How Do You Mobilize Political Elites and Citizens

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you, everyone. Welcome to our panel on how to mobilize political elites and citizens. Today we have with us Alice Evans, who is a BSC Associate and also a lecturer at King’s College London. We have Lily L Tsai who is a professor of political science at M.I.T. and the director, faculty director of the MIT Governance Lab. And we have Rakesh Rajani, who is the vice president of programs at Co-Impact, formerly at the Ford Foundation, and then formed 12 Ways, as some of you know him from there. And Haki Alemu is from where I know him from. And we’re really excited to have these panelists and to hear what they have to say. I wanted to just give you a brief understanding of what it is that we were looking for in this panel. We know that there is a lot of agendas out there that are really important, whether they may be at a global level or a regional level, at a local level that sometimes don’t get on the agenda. And sometimes even when they do get on the agenda, and nothing really happens. And so what we wanted to do is how do we understand? How do we mobilize citizens? How do we mobilize political elites to actually get these agendas on and things and they actually get implemented and things actually happen. So what we did is we’ve given the panelists a series of questions to answer. And they’re basically how does one think about mobilizing the attention for policies that should be on the agenda and those that are not on the agenda? I wanted them to share from their own experience as examples of what they’ve tried, what they’ve learned, how they may have done this in the past. What types of capabilities need to be built and whose capability do we need to build? And then finally, we are at the Kennedy School. What kind of capabilities do we need to instill in students here so that they are able to get these agenda items onto policy agendas and not just be on an agenda, but something actually happens to get things done. So I wanted to start first with Alice. Do you want to share from your experience?  

Alice Evans So I think one example of some kind of change that’s really hard to mobilize is if it’s concern for distant others. So not people’s everyday priorities too, if you perceive there as being strong, coordinated opposition. And three, if there’s widespread despondency, if people think it’s doomed to failure. And an example of that that I’ve been studying recently is corporate accountability in the UK, Europe and wider USA. So this is concern for labor rights abuses and global supply chains, you know, distant others in Bangladesh or Vietnam where there’s strong business opposition. In any country, it will be tremendously hard to introduce legislation, increasing liability on our companies, because they would immediately try to say, if you make things harder for us, we’ll become less internationally competitive, so we’ll go elsewhere. So there will always be strong business opposition. Three is if we never see that kind of change happening, NGOs might think it’s not possible. So instead of investing in that kind of activism, they opt for a second best scenario. So work with companies to improve CSR, even though we know CSO does very little to abate the problem. So Rana Plaza. So I’d say one of the hardest problems would be trying to get corporate accountability for those reasons.  

Salimah Samji Okay. Did you want to answer all the question?  

Alice Evans Oh, yes, yes, yes. Okay. Okay, but this is the exciting thing.  

Salimah Samji To go, Alice.  

Alice Evans As of 2018, all large French companies are now legally obliged to identify and reduce risks of human rights abuses in their supply chains. And if they fail to do this and enough of these happens, then they’ll be taken to court and they can be sued and the exact same. Similarly, in Switzerland this year, in July, the National Council voted in support for similar legislation. We’ve now seen new campaigns opening up in Finland, in Denmark, Canada. They’ve just been to the International Development Committee, which has had a parliamentary motion calling for similar legislation. So why did this happen? How did we come to mobilize people for change despite these huge obstacles? One is journalists publicizing crises, eroding the legitimacy of the status quo, getting people concerned that all companies were perpetuating these harms, that CSR just isn’t working. So one to journalism two is providing credible reasons for hope by showing that corporate accountability is the direction of travel. So in both France and Switzerland, they pointed to various examples and ways in which this was happening. So they pointed to Dodd-Frank, where there’s a clause about conflict minerals. They pointed to some aspects of the Canadian legislation, the French campaign, the French legislation has emboldened activists in Switzerland. So people seeing that it’s possible that it’s credible and getting companies to think that this is the way that we’re going. So providing credible reasons for. For showing that this was the international agenda. And incredibly importantly here at the Kennedy School, John Ruggie played an enormously important part of this. So John Rockey was part of the U.N. global norms where they were introducing this voluntary idea of due diligence. So they were setting up the idea that it was a voluntary mechanism just advising and encouraging companies to identify and reduce risks of human rights abuses. That wasn’t mandatory, but by making it voluntary, it was not threatening. Everyone got on board with it. Everyone came to understand, and it was a very participatory, inclusive meetings. And so by its being this sort of non-threatening, consultative, inclusive process, more companies and governments engage with this idea of due diligence. Then the French companies strategically use that idea which had widespread support and said, let’s turn this into legislation. But to do that, what they needed is a broad coalition. So they worked with a broad range of environmental activists, with development tangos, with Catholic churches. They got a whole group of legal activists or legal minds to work through the legislation, consumer groups. They got all these brilliant people together, tapped into that. That was and the same is true in Switzerland. So the Swiss campaign is the largest civil society campaign ever, and they’ve managed to do it by having like over 120 NGOs all collectively watching what they do in Switzerland is they are careful not to portray it or present it as a niche left wing environmental campaign. They purposefully amplify right wing support. So there are some right wing groups. So there are religious groups or their business groups. They say we’ve got 100 businesses on board. Now, most of these are actually vegan ice cream companies. True story. But we’ve got these businesses on board. Right. And so you make it seem like it’s a broad, you know, socially inclusive agenda. So the broad coalition publicizing reasons for hope, you know, tackling that despondency because showing its international direction of travel does two things. One is it raises aspirations. You know, it raises our expectations that people come. We only invest in things if we believe that it’s possible everything is doomed to failure. We’re not going to do it. We’re not going to even try. And that despondency, you know, creates the negative feedback loop. But once we think it’s possible, then governments and politicians become less worried about undermining their companies competitive advantage because they no longer think that companies will go elsewhere because other countries are likely to pass similar legislation. So those three things were important. So what we need to do then? For me, it’s partly about shifting expectations, providing credible reasons for hope, for getting us to think that we can achieve these things by highlighting examples of successful mobilization and responsive governance. Now, what can we do? What can students do? What? How can we support all students to go into the world? Mobilize change. Right. Okay. So I’m sure you’re doing some of these things already. If it was me, I. And it is me, right? As a lecturer in my own, what I think is three things. One, encourage and support my students so they are equipped, capable and ready to work with diverse groups. You know, that was really key in the Swiss campaign and also the French campaign working for more with academics, with linked with lawyers, with environmental activists, recognizing that we gain strength through that diversity, tapping into different. So being ready for that. Two Being skilled in mass communications. Like the other day with my students, we were writing blogs, you know, mass communications. That’s key. And I think learning through the sort of success of comparative social movements, learning wise, some of course, in mobilization and more successful than others.  

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you. Lily.  

Lily L Tsai I strongly recommend.  

Salimah Samji You go through catch.  

Lily L Tsai And, like, only 100th of an enemy. It is.  

Alice Evans The only balance.  

Lily L Tsai I think is good. So, like, to get down.  

Alice Evans A few slides.  

Lily L Tsai I guess I wanted to start. I mean, actually, I’m going to pick up on a lot of the points that elephants just raised and illustrate this morning in terms of them and specifically this like this idea of starting with feeling like you’re doomed to fail. So I guess one thing that I know as a political scientist is that mobilizing attention from citizens and elites for that matter. But a mobilizing attention is different from mobilizing action. And we know that you can get citizens to increase the salience of an issue for them to care more about a policy. You can get politicians to run on policy platforms, so it’s more about substance rather than anything else. But nevertheless, issue salience is not the main factor and it not a main predictor in whether or not citizens take action. Things like party identification are much more important. Or as my colleague Danny Togo, who studies Brazil, points out, there are in the developing world different equivalents, the party I.D. So in Brazil, it’s loyalty to political family. So those things are way more important for determining action. So I just want to underscore that ordinary people increase attention to these issues that we care about, but they don’t necessarily take action as so why? And so here again, picking up on some of the things that have been already raised by Ellis, I would argue that too often we try to mobilize the action of citizens without mobilizing the actions lead. And so I would argue that both in terms of my own work and the existing research out there, that it’s really it is perhaps really important to mobilize elites first. Number one, because I have started to become really uncomfortable with how external actors seek to mobilize the actions of citizens without knowing or being, you know, having a degree of confidence that the elites will respond. So I think I actually would put it forward that it can be somewhat unethical to mobilize the actions of ordinary citizens to advocate for these issues when you don’t know or you don’t have a pretty good idea that elites will also take action in response. But second, also because if you don’t mobilize elite action first or you don’t have that lined up, citizens are just going to stop taking action. Because with you know, the research shows that that instead when you don’t get elite response to citizen action, you get disillusionment, disenchantment and exit and over its highly informed disillusionment. So they like they’re very, very disillusioned because they know they’ve experienced it firsthand, like the disappointment. So, you know, I think that we can all come up with examples of this. I’ve recently thought a lot about and written about the anti-corruption campaigns that have happened after the fall of communism. So, you know, those of you who remember that there was a rise of international anti-corruption advocacy campaigns. And, you know, I think it is it’s very easy to make the case that they might have done more harm than good. They changed. They did they did politicize the issue of corruption and they put anti-corruption on the agenda and good governance on the agenda. But because the EU, for example, in Eastern Europe, the EU required Eastern European countries to set up anti-corruption institutions as a condition for accession to the EU. There was this external pressure. These institutions are set up. But what what didn’t happen is that external actors did not make sure that the elites were going to enforce. And so without enforcement, what happened was politics was is that the question? Okay, are just what.  

Alice Evans Do you want to.  

Lily L Tsai Give me opportunity to like? So. So what happened was politics got it became all about corruption and anti-corruption. And political parties were able to use anti-corruption as a key issue to accuse the other side. So, you know, in the case of Romania, for example, opposition parties banded together to accuse the president of corruption. They started impeachment proceedings, you know, their high profile investigations on both sides. There’s no there’s no there’s no there’s no prosecution. Right. And so as a result, citizens in Romania are like, this is just something that the politicians used to accuse each other. And politics continues to be about corruption in anti-corruption, but without much change, which just leads to a declining public trust in the political process. So I guess, you know, one thing that I’ve been cautioning practitioners nowadays is that that is that is a pretty instructive case for the current movement to advocate for anti-corruption and the more international initiatives that happen to try to put corruption and good governance on the agenda. You know, they should take into account these historical lessons. So let’s see in terms of what kinds of capabilities need to be developed to bring these issues onto the policy agendas and whose capabilities need to be developed. I mean, to keep in along the same line of reasoning, you know, I think that it would be important to develop the capabilities of external actors to work on getting reformist elites and reformist activists on the societal side to mobilize attention and action simultaneously. And in fact, you know, perhaps setting up the government response first, lining it up first and then and then mobilizing action. It’s a little bit like capital campaigns in universities, you know, so that you raise like $800 million and then you announce the campaign. You’re like 80% of the way there. So, you know, just contribute. But I mean, but it is a very similar kind of logic. And so, you know, I just wanted to briefly go over some of the research that I’ve been doing in China, where it is this priming the pump kind of strategy. You know, China, of course, I mean, not to romanticize or glamorize what China’s doing because there are lots of potential problems. But when citizens believe that higher levels will punish corruption and malfeasance, what I find is that there’s an associate that’s associated with an increase of 13% in citizen participation. It’s also increase associated with an increase of more than 25% in the likelihood that they will complain to the government if their if grassroots elections were canceled. So that’s a very high risk kind of engagement, basically. But when they see that higher levels are willing to take action, are willing to enforce, then that actually stimulates more citizen action. And so I think that actually is an instructive example. You know, you arguably could see similar things happening in Rwanda. And, of course, like I, I come from this perspective of focusing on authoritarian regimes and a lot of my research. I’m going to move on. I was going to go over a case and the Philippines as well. But, you know, I think it would be more important to have more of a conversation with the group. So then what capabilities would we need to develop? And students I mean, again, I think it is this matter of like setting up some of the action and response by the other side or the government side first before mobilizing citizens. And, you know, I think there is an increasing amount of research and maybe you all talk about this at the Kennedy School already. As a political scientist, you know, we’re still stuck in this framework where societies, the state needs to be insulated from society, that there is this, you know, thinking from that paper that there should not be personal relationships across the state society boundary. But I think there’s an increasing amount of empirical research that suggests that actually building these kinds of personal relationships, even having a revolving door between civil society and the state, can be can result in constructive outcomes rather than cooptation. So I guess I would raise the possibility that it’s important to develop the capability of being multilingual and multicultural in the sense of having experience both on the government side and the societal side of the civil society side. Because I think in order to be able to prime the pump and to line up that government response, if you’re on the societal side, you have to be able to translate your goals into the other side’s languages, concerns and values. So that’s what I would. Thank you.  

Rakesh Rajani All right. So I’m just going to tell two stories. And I think a lot of the themes that I’ve said before, I think can use those as lenses. One is a story about primary education in Tanzania, where I read through Traverso, and the other is a story of something I supported through the Ford Foundation about universal preschool in Cincinnati, Ohio. So and I think that’s a little bit apples and oranges, but I still think they are inseparable. So, you know, education in Tanzania, primary education tends to be like in many other global south countries. And I think, you know, the story of independence, very few went to school because only the elite were meant to be educated. So in terms of the end is less than 10% of school. So the story on what you did for post-independence was around getting kids into school and that involved a lot of money. So it was all about having enough money in ten, 20 years after independence when so much money was going. But that servicing the story became how do we cancel the debt? So reduce the debt so that we have actually enough money for school. And the money was supposed to buy things that matter, that are needed, like classrooms, desks, books, all these emails. And that captured the public imagination. And there was really a lot of consensus across there. You know, maybe the IMF and the bank at times are outsiders, but everybody else, you know, if you talk about teachers, kids, parents, local officials, members of parliament, the local governments, businesses, donors, media, everybody agreed we needed schools and everybody should be in schools. And that’s what we spent a lot of energy on. And in doing that, these this story, this narrative and these images are and what we need is everybody in school and a good school is one that looks like this. You know, you can it’s easy to visualize what a classroom or a school is, you know, is what we’ve had for 50 years. And it succeeded, right. You did have debt cancelation. In fact, when I was a student here, right here at the Kennedy School, there was work on the epic campus that Jeffrey Sachs, one of the few good things he did then, you know, so there was stuff that actually succeeded in you know, we succeeded in Tanzania, for example, in the course of a decade while I was working on this, tripled in real terms, this budget on education at that time, you know, spending about a quarter of all it’s in a quarter of government budget went to education. We did build the classrooms. We did enroll millions of kids. So it actually succeeded. But now the problem. The kids are not learning. And we knew that, but it wasn’t catching. So what did I do? Borrowing the model from India is we did this simple test and measure the actual literacy and numeracy level. Some people supported that and we managed to show at a very large scale through this very simple test that kids that schooling is not the same as learning. And we showed this data and the data was good, simple, but robust. It could be verified. And it was it wasn’t just proxies. These were real measures of whether the kids could write, I mean, read or count. It would make a splash when the report was issued some headlines. But the initial view of the government was to just say and question the methodology of just spurious kind of questioning. It wasn’t taken seriously. The test was repeated every year. Every year it would make some headlines. Eventually, the government kind of went along, but really it was only the donors and a few NGOs like ourselves, not even the NGO community that really important. Even the other NGO supported this course felt, yeah, this matters. But let’s also talk about there being enough books and enough desks and things of that sort. So, you know, we as well that did not manage to get a big coalition focused on these things despite the evidence that pouring more money was not going into the results. And then there was a key breakthrough, at least we thought it was a breakthrough where the government was feeding a sense of crisis and they created something called big results, not borrowing on a Malaysian model to say a government is too messy, let’s create this kind of vertical, high level unit unity. We’re going to push through something results. And we were very proud as powers that we got. The influences in the learning outcomes piece was the core focus. There was transparency on the data that we reward the schools, that the better that improve the most, get rewards and so forth. Huge energy put into it. So you could I could easily tell you a story now of great success of because this little official government policy was rolled out. And so this happened two years before the previous president in the last two years of the previous president’s term. Soon as his term ended, the current president, even though he comes from the same ruling party, abandoned this entire effort. And the coalition that had come together to work on the be our end the big results workshop was too weak to fragment as they had no sense of identity. There’s no sense of belonging. There’s no sense of we are doing this for this to last. So if you go to Tanzania today, it’s really not focused on learning outcomes in any serious way. The government is not focused. The community is not focused. Parents, you know, we thought if we give data to parents around the kids on off learning and we gave them ideas of what you could do, that they will go. They have an incentive. It’s their own kids. They’ll do something. They didn’t really do anything. Teachers were I felt the feeling that I blame. So he has a story of where we we had some level of elites agree. We even had policy pronouncements and so on. But in the end, when all it took was a little nudge from a new regime and the whole thing crumbled and there really isn’t much going for it. Now, you know, I can tell you a story and therefore when there are pieces, but ultimately things are not coalition focus. Now, let me quickly tell you the story of Cincinnati, Ohio. So in November 2016, Trump wins the election. He wins Ohio by six or 8% of. But in that same time, the same moment, the voters in Cincinnati passed a new tax for preschool by a margin of 24%. So so hold on. These are Trump voters who are also voting for by a 24% margin. You know, voting for tax to pay for preschool and essentially preschool for poor kids would happen to be much more lower income and happen to be disproportionately black. So how does what’s the story behind what experiments? Drawing on work by Hari Hines, a political scientist at Lilly and others. Important. And so I’ll let me give you a quick background. In 2001, there was a young black man who was killed by the police. There was large civil unrest as a result of that. Remember, Cincinnati has the second highest poverty rate of cities in the US, despite it having lots of Fortune 500 companies. If you look at capital calculation. Cincinnati has more Fortune 500 companies than Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. So the business leaders said, gosh, you know, we but we’ve got to do something. I think a combination of being scared shitless about all the riots and, you know, maybe we had some responsibility. So they came together and and they decided we really need to focus on early childhood. If we focus on early childhood and get it, it’ll help. It’ll help for people. It’ll get them to do better. Or maybe they’ll riot less and we’ll have peace. And they did a campaign. And this involved, like, you know, the CEO of Procter and Gamble, lots of big companies. And they did it to the United Way. So the United Way and these big businesses worked. And I’m for time. I’ll cut this long short. But they were from 2003 to 2013 for ten years. High level elite engagement in trying to do something in Cincinnati. What did they achieve? In summary, they raised $10 million in ten years. These are big companies and they managed to get 5000 petition, 5000 signatures to a petition. That’s all they were able to do, despite having a consensus of the elite level of trying to do this. And what happened is that once the riots died down and so the commitments were they on paper, but there was no energy behind it to make this work. In the meantime, in 2014, a guy called Troy Jackson became the executive director of a faith based organization called Amazon One of my favorite prophets. But that’s a sidebar. And when he became an executive director, what he did was he went and had hundred meetings with people in his constituency, face to face meetings. And when you talk to them about what’s going on and they all talk about a lot of them talk about their children and this issue of preschool education, the same thing that these elites had identified more than ten years ago, came up as the core. So what he did. Is he said, okay, let’s start working on this. But the way I want to work on this and I’m quoting Harry here, is that I want to do this in a way that builds the interests, capacities and leaderships of leadership in my constituency. So it’s not like I listen and I’m going to figure out the solution for you. He he proceeded to work in a way that involved his constituents and built their leadership. They went house to house, engaged over 1000 people. Over 60 churches were involved. While this was going on, there’s a church in Cincinnati called Crossroads Church, Evangelical Church. More than 80% white. The largest is the fastest growing evangelical church in the United States. Its growth rate is, you know, still is very small, like I said, mostly white, but not entirely. And they remember in 2015, we had all these rash of shootings by police of black men. So there was a pastor, an associate pastor, African-American, who said, I’ve got to do something. What do I do with the largely evangelical white church? So he went to Troy Jackson, the head of homeless, and said, Help me out here. I really need to do so, but I don’t know what to do. So they’ve spent seven months. It was a slow process figuring out what to do. And they came up with this idea of undivided, undivided, maybe indivisible, undivided. And they created a six week program expressly focused on racial reconciliation inside this large, fastest growing evangelical church. Over 1200 members of this church, one trained. And they launched a program in 2016 of training this. And from this, 1200 people, 750 volunteers emerged to form what is called the justice team. And there was the whole message talking about your point out actually was about this is our faith, but how do we put our faith into action? What would it mean to do that? And they started being powerful. They had this network, some of these big leaders who are like, you know, skidding in their tracks, heard about this and said, maybe we can get some help from them. So they went to Troy Jackson said, can you basically get your people to help us behind this preschool initiative? And Troy said, okay, but here’s the deal. They have a I forgot to tell them, come up with a people’s platform for ideas we have has to be the starting point to if you want to do this, we have to do this in a way where you actually engage with the constituency. So you have Mr. CEO of Proctor and Gamble and you of you know, you’ve come to our place and you talk not just to me, but you talk to them. And so they came in literally in the in these Baptist churches and so on, and started talking and had to listen to these people talk about everyday life and what was going on. And what happened is so, for example, the people’s platform said, the way we’re going to finance this is not a bunch of CSR. We’re going to have a progressive income tax. The business leaders said, no way. We, you know, business tax, you know, they will kill you. No, no, no progressive income tax. But through this negotiation, you know, and they want a no tax, they basically settled on a property tax, which was progressive in the sense that, of course, rich people have to pay much more again for time. I’ll just kind of skip the basically this tax got passed. And not only not only did that happen, but the elite coalition, the business agreed to all other aspects of these people’s platform that included, for example, a minimum wage to $15 and a number of other progressive, progressive measures. So what I’m saying, what I’m also achieved through this approach to the following one, they won the they won the battle. They got the tax cut, they got preschool funding. But the way they did it, and I think this is the key that conscientious ised, a low income, marginalized constituency on the issue, they developed positions on the issue. They figured out a pathway to action. They developed skills to do that. They were able to organize among themselves. They were able to actually also engage with these CEOs. They got to experience that sense of agency. The key word here, I think, is they were not mobilized, they were organized. And we can talk about that distinction because I think it’s useful. This constituency got visibility and recognition and they built a vehicle through this action to create a coalition across black, white, but also across elites and low income that came together to win this. So I wonder when I hear the story and I was when I was doing work like this at Ford, I was wondering what if we had done the work on learning outcomes in this sort of way? Would it have made a difference? You know, I don’t know. But I wonder. And of course, what this group has succeeded doing is raising money. And raising money is what we also managed to do in Tanzania. For the raising money is one thing. Improving learning outcomes is another. So I’m curious, will this coalition being in place somehow be better at actually achieving the outcomes or not? These are some of the questions we have. And to close with what should students do? I really think the one thing students should do is absolutely personally get engaged in organizing themselves. And it doesn’t matter. I don’t care what the issue is. But you. Do that yourself. And I think that will teach you, you know, a heck of a lot more than just what the and others are going to do.  

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you very much. Before I open it up for questions, I just had a question each for each of you. Alice, you talked about some things that the students should do is teach them how to work with diversity. How exactly does one do that? Right. That’s a question I’ll ask all of you your questions and then you can answer. Lily, to you. You talked about, you know, you have to mobilize a leads. What are some concrete things that one can do even if you’re working on citizen engagement of thinking about how you can mobilize the elites, whether they be political elites or others. What are some concrete things that you can do where you kind of answer the question I have for you, as you were telling the Cincinnati story, which is a fantastic story, at the back of my head was going, what could they have done differently? At what ways? And can you just think of some things that you could have to create the vehicle, right? Have these feet on the ground to change people. So that had the next president come in and said, I’m putting this off, people would have been on the street saying, no way, you can’t touch this.  

Speaker 2 So two things. One, in my teaching, I tried to highlight the benefits of interdisciplinary thinking, like highlighting anthropological and political science insights that always make reading lists diverse to highlight different peoples, you know, the benefits of learning from diverse groups. So one is to show that diversity through the classroom tuition. But I think that she’s 100% correct that most of what we learn about the real world comes through our own observations and our own experiences. So to get students engaged in understanding or how to work with diversity, you know, do whatever campaign you like, whether it’s a climate change campaign, a sexual harassment campaign, go out and campaign. And in that process, you’ll realize you’ll achieve a hell of a lot more if you work with a whole bunch of different groups. So just what for? Cash says really.  

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you.  

Lily L Tsai I just want to point out that when I was asked to be on this panel and it was just about mobilizing elites, I said no, because I that’s just my that’s not my area of expertise. And you’ve given me that question.  

Salimah Samji No, but you made a valid point. I misspoke saying that you do it pump priming the pump, but and they’re on the other side that you kind of do need to.  

Lily L Tsai So I guess what I would say is that when an external actor or even citizens can reduce the costs of governance to the elite. So you have to think about what the governance outcomes they want are. And sometimes it’s tax compliance or another kind of compliance. If you can cut a deal, if you could figure out a deal where. And so actually, actually, what I will say a little bit about this Philippines civil society organization that we work with. So they put together a pilot program that would be inserted into the Philippines’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program, which is one of the biggest in the world. And what they wanted to do was to train people among the poorest of the poor, the beneficiaries of the program, to pressure local governments for better education, health. And the reason they could do that was because the cash rich cash transfer program comes with the requirements that you have to take your kids to get their destinations, and they have to go to primary school in order to get the cash transfer. So it was this kind of like piggybacking. So so what they proposed to the government was that what the civil society organization proposed was that, you know, what will help you monitor the conditionalities, will help you help you with your complies with the conditionalities. And in exchange, we’re going to train these leaders to pressure local officials. And so that that was a good enough deal, right? Because there’s limited state capacity. And if the CSO can offer the government a service essentially that they need to accomplish, then it leads can potentially be mobilized.  

Salimah Samji And I really like your comment on the revolving door between civil society and government. It’s a very nice image to.  

Rakesh Rajani The right wing in this country are masters at that they can they really great job and they are the reason.  

Salimah Samji That.  

Rakesh Rajani I think one of one of many mistakes I made was I just kind of assumed that people would self-organize and you would kind of have this you know, I had this notion, like, if you look at the Roman Catholic Church, they have these, you know, Bible studies and they organize and the teachers meet and this union and great sweep of it. So there was this notion that people will somehow self-organize. Even though I knew that historically that at independence the ruling party absorbed and co-opted everything. The workers movement, the women’s movement, the youth movement, every movement was co-opted, became part of the party with the sanctions against independent organizing. So the evidence of the history was very clear. And then unlike India and like Latin America, we if you talk to. East Africans. There’s no real notion of organizing. And yet somehow I thought it’ll kind of happen. And we had we had no capacity, but neither did we try to have a theory of organizing. And I think that that was the biggest, biggest weakness. The other thing I think what put us off is I again, I think that’s one of the is that I, I made a mistake. I cared about scale. My worry was about creating little boutique projects. Anybody can create a boutique setting, but it was moral. So if you want to have an impact at scale, I just was like, How are you going to organize? Familiar? I don’t know how to do that, but that’s a mistake. It’s not as if you have to have an organizing infrastructure that is huge in order to reach huge numbers of people. You can if you look again, if one had studied more, you see that often these movements start with small, very focused ideas and leadership. And so we could have pulled it off if we had just been smart enough to have got our act together.  

Alice Evans May I just say one thing to tie Lillian Reproaches points together? So, like Lenny was saying, is that people are more likely to mobilize when they perceive the state as responsive, as tolerant, as capable and as nonviolent. So what we’ve seen from the research on transparency is it’s no good just providing information about financial flows and expecting people to mobilize in response to poor learning outcomes. They have to believe that the state will do something in response to their organizing. So it’s all about publicizing that state responsiveness wherever it’s happening and through that, you know, hopefully providing credible reasons for hope and showing in one district that the state is being responsive and that’s encouraging more people. So this is a great new book on India highlighting that Gabby Cruz occurs, which shows that people when.  

Lily L Tsai A student of mine. Oh right.  

Alice Evans Right. So she’s going to say.  

Lily L Tsai I will tell her that.  

Alice Evans She’s got this fissure and this well, well, politics. A paper on how rural Indians are more likely to mobilize to push for better services if they’ve got broader social networks or spatial diversity, where they see the state doing that. So when they go and travel and they see the state of action, they’re like, Huh, I can get that too. I’ll push for that back home. Yeah. So it’s that small process of generating positive feedback loops, shifting people’s expectations about how the state will respond, and that of course, as more people push for accountability, then we get into the sweet spot of a positive feedback loop.  

Rakesh Rajani Can I piggyback on that? Yes, an anecdote.  

Salimah Samji Absolutely.  

Rakesh Rajani I did a lot of work on open government and accountability, and there was a time when I had access to President Kikwete rather than I would when I met him. I would make a long list of, look, this is not working, this promise is not working. And I would give him lots of data on what needed to improve and he would listen and so on. And after about the third or fourth meeting, he would say and said, okay, let me tell you a story. When I wake up in the morning and my wife of many years looks at me, you know, she might think I’m now much older on my face. Skin is not as fresh as it used to be. But she doesn’t tell me, Oh, you don’t look as handsome as she tells me. I just love you so much. And then she tells me what she wants. And so. So even if the government is being non-responsive 99% of the time, if you focus if I spent my time now, if I could rewind, if I spent my time telling you this little thing and that.  

Alice Evans Part, that was really.  

Rakesh Rajani Cool, you know. Yeah. And then maybe that would have motivated for those things rather than the long litany of what was failing.  

Salimah Samji So great. I want to add another anecdote to yours, and this is from other Rukmini Banerjee ways I got this idea from. And so they’ve been doing this like testing on learning outcomes for decades, for a decade and a decade. They did this one year where they did a multitude of things. So they did health, they did education, and they did water and sanitation, they actually did water tests, etc. So it was like looking at three different sectors and then they collected this data and then talked to the district officials and what they found and Rukmini told me this herself, it was a game changer in the reaction they got from the government officials at the at the district level, because they said, now you’re telling me a story about things I care about, what is my quality. And we can have a conversation about maybe thinking about what I can do about this. Because when you come in and you tell me that the children aren’t learning at that, you know, they can’t do fourth and fourth grade. They can’t even do first grade level math then that I know this. Don’t tell me something I don’t know. Come to me and tell me what I can do about it. And so I think that is really important, right? A lot of these people, they don’t have the rose colored lenses. They know things aren’t working. But what they would really like is a how to, you know, maybe you could try this, maybe this just pointing fingers at them, telling them that you’re doing a crap job isn’t really helpful to anybody. So I totally. You agree with that? I’m going to open to questions. We’ll take three questions and then just tell us who you are and where you’re from and the questions for. Thank you. Not everyone at the same time Dennis.  

Attendee 1 Is actually a comment and I hate seem that guy because of that but I worked with Matt in Sri Lanka and one of the first things we did when we were there is he had Kennedy school student interns, look for positive deviants, look for parts of the government that were actually functioning very well. And I didn’t think too much of it. But, you know, I read the cases and I thought they were interesting. And then it was incredibly useful because whenever anyone I met with said, stop expecting so much of us, you know, we can get anything done here. It’s always the same, I would say, well, I’ve heard the passport office is really good but one our you know even in the states two days and they were like, oh yeah that’s true. And not only that, but you could point to the whole story of how that happened, the change process. And it wasn’t, you know, outsiders coming in. It was completely local. So it was incredibly useful. And I’d love to have more stories like that.  

Salimah Samji That’s your hopes. And you get.  

Matt Andrew I’ll share a hope story.  

Salimah Samji Really?  

Matt Andrew Two years ago, I was involved in doing a big study of service delivery in the Middle East as a region, and the standard way which that would be done would be to do a whole bunch of different country cases with bar graphs showing Egypt, Syria, Lebanon there. And everybody thinks that I was really good at testing, but we said, no, this one, we’re just going to take a look. Most of the lessons about what people really need to learn are domestic, probably rather than international. Maybe we can sell to some positive deviants, but the stories that actually use the existing data, we have to be able to explain to both documents standard deviation as an empirical matter, but then also to explain why you and where and how you got this diversity and use that as the basis for plugging into a domestic conversation. And we’ve written this report. It was all very nice. And then we my coauthor, I got summoned by the Saudi executive director of the World Bank. But this is not good. You only get summoned by the Saudi executive director and he’s really pissed about something. So I sort of braced ourselves if we walked into the room and he said, you know, I’ve been to a lot of these regional reports and they’re always just this country should learn from this country, this rigorous evidence of all about. He said, you know, that’s the first report I’ve ever read that really taught me something. Lots of us I didn’t know but helped to give a language to explaining why there was such diversity. And I said, I really liked that approach. I want you to know about it. So I thought it was but it was really, I think, telling that this was also to be had a positive deviants discussion in academia. It’s all about such an independent variable, always nerdy kind of discussions about whether it’s the right way to do things, which and those are legit discussions. You should have them at Harvard and M.I.T., but. CS When you’re doing this stuff, as this research are saying in the put in the political space, you just you can’t just be the purveyor of truth of what appears to be an empirical reality of most things. Something is working somewhere some of the time. Where is it? How is it happening? And in this case, in the Middle East, where we’re doing it, the methodological virtue is that you could control for policy consistency because these are relentlessly centralized countries, though that policy is pretty much identical, at least at the country level. So when you see this big variation, it can’t be because as a policy issue and there’s a monster uniform compensation issue or an implementation, its context issue and helping to illuminate all of that and provide hope and provide a basis in these really tough circumstances, like in Palestine, where it’s just it’s grim, really, really tough to do work there. And you find a school in your dataset that happens to be producing kids that get outcome performance tests in schooling that are OECD standard by the average level of spectacular. But you know what a school can do that’s in the middle of nowhere where 70% of the fathers are dead or in jail because of the circumstances they’re on there. And yet their kids are aspiring to these amazing things in the future. And you do some deep drilling to find and talk about that sort of stuff. You give a well by country directing. You give local politicians so much more actual material to work with that. I know then there’s a bias. I hope to use an Armenian kind of language to be able to unpack a lot of that. So I think that for us in a place like Harvard, it pays to be methodologically astute with sort of what are the trade offs, so to speak, that you take when you engage in doing this kind of positive deviance kind of work. But the unappreciated component on the plus side is just how it works and feeds into a political logic of how change actually happens. And I think that’s underappreciated. Maybe hopefully a place the Kennedy School it’s that trade off is weighted a little bit more differently than it might be if you’re trying to get published in the American Political Science Review.  

Attendee 5 As I’m trying to highlight in a postdoc here, I have a question that I don’t think is fully formed mostly from Lily, but everyone is welcome to take the bait. I was really interested by this idea of framing the pump and not sort of activating Europe’s broad based human coalition until you have the least in Line. But I see that as really kind of a two actor model. You have some sort of probably government elite and some sort of group of people that would like something and hopefully their interests can be aligned if they sort of all get on the same page. But what happens when you have like a third actor? I work in global food systems. Oftentimes the private sector is highly reticent or even working really hard behind the scenes, or if you take climate change, is another example to come on line. So then do you still have the same advice. That you can’t. Like activate citizen engagement? I guess that’s what 350.Org has done. But what happens? What do you even do at that point if the leads are not.  

Speaker 2 Ready to go where you need them to go? And yet what you’re saying is that you can’t activate.  

Speaker 5 Citizens, are those just going to get kind of ignored? And I don’t know. So. That’s my question. I’m not very well informed.  

Lily L Tsai Yeah, I mean, I that’s a really good question. I mean, I think if you have the three after model and I think of, um, there’s someone at who was it at MIT who’s going to Oxford. I think he was working on the reactor model of like mining companies that are mostly mining companies, indigenous communities and the government. Right. So when you have a reactor model, it then it’s a different game and it is a matter of assessing where can you get two sides to put pressure on the third rate? And so it’s less it’s like a light up the government. Maybe you light up the citizenry and then get them to be people and then get them to go public and coordinate. Because I think with three, you can pressure the third.  

Alice Evans There was some behind me.  

Attendee 6 My. My name is Kriti. I’m a mid-career student. I wonder if you have the examples of the elite in particular working to reduce the polarization that society seems to me increasingly our country is becoming increasingly polarized and more and more quotidian regimes are democratically elected. So it’s a cause of concern and people believe in what the need to stand up for. So that’s a strangely difficult situation. Mean see how people understand democracy is very complex and as a student of democracy, it sort of follows me.  

Salimah Samji Let’s take two others and then you can all answer that.  

Matt Andrew Matt and I had a couple of questions. One is to all of you, and then the next is to a question I’ll start with, because you said you would clarify the difference between organizing more lives organizing and that’s it’s more I’m really fascinated to see Lily. One of the things that all three of you said, which is really interesting about both how you should teach students about what works, is that you need actors to be engaging with each other and moving around, and you need to be moving people into different realities and very much in the story. But I think also very much you noticed the story and it sounds like in the story too, that it’s almost taking people outside of their tribal identity so that they can explore other people at the same time. And you made the comment that mobilizing attention and mobilizing action are different, and that mobilizing action almost requires cited, like appealing to them in their truck, that appealing to them in their party. And so there’s something about this static identity that matters to mobilize that action. But it sounds like it’s something like the dynamic movement that mobilizes their attention. And I don’t know if I’m just hearing wrong, but it’s a tension that I would just be interested to kind of care about is how do you how do you speak to people where they are, but how do you simultaneously get them to move around and engage with different people?  

Attendee 8 Yeah, my comment or my question is actually very linked to what you said about the difference between mobilizing and organizing. And I just wonder whether there’s a time component there. Like we tend to think about mobilizing as a one off on elections or campaigns or something versus something that is a lot more sustained. So you think about the relationship. You’re trying to change the way the people relate to the government over time. So is there evidence is running? Is your stuff around that that component and link to that, is there a mobilizing within the state as well? I mean, is there kind of studies or evidence about how you mobilize within government actors?  

Salimah Samji Okay. Anyone.  

Rakesh Rajani Okay. So organizing, mobilizing. So one feature, I think, is that mobilizing tends to be instrumental. You know, you mobilize for a purpose. It’s typically you figured out what it is you want, and then you just need the numbers of the masses of the elites or whoever is behind it. So in effect, you say, I figured it out, come support my thing. You try. It’s more efficient. You know, you you’re not at some level. You don’t care about the you don’t even care about the identity of the capacity or perhaps even anything else about that constituency that you’re mobilizing. You just need them to vote or you just need them to demonstrate the self. And ultimately, it’s transactional. Whereas organizing is much more interested in the capacity of that constituency itself to advance its own interests. So that means you have to get to know them. You have to build relationships. And it’s not as simple as well. They know best. They know a heck of a lot. But there’s a whole bunch of things they don’t know. They don’t know how to organize. They may not know how to analyze. There may be differences. There may be a complete lack of hope. So it takes it’s hard work. It has lots of setbacks. It takes a long time. And a lot of that is about building hope, but also building trust, why people are making very rational choices like Lily or saying of not investing in doing anything because they have lots of experience that tells them it’s not worth it. You know, the government won’t respond or whatever. So to be able to to work at it and find at least a partially viable pathway that you can work on, manage expectations. All of those things. It’s a very, very long slog and hard work and, and yeah. It’s not easy to is it to do on the on the. I just want to make a quick comment on your question also about identity. I, I think the mistake we make is to think that you are either a tribalist or you have, you know, you are a cosmopolitan, you know, and or like the small. I think I think the basis of any organizing is based on tribes that your tribe might be particularly interesting. But it is it’s more around the affiliations you feel with other tribes and how you find that there’s something in common between my tribe and your tribe and your tribe, rather than some kind of dilution of our tribe that we kind of post tribe. I think is that is the key and a lot of the time and again in this country, I think one side is much better understanding that fact than the other side. You could even argue, ironically, that one of Obama’s biggest failures is he tried to kind of point to a post tribal America. We are not red, we are not blue, we’re not white, we just American lowercase. There’s no such thing as America if you’re not also the same time, all these other things. Right.  

Salimah Samji Right.  

Alice Evans To respond to Matt’s point about identities and diversity, I think, as Lily was saying earlier, identities are salience. And when they’re triggered, you can push people in various ways. So, for example, when Trump says trade is bad, we see a big shift in what Republicans think as opposed to said what the what the leader says that can push people who identify within that cohort. But the same time, we can mobilize even greater change through a broader, more inclusive coalition. So to give an example from Bolivia, Morales was an indigenous leader, but he didn’t just market himself as indigenous. He marketed himself as anti-austerity, and through that he was able to galvanize a broader alliance. So, yes, identity is salient. Yes, you can pick people often selling, setting yourself as being one of that group, but you can achieve something even bigger if you should reach out through more inclusive language. I think.  

Lily L Tsai Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if I’ve got anything else to add to this. Very good responses. And I mean, I guess I would just tie this polarization question together with what Matt raised, which is to say, I mean, I think that you have to use what you what you got basically like. And if you have a tribe like that, tribe has an organization and an identity and those are really valuable resources. So like you should organize through that. But I think this is picking up on this point about polarization. And, you know, Rick Perry’s heard me say this before that what ideally happens is that the leaders of those tribes are able to come to an agreement about the rules that will govern the process of interaction among tribes. Right. And that those rules ought to be like rules of civilized dialog and rules of civilized negotiations. And that is also the fact that you have tribes with leaders that. A resource. And so, like, we ought to try to make use of those resources in those ways.  

Rakesh Rajani This one equipment supplemental. So I don’t have the answer, but there’s a guy called Salim Chetty that you might think, you know, he’s here. So he’s asking the very same question that you are. And I think you should talk if you probably already are. But.  

Alice Evans Any other questions?  

Attendee 7 I have kind of a weird question when you’re talking about, you know, elites and having a plan for them, how I think how much of it is a model where they want the opposite of what you want. And it’s, you know, the world is what’s the word win, win, lose that if your cause gains their cause loses 000 versus how often do you think it’s just they don’t quite understand what you’re saying. Or maybe there’s a way that everyone can win and it’s just a matter of getting them to see the right way or making an arrangement where everyone benefits. Just in your personal experience or in your studies in general, which is true more often.  

Alice Evans I mean, I give an example from Latin America. So over the 2000s, income inequality fell in many Latin American countries, especially those that experienced the commodity boom. And how that happened is largely through sharing the proceeds of growth. So rather than tackling the structural causes of inequality, rather than by redistributing land which is phenomenally unequal or pushing for more progressive taxation, it was a win coalition of, you know, minimum wage hikes enabled by the commodity boom and growth, so that they were able to achieve some wins for all as long as it was win wins. But the problem is that many of these Latin American governments didn’t tackle these structural causes of inequality, and that formed despondency and frustration with the PTI and many other parties. So, you know, you tackle some bits that you can, you get some benefits, you don’t you miss out on the other bits, you gain the support of the elites, but they may not be long lasting, etc.. So that’s a rubbish answer, but I mean that there that there are, there are bits that are good, there are bits that are bad and there are all these sorts of trade offs and complications depending on what decisions are taken.  

Salimah Samji Great. Any other comments? Okay.  

Attendee 2 I have one other question. And so it’s. It’s a bit of an existential question teaching. And it’s about the last question you had about what we teach our students. I would say that, you know, in in so in August, Frank Fukuyama wrote this this article that said, Public policy schools teach people about I mean, as I put it, about answers rather than about how to do things. I think it’s worse than that because I think it’s that what you guys have said really matters is a lot of kind of how to know yourself, how to know your trust, how to build relationships with other tribes, how to move in and out, how to come from us, how to how to agree on second best solutions at times. I think it’s not that we are we just teach answers. We teach the answers are needed. And we teach that the identity of people working in public policy is about your expertise and your answer and not about these other things. I just wanted to get your sense of my rights about this. And what do we do about it? If I’m right about that, how do we steer? Because we want to keep teaching people how to analyze data. We want to teach the. You want all that stuff. We want people to learn. But we want them to learn that stuff with some humility and with some context and with some idea that this is a tool that you use in the process of engaging. This isn’t the end in itself. Just kind of wondered if there was any reaction and if you had any idea of kind of how do we how do we cut it through that needle of saying this stuff all matters. This stuff is important, but let’s put it into its place and it’s kind of show you how to use a tool.  

Lily L Tsai Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a great comment that makes me think of this op ed in The New York Times that was written by climate scientist in North Carolina dealing with this, where, you know, he wrote about how he would visit the local government office and the local official that he visited would be like, you’re an interest group.  

Salimah Samji Like.  

Lily L Tsai You know, you like I don’t care one bit about your scientific expertise like you’re an interest group. And, and he talked about how like it wasn’t until he visited repeatedly and built a relationship of trust and mutual respect that it’s you know, it’s I think very similar to what you’re saying. Like you can it’s important to know the policy and maybe the best practice or whatever. But ultimately, it’s you have to you have to persuade people based on interactions of mutual respect. Like even if they don’t believe even though if they believe you’re like a storyteller, basically. Like so. So again, it comes back to this process and norms like what are the norms that govern the process? Contractual.  

Alice Evans I would like that introduction for all my speeches. Nice little book and go, oh, I just a segway. I was speaking to someone recently who is an aura for an IPA project and this person was not she didn’t have a glittering career, but she was good at talking to people and rapport and they previously had a Harvard, very qualified, very brilliant young mind who was who they called a Harvard brat. And she was, you know, academically brilliant, superb. You know, she knew how to run a regression, but she wasn’t good at working for this IPA project. So they had to replace her with someone else who was a nice, decent human being, who knew how to engage with people. So, yeah, absolutely. I’m totally with you. You know, to get things going, we need to be nice, decent human beings. So that is something partly that we need to teach and inspire, you know, for me. And, you know, one thing I’ve really benefited from, and maybe even more so than any sort of academic content is seeing how my professors interacted and engage with others and provided mentoring and provided constructive criticism and just seeing how they engage with others. You know, those role models to me was so important, you know, so when I see how people respond to questions or how people engage with me, so I think that role modeling process and how we engage with our students is phenomenally important so they don’t end up with being Harvard brats, you know, that goes for any place. Secondly, I think it’s the process of continual critique and being aware of alternatives and questioning what we’re doing. One phrase that I like to tell my students is always embrace self-critique, but never self-doubt. You know, always listen to alternatives and think about other ways of doing things, but never doubt that you can do it. So believe in yourself, but be open to all the other criticisms of what you’re doing. And that’s I mean, to your point about issuing hubris. So I think that’s so important to cultivate that awareness of alternative hypotheses, alternative disciplines, alternative ways of doing things, but to have that sense of self belief. I think we’re okay.  

Rakesh Rajani I think that’s pretty cool. So three things. When I was a grad student here, I was also very excited and very motivated to do a small project. I want to get into the details of that with homeless guys, men in Boston in the south end of Boston and I it was the hardest thing mostly didn’t work and ultimately, you know, even though I had lots of ideas and lots of skills, lots of things going for me, it didn’t work and that so, you know, I’m doing that and it means that I’m taking courses here and designing policies and so on. And so it was it was a kind of nice, you know, reality check. And I think that’s another reason why it’s good for people to get engaged in real world stuff while they are in school. Somehow, some are trying to integrate that, too. That’s 1/2. Gosh, I should have written this. Uh, where was I going? This. It’ll. It’s disappeared. So then I let it go. Maybe it comes back out. So impressed by that they haven’t. Oh, yeah. Um.  

Salimah Samji I thought it was going to move on, and you’re like, No, I got it.  

Rakesh Rajani I, I teach a few classes, not a whole course. I teach a few classes at the Columbia School of Public International Public Affairs, where all I talk about is things I’ve done, where there are, you know, there are not stupid, there are smart, there are well intended, usually well executed. Like it’s a it’s not a it’s not a car. It’s not a cardboard story of a badly done project. It’s a story of well-meaning, well-motivated people trying to do good things and ultimately not succeeding. And because they are stories about myself, there’s a certain intimacy and a certain kind of responsibility that to that and the student feedback that comes either right in that class after those classes or at the end of the course, they often point to that particular device being really helpful to them rather than kind of giving answers delicately, stories of when you tend to the world or not. And I think that’s something that could be really, really helpful to do. A final point I want to have is around. The design of policy matters. This is I mean a little bit like under a Campbell’s feedback loops maybe. I think connects with this bubble. You know, a lot of the time we think that we focus a lot on just what is a good policy and, you know, what’s the incidence analysis and who will benefit all those really useful things. But we rarely talk about how can you design a policy that builds and hooks where constituencies will continue to be engaged? Right. How do you design a policy, for instance, which will require in its very structure for there to be annual reporting, will require feedback loops where in fact it will keep fueling, creating and fueling a constituency that has a stake in that policy and will be able to defend it, keep it real, to hold it accountable. And I don’t have the you know, I don’t have research on this, but my hunch is that that’s that design matters because ultimately the policy will go where the center of gravity of that country goes and even a good policy will kind of wither away and you’ll have otherwise. So more mimicry unless there’s a constituency. And so you can you can it doesn’t just accidentally happen. You can design policies to be of that sort. And that’s something that I think you can teach students.  

Salimah Samji On your point on telling stories. I, I really like that. And I personally am very moved when I hear someone telling their story because again, it’s just like observation. It’s kind of an extension of an observation. How do you compare the two cases? Because, you know, a lot of people use cases. I have my own bias on cases. But I just wanted to hear your thoughts on the case that’s being taught in a class versus your personal experience, where you are the one telling the story through your experience and can answer any question that anyone asks to the best of your ability.  

Rakesh Rajani Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t thought. I mean, I think I like cases. The problem with cases is that that they can often become kind of performance that’s right to come this to take you pull out the stylized elements of the case so and you often strip away the ambiguity and the really interesting parts so that’s they can come across as can. But I still think cases compared to lots of their jargon, it’s always better.  

Lily L Tsai But I also think I mean, I just want to underscore another aspect of what we’re saying, which is that these are stories if I if I heard you write about like failure, right. Which I think is another incredibly important thing to teach. Students said, like, you know, to give stories about failure and learning from failure, but also to inculcate the fact that like that should be totally upfront and normalized. And we still do a terrible, terrible job of that, like, I think, in every dimension.  

Rakesh Rajani And I think that stories of failure become are really interesting when they are not stupid failure. Right. Because a lot of stories of failure are like, look, they didn’t think of this obvious thing or they were just all misogynist. So you’re like, those are easy to write off. Or you write them off because you never identify with them. You would say, I would never do that. But the ones where you can identify with like could have actually done other ones, I think, that are more captivating.  

Alice Evans Great. Michael, you had a.  

Attendee 3 Yes question for you. Actually, just I can just riff a little bit more on this, some of the virtues of targeting elites, so to speak, because I think that’s somewhat of a relative question. Everyone in this room, by any worldly standard, is a super elite. But was what you were saying? Authorizers like people that have political authority that can be from presidents down to local council, people down to the chair of the school board. I mean, this the elites at multiple levels. So in the Russian doll sense of there’s different layers of elites ness, so to speak, when I’m not just to speak a little bit more thoroughly, because I think I’ve always thought the way I understood the ethics of what you were saying about the that you don’t want to be in a situation where one is acting an extra jurisdictional space, so to speak, to try and leverage and influence something that’s not your purview to to engage with. But I think a large part of our theory of change with the Building State Capability Program is that, yeah, we need to have these executive programs to sort of get the apex of the triangle, so to speak. But we give that training away. We give our book away precisely because we don’t. Our theory of change is about the middle of the pyramid as much as anything else, because those are the people that actually do a lot of the work that we really care about. So I’m sympathetic in principles of what you’re saying, but just can just sort of riff a little more on sort of what you what what’s your theory of elite ness, so to speak, to that that we need to worry about?  

Lily L Tsai Yeah. I mean, I guess there are two things that occur to me if I were to riff on it is I mean, I guess first I’ll say I was thinking about government decision makers when I started, so I had a pretty specific idea in mind, which I didn’t make explicit. But but now that you bring it up and you tie it to this point of like not mobilizing citizens or ordinary people until you mobilize elites and realizing that actually I think there’s an important point about accountability, that to take it a little bit further, I think that, you know, we should think twice before mobilizing citizens when we as elites or an external actor or an international organization or some sort of international advocacy campaign, if if those if we if the external actors cannot be held accountable by the people we are seeking to mobilize, that doesn’t seem right. You know, and so and I think that happens a lot. So but I was thinking of the specifically the government decision makers. And I think that in the buildings capacity program, you know, I think those mid-level bureaucrats, the implementers are an incredibly important actor and they’re both principals and agents. And that’s the interesting pitch, right? So, I mean, I could riff more on that. But yes, I mean, I think, broadly speaking, important to mobilize those people when their principals are principals. But the principals ought to be I mean, are the principles I mean, they should be agents. And so so actually it should be that the ordinary people can be enabled as principals to hold those people’s agents accountable.  

Attendee 3 So we can build out that free press and model and the lateral license.  

Lily L Tsai Of, say, right.  

Attendee 3 When principals become agents and when agents become principals. And that.  

Speaker 3 That’s right. I mean, you have to like. Yeah, but you have to keep switching. But yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Attendee 3 That’s good.  

Attendee 4 Thanks so much. And I love your question.  

Salimah Samji You can.  

Attendee 4 Do this. So this mobilizing elite thing. How so? My experience of government decision makers is, you know, you rarely find the kind of completely callous person and you rarely find that completely amazing motivated reform. And they kind of in between. And most of the time, they don’t take much initiative because that’s what usually gets into trouble. So they kind of so in the in the theory of mobilizing elites to questions like how do you nudge them to their kind of better selves? Right. And who does that right? And, you know, do you think that that can be kind of a bunch of technocrats or people like ourselves or, I don’t know, the World Bank person? Or do you think that there’s something around something powerful or maybe enduring if that is done by the constituency who most feels the pain of, you know, the lack of action on their part of inattention? Whatever is the is there something around of value, both in terms of achieving the outcome, but also of having that outcome last, you know, that pressure less if it comes from the constituents. Two questions. How do you not them and who the who does that.  

Lily L Tsai Yeah I mean on how you nudge them. I have a two by two psychology, intrinsic and extrinsic, but I think that’s like how often that’s led to me. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, as many of you know and I’m sure like, you know, the research there’s like intrinsic extrinsic motivation and moreover, if you motivate them by. Creating or creating external incentives. There’s motivational crowding which crowds out like any kind of intrinsic motivation that they have to be really very careful about, whether you’re using external punishment and incentives so that like the good types, the people who are genuinely motivated don’t like switching to this different game, right? So I mean, I can elaborate on that, but I’m assuming all of, you know, sort of that literature, right? Like there’s this, there’s really daycare center paper that I always raised, right? Like you penalize, teach or you penalize parents for picking up your kids late and all of a sudden they all start picking up their kids late because they’re like, Oh, this is a fee for service model. Now, instead of like, Oh, I feel really bad about keeping my kid’s teacher late, etc.. So, so yes, I mean, I think that’s important to note. And then how nudge or how this the importance of the disempowered pressuring or nudging, I mean, I think comes back to what you were saying. And I also have a couple of examples or papers that I’ve written on this where there’s something incredibly there is something incredibly powerful. If you are able to get the elites to come to the to like level to re level to, you know, like if they come to the ordinary people or, you know, I wrote a paper where local officials in China were able to increase citizen compliance because they ceded decision making control over financial resources to village council or village or councils. And that was a really important symbolic like priming the pump, kind of like trust or what’s called brave reciprocity in game theory. Right. So the in that case, the officials were like, you know, we don’t know if you’re going to reciprocate by like giving us more compliance, but we’re going to cede control. And if you reciprocate, then you’ll start this like positive equilibrium going. So. So, yes.  

Salimah Samji Matt, I wonder if you wanted to answer that question.  

Lily L Tsai Yeah, I mean, but also.  

Salimah Samji Sorry to throw you off on this one, but.  

Matt Andrew Oh, God. I’m just. I’m just thinking about it, because I think in our work, motivation is the hardest thing.  

Salimah Samji Exactly.  

Matt Andrew And the motivation of the author. Right. You know, we don’t speak about it because everyone is in it, but we speak about the authorizers and we speak about the work piece. And, you know, and it motivating people is very, very, very difficult for me to do that. But being involved in it, I think we would say I agree completely with Lily that you need to be very careful about how you use extrinsic motivators, because I think that they do cut out other motivators very, very quickly. And I think that the intrinsic motivators, though, are hard to find when you’re an outsider. It’s hard to understand what it is that’s going to move people, that’s going to drive people. And I almost feel that we depend on like when we’re working in these places in and where we are lucky enough to, to, to kind of trip over a thing that mobilizes some of the people we’re working with. And then that becomes like a mobilizer for other people as well, because that person then starts to mobilize people. Because I do believe one of the things that’s interesting is when you when you nudge one person, there’s an impact on other people. And one of the things you guys are talking about is, you know, this isn’t about citizens versus the state. It’s about that. It’s about adults. And I think I would see bureaucratic reform as well. I think it’s the same you know, we often think it’s like people, public officials are in tension with politicians above them. And it’s like this constant battle that they’re in. And I think, though, it’s more like a kind of an interactive movement. And so if you can kind of identify and often, if you like, some kind of intrinsic motivator from someone, then that person can become like a little bit of an intrinsic motivator for others. So it’s kind of an interesting thing about who I would say it, how I think the nudges need to be intrinsic more than extrinsic. That’s, that’s and we’ve kind of found that I don’t know what some of my colleagues are with the idea that that said, I think that getting people in the room sometimes requires some extrinsic motivation. Getting people on board at the beginning is to kind of give them an external nudge, so to speak, which I think of as a story also from earlier, is about kind of the extrinsic motivators at a global level. I think that part of it had a look at it at a personal level too. But I think that when you speak about who does the nudge, you know, we’re designing our we are kind of we have a role in designing intervention, but it’s not our intervention. But we design the choreography of the intervention to a degree. So we are looking for ways in which how do we how do we become maybe the first much right. Knowing though, that how much is not going to be enough to keep them going very long. But because we iterating a lot, we are really very trying that early on in the process. We are doing the nudging, we are convening folks, we are holding them together, but we are really looking for the person who emerges as the intrinsic motivator of everybody else. And you’re almost looking then to create a bunch of nudges that happen between the people themselves and to almost create like a, I don’t know, an interactive nudging like setting.  

Alice Evans Right? Setting off a snowball.  

Matt Andrew That’s exactly what it is. I think that that’s and I think that that’s what you’re off there. And I think that when you’re thinking about the motivation in groups, that is what happens. And if you can get the group, the individuals in the group to start mobilizing each other, I think it’s really powerful. It’s one of the reasons also why we work. We try to always work with multiple teams rather than one team because we find that, you know, different teams can be kind of like at different points of their, you know, emotional roller coaster. And if some of them are mobilized and motivated because they had a good week or something happened or they had a conversation or something that really put them on a high, they can kind of bring the others up. But it is, I think, a very, very mysterious thing. I think I mean, there’s a big literature on it and the literature is fantastic and very useful to a point. So but I think you are to me, intrinsic, very important. You do need some intrinsic motivators, but you need to be careful to use them very sparingly. And I would say you use them sparingly at key points, the beginning of the work, and then maybe at points when you’re looking for some kind of tipping, you know, when, when, when it’s almost like people are moving to that place where they need something to kind of push them into a totally new level of work. But the key thing is to try and get that kind of like I’m almost thinking. It’s like, what’s that game? All right. It’s like the lads keep banging because the ball keeps bouncing around and it’s, it’s if you can get that going and the thing works is pinball. And if you can’t get that going in other teams, then the teams kind of. But they just don’t continue so that it’s a big, big deal. It’s very hard to do.  

Salimah Samji Great. Thank you. Do you guys have any last comments you want? Well, thank you very much. It’s been an honor to be on a panel with the three of you. I have to say personally, I am so inspired and in awe of all of the work that you guys do doing what I love the most about it. It’s true. What I love the most is how humble each of you are, you know, for the amount of incredible work that you have all done in your lives. And you you’re on the ground. You engage with real things, you care about them, and yet, you know, you don’t have any egos. You don’t have any kind of a you. Have you seen where we’re sitting? I have a good comparison for my comment. So it has really been an honor. I have learned a lot. And thank you very much. Thank you, guys.