Opinion Sur
The programs that identify and reward good practices have made an important contribution to encourage innovations and disseminate results. As any other course of action, they can use that experience to evaluate their performance and adjust to the changing needs of our southern hemisphere countries. This article analyzes some characteristics of good practices programs and offers suggestions to strengthen their effectiveness. Different national organizations and international forums have been developing programs to identify and disseminate good practices, ways to satisfy needs that affect social groups or communities. A practice is considered to be ‘good’ when it fits certain criteria that those who have designed the program of good practices have previously established according to their ‘sound judgment’. This tinges, conditions and orients the actions of those programs since, as it will be explained in the following lines, the ideologies, perspectives and values of the programmers and their principals influence our understanding of what is going on and project themselves on the expected intentionality and effects of good practices.
Good practices emerge from efforts that, faced with contemporary challenges, have managed to execute appropriate solutions. Each program determines what contemporary challenges it recommends to face and based on what parameters a solution is considered to be appropriate; this way the sought purposes and the kinds of good practices to identify are established.
In addition it is necessary for efforts to be sustained over time as to ensure that their positive effects on the mobilized social dynamics can be maintained or enhanced. A good practice that stagnates in its initial accomplishments and does not manage to be sustained in the present in order to then project itself into the future, will have lost one of its main attributes and sterilized the potentiality that lied within itself.
Representativeness of good practices
The good practices that programs identify represent a very small fraction of those that blossom as solutions and potentialities in the world. This occurs due to several factors among which we highlight the following:
(i) Within the universe of existing good practices just a few are identified given the restrictions and limitations every selection process has: (a) because of reasons of dissemination and access to information, the selection process is known by a small part of those that promote the innovations/good practices being implemented in the world; (b) some of those who are informed of the process are not interested in participating in it, whether it is because they are sufficiently renowned and believe that what they would get from their involvement is marginal or irrelevant, or because they do not agree with the selection criteria and guidelines; (c) others are interested but do not have the institutional energy nor the familiarity regarding a selection process that carries a more or less bureaucratic administrative dimension with requirements that restrict their capacity to participate; (d) several groups are performing valuable initiatives without considering them as good practices, whether it is because of modesty, lack of acknowledgement from third parties or not being familiarized with that categorization.
These restrictions can be reduced with better work approaches and methodologies but not eliminated. Of course they do not invalidate the selection effort but represent a severe limitation and an inevitable imperfection expressed in a profound bias in terms of the representativeness and nature of the chosen ensemble of good practices: the ones that are close to and familiarized with the adopted dissemination networks count with a huge advantage, within which only participate those that accept the established selection criteria and guidelines, also have the necessary institutional energy to prepare their presentation which is usually not simple (it requires a certain skill) and agree to navigate the different phases established by the selection process. In this regard a bias could grow benefiting average practices that count with good communication teams in detriment of more meaningful practices that ‘do not have anyone who will write for them’.
(ii) The good practices that are being executed were able to materialize due to a series of driving and facilitating factors that are singular in essence and belong to each specific situation. Identifying them is helpful to some extent because they could be part of a menu of desirable factors to generate good practices. However, this is less clear and much more complex when we realize that it is not only about identifying driving and facilitating factors but also it is crucial to perceive how they interact, their multiple influences on each other, timing and territorial sequences, contradictions, tensions, eventual synergies, severe changes in the national or global context, among many other issues that play a role in each situation’s singularity and specificity; this pile of circumstances makes any extrapolation difficult or, in some cases, even of absolute futility.
This however does not invalidate the effort to recognize good practices but it affects one of the most important attributes required: that it can be taken as reference for different efforts that could be blossoming or soon to blossom elsewhere. There are people who are not aware of the inevitable particularities, always singular, of every social process and naively or negligently believe that a certain good practice could serve as a role model. That preaching of models ends up being a cultural imposition that ignores and does not respect the values and referential utopias of local communities, thusly faced with proposed conceptions and courses that are not their own. Good practices can be inspiring and therefore serve as motivation to act according to one’s own conceptions and desires; knowing them could lead to imitating, transforming or denying the good practice as to help shape an original path.
This political-cultural dimension of every good practice requires acting with extreme caution in order not to end up smuggling values or interests that do not belong to the communities that we intend to serve. It is a warning that good practices programs would be right to adopt: to prevent that approaches presented as ‘renowned’ do not affect the creative singularity that nests within any community.
Good practices nature
There are many kinds of good practices and they can be classified in very diverse ways. One option is differentiating good practices that (a) solve specific problems within the established order and can inspire other similar interventions, and (b) serve as trial elements for the establishment of public policies that will facilitate transforming the course and the way communities, regions or countries function.
They are different because of the purposes they seek, the challenges they have to face, their work approaches and the dynamics and effects they generate over time. Therefore, they need very different types of support and eventual assistance from the programs of good practices.
Conditioning factors that influence replicability and sustainability
It is worth approaching this topic by visualizing the notorious differences there are between private action that basically tries to get economic benefits and the actions of good practices that are mainly oriented to contribute to the wellbeing of groups or communities. Let us take commercial franchises as reference for private action which, because of its own structure, are obliged to pay special attention to their business model replication and sustainability. Commercial franchises, large, medium and small, are private businesses created to attend some mass consumption needs. They are structured as a network of establishments all under a centralized management that is the one that establishes the rules of functioning and the distribution of results among the parties involved (franchisor and franchisees). In them replication is essential because it sustains their eventual growth which it ensures by offering a theoretically attractive business model to the eventual franchisee as long as he/she accepts certain contractual terms. Rights and obligations are established, ensuring financing for equipment and set in motion of the franchised unit, technological and managerial assistance, training, brand marketing, inputs supply, general supervision. This way, the business model replication is closely related to a proposal of economic sustainability. Some franchises, forced by the clients’ opinion or due to their own beliefs, can respect environmental criteria and take an interest in the wellbeing of the communities they operate in, but none is deviated from their basic purpose which is getting as much profit as possible.
Instead, when we refer to a good practice’s replication and sustainability we are not conceiving an expanding organization but considering ways, as effective as possible, to share experiences and results among diverse social actors in the hope that they can be useful to solve similar unfulfilled needs in their communities. There is not in fact a centralized management unit, neither is financing offered and only very rarely some occasional technical assistance. This added to what has already been pointed out about each situation’s singularity and the significant differences in terms of context and internal circumstances that social practices face. Perhaps the common denominator that draws those who lead these initiatives together is basically having similar concerns and a real need to test and improve their work approaches. So the enormous disparities that exist with private actions come as no surprise, not only in terms of the chances to replicate good practices but also on the nature of what is intended to replicate and the technical and motivational mechanisms that are available.
All this does not nullify but conditions the spaces to promote good practices’ replication due to not having worked at the same time with its sustainability requirements; it forces the good practices programs to significantly re-conceptualize and improve the sharing of innovative ways to approach solutions. Massive events where dozens of good practices are shortly presented to groups with very diverse interests and needs do not get good results; other more effective modalities are needed in order to reach the pursued goals. The approach should be personalized, this means adapted to the singular circumstances of the different situations and, as much as possible, see to integrate the possibility of replicating a practice with concrete mechanisms that will support its economic and environmental sustainability.
This type of approach gives way to a promising though scarcely undergone space of innovations to simultaneously facilitate the replication and the sustainability of social practices. This is not easy for those who operate far from the specific realities that tend to perceive the universe of ‘their beneficiaries’ as relatively homogeneous when in fact it is not. This happens rather than because of ignorance, because of certain common characteristics of bureaucratic actions that, facing the need to achieve mass interventions and results, respond with standardized solutions that are not suited or consistent with the singularities of the diversity of actors and circumstances.
The efforts to replicate good practices need to start with understanding the shortcomings and needs that prevail in each specific situation and what options could be available to face them. This rules out traditional massive events and motivates to organize other smaller groups according to their objectives and sectorial activities as to obtain ways of exchanging and follow-up suited to their needs and circumstances. This kind of approach requires counting with decentralized support systems and guidance for social practices, make up by networks of organizations and individuals mobilized by coordinating nodes. A critical aspect is that the election of the type of support to be received is chosen jointly with those locally responsible for the practices and not imposed as part of a pre-established menu from the good practices programs; it would also be advisable to proceed in the same way when it comes to selecting the consultants that will work with them.
The case of good economic practices
Within the universe of social practices there is a segment with a very different specificity, the one of productive activities and employment generation for workers, small producers and unemployed people. With the necessary adjustments, those activities can benefit from some of the structuring and organizational modalities that commercial ventures of the kind of the aforementioned franchises use.
It is worth mentioning that the economic power is not comparable and that the manipulation of preferences imposed by a profit-driven productive activity through massive publicity is no way near the economic conditions or the values upheld by those working in the field of social economy. Instead there are effective organizational modalities that, appropriately adapted, can be used. For example, a variation of the franchise system that enables integrating currently scattered or unemployed small producers in medium-scale economic ventures with strategic partners that will reinforce their managerial and market access capacity. These grassroots franchises have a different ownership structure than the one of commercial ones, a different modality regarding management, internal results distribution, mechanisms to prevent abuses, economic and non-economic support at the level of their Board of Directors but, at the same time, they can utilize some features of a commercial franchise. In this regard grassroots franchises considered good practices have better chances at being replicated and get the much-needed sustainability.
Those interested in reviewing this topic may look the article [Inclusive venture developers->http://opinionsur.org.ar/Inclusive-Venture-Developers] where main characteristics of grassroots franchises and a mechanism to promote them are outlined. A concrete example is described in [Community tourism of excellence->http://opinionsur.org.ar/Community-tourism-of-excellence?var_recherche=tourism].
Suggestions to strengthen good practices programs
It has been pointed out valuable opinions, proposals and action courses are left out from the space adopted by good practices programs. Of course it is legitimate to sustain that this structural bias, with the subsequent absences due to ‘design’, does not invalidate them since every field of human action is always a cutback of reality and, therefore, the options to intervene. Even though we aspire working with comprehensive approaches, there are so many dimensions and variables that shape up a concrete reality that we are forced to choose only subsets of those large and always expanding universes. This is why one of the biggest challenges becomes how to select relevant dimensions and variables, an issue that inevitably introduces an ideological-interpretational bias regarding what is more relevant and why it is so. This takes the good practices programs to make the reasons for its preferences explicit that always carry a certain degree, greater or lesser, of subjectivity.
With this in mind, what we propose is to adjust the performance of good practices programs in several fronts:
(i) Working to minimize biases, facilitate on the march improvements on good practices and democratize as much as possible their selection processes and criteria.
(ii) Incorporating a new component of emerging practices, initiatives that have just started that even without a proven trajectory present a strong transformational potential.
(iii) While all good practices can somehow influence public policies, there are some that specifically act as trial elements in the process of transforming the existing public policies or of establishing new ones; it would be advisable to give them a special consideration and a very different treatment.
(iv) Operating not as the ones responsible of identifying and rewarding good practices but as nodes for mobilizing organizations to promote, assist and guide good practices; instead of basically acting as judges for the selection of good practices, act through a network of local organizations as developers or incubators of good practices.
Each one of these fronts requires a set of implementation measures that Opinion Sur will try to analyze with those who execute good practices programs before eventually presenting them in another article.
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The author thanks the Sociologist Claudia Laub for her comments on an initial draft that helped deepen the analysis and include aspects that had not been considered.
