Is the complexity paradigm killing inclusive market systems development?

I am a geek… there you go; I admit it. And when it comes to complex systems, I am a romantic geek. I believe in the idea that in order to “do” good market-systems development we need to embrace and understand the paradigm of complexity; take what we can from it and adapt it to our work in highly dysfunctional markets. 

This is why I have been shocked in the last year to hear from senior officials in large, international NGOs and leading development agencies -some of whom I know have been pushing for the adoption of systemic approaches-  that they still doubt the value that systems and complexity can add to what they are trying to achieve.

A recent blog by Duncan Green called Politics, economists and the dangers of pragmatism: reflections on DFID’s governance and conflict conference (14 Nov 2014) reinforced my disillusionment and prompted me to write this blog. In his description of a DFID annual get together –where it seems that economists are ‘getting’ the importance of politics and governance issues, Green warns us that this moment of illumination is not complete; in fact, it may contain the seeds of its own destruction.

Green mentions that Stefan Dercon, DFID’s Chief Economist, is “impatient with all that talk of complexity, which he sees as a recipe for paralysis and navel gazing”. Dercon continued by asking: “Are you just the problem cadre?”

I agree with Green when he says that Dercon does not “fully grasp the implications of systems thinking for how we should do things differently”. I am actually very glad he said this; but I think he should have gone further. Why? Because this is an extremely dangerous trend in the discourse! So dangerous that could actually kill the market-systems development (MSD) approach before it shows its full potential.

The following are a few ideas to reverse this trend:

• Recognise the origin of the complex systems field: it comes from biology, mathematics and cybernetic. None of these disciplines deal with real human beings; therefore, we must be careful when adopting methods and lessons coming from them. 
• Not all systems are complex: for complexity to show its scary fangs, several conditions must be met; for example: there must be a sufficiently large number of nodes (e.g. market actors) in the system; they must be free to act according to certain drivers and rules; the rules tend to be few and simple (e.g. make profit, women cannot do this or that, in order to compete I have to bribe this official, etc); there is no centralised point of control (i.e. nobody governs the actors).
• Market systems are in fact a collection of interconnected subsystems: a government agency, a farmers’ cooperative, a network of agricultural research institutions, etc. All of these are systems in their own right but, are they complex systems? Not necessarily. In fact, very few subsystems display complex behaviour. Why? Because there are not enough people in them; the rules and drivers are many, unclear or understood differently by different people; and there are managers trying to manage people’s behaviour and performance. 
• Know the realm of complexity: complexity can be very useful to understand scale-up processes, consumer trends and price fluctuations but not to deal with the initial stages of project implementation, when project staff is engaging with a few actors and trying to get them to experiment with new ideas or ways of doing things (e.g. a new business model, credit service, improved seed, collaborate with others to build economies of scale, decentralise the operations of a cooperative, etc.) In this phase of close contact with the peters, aishas, and shamims when we are interested in convincing them to experiment with new ideas that can be replicated or adopted by many others, game theory and political economy are much better “lenses” to use than complexity. 
• Build respectful communication and learning between complexity experts and market-system development practitioners:  academic research in complex systems has produced an amazing body of lessons, methods and tools; the problem is that this has been taking place in total disconnection with the people who can put them into practice in the context of highly dysfunctional markets full of real people.  On the other hand, practitioners have a fine-grain understanding of reality; the contexts, the actors, their incentives, their fears, their motivations…  Gold dust for researchers looking to test and validate their theories and models.
• Being systemic is not about doing lots of things: in fact, as Eric Berlow masterfully explains it in a much celebrated TED talk, being systemic is about being able to zoom out and understand the connections between actors and issues and finding areas of intervention that will unlock or unleash the system to move in the ways we desire (more inclusion, more productivity, more efficiency). A systemic approach will guide us to better strategies that we would have not found had we kept a narrow view on “the poor”
• Uncertainty has been overrated: despite the fact that every possible detail in the evolution of a market system can be predicted, there are patterns that keep on repeating themselves. This is what in complexity theory are called “attractors”; basically, stuff that keeps on happening in many contexts. These attractors have not been discussed enough in our field and can provide useful clues about the probable effects of our interventions in a given context. 
• We are in the universe of heuristics: we must wake up from the dream that market systems development practitioners will ever use detailed academic research as scientists in pure sciences and engineering do. These practitioners are in the world of rules of thumb and intuition. Embracing complexity’s wonders can help them to improve the way they make decisions without relying on excessive information that ends up overwhelming them.

The field of complexity science and systems thinking can help field practitioners and policy-makers to take real, practical and concrete actions to invest resources more effectively and move market systems into higher levels of functionality and inclusion, but we must understand them better.