Putting the “Strategic” into Strategic Religious Engagement

Abstract

In light of the lessons learned both from COVID-19 response and now over 20 years of research on religious engagement, this essay lays out the flaws in current religious engagement in humanitarian and development work. Religious engagement can be seen as unknown, unevidenced, and unacknowledged by development agencies. Now knowing more than ever about religious engagement, there are mistakes that can be avoided by understanding the previous religious engagements, challenging secular-religious dynamics, and purposefully using the evidence. Overall, the essay argues that current religious engagement is not strategic, but suggests how each of these flaws can be counteracted.

Keywords:

• religion
• faith
• development
• humanitarian
• strategy
• engagement

Following 2020, how should strategic religious engagement (SRE) evolve and develop? As 2020 unfolded and the world grappled with the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, those of us involved in and monitoring religious engagement in development noticed an upswing in interest. As news came in of super-spreader events among religious groups in the early months of the pandemic, lights started to turn on among global health and development professionals about the potential influence of religions in a global health crisis, both for better and worse. Committees were formed, meetings were scheduled, guidelines were written (Wilkinson and Marshall 2020a; 2020b), and practices were adapted. These light bulb moments did not materialize from the ether, however. They were and are results of now over 20 years of debates, evidence building, and implementation of faith engagement approaches in development (Tomalin, Haustein, and Kidy 2019). The USAID Evidence Summit on Strategic Religious Engagement (SRE)¹ in October 2020, while the first such event hosted by USAID which should be commended, is not the first conference on evidence in religions and development, nor the first event on faith engagement in development, nor the first time USAID has worked on religious engagement. Taking the Summit and its four background research papers as a point of reflection and pause and considering the lessons from pandemic response experiences in 2020 (and now 2021), this response essay aims to lay the ground for conversations on SRE in the next 20 years. Existential questions of whether religious engagement should or should not happen are no longer appropriate. Religious engagement is happening constantly (COVID-19 response has demonstrated that more than ever) and it has been studied and debated for over two decades. The question now is how to make it better (i.e. putting the “strategic” into SRE).

The history of religions and development presented in the first of the Summit’s papers (equally supported by the breadth of publications covered in the rest of the Summit papers) demonstrates how long this discussion has been going on and, therefore, how dated many of the foundational arguments are becoming. Some of the more repetitive or dated arguments are those that simply present SRE as something new, or as unreceived/unacknowledged by a secular norm in development, or as unevidenced. In the rest of this response essay, I will further unpack each of these, challenging some of the details of what was presented in the Summit papers but broadly agreeing with the arguments behind them, and presenting some ideas that can push the conversation forward.

First, any argument that claims newness or an unprecedented status when it comes to religious engagement is now willfully ignorant of a wealth of resources that can quickly contradict this idea. None of the Summit’s papers or organizers would make such a statement, but among some development professionals there are still expressions of novelty when it comes to SRE. Of course, there can be innovations within SRE that push the practice forward, but the presentation of SRE as a new strategy overall is misleading. It is misleading because development organizations have been evolving their religious engagement for decades (Duff et al. 2016) and each organization, even each department within an organization, will have its own history of religious engagement. The reality of high turnover within staffing of humanitarian and development organizations (Korff et al. 2015), including the influence of election cycles that can drastically change the direction of an agency every few years, means that institutional knowledge and capacity is often short-lived. New staff see SRE as a novelty because it is new to them.

Based on my observations of religious engagement over the years, the strength of an organization’s religious engagement can be disconcertingly frequently based on the self-developed and self-motivated capacity of an individual (or small handful) of staff members, rather than an institutionalized system that can be replicated and is more impervious to the turnover and trends of development policy and practice. When a new partnerships officer steps in, religious actors have to re-start the process of engagement with an organization they have been in contact with for years. Religious actors have deep roots in their different contexts and have seen many new development professionals cycle through the sometimes quickly revolving doors of a development organization. Sometimes there have been strong partnerships built over several years, sometimes there have been deep divides aggravated over time and repeated disagreements and disappointments, sometimes they have been ignored by the donors and larger development organizations (Olivier and Wodon 2014b). Without the knowledge of this past, every new staff member is starting afresh. The burden can fall on the religious partners to renegotiate relationships and brief the new staff members on their own organization’s partnership history, leading to repetition and duplication.

To live up to the claim of strategic religious engagement, therefore, SRE must not be presented as the shiny, latest development trend. Religion and development has been somewhat of a development trend before, in fact (for example the momentum of activity launched from the World Bank in 1999–2000 or the rush of interest during the 2014–2015 Ebola response [Greyling et al. 2016]), and has experienced the peaks and troughs of passing interests. To make it truly strategic, SRE approaches must examine an organization’s own previous efforts—what worked in the past, what did not, who did we engage with in the past, when and why did we not engage—in order to not only better understand how to build on previous accomplishments and not re-invent the wheel, but also to acknowledge the baggage that the organization may carry.

While providing solutions to staff turnover is far from the aim of this essay, a solution that must be part of SRE is to institutionalize religious engagement knowledge and standard practices. This is not an easy task in itself, but some key and core first steps can be achieved. For example, an organizational mapping of religious partnerships demonstrates what has come before, and has successfully for other organizations, such as UNICEF (UNICEF 2015), cemented their motivation to further refine their faith engagement processes so that they are not as ad hoc and un-strategic. Mappings like this also often simply make the case to an organization that religious engagement is already widespread (see the example of UNFPA’s mapping in the 2000s (UNFPA 2008)) and therefore must be taken into consideration, even to those who are wary of the fact. These mappings need to be updated as needed and should also be undertaken at the country or regional level. Likewise, an organizational strategy that lays out the parameters for SRE in the organization will help, but even better is an organizational program guide that practically leads staff through the process of SRE in a complete program cycle. Essentially, what is the one, straightforward, and implementable document that you want every project manager to be able to pick up, confidently absorb, and then put into practice? While we know of many strategy papers on religious engagement in international organizations, we rarely see highly practical and detailed guides and complementary processes to help the implementation of SRE within organizations. Too often the religious engagement discussion ends with an HQ-produced strategy paper.

Second, it is no longer enough to say that religions are taboo in development (as stated in Ver Beek’s widely cited 2000 paper) and it is false to frame SRE as a binary between the secular and the religious or from the secular to the religious. Given that we are over 20 years on from this observation, we know more about the reasons why religious engagements have, at times, been sidelined by development actors (Bartelink, n.d.; Marshall 2016; Fountain 2015; A. Ager 2014; A. Ager and Ager 2011; Deneulin and Bano 2009; J. Ager, Ager, and Abebe 2014), we know more about how secular-religious dynamics unfurl to influence this situation (A. Ager and Ager 2015; O. J. Wilkinson 2019; Alford and Koeman 2019; Carrette and Trigeaud 2013; Clarke and Greenwood 2017), and, probably most importantly, we are constantly learning about what can be done to improve the situation (Whyle and Olivier 2017; O. J. Wilkinson 2017; El Nakib and Ager 2015; Frazer and Owen 2018). These citations are but examples of the range of resources that could be cited to demonstrate these points. Suffice to say that the debate must be nuanced to unpack reasons behind secular biases and, more importantly, the intersections of these biases with the other biases that plague current development practice, namely the place of a secular outlook within a Western neo-colonial mindset that is replicating the power imbalances of previous centuries. The Summit’s papers do not fall into this trap of oversimplification of secular positions in development, with several papers mentioning the “constant and evolving mix of religious and non-religious perspectives” (second paper) and “complementary, intermingled” nature of secular-religious dynamics in development (third paper).

The strategic element of this approach is the recognition that religious engagement is not only religious, but importantly part of secular-religious engagement and dynamics. With this comes the need for an awareness of people’s positionality in the dynamic—what are your personal beliefs and baggage you bring to the engagement?—and also all the involved organizations’ beliefs and baggage (as discussed above). As stated in the second Summit paper, to this extent SRE is fundamentally “simply naming and accounting for different perspectives,” or as I would edit this slightly, “similarities and differences in perspectives.” SRE is about finding common ground and respecting differences. The other acknowledgment that is part of the strategic approach here is to move away from the thinking that SRE is only for secular development actors to dispense onto their engagements with religious actors. A widespread argument in the religions and development field underlines that instrumentalization is prevalent in the power dynamics of large, international, secular development actors particularly in their engagements with smaller, often national religious actors (Jones and Petersen 2011). While this is still often the case, recent research into religious actors is questioning the very underpinnings of the instrumentalization debates to demonstrate that religious actors also use their agency to exist in different real and performative secular-religious spaces in development (Tomalin 2020, 2021). A question to pose to religious actors, therefore, is “what is strategic secular engagement?” or, even more truthfully, the re-framing for us all to discuss is strategic secular-religious engagement. The phrase does not roll off the tongue quite so easily and, unfortunately, we are confined by our language limitations to still use “secular” and “religious,” which seems to set up a binary, but it more realistically lays out the undercurrents at play, including somewhat of a leveling of the “from the secular to the religious” (and implied top-down approach) connotations of SRE.

Third and finally, there is no longer a “paucity of evidence” (as the second paper unfortunately claims) in religion and development. There are an endless number of new research questions and avenues to explore, but there is an evidence base on religions and development. Again, any claim to the contrary is willfully ignoring the bibliography that was created for this evidence summit, the other libraries online (the Joint Learning Initiative resource library now has over 1500 entries), the books and journals, including special issues that have focused on religions and development (for example, Sidibé 2016; Olivier and Wodon 2014a; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2011; Rakodi 2012; Amanze et al. 2019; Chitando, Gunda, and Togarasei 2020), or equally a simple Google Scholar search for “religions and development.” So why do we keep hearing the claim that there is no evidence? There has been a perceived and real pressure to prove the “value-add” of religious engagement for development. This leads to a belief that the only “evidence” worthy is a neat statistic that proves a religious engagement approach had a comparably better effect against a non-religious approach. This is also influenced by broader evidence debates in the humanitarian and development sectors about evidence of impact, the gold standard of randomized control trials, and long-standing qualitative and quantitative methodological divides (Eyben et al. 2015; Knox Clark and Darcy 2014). Whenever these kinds of numbers have been reached for in the religions and development field, they have always been widely mis-evidenced (their sources and methodologies commonly questioned) and mis-used (the now classic example is the case of the number of faith-based health providers in sub-Saharan Africa, which has been claimed to be anything from 20 percent to 70 percent at different times (Olivier et al. 2015)).

Ultimately, as the first Summit paper rightly notes, the diversity of religions, and subsequently of religious engagements, around the world means that there will always be evidence, but it will be difficult if not impossible to boil it down to headline figures that decidedly “prove” the value added by religious engagement. As Scott Appleby noted in a recent webinar (On Fundamentalism, the Ambivalence of the Sacred, and Contested Modernities 2020) in a reflection on 20 years of The Ambivalence of the Sacred (Appleby 2000), he meant to underscore the complexity of religious dynamics and engagements in each context, meaning that there needs to be discussion with scholars and experts on the sociologies of religions in each country context employed and engaged by diplomatic and development actors to parse through the contextual evidence on religions and development that is meaningful for that space, place, and time. All this is to say, do not hold your breath for the ultimate evidence that definitively proves the value add of religions for development. But do get excited for country-specific religious landscaping (notably, those from WFDD and USIP, e.g. Marshall 2017; Wilson 2019), do use review and synthesis papers to quickly get up-to-speed on the main debates around religions and development, and their intersection with any number of thematic areas that are relevant to your work (as covered extensively in the JLI scoping studies² and as broadly and well summarized in the third Summit paper) and do get to know scholars who have deep knowledge of religions in the country in which you work. There will be a scholar who has spent their working life examining every aspect of religion in the country in which you work, who will most likely be delighted to tell you all about it if asked nicely! The truly strategic approaches to evidence nowadays are not interested in proving the “added value” of religions to development. Instead, they are interested in intersectional and interdisciplinary analyses of the complexity of the religion in development field, asking research questions and using methodologies appropriate to their contexts. Strategy for the future of research and evidence abounds: there is still much to be achieved in strategic research communications on religions and development, any number of research questions, and the integration of questions about religions into other development research and learning as a matter of course.

To conclude, SRE cannot be a continuation of status quo partnerships, with just more or different religious partners. The impression that SRE is only about increasing the number of religious engagements is dangerous as it can compound fears of religious powers trying to unduly influence development. The practice of religious engagement to simply increase the number of religious partners is even more dangerous as it can actually lead to harmful partnerships and results. Again, this is why religious engagement needs to be strategic—SRE is a quality over quantity approach. Efforts to make religious engagement more strategic must let go of some of these now dated and repetitious arguments. Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 response, we have seen some of the engagements fall back into these old tropes—unaware of their own history, unaware of their own positionality, unaware of the evidence and supports that can help them, leading ultimately to many re-inventions of the wheel. Religious engagement is happening all the time—simply demonstrating that it takes place is not groundbreaking. However, what is exciting and different is a more concerted effort to improve religious engagements to make them more strategic, i.e. purposeful, self-aware, unrepetitive/duplicative. After over 20 years of debates and the reckoning of COVID-19, this strategic approach is, as of yet, commonly missing. In the next 20 years, there must be a commitment to better religious engagement—real SRE—not only religious engagement for the sake of religious engagement.

Acknowledgments

Publication of this response essay as part of a special open-access issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs was made possible by the Templeton Religion Trust.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Olivia Wilkinson

Olivia Wilkinson is the Director of Research for the Joint Learning Initiative on Faith and Local Communities (JLI). In her research work for JLI she collaborates with partners from UN agencies to NGOs to universities. Dr. Wilkinson is a sociologist, working at the intersection of sociology of religion and humanitarian/development studies. Her publications include her monograph Secular and Religious Dynamics in Humanitarian Response (Routledge 2020) and the volume International Development and Local Faith Actors: Ideological and Cultural Encounters, co-edited with Kathryn Kraft (Routledge 2020).

Notes

1 See https://www.usaid.gov/faith-and-opportunity-initiatives/2020-evidence-summit-strategic-religious-engagement.

2 See the catalog here: https://jliflc.com/about/learning-hubs/.