Survival of the fixest
Many of us have used 'fixers' to help deliver our thing in development or research. But is individual fixing just short term gain that perpetuates long term pain?
1. Fixers
This piece is an itch that I have long wanted to scratch – on ‘fixers’ and ‘fixing’ in development and research. I try to join the dots from the personal to the macro - from an individual tendency to seek fixes when we want to get things done in a hurry (and have the privilege of access); via the behaviour of organisations ‘doing development’ in difficult settings; to the ‘rules of the game’ and private sector deals; and relating this to behaviour oriented to short term wins but not longer-term gains in growth, development. Plus, a tiny bit of theory.
No morality tale intended, just scratching an itch.
So…have you ever used a fixer? I have. Here are a few examples from little to big.
Little fixes
My (mosquito focused) PhD fieldwork was in Dar es Salaam in 1993-94. A Tanzanian researcher was generous with advice - formal and informal. He talked me through health sector politics, navigating permissions and permits, and finding a field team. He warned me against being pressured into employing people’s relatives. Then, without missing a beat, he said that his brother was looking for work.
I asked, ‘Does he have any experience in social research?’. He laughed. ‘No. But he has good networks, and you need a fixer’.
I did. JP’s job title was ‘manager’, but his fixing skills were gold standard. In those pre-email, pre-mobile days, and with the machinery of the state tied up with the ruling party, this meant hours waiting to have a quick word with officials to get paperwork moved up the pile; building relations with community leaders, party officials and local government to allow us access to ask lots of questions about mosquitoes. No-one had to actively help us - we sought ‘positive discretion’.
JP’s currency of influence was often a shared cigarette and a chat, with patience, good humour, and an uncanny ability to find kin in any community or office.
Q: Were decisions made that would not have otherwise been made?
A: Probably not (I tell myself).
Q: Were the right decisions made faster.
A: Yes (or so I tell myself).
The losers here included those with paperwork that we pushed further down a pile. Our success was their delay. But these were the ‘rules of the game’, and we had a tight fieldwork schedule. To me, ‘my thing’ was more important than any stranger’s ‘unknown thing’. This ignorance helped. Fixing is about ‘everyone for themselves’. Research dog eat dog.
I think ‘little fixes’ are recognisable to many in research and development. Fixers are even more visible in the worlds of film production and journalism. Journalistic fixing can be the stuff of legend, gets featured in movies, and has online resources for finding and supporting fixers (such as this from Mexico with comic book graphics and a stress on safety, rights, and due recognition). There is even research on fixing in research (‘contrôleuse’ in West Africa).
So, if everyone is at it, maybe I don’t need to feel guilty?
Bigger fixes
Later I worked for an aid funded water and sanitation project, with stakes much higher than small PhD research. Our fixer was a well-paid retired official who had previously had a senior role in our client department. What did he do? Fix. How? I’m not sure. He didn’t tell me (and didn’t like me because I wasn’t an engineer and I asked too many questions). He knew the ‘rules of the game’ partly because he had written some of them. I had a strong sense of deals cut as well as rules followed. This made me uneasy. If most such projects behaved as we did, how did the ‘normal’ system operate?
Q: Were decisions made that would not have otherwise been made?
A: Probably.
Q: Were the right decisions made faster.
A: Yes, also.
This felt closer to actively doing bad. We were a contractor with an array of sub-contractors, and our cash flow was important. We sought the decisions that were right (signing off completion certificates for construction) and timely. All sides – and the fixer – knew this, which made it a high-pressure game. The whole point of a deal is for mutual benefit, and the fixer mediated this.
Multifixes
Later, working for a development agency we had our own staff who were renowned fixers - fantastic networks with government, politicians, civil society, and business. They could cut through red tape, get preferential access to VIPs, lubricate success. Do deals. As usual, we told ourselves that everyone was at it. Yet I had doubts:
First, a fixer often hurdled due process to get things done (and as office governance nerd I had a role in due process - so there is some dented ego at play here). Opportunities might be talked up by fixers, without risks being carefully assessed. Occasionally I found myself ‘unfixing’ by putting my concerns in writing (fixing is largely off record, so a paper trail can be fixer’s kryptonite1). This could be high stakes:
Fixer: I have a back-channel opportunity for us to work in the health sector in x.
Me: But x is notoriously corrupt and dangerous. I think it would be a really bad idea to move quickly on this.
Fixer: think of the profile and influence that we would have (and I have already made promises).
Me: (by email) FYI I have compiled these media stories about health procurement officials that have been murdered in x in the last 2 years.
Unfixed!
Second, fixing is a confidence game. Fixers have strong incentives to make themselves indispensable. Straightforward actions may be dressed up as complicated, building the reputation and capital of the fixer (I know this strategy because when I was a consultant, I had no incentive for sending a single line of good advice when it could be a day of fee paid work to say the same thing at length). I also saw fixers complaining about and undermining each other - fixing is a competitive market.
Third, in order to get things done, fixers might be naturally very close to some of our suppliers and competitors. But why sell your skills to one customer when you could ‘play both ways’ and advise all sides. This was difficult to evidence but there was at least a whiff of sulphur. Sometimes a fixer would leave us and join our supplier and become their fixer.
Q: Were decisions made that would not have otherwise been made?
A: Possibly, sometimes.
Q: Were the right decisions made faster.
A: Yes, also.
However, I also found myself doing some fixing. I am naturally competitive. Getting things done in challenging environments is difficult, but you win plaudits for doing it. Sweating my own networks. Seeking ‘discretion’.
Over to you: Does any of this ring true? Have you used a fixer?
If you think that you have never used a fixer, could this be because you turned a blind eye (or were blissfully ignorant) when a colleague or downstream partner did so on your behalf?
2. Fitting Fixing into theory
I then read more theory and political economy research that alluded to behaviours akin to fixing. North et al described how states function, contrasting ‘open access orders’ (“upper-income, advanced industrial countries … all have market economies with open competition, competitive multi-party democratic political systems, and a secure government monopoly over violence”) with ‘limited access orders’ and, surprise surprise, it is not always about following the rules. As an individual in Tanzania, and in the organisations that I later worked for, I/we were operating as elites in a ‘limited access order’. Using fixers was part of how we - elites - navigate this terrain.
If we jumped ahead of others in the queue, and they did not elbow their way forward, it was because they were not part of this elite, the limited access order.
Part of me wants to say ‘suckers!’ here, for comic effect. It is not how I or we felt, but just because we were earnestly pursuing our ‘greater good’, it doesn’t mean we weren’t behaving badly, and creating ‘losers’.
At risk of turning their book into a sentence, Pritchett, Sen, Werker and others later articulated the difference between ‘rules’ (de jure – ‘from the law’) and ‘deals’ (de facto - from the fact – reality). Fixers and fixing are deals, not rules. The book, and its underpinning research, cover a range of countries and focus particularly on how growth happens and the manoeuvring of the private sector that delivers this (dividing them into powerbrokers, magicians, rentiers, and workhorses). Some actors break or bend bad rules in pursuit of good growth. Mushtaq Khan et al and Yuen Yuen Ang have also differentiated between types of rule breaking and corrupt behaviour, and the effect that these have on growth (good and bad). You can imagine the type of fixers and fixing that accompany the ‘exchanges’ in Ang’s 2 x 2 matrix.
We live and work on a continuum (or a 2 x 2 if are an economist), not in binary moral categories. Rules, deals. But at least the law is the law…. oh.
Fixing in law (grease is the word).
I recently did a quick dive into the international architecture of anti-corruption, including reminding myself of the details of the US’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
I was (again!) surprised to see that the FCPA differentiates between two types of payment (and fixing) that might otherwise both be lumped together as a single bad. In simple terms, paying for a decision to be made in your favour is bribery, and illegal. Paying for a decision to be made more quickly, but not actually influencing the decision, is greasing – which is allowed. Back in 2014 Matthew Stephenson advised us to not get too worried about this but it still strikes many as odd.
3. Shifting gears: If those who can, fix, what does it do to the environment for others?
So, fixers have punctuated my professional life, and fixing is a reality in places where there is not (yet?) an open access order, a rules-based system, the rule of law. Good things get done, in spite of the system, so where is the harm?
A few vignettes (and bad puns).
PEP talk
Firstly, trying to pull apart the avid pursuit of fixes for short term results in self-interest, and how this effects long term developmental and progressive change.
From my experience of the Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) research, and discussing strategy with private sector investors, it is clear that being ‘politically smart’ in relation to private sector investment growth can have very different meanings depending on whether you think short term or long term. T
One type of ‘politically smart’ approach would aim to deliver development benefits and also be a step forward in tackling systemic corruption and unleashing more growth and development.
The other type of ‘politically smart’ would help deliver a deal, a specific gain or investment return, but do nothing positive for the system. Or worse, it would further embed and extend the ‘deals not rules’ environment (I’m being polite - corruption).
Your view of the same politically connected person (Politically Exposed Person - PEP) would depend on whether your aims were short term and narrow, or long term and wide ranging. So, if your interest was in the success of your own ‘deal’ then getting the president’s niece on board (as a partner or super fixer) would be a good thing. She could help fix permits, avoid delays and political interference, maybe stifle union action, and so reduce investment risk. This is how fixing and deal making works.
Conversely, if your interest was in growth, development, and pushing a long-term shift from deals to rules, and thereby reducing corruption, this was a person to be avoided, even actively side-lined.
Happily, data leaks such as Panama and Paradise have made PEPs a bit riskier to work with.
Rules of the offshore game
I was starkly reminded of ‘rules of the game’ arguments when colleagues developed a new portfolio of returnable investment using aid. The expert advice was that we should invest through intermediaries in an offshore low tax and secrecy jurisdiction because ‘this is how the market works’ – everyone did it, and we would be undermining our own goal if we sought the moral high ground. For those of us using aid to increase domestic resource mobilisation in the same country this seemed like ‘robbing domestic Peter to pay offshore Paul’.
Funders playing nicely
A fixer-supported free for all (survival of the fixest?) is obviously bad. But to me there is a direct line of sight between fixing and deals, and development partners pursuing their own short-term result at any cost – either by wilfully ignoring the wider consequences (eg who loses?) or being truly ignorant of these.
I cut my teeth in aid during the heady days of harmonization and aid donors falling in behind country-led strategies (in theory at least). This was imperfect, but there was a degree of discipline amongst aid donors and international organisations and how they operated in any country. There were public commitments to reducing inefficient, parallel and duplicate projects and funding flows.
Bilateral badgers
In those days, selfish ‘fixing’ (such as bilateral badgering of government for deals in narrow self-interest) was noted and complained about. Energy and time were put into improving norms in aid, and mobilising collective action – including calling out those who ignored norms and rules in favour of deals (cynically, it was easiest to complain about smaller players).
That era seems distant and idealistic. The relative importance of government aid (ODA) has diminished compared with other flows, and the world is visibly more complex – including geopolitical shifts and the rise of international players that don’t buy into the same set of progressive ideas and common rules.
That said, my recent dives into political economy research on states and sectors (health, education) in development of the ‘practical politics platform’ reveals some bad ‘fixing related’ behaviour amongst northern funders and foundations that really should know better. This includes large numbers of partners (health, education) in single districts each ‘doing their own thing’, and so undermining government strategy, fragmenting policy, and diverting front line workers because of the size of their project’s budget or incentive package. This looks like deals and fixing. I don’t think that host governments and national elites are innocent victims in this – if your strategy for retaining power is something other than growth and development (Dercon’s gamble on development) then multiple deals and a contest of fixers are quite attractive. As I noted above, deals are all about mutual benefit.
Brown envelopes
The whiff of fixing is also there in the amazing endurance of things like allowances for attending conferences and meetings (perhaps fixing by brown envelope). These were part of the fixing landscape 25 years ago. One of the worst responsibilities I have ever had in development was handing out the brown envelopes at a workshop, ticking off officials’ names as I handed them cash. That was 20+ years ago but we thought we were close to setting new norms, helping to rationalise incentive packages, and seeing the end of brown envelope culture. But 20 years later I hear such allowances are still with us. I fear that we tried to fix a political problem with a rational, technical solution. Short termism for the long term.
4. Fixing forwards
I am not morally against all fixers and fixing. Making things happen in development is often difficult, and to paraphrase Dan Honig and his ‘Mission driven bureaucrats’ I believe in managing through empowerment rather than compliance.
But I seek to keep examining and understanding how and why fixers function, and what they mean in the short and long term. I feel the need for personal reflection on where the boundaries lie, or at least the coordinates of the grey zones, between rules and deals, fixing winners and losers.
This is also a useful collective reflection - if we work in development or related research, are we fixing just enough or too much? Fixing is usually ‘everyone for themselves’ and allows those with access or privilege to succeed, or cut deals, perhaps for short-term, limited, or self-serving wins, at the expense of ‘losers’ (whether we see them or not), and of long term change. Is each deal really for the greater good?
I bump into fixers in the UK – mainly paid by rich people to expedite boring, time-consuming tasks. I think that bigger fixing happens in secret. As I write, the scandal of the VIP lane for Covid PPE contracts rumbles on in the UK. It seems to have been a fixing frenzy.
I think we need to keep on checking our fixes – is this a short-term or long-term play? Where does my/our fix fit on the grand continuum of slightly lubricating (greasing!) things that would have happened anyway, versus perpetuating bad, unequal systems, or even undermining collective progress that was painstakingly made by the last generation of people like us. Perhaps we need our own 2 x 2 matrix, and labels (we can’t all be ‘magicians’ on ‘steroids’).
If you have read this far… please pick up your brown envelope on the way out.
Kryptonite: a substance that causes the comic-book character Superman to become weak when he is exposed to it.