How to create sustainable institutional excellence?

Author’s Note: This essay was drafted in 2017. At that time, I was involved with the U.S.-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Water (USPCASW), a USAID-funded project to establish a water research and education center at Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan. This is the “Water Center” (a.k.a. USPCASW) referenced below. I should thank my mentor, Tariq Banuri, for introducing me to the Four Capitals Framework and encouraging me to apply it to the USPCASW case. Of course, I bear sole responsibility for the way in which this has been done (and to be clear: the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of USAID or the U.S. Government). For further elaboration on how our project team (led by Steve Burian at the University of Utah) ultimately carried out implementation of this framework — and how the model evolved over time — please stay tuned for another essay/paper. In the meantime, see the introductory chapter of the USPCASW Final Report (available here https://water.utah.edu/uspcasw/).

The challenge

Development aid interventions are designed to create change — but often the real development challenge is not creating change but sustaining it post-donor funding.  A common criticism of development assistance is that shortly after projects end, conditions regress towards what they were prior to the assistance.  Although the worst cases may tend to be those interventions focused solely on physical infrastructure (e.g., building a school), even capacity building interventions can result in limited long-term impact.  For example, teachers or health workers may receive donor-funded training, but they may not be able to put this training to effective use due to poor physical infrastructure or lack of adequate institutional support. 

To illustrate how this might occur in the context of higher education, imagine faculty researchers who learn new laboratory techniques through a donor-funded capacity building workshop, and a new laboratory with the necessary equipment is built with donor funds so that faculty can apply these new techniques. 

Now imagine that through an unfortunate combination of funding shortages, procurement delays, and overall poor management, the laboratory supplies are not readily available for use by faculty when they are needed.  Not only does this hinder the advance of research, but the delay itself can signal the lack of institutional commitment for a culture of excellence: it signals that faculty who are passionate about their research would be wise to look elsewhere for employment if they wish to be as productive and innovative as they can be.  

Consequently, the human capital (i.e., knowledge and skills) that had been developed through the intervention moves from one institution to another since it remains with the individual faculty member — it is a private good.  Meanwhile, the institution loses a critical human resource that will be increasingly difficult to replace as the institution’s reputation declines.

Creating sustainable change

Turning to the approach taken by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) with regard to its U.S.-Pakistan Centers for Advanced Studies (USPCAS) program: the goal is to create three centers with the capacity to drive change for water security, agriculture and food security, and energy security.  This goal of creating academic centers of excellence shapes the strategy that must be used to achieve it.  It is not enough to build physical capital (i.e., buildings, infrastructure, technology) and human capital; the institutions must be such that they not only can maintain the physical capital and retain the human capital but also continue to develop them post-donor funding.      

What this means is that improvements must be institutionalized, becoming embedded within the organizational culture.  In other words, to create sustainable change, a “culture of excellence” must be nurtured at each center such that members value high quality education, research, and stakeholder engagement[i]; make substantive contributions to achieving the sustainable development goals for Pakistan; and support norms, policies, and systems that incentivize and reinforce this culture of excellence. 

Although the phrase “quality assurance policies and procedures” may not inspire many people, the pursuit of excellence for a higher purpose — namely the environmental and social well-being of Pakistan’s people — can foster a collective spirit that can be put to use for the long-term.  Quality assurance (QA) policies and procedures become tools for this higher purpose.  Experimenting with different QA policies and procedures to find ones that are locally effective is an important activity, and the desire to revisit and reflect on their appropriateness and efficacy is itself an indicator of the value being placed on excellence.

Capacity development for excellence

Indeed, excellence is not a static condition; it requires ongoing effort.  Thus, capacity strengthening never ends — but it should become increasingly self-driven.  This emphasis on shifting from externally-driven to internally-driven capacity strengthening reflects current thinking on how to achieve genuine capacity development.  The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines capacity development as:

“the process through which individuals, organizations and societies obtain, strengthen and maintain the capabilities to set and achieve their own development objectives over time.”  

— Capacity Development: A UNDP Primer (2009), p. 5

However, as UNDP explains in its capacity development primer, the process through which capacity development is achieved is complex and there has been an evolution of thinking about how best to approach it, with the original model being one of “foreign aid,” followed by “technical assistance,” then “technical cooperation,” and finally “capacity development.”  

In essence, the locus of change has shifted from money, to foreign technical advisors, to partnerships between developed and developing countries, and finally to developing countries themselves.  This has profound political significance because capacity development may involve what might be considered culture change:

“An essential ingredient in the UNDP capacity development approach is transformation.  For an activity to meet the standard of capacity development as practiced and promoted by UNDP, it must bring about transformation that is generated and sustained over time from within.  Transformation of this kind goes beyond performing tasks; instead it is more a matter of changing mindsets and attitudes.”  

— Capacity Development: A UNDP Primer (2009), p. 5 (emphasis in original)

For culture change to be driven by members of a culture itself is a much different process than culture change driven by external actors.  The latter process can be imperialistic and paternalistic; the former can be empowering.  Ultimately, the goal of international projects focused on capacity strengthening is self-driven transformation for sustainable development. It is only through such a self-driven process that true sustained impact can be achieved.

This should not, however, be taken to mean that developing countries must “pick themselves up by the bootstraps” so-to-speak.  Rather, the focus of donor-funded capacity building projects should be on helping local people and institutions strengthen their capacities for self-driven excellence.  Part of that capacity is in terms of knowledge and skills — and part of that capacity is in terms of social networks, physical infrastructure, and financial resources. 

Requirements for sustainable change

In order to ensure that capacities are developed in a sufficiently holistic manner to support self-driven excellence in higher education, the CAS Water Center (i.e., USPCASW) team adopted a “four capitals” framework.  This framework was an adaptation of the “five capitals” approach to sustainable development articulated by Forum for the Future and others (see Ekins et al. 1992; Parkin et al. 2003; Serageldin and Steer 1994).

The five capitals include human capital (knowledge and skills), manufactured/physical capital (infrastructure), social capital (social networks/groups and norms), natural capital (natural resources and ecosystem services), and financial capital (money to invest in the other capitals). In terms of the USPCASW project, the goal of building stocks of human, physical, financial, and social capital was ultimately to improve and protect stocks of natural capital (i.e., available clean water) — hence the emphasis on four capitals (to produce the fifth).

The decision to use this framework reflected the following considerations. 

• First, in order to fuel self-driven excellence in higher education post-USAID funding, there must be sufficient stocks of capital — human, social, physical, and financial — for faculty, students, and administrators to draw upon as needed. 
• Second, the faculty and administrators must themselves have the capacity to maintain, replenish, and grow these stocks (without foreign aid) for the Center’s ongoing pursuit of sustained excellence. 
• Third, the Center’s leaders must have the capacity to set long-term goals, identify strategies to achieve them, effectively implement and adapt these strategies, and make decisions — even in the face of constraints and necessary trade-offs — that reflect the underlying value placed on high quality education and research for sustainable development.  
• Fourth, institutional arrangements must be established to support the maintenance, replenishment, and growth of the four capitals to ensure that the Center will be resilient against system shocks (e.g., loss of a key leader; dramatic reduction in federal funding).  

The Four Capitals Framework integrated these considerations and provided the conceptual scaffolding for achieving long-term institutional sustainability. In particular, the third consideration reflected an awareness of a point made in UNDP’s capacity development primer:

“Measurement of capacity development success cannot be reduced to an increase in input resources such as human, financial, or physical resources.  Availability of input resources does not guarantee their contribution to development objectives.”     

— Capacity Development: A UNDP Primer (2009), p. 32

Ongoing generation of four capitals

In practical terms, this framework suggested that project teams for higher education capacity strengthening must consider what kinds of activities will generate the four capitals — and what kinds of activities will ensure their continued generation. 

Table 1 provides some examples of both of these kinds of activities. The primary difference between the sets of activities is that the activities designed to ensure ongoing capital generation are essentially institutional arrangements at the level of the organization. 

Table 1. Examples of activities to generate four capitals and to ensure their continued generation

Conclusion

Although informal cultural norms are crucial to creating a “culture of excellence,” the formalization of this culture through codified policies and procedures increases governance transparency at the same time that it guides behavior and transmits values through time. Unfortunately, too often there is an emphasis on evidence of the generation of capital, rather than evidence of the institutionalization of mechanisms for its perpetual generation.

A thoughtful approach guided by a theory of change based on institutional development for sustainable excellence can counter this tendency and produce better results.

Endnotes

[i] Such a statement may raise concerns about a hegemonic approach to conceptualizing “high quality research.” As an anthropologist, I take such concerns seriously. I do not, however, reject the general notion of research quality as long as it is defined, qualified, and problematized appropriately. I am presently working on some essays about research quality and epistemological pluralism for which I will post links to once available.