How to make sure that research has a durable impact? Examples from DRC by Dorothea Hilhorst and Adriaan Ferf

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About the authors:

IMG_4761_2Adriaan Ferf coordinated the DRC programme of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium. He has over 40 years of experience with policy studies and evaluations of development and humanitarian programmes in Africa and Asia.

TheaDorothea Hilhorst is professor of humanitarian aid and reconstruction at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam.

This post was originally published on the website of the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium and is reproduced here with permission.

The Institute of Social Studies means to produce knowledge with a societal impact. It has been long realised that researchers need to be pro-active to ensure that their findings find their way to people in policy and practice (called research uptake). The authors of this blog have participated for 6 years in a research consortium, the ODI-led Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, where they had a range of research projects in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The long-term nature of this work gave them a unique opportunity to think about possibilities for durable impact. So what have they learned about how to make research count for development?

A history of research uptake

In past decades, donors have often put a premium on research uptake. A clear research uptake plan tends to be a requirement for any research funding. The primary focus of such a plan is to highlight that both researchers and funding partners have a responsibility to ensure that research findings reach key audiences. In recent years, research uptake has evolved from mere dissemination and communication strategies built around bombarding policy-makers and development actors with messages in the hope that some would get through.

Familiar problems

But some of these traditional approaches to research uptake have shortcomings. They often solely target decision-makers (including donors). This assumes that policy shapes practice, and hence that influencing practice should start with policy. But it has long been recognised that practice is shaped by many factors outside of policy. Often, innovation starts in the field, and practice gradually influences policy over time. That means it is as important for research uptake to get communities of practice to engage with research.

A second problem with focussing mainly on decisionmakers is that they spend far less of their time than researchers imagine on ‘the technical’ and ‘the practical.’ The challenge of keeping big programmes running and hungry bureaucracies satisfied may draw decision-makers’ attention from research-based insights (even if they would rather be spending their time on reading research). Conversations and conferences that draw in the great and the good from the policy and decision-making worlds can cause temporary flashes of interest, but their impact tends to fade quickly.

IMG_3247A third problem with established approaches to research uptake is that they assume that those commissioning research mean it when they say that they want to base their programmes on evidence. Unfortunately, policy agents tend to cherry pick what they find useful in research, to then act only on pieces of evidence that speak to their frame of reference. Finding out that your leading governance or social development programme, which has taken years to design and implement, is actually challenged by emerging research evidence is a major headache. In the politicised pulls and pushes that inform the process of policy-making, the space for using evidence can be rather small indeed.

Not just messages—relationships

But this does not mean that we should abandon the research uptake. We now understand the ‘relational’ aspects of research uptake better. This means that messages need to be tailored to specific audience needs and packaged appropriately. But even then, to get research to have an impact on policy and practice means travelling on a long and difficult road.

Our work in DRC as part of the SLRC has as much as possible worked on reaching out to communities of policy and practice in a systematic way. Having the luxury of a six-year programme allowed us to pay attention to the relational aspects of research uptake and to invest in relations with representatives of policy and practice. This enabled us to tailor our communications to the specific needs of these audiences. Research into the networked governance of the health sector by Aembe Bwimana and into livelihood strategies by Gloria Nguya both fostered the type of relationships that allow the researchers to repeatedly meet key-stakeholders and spend time discussing the meaning of their findings for policy and practice.

In addition to the traditional approach of broad messaging to decision-makers, we should also broaden it and seek to complement the efforts to reach audiences with research findings with alternative forms of more lasting research uptake. Here are a number of examples from our work in DRC on how we have done this.

Durable Research Uptake by SLRC in DRC

  1. Strengthening the institutions that enhance evidence-based approaches

In the DRC, the SLRC programme includes a collaboration between a Netherlands-based university and the Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural in Bukavu. Joint production of evidence and research papers, and shared investment in research networks helped strengthen the institutional pillars of the ISDR. Through the SLRC, the collaboration resulted in an initiative to jointly set-up a Centre of Research and Expertise on Gender and Development (CREGED). The centre is hosted by ISDR and supported by different universities and NGOs in South Kivu, as well as by the Institute of Social Studies.DSC_0349.JPG

  1. Strengthen individual researchers through PhD trajectories

Because the SLRC is a long-term programme, we were able to offer a number of the researchers a PhD scholarship. These researchers advanced their academic skills through fieldwork in a programme that was also pro-development and pro-poor. We placed a premium on research uptake as well as academic excellence. Thus the SLRC has helped foster a generation of grounded, practice-oriented PhD holders who, we hope, will further advance the research principles that are at the core of the SLRC.

While finishing their theses, Aembe Bwimana and Gloria Nguya have both invested in building relations with development actors. Gloria has done an internship with UN-WIDER in Helsinki, and when Aembe was conducting research into performance-based financing he collaborated closely with the NGO Cordaid.

  1. Incorporate research findings in the curricula of higher education

When research findings reach higher education curricula, they can resound for years and inspire students that may well be future decision-makers in policy and practice. And years (rather than one-off research conferences) is what it takes to achieve durable impact. The DRC team is currently planning to develop a Master’s course on gender and development, partially grounded in the findings of our research.

This initiative has been taken on by ISDR, in collaboration with a national network of gender studies that is based in Kinshasa and CREGED is preparing to offer this course in the next academic year.

Conclusion

As the DRC struggles to make its way through another difficult time in its troubled history, we look forward to hearing further perspectives on how to translate knowledge into policy and practice and to the challenge of using our future research findings to see how we can further improve our research uptake.

 

Why history matters to understand rebellion: the Rwenzururu Movement in Uganda by Martin Doornbos

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About the author:
pasfotoMartin Doornbos is a retired professor of the ISS, and this post is based on his new book The Rwenzururu Movement in Uganda: Struggling for Recognition, published by Routledge in 2017.

 

A few years ago, the self- styled kingship of the Rwenzururu movement in Uganda was recognized by the government. When in 2016 armed clashes between the Rwenzururu king’s bodyguard and a patrol of the Uganda army erupted, the new king was held responsible and he is currently being kept under house arrest. Fascinated by this movement that few people outside Uganda know about, I had set out to explore and write about the origins and evolution of this movement.

The Rwenzururu movement was a case of sub-nationalism emerging in the early 1960s and seeking liberation for the Bakonzo and Baamba people from Batoro overrule, all of these representing ethnic groups in Western Uganda. It soon gave rise to a highly complex and in some respects spectacular situation which would endure for decades to come.

The Rwenzururu movement originated on and around the Mountains of the Moon, on the borders between Uganda and Congo (DRC). At the establishment of British rule in the early 20th century, Bakonzo and Baamba had been included into Toro Kingdom, which became a district within the Ugandan colonial set-up together with three other (neo-traditionalized) kingdoms. The Bakonzo and Baamba constituted sizeable minorities (just under 40%) in this district that was dominated by the Batoro. Throughout the colonial period Bakonzo and Baamba had been treated as second-class citizens by the dominant strata of Batoro within Toro kingdom. They lacked equitable representation and were seriously neglected in terms of educational opportunities and elementary government services.

Unsurprisingly, as independence approached and a possibility of redrawing of district boundaries seemed in reach, the two groups joined hands in a movement of protest, Rwenzururu, that first sought recognition of equal status within Toro. When this was refused they demanded a separate district. At the micro level at that time, a separate district was perceived almost like attaining independence. As these demands received negative and rather high-handed responses from the Toro district government and the central Uganda government, protest soon gained momentum, and in subsequent years led to numerous violent encounters with Batoro militias and Uganda government troops.

One wing of the movement took the more radical step to secede from Uganda and set up its own, rudimentary government. Its leader, Isaya Mukirane, first became President, later King of Rwenzururu. Upon his death in 1966, his young son Charles Wesley Mumbere was nominated to succeed him. The other wing of the movement continued to struggle, under considerable hardship and harassment from both Ugandan army and police forces and from Rwenzururu militias, for equal recognition within the Uganda political framework by way of a separate district.

In 1967, the Uganda government of Milton Obote abolished the (neo-)traditional kingdoms within Uganda, thus removing the Toro kingship which had been one of the sources of discontent and envy to Rwenzururians. The next government, that of Idi Amin, resolved another key source of frustration by granting the Baamba and Bakonzo a separate district each. Then, after the toppling of the Idi Amin regime and the (controversial) return of Obote as president in the 1980s, the secessionist Rwenzururu kingdom, now with Mukirane’s son Charles Wesley as its leader, showed itself responsive to overtures for reconciliation and agreed to a settlement. The deal involved the ceremonial laying down of arms by Rwenzururian forces and the resignation of Charles Wesley as ‘king’, in return for promises of development funds for social welfare and education. For the ex-king himself there were material incentives including a bus, a shop, and a government scholarship for study abroad, which was to materialize in the United States.

The Rwenzururu saga continued, however, for mainly two reasons. One, not all secessionist Rwenzururians were supportive of the idea of reconciliation and some who had initially been in favour slipped back into armed resistance, lured by larger profits and powers offered in an environment ideally suited for contraband and guerrilla activities. Second, Uganda in 1986 once again saw a change of regime with Yoweri Museveni taking over. Having its power base in the National Resistance Army, his new government in due course felt it had to accommodate pressures from Buganda(the largest of the neo-traditional kingdoms incorporated within Uganda) pleading for restoration of its kingship. As it is legally difficult to restore a single kingship where all had been ‘banned’, parliament in 1993 passed a ‘un-banning’ order allowing the restoration of ‘cultural leaders’, provided ‘the people so wish’. In emulation of the restoration of Toro’s kingship and out of a strong wish to be at par with that, however, Rwenzururians claimed that their own kingship, albeit a novel institution, should also be restored. Thus a popular movement swell to have Rwenzururu’s ex-king, Charles Wesley, return from the United States where he still lived and be recognized by Museveni’s government. He did indeed come for a visit in 1998, but this was not immediately followed by official recognition. Charles Wesley at that time preferred to return to his job in the United States.

But Rwenzururu involved much more than the kingship issue. Many or most other Bakonzo and Baamba, living in the more accessible plains and on the lower mountain spurs, were equally strongly engaged in ‘Rwenzururu’ without subscribing to the idea of secession or the newly invented royalty. Associating Rwenzururu mainly with the secessionist wing and its (indeed spectacular) history amounts to a narrowing of perspective and leaves underexposed the struggles fought at another level, and with altogether different objectives, by a majority of Bakonzo (and Baamba) for whom secession was no realistic option or target.

More broadly, looking back at the conditions in the region at the time the Rwenzururu movement emerged, there can be little doubt that these were then just ‘ripe’ for a rebellion to break out and would have spurred that in one way or the other, just like they did elsewhere in Uganda at the time – in Sebei, Ankole, and Kigezi, in particular. Such social dynamics are of crucial importance in understanding why a protest movement emerges and what course it may take. In the case of Rwenzururu, it is interesting to note that decisions made about the future shape of ethnic relations and ethnic subordination at the time of the establishment of colonial rule in Uganda, would now, more than a century later, backfire and lead to renewed ethnically inspired violence between the groups concerned and even involving the central government.