Hasta La Ideas

This is the second post in a 7-part series from Panthea Lee of service design consultancy, Reboot. In The Messy Art of Saving the World, Lee will explore the role of design in international development.

Every successful revolution carries great expectations. But while the day a regime falls is historic, the period immediately after is what sets the precedents which will impact a society for generations.

Take Portugal: After the 1974 Carnation Revolution, the post-revolutionary government struggled with reforms designed to simultaneously loosen the state’s grip on the economy and deal with the influx of Portuguese returning from former overseas territories. It took the country 16 years to recover from the resulting economic collapse. Today, Portugal remains mired in a glut of public servants, mounting sovereign debt, and a regulatory vacuum, a situation that prompted one revolutionary to declare that had he known the direction his country would go, he would not have participated in the revolution at all.

In short, Day One of a revolution is important, but students of history know that the real work of governance—and the risk of serious consequences—begins on Day Two.

That’s why, after the Egyptian revolution, Reboot rushed to the country as quickly as possible. We landed nine days after Hosni Mubarak was ousted—a chaotic, important time in the country’s transition, as well as in the foreign response.

The international community had started preparing to support Egypt’s transformation almost as soon as citizens took to the streets in early 2011. Yet simultaneously, concerns for safety led almost all institutional personnel to leave the country. While all eyes were on Egypt, few eyes were actually on the ground. Press reports and special interest groups had their own biases and blind spots, leaving big question marks about who was doing what, and who the international community should support. Significant investments were being planned without a clear idea of what was actually happening.

I’ve written before about the common shortcomings of traditional approaches to international development and governance; the willingness to craft programs from afar is among the biggest. It’s also an area that the discipline of design is well-suited to address.

We at Reboot knew that without an educated understanding of the mechanics of the revolution, future aid and investment initiatives had, at best, a good chance of failure. So, before the standard slew of governance, democracy and rule of law programs was rolled out, we went to Egypt to pursue a design research program. We planned to (and did) share the results with institutions that were planning investments in Egypt in the coming months and years, to inform their policy creation and increase the positive impact of their programs.

We decided to focus our research on identifying the groups that would play key roles in the new governance structure. Prevailing media narratives had focused on a relatively small, digitally connected and Western-friendly group—basically, youth activists on Twitter. While these youth were certainly part of the revolution, Western media reports tended to overplay their structural importance to a society where many diverse groups were driving the revolution and would drive the post-revolutionary period as well.

We wanted to tap into the experience, credibility, networks and organizational prowess of these other groups, neglected but important actors. They would be critical in creating a more participatory Egyptian governance system, and they deserved attention and support.

We conducted a robust assessment of Egyptian civil society and the role various actors could play in the post-revolutionary period and beyond. The two of us from Reboot who led the project worked with a local team of three journalists and one university student. All were Egyptian, and each had critical connections to the four towns and cities we visited—four, by the way, is three more than international governance specialists in Egypt typically visit—lending us critical clout in a country where wasta (connections or influence) is everything.

Our research process stresses in-depth interviews, both scheduled and ad-hoc, and always in the contexts of where people work and live. We spoke with 200 individuals (199 Egyptians) from all walks of life—day laborers and government officials, farmers and lawyers, labor organizers and white-collar professionals. (For a detailed explanation of our research methods, you can read this post on our blog.)

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