MSD Hub editor's note (Michael Field, Senior Systems Specialist, Vikāra Institute):
The blog highlights an important emerging trend related to using systems lenses when intervening to support communities in crisis. While humanitarian efforts have traditionally, and with good reason, focused on meeting the immediate needs of communities as they struggle from a shock or stress, increasingly practitioners are realizing that meeting immediate needs is becoming insufficient. For example, climate change is triggering a combination of shocks and stresses that are pushing many communities into a cycle of shocks and stresses that are breaking down communal coping mechanisms and forcing communities into maladapted coping tactics like conflict, migration, etc. Systems lenses are helping practitioners to gain insights into the challenges and opportunities facing communities stuck in such cycles that allows the practitioners to more effectively support communities to break the cycle and emerge into more stable contexts.
Maybe one of the more frustrating aspects in international aid that seems to be increasingly more common is when communities become stuck in a cycle of crises particularly in fragile and conflict affected contexts. Crises occur when local systems are weak or failing and unable to respond to the needs of affected populations. This often results in negative coping behaviors which further weakens local systems leading to a cycle of ongoing crises. Historically, humanitarian aid focused on the critically important immediate needs of populations as they struggled to meet their food, water, shelter, and protection needs. At the same time, the various underlying forces and factors that combine to launch communities in a cycle of recurring crises are often left unaffected by humanitarian responses. Those forces and factors often continue, weakening communal coping mechanisms making communities more fragile after each recurrent crisis.
Donors and practitioners realizing this concerning pattern have been adapting their approach to better deal with both immediate needs and underlying forces and factors that can improve the ability of local systems to manage future shocks and stresses. One of the key tenets of GOAL’s Crisis to Resilience Framework, which is also integral to Vikara’s MSR framework, is that the only way to enable crisis affected populations to move beyond recurrent cycles of crises towards resilience is to protect, leverage, stabilize and strengthen/transform local systems. This very much aligns with the current emphasis on locally led approaches, but GOAL and Vikara argue that locally lead approaches should place more emphasis on catalyzing better alignment within systems so local actors want to fulfill their functions in ways that leads to systems that are more resilient, productive and inclusive.
Systems Thinking Lenses
Increasingly, practitioners that focus on communities managing a crisis from shocks like natural hazards, conflict, political/market turmoil, etc. are finding that using systems lenses is critical to intervening in ways that both deal with the immediate needs, as well as catalyzing systemic change that improves how communities manage risks. Especially, with the emergence of systemic resilience frameworks that provide insights into how local socio-economic systems manage risks, practitioners are increasingly better able to identify critically important insights into a range of patterns related to:
Informal community coping mechanisms: For many crisis affected populations, informal social norms and practices are foundational to their ability to weather shocks and stresses. Especially, as communities are thrown into crisis, it is often the identity boundaries and communal beliefs that guide community members to support and work together in ways that are foundational sources of resilience. At the same time, such community norms can also include strong in-group/out-group norms that can encourage or reinforce community versus community divisions and conflict that can make communities more vulnerable.
Public goods governance systems: In many countries, especially countries with high levels of poverty, formal governments are entrusted with delivering health care, social safety net, emergency response, education, energy, water, security, etc. services, but are unable or unwilling to effectively deliver such services to communities. By using systems lenses, practitioners can identify entry points for catalyzing changes in governance systems that can improve the value delivered to communities especially in relation to supporting communities when weathering shocks and stresses.
Commercial market systems: Increasingly, commercial market or market systems are being touted as able to deliver on historically public goods like health care, education, social safety net, emergency response, etc. services. At the same time, it is well known that patterns in market systems interactions can exacerbate community vulnerabilities especially when market power is wielded to maximize the margin that market actors can capture during a transaction. While there are opportunities to leverage market forces to fill gaps, in some historically public goods services, market systems have limitations and require effective counter-balancing mechanisms/systems that can push/guide/incentivize market actors to focus on the value they deliver. Using system lenses can provide insights into how and why local systems operate in ways that are unhelpful, and where and how such systems would find it attractive to change in ways that can substantially improve how vulnerable and marginalized communities manage crises. For example, GOAL has developed a framework to gain insights into and find opportunities to engage system actors to catalyze change in local systems that lead to improved wellness and resilience outcomes.
Source: Resilience for Social Systems Approach (R4S) Guidance Manual, GOAL, 2019
Systemic resilience (SR): Frameworks that provide insights in how social economic systems manage risks are proving very helpful at making sense of the underlying forces and factors at play in complex contexts, especially in relation to helping communities move beyond crises. For example, SR frameworks are helping practitioners better understand how various forces and factors push and pull against each other and then how they manifest in different ways in different systems. By understanding how risks are managed in various systems, including how systems are interconnected and interdependent related to risk management can help practitioners better intervene in ways that can help communities in the near, medium and long-term.
Insights into Action
While systems-thinking analytical lenses provide essential insights, it is equally important to turn insights into actions in ways that are also informed by system-thinking principles. Some important principles include:
Complexity: Complexity means that there are multiple forces and factors pushing and pulling against each other. When intervening in complex systems it is critical to understand that longer-term change requires internal changes in how forces and factors push and pull against each other, but it is not possible to know exactly how any intervention will actually affect how internal forces and factors interact. As a result, it is essential to follow a process of probing, learning, and adapting that focuses on catalyzing and internal change processes. To do this well requires a team to develop an effective learning-based theory of change and pathway that sets out important change objectives and expected indicators of change. Especially, for communities in crisis, intervening in ways that closely observe the effects is critical to ensure an intervention does not have any unintended negative consequences.
Self-organization: Self-organization means that systems work the way they do, even when there are troubling patterns, because there is something useful to work that way. For example, gender norms that can be perceived as disadvantageous to women and the wider community, often provide advantages that communities find important. As a result, any intervention should be designed with an expectation that any change will include some level of trade-off or push-back from system actors. Especially for communities managing a crisis, it is imperative to closely monitor initial interventions to look for signals that any behavior change objectives may not be favorable from the perspective of the community.
Fast and slow moving variables: Fast and slow moving variables is a principle that says some changes in systems can range from things that are easily influenced so changes often (i.e., fast. Moving variables), to changes that are more deep-seated and only change is tied to a substantial change in the system operates (i.e., slow moving variables). Slow-moving variables also tend to plan an important influencing role like cultural norms and practices such as gender norms. When catalyzing change, it is critical that practitioners understand that while it often makes sense to start with faster-moving variables like transactions, access to finance, etc. but durable change that will lead to ongoing positive ripple effects come from slower-moving variables. For communities in crisis, it is often important to recognize that basic needs maybe be tied to faster-moving variables, but when providing for basic needs, it would be important to think about how initial access could be leveraged to deeper changes that could catalyze a pathway out of crisis and heading toward greater well-being and resilience.
Attractors: Attractors are an important principle that defines how systems change. Attractors are emergent changes within a system that actors perceive as more attractive than the previous behavior/pattern/norm. If an emergent change is attractive enough it will be adopted by more and more market actors as they signal the benefits (i.e., from their perspective) of making the change. This process of emergent change is why change can often be perceived as messy as each system actor may be influenced by multiple factors that combine differently. Interestingly, crises often create more opportunities for change as the disruptive nature of crises re-order forces and factors making emergent change more likely to be attractive to previous behaviors.
More to Learn
While GOAL and Vikāra Institute are learning a lot related to the nexus of crises, humanitarian response, and longer-term development, there remains a lot more to learn. Systems thinking frameworks and lenses are providing essential insights into how complex social-economic systems evolve in response to various shocks and stresses. Interestingly, even though GOAL and Vikāra Institute have taken different paths in applying systems thinking, they both have realized that transformative change that leads to substantial wellness and resilience outcomes has to emerge from and driven by local systems. Donors can support and even amplify local attractors in support of change, but durable change is change that delivers ongoing improvements in wellness and resilience for all system actors.
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