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.

How to measure change in a complex system? Keep an eye on diversity

"One of the most respected attempts to measure complexity was made ten years ago by John Tyler Bonner, a biologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. Count the number of different types of cell in the organism, he suggested. In principle, this gives a sense of the number of specialised functions an organism can perform, and that is a clue to complexity. Although it leaves out behaviour, the approach also has the virtue of considering the whole organism, not just one part." (Roger Lewin, New Scientist, 05 Feb 1994)

This idea makes me think that diversity could be used as a key indicator of structural change in a market system. How many different private and public actors are there in a market system at different points of our interventions? Moreover, diversity presents fractal properties: one could look at diversity within the system, the value chains within the system, the types of actors within the value chains, and variations within a given type of actor.