICAL, CROSS-SECTORAL
AND MULTI-LEVEL
While the ultimate goal of development organisations
supporting leadership is to improve development
outcomes, the nature of their support is often projectised
into improving managerial skills or organisational
development. In part, this derives from the fact that most
leadership training and literature is rooted in Western
business management, prioritising performance and
eciency. As Lyne de Ver and Kennedy (2011: 8) note: ‘In
the past ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ were often seen
as virtually indistinguishable, and leadership was thus
largely seen in non-normative terms.’ This approach
emphasises the bureaucratic and managerial aspects of
leadership, which are of course important. But it overlooks
the political nature of leadership, which is increasingly
recognised as a key component of achieving change,
often through forming networks and shaping coalitions
which can bring different leadership contributions
together (Andrews et al, 207: 226), as well as bargaining
with potential allies and rivals (DLP, 2018). The risk is
that development organisations provide support that
equips those they work with to support with strengthened
technical managerial skills, but not with the political skills
required to make change happen in dicult contexts.
Furthermore, an important element of what has been
termed ‘adaptive leadership’ is increasingly seen as an
ability and willingness to disrupt the status quo, rather
than manage the implementation of existing strategies
or policies (Heifetz et al, 2009). This approach recognises
that there will always be vested interests in existing
practices which represent obstacles to change, and which
need to be challenged, whilst new approaches are tested
and institutionalised. This requires political as much as
managerial skills, as well as different types of support.
Support focused on women’s leadership and disability
initiatives appears to be ahead of the curve in this
regard. Lyne de Ver and Kennedy for example found
that, compared with the other leadership development
programs they studied, those ‘aimed at women’s leadership
show greater understanding of leadership as political
process, are more often based around concrete objectives,
and work together more frequently as a movement’ (Lyne
de Ver and Kennedy 2011: 19). This is perhaps due to the
long-standing recognition that achieving advancements in
gender equality or disability rights in all countries requires
overcoming signicant resistance from incumbent
leadership, as well as entrenched societal norms.
Therefore, collective approaches to change that are
focused on navigating the politics of change are viewed as
more effective and sustainable than supporting individual
leaders with managerial or organisational skills (see for
example Derbyshire et al, 2018). It is often also the case
the women and disabled people’s organisations insist on
a more collective approach to leadership. Focusing on
women’s organisations or disabled people’s organisations
therefore has the potential to deepen our understanding of
the politics of informal leadership. Nazneen also suggests
that that ‘a key gap in the literature is a systematic and
comparative analysis of what role intersectionality plays
in inuencing the ability of the marginalised groups to act
collectively, and when and how intersectionality can be a
source for legitimacy.’ (Nazneen, 2019).
Finally, there seems to be a gap in our understanding of
cross-boundary leadership, particularly at the ‘meso-
level’. The focus of much research – including in the
second phase of DLP – tends to be on formal leadership
roles (i.e. following reasonably determined paths through
higher education, political leadership) or on community or
coalition level leadership (women’s groups and coalitions,
etc.) working in particular sectors, with little in between.
What remains underexplored is: a) alternative non-elite
leadership pathways (e.g. through technical colleges,
local/provincial government, small businesses); b) how
leadership across local, national and international levels
functions; and c) how cross-sectoral and cross-group
leadership addresses ‘wicked problems’ like climate
change or migration.
Potential avenues of research might look at how
development organisations can assist potential leaders
(or groups of leaders) in maintaining collective action
and navigating the politics of reform processes, with
potential learning from successful leaders/reform
processes. This might include an exploration of what
can be learnt from the political leadership of women’s
organisations, coalitions and disabled people’s
organisations, as well as intersectional initiatives,
and what this might tell us about non-elite leadership
pathways, and how multi-level, cross-sectoral leadership
functions.
14 HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
IMPLICATIONS FOR HOW CHANGE HAPPENS
Development organisation support for leadership is
based on particular ideas about how change happens.
Often, change is viewed as occurring ‘transformationally,’
by a leader appealing to the higher conscious or ideals
of supporters and acting as a role model who inspires
change. While this reects how change happens in some
cases, it is increasingly accepted that developmental
change frequently occurs in a much more transactional
manner (Booth 2015; Laws 2010; Parks and Cole, 2010
etc.). That is, leaders bargain and negotiate, making
compromises and incremental progress. The difference is
important because it changes the way that leadership is
supported. A training program that understands leadership
as supporting transformational change will likely focus on
different skills and strategies from one that understands
leadership as pursuing transactional change, where
negotiation, bargaining and working in politically smart
ways is more important.
Transformational leadership has an inherent appeal and
is often viewed as ‘good’ leadership, while transactional
leadership is judged to be ‘bad’. ‘Transformational
leadership tends to be portrayed as heroic, or visionary,
while transactional leadership is seen more as
‘managerial’, or even clientelistic’ (Lyne de Ver and Kennedy
2011: 10). Yet this view is not necessarily in keeping
with the reality of how change happens and closes off
important avenues to achieving change. Each leadership
style may be appropriate in different contexts and at
different times. By focusing on one form of leadership
over others, development organisations might be missing
potential change strategies and would be better served by
keeping an open mind about how change happens in the
different contexts they work in.
As Grebe and Woermann (2011) note, transformational
leadership may be appropriate at critical junctures where
more profound or systemic change is possible (such as
when conict ends, or political transition takes place)
but ‘these junctures are few and far between.’ However,
when these transformational moments or opportunities
do not exist, transactional leadership may be the more
realistic way that sustained change happens. Similarly,
Nazneen notes in her Foundational Paper, collective
action processes often have distinct stages: a) collective
formation, i.e., leadership involves forming collectives
and maintaining group cohesion; b) legitimation, i.e.,
leadership involves framing and justifying demands and
strengthening the collective position to make claims; c)
securing institutional change, i.e., leadership involves
using different strategies to negotiate an outcome. It may
be interesting to explore how different types of leadership
map onto these different stages as part of Nazneen’s
suggestion of the need to look at how are different ways of
working (such as transformationally or transactionally) are
associated with different points in the life cycle of reform
(Nazneen, 2019).
Finally, there is long standing view in broader sociological
literature (Bourdieu, 1990; Elias, 1998), as well as
that related to complexity thinking and development
organisations (Stacey, 2007; Mowles, 2008) about the
‘transformative nature of everyday experience [based
on]…one of the central insights from complexity
theories, namely, that global patterns emerge only as a
consequence of the interactions of local agents’ (Mowles,
2008: 810). This underlines the potential importance
of day-to-day relationships that might be deemed
transactional, as a key part of more transformational
processes. From a leadership perspective this addresses
the structure-agency debate raised by Corbett in his
Foundational Paper (Corbett 2019: 9) by recognising the
recursive relationships between the everyday interactions
between leaders and their constituencies, and how this
both shapes and is shaped by broader economic, political,
social and organisational factors.
Potential avenues of research might therefore include
an exploration of how leadership support might vary
by taking account of different types, styles and levels
of leadership, the opportunities available for change,
the stages of collective action, and how the interaction
of leaders and local agents creates new patterns of
behaviour more broadly.
15
PART TWO: WHAT MIGHT THIS
REQUIRE OF DEVELOPMENT AGENCIES?
The earlier section, and the other Foundational
Papers indicate that there a number of forms of
leadership support which development agencies
might undertake. This includes direct support to individual
leaders or collective leadership in the form of coalitions
or alliances, or more indirect and oblique engagement
in shaping the processes, policies or environment which
facilitate the emergence of developmental leadership.
But the literature also suggests there are a number of
attributes or features of programs that have successfully
supported developmental leadership, and which can also
help determine what specic interventions might be more
or less effective in particular contexts.
The emerging body of literature on ‘Doing Development
Differently’ and ‘Thinking and Working Politically, (TWP)’
as well as DLP’s back catalogue of research consistently
suggests a number of common features of programs
that are deemed to effectively support developmental
leadership. Table two below captures some of these
common features, building on a review done by Julian
Barbara (Barbara 2019) and including, in particular, work
undertaken by DLP and specically the Gender and
Politics in Practice Research Program, as well as research
undertaken by the TWP Community of Practice (Laws
and Marquette, 2017), Dan Honig (2018), and the Overseas
Development Institute.
But in so doing – and in ways consistent with the DLP
synthesis framework used above (see Table One) – we
also try and tease out how these features of successful
programs might play out at different levels: program level,
organisational and the sectoral or systemic level (i.e. at
the level of ideas and constraints related to the political
economy of the development sector). The latter two levels
are particularly important given the nding of the TWP
community of practice research that there was a need to
develop ‘a more complete picture of the ways in which TWP
faces a set of systemic bureaucratic and political obstacles’
(Laws and Marquette, 2018: 31). These levels basically cover
the ‘proximate’ and ‘distal’ contexts referred to in the rst
Foundational Paper (Hudson and Mcloughlin, 2019). These
levels also, in some ways, mirror the levels of individual,
collective and societal used in Table One. Clearly identifying
these constraints is the rst step in hopefully identifying
where and how they have been – or can be – overcome.
As such the table and the analysis which follows seeks to
tease out not just the implications for projects or programs
working in ways which support developmental leadership, but
also to suggest organisational and sector wide implications.
We believe this is helpful in not only bringing together
ndings from the literature which are often focused on
separate levels, but also in outlining possible areas of future
research which take this more holistic analysis into account.
© Neil Thomas l Unsplash
16 HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
TABLE TWO: IMPLICATIONS AT PROGRAM, ORGANISATIONAL AND SECTOR
LEVELS
PROGRAM LEVEL ORGANISATIONAL LEVEL SECTOR/SYSTEMIC LEVEL
Contextual
understanding
and relationships
Strong political economy analysis
including analysis of power relations,
which improves understanding of
how leaders/coalitions emerge, their
relationship with followers and how
they operate to achieve change, as
well as the building of effective local
networks which provide a range of
perspectives on the context.
Providing incentives for local staff
to be developing and maintaining
their contextual knowledge and
relationships.
Recognising the risk of rapid staff
turn-over.
Developing cross-cultural agility.
Tendency for the analysis and
relationships of expatriate staff
and external consultants (both of
whom are usually short term) and
western leadership perspectives
to be privileged.
Locally-led
problem solving
Identifying and supporting
local leadership and coalitions
in the processes of problem
identication, the testing of
‘solutions’, and appropriate
adjustment.
Ensuring that program designs
and implementer contracts do not
encourage externally led problem
and solution identication.
Predominance of principal-agent
notions of accountability, rather
than peer, social or political
forms of accountability.
Expanding and
nurturing the
space(s) for
change
Building and expanding spaces
which foster: acceptance of
change; authority to change and
introduce or liberate the abilities or
capacities to achieve change.
Developing program policy
which recognises leadership
interventions should focus on
creating ‘change space’ as much
as identifying and supporting
individual leaders.
Preference for more engineered
and theoretically more
predictable processes than less
certain emergent ones.
Convening
and brokering
relationships
Use of convening power and
relationships to support local
and multi-level leadership and
coalitions in their problem-solving.
Valuing and rewarding the
dicult to measure processes
of relationship development and
brokering.
Recognising the risk of putting
money on the table.
Pressures to spend and meet
pre-determined and easily
communicable, tangible targets.
Learning,
adaptation and
M&E
Establishing effective learning and
review processes which provide
effective feedback on both the
changing context and program
outcomes to front line staff and
partners, as well as meeting other
accountability requirements, which
is then used to adapt programs and
strategies.
Providing front-line staff and
partners with the ability and
discretion to ‘navigate by
judgement’; seize opportunities and
to adjust programs as a result.
Risk-averse, compliance culture
which seeks a high level of
‘control’.
Discomfort with uncertainty and
unpredictability.
Authorising
Environment
Trust of, and support from,
individuals who ‘get’ this way of
working and are prepared to ‘push
back’ on organisational systems to
protect programs for which they
have responsibility.
Trust of, and support from,
individuals who ‘get’ this way of
working and are prepared to work
the system to protect programs for
which they have responsibility.
The political space for
development agencies is highly
constrained and public attitudes
to aid are ill-informed and not
politically salient.
Source: Adapted from Barbara 2019, Andrews et al. 2012; Thinking and Working Politically Community of Practice 2013; Booth and Unsworth 2014; The Doing
Development Differently Manifesto 2014, DLP synthesis 2018; Derbyshire et al 2018, Honig 2018, Hudson and Mclouglin 2019
17
CONTEXTUAL UNDERSTANDING AND
RELATIONSHIPS
Most cases of programs which effectively support
developmental leadership point to the importance
of having a nuanced understanding of the political
environment, including a grasp of national, local or
sectoral political settlements (Laws and Marquette,
2017) as well as an effective understanding of processes
of disempowerment and marginalisation (Derbyshire et
al, 2018). In the rst Foundational Paper in this series
a strong argument is also made for adopting a cultural
perspective to understanding the leadership context, as
well as the channels by which perceptions of leadership
are formed (Hudson and Mcloughlin, 2019). This is
particularly important in understanding potential barriers
for women taking up leadership roles. Some go further
to recognise the importance of actually being part of a
broader knowledge ‘eco-system’, given the diversity of
perspectives on ‘what is really going on’, and the fact that
this understanding can evolve rapidly as circumstances
change. Mariz Tadros, for example, notes the importance
of local and international staff having ‘developed previous
local relationships and networks across a long period of
time, amounting to a repertoire of social and political
capital’. As such she argues these relationships are not
just important in improving contextual understanding, they
also help build effective relationships and trust (Tadros,
2011). The challenge for development agencies is that staff
turn-over can be too high for relationships to mature, and
too often it is the contextual analysis of expatriate, rather
than local staff, that is valued. In addition, where the
knowledge of local staff is valued, there can be a tendency
to rely on a small number of ‘known quantities’ without
interrogating their own biases and seeking broader views.
This invests a large amount of power in a small group of,
often elite individuals.
While tools like political economy analysis, conict
analysis, political settlements analysis – and so on – can
help, they are ultimately only as good as the information
fed into them and are no substitute for deep contextual
knowledge and relationships. Such knowledge is key to
understanding whose leadership to support, in what ways
that will have local value, and with what resources.
LOCALLY-LED PROBLEM SOLVING
Whilst it has been recognised for a long time that
development processes need to be ‘locally-owned’ and
‘locally-led’ (Paris Declaration 2005; Accra Agenda for
Action 2008; Busan Partnership Agreement 2011), it has
also been noted that the very identity of the international
development sector has historically been premised
on solving problems, lling gaps and overcoming local
weaknesses often using ‘solutions’ developed elsewhere
(Baser and Morgan, 2008; Denney, Mallett and Benson,
2017). Furthermore, there can also be a reluctance on the
part of donors to support ‘small’ interventions, despite
the fact that they can create high energy processes
which build condence and awareness and ignite
self-organisation that can cascade out in unexpected
ways (Baser and Morgan, 2008). As noted in the rst
Foundational Paper, leadership development programs
which do not take account of local cultures, values and
ideas are likely to be less effective. Indeed, there is
evidence to suggest leadership development programs
are more locally owned where they are aligned with
culturally relevant perceptions of leadership (Hudson and
Mcloughlin, 2019; see also Rhodes, 2014). The successful
cases identied in the literature seem to have overcome
these tendencies and been genuinely open to locally led
problem identication and experimentation, not least
by focusing on local actors and their relationships as
much as on ‘the project’ and the money, and recognising
this in project designs and contracts with implementers
(Derbyshire et al, 2018).
Leadership development
programs which do not
take account of local
cultures, values and
ideas are likely to be
less effective.
18 HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
EXPANDING AND NURTURING THE
SPACE(S) FOR CHANGE
At the same time, in line with ideas around development
as leadership-led change (Andrews, 2010) there is
recognition that donors can play a role in not just ‘picking
winners’ or champions, and going beyond supplying
‘political will’, but in helping to shape the environment
which allows local leadership to emerge and thrive. This
might include: helping to build acceptance or buy-in
amongst elites, or other donors, for different ways of
doing things (for instance, promoting gender equality
and women’s leadership through hosting high level
regional meetings); protecting civil society space as a
forum for leaders to emerge; supporting authorising
or accountability structures, which for example might
provide more voice to marginalised groups; or enhancing
the abilities of coalitions to overcome internal differences
and develop appropriate strategies and alliances. The
rst Foundational Paper in this series also notes the
importance of the media – and increasingly social media
– as spaces within which perceptions of leadership are
shaped (Hudson and Mcloughlin, 2019). Such approaches
require a degree of comfort with uncertainty, and more
oblique change strategies, which are often at odds with
risk averse and overly prescriptive program designs. Yet
such approaches offer the best opportunities for working
on the ‘structure’ side of leadership and shaping the
broader environment in ways that enable developmental
leadership to emerge.
CONVENING AND BROKERING
RELATIONSHIPS
Several successful cases of developmental leadership
point to the challenges of initiating and, in particular,
maintaining collective action. They note the hard work and
commitment that needs to go into negotiating agendas
and interests, developing the range of expertise, skills
and political networks required to successfully promote
reform, and in adjusting leadership styles and ways of
working according to the context and stage in the life
cycle of a given reform process (Faustino and Booth 2014;
Denney and McLaren 2016). As the rst Foundational Paper
suggests this demands that leaders have the ‘cultural agility ’
to work across different interest groups in order to build
common ground (Hudson and Mcloughlin, 2019). In these
cases, donors have played important roles in: providing
the resources and space for these internal processes
(Rousseau, 2018); and ensuring that their calls for funding,
demands, and reporting do not inadvertently undermine the
cohesion of coalitions or exacerbate competition amongst
its members (Denney and McLaren, 2016).
LEARNING, ADAPTATION AND
MONITORING & EVALUATION
One of the major challenges which has been repeatedly
raised in the eld of adaptive programming is how to
undertake effective monitoring, learning, adaptation and
evaluation that serves multiple purposes, and different
levels of decision-making. Successful cases seem to
have recognised the existence of different purposes
(accountability, learning, and so on), as well as recognising
the politics involved in these processes. This has resulted
in:
•a range of efforts designed to incentivise, promote, and
reserve time and space for, gathering and processing
data and feedback to actually use this to enable
adaptation and adjustment (Ramalingam et al, 2019a);
•experimenting with a number of tools and methods,
such as strategy testing (Ladner, 2015), outcome
harvesting (Abboud), social network analysis (Hoppe and
Reinelt, 2010), action-research (O’Keefe et al, 2014) and
Qualitative Comparative Analysis (Zeng, 2013) which hold
promise for program design and which gather data in
ways that are robust but also more consistent with the
messy reality of leadership and political reform;
•a recognition of the need to bring ‘big data’ and ‘thick
data’ together (Ang 2019), and to be clearer about how
‘generalisable’ and locally generated evidence are
combined in different circumstances (Oliver et al 2018);
•the recognition of the importance of M&E and the
communication of program success in ways that
enhance the political capital of initiatives and which
in turn expand their space for further experimentation
and adaptation (Barbara, 2019).
Successful cases of
leadership support
commonly note
the importance a
supportive internal and
external institutional
environment,has an
appropriate appetite
for risk; and provides
adequate space for
reection and learning.
(Booth and Unsworth 2014; Denney
and Domingo 2014).
19
There are two issues here: what might we want to learn,
monitor and evaluate; and, how best this is done. The rst
three Foundational papers suggest a number of generic areas
which might be potentially important in any MEL process
associated with leadership programs, these include:
•How contextual - and in particular political and cultural
- factors shape perceptions of leadership, and the
opportunity structures for leadership to be exercised;
•The diverse resources and forms of ‘capital’ that
different kinds of leaders can deploy and how this
shapes the choices they make as well as their
legitimacy, and how this changes over time;
•Understanding not just the outcomes of leadership
development but also the active processes by which
leaders, individually and collectively cultivate their
identity and engage with their ‘followers’, as well as
across diverse interest groups;
•Exploring how different levels and types of leadership,
and leadership support, combine to address complex
challenges in direct or less direct ways.
FLEXIBILITY
A wide body of DLP and other research has found that
greater exibility in aid programs leads to better outcomes
because such an approach enables better understanding
of, and adaptation to, local context, as well as allowing
for greater responsiveness (see Tadros, 2011 on women’s
movements in Egypt and Jordan; Denney and McLaren,
2016 and Fletcher et al, 2016 on reform coalitions in the
Pacic; and Hodes, 2011 on women’s coalitions in South
Africa, as well as Faustino and Booth, 2014; Carothers and
de Gramont, 2013). This is supported by a long tradition
of scholarship which has explored how the organisation
of international aid matters for development outcomes
(Hirschman, 1967; Tendler, 1975; Honig & Gulrajani, 2018).
More recently, Dan Honig’s empirical work has used a
wide range of quantitative data, as well as comparative
qualitative analysis, to provide clear evidence that when
eld staff in agencies are given greater space to ‘navigate
by judgement’ then this leads to better project outcomes.
This is particularly the case in volatile, unpredictable
contexts, and for complex programs, whereas in more
stable environments and ‘externally veriable’ projects i.e.
projects where the link between quantiable outputs and
goals is clear and tight, more traditional approaches may
be more suitable (Honig, 2018: 106).
AUTHORISING ENVIRONMENT
Successful cases of leadership support commonly
note the importance a supportive internal and external
institutional environment, which provides long-term
support, allows for the recruitment of people with
good contextual knowledge and experience; has an
appropriate appetite for risk; and provides adequate
space for reection and learning (Booth and Unsworth
2014; Denney and Domingo 2014). Some also suggest
that the establishment of high levels of trust and mutual
understanding between implementing agencies and
donor staff is particularly important including this being
sucient for implementing agencies to ‘push back’ on
donors if when they feel their demands are undermining
the programs commitment to locally led, politically
informed ways of working (Eyben et al 2015, Derbyshire et
al 2018). What is perhaps less clear in these accounts is
the degree to which this authorising environment emerges
from the day-to-day interactions of individuals and teams,
as opposed to the institutional policies and procedures
of both implementation agencies and/or donors. There is
some evidence to suggest that the former is an important
part of the mix, but often underplayed.
Potential research avenues: Building on the Gender and
Politics in Practice Research to explore how successful
programs have navigated and adapted business
practices, HR policies, contract management and MEL
in ways that effectively support programs seeking to
promote developmental leadership. Similar to ongoing
research efforts to understand and support the work
of DFID’s Better Delivery Unit and USAID’s Collaborating
Learning and Adapting (CLA) framework, research in the
Australian context could explore opportunities within
DFAT for organisational-wide efforts to enable such ways
of working.
20 HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
© Bekir Donmez l Unsplash
21
PART THREE: THE CHALLENGE OF
SYSTEMIC CHANGE
Beyond encouraging leadership support by
development agencies to support the program
features set out in part two to improve
effectiveness, it is also important to reflect on what
changes might be needed within development agency
systems and ways of working that would enable better
support to developmental leaders. In the same way that
there are indirect means to support the emergence of
developmental leadership by seeking to promote shifts
in the operating environment, we also need to consider
the indirect means by which the operating environment
of development agencies might better enable them to
support locally led process of change, and the emergence
of developmental leaders.
So, what would it take for the lessons about organisational
and sectoral constraints to be translated into shifts in
the institutional and sector-wide assumptions, policies
and practices (laid out in columns three and four in Table
Two)? The work from the Doing Development Differently
and Thinking and Working Politically movements, as well
as DLP’s back catalogue of research all strongly suggest
that if development agencies are going to be in a position
to more effectively and consistently enable locally led,
politically informed development, then there are a number
of systemic changes that need to be made.
DLP’s Gender and Politics in Practice Research, on
programs that have successfully supported gender
sensitive and politically informed processes, points
to the need to consider changes to: human resource
and recruitment policies; funding and contracting
mechanisms; monitoring, evaluation and reporting
systems; governance arrangements; and oversight and
accountability relationships (Derbyshire et al 2018).
Research on achieving change in the elds of justice and
security has found similar reforms are required to improve
the quality of programming (Denney and Domingo, 2014).
However, it is also the case that a body of recent research
and literature has suggested that the kinds of changes
that good development practice seem to require, and
which are outlined above, are dicult – if not impossible
– to implement once the political economy of the
international development sector is properly factored in.
Pablo Yanguas, for example, suggests that international
aid is often used as a political football in domestic political
battles. As such, policy positions are taken more to provide
signals to ideological supporters, than to improve the long-
term quality of development programs (Yanguas, 2018).
Jack Corbett’s analysis of ‘Australia’s foreign aid dilemma’
argues that shallow levels of public support for aid and
high levels of executive discretion, have led to a form of
‘court politics’ in which the ‘manoeuvring and strategising’
about aid policy is conducted by a relatively small group of
ministers and senior public servants (Corbett, 2017: 5). In
addition, he posits that this produces a constant attempt
to balance policy, technical and administrative legitimacy
that has been unsuccessful, with different priorities
winning out at different moments. The result in his words
being an aid program that is ‘hostage to political fortunes’
(Corbett, 2017: 209).
It is these kinds of structural explanations of why
development agencies behave as they do, that leads
some authors to describe progress in adopting new
practices or ways of working as ‘partial and in many
ways tentative’ (Carothers and de Gramont, 2013: 255).
Although these arguments also focus on the fact that
the political interests of development agencies – and the
foreign affairs ministries they are increasingly located
in – trump those of aid effectiveness, they also note more
traditional bureaucratic obstacles such as a narrow focus
on ‘results management’ and overly rigid project planning
which constrain exibility and favour more technocratic
approaches to development problems (Carothers and de
Gramont, 2013: 272; Natsios, 2010).
22 HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
As Katsutoshi Fushimi has recently noted, the continued
utilisation of these kinds of ‘blueprint’ methods and
tools, despite their well know disadvantages, is
somewhat puzzling (see also Natsios, 2010). Using the
lens of sociological new institutional theory he argues
that a combination of ‘rationalist institutional myths’
(prioritizing legitimacy to domestic stakeholders even if
adopted methods hinder effective programming abroad);
decoupling (whilst a log-frame might exist to satisfy
accountability requirements, project staff are not held
to it in practice); and institutional mimicry (a mix of
coercive pressures from funders simply copying others,
and normative pressures from professional experts) help
explain this puzzle (Fushimi, 2019: 10-12). Fushimi goes on
to argue that these processes suggest that whilst there is
a degree of external pressure which explains this, there is
also a key role for ‘distributed agency’ across organisations
– or indeed one might argue distributed leadership – which
helps explain these processes of institutionalisation,
rather than this simply being down to ‘institutional
champions’ or ‘entrepreneurs’ or broader structural
political economy concerns (Fushimi, 2019: 14).
In a similar vein, Honig and Gulrajani argue that
development organisations will only be able to accomplish
their desired macro-level organisational transformations
(i.e. – equitable development outcomes) by focusing on
linked micro-level organisational behaviours’ (i.e. – how
the organisation works on a day-to-day basis) (Honig
& Gulrajani, 2018:69). As such, they argue that it is by
examining the role played by the ‘agent-level factors’ of
motivation, autonomy and trust which might promote
‘contingent’ ways of working. That is, ways of working
tailored to context. These factors would recognise:
the value of freedom and discretion; that staff who are
connected to their work are more effective; and the need
to expand notions of accountability. The kinds of macro-
level outcomes that development organisations seek are
thus fundamentally connected to the bureaucratic, day-to-
day workings of their staff.
Furthermore, they submit that whilst political authorising
environments are a constraint on the autonomy of aid
agencies, as Yanguas and Corbett suggest, there is more
scope to shift internal ways of working than is commonly
acknowledged. However, they also question whether
institutional change can be achieved through small
incremental changes which are limited to specic domains
such as DFID’s Smart Rules or USAID’s Local Systems
Framework, without more holistic attempts to shift
incentives.
TABLE THREE: ADVANCING CONTINGENT WAYS OF WORKING THROUGH A
FOCUS ON AGENTS
CONCEPT CONTINGENT WAYS OF WORKING
Contextual knowledge Adaptability Flexibility
Automomy Giving agents the ability to make
use of local knowledge encourages
its gathering.
Allows for adaptation to local
contexts based on better
knowledge of context.
Less rigid hierarchy allows
agents to respond to observable
but unveriable features of
context.
Motivation Only motivated agents can and will
gather contextual knowledge when
their efforts cannot be monitored.
Where context can be assessed
only by eld agents, motivated
agents will be able to adapt
programmes appropriately.
Motivated agents will work
harder to ensure projects are
exible to changing needs and
circumstances.
Trust Contextual knowledge derives
from trusting staff when
monitoring staff is not possible.
Trust required for eld staff to lead
adaptation, where relevant features
of context not transmittable to HQ.
Agents who feel trust by
organisation, and organisations
that are trusted by authorisers,
more likely to have and use
available exability.
Source: Honig and Gulrajani (2018:74)
23
All of which arguably bring us to questions about the
leadership of individual development agencies, as well
as of the development sector more broadly. Arguably, if
we are to understand how developmental leadership is
to be best supported by development agencies then we
can apply a similar set of questions about the practice of
leadership in development agencies that we have asked of
developmental leaders themselves, notably:
•What kind of mix of individual and collective leadership
is required and what are the different ways this might
be supported?
•How might indirect attempts to shift the operating
environment enhance the emergence of effective
leadership?
•How might attempts to shift micro-level staff
relationships and behaviour create new practices and
behaviours?
Possible research avenues: exploring the strategy and
practice of leadership in development agencies, and the
degree to which this enhances their effectiveness to
support developmental leadership. What do development
practitioners have to navigate or overcome to implement
effective programs? What does this tell us about what
changes that may be needed within development
organisations to better support effective developmental
leadership?
© Chris Slupski l Unsplash
24 HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
PART FOUR: FUTURE RESEARCH
This paper has suggested a long list of potential
research avenues that might be explored in phase
three of DLP. These are summarised below.
Potential research avenues identied in Part one:
1. What can leadership programs learn (from women’s
empowerment efforts, or disability initiatives, in
particular) about moving beyond an individualised
approach? What kind of combination of individual
and collective support might be required in different
contexts, and on different issues?
2. How does programming that takes into account,
or focuses on, the wider enabling environment
contribute to supporting the emergence of
developmental leadership? How do programs
that support individual and collective leadership
contribute to overcoming structural constraints and
therefore broader societal change?
3. Given the multiple resources that leaders can develop
and strategically deploy to achieve their goals, what is
the mix of support that might be required to enhance
these resources in different contexts, and for
different groups or issues?
4. Further work on how leadership support may need
to differ when supporting prototypical leadership
(as opposed to atypical leadership), and in particular
exploring what kind of support might enable such
leaders to go against the group’s interests while
retaining their legitimacy and support base. This
in turn might provide useful clues as to what kinds
of non-western conceptualisations of leadership
development and support might look like, as well as
how they might be harnessed for developmental ends.
5. How development organisations can assist potential
leaders (or groups of leaders) in maintaining
collective action and navigating the politics of reform
processes, with potential learning from successful
leaders/reform processes. This might include an
exploration of what can be learnt from the political
leadership of women’s organisations, coalitions
and disabled people’s organisations, as well as
intersectional initiatives, and what this might tell us
about non-elite leadership pathways, and how multi-
level, cross-sectoral leadership functions.
6. Potential avenues of research might therefore include
an exploration of how leadership support might
vary by taking account of different types, styles and
levels of leadership, the opportunities available for
change, the stages of collective action, and how the
interaction of leaders and local agents creates new
patterns of behaviour more broadly.
Potential research avenues identied in Parts two and
three:
7. Building on the Gender and Politics in Practice
Research to explore how successful programs
have navigated and adapted business practices,
HR policies, contract management and MEL in
ways that effectively support programs seeking
to promote developmental leadership. Similar
to ongoing research efforts to understand and
support the work of DFID’s Better Delivery Unit and
USAID’s Collaborating Learning and Adapting (CLA)
framework, research in the Australian context could
explore opportunities within DFAT for organisational-
wide efforts to enable such ways of working.
8. Exploring the strategy and practice of leadership
in development agencies, and the degree to which
this enhances their effectiveness to support
developmental leadership. What do development
practitioners have to do in order to navigate or
overcome barriers to the implementation of effective
programs? What does this tell us about what changes
that may be needed within development organisations
to better support effective developmental leadership?
9. Finally, it is striking that we have not been able
to locate a more up to date review of leadership
development programs in international development
than the de Ver and Kennedy study of 2011. This
suggests a strong argument for repeating that
exercise to explore if the landscape has, or has not
changed in the last 8 years.
This long list can be used to a) initiate further discussion
with DFAT about potential areas of focus, and b) as a
‘menu’ for potential case studies which emerge under the
other research questions to select from. For example, it is
likely that some of the above will lend themselves better
to programs focused on individual leadership rather than
collective leadership.
25
As far as disciplinary lenses and methods are concerned,
there are a number of approaches that might be fruitful.
In particular, it would seem that the following offer
interesting avenues to explore:
•new and feminist institutionalism, as Sohela Nazneen
notes such approaches help to unpack the informal
processes that translate human interactions and
power relations into structures and rules and rules and
how this relates to performance and change (Nazneen,
2019);
•elements of management/organisational theory such
as contingency theory, as effectively used by Honig
and Gulrajani to explore alternatives to top-down
decision making in development agencies in order ‘to
widen the menu of options at the disposal of donors
when searching for organisational solutions’ Honig and
Gulrajani, 2018: 69);
•complexity thinking, as suggested by Chris Mowles
and other authors who have noted that the concepts
of non-linearity, emergence, tipping points, feedback,
adaptation and self-organisation are salient not only to
development processes but development management
(Mowles, 2008; Ramalingam, 2013; Boulton, 2015);
•action research within development agencies or
with particular programs is also a useful way to
open up research on the systemic constraints and
opportunities, as well as experiences of leaders and
leadership within those organisations. Furthermore,
such approaches can assist in lling some of the gaps
that traditional monitoring and evaluation systems
tend to miss (O’Keefe et al, 2014).
26 HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
CONCLUSIONS
This nal Foundational Paper has sought to explore
the role of development organisations in supporting
developmental leadership, and to propose potential
research avenues for how their role might be strengthened
under phase three of DLP.
In the rst section of the paper we summarised a range
of literature, including part of the DLP back catalogue,
in order to describe the main strategies development
agencies use to directly and indirectly support leadership.
We used the three levels of individual, collective and
societal leadership developed in the DLP synthesis paper
to tease out how these forms of support might contribute
to change across these levels (DLP, 2018). We then distilled
from this a number of issues that indicate the various
ways that leadership is understood and supported, and
the implicit theories of change that this suggests. This
indicates a greater focus on individual leadership based
on more managerial and Western-centric notions of
leadership, than collective leadership, or more indirect and
oblique engagement in shaping the processes, policies or
environment that facilitate the emergence of leadership.
The second section of the paper explored what we
have learned about ways of working that enable better
leadership support by development agencies, based on
the secondary literature reviewing a range of program
experiences. This pointed to a range of ways of working
that a growing body of evidence suggests are important
for improved outcomes. In the third section, we described
some of the systemic challenges that agencies and the
sector more broadly face in working in these ways. This
latter point opens up the workings and political economy
of development agencies themselves as an important area
of research.
Finally, part four sets out a range of potential research
avenues to guide this area of research under DLP III. These
include exploring:
•how individual and collective leadership support might
be combined more strategically;
•how programming might focus on shifts in the
wider enabling environment in order to support the
emergence of developmental leadership;
•what mix of support might be required to augment
the multiple resources that leaders can develop and
strategically deploy in different contexts, and for
different groups or issues;
•to test and explore how prototypical leaders can go
against their group’s interests while retaining their
legitimacy and support base;
•what can be learnt from the political leadership of
women’s organisation, coalitions and Disabled People’s
Organisations as well as intersectional initiatives,
and what this might tell us about non-elite leadership
pathways, and how multi-level, cross-sectoral
leadership functions.
•an extension of the Gender and Politics in practice
research to explore how successful programs have
navigated and adapted business practices, HR
policies, contract management and MEL processes
to effectively support programs seeking to promote
developmental leadership.
•the strategies and practices of leadership in
development agencies, and the degree to which
this enhances their effectiveness to support
developmental leadership.
27
It is suggested that this long list can be used to a) initiate
further discussion with DFAT about potential areas of focus,
and b) as a ‘menu’ for potential case studies which emerge
under the other research questions to select from.
Finally, we suggest that there are a number of disciplinary
lenses that might be usefully considered in this area notably:
new and feminist institutionalism; elements of management/
organisational theory such as contingency theory, and
complexity thinking.
The investigations pursued under this area of DLP III
research will help better connect what we are learning
about how leaders achieve developmental change with how
development agencies support these leadership processes.
This, in turn, will contribute to the growing evidence base on
what program features and ways of working are important in
enabling more successful programs. Finally, and at the more
macro level, the systemic constraints within development
agencies and their wider operating environment will
themselves be opened up for critique – exploring how
‘leaders’ or coalitions operate internally within development
agencies to support more effective ways of working; and
how challenging political and bureaucratic environments
are navigated. Such research will build on, and extend,
DLP’s existing catalogue of research in ways that improve
its relevance for programs, development agencies and the
staff that seek to make both operate in ways that support
developmental change.
This paper indicates
a greater focus on
individual leadership
based on more
managerial and
Western-centric notions
of leadership, than
collective leadership,
or more indirect and
oblique engagement in
shaping the processes,
policies or environment
that facilitate the
emergence of
leadership.
28 HOW CAN DEVELOPMENTAL LEADERSHIP BE SUPPORTED
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31
This publication has been funded by the Australian Government through
the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The views expressed in
this publication are the authors’ alone and are not necessarily the views
of the Australian Government, the Developmental Leadership Program
or partner organisations.
The Developmental Leadership
Program (DLP) is an international
research collaboration supported by the
Australian Government.
DLP investigates the crucial role that
leaders, networks and coalitions play in
achieving development outcomes.
dlprog.org
dlp@contacts.bham.ac.uk
@DLProg
Developmental Leadership Program
International Development Department
College of Social Sciences
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, B15 2TT
United Kingdom
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