Navigation by Judgment: Why and When Top-Down Management of Foreign Aid Doesn't Work

by Dan Honig

Foreign aid organizations collectively spend hundreds of billions of dollars annually, with mixed results. Part of the problem in these endeavors lies in their execution. In Navigation by Judgment , Dan Honig argues that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Drawing on a novel database of over 14,000 discrete development projects across nine aid agencies and eight paired case studies of development projects, Honig shows that aid agencies will often benefit from giving field agents the authority to use their own judgments to guide aid delivery. This "navigation by judgment" is particularly valuable when environments are unpredictable and when accomplishing an aid program's goals is hard to accurately measure. Highlighting a crucial obstacle for effective global aid, Navigation by Judgment shows that the management of aid projects matters for aid effectiveness.

284 pages, Hardcover

Published April 27, 2018

Reviews

[Theres · Rating 3 out of 5]

He makes a very interesting point, but I would have preferred him to go a bit more into the implications of his approach when applied to different types of employees. To some extent this is a very straightforward autonomy vs incentives argument, where he says autonomy can be more important (as uncertainty and unmeasurable outcomes become more important), assuming your employees are self-motivated and know what they're doing. This doesn't necessarily apply to all levels in International Development Organisations. His example of trainers being trained but then leaving, but management deciding not to change the intervention in order not to look bad - are we certain those same people would work towards the best of the organisation if left more autonomy? Not sure.

I also would have liked him to go a bit more into something he mentioned at the start - setting long-term objectives but with little input into how to get there, as trialled by the recent Development Impact Bond in Indian Primary Education.

Plus, he talks about how the funding situation of Dfid vs USAID affect their approaches, but not much about how this can be changed, or even why we're not seeing private funds racing ahead on these things if they're presumably more autonomous?

In any case, a useful rebuttal to "over-measurement".

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dan Honig pulls together a tour de force of primary research and data from development agencies to argue that effective development assistance is not just about continuing to measure and quantify, but also about leveraging soft information and giving discretion to local agents to adapt to changing contexts.

His case studies, comparing and contrasting different development agencies, help to challenge ourselves to think about characteristics of systems that effectively support adaptive development. His balanced approach also emphasizes the situations and characteristics of effective approaches to measurement & evaluation, areas where measurement may be complementary to adaptation, and where measurement may be likely to lead us astray.