The importance of local agency and leadership has long been emphasised in aid reform agendas, under the heading of 'ownership'. But in practice, this focus has often fallen victim to 'agency creep', as donors strive to retain control over the policy choices of aid-receiving countries. Even the ‘second orthodoxy’ risks being locally informed without being locally led. More recently, many factors have been reducing donors’ previous leverage over aid recipients’ policies. Given their previous difficulties with local agency, how can donors find new ways to support, enable and embrace it, and to navigate this new world of changing hierarchies? This paper explores the potential benefits of prioritising local agency, as well as the risks and constraints which make it difficult. The analysis suggests a possible way forward for donors: to create an enabling environment, by providing meaningful policy space for local leaders in aid-receiving countries to make their own policy choices. This change in emphasis could enhance the accountability and responsiveness of aid-receiving governments, while managing risks and delivering results. It would involve a shift in donor focus, away from being the protagonist and trying to influence the outputs of policymaking - the policy choices that countries make - and instead, towards trying to support the process of making those choices. In short, the remedy for a perceived misuse of power may not be to usurp it, but rather to support and enable its use for good.
Network transmission of infection or information can have serious social, economic and political effects. Heuristics are often used to address the computationally hard optimal seeding problem, and to approximate SIR models of epidemics. This paper develops a new heuristic for the probabilities of node-to-node diffusion in networks. The simple formula uses De Morgan’s laws to eliminate the double counting of signals found in diffusion centrality. It provides a new measure of centrality — word-of-mouth centrality — which gives the average probability that a signal emitted by a node will be received by other nodes in the network by diffusion. The paper also gives two further centrality measures for the cases when some nodes obstruct or conceal signals, called obstructed centrality and visibility centrality.
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