Duncan Green's Blog, page 75

Links I Liked

UK parliamentary procedures ht Esther Webber

Turns out she has a genius for political theatre as well as social media. AOC is having a ball now Congress has reopened.

The seven types of policy makers and what they mean for getting your research used

Billions of pounds of UK aid are failing to reduce poverty, a new report finds; Why? tl;dr DFID is good, but the rest of the UK government hasn’t a clue (or is using the money for something else)

If you want to expand your reading horizons (a lot) check out book hoover Dave Evans’ personal blog and January reading recommendations Example: “The difference between war and peace is as follows: in war, the poor are the first to be killed; in peace, the poor are the first to die. For us women, there’s another difference too: in war, we get raped by those we do not know.” From Woman of the Ashes, by Mia Couto

The blogosphere loves a spat, and some people are always happy to oblige. Branko Milanovic weighs in on long term global poverty trends, and largely supports Jason Hickel in his scrap with Stephen Pinker and Bill Gates.

They in turn were basing their optimism on the work of Our World in Data. Here’s a brilliant long read (and great teaching resource) on how we calculate historical poverty rates going back to the 1200s. And here’s the infographic that sent Bill Gates into ecstasies.

 

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Audio Summary for FP2P posts week beginning 4th Feb

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What is different about how INGOs do Adaptive Management/Doing Development Differently?

experiment by Christian Aid Ireland (CAI). The paper really adds to our knowledge of AM/Doing Development Differently:

It looks at the work of an INGO, when most formally identified AM practice and research involves big bilaterals like DFID
Linked to that, the focus is on how AM interacts with the partnership model that lies at the heart of CAI’s work – especially partnership with local NGOs. Most AM is either working directly with the state, or has a more top-down relationship with NGOs.
The CAI programme targets 7 conflict and violence affected states – most AM work has so far taken place in relatively stable settings
It is one of the first attempts to apply AM to an organizationally complicated programme – most previous AM projects have been single project, single management structure. This involves several countries, is multi-tiered, and covers a complex set of relationships and topics – governance, human rights, peace-building, gender equality.

According to Gráinne Kilcullen of CAI, 4 innovations characterize the programme:

A Theory of Change was developed with each partner in each country, and at country programme level. The ToC are built on the answers to an admirably simple set of questions: what change do you want to see?; what are your assumptions about how that change will happen?; what initial strategies will you try out?; how will you know whether they have worked?
Strategy Testing, taken from the work of The Asia Foundation: this is a process of reflecting on and adapting the theory of change, on an annual or 6 monthly basis. Are these assumptions still true, are our strategies helping? CAI support this process in country, along with ‘critical friends’ from outside the programme. The discussion also helps CAI feed the results machine.
To bring in evidence, the programme uses Outcome Harvesting to capture results as they occur
There is a focus on bringing in community perspectives, where discussion with programme participants ask about what changes are happening, why and what could be improved?

Lessons from the previous five year programme under Irish Aid told the story that partners found target setting too restrictive given the complex issues and contexts. So CAI asked Irish Aid to try something different in the next programme phase (2017-2021). Irish Aid agreed, but wanted to continue with a traditional matrix of targets and results framework. The compromise was that the CAI core team in Dublin took on the reporting burden, drawing on information from the outcome harvesting and strategy testing processes, and so tried to free partners from the linearity and pressures of traditional aid.

The discussion on the role of partners was one of the most interesting aspects. In some places, eg according to Christian Aid’s Alicia Malouf, in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, their reaction was ‘‘this is exactly what we need. Before it was all results and numbers – but this allows us to capture how we respond to eg unpredicted actions by the Israeli government.’ Alicia added, ‘Partners like outcome harvesting. It allows them to step back, analyse their contribution and communicate to other donors as well as us. When we are not sure if we contributed to some changes, outcome harvesting allows us to say we may have helped – it produces greater richness and understanding of partners and the challenges they face. Partners are slowly realizing that we are funding them to sit, think, reflect, not just report on targets. It is an opportunity that few others encourage.’ Some are asking for guidance to do strategy testing for themselves and with their own partner organizations.

In other cases, partners struggle: they may have started out as instinctive ‘dancers with the system’, but decades of traditional aid have to some extent rewired them to work and think linearly, especially at field level. If they are single issue NGOs, it is very hard for them to say “we specialise in budget monitoring, but that doesn’t seem to be working, so what do we do instead?” In addition, partners typically rely on multiple donors, and if the rest are all doing traditional aid, it is hard to be truly adaptive in just one part of your work.

Three final thoughts from me:

Is AM designed for a high trust or low trust environment? To empower good, dynamic partners by giving them the flexibility they need, or to introduce accountability and control mechanisms for when recipients turn out to be a bit rubbish? In practice, there will always be a mix of both kinds, and AM design needs to combine the two approaches, but people tend to argue on the basis of one or the other. Not helpful.
If programmes like these really do better than traditional linear programmes, then the pressure for results and value for money should be our friend. But people experience the opposite – why is that? One speaker thought it was because in DFID’s 4E model for VFM, economy and efficiency in practice take precedence over the other two Es – effectiveness and equity. Chuck in a donor preference for predictability and ‘no surprises’ and AM is likely to struggle. But I still think the answer is to try to win the battle on results and VFM, not reject them.
Once again, the question of delivery models came up. Aid is starting to resemble a supermarket supply chain of connected players: donors, fund managers, implementers, NGOs, civil society organizations and communities. If AM is to prosper we need to understand the drivers and blockers in that chain – how each of them reacts to it, how it interacts with their incentives.

Great stuff – please read the report if you can.

 

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Inequality kills: the cold, wet fate of refugee rights in Lebanon

how Lebanon can tackle inequality and protect the rights of millions of Syrians.

Back in 2015, I remember standing in a damp, soaked tent in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, watching kids run around in the snow in slippers. Their parents looked on in desperation because they knew they would never be able to dry them off, or treat their children properly if they (inevitably) got sick. In response to the look on my face, a Syrian refugee mother said to me: ‘But still better than waiting for the bombs to drop or armed men to come for their brothers, fathers and sons; to never see them again’.

Four years on, we are looking at another winter, another storm, and more fundraising.

The violence that drove refugees from Syria is deliberate. The poorest, most vulnerable among them are particularly at risk. Like elsewhere, refugees tend to settle in poorer communities –  where they could afford rent and services. This is also a decision – though not one where refugees have much agency. The longer crises last, the more they can add to social tensions in such communities. Where resources are already scarce, the poorer among the Lebanese and Syrians find themselves competing for essential services. The lack of financial support to poorer communities (municipalities) of Lebanon from the government in Beirut is also a decision. It may be an informal, opaque decision by an elite-captured, highly unequal political establishment – but it is still a decision.

This situation is not exclusive to Lebanon. Most people on the move tend to drift toward communities they can access, and where they can afford housing and services. This comes with a high cost – both for those displaced by conflict and for those whose communities they come to call their temporary homes.

The poorer Lebanese municipalities tend to host the most refugees. Political deadlock, elite capture and corruption has meant that those municipalities do not get enough attention or cash from the capital. The international community is heavily involved in trying to fill the gap, through the UN-Lebanon crisis response mechanisms, including with direct support to municipalities.

I was a child when my family left the USSR and received asylum in the US. As new arrivals in the poorer communities of racially-divided, wealthy Boston, I felt parallels when I visited the snow-capped, makeshift, damp tents in the Bekaa valley. They seemed a world away from the bustling, construction-hub of luxury Beirut. The inequalities are striking. There are many differences between being a Soviet refugee in 1990s Boston and a Syrian in today’s Lebanon. The soggy tents are one – the refugee rights another. We came to the US with nothing, but we had the right to protection (including documentation), the right to claim housing and social services, when we needed it. And if we ran into trouble, the right to due process, and police protection. We had the right to become citizens of a country we came to call home: the right to a future.

Lebanon is a small country where sectarian structures are central to the form of government. This, combined with historical tensions with Syria and the Palestinian refugees already in Lebanon for generations, means that the ‘rights’ of these refugees to housing, water, food, education, livelihoods and integration are up for constant debate in a highly fragile, sensitive political environment.

It’s not all bad news. The international community has learned a lot during the Syria refugee response. There is greater emphasis on supporting local communities as well as refugees (to avoid inadvertently stoking social tensions and grievance over who gets aid and who doesn’t). And the aid community has worked hard to increase focus on governance in Lebanon, and to engage local and national authorities on aid effectiveness, inequalities and rights. We are keen to help Lebanon look ahead to inclusive development and prevent a recurrence of conflict.

We need to ask more questions about how we can better support Lebanon to govern in a way that distributes wealth more equally, boosts accountability and active citizenship. And doesn’t leave those who are not Lebanese shivering in the cold.

 

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Thinking and Working Politically in Economic Development Programmes – Some Sprints and Stumbles from a DFID Programme in Kyrgyzstan

Guest post by Andrew Koleros, Programme Director with Palladium (left), and David Rinnert, Deputy Head of Office and Governance Adviser with the UK Department for International Development’s (DFID) Central Asia Office. The views expressed in this blog do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies or Palladium’s views.

In November 2018 the FP2P blog posted a couple of instalments (here and here) reflecting on some of the successes of the Thinking and Working Politically (TWP) ‘movement’ in the past years and the challenges ahead. As a funder working for and an implementer working with DFID, we would like to further explore a question Duncan raised there: how to create the right tools to support other sectors to adopt and replicate TWP (outside of the governance bubble), without watering it down?

In response, we’d like to share some of the successes and challenges that we’ve seen in our work to date applying TWP on a DFID-funded programme in Kyrgyzstan. The Governance in Action programme in Kyrgyzstan seeks political solutions to economic problems. It brings together Members of Parliament, non-state actors and Government officials to work collaboratively, and in their shared interest, to address pressing market issues. These coalitions focus on fostering the minimum level of government action required rather than long shopping lists of unrealistic government reforms. It’s a TWP programme that works less in the “governance bubble”, and on the TWP uptake spectrum would be located more on the “revolutionary uptake” end.

A good example of how the programme works is its support to revising a Law on Internal Trade and Tax Codes, which requires Kyrgyz small businesses to pay a number of fees to domestically market their goods. This prevents many small businesses from selling their products in supermarkets and increases the price of goods for those that do. The project worked with concerned MPs, government and business representatives to collectively address the issue. The coalition gained agreement on the need to revise the current law in order to create a fairer trade environment in a way that benefited both small businesses and supermarkets.

This example is also a good way to discuss some of the successes and challenges the programme is facing implementing TWP in an economic development programme, and what lessons we can learn from this for future “toolkits” and programmes in other sectors. For example, we identified the internal trade issue itself through political economy analysis largely led by international expertise, who didn’t have much local experience or expertise in the sector, working with local staff who understood the sector and knew the major players in the value chain, but were new to TWP and challenged by this new way of thinking and working.  This led us to relying too much on international expertise at the start of the project, and an underestimation from the outset on the investment that would be needed to build a team able to work in a locally-led, politically smart, iterative and collaborative ways.

In addition, high quality political economy analysis is key to identify “solvable” political constraints that are not too “easy” (ie issues that might have been solved without programme support) or too “hard” (ie unrealistic for a development intervention to change). Mainstreaming rigorous political economy analysis in development remains a challenge (eg see here). However, we found that the economic development focus allowed us to look beyond “traditional” governance stakeholders and towards the identification of tangible constraints, such as those faced by businesses in the internal trade issue.

Specific TWP challenge
                   Challenges     
Existing toolkits or approaches
How we address it in our programme


Theory of [systems] Change
Identifying the key changes you achieve as a result of an (adaptive and) politically savvy approach (e.g., changes to institutional reforms as well as changes to economic constraints)
Traditional Theory of Change approaches; PDIA; Adapting the systems ‘toolkit’ (e.g., causal loop diagrams, social network analysis, etc.)
Drew from systems thinking toolkit to develop a theory of change which included multiple pathways from intervention to change in inclusive growth issues


Identifying quick wins (‘low hanging fruit’) to build morale/momentum
Working on a number of issues in a number of sectors in the absence of a more coherent strategy risks resulting in a series of interesting but ultimately unconnected results
Political economy analysis;

Inclusive growth diagnostics; other diagnostics approaches
Agreement on rigour of analysis in issue selection (built into programme tools), and agreement on a balance between the number of sectors and number of issues we work on


Getting people to both think AND work politically
Ensuring that PEA is a process not a product requires not only a capacity-building component but also a mind-set shift. And a recognition that this may require a different type of team
Existing PEA approaches and learning from applied PEA; see eg Everyday PEA
Building an organisational culture around “how the programme works”, embedding PEA process into programme tools


Finding and recruiting development entrepreneurs
The small pool of individuals who have the necessary qualifications the funder seeks (relevant sector and country experience, donor experience, able to lead a team and implement TWP/PEA) essentially sets up teams for failure
Value-based and competency-based recruitment;

Training for individuals and teams to implement TWP tools
Recognising that we may not get the ‘full package’ in any one individual, and building teams with different but complementary skills/experience


Doing the M, the E and the L in practice – Logframes and Learning for TWP
Most donors require a results framework for accountability purposes but there are challenges around a) data collection; b) measurement (eg How to measure change in a politically savvy programme?),  c) data quality and d) learning (How do we ensure that ‘real-time learning’ really happens and is not just a buzz word).
Logframe alternatives (e.g., search frames), flexible indicators (e.g, basket or bedrock indicators); data collection tools for PEA and other political analysis; different development evaluation approaches
Holding quarterly strategy reflections with DFID which have helped to build trust and a close relationship;

Logframe doesn’t prescribe issues to work on or particular results, but uses basket indicators to capture types of results; includes an output holding us to account for being an adaptive programme

We also drew from the “systems toolkit” to develop a theory of change based less on cause and effect logic and more around “how change happens” in a complex market system like the agriculture sector in Kyrgyzstan. This helped us to map out the different ways that our coalition’s work might address the economic issue: working through parliament (e.g. revising an existing law); working with or through parliamentary mechanisms (e.g., using parliamentary oversight) or working directly with the executive branch (e.g. a new ministerial policy or regulation). Our Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning system then captures results as they happen. However, it is a long path before implementation of the revised law will lead to actual material benefits for local businesses and help reduce poverty. So measures of success on the programme are a mix of both capturing stories of “what changes happened” as well “how and why the change happened”.

Our experience has helped us to adapt the Governance in Action programme in Kyrgyzstan over the last two years, but has led us to further questions for reflection, including the following:

How can implementers better recruit and build teams that possess both the technical skills and experience needed within a programme’s particular sector focus, while ensuring they’re able to work in locally-led and politically smart ways? What should funders be looking for in potential implementers and project teams when commissioning projects?
Given the long and adaptive nature of the pathways between intervention and impact when thinking and working politically, what should ‘success’ look like in the short and medium term, and how do we capture this in programme MEL tools?

Overall we hope that those working on programmes might find some similar experiences and challenges and we encourage everyone to begin sharing these more widely to help us all learn how best to transition the TWP approach into the mainstream of large-scale development programming.

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No Matter Where You Live, the World is More Unequal Than You Realise, according to new research

Update on some interesting research by Franziska Mager and Christopher Hoy. It builds on a December post on the World Bank Development Impact blog, covering more countries  and expanding the discussion to people’s misperceptions about the level of national inequality as well as their misperceptions of their own positions.

New research by the Australian National University conducted in collaboration with Oxfam reaffirms that there is serious concern about inequality among ordinary people according to representative surveys of over 30,000 people across 10 different countries that make up over one-third of the world population. But our most striking finding is that even across a set of very different countries, people’s concerns about inequality is actually based on large misperceptions.

The new findings show people tend to underestimate the extent of inequality in their country and think they are ‘middle class’ regardless of whether they are actually rich or poor. In other words, people are bothered with inequality even though they don’t realise how bad it is – and often poorer people don’t realise they are among the poorest in their society.

What’s more, despite these rosy notions about the scale of inequality and erroneous self-placement, across all countries in the sample – from Mexico to Morocco to the US – poor and rich people alike want inequality to be much lower.

Underestimating the level of inequality

When respondents were asked to select one of six ordinal income distributions to represent their country, ranging from perfectly equal (which does not exist anywhere in the world) to extremely unequal (based on data from South Africa), only 20% of people picked the closest ‘correct’ distribution to what was the case in their country, and 49% picked a too-egalitarian distribution.

Figure 1: Stylised range of income distributions. Options were based on actual distributions of income in some of the countries that were surveyed (except ‘somewhat equal’ and ‘completely equal’).

In other words, in many cases people drastically underestimated to what extent economic resources are concentrated in the hands of the richest. And these misperceptions matter: they often predict what people want done. For example, those who perceived higher levels of inequality were significantly more likely to agree or strongly agree that the gap between rich and poor was too large – irrespective of country.

We all think we are ‘middle class’

What’s more, from the UK to India to Australia, people generally do a very poor job at estimating where their own income places them relative to others in their country. An overwhelming majority actually wrongly think they are in the middle of their national income distribution, when this often isn’t the case. Whether you are relatively poor or relatively rich, you are likely to think your income places you roughly in the middle of incomes in your country (figure 2).

Figure 2: Self-placement in one of 5 income quintiles across 10 countries. This question was asked immediately following the question shown in Figure 1.

Again, this self-perception matters a great deal: people who mistakenly think they are poor have a greater preference for equality compared to people who think they are relatively rich.

Among the ones who are actually relatively poor, those who perceived themselves to be in the bottom half of the income distribution were on average 20 percentage points more likely to prefer lower levels of inequality than poor people who perceived themselves to be in the top half of the income distribution.

Just how much money do our bosses make?

A third common misperception about inequality is that peoples massively underestimate the ratio of the wages of CEOs relative to ordinary workers , yet still, they’d like them to be much lower. This finding once more reaffirms that people are bothered by pay gaps even though they don’t realise how bad they are. For example, in South Africa – the country with the highest known CEO to worker wage ratio, according to Bloomberg, and one of the worst places in the world for income inequality – respondents think this ratio is about 28:1, and would like it to be as low as 9:1. In reality the pay ratio is estimated at over 500:1.

Perceptions matter for policy makers

The research concludes that policy makers who are interested in understanding public support for redistribution should be as concerned — if not more so — about people’s perception of income concentration and wealth differences even when these don’t closely match reality. It bolsters a growing body of evidence that suggests people’s perception of inequality and their perceived position is a better predictor of their preferences for redistribution than what is objectively the case.

As for campaigners, the lesson is that the more they can raise public awareness of the true extent of inequality, the greater the public call for action is likely to be.

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Links I Liked

The art and science of measurement in aid and development. Nice write up of latest LSE lecture by the brilliant Claire Hutchings of OPM

Major western brands pay Indian garment workers 11p an hour. Important new research on the home workers who ‘finish’ garments – adding buttons, tassels, embroidery etc

Check out Alex Evans’ latest venture. It’s called the Collective Psychology Project

The miracle method for sustainable rice that scientists dismissed. Turns out that SRI is also better for the climate.

Excellent discussion on the realities of ‘Research into Policy’ btw James Georgalakis of IDS and Paul Cairney of Stirling University

Historian Rutger Bregman and Oxfam’s Winnie Byanyima made a formidable tag team on tax and injustice at Davos. The guy from Yahoo didn’t know what hit him.

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Audio Summary (8m) of FP2P posts, week beginning 28 January

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How can digital bring Millennials into International Development? A ginger session with Save the Children

earlier this week certainly got the room’s attention. But then the speaker was pretty extraordinary. Mariéme Jamme, whose online bio includes this para:

‘Mariéme grew up in rural Senegal, from an oligarch mother who gave her away at an early age and later was raised in various foster houses including in an orphanage and then trafficked as a young prostitute to Paris. She experienced considerable hardship during her childhood and did not have a formative education until the age of 16 years old when she taught herself how to read and write.’

From there she’s gone on to become a celebrated tech and startup guru, who recently set up https://www.iamthecode.org/, which aims to train a million women and girls to code over the next decade.

Her reason for disliking Save (and all other INGOs, to be fair) is that ‘they are too safe…. Poor people are not waiting for them any more, they are getting on with it.’

Mariéme, David Ripert and I were running a ‘ginger session’ trying to jolt senior managers into thinking radical new thoughts about the direction of the organization (is there a proper name for these slots?). David is a tech guru (Youtube, Google) and now a Save the Children UK trustee. I summarized my ‘Fit for the Future 2.0’ paper on new directions for INGOs.

In the presence of such digital wisdom, I managed to restrain my usual ‘bah humbug’ rant about the over-hyping of tech solutions and listened a bit harder to what they were saying. Which was that a whole generation of dynamic entrepreneurial young people, North and South, want to ‘do it themselves’. Disintermediation is their instinctive response. They don’t think INGOs or governments have a clue, and reckon they can do better if they just get on a plane or a bus and go and help people.

According to David, a bunch of youtube influencers and others recently set up ‘Love Army’ (I guess Joy Division was taken), crowdsourced over $2m for the Rohingya, and then took it to Cox’s Bazaar and distributed it to the refugees.

Alarm bells – this could so easily become the traditional post-disaster nightmare of well-meaning but inexperienced do-gooders descending on overcrowded refugee camps and chucking money around with no understanding of the impact on local power relations, economies and communities. The ensuing screw-ups then either lead to disillusionment, and the Love Army gives up on the whole thing, or require a long and painful process of re-learning the lessons absorbed by previous generations.

But if old lags just moan and say ‘Well done, young people. Now hand over the money and we’ll take it from here’, no-one will listen. For many millennials, INGOs and the aid establishment are part of the problem, not the solution.

What to do? In these kinds of meetings, there are often lots of warm words about how big organizations are going to get agile, funky and down with the kids. But those declarations of imminent reinvention tend to ignore the internal power structures and incentives that perpetuate the obstacles, so unsurprisingly, stuff doesn’t shift. Anyway, revamping venerable brands like Save or Oxfam with millennials sounds like a really tough gig and might be counterproductive, with a risk we would lose our more traditional supporters along the way.

So what kind of tactics/ internal theory of change might unblock the path to funkiness? At this point a light bulb went on and I brought in something from my paper – start-ups/spin offs tick several boxes. They can escape from the fustiness of long-established brands, and be innovative and agile without the dead hand of corporate culture, sign off etc to hold them back.

David pointed to the example of the Children’s Society in the UK, which has launched (and funded) an initiative with Bethnal Green Ventures, a ‘tech for good’ incubator, to support ‘new ways of using technology to address some of most serious issues facing vulnerable young people.’

In Save’s case, that could mean signing up with Love Army or supporting similar new initiatives, and helping out with the surprisingly tricky task of getting support to people who need it without screwing up. But the Save brand would have to take a back seat. It might also mean accepting and finding ways to work with the fact that the youtube influencers or other celebs are likely to insist on a bit of disaster tourism in exchange for their engagement.

Overall, I’m guessing that the people there will mainly remember Mariéme, who is a truly extraordinary woman, rather than sage advice on digital. But the good news is that she promised to do a podcast with me at some point, preferably in the restaurant at Brixton prison, where she has a project, so watch this space.

 

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How Does Fair Trade go from inspiring examples to Transforming Capitalism?

about how to transform capitalism

I think I’m sitting on a goldmine of examples that could help efforts to transform business and economies. I lead a global community of 330 real examples of alternative business models. These are the social enterprises that make-up the WFTO community, and I need advice on how they can galvanise efforts to achieve broader change.

Positive deviants like our Fair Trade Enterprises are great. They inspire and support each other whilst having direct impact on the people they’re built to benefit (about 1m workers, farmers and artisans in 70+ countries, north and south). But I joined this community primarily to broaden its impact. This means working with new actors, taking our examples to other movements/thought-leaders and supporting them to drive the economic changes that are so sorely needed.

And the moment seems ripe. Global debates have evolved, new economic thinking has emerged, new challenges (like inequality) have come to the fore and shareholder capitalism is now recognised as driving ever-growing inequality and ecological destruction (it has become supercharged in recent decades). Our WFTO community is well placed to show that alternatives are possible, and explicitly propose models that fundamentally shift the power structures and drivers within businesses themselves.

Alternatives like PODIE in Sri Lanka exemplify our 300+ members. They are structured to give their 2,000 spice farmers majority control on their board and ensure all profits are used to benefit these farmers. Other examples are Township Patterns in South Africa or Global Mamas in Ghana, businesses that exist solely to support artisan-owned producer groups, reinvesting profits for that purpose. Or Maquita in Ecuador, which runs several social businesses, investing all profits to benefit their community and ensures communities are represented on their board. In India, models like Creative Handicrafts and Last Forest demonstrate worker and farmer ownership can compete with profit hungry apparel factories and clothing outlets. Or Mahaguthi in Nepal, which protects its social mission by requiring all profits are reinvested to benefit its workers and artisans. The chief executives of such businesses aren’t pressured to drive down costs and squeeze their suppliers. On the contrary, the workers and farmers are the voices that dominate their board rooms, forcing management to run the business in their interests. You can hear their stories on our podcast series, FairTradio.

Imagine most firms and factories operated like these, giving power and priority to their workers, or that brands invested the value they capture to eliminate their environmental impacts and benefit their communities. Suddenly, we wouldn’t live in a world of cost-cutting and profiteering, but a world where businesses serve a social mission. This would change our economies from one based on greed and inequality to one built to benefit society.

Such a broader transformation needs deep changes in the underlying business ecosystem. This means a transformation in accounting rules, business schools, legislative frameworks (e.g. legal forms), tax codes, business regulations and trade agreements so they truly foster mission-led businesses (rather than profit maximising ones). Perhaps most critical is to reshape financial markets so they’re designed to finance mission-led businesses.

So back to my dilemma: I have a small(ish) team, focused on verifying and supporting our members (the Fair Trade Enterprises). We cannot lead the charge to remake the global business ecosystem, but we can be part of efforts to legitimise and inspire it. Think of us as a Proof of Concept. So who do we need to link up with to catalyse this debate? Should we find a star-economist or academics (e.g. should we chase Piketty or Sachs, trying to get them to use our example to show a new business world is possible) ? Or deepen our links with emerging movements demanding a new economic paradigm, or the social solidarity economy and social economy movements? All these have pros and cons, but we are at least in discussion with all these movements (I speak at their conferences, cross-promote on social media etc). There may be others that should be on our radar also.

The broader Fair Trade movement (beyond WFTO) is itself global and going strong. For instance, there are now over 2,000 Fair Trade towns powered by grassroots groups promoting Fair Trade. This movement focuses on promoting Fair Trade products and achieving practice change in mainstream businesses (including via regulation) – both critically important goals! But what the Fair Trade movement doesn’t focus on is promoting alternatives to shareholder capitalism, nor has it focused on shaping a business ecosystem that would foster such alternatives.

One obstacle is that people think “ah yes, I already know about and support Fair Trade – I drink the coffee/wolf down the chocolate,”. They’re often referring to the commodity certification system. That’s not who we (WFTO) are. We work with our friends who run the Fairtrade commodity system, who offer a solution to any business to buy raw materials like cocoa, sugar or cotton on Fairtrade terms. They work to get Fairtrade products onto the shelves of mainstream supermarkets.

Our approach is a bit different: we bring together businesses that are built in their entirety on benefiting their producers (including all their supply chains, their own premises and their very business DNA). This means the mission is reflected in their core structural features (like board, constitution, profit-distribution model) as well as in their behaviour and in their impacts (this is what our system verifies). We are essentially the social enterprise wing of the Fair Trade movement. But it’s often a challenge to convince people to think beyond commodities and Fairtrade products. This is why we have a communications challenge in getting the attention of movements/advocates/thought-leaders so they understand how we can help.

Our potential to support initiatives to transform economies is huge. But we need to decide where to focus our efforts. I think we have four viable options. Which should be our priority?

OPTIONS

Work with academics (research into our models will galvanise the interest of other movements)
Focus on the social and solidarity or social economy movements
Partner with INGOs to promote these business models in their campaigns and programmes
Present Fair Trade Enterprises as part of new economic paradigms

Advice please – and cast your vote (you’re allowed two each)!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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