Duncan Green's Blog, page 153

Marginalised youth say ‘Enough!’ Guest post by Alcinda Honwana

Alcinda Honwana is Visiting Professor of International Development at the Open University. She will be giving a talk “‘Enough!’ Will Youth Protests Drive Political Change in Africa?” as part of the London School of Economics Africa public lecture series on Wednesday 18 November 2015 at 6.30 pm.

Young people have caught the attention of politicians as their backing of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Bernie Sanders in the US, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece changes the electoral landscape. In Africa they changed governments in Egypt, Tunisia, Senegal and Burkina Faso, writes Alcinda Honwana.

The world has never been so young. Today there are more young people than ever before with about 1.8 billion between the ages of 10 and 24. The majority of them live in developing countries. But global economic policies over the past decade mean that young people’s transitions to adulthood have become increasingly uncertain and a growing number of young women and men, both educated and non-educated, find themselves unemployed or underemployed, and have to improvise livelihoods outside of dominant economic and familial frameworks. While chronological age may define some of them as adults, they are still waiting to attain the social markers of adulthood: earning a proper living, being fully independent, establishing families and becoming taxpayers.

In West Africa the vernacular term “youthman” describes those who are stuck in this liminal position. In the US and UK, expressions such as the “boomerang” or the “yo-yo” generation have been used to describe graduates who return home and continue to rely on their parents for support. In Japan, “freeters” or “parasite singles” refer to the growing number of young people who have difficulty entering the labour market or starting their own families.  In Italy “bambuccioni” evokes the image of grown-up males still living with their parents. Similar terms appear in cultures around the world. I use the term “waithood” for those people trapped in a seemingly endless wait for adulthood, struggling with unemployment and underemployment. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) in a new report released 8 October, a survey of 26 countries found “more than half of young adults [25−29 years old] had still not completed the transition to stable or satisfactory work” – the “waithood” generation.

On 23 October 2015 it was reported that in Britain a fifth of young adults are staying in the family home until they are at least 26, in part because people under 30 have suffered a fall in average incomes of about 20% since the 2008 crash. The ILO also found that in 2014 youth unemployment rates exceeded 20 per cent in two-thirds of the European countries, and in the EU as a whole 43 per cent of employed young people were in temporary work.

The report further indicates that “youth in developing countries continue to be plagued by working poverty stemming from the irregularity of work and lack of formal employment and social protection. In 2013, more than one-third (37.8 per cent) of employed youth in the developing world were living on less than US$2 per day. … In most low-income countries, at least three in four young workers fall within the category of irregular employment, engaged either in own-account work, contributing family work, casual paid employment or temporary (non-casual) labour. Nine in ten young workers remain in informal employment.”

Globally “the youth unemployment rate has been consistently close to three times that of the adult unemployment rate since 1995.”

In interviews from my book The Time of Youth: Work, Social Change, and Politics in Africa young people described the extemporaneous and precarious nature of their waithood lives: “desenrascar a vida” (to eke out a living) for Mozambicans;  “débrouillage” (making do) for Senegalese, Tunisians and other Francophone speakers; or “just getting by” for South Africans and English speakers. This experience of improvisation, or “making it up as you go along,” entails a conscious effort to assess challenges and possibilities and plot scenarios conducive to the achievement of specific goals.

Increasingly this involves reacting and challenging the political and economic establishment. Some marginalised young people in Africa and Europe are joining Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram. Recently young Africans have been at the forefront of demonstrations and riots in Burkina Faso, South Africa and Congo-Brazzaville. In the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street Movement, the Indignados Movement in Spain, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong and the numerous street protests across many African and Latin American countries, young people were shouting: Enough!

Jobs matter, and the un- and under-employed generation is standing up for itself and confronting the status quo across the world. In the past year it has taken a key role in electoral politics in Britain, the US, Canada, Greece and Spain. Political marginalisation, social inequalities and economic crisis are pushing this generation into radical action.

 

 

Links I Liked

In 1800 there was no country with a life expectancy over 40.

Please excuse the self promotion, but if you’re in Washington Weds, please come along to discuss How Change Happens at CGD. Put the draft book up on Friday, and the first review went up same day – not that’s what I call fast feedback.

Has the governance agenda lost its mojo? The wonderful Sina Odugbemi worries that ‘the thrill is gone’, but I think it’s just the arrogance that is waning, making way for more interesting approaches to power and politics.

According to the Economist, Africans are mainly rich or poor, not middle class (growing v slowly). That should worry democrats

Could Agile software development + Adaptive Programming = A new dawn for ICT for development? Thoughtful from Matt

‘Every 5 years in China, man

They make a new development plan’

China’s 13th 5 year plan, presented through a 3m music jingle. Indescribable.  [h/t Alice Evans]

The Guardian’s Stephen Collins nails the discomfort of a British Halloween 

 

What I like about this strip cartoon on the need for an SDG on extreme wealth is the wider satire on aidspeak

 

First Draft of ‘How Change Happens’ now ready – anyone want to read it?

Now for the scary part. Can I ask for a big favour? The first draft of my next book, How Change Happens, is ready,

They probably need to read this book

and I’m keen to get comments from as wide a range of people as possible. Deadline 10th December. Anyone out there prepared to chip in? If so, you can download the whole manuscript here  – it’s not pretty but click on the page icon on the RHS and it should work – let me know if there’s a problem. Just below it is the page for the outline, in case you want to read before deciding whether to download the whole (160 page) thing. If you are able to comment, please do so in the comments section on this blog, or by email to acoryndon[at]Oxfam[dot]org[dot]uk.

The book will be published by Oxford University Press in October 2016 (in hardback, and free online as a pdf – props to them for going full Open Access). It will be accompanied by an online platform with extra materials, and a MOOC (online educational course). All v funky and exciting.

I’m now making a disorienting transition from a year in an ivory tower (well, my spare bedroom) writing to non stop consultation and powerpoint. Internal conversations next week in the US at Oxfam America, USAID and a public meeting at CGD in Washington next Wednesday at 2pm, if you’re around. Something at DFID later in November, then Melbourne and Canberra (tba). There may be other events to follow – I’ll keep you posted.

Here’s the basic pitch for the book, from the outline:

‘‘There is nothing permanent except change’, Heraclitus, 6th century BC

‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.’ Karl Marx, 1845

Human society is full of would-be ‘change agents’, a restless mix of campaigners, organizers and development workers, both individuals and organizations, set on transforming the world. They want to improve public services, reform laws and regulations, guarantee human rights, achieve greater recognition for any number of issues or simply be treated with respect.

Striking then, that universities have no Department of Change Studies, to which social activists can turn for advice and inspiration. Instead, scholarly discussions of change are fragmented with few conversations crossing disciplinary boundaries, or making it onto the radars of those actively seeking change.

This book brings together the latest research from a range of academic disciplines and the evolving practical understanding of activists. Drawing on many first-hand examples from the global experience of Oxfam, one of the world’s largest social justice NGOs, as well as the author’s 35 years of studying and working on international development issues, it tests ideas on How Change Happens and sets out the latest thinking on what works to achieve progressive change.’

A student at LSE asked a colleague recently ‘isn’t he that bloke who keeps banging on about his book?’ Oh dear, and still a year to go til publication……….

A nice example of how government-to-government peer pressure can lead to innovation

Guest post from John Hammock of the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative

In your thought-provoking blog ‘Hello SDGs, what’s your theory of change?’ you rightly identify peer pressure as a potentially very effective means of governments coming to internalise the SDGs in their domestic processes and influencing others to follow suit. Let me give an instructive case study based on our experience at OPHI.

I think there is common ground that effective change must be owned by the implementers of change, not by donors or academics, not by consultants or think-tanks, not by well-wishers (or even bloggers).  Change happens in government when the change is owned and this happens when the policy maker sees how the policy will help both deal with the problem in real time and help the government in power.

Let’s take the case of multidimensional poverty and its measurement.  OPHI—an academic centre—developed at the end of 2008 the Alkire Foster method to measure multidimensional poverty, giving the world a practical tool to measure many deprivations that poor people face at the same time.   Four years later, three ‘vanguard’ governments [to borrow your phrase!], Mexico, Colombia and Bhutan, had adopted the measure but take-up elsewhere was painfully slow.  Statisticians and geeks loved it, but governments were not following the starting three.

MPI 2015

That is when Mexico and Colombia made a crucial decision based on their concept of change.  Instead of going to large donors to buy the new methodology in order for them to then deliver or “sell” it to countries, they decided that change would come only if high-level policy makers from governments got involved and assumed control of the process of change. So, they created the Multidimensional Poverty Peer Network, a south-south informal network of policy makers who deal with poverty. President Santos of Colombia became the network’s first champion and presided over the opening of the first meeting of the network along with Amartya Sen in 2013.

Here we see combined solid academic grounding of a method—an operationalisation of the Sen capability approach—tied to one of the key tenets of its approach, namely that governments and people must be empowered to take control of their own development.  From its inception, southern countries owned the MPPN network. And the network was open to all governments interested in multidimensional poverty. A government did not have to have made a decision to launch an official multi-dimensional poverty index or MPI to join. The theory of change led to openness of sharing, of education of policy makers, of debate and questioning.

The MPPN is a loose, informal network of Ministers and heads of state that meets as a group once a year, though its members mount peer-to-peer missions to assist individual countries in between. It has simple, clear and focused objectives—first, to educate governments on the utility and benefits of national MPIs for public policy, leading to the adoption of MPIs as national measures to complement income and, second, to promote dialogue on the need for a global MPI as part of the SDGs.

Again, this comes from a theory of change that focuses on both the need for national level data and programmes that are effective and varied in accordance with national priorities and on the need for global comparisons to help measure global progress over time. A global MPI would give the world a clear method for measuring poverty across many of the goals of the SDGs, leading to the meeting of Goal 1.2 which aims to reduce at least by half the proportion of those living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions by 2030.

A theory of change is essential for long term impact in development programming. Our experience with this peer-to-peer network shows that change can be rapid if the change meets a need, gives policy makers tools for effective action, is locally owned and adapted to local realities and reflects the values of that society.  The MPPN network, which started only two years ago,  now has 40 participant governments and a number of these governments are now about to launch official national MPIs—technically solid but reflecting their own values, their own policy needs.

And here’s a 5m video on the MPI methodology

Of Sasquatches and Flexible Programming: A genuine sighting

Lisa Denney , Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute, goes in search of an elusive development beast.

Much has been written recently on the need for more flexible and adaptive development programming. This area has spawned considerable research attention across sectors, multiple workshops and communities of practice – but such ways of working in practice remain a little like the mythical sasquatch – reportedly existing but rarely seen. There are, of course, sightings, but they are rare and are far from constituting the mainstream of development programming. And often claims of sightings, when checked by others, turn out to be just footprints in the forest. So amidst the crescendoing whispers of flexible programming, I was pleased, while conducting action research for the Overseas Development Institute with the Asia Foundation in Cambodia, to sit in on what I considered to be a genuine effort to work in highly flexible and adaptive ways. This was through a process The Asia Foundation call ‘strategy testing’ (and conveniently, The Asia Foundation have just published a paper on how they’ve done it).

Flexible, adaptive programme, top right

Under a partnership with the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade roughly 15 Asia Foundation programmes are being encouraged to ‘work flexibly’. This extends from programmes related to violence against women and economic development in Bangladesh, to land reform in Vietnam, to solid waste management in Mongolia and Cambodia, the programme I have been working alongside. Undoubtedly these programmes – like all others that claim to work flexibly – exist on a spectrum in which there are varying degrees of embrace of flexibility. There is a big difference, for instance, between changing some inputs in your logframe once or twice, to regularly revising your theory of change (and thus also your programme activities) to reflect changing dynamics. The strategy testing session I sat in on suggested this programme lies somewhere towards the more flexible end of this spectrum, with programme teams meeting every quarter to question underlying assumptions of programming, and commit to change where required.

Here’s how it worked.

The programme team all came together for a full day set aside for ‘strategy testing’. The Country Representative joined, adding in a level of oversight, but also some fresh ideas from someone slightly outside of the day-to-day of programming. The Program Manager sketched out on a board all the aspects of current programming (focused on making Phnom Penh cleaner) and asked the team about the assumptions implicit in the belief that these strategies would get them to their developmental goal. What had the team learned over the last few months that supported or questioned those assumptions? Where assumptions were no longer certain, these were highlighted as requiring further discussion or adjustment. Key blockages to getting the desired outcome were noted. Results from monitoring of programme activities were presented. Some things were getting better, some things appeared to be getting worse and the team dug into various reasons that might explain this, ultimately deciding to make a small investment in some deeper dive research to help explain some counterintuitive results (why wasn’t a pilot project working as intended?) and help refine the programme.

After lunch, alternative programming approaches were discussed. Should some activities be ditched and new ones tried? Should multiple strategies be tried simultaneously to see which yields better results? What is required to make an extra push on activities that seem stuck? What new relationships are needed that don’t exist already? By the end of the day, the team had decided to trial a new approach to the problem (to end the monopoly contract for waste collection), while continuing the existing approach (to improve the performance of the monopoly contract holder), and to re-visit in a couple of months to see which appears to be making more ground and whether one should become the dominant approach. This was not an insubstantial change. It required bringing in new staffing expertise around legal frameworks and waste management governance, engaging with new political counterparts and, potentially, winding down existing activities and relationships with the monopoly contract provider. It fundamentally altered the theory of change, the inputs and outputs of the programme, shifting from working within the existing system to deliver improved waste collection by improving contractor performance, to changing the waste collection system to enable competition between multiple providers to drive improved performance.

As one of the team members remarked, it felt like the ground had been pulled from under their feet. And this happens every three months – with the changes, the reasons for them and the implications summarised to constitute a quarterly report. It was incredibly refreshing to see such rigorous and apparently regular critical reflection on programming choices and effects that genuinely re-oriented the programme approach. And one gets the sense that working flexibly should feel unnerving for those involved, because it requires constant motion and regular change, reflecting the fact that not only is the context evolving, but that the team’s knowledge, relationships and thus opportunities are also evolving. Flexible programming should take advantage of that. Theories of change and programme strategies are thus never complete pictures – they are a best guess at a given time based on the team’s current knowledge.

Clearly not everyone can work this way (and maybe that’s not even desirable). You need the requisite budget flexibility to divert resources (though not necessarily large amounts) quickly. You need reporting flexibility so that the donor reporting requirements don’t limit your ability to change inputs, outputs and outcomes. And you need staff who can cope in that environment – who are limber enough to jump from working one way to another within days and quickly build the necessary relationships and knowledge to do so. This is in keeping with much of the literature on working flexibly, but it also showcased ways of working flexibly in practice that could be learnt from by other programmers. ODI and the Asia Foundation have been partnering over the last 18 months to document three of these flexible programmes to see how exactly they’ve done it – more on that soon. It’s that issue that the community of practice now needs to grapple with in order to move from talking about the benefits of working flexibly, and even examples of programmes that have done it, to the tools that make it possible that others can start using.

 

 

The Joy of Blogs (and Tweets): Why Academics should take Social Media seriously

This is an edited version of a piece I wrote for the LSE International Development Blog

Before I started teaching at LSE in January, I had the impression that the academics and researchers around the school were totally social media savvy – prolific tweeters like Charlie Beckett and top blogs like LSE Impact are high up on my follow list.

It turned out the impression was, ahem, a little misleading. A good proportion of the people I have come across may be brilliant in their field, but when it comes to using the interwebs, tend to sound like the querulous 1960s judge asking ‘What is a Beatle?’ (‘I don’t twitter’). Much of life is spent within the hallowed paywalls of academic journals (when I pointed out that no-one outside academia reads them, the baffled response seemed to be along the lines of ‘and your point is?’).

So why should they rethink? Here are some initial arguments, confined to blogs and twitter (the only bits of social media I engage with). I’m sure there are lots of others – feel free to add:

Remember that a blog is a ‘web log’, i.e. an online diary. Regular blogging builds up a handy, time-saving archive. I’ve been blogging daily since 2008. OK, that’s a little excessive, but what that means is that essentially I have a download of my brain activity over the last 7 years – almost every book and papers I’ve read, conversations and debates. Whenever anyone wants to consult me, I have a set of links I can send (which saves huge amounts of time). And raw material for the next presentation, paper or book.
Making sure someone reads your research. Look no further than the excellent LSE Impact blog for evidence: here’s a quick search of their posts:

Patrick Dunleavy   argues blogging and tweeting from multi-author blogs especially is a great way to build knowledge of your work, to grow readership of useful articles and research reports, to build up citations, and to foster debate across academia, government, civil society and the public in genera l.

World Bank research on economics blogging (with regressions, natch) concluded:

‘Blogging about a paper causes a large increase in the number of abstract views and downloads in the same month: an average impact of an extra 70-95 abstract views in the case of Aid Watch (now sadly defunct) and Chris Blattman, 135 for Economix, 300 for Marginal Revolution, and 450-470 for Freakonomics and Krugman. [see regression table here]

These increases are massive compared to the typical abstract views and downloads these papers get- one blog post in Freakonomics is equivalent to 3 years of abstract views! However, only a minority of readers click through – we estimate 1-2% of readers of the more popular blogs click on the links to view the abstracts, and 4% on a blog like Chris Blattman that likely has a more specialized (research-focused) readership.’

LSE Impact for twitter users includes:

The effect of twitter on publication downloads
A short guide to Using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities


It gives you a bit of soft power (let’s not exaggerate this, but check out slide 15 of this research presentation for some evidence). Blogs are now an established part of the chattersphere/public conversation, so you get a chance to put your favourite ideas out there, and spin those of others. People in your organization may well read your blogs and tweets even if they don’t read your emails.
Blogging is a great antidote to that feeling of anticlimax and futility that comes after you send off the paper or the book manuscript, and suddenly the true indifference of the universe becomes apparent. You can keep discussing and communicating with interesting people, and keep the existential crisis at bay.
And don’t forget the free books, also known as ‘review copies’.
And the chance to publicly insult your enemies (not relevant in my case, obvs, as I don’t have any).

The counter-argument is bound to be ‘we don’t have time’, but if you take too long, that probably means the blog won’t be very accessible. Reading a blog should be like listening to the person talk, but with links. This post took me precisely 30 minutes to write, including the ‘research’.

If you’re interested in dipping your toe in the social media ocean, here are some tips for bloggers on international development and a previous effort to convince sceptics. But the best thing is just to try it and see. At the very least, follow Chris Blattman to see how it’s done.

Links I Liked

Top geek cartoonist XKCD supports World Polio Day, while managing to satirise innovation fetishists

On the other hand, for all the tech sceptics out there, here’s the price of light over the last 700 years, from Max Roser

Where to go for reliable gender stats, including that 2/3 of the world’s illiterate adults are women: the UN’s new The World’s Women 2015: Trends and Statistics

New study of examples of disabled women living in poverty successfully engaging in the market

Five (rather interesting) myths about poverty, growth & inequality from ODI’s Chris Hoy

Article summarizing World Bank’s Berk Özler’s talk, summarizing the state of evidence on Cash Transfers

Road deaths are the leading killer among the world’s 15-29 yr olds, & highest in poor countries

Handwashing awareness raising isnt normally thus funky. 2m video from Nepal [h/t and background from World Bank]

The Politics of Data – the bit the geeks forget?

Had a really thought-provoking conversation with Dustin Homer of Development Gateway last week. Development Gateway was originally set up inside the World Bank, then spun off as an independent tech organisation, and focuses on helping governments and international organizations make better use of data in their decision-making.

So far, so technocratic, but Dustin got in touch because he read my piece on the politics of SDG implementation, and it struck a chord. After years of experience, Development Gateway seems to be going through the same process of realization (and adaptation) that Twaweza in East Africa have gone through, when you see that access to data and information alone doesn’t automatically lead to any changes in policy or behaviour. DG is now doing a lot of research about how to promote data uptake, and Dustin had some intriguing initial ideas about what is really going on:

A lot of data collection and use is largely symbolic. High officials put pressure on low officials to collect it, then put it all together and present it to as an offering donors. But ‘the enabling environment for data-based decisions is often non-existent’.
That reporting burden may be symbolic, but it is huge, eating up staff time on data collection without leaving time/incentives/skills for useful analysis. Dustin was struck by a conversation with an agricultural extension worker who had two parallel data collections systems – one she had devised herself, which was actually useful in doing her work, and an entirely separate one she had to fill in for the bosses back in the ministry
Instead, Dustin has had some conversations along the lines of ‘look, if some big cheese phones up and tells me to do something, I do it, regardless of what the data tells us.’
Changing that requires champions at senior level – as Matt Andrews has found with PDIA, that can create a permissive environment that allows mid level technocrats to get on with some data-based policy
There are often pockets of data-based management, many of them at local level, where officials seem to have more latitude – and we can probably do a lot more to support them

What emerged from this is a picture of an enormous, multi-billion dollar data machine that has so far been largely supply driven by data providers and lobbyists. There isn’t enough user-centred design (going to ask decision makers what data they actually need to do their job, then helping them devise efficient ways to collect it). Some are calling for direction change toward demand-driven, locally-relevant data solutions, but too often, international reporting mandates win the day. International players often pre-suppose what is needed and offer solutions or systems that meet certain reporting requirements – but may not get used for much else.

Some are trying to push beyond this – for example, the government and local donors in Ghana tried to run the tables and did a gap analysis of its data needs, but they are still trying to rally support (and funding) to do something about it.

All the momentum behind Big Data, data scraping, etc is if anything flying ever higher above the ground level where decisions are actually being made, and if we’re not careful that could come at the expense of local decision-makers. It would be horribly ironic if the move to Big/Open Data saw citizens become mere data generators – the object of data, rather than the subject.

So where’s the demand-led, bottom-up data movement? Either at the top – something like the International Growth Centre, which would offer what amounts to a free, top level consultancy to developing country governments, or more radically, some ‘barefoot data’ movement that tries to build a new bottom-up approach to collecting data (but it would have to be data that can be aggregated to the point where it helps government decision makers). Who is the Robert Chambers of data? Would love to see some examples if you have them.

Two more general points:

There is bound to be a trade off between local relevance and comparability, both between places, and over time. How much effort should go into generating beautiful data that is only relevant to one village, and can’t be compared with any others or even with the same village a couple of years later?

Thinking back to the Twaweza example, it seems to me that we have to look much more closely at the arrows in our theory of change diagrams. You know, things like Access to Data → Better decisions. The problems always arise from the assumptions implicit in the arrows – maybe every arrow should have an explanatory footnote in our project documents.

Can we afford the super rich?

Max Lawson, Oxfam’s Head of Global Campaigns and Public Policy, unpacks the political implications of the recent Credit Suisse report on global wealth.

At the beginning of this year the Economist, a right leaning newspaper, criticised Oxfam for predicting that by 2016 the world’s wealthiest 1% would hold more net wealth than the other 99% put together, calling our projection ‘simplistic and arbitrary’.

Last week, Credit Suisse published its 2015 Global Wealth Report, with the headline that the top 1% own 50.4% of global wealth, a year earlier than we predicted.   At the same time, and with a certain grim symmetry, Credit Suisse also calculated that the bottom half of humanity, 2.4 billion adults, own just 1% of world wealth.  This of course includes most of the people in most of the countries where Oxfam works.

Whether or not this turns out to be peak inequality remains to be seen.  What is clear is that we haven’t seen this level of inequality for almost a century, not since the time of the Great Gatsby.

The Economist went on to say that far more relevant than the runaway wealth of the 1% has been the rapid growth in the income of the middle classes in emerging countries  like China, Indonesia and India in the first part of this century. It argued that this incredible good news story eclipses the wealth accruing to those at the top.

China

The Credit Suisse Report also spends some time looking at the middle class worldwide.   We know that a growing middle class has historically often been key to the development of democracies and vibrant politics. The good news is that by any measure, the growth in the numbers of middle class individuals since 2000 has been huge.  Credit Suisse estimate that the number of middle class adults has risen by 140 million or 27%.  Every region contributed to the massive expansion, but China is a huge part of the story.  China is rapidly catching up with US history – in the year 2000 it had the same wealth as the US in 1939.  Fifteen years later, it has the same wealth as the US did 33 years later (in 1972).

Inequality is growing fast in China, and it now has the second highest number of Ultra High Net Worth Individuals – UHNWIs – (9600), with fortunes over $50m. However it is coming from a relatively equal base, given the legacy of Communism and a relative lack of inherited wealth, meaning that much of this newfound wealth has been fairly evenly distributed  so far, contributing to the rising numbers of middle class individuals.   China now has the largest number of middle class adults anywhere in the world, 109 million, more than the U.S.

That contrasts with India. There, the starting point is one of much greater inequality.  In this sense China was similar

Future PM?

to Europe after the two world wars when a huge amount of wealth had been destroyed, levelling the playing field. (Interestingly China also probably holds the record for killing its UHNWI’s , executing 14 yuan billionaires in 8 years on corruption charges.)

What the Credit Suisse Report goes on to show however, is that this huge progress came to a juddering halt with the

financial crisis in 2007.  Most countries saw a big drop in middle class wealth following the crisis, and numbers have not recovered to their pre-crisis level in any region (including China) apart from North America.  In Africa, Europe and Latin America they have continued to fall since 2008.  At the same time the wealth of those at the top has continued to rapidly increase, meaning that the overall share of wealth going to the middle class has declined in all regions except China for the whole of this century, with the highest decline in North America of 16%.

Across the world since 1990 the share of national income going to workers instead of the owners of capital has steadily fallen in many countries as wages have stagnated and instead the returns to those with assets or money in the bank has continued to outpace wages and growth.   This in turn has fuelled inequality and also reduced demand in the economy. People have been able to keep buying things and governments keep going largely because of huge amounts of cheap debt, but it is far from clear how long this fragile and ultimately unsustainable economic model can continue.  Already the economic storm clouds are gathering and a new financial crisis seems not far away.

This decline in the share of income going to workers, the runaway wealth of the super-rich and now the collapse of the middle class since the financial crisis are all signs of an economic model that is increasingly running out of steam and only delivering for those at the top.  Yet it is an economic model that continues to dominate.

We can do better than this. We urgently need to get the middle classes growing again across the world, raising the incomes of ordinary families whether they are in Dar es Salaam, Dhaka or Detroit.  To do this we need to redistribute wealth away from the bank accounts of billionaires and into the wages of workers across the world.  We must reverse the hollowing out of the middle-class since the financial crisis, with all the negative implications that has for democracy and economic progress.  We must bring an end to the runaway wealth of those at the top of our society, which corrodes our politics and mutates our economy.

We know today’s extreme, obscene inequality is bad for the global economy, and bad for the future of humanity, yet as the Credit Suisse numbers so graphically demonstrate, it is rapidly getting worse and not better.  Despite much hand wringing and new found concern, there has so far been little change in the policies that have driven this great divergence.  It simply makes no economic sense to have so much money in so few hands.  Unless of course those hands are on the steering wheel of a super yacht, in which case it makes all the sense in the world.

How will the SDGs differ from the MDGs?

This piece, written with my Oxfam colleague Takumo Yamada, went up on the International Growth Centre blog earlier this week

Will the SDGs be bigger, better and more universal than their predecessor, or a bafflingly complex mishmash of

issues that fail to generate traction on decision making? They could go either way.

Now that the list is finalised, most of the SDG circus will declare victory and go home, while the remainder focuses on implementation, where much of the policy attention will focus on financing and a geekfest on metrics and indicators. Both are important. But for us, the decisive issue is the important-but-boring question of the mechanisms for reporting and following up on SDG commitments.

Who/what are the SDGs supposed to influence? There are at least four answers to that question:

Developing country budgets and policies
Wider social norms about rights and the duties of governments and others
Aid volumes and priorities (i.e. a re-run of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were mainly effective as an aid lobbying tool)
Developed country budgets and policies

Of these the first two are the most promising: aid is falling as a percentage of government revenue, while the SDGs seem unlikely to have much influence on the policies of developed countries (hope we’re wrong of course –the Swedes are making the SDGs central to all ministries’ benchmarks, ensuring policy coherence with foreign policies including climate, migration/refugees, aid, trade, tax cooperation etc., and calling on the other rich countries to do the same. The Prime Minister has formed a “High Level Group” with eight other national leaders, including Angela Merkel and Dilma Rousseff).

For each possible channel of influence, we need to think through how the SDGs could exert real traction. In the case of developing country budgets and policies, this could be through:

Remember Them?

Peer pressure: already in New York, some ‘vanguard governments’ (Colombia, Gabon, Indonesia) were talking about internalising the SDGs in domestic processes. They could be effective sources of pressure on their neighbours and others to follow suit. What kind of platform or reporting process could help them do so?

National media: always a good source of pressure on decision makers. What sort of data and media operation around the SDGs is likely to grab their interest at regular intervals over the next 15 years?

Civil Society: what do national CSOs need in order to make the SDGs an effective part of their advocacy repertoire? Civil Society gets several name checks in the final SDGs communiqué agreed by the UN, but is under siege in many countries. The implementation process could help by clearly and consciously requiring civil society participation as an integral part of implementation.

The UN Summit final document sets out some encouraging but rather vague outlines for how the implementation process will be developed. A focus on the SDGs (both implementation and review) being country-led (good, we don’t want a media circus in New York every few years with no influence on the ground) and a role for stakeholders beyond government (private sector, civil society), which should help keep things honest.

But very little of this is mandatory – lots of ‘voluntary’, ‘we encourage’, ‘countries can try X or Y’, which leaves lots of boltholes for governments who don’t like the scrutiny.

The detail is left to the UN Secretary General, who has been asked to produce a report on the way forward by early 2016, and a High Level Political Forum, which will report back next July and will then have a ‘central role’ in follow up, with a meeting every four years, and an annual progress report from the UN Secretary General in between times. The details on the Forum on the UN website are still sketchy (e.g. who’s on it), but if you are interested in whether the SDGs generate genuine traction, or a lot of hot air, that’s the place to watch over the next few years.

Our dream result? Pending some proper research, perhaps some combination of regional league tables that identify leaders and laggards and galvanise public and media pressure on government. The New York communiqué stressed opposition to creating new institutions, so perhaps the follow-up mechanisms could learn from and adapt established UN implementation processes like those for the Commission on the Status of Women (which gets rave reviews from our boss Winnie Byanyima) or the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, where a UN Commission reviews every government’s report on its performance, and has the right to consult non-government agencies for a second opinion.

The worst outcome would be if no-one pays attention to the nuts and bolts of implementation, allowing the SDGs to join the long and ignoble tradition international fora of warm words that have not led to real deeds.