Quick-win ideas for strengthening the Transparency and Accountability Initiative

Yesterday, Julie McCarthy at the Open Society Foundations shared an important update with the transparency, accountability, and participation (TAP) community of practice that lays out the future direction of the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/AI), a key donor collaborative that has become an influential actor in the TAP space during the past several years. A big news item confirmed in the email is the forthcoming arrival of Michael Jarvis from the World Bank as the new T/AI executive director, which is great news given his stellar track record, domain expertise, and interpersonal skills.

Many in the TAP community have been consulted formally and informally in the past half-year about where and how T/AI should evolve in the future, myself included. I think there is value in sharing some of the key points I communicated privately in the interests of stimulating a more public conversation that supports Mike in his work plan development process this summer.

(Disclosure and caveats: I’ve worked on a range of projects over many years with T/AI donors including Open Society Foundations, Hewlett Foundation, and Omidyar Network. So feel free to take the thoughts below with a grain of salt/potential for subliminal bias.)

To wit, here are my top 4 quick-win ideas for improving the return on investment from T/AI.

1. Transparency donors will be more effective if they are more transparent. How meta! But in all seriousness, a peculiar characteristic of some T/AI donors is that their strategic funding priorities remain largely a black box to outsiders. One positive deviant in the group is the Hewlett Foundation, which recently published a wonderfully concise strategy document describing where and how they aspired to invest their funding in the TAP universe in the coming years. Were other T/AI donors to follow suit, it would dramatically reduce the friction and opportunity costs on both sides of the donor-grantee divide by minimizing the need for the typical kabuki dance associated with trying to divine whether one’s shiny new project idea is a potential fit for a donor. A future where T/AI donors are all saying individually and publicly, “Here’s what we’re interested in funding, here’s what we’re not interested in funding, and here’s where we’re open to new ideas” is a really exciting vision to me and would add tremendous value at almost no cost.
2. We need stronger links between TAP work and sector outcomes. In the update from Julie and T/AI co-chair Martin Tisne at Omidyar Network, we learned about a potential overarching T/AI focus on the global financial architecture, open data and privacy, learning, and civic space. All of these are great and necessary. But they are also all traditional TAP cross-cutting technocratic areas that leave service delivery and sector outcomes as a secondary set of priorities, at least at the global level. It’s fair to say from the past 15 years of collective experience that our community’s failure to establish stronger links (through both evidence generation and practical collaboration) with the global health, education, sanitation, nutrition, and agriculture development communities has been a strategic mistake (there are glimmers of progress at the country and subnational levels, however, where these linkages have indeed been forged in some countries). I hope T/AI takes a hard look at this moving forward.
3. We need more T/AI donors. Easier said than done, I recognize, but the challenges here are rooted in #2 above, I believe. Other key, large potential donors in the TAP space (think the Gates Foundation, Rockefeller, and a range of bilateral government donors outside of DFID) simply aren’t convinced that TAP work generates sufficient return on investment for their sector priorities. Relying solely on the generosity of the existing five T/AI donors is a recipe for stagnation as a community; we need more firepower, but we first need better arguments to win new donors over. There’s some potential hope on the horizon through Jonathan Fox’s new Center for Accountability Research at American University, a newWorld Bank-organized research collaborative on the impact of open government (disclosure: R4D is involved), and R4D’s collaboration with Harvard on the Transparency for Development project (originally brokered by T/AI and funded by Hewlett, DFID, and the Gates Foundation). Perhaps there are ways T/AI can link up further with those efforts to bolster its strategic recruiting.
4. Invest in the right kind of learning and knowledge dissemination. It’s exciting that learning appears to be a key focus of T/AI moving forward. But a mistake I hope we avoid is the proliferation of new “PDF graveyards” as our only solution to that challenge. Rigorous and well-executed research and peer learning is essential for knowledge generation within the TAP and T/AI communities, but few are going to read a dense, 50+ page “report” these days. If we’re serious about getting knowledge into the right hands with a better chance for uptake, we know from newer research into practitioner learning that “learning by doing” is an important piece of the puzzle. That is, T/AI may find good return on investment on the learning front by providing opportunities for key partners and grantees to learn from and with each other by working on real-time challenges and projects together. This strikes me as a powerful complementary approach to commissioning an army of external experts to marshal and then disseminate evidence at arms length.

It’s wonderful to see T/AI on the cusp of revitalization, and a big welcome to Mike!