Duncan Green's Blog, page 144

Links I Liked

You are where you sit (in class), via PhD Comics

The aid trend is reversing: More money is now going to the poorest countries, according to Erik Solheim oecdinsights.org/2016/04/18/aid…

Vietnamese kids do absurdly well (and some Latin Americans really badly) on international test scores (PISA) given their income  [h/t Laurence Chandy]

‘Climate scientists are developing pre-traumatic stress disorder  due to their awareness of what is underway.’ Schuyler Brown on ‘Moving from Sustainability to Regenerative Design’ [h/t Alex Evans]

Health v military spending by region. Central/South Asia & Mid East the

worst, [h/t Snippets of Random]

Road traffic kills far more people than homicide in most countries. Development issue?

‘Just give me a normal, non-gay, standard turtle’. Inspired funny/sad anti-hate Amnesty campaign in Turkey

If governments don’t tackle the causes of conflict and the refugee crisis, will the World Humanitarian Summit be a damp squib?

Ed Cairns Oxfam’s humanitarian policy adviser, sets the scene for next month’s World Humanitarian Summit as we publish our curtain raiser for the event.

After years of preparation, and a roller coaster of expectations plunging and soaring, it is almost upon us. One month from tomorrow, dozens of world leaders will gather in Istanbul for the World Humanitarian Summit. The UN has finalised the commitments it hopes world leaders will agree, and NGOs and think tanks have been busy offering their views.

One of the most challenging came from the Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI, whose Time to let go says that ‘the humanitarian system is simply not doing a good job in the eyes of the people it aims to help.’ While accepting that humanitarian agencies are ‘caring for more wounded and more hungry people in more places than was conceivable even a generation ago,’ it judges years of humanitarian reforms as ‘rearranging the deck chairs’ rather than tackling the ‘fundamental assumptions, power dynamics and incentives’ that deny affected people and local organisations influence over the workings of humanitarian aid.

Oxfam came to similar conclusions in last year’s Turning the Humanitarian System on its Head, calling for greater support for local NGOs. Over a hundred NGOs, including Oxfam, have endorsed the Charter for Change ahead of the Summit, which commits them to, for example, pass 20% of their humanitarian funding to local and national NGOs by May 2018. In fact, Oxfam has promised to hit a target of 30% by that date.

But I think the ODI report falls short, failing to draw all the logical conclusions from its analysis. It argues that it’s the starkly unequal power dynamic between affected people, local and international organisations, and donors that’s at the heart of the problem, and that previous humanitarian reforms have done nothing to change that. True.

But it also argues that humanitarian crises are more frequent and affect more people because of a host of human factors from climate change to the conduct of conflicts. ‘Civilian suffering in conflicts in Syria, South Sudan and Yemen,’ it says, ‘is a sobering reminder of the international community’s failure to translate legal obligations around the conduct of war into tangible benefits for civilians.’ In other words, political choices cause humanitarian crises and the human suffering in them.

Time to let go offers no solution to that, and like much of the debate ahead of the Summit, puts the emphasis on changing the ‘humanitarian system’, rather than changing the policies and politics that are driving up humanitarian needs in the first place.  Simon Maxwell wrote last month that a great risk at the Summit is that political issues, such as the causes and conduct of conflict, would ‘overload the humanitarian system with responsibilities that it cannot, indeed should not, assume.’ But I suspect the two greatest risks are very different.

The first is that governments, UN agencies and NGOs turn up and make broad statements rather than practical commitments to change – or that some heads of state or government don’t even turn up. The second is that the only major progress is around the ‘Grand Bargain’ proposed by the UN Secretary-Genera’s High Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing in January, whereby donors and aid agencies collaborate to increase multi-year funding, reduce duplication, and improve financial transparency. That is vital but somehow misses the big picture.

The World Humanitarian Summit will take place not only in the shadow of Syria’s terrible conflict and the greatest refugee crisis of our age – but weeks after its host, Turkey, and the EU struck a refugee deal that may trade human bings for political concessions. If anyone ever doubted that politics drives humanitarian crises, they know now.

The Summit will also take place in a world in which warring parties kill civilians without consequence, in which El Niño highlights yet again the rising tide of disasters affected by climate change, and in which most governments do everything possible to keep the world’s displaced people from their doors. Even the most generous donors are becoming less humanitarian about welcoming refugees. Only three countries – Canada, Germany and Norway – have met their ‘fair share’ towards Syria’s crisis in terms of both aid and resettling its refugees.

If the World Humanitarian Summit does not begin to address that, that truly would be a failure. That’s why Oxfam is publishing a rather unusual paper today, Commitment to Change, which not only sets out our own commitments to change, but our calls to world leaders to make commitments themselves.

For it is governments that must commit to tackle the toll of civilian death and displacement as warring parties violate International Humanitarian Law – and too many governments around the world, in effect, permit them to do so through their continued military support, including the transfer of arms.

And it is governments that must take a fair share of the responsibility for the world’s most vulnerable people, which, for almost all wealthy countries, means welcoming far more refugees than they have – and far greater international support to host countries who themselves must do more to give refugees a future with dignity, livelihoods and education.

In some ways, those are all part of far longer struggles. Almost 70 years since the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the struggle to ensure respect for International Humanitarian Law goes on. More than 60 years since the 1951 Refugee Convention, the struggle to uphold it is more vital than ever.

We should not expect the World Humanitarian Summit to switch on a new world in which international law is strenuously upheld. But it would equally be wrong to think that nothing can change. Governments see the unsustainable cost of the rising tide of disasters. They see the destabilising contagion of conflicts that drive millions of people from their homes. They, well some of them at least, see the political cost of failing to help resolve the world’s crises. And – I hope – they see the World Humanitarian Summit for what it is: a chance to make the strongest possible commitments to make the profound, tangible changes that are so vitally needed.

Thought Leadership and NGOs: What is it? How can we get better at it?

Here’s today’s 2 minute vlog summary for the incurably lazy/visual

The aid business specializes in baffling, slippery concepts, often adopted as the latest management fuzzwords (like buzzwords, but fuzzy). One recent example in Oxfam was a brainstorm on ‘thought leadership’ – What is it? Does Oxfam do it? Do we want to do more of it? If so, how can we do it better?

My instinctive reaction was hostile (to the term, if not what it describes) – too arrogant, too Stalinist, too top down. And also self-defeating – the essence of thought leadership is that it must be conferred, never claimed. Calling yourself a thought leader is just not done, at least in the UK, where false humility is a national sport.

But there is something there – in some areas, civil society in general and NGOs in particular have at times led the way in introducing and developing new concepts (Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics), or moving existing ones up the agenda (inequality, disability).

Two concepts might be helpful: idea ecosystems and the policy funnel.

In idea ecosystems, the intellectual terrain that helps us understand the world is a complex system, characterized by continuous change and churn. Applying evolutionary theory, ideas are subjected to a process of variation, selection and amplification: new ideas constantly surface (variation); they are then tested and scrutinised, both conceptually and in practice (selection); fit variants prosper (amplification) while others disappear (dinosaurs).

In such a system, I don’t think aspiring to be a ‘thought leader’ makes much sense if it consists of ‘we want to be a recognized authority on X, we we are going to appoint a couple of wonks and tell them to do it’. What makes more sense is to see ourselves as ecosystem gardeners, trying to get better at all 3 stages of evolution: encouraging (rather than suppressing) variation, whether inside our organizations or beyond; having more effective (and faster) ways to identify the good stuff and reject the bad; then finding ways to amplify it (see post on spin offs). Sure we can set boundaries – eg we want to specialize on inequality – but what emerge as successful, innovative approaches or ideas within those limits is bound to have an element of chance.

But we can also be ecosystem warriors. Power imbalances shape the ecosystem, filtering out some ideas, and unjustly favouring others. CSOs can champion ideas that emerge from excluded groups, critique those that perpetuate injustice and inequality. Promote intellectual meritocracy, I guess.

The policy funnel, which I nicked from Michael Jacobs (see yesterday’s post), is a handy device to think about how the nature of TL varies according to the maturity of a given issue. At the early, open end of the funnel, getting issues into public debate is all about framing, getting recognition of new problems or responses. It’s about setting the agenda. Further down the line, TL is more about accompanying the move from idea to law/decision to execution. It’s about being propositional.

In either case, we need to remember that there are much bigger beasts in the jungle of intellectual activity – 800 kg gorillas like the university system, thinktanks, government research units all dwarf NGOs in terms of staffing and resources. Where might civil society organizations have an edge, whether in identifying what matters or what works? It all comes down to their ability to walk along a series of boundaries and to use connect others that reside on either side of those boundaries:

Inter-disciplinarity: academia remains dogged by disciplinary siloes. Everyone sings the merits of working across them, but the incentive systems that deter it remain strong. Without having to agonize about academic respectability or tenure, NGOs can jump across the boundaries in search of new things to think and say.
Convening and brokering: NGOs in some circumstances can act as ‘convenors and brokers’, pulling together organizations and individuals that don’t see the world the same way, or normally talk to each other. New thinking and approaches often emerge from such ‘awkward alliances’. It’s not leadership in the Stalinist sense, more like acting as the midwife of something new.
Theory and Practice: At their best, NGOs combine intellectual curiosity with a real commitment to change the world. That puts them in a good position to try out new ideas, pilot new approaches, or spot new stuff emerging from the system itself. If ever the awful term ‘do tank’ (cf ‘think tank’) is warranted, it ought to be for them.

Thanks to my fellower wallowers-in-confusion, Irene Guijt, Kashif Shabir and Claire Hutchings, for comments and suggestions

Michael Jacobs on how civil society and others achieved the Paris Climate Agreement

A brilliant analysis by Michael Jacobs of the success factors behind last year’s Paris Climate Agreement appeared in Juncture, IPPR’s quarterly journal  recently. Jacobs unpacks the role of civil society (broadly defined) and political leadership. Alas, it’s over 4,000 words long, so as a service to my attention deficit colleagues in aid and development, here’s an abbreviated version (about a third the length, but if you have time, do please read the original).

The international climate change agreement reached in Paris in December 2015 wasan extraordinary diplomatic achievement. It was also a remarkable display of the political power of civil society.

Following the failed Copenhagen conference in 2009, an informal global coalition of NGOs, businesses, academics and others came together to define an acceptable outcome to the Paris conference and then applied huge pressure on governments to agree to it. Civil society effectively identified the landing ground for the agreement, then encircled and squeezed the world’s governments until, by the end of the Paris conference, they were standing on it. Four key forces made up this effective alliance.

The scientific community: Five years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was in trouble. Relentless attacks from climate sceptics and a number of apparent scandals – the ‘climategate’ emails, dodgy data on melting Himalayan glaciers, allegations surrounding its chairman – had undermined its credibility. But the scientists fought back, subjecting their work to even more rigorous peer-review and hiring professional communications expertise for the first time. The result was the IPCC’s landmark Fifth Assessment Report, which contained two powerful central insights.

First, the IPCC report introduced the concept of a ‘carbon budget’: the total amount of carbon dioxide the earth’s atmosphere can absorb before the 2°C temperature goal is breached. At present emission rates, that would be used up in less than 30 years. So cutting emissions cannot wait.

The other insight was that these emissions have to be reduced until they reach zero. The IPCC’s models are clear: the physics of global warming means that to halt the world’s temperature rise, the world will have to stop producing greenhouse gas emissions altogether.

The economic community: But it was a second set of forces that really changed the argument. Since the financial crash in 2008–2009, cutting emissions had fallen down the priority lists of the world’s finance ministries. The old orthodoxy that environmental policy was an unaffordable cost to the economy reasserted itself. A new argument was required.

Enter the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, an initiative hatched by a number of economists, research institutes and the Swedish, Norwegian and UK governments to re-examine the evidence on climate change and economic growth. The Commission’s report, Better Growth, Better Climate, set out a powerful new argument. Cutting emissions could generate better growth, with lower air pollution, more liveable and economically efficient cities, more sustainable use of land and greater energy security. The heads of the IMF, World Bank and OECD quickly took it up.

At the same time, a quite separate economic story was being told by a tiny NGO in London. Carbon Tracker took up the IPCC’s idea of the global carbon budget and turned it into a startling proposition. If the world was to stay within the 2°C limit, 80 per cent of the world’s remaining oil, gas and coal reserves were now effectively ‘unburnable’ and would have to be left in the ground. If governments acted on their own commitments, it would leave many of the world’s fossil fuel companies with ‘stranded assets’, unable to continue planned production and with heavily devalued share prices. The world’s stock markets and pension funds were effectively sitting on a ‘carbon bubble’. Carbon Tracker’s analysis spread like wildfire. Some of the biggest shareholding institutions sat up.

The businesses: As these narratives of science and economics gathered pace, a critical new player began to amplify them. The traditional stance of business organisations had been to oppose stronger climate policy. However, over the last decade a number of leading global corporations, exemplified by the consumer goods giant Unilever, had begun to argue in public that strong climate policy was in the interests of business. On the one hand the ways in which climate change threatens water and food production in supply chains around the world had become increasingly clear. On the other, the growth of green and renewable energy policy has created a new and growing global market.

The result was the creation of a new global network, We Mean Business, to lobby in favour of climate policy and for a new international agreement. By September 2014 over 1,000 global companies were calling on governments to introduce ‘carbon pricing’ through carbon taxes or emissions trading schemes.

The NGOs: Meanwhile, environmental NGOs had shifted their campaign tactics in the aftermath of the Copenhagen conference. While some NGOs downgraded climate campaigning altogether, others focussed their attention on a different battle: the fight against fossil fuels.

The initial focus was coal. The results have been remarkable: since 2010 new coal generation has been virtually abandoned in the US and western Europe, and almost 900 projected plants have been cancelled worldwide. Global coal demand has now tipped into decline.

What made the NGO revival after Copenhagen different was its global nature. As it became clearer in many developing countries that climate change was already occurring, it increasingly became a focus for a huge range of civil society organisations struggling for development, women’s rights, the rights of indigenous people and other social and economic issues. The global labour movement, too, took it up.

At the same time, two much newer NGOs entered the fray. 350.org, founded by the American writer and activist Bill McKibben, fired up a largely student and youth membership with two highly imaginative and focused campaigns, calling upon universities and other institutions to divest from fossil fuel companies and mounting a nationwide campaign in the US against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

Meanwhile the online campaigning organisation Avaaz was steadily building a global supporter base. Deploying an imaginative combination of online petitions and email campaigns with street protests and paid-for advertisements in newspapers around the world, Avaaz had reached 42 million global supporters by the time of the Paris conference.

THE 2014 CLIMATE SUMMIT

These four emerging forces in civil society – science, economics, business and NGOs – first came together in an organised way around the climate summit in New York in September 2014. Organised by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon, the summit was unusual in that it brought together not just heads of government but leaders from business and finance, city mayors and state governors, heads of international organisations and NGOs.

While the heads of state made speeches accepting the IPCC’s science and the new economics of low-carbon growth, it was outside the conference hall that the summit really took off. The People’s Climate March on 23 September 2014 became the largest in the history of climate campaigning, and one of the largest ever – 400,000 people in New York, and many more in countless parallel marches in cities around the world.

The climate summit marked the long build-up of political momentum towards the Paris conference. In June 2015 the Pope’s encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si, galvanised support from faith-based organisations, particularly in the developing world; he was joined in his calls for climate action by leaders from almost every other faith.

THE THINKTANKS

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, a fifth civil society force was exerting its influence: the thinktanks and academics drawing up designs for the agreement to be secured in Paris. They conducted quiet consultations with governments and civil society organisations to gather ideas and build support for a new international regime. A gradual consensus coalesced around the concepts of a five-yearly stock-take and cycle of commitments, parity between mitigation and adaptation, the importance of ‘climate justice’, finance for developing countries, and the definition of an accounting and monitoring regime.

THE DIPLOMACY

In the run-up to the conference, the dominant dynamic in the UN negotiations was the relationship between the US and China. Determined to leave a new international agreement as part of his legacy, President Obama and his secretary of state John Kerry prioritised the establishment of a climate relationship with the Chinese government. A joint statement between the two heads of state in November 2014 was followed by a second in September 2015.

But in Paris something else happened. The US and China continued to talk, but a much more powerful force emerged as the dominant voice in the negotiations. This was that of the countries most vulnerable to climate change – the low-lying islands and others who are already experiencing severe impacts from rising temperatures and extreme weather events. A new grouping of 43 countries, the Climate Vulnerable Forum, made itself heard alongside the more traditional groupings of small island states, least developed countries and African countries. Together they set the negotiating agenda: they would not sign an agreement unless it had the target of holding global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C; included the long-term goal of net zero emissions; recognised that developing countries needed support for the loss and damage they were already experiencing from climate change; and committed developed countries to scaling up finance from a floor of $100 billion per year in 2020. As one Filipino negotiator said, ‘it was the ants moving the elephants’.

The final piece of the jigsaw that created the Paris agreement was the expert management of the conference by the French government, led by foreign minister Laurent Fabius and his climate ambassador Laurence Tubiana, together with the executive secretary of the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres.

THE NEW POLITICS OF CLIMATE

So has the agreement saved the world? Of course not. No international negotiation can do that. As many people have pointed out, the agreement is just a framework of goals and rules. But in building this agreement, civil society has cleverly written itself into it. Lying at the heart of the agreement are the five-yearly ‘global moments’, when governments will have to face up to the inadequacy of their current efforts and commit to doing more. At each of these moments it will be up to the combined forces of civil society – in every country – to pressure them into doing so.

 

What have 3 years of campaigning on Big Food achieved? What still needs to happen?

Erinch Sahan, acting head of Oxfam’s private sector team,   looks back on 3 years of trying to get the world’s food giants to clean up their act, the subject of a new Behind the Brands report.

The captains of the food industry have come a long way over the last few years. The “Big 10”, the world’s 10 largest food and beverage companies, have moved from being seemingly  unaware of the great injustices at the bottom of their supply chains to now acknowledging these and making commitments to address them. Land rights, women’s empowerment and climate change are where there’s been particularly impressive progress. Strong commitments are now also arising looking at how farmers and workers are treated, and how companies deal with water and transparency.

Despite good progress two fundamental challenges remain. First companies need to actually implement the commitments they have made and secondly, we are yet to see true transformation in the business model of how the sector operates.

Supply chain Implementation 

Companies need to shift up a gear and start turning policy commitments into company practice. This starts with moving beyond their own operations to ensuring that new standards and approaches are implemented by suppliers too. Most of the big companies don’t get their boots dirty on the ground – that role is left to their suppliers who either grow the crops they use directly, or buy from others, including small scale producers. Only when suppliers  come on board will corporate commitments really start to bite.

For instance, Illovo Sugar (a subsidiary of ABF), Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Unilever all committed to zero tolerance for land grabs in their supply chains. This will only translate into real change for communities when company suppliers start to implement these policies.  Applying the principle of free, prior and informed consent, supporting access to grievance mechanisms and supporting women producers’ land rights all need to be applied at community level if companies are to effectively implement their land policies.

Similarly, eight of the Big 10 companies committed to take steps to better understand the specific challenges faced by women in their supply chains. If these companies are serious about addressing the rights of women change will only happen when the companies focus on their supplier’s actions to ensure that the discrimination that women producers face is eliminated. This includes- supporting greater leadership and voice for women, improving women’s access to and control over land and, assuring that access to services like credit and training are made available to women too.

Finally, despite the strong movement we have seen on climate by the Big 10, we will only see real progress in reducing agricultural emissions when suppliers of the Big 10 take necessary action in their own operations. This includes- taking measures to stop deforestation and reduce the carbon footprint associated with growing, transporting and processing the food and drinks that millions of consumers love.

Business models that share value fairly

But even were the Big 10 to do all this, there would still be a massive structural problem. Transformation in the food system is desperately needed and will require a fundamental disruption of the dominant business models across the sector. The last few decades have increasingly seen power and value concentrated among a smaller and smaller set of traders, processors and other corporate actors in value chains. Meanwhile, small scale producers and farmers have been left with an ever-decreasing share of the total value that consumers pay for their food. As a result, millions of workers on plantations earn poverty wages and small-scale producers earn incomes barely enough to live on. A cocoa farmer today gets less than 6 per cent of the value of a chocolate bar. 30 years ago, that farmer got 18 per cent.  Business models that squeeze value away from farmers and workers must be transformed so that farmers and workers can thrive, and so that the food system can work for us all.  Good practice is starting to emerge and some of the best examples being commercial business models where farmers own businesses that capture more value (for instance through processing).  Models like KTDA, where 550,000 small-scale tea farmers co-own processing plants result in farmers receiving 75 per cent of the final tea price (while tea farmers in nearby countries like Rwanda receive 25 per cent) .   Business models such as these must become the future of the food sector if we are to allow farmers and workers to thrive so they can continue to feed us all.

 

Links I Liked

In China, kids improve their dad’s passport photo (he was turned back at the airport).

Fascinating round up of mutants/positive deviants in aid and development and how aid agencies need to respond

Last week saw a flurry of discussions on mental health in aid and development saw good pieces by on OECD Insights and CGD. Let’s hope the spotlight stays on this seriously neglected issue.

Topical palindromes – are they a thing? This from Will Howells: ‘A man, a PM, A/Cs, a scam, Panama!’

In Zambia, social norms don’t exist and neoliberalism advanced gender equality. Alice Evans rattles some cages

Global inequality may be even worse than we think. Jason Hickel goes over the numbers

Women’s Economic Empowerment – how to turn a trendy slogan into something with

And in response to me venturing into the vlogosphere, Gawain Kripke taught me about GIFs. Here’s his vicious and unprovoked attack on me. Here’s my retaliation. Then Alice Evans decides to use them as clickbait for her papers (apparently traffic jumped, although remember we are still talking academic papers, here). They’re dead easy, if you want to play, go here.

How to Work Better: at last, a check list we can all buy into (but make sure you read to the bottom). Shame both this and the passport pic were probably photoshopped…..

 

Book Review: Branko Milanovic’s brilliant take on Global Inequality

Some of my favourite development economists are nomads, people with feet in different regions, which seems to make them better able to identify interesting patterns and similarities/differences between countries. Ha-Joon Chang (Korea/UK), Dani Rodrik (Turkey/US) and now Branko Milanovic (Serbia/US), whose latest book Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization is a brilliant and thought-provoking essay stuffed with enough graphs to satisfy the numerati, anecdotes for the general reader and political insights for the policy wonks. Read it.

Milanovic is best known for his number crunching, especially his great graph of where the money from global growth went from 1988-2008 (see left). There’s no better way of showing the simultaneous rise of the emerging world (mainly Asian) middle class and the global plutocracy, accompanied by the hollowing out of the Western middle class and the neglect of the poorest.

But this book, even more than his previous ones, shows he is much more than a tweeter of top graphs: his level of political curiosity and insight is uncommon for an economist. He introduces politics much more centrally than other inequality gurus like Thomas Piketty or Angus Deaton, for example. In fact, I wish he’d given more time to the politics bit, and less to the economics. More on that later.

Milanovic also writes Kerouac-fast: his acknowledgements section depressed me deeply when he said of a writing trip to Panama ‘After a week almost fully dedicated to the book (with a few dips in the Caribbean in between), a good part of the text was done’. If that ‘a week almost fully dedicated’ is not some kind of typo, he will be hated by authors everywhere.

So what does he say? He sums up the book structure with a nice ‘executive infographic’. He shows the overall trajectory of global inequality, then decomposes it into what happens within and between countries. Like Piketty, Deaton or Chang, he takes the long historical view – centuries rather than decades, with erudite asides on inequality in the Roman Empire. He then pulls it together to discuss how inequality is likely to evolve in the 21st Century (the best section, IMO).

There is so much in here that doing it justice in a blog post is pretty much impossible, but the things that most struck me included:

Moving from Kuznets curves to Kuznets waves: Simon Kuznets predicted that income inequality would follow an inverted U shape as countries develop: rising first as societies grew, while the large pool of un/underemployed poor people kept wages low, but then falling as countries reach full employment and wages start to rise. Trouble is, that doesn’t explain the rebound of inequality in much of the West since 1980. Piketty’s response was to replace Kuznets’ optimism with his own pessimism, arguing that the downslope of the U was an unusual event driven by the destruction of capital by two world wars, and that normal service (i.e. rising inequality) has now resumed. Milanovic thinks it’s more like a long wave, with contending forces alternating over time. Growth, differentiation and elite capture of politics increase inequality; war, welfare and progressive politics decrease it.
On inequality between countries, he argues that the convergence between rich and poor countries is returning the world to the status quo circa 1820, when the main source of inequality was class, rather than location (i.e. where you stood in the social pecking order of your country, rather than whether you were born Indian or American). The younger Karl Marx would recognize the new order more than, say Frantz Fanon.
His most readable section was the speculative chapter 4 on where the 21st Century is likely to take us on the Kuznets rollercoaster. He argues that China’s high inequality levels are likely to fall, as labour shortages push up wages, but is much more pessimistic about the US, where he sees the drivers of inequality (eg political capture by the rich) as far stronger than the countervailing forces, leading to its politics acquiring a ‘quasi-dynastic look, which the country shares with India, Greece, the Philippines and Pakistan’. He thinks inequality is leading to a ‘hollowed out democracy’ in both Europe and North America, in which state spending moves from providing services to funding police and security to protect the rich. He compares the West to the Roman Empire, where an increasingly autocratic regime masqueraded as a Republic, before crumbling.

Inequality within countries is becoming the decisive factor. credit Paul Smith, Panos

The writing reminded me a lot of Piketty – like a very long dinner listening to a particularly erudite and interesting guest. Milanovic finishes with ‘ten short reflections on the future’, in which there are some great points, for example that given the mobility both of capital and high earners, future attempts to reduce inequality will have to be more like East Asian ‘predistribution’ of assets and education, than European tax and spend. But he then wandered down some eccentric or disappointing blind alleys, eg arguing that ‘the root cause of prostitution is income inequality’ or dismissing as hypocrites those concerned with planetary boundaries and limits to growth.

And then, suddenly and frustratingly, the book stopped. I wanted him to push himself harder to take the great political insights in chapter 4 to produce a real conclusion and advice on the most promising political pathways and opportunities for those wishing to tackle the scourge of inequality in this century. Any chance he had could spend an extra week in the Caribbean sometime and finish the job?

P.S. I’m not the only fan, here’s Martin Wolf’s rave review in the FT

Why should large aid organizations spin off more start-ups? What kind?

Here’s vlog number 3 – they’re turning into kind of lazy exec sums for blog posts. And a chance to study my kitchen….

I’ve been thinking about the idea of Oxfam and other large aid players deliberately ‘spinning off’ start-ups as independent organizations. The idea came up when I was writing ‘Fit for the Future’ last year, on the way INGOs need to adapt to work in complex, fast-changing systems, and has been niggling away at me ever since.

The argument for spin-offs is twofold: firstly, it frees a small, energetic start-up from the workings of a large bureaucracy, with its rules, sign off procedures and regular shifts in focus and priorities. It means you can just get on with things, try stuff out, adapt and evolve. In the UK, New Internationalist and Fairtrade Foundation started life in this way, and lots of successful organizations in developing countries can be seen in this light – starting with a good idea and an aid grant or two, and then building into mighty organizations like SEWA in India. More recently, we have got better at setting up independent ‘multi-stakeholder initiatives’ like the Ethical Trading Initiative.

The second argument is more subtle, and comes from Mike Edwards. Development in complex  societies, polities and economies is best served by a rich, diverse ecosystem with lots of diversity, innovation, creative destruction etc. But in many ways, business as usual in the aid business encourages monoculture – small numbers of INGOs, funding grassroots organizations that ‘look like us’ in terms of politics and narrative. Seeding the ecosystem with start ups is a way of spreading diversity in the system with long term benefits for the system as a whole (i.e. development).

What might be the best candidates for spin offs? Here’s a few ideas, but I’d love to hear yours:

Particular projects with a viable commercial business model, whether as producers of products or services. These can be global or national.

Watchdog bodies to follow up major campaigns: the excellent Bretton Woods Project was set up to keep a body of expertise on the World Bank and IMF alive even when wider attention to structural adjustment etc fell away. Control Arms is doing a fine job on keeping up the pressure on the Arms Trade Treaty. But as far as I know, there is no global campaigning body on the WTO or regional trade agreements like EPAs or the TPP (although there are thinktanks), which couple prove a real missed opportunity, should the need to revive trade campaigning return. Any new major campaigns should think about spinning off small specialist bodies as part of their exit strategy – what would a BWP equivalent on inequality look like?

Sectoral Specialists: Fashions and priorities come and go, but people will still need schools, hospitals, rights and roads whatever the latest development fad. It would be interesting to map out the institutional ecosystem and identify where some sectors are neglected, then encourage start-ups to populate the gaps. This could be the answer to my regular rants about why the aid business pays so little attention to ‘cinderella issues’ like obesity, tobacco and alcohol.

Against this suggestion is a clear institutional obstacle – why would Oxfam ‘give up’ its most interesting/innovative

Breaking Good?

programmes, leaving a rather tame rump of traditional activities that critics could slag off as same old same old? Giving Oxfam a chunk of shares in the spin-off, as in private sector spin-offs, doesn’t really work, but is there some other way to align incentives, eg by giving the parent organization some kind of reputational stake in the subsequent glory of successful spin-offs?

One answer might be to take a two tier approach – some degree of autonomy within the Oxfam brand for spin offs where there is a case for retaining an institutional link (this could include my long-standing suggestion for semi autonomous advocacy groups of ‘grey panthers’, and I guess this blog is one example!) And a second tier of fully independent spin offs.

Any other suggestions?

 

Women and Power: final report of excellent research project + top recommendations for aid agencies

ODI have just wrapped up an excellent two year project on ‘Women and power: overcoming barriers to leadership and influence’ with a final synthesis report that is well worth reading. It’s an intelligent discussion, informed by the thinking in the ‘Doing Development Differently’ network (which is in need of a stronger gender focus). It combines some ‘well duh’ obvious stuff (‘elite women are most able to take advantage of new political opportunities’) with a few nuggets (women leaders often rely on political skills acquired outside formal politics, eg in student politics or faith-based organizations) and some excellent recommendations for aid agencies. Here are the recommendations:

Policy recommendations: what should be done differently?

Policy-makers and practitioners need to capitalise on the high-level momentum regarding women’s rights and leadership, and ensure that good intentions do not get stuck at the level of commitments and conferences. Women’s rights and more equitable gender relations can be achieved only through the actions of the women and men concerned.

International development organisations can, however, play an important role in helping reformers in developing countries to ensure ‘women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public life’ (SDG Target 5.5). Based on our evidence review and empirical case studies, we provide four sets of recommendations for what international agencies in particular could do differently to cultivate women’s substantive power and influence.

Invest in existing organisations, not those you wish existed

Donors need to support and work with organic, locally anchored organisations able to work with their members and the wider community or society to change exclusionary gender relations and advance women’s rights and wellbeing. The main objective should be to help women to organise around common interests and problems, and facilitating connections among different organisations (peer–peer, grassroots–elite), not to determine their agenda. This means:

Support existing feminist organisations of different kinds and build relation between them (e.g. rights organisations, professional associations and grassroots groups).
Nurture diverse civic associations by working through intermediaries to invest in long-term partnerships with women’s organisations of all types. Where civil society is more mature, work through national organisations and networks; where it is weak, work through specialist international women’s organisations.

Focus on groups, not individual women

Women need political skills to be influential, but project-based support that tries to quickly plug skills gaps of individual women is unlikely to be the most effective use of resources. Instead,

Invest in collective not individual leadership by supporting organisations where adolescent girls and women can hone their political and leadership skills (e.g. student groups, trade unions, professional associations, faith-based organisations, political parties).
Work with families and communities, not only women, to change the beliefs and expectations about gender roles and capabilities that are the main barrier to women’s empowerment and to gender equality.

Target all sectors, not just gender

Women’s political power is strongly associated with their economic power. Discrete gender programmes cannot increase women’s substantive power; sector programmes are also needed to build the capabilities and resources women need. This means:

Invest in women’s economic power through reforms that increase their formal market participation, reform of laws that prevent women from inheriting/owning assets, and through livelihood/economic programmes that explicitly seek to shift gender norms that prevent women from controlling/owning assets rather than simply to raise household income.
Invest in women’s higher education by working with universities and families to address barriers to women’s access, both economic (e.g. affordability) and social (e.g. early marriage, childcare responsibilities).
Invest in national knowledge production by funding local think tanks and academic departments who have an interest in women’s rights and wellbeing.
Invest in women’s role in post-conflict and regime transition processes through logistic support to women’s organisations and networks, and by using UN Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1325 and related resolutions to advocate for women’s inclusion in high-level peace negotiations and political reform processes.’

That seems like an evidence-based, politically informed way forward, but when it comes to gender-related issues, I’ve come to accept that I’m usually wrong – over to you to put me straight…..

Payment by Results take 2: what I learned from the response to last month’s rant

A couple of weeks ago I posted a fairly polemical piece about the hype around ‘payment by results’, which prompted quite a response, including a piece by CGD’s Nancy Birdsall, and an excellent set of comments from a bunch of people who are much more on top of the issue than I am (not difficult, I know).

Nancy argued that the problem with PbR is that it is mostly a severely bastardized version of CGD’s original Cash on Delivery proposal:

‘PbR programs tend to create “deliverables” defined by donors, to be delivered on a preset schedule, which invites creation of “plans” and “result chains” and fixed implementation schedules. That, in turn, diverts donor attention from outcomes to inputs, indulging donor impatience and discouraging the kinds of local initiative and innovation (e.g., Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation)  that are ultimately the best guarantee of sustained progress.’

Which raises an interesting point that the aid biz seldom thinks about – any clever idea is likely to be mutilated by institutional practice, culture, incentives etc on the way to being implemented. Is half a good idea still good, or is it likely to be even worse than what it is replacing?

What emerged from the comments thread is that there is a lot of experimentation going on, generating a growing understanding of do’s and don’ts, and a few surprises along the way. Here are some of the themes that emerged from the discussion on the blog, and within Oxfam.

Could PbR encourage downward accountability to poor people and communities rather than just upward accountability to donors?

Michael O’Donnell, BOND: ‘Tantalisingly, at a meeting hosted by WorldVision last week, we heard of communities who were involved in verification of results from PbR projects feeling that NGOs were much more accountable to them in that PbR project than in other work. There is scope to do this in a clever way to promote agendas like adaptive management, downwards accountability – but it takes a lot of thought.’

Paul Harvey, ODI:  ‘Are there any examples of payments based on customer satisfaction type ratings? So, in humanitarian aid, you could have a bonus for agencies where disaster-affected people rate the aid provided on measures such as whether it was fairly targeted, delivered with respect to dignity, consulted fully with local people, timely, adequate and appropriate.’

Does PbR encourage learning and better Monitoring and Evaluation?

Michael O’Donnell, BOND talked of ‘the positives that we now hear from organisations implementing PbR. The focus on results is helping improve M&E and performance, but within the narrow scope of whatever results are defined as triggering payments. However, those benefits may not spill over into wider M&E systems and learning beyond the project.’

Oxfam’s Francesco Rigamonti, who is running a huge (£20m) DFID PbR contract in Eastern DRC and Kenya on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) is even more positive ‘PBR allowed us to strengthen our M&E and make it more rigorous and this can have positive effects on other programmes implemented with other funding mechanisms.’

But Francesco also sees dangers that PbR will push agencies into ‘counting what can be counted’ rather than ‘counting what counts’. Francesco wrote a nice blog on his experience of PbR, which I had missed.

The PbR contract with DFID has an interesting mix of short term and longer term indicators: ‘In the first phase we had to deliver two or more WASH services to about 850,000 people. Starting from today we have entered a new phase in which our attention will be solely focused on ensuring sustainability and sustained behavioural change for the beneficiaries reached so far. DFID will stop paying us every quarter for the number of people with access to a latrine or safe and clean water.  From now on we will be paid once per year, and the actual level of payment will be based on a survey showing how many people continue to have access to water and healthy sanitation and show signs of sustained behaviour change.’

PbR is a rapidly expanding and diverse field

Donald Menzies of DFID stressed the diversity the sectors in which PbR is now operating, including low carbon energy, girls’ education and agriculture.

Risk of crowding out smaller players

According to Oxfam’s Helen Bushell: ‘We are already seeing a risk of crowding out. At a meeting in Whitehall 2 weeks ago for an upcoming £100 million plus call (WASH 2020 Challenge programme) it was surprising how few agencies were in the room. The combination of the financial risk transfer, cash flow implications, management costs and risk management itself and the costs of learning and adapting are arguably beyond the risk appetite of many agencies. At a time when DFID is looking to promote southern civil society, and advance small and medium NGOs this funding model would seem to be working the other way.’

A Mixed Bag for NGOs?

Oxfam’s Head of Programme Funding Tom Winslow emailed: ‘While I agree with many of the criticisms that you’ve identified in your latest blog, the evidence from our own experience in Oxfam is that it does produce some positive results – greater flexibility in programme spend to achieve outputs (which programme teams really value), greater ability to cover the full costs of implementation (because we charge the donor a price rather than submit a budget), much greater incentive to spend and deliver on time (which can only benefit people in poverty), etc.’

Based on Oxfam’s experience, Emma Feeny pointed to a useful checklist for NGOs considering implementing a Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) programme on a PbR basis.

My takeaways?

I still think the hype curve is a useful construct for PbR and any other aid fad, but we seem to have all sections of the curve happening at once: the snakeoil salesmen are out there over-selling; the bah humbug types like me are pouring cold water on it; and loads of experimentation and learning is already propelling us towards a more realistic grasp of where/when PbR might be useful and how it needs to evolve (the plateau of productivity), much faster than the comparable curve for, say, microfinance.

What have I missed?

And here’s today’s vlog – lots of advice on my first one last week (thanks to all). Result: I will do these as a supplementary to original thinkpieces (not book reviews or guest posts, obvs) and don’t worry, they are not going to replace the written version. Any more feedback v welcome – done like this, they don’t take much time, but I’m still not sure how much they add to text blogging.