Duncan Green's Blog, page 83

Who wants to be a Volunteer? Book Review

of adventure, altruism and self improvement. Volunteering is big (a $2bn industry), but is it beautiful? Learning Service: The Essential Guide to Volunteering Abroad, a 350 page tome aimed at informing and guiding would-be volunteers, left me with very mixed feelings on the subject.

The book’s instincts are good. Written by 4 authors with extensive experience in both being and organizing volunteers, they are open about some of the development disasters they have seen. Here’s one of the 4 co-authors, Zahara Hecksher:

‘I was 22 when I volunteered in Zambia. I had no experience in farming and no prior travel in Africa, but I had an almost pathological desire to fix other people’s problems. At home, I had directed that energy toward a boyfriend with a drinking problem. Now, without realizing it, I wanted to focus that energy on the people of Africa.’

A full on, can do, American bull in a china shop, Zahara arrived in her Zambian village and decided it needed a medical clinic (she had no medical training). She drew up a budget, and launched a petition urging the local youth centre to build a clinic. They refused (not least because there was no money for staff or medicines) and Zahara got frustrated and angry.

The book charts the evolution of volunteering from the 19th Century missionaries onwards. The modern version grew out of a combination of circumstances around the start of the millennium: traditional volunteer sending agencies like VSO got more picky about only sending people with specific skills, just as the internet made it much easier for would-be volunteers and start-up agencies to find each other.

That new level of disintermediation was a mixed blessing, lowering the barriers to volunteering but opening the door to a variety of flakes and charlatans. Travel agencies now routinely offer ‘voluntourism’ – a few hours in an orphanage to add feelgood to a holiday package. The trouble is that this has led to a spate of stories about sham orphanages, where poor parents are persuaded to park their kids to talk to the tourists, when they should be at school.

Guided by far too many such examples, the authors want to reform volunteering towards what they call a ‘Learning Service’, where the emphasis is on the need for would-be volunteers to first learn about the place, the people, the context and reflect upon their own strengths and weaknesses, rather than jumping in and going full-on white saviour.

Some kind of reform is clearly needed and there are already some good examples eg Development in Action. But I have to say that such was the horrible picture painted overall, that I came away thinking the arguments for banning volunteering are at least as strong as those for promoting some more respectful, thoughtful variant. Or how about a volunteer tax ($1000 per person?) to go to fund proper social services, including real orphanages?

The critique is followed by a really good and detailed guide to would-be volunteers. It treats the volunteers with kindness and respect (aid types would probably show a lot less patience). There are chapters on alternatives to volunteering, on the role of volunteers, on how to research different volunteer options, how to compare opportunities and how to sign up. The authors try to help prospective volunteers through some of the challenges they will face – curbing northern impatience, whether to bargain, how to respond to begging, what to do if you decide the organization you are placed with is corrupt.

But I found these generous instincts contradicted by two big, and to me, pretty unforgiveable gaps: firstly, there is almost no evidence cited from research on the actual impact of volunteering – just a string of anecdotes and reminiscences. There must be more than that out there, surely? What impact does sustained exposure to volunteering have on norms, community cohesion, social mobility and income? Would appreciate some links and references.

Even more alarming is the almost total absence of the volunteered-upon – the families and communities who host those 10 million arrivals every year, with all the attendant disruption and mutual incomprehension. Hundreds of volunteers are quoted in the book, talking about how much they’ve learned, how naïve they were at first etc etc. But there is hardly anything from members of the ‘community’ they are trying to help, and precious few thoughts from local NGOs either. That just feels wrong.

I first came across volunteering as a journalist in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas in the 1980s. Solidarity campaigns in Europe and North America were organizing ‘coffee brigades’ to bring in the coffee harvest in an economy under siege by the US and its proxy army of ‘Contras’. The trouble was the incoming ‘sandalistas’ knew nothing about coffee and wrought havoc on the coffee bushes. But the government reckoned it was a price worth paying for the organizing that those volunteers undertook when they went back home.

The difference now is that far too many volunteers still don’t know what they are doing, but the benefits of their naïve urge to help are too often accruing to travel agents and con artists, rather than anything more uplifting.

But if you know someone set on becoming a volunteer, and cannot dissuade them, this book would still make an excellent Christmas present.

And of course there’s no way I can finish with anything other than the ‘Who Wants to be a Volunteer’ spoof

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Payment by Results: what is the Evidence from the First Decade?

, introduces his new paper on Payment by Results, a popular new aid mechanism (see also his 2016 post on the same topic).

In a new paper, I argue that despite its public support for the idea, DFID hasn’t really tried Payment by Results, at least not in the way its proponents would define it. Of course, DFID does have several projects that look a lot like PbR. They have even more where PbR is something of an added extra. But amongst the available evidence, I couldn’t find a single full PbR project.

So it might not be surprising that my overall finding is that there’s “no evidence that PbR leads to fundamentally more innovation or autonomy, with the overall range of success and failure broadly similar to other aid projects”. Part of the battle over PbR in the coming years will be about whose fault this is. Is the problem with donors, for failing to implement a good idea? Or is the problem the idea itself? Regardless, we’ve already learned some useful lessons along the way.

Lots of Views, Little Evidence

‘Payment by Results’ is a phrase which provokes some pretty strong reactions on this blog. For some (e.g. the Center for Global Development), Payment by Results (PbR) is a fantastic idea with the potential to transform aid. Freed from the need to track inputs, aid recipients have the freedom to innovate. Donors will reward those that deliver results, making stretched aid budgets go further. For others (e.g. Robert Chambers), PbR is symptomatic of a perverse shift from participation to petty control. Donors set targets that have little relation to ‘real results’, and PbR merely helps sell aid to a sceptical public.

Stepping back, this debate is in an odd place. The two sides don’t just seem to disagree about PbR, they seem to be talking about completely different ideas. Does PbR mean a reduction in red tape, or is it yet another bureaucratic hurdle? Does it provide freedom or a strait-jacket? Does it deliver concrete results, or a mirage? There are sensible reasons why the two sides are so far apart: there is very little good evidence. With committed and sensible people, these views can only coexist because the evidence cannot currently decide between these views.

Not only is the evidence thin, it’s fragmented. Two people arguing about PbR may not recognise the other’s working definition of PbR. My own view is heavily influenced by the first such project I evaluated: a Results Based Aid project.  The UK government agreed to pay the Rwandan government for any improvements in the numbers of students sitting key exams, for three years. Other people hear PbR and think of contracts with small NGOs, or health workers, or multilateral organisations. Instead of 3 year contracts with 3 rounds of results, they may think of longer term contracts with many rounds of results. PbR means different things to different people.

With thin and fragmented evidence, people are bound to hear more from their own sector. If you’re in the WASH sector you may be very aware of a certain kind of PbR, and blissfully ignorant of an entirely different set of acronyms, practice and results.

Another PbR paper, this time with added evidence

My latest paper (here) tries to help in two ways. One, by discussing new evidence. Two, by being more systematic in the identification of that evidence. With DFID staff’s inputs, I went through all the PbR projects that they fully or partially funded. Of those 20 projects, I was able to identify useful evidence from 8. I included everything that gave sufficient information on what was actually

Still waiting….

achieved. (If you’re interest in the underlying evidence, see appendix 1 of the accompanying DFID document.)

This meant I excluded some promising projects that only had ‘lessons learnt’ type documents. I also couldn’t include one that was cancelled ‘due to suspicion of fraud’. What’s left is the boring but representative projects that make for bad gossip. There is also relevant evidence that isn’t DFID-funded or wasn’t available at the time, which isn’t included. At each stage, I invited comments on any material I was missing from the relevant DFID staff. This approach means your favourite project might be missing, but hopefully it also means the evidence is more representative.

With these 8 projects in hand, I then dusted off my MAP framework. Every PbR agreement has a Measure, an Agent and a Principal. In other words, an agreement that determines the payment, and the parties that receive and give the money. This theoretical framework allows fairly disparate projects to be compared, using theoretical insights.

What does the evidence say?

The headline is that DFID hasn’t yet done the kinds of PbR contract that proponents envisaged. The idea was to set recipients free to achieve an agreed goal. They would have enough time, space, and incentive to find the best way to achieve this. Regular feedback against the measure would be the dose of reality required. Of all the projects I had access to, I couldn’t identify any project that really matched this. Most often, they were too short term. Sometimes there was little feedback. One thing I hadn’t expected was how often a measure could be too complicated to get the attention of the relevant NGO staff, government minister or health worker.

A lot of the evidence is a kind of negative evidence. Like a cake that’s missing eggs, we see projects that didn’t deliver because they only had 80% of the required ingredients. Unfortunately, you don’t get 80% of the results in this case. If donors want to go for ‘Cash on Delivery’ aid in future (what I call ‘big PbR’), they need all the ingredients.

There is a temptation (which I think proponents have mostly avoided, to their credit) to blame donors for not implementing the idea well. Personally, I think we should be a bit more pragmatic than that: donors are constrained, and PbR is only a good idea if it is practically possible to implement given real constraints. So far, it hasn’t been.

So, is it all bad?

No. In the review, we see evidence of very successful PbR projects. These are all ‘small PbR’, where a larger project had an element involving a PbR contract. Where this targeted the right thing, it seems to have worked. However, knowing whether you’ve targeted the right thing is difficult. Some recipients are incentivised, pay more attention and achieve impressive results.

For example, in a Ugandan Results-Based Financing (RBF) project in the health sector, areas that were paid according to PbR outperformed a control group by 2.5 times. But others are incentivised, pay more attention and miss the target completely. For example, in a health project in the DRC, workers lost a third of their take home pay because their extra effort didn’t translate into extra results.

Will the real PbR please stand up?

There is enough evidence in the paper to provide ammunition for both sceptics and enthusiasts: see the paper if you’re interested.

With ‘small PbR’, we should expect to see more examples along both of these lines – PbR will not fundamentally change the range of project success or failure, rather it will act as an added extra. Sometimes the benefits will outweigh the added costs, and in other cases they won’t. With the growing evidence base, we may learn more specifics so we can increase the likelihood of success (e.g. by identifying good measures), but the upside is relatively limited.

It is of course possible that ‘big PbR’ works, but just hasn’t been tried yet. Whether it is even possible to implement remains to be seen.

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Links I Liked

give Branko Milanovic’s elephant graph some competition?

Speaking of Branko, here’s his gloriously written review of 15 authors’ attempts to chart a future for social democracy.

The son of South Sudan’s President explaining how he got his money. Extraordinary.

Federal judges in US who participated in a right-leaning economics training subsequently used more economics language and ruled more conservatively (against environmental and labor regulations, and harsher criminal sentences). ht Chris Blattman

3 countries in Africa have achieved gender parity in their cabinets/ministerial positions: Seychelles, Ethiopia and Rwanda (all 3 pretty in pink).

Since 1995, there has been consistent and significant convergence [in national GDP per capita], even between the poorest group of countries and the richest, an effect that exists even discounting China and India. Important work from Dev Patel, Justin Sandefur and Arvind Subramanian [based on national averages, so doesn’t include rising inequality within countries.]

Amazing African documentaries – all showing in Film Africa, London, w/b 4th November

If you liked last week’s ideas for better blogging, why not check out the real writers: links to top tips from Zadie Smith, John Steinbeck, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and more

Alarming how well the hate speech of politicians suits the lyrics of Drill

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Audio Summary (7m) of this week’s posts on FP2P – now downloadable!

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One of my favourite stories of change: how an indigenous group won the rights to 1m hectares of land – and a new interview with an NGO person who supported them at the time

If you repeat the same story often enough, at some point you start to wonder if you’ve really just made it up, or at least embellished it beyond recognition. One such story, which I often tell at the start of a How Change Happens presentation, is about the Chiquitano Indians of Bolivia and their successful struggle for land. So I got very excited when I bumped into Simon Ticehurst, Oxfam’s Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, who told me he had been there for much of the Chiquitano story (also relieved to have my story confirmed as roughly true). I sat him down in front of the phone for a short (13m) catch up on the story.

Obviously the best thing would be to go back to the Chiquitanos, who I visited around 2006, and find out what’s happened since. But until I can find time and budget to do that, I will just have to rely on talking to people like Simon. Any other updates/sources very welcome.

And here’s my original write up:

‘On 3 July 2007, after twelve years of unremitting and often frustrating struggle, the Chiquitano people of Bolivia—a group numbering some 9,000 people—won legal title to the 1 million hectare (2.4 million acres) indigenous territory of Monteverde in the eastern department of Santa Cruz. Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president attended the ceremony with several of his ministers. So did three elected mayors, ten local councillors (six women, four men), a senator, a congressman and two members of the Constituent Assembly—all of them Chiquitanos.

Such an event would have been unthinkable a generation before. Until the 1980s, the Chiquitanos lived in near-feudal conditions,

the red bit

required to work without pay for local authorities, landowners and the Church, and prevented from owning land. In the words of Chiquitano activist Jeronima Quiviquivi, ‘My father never realised about our rights. We just did what the white people told us; only they could be in power, be president. We couldn’t even go into the town centre, people swore at us. But then we got our own organisation and elected our own leaders and that’s when we realised we had rights.’

To test the power and systems approach, let’s explore how this change happened.

Systems, Power and Norms: The change took place as part of wider evolution of indigenous identity and of Bolivian politics and

economy. In the 1980s, inspired in part by Chiquitano language radio programmes, for the first time, the Chiquitanos began to identify themselves as indigenous people. Indigenous identity began to replace the class-based peasant identity promoted by the nationalism of the 1952 revolution.

The dawn of ‘power within’ rapidly led to ‘power with’ in the form of cultural associations which rapidly acquired an explicitly political nature. The Chiquitano Indigenous Organization (OICH), represented more than 450 communities. As one elderly woman explained, ‘Only a short while ago did we begin calling ourselves Chiquitano Indians… We look alike, we were all handed over to the bosses… they called us cambas or peasants until not long ago.’

The Chiquitano movement was unexpectedly boosted by the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s, which dramatically reversed three decades of state intervention and improvements in social rights, and galvanised protest movements across Bolivia. Sacked miners from the highlands spread out across the country, setting up new organizations and spreading their traditions of activism and protest. The 1990s saw some unorthodox measures within the hard-line Washington Consensus policies, including a new law that greatly facilitated participation in local government, and an acceleration of agrarian reform, all of which helped boost indigenous movements.

The Chiquitanos’ recovery and celebration of indigenous identity led them to join in continent-wide alliances to protest the 500th anniversary (and celebration) of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas. The rise in indigenous consciousness was reflected in Bolivia’s constitutional reform of 1994, which redefined the state as ‘pluri-ethnic and multicultural’.

Chiquitano churches are wonderful

The tipping point came in 2005, with the election of Evo Morales as Bolivia’s first ever indigenous president. It marked a sea change in the fortunes of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples, including the Chiquitanos. Many smaller ‘critical junctures’ helped galvanize the movement, including a succession of long marches to the capital La Paz. At one point protestors broke into the local mayor’s office and found documents showing that forced labour had been banned in Bolivia, even though the Chiquitanos were still being obliged to perform it. Their conclusion? We need our own mayor.

Two further factors eased the path to change. The discovery of large reserves of natural gas from the late 1980s onwards contributed to a general perception that the country was on the threshold of a historic opportunity. Second, the historical memory of the country’s indigenous peoples allowed them to draw strength from deep traditions of identity and resistance.

Formal Politics: After protests toppled President Sánchez de Lozada in October 2003, identity documents became easier to obtain and candidates were allowed to run independently of traditional political parties, which led to major gains for indigenous peoples in the 2005 municipal elections. Because Evo Morales’ MAS party was unpopular locally (it was seen as being dominated by the more numerous indigenous highland peoples), activists stood as OICh (Chiquitano Indigenous Organization) candidates.

The Law: In addition to marches and protests, the Chiquitanos  tried to work within the system, insisting on legal procedures despite the tricks of adversaries and delays of judges.  In January 1995, the Chiquitanos presented their first legal demand for title to Monteverde under a new concept, ‘Original Community Territory’. A year and a half later, a second indigenous march won parliamentary recognition for the concept. Years of tedious legal procedures followed, with small gains and reversals, but they paved the way for eventual legal recognition for their territorial claim.

The International System:  The International Labour Organization (ILO) played a role in the rise of indigenous identity and was also a channel for legal appeals from the Chiquitano movement.

The Private Sector: The local private sector, especially landowners and forestry companies, were the main opponent of the land reform, but in the end were unable to stop the momentum of the Chiquitano movement.

Change Agents: The main actors in the drama were of course, the Chiquitanos themselves. Following the lead of other social

Monument to the Chiquitano family, Santa Cruz

movements, lowland peoples organised a march to the capital La Paz in 1990, which, as one participant put it, ‘demonstrated that the indigenous peoples of the East exist’. Literally and politically, indigenous people were on the move.

Alliances: A turning point came when the Chiquitanos decided to join up with Bolivia’s far more numerous highland Indians. ‘We met with one of the highlands leaders,’ recalls Chiquitano leader, now Senator, Carlos Cuasase, ‘and we said, “Look brother, you have the same problems that we do, the same needs.” We agreed not only on [the law to nationalise] hydrocarbons but also to defend the rights of indigenous people of both highlands and lowlands.’ The Roman Catholic Church was divided on social justice issues between traditionalists (‘blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God), and more radical liberation theologians among the local priests who were important allies for the Chiquitanos.

P.S. on Oxfam’s Role: The Chiquitano movement was highly ‘endogenous’, with only a minor role for outside supporters such as NGOs. One of these was Oxfam, which provided small amounts of funding, thanks to the imaginative ways local staff came up with to get round Oxfam’s internal bureaucracy. When one evaluation asked about the ‘mobile workshops’ we were funding, a sheepish programme officer confessed that this was funding for the long marches to the capital, which did indeed act as mobile workshops.’

Eduardo Caceres’ longer paper on the Chiquitano story is here

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One step forward, two steps back? Why WDR 2019 harms the World Bank’s role as a thought leader on employment and gender equality

Guest post on the new World Development Report by Shahra Razavi (left) and Silke Staab of the UN Women Research and Data Section. (The views expressed here are in their individual capacities and do not reflect the position of UN Women).

Diego Rivera’s 1931 mural, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, makes an alluring cover for the WDR 2019.  Rivera (a Communist), reflecting the 20th century ethos of the working man (aka the ‘male breadwinner’), places a ‘gigantic worker at the center of his work, towering over bankers, architects and artists’ (p.96).  As WDR aptly points out, ‘only one woman appears among the 19 people in the mural’ (p.96).

One would have hoped that the World Bank’s flagship report, the jewel in the crown of an enviable research and statistical machine, would offer an equally monumental edifice to the world of work in the 21st century, with the working woman, and her struggles, standing tall at the center.  Unfortunately, on this (and other) fronts the report has a distinctly yesteryear feel to it.

Message number one is the importance of human capital investments throughout the life course, especially in the ‘first thousand days of a child’s life’ (p.53). One would have thought that with the twist of the ‘first thousand days’, an opening is created for thinking more expansively about human capital and connecting it to the care economy.  Previous reports, especially WDR 2012 on gender equality and WDR 2013 on jobs, had started to acknowledge unpaid care work, though insufficiently.

But in WDR 2019 no reference is made to the critical role of unpaid care work in building human capabilities. The report thus remains wedded to a rather narrow neoclassical view of human capital that focuses entirely on the ‘value-added’ in the form of education and experience without considering the bearing and raising of children that creates the basic foundation which education and experience may enhance. The relevance of unpaid care work is not only in constraining women’s paid work (to which the report makes a passing reference, but offers little by way of policy guidance), but as an investment that sustains people in the here-and-now and from one generation to the next, while undergirding the entire economy. Feminist economists have brought unpaid care into mainstream statistical and policy arenas, including in new definitions of work and in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (target 5.4).

By ignoring the care economy the report also fails to identify and offer policy guidance on what is already a major employment engine, and likely to become even more so in the years to come.  According to a recently published ILO report, the global care paid workforce amounts to 381 million workers, or 11.5 percent of total global waged employment. Two-thirds of this workforce, or 249 million workers, are women, making up 19.3 percent of global female employment. That is, already nearly 1 in 5 women in paid jobs are employed by the care sector – as nurses, child minders, elder care assistants and domestic workers—apt depictions for a mural on the 21st century world of work, surely! The burning issue is how to ensure that growth in this sector produces jobs that are decent and that meet core labour standards.

This takes us to our second point, which is the report’s approach to labour market regulation. WDR 2013 acknowledged widespread market failures associated with labour markets and employment dynamics and saw a significant role for the state in pursuing policies that can support better and more equitable employment outcomes. This was refreshing, especially after the 1980s, when the Bank seemed to see all labour market regulations as ‘distortions’.  With WDR 2019 the World Bank risks turning the clock back to when government regulations, such as minimum wage laws or collective bargaining processes, were assumed only to raise labour costs, reduce the number of jobs and increase unemployment and informality.

All it has to offer on strengthening women’s earnings potential more specifically is the removal of discriminatory laws. But the problems of gender pay gaps goes far beyond legal discriminations; and regulation is critical to combat them.

This includes minimum wage floors to reduce the penalties for women at the bottom of the wage hierarchy. Take the case of domestic workers. Evidence from a diverse range of countries, including the so-called ‘emerging economies’ that appear to be of central concern to the report authors, shows how collective action combined with better minimum wage coverage produces positive results. In Brazil, such efforts were associated with a 47% real rise in domestic workers’ wages between 2003 and 2011, compared to a 20% increase in average wages for all wage employees over the same period. The doubling of the minimum wage in the 2000s also helped close the gender wage gap. In South Africa, likewise, the effect of minimum wage legislation on domestic workers (and other low-wage sectors) has been positive without a negative impact on employment—a finding that is at odds with what standard competitive market models predict.

Finally, the report’s call for ‘strengthening social protection’ is welcome in a world where women’s equal access to social protection remains far from achieved (though the report provides no sex disaggregated data and little, if any, gender analysis). In most countries with available data, women are less likely than men to receive a pension in old age. Women also remain poorly covered for gender-specific life course risks. Globally, for example, only 41 per cent of mothers with new-borns receive a maternity benefit.

WDR 2019 underlines the need to close these gaps; but instead of basing its recommendations on context-specific empirical analysis, its starting point is the blanket proposition that “the contributory approach is not a good fit for developing countries, where formal and stable employment are not common” (p. 113).

Conveniently ignored are the huge variations between the social security systems of ‘developing countries’ and the fact that in some of these, contributory systems not only cover a significant share of workers but have also been transformed to become more inclusive of both informal workers and women. Alongside the introduction of minimum wages, for example, South Africa, reformed its unemployment insurance to cover domestic and seasonal workers for job loss, maternity and sick leave. Countries such as Ecuador and Uruguay have also made progress in bringing greater numbers of domestic workers under contributory coverage within a relatively short period of time. And second-generation pension reforms across Latin America have introduced care credits in contributory systems alongside social pensions, to improve outcomes for women.

This is not to deny that gaps in coverage and benefit levels between formal and informal workers and between women and men remain large or that strong contributory links are often problematic for women. But limiting social insurance and doing away with labour standards while aspiring to create some vague ‘guaranteed social minimum’ through social assistance is too simple an answer. The report makes no reference to the ILO’s Social Protection Floor initiative—which provides a concrete menu of benefits and solutions for delivering them that are in line with international human rights standards— a lost opportunity. Indeed, the WDR manages to present an entire chapter on labour market (de)regulation and social protection without a single reference to the huge body of research by the ILO and others.

WDR’s narrow conception of social protection also sits uneasily with the growing body of evidence that suggests that it is the linkages that matter: between contributory and non-contributory social protection to be sure, but also between social protection, public services and infrastructure—a theme that governments will be discussing at next year’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). The importance of linking is particularly evident when it comes to strengthening the earnings potential of women in informal self-employment. While the report affirms that social assistance is not an alternative to health, education or other services (p. 110), the figure used to explain the idea of a Universal Basic Income suggests otherwise: it presents ‘cash’ and ‘services’ at opposite ends of the spectrum of social protection modalities instead of acknowledging that public services are critical to make cash transfers succeed (cue: cash plus).

Overall, WDR 2019 seems to return to the problematic practice of blanket prescriptions—which previous WDRs have been lauded for leaving behind. One can only hope that this is a one-off in the trajectory of a report that the world holds to the highest standards.

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11 Tips for Better Blogging

youth wing, and academic bloggers at the Institute for Social Studies in The Hague. All three sessions followed a similar format, developed for a Unicef session I ran last year – a half hour intro from me, and then an editing session where we read and comment on the participants’ draft posts in turn (5m reading, 10m discussion, then move on). Despite the differences between the participants, similar editorial points kept cropping up, so I thought I’d try and nail them down here.

Write like you talk: a blog is a weblog – a diary. So write like you talk, which may well mean quite a lot of unlearning, given that academia spends years training you not to write like you talk! Re our recent devspeak discussion on this blog: if you find yourself using phrases or words you would never use in a conversation (‘it therefore seems appropriate that…’), stop.
Throat clearing and the Third Para rule: it’s striking how often you edit a draft by cutting the first two paras and starting on para 3. The reason is that people feel compelled to introduce the blog by talking at length about process (‘we recently organized a seminar, consisting of 2 plenaries and a set of breakout workshops’) or name checking a pile of organizations. But the first paragraph of a post is a precious place – it is often the only para people read, and it has to grab their attention if they are to carry on reading. So that para needs to keep introductory scene setting to the bare minimum, and then move swiftly on to be the core idea of your piece (if you don’t have a core idea, that’s also a problem).
Narrative is everything: A blog is not a lit review or an exec sum. You need to make the narrative central, and minimise the baggage of references and namechecks (including for the author – use links to books, papers and online bios to avoid wasting precious words and diluting the narrative).
Ideas work better than Process or Description or (shudder) lots of acronyms: no-one cares where the workshop was held, who was there, or even that there was a workshop at all. Focus on what emerged that is of general interest – the ideas and concepts, the new insights. And not too many of them – one big idea is perfect for a blog. 10 ideas make for a confusing read. Avoid long lists of acronyms that turn readers off.
Style: Avoid the passive tense and double negatives (‘it is not unreasonable to assume that….), keep sentences and paragraphs short. Define terms. Don’t be pompous. Be more Orwell.
Don’t be scared: both academics and NGO types seem petrified that someone is going to catch them out. That leads to defensive writing, with loads of caveats, or alternatively to a weird hectoring style, with lots of finger wagging (‘the IMF can and must…’). Boring, boring, boring. Much better to reach out to the imaginary reader, make friends with them, take risks.
Write in tiers: A post should be a nested product, with a spectrum of levels from brevity to comprehensiveness; people can follow the tiers as far as their interest and time (and the writing) allows, but they should get a clear and free-standing message from each: Title → First Para → Post → further reading via links.
Accompany the reader: in keeping with the conversational ‘write like you talk’ style, you can help the reader with occasional flags, explaining what they are about to read: ‘why does that matter?’ or ‘First the good news’ style sentences make the info easier to absorb.
Illustrate ideas with examples: don’t just stay in the conceptual meta-world; show what it means on the ground – a historical example, a case study or how the idea might apply to a particular person (for a Tanzanian farmer growing maize, this approach to climate insurance would mean X’).
Admit doubt. You are not Moses coming down from the mountain, so forget the tablets of stone. This is a conversation, and you can say ‘I’m not sure about this – what do you think?’ and hope readers will help you think things through.
Academic does not mean boring: even for academic blogs, the above rules apply. Avoid unnecessary jargon and obfuscation – remember people could be reading on their mobiles while juggling child care.

Although I would be the first to say there is no one way to write a blogpost – they should reflect the personality and background of the author, these 11 tips seemed to be applicable to most of the very different posts were were looking at.

And here’s my powerpoint, including ten ways to write a blogpost in under an hour. Please steal.

Better blogging October 2018

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How Change Happens is two years old this week, and Open Access has played a big part in getting people to read it

Time Flies….), so here’s a summary of what’s happened since.

From a publishing point of view, the most interesting aspect of HCH was that it was open access from day 1. In return for Oxfam waiving its royalties, Oxford University Press agreed for it to be freely downloadable as a pdf, and readable online on Google Books.

For Oxfam, this is great – the book has been downloaded in over 130 countries, whereas book sales are inevitably more concentrated in the richer economies with functioning distribution systems.

What’s interesting is that based on their experiences with other books, OUP believes the sales figures have if anything been helped – enough people have read it online or on a pdf, and then decided to buy it, to outweigh the numbers who went in the opposite direction and stuck to reading it for free. I asked my Adam Swallow for a quote, and here’s what he sent me:

‘Open Access works best – in terms of achieving mass readership — when it is backed by an institute or author with a great social media presence. There is a loss of print sales for some titles, however others see almost no reduction, and in HCH and a few other titles we see solid and ongoing sales. Open Access really is in keeping with our mission of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.’

Publication Day, 2016. Seems a long time ago.

Here are the numbers:

Headline figures: in the first two years, How Change Happens has had approximately 70,000 readers. That’s an approximate figure – there could be double counting (someone downloads the pdf, then buys the book) or undercounting (someone downloads pdf and circulates by email).

Of these roughly 8,700 bought printed copies and ebooks, 17,300 downloaded the pdf and 43,000 read it online (a tidy 1:2:5 ratio, if you’re into that kind of thing – for every copy sold, two people download the pdf and five people read it online).

Printed Copies

Hardbacks sold by OUP:                                                                                            3881

Paperbacks sold by OUP (first published, May 2018):                                        1105

Paperbacks distributed by Oxfam:                                                                          2649

Electronic Downloads

Ebooks (OUP):                                                                                                             1114

Oxfam pdf downloads:                                                                                              13397

OUP pdf downloads:                                                                                                   3353

Online Visits

Unique Visitors to OUP ‘Oxford Scholarship Online Usage’:                            10149

Google Book Visits:                                                                                                    34033

Total Number of Readers in First Two Years                                        69681

If you compare these to the first year stats, the shift in the second year has been towards open access – of the 30,000 new readers in year two, only about 2.000 paid for the book. I suspect a lot of those are students reading bits of HCH as parts of their course reading.

Other points to note:

Translations are appearing later this year in Chinese and are already out in Spanish (in Mexico). Another is under way into Arabic (in Yemen)

An audiobook is available – only 60 sold so far.

Spin-offs: the book is the course text for the new Make Change Happen MOOC co-designed by Oxfam and the Open University, and for a London School of Economics module on its International Development Masters programme

Rip offs and Copy Cats: at least two other books called How Change Happens have been announced in that time. I reviewed one (totally impartially, of course), by Leslie Crutchfield, here. The other, by Cass Sunstein, (the Nudge guy) comes out next April. Hopefully a few people will get confused and accidentally buy mine instead….

I’d be very interested in any other news of how the book has been adapted or adopted

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Links I Liked

Honestly, it really isn’t a ‘scary time’ for men. Thanks Lynzy Lab Stewart

“Ninety-five percent of economics is common sense.” Ha-Joon Chang in the LSE student paper, on Brexit, trade and Kpop, after launching this year’s series of Friday afternoon guest lectures at the LSE. Details of top line up of future speakers here.

It’s only week 1, but I’m seriously impressed by the level of participation and insights on the Oxfam’s new online Make Change Happen course for activists. Not too late to sign up.

Pope Francis canonized Oscar Romero on 14th October. Massive props to Julian Filochowski, Clare Dixon & everyone at CAFOD, who campaigned decades for this moment. This is a big deal: St Oscar, assassinated in El Salvador for defending the people, will be a beacon of social justice for centuries.

Oxfam (and everyone else) criticises the World Bank for backing deregulated labour markets in the new World Development Report on the future of work

How about offering team-based PhDs rather than insisting on the ‘loneliness of the long distance scholar’?

History RePPPeated – How public private partnerships are failing. 10 case studies from different sectors across 4 continents released ahead of annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank

And your reward for getting this far: a deer goes for a morning skip on the beach – when did you last feel like this?

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Audio summary (5m) of FP2P posts, week beginning 15th October, and a new FP2P podcast

Hi there, here’s my weekly audio round up of the week’s posts on @fp2p. The big news this week is that I now have a podcast channel (thanks to Amy Moran), where you can download these summaries along with this week’s first ever FP2P podcast – an interview with Oxfam Mexico’s Ricardo Fuentes about his country’s impending political transition. Enjoy.

http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/wb-15th-October.m4a

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