How can the international system cope better with crises? Good new paper

Alex Evans of Global Dashboard is always interesting on risk and global institutions. His latest paper, with Bruce Jones and David Steven takes such a long view that it feels pretty cosmic. But here’s my attempt at a summary/highlights of ‘Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization: Risk, Resilience and international Order’ (far too many syllables for a haiku).

We live in a world of discontinuous change: ‘Shocks, rather than stresses, are the primary triggers of change, as three global crises – the September 11 attacks in 2001, the combined food and oil price spike that peaked in 2008, and the global financial crisis in the same year – have demonstrated.’

But the clunky and sluggish international system is rubbish at dealing with volatility and shocks. ‘At both national and global levels, policy formation and delivery is weak and fragmented across issues and organizations. The need to overcome these ‘silos’ forces complex issues upwards to leaders’ level, both at home and internationally in forums such as the G20. Unfortunately, lack of ‘bandwidth’ leaves heads of government with limited capacity, and leads to a prioritization of firefighting over long-term risk management. The organizations charged with the delivery of foreign policy – aid agencies, militaries, foreign ministries – were designed for a different age.’

To replace it, the authors call the adoption of a new ‘risk doctrine’: ‘The overarching need is hence to move from a foreign policy paradigm that focuses on a usually ill-defined conception of the national interest, to one that aims to manage shared risk. Although agreement will still prove elusive, a risk paradigm provides a basis for cooperation between states. It emphasizes uncertainty; increases the focus on future challenges; provides a longterm context to balance immediate interests in acute crisis; and can bind together disparate structures for cooperation.’

Then comes a metaphor that brings back traumatic personal memories of white water rafting (or more accurately, white water drowning – see below) on the Ugandan Nile:

‘The challenge facing globalization can be compared to ‘shooting the rapids’. Charting a course through whitewater, there are many possible paths, but few attractive destinations. It is the river, not the paddler, that dictates the speed with which the boat moves. There is no opportunity to pause and rethink strategy, or to reverse direction: it is the capacity to reorganize while undergoing change that ultimately determines the journey’s outcome. Above all, the challenge is a collective one: the direction of the boat depends on the combined efforts of all those on board.’

So far, so very abstract. What does it all mean? ‘Governments should take several initial steps to position themselves to shoot the rapids, including:

Investing in mechanisms that build shared awareness of key risks, using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a model. Policymakers should consider setting up similar bodies that can provide a locus for strategic conversation on threats and solutions in areas such as resource scarcity, bio-security, global climate policy (as opposed to science), and international support for fragile states.

Increasing the ‘bandwidth’ of the G20 by investing in stronger sherpa mechanisms and building links between the G20 and formal institutions, thereby providing heads of government with more comprehensive analysis of policy options.

Looking for opportunities to collaborate, whether in ad-hoc groups that are constructed risk by risk; in semi-permanent alliances, negotiating blocs and interest groups that bring together countries who have shared awareness across a range of risks; or in formal architectural solutions like the EU, ASEAN, WTO or UNFCCC that institutionalize cooperation between countries.

Establishing a ‘challenge function’ within the international system that is charged with exploring non-financial systemic risks, complementing the work of the Financial Stability Board in the economic realm. Such an organization would need to be agile, flexible, networked and relatively independent – organized on similar lines to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is charged with ‘preventing surprise’ for the United States.

Changing the organization and delivery of foreign policy. All governments will need to increase substantially the funding they devote to managing global risks, as part of a marked shift in emphasis from domestic to global policy. Funding levels should be determined as part of a fundamental review of the combined instruments of international relations – foreign assistance, diplomacy, military – that evaluates the contribution of each level to effective risk management.’

For more practical (or prosaic) minds, the authors provide a nice table comparing where we are with where we need to get to on the big global challenges: nuclear security; biosecurity; fragile states; terrorism; demographic change (urbanization and population growth); resource scarcity; climate change and global economic stresses. Plenty of stuff to get your teeth into there.

And here’s why the shooting the rapids metaphor makes me so anxious – imagine it’s the G20 in the boat….. (and I bet these guys selectively edited the video – our raft capsized five times on the same stretch of river)

What will drive action on climate change if negotiations can’t?

I’ve been mulling over the extraordinary shift in public mood since the Copenhagen summit. The devastating combination of a failed summit, the Democrats’ loss of the supermajority in the Senate and a string of climategates surrounding the University of East Anglia and IPCC risk a mood-swing in public sentiment from a ‘now is the time’ historic moment to ‘we’re all doomed and there’s nothing we can do’ resignation. (The Guardian’s investigation of the UEA emails is riveting – it should be compulsory reading for anyone doing research for advocacy).

So where next? Here’s a hypothesis to chew on: Copenhagen represents the failure of a ‘peacetime’, politics-driven strategy on climate change. It is time to look at other change models, namely shock-driven and/or technology driven.

Shock-driven change
Changes of the magnitude required to combat climate change normally require a major shock – typically war or economic crisis. Thus women won the vote in the UK after World War 1; the US got the New Deal after the Great Depression; the UN and Bretton Woods system was born out of World War 2; Ethiopia overthrew the repressive Derg government after the great famine of 1984.

It may thus require a system-wide trauma like the sudden onset of peak oil, or a climate shock one or more orders of magnitude greater than Hurricane Katrina, and affecting some/all of the major emitters, before a genuine shift to a low carbon economic model, with agreed limits on emissions under a fair, ambitious and binding global deal, becomes achievable.

Implications for campaigners: This does not mean that popular mobilisation, or elite advocacy are redundant. There is more to life (and climate change) than the UNFCCC. We should engage with those parts of the UN-led climate change apparatus that are producing real impacts (good and bad) on poor people and the climate, particularly climate finance in the near term. We should be working with the different bits of private sector that are either allies or foes on tackling climate change.

Public awareness work could include both specific work on the damage/threat of climate change, and broader ‘attitudes and beliefs’ work trying to raise the importance of a well-being framework, rather than a consumerist one (see previous post on Prosperity Without Growth).

On the UN negotiations, it means recognizing that change is discontinuous, and preparing for the window of opportunity created by a relevant shock. That means developing policies and the public awareness, much as the suffragettes did before World War I, or Keynes before and during the Great Depression. The point is to have both the political climate and ‘off the shelf’ policy prescriptions ready and widely disseminated before such a shock occurs.

But that does not require a major engagement with the UNFCCC process as the best way to deliver short-term change (at least until a shock hits). Engagement with the negotiations would then be guided by the longer term aims (policy development and public awareness), rather than the intricacies of the negotiating process.

It also means that campaigners have to be prepared to recognize, agree on and act on the opportunity represented by a shock. Especially the large NGOs tend to be more comfortable in their ‘planners’ world’ of strategic plans, agreed objectives etc, and much less agile and able to respond to events. That has to change.

Technology-driven change
In their recent piece ‘The End of Magical Climate Thinking’, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute argue persuasively that ‘it’s the technology stupid’. Contrary to Al Gore’s assertions, they argue that current technology is not sufficient to produce a world of painless win-win shifts to a low carbon economy, and that is the underlying reason for paralysis in the negotiations. Within the Obama administration, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu, who ‘gets’ the technology issue, has been marginalised by negotiators like Carole Browner and Lisa Jackson.

The amounts of money currently dedicated to green R&D fall far short of the levels needed. According to Nordhaus and Shellenberger, Chu has already set out the main challenges in remarks to the New York Times:

‘How do we convert sunlight into energy much more efficiently than solar panels do today? What combination of chemicals can store more energy in batteries that are smaller and lighter? How can we manufacture a next generation of self-contained nuclear reactors that are safer, smaller, and cheaper than the large ones of the 1950s and 1960s? And how can we engineer new biological organisms to serve as a cheap fuel alternative to oil? Solving global warming’s technology challenges will require not a single Apollo program or Manhattan Project, but many.’

Early geoengineer

Then of course there are the various forms of geo-engineering. These are routinely dismissed as Dr Strangelove fantasies, but if politics and economics continue to fail us, they may in the end be our only hope. A useful starting point for considering these options is a recognition that, like it or not, we humans have already dabbled in geo-engineering in a big (if unconscious) way: see human-induced climate change.

Implications for campaigners: Campaigners are traditionally schizophrenic on new technologies. Not without reason, we love some (renewables, internet) and are deeply hostile to others (GM, nuclear). A focus on technological solutions will require a shift in mindset and instincts to a much more pro-science position, but without abandoning the substantial basis for our previous science-scepticism, namely issues of control and impact on poor and vulnerable people.

Campaigning for a green tech revolution would involve:

1. Direct lobby on government budgets, either for bilateral projects (Apollo, Manhattan) or international collaborations (CERN, large hadron collider)

2. Scrutiny of emerging technologies on issues of control (eg intellectual property rights) and poverty impact (eg expulsion of small farmers by biofuels, gender impact of different technologies)

3. Monitoring and advocacy work on unintended consequences, which are always a likely result of new technologies (eg destruction of markets for commodity producers whose products have been replaced).

Nordhaus and Shellenberger pour scorn on the negotiation-focused activists, and portray their science-first thesis as entirely different, but Oxfam climate change guru Antonio Hill is not so sure – last word to him:

‘On the tech investment idea, I agree that the shift in the change model allows for a different focus / emphasis, but still feel that it doesn’t fundamentally change the power dynamics or alter the key obstacles. The “Magical Thinking” piece itself illustrates this powerfully: while Obama proposed and Chu fought for $15bn in clean energy R&D, the bill approved by the House (and yet to be passed in the Senate) includes a meaningless (less than a third of current levels) $1.1bn per year (while handing £32bn to coal and power utilities).  In other words, the same “political will” that N & S ridicule in their piece is the same political will needed to finance serious R&D investments. And are the two things mutually exclusive options? Even once you’ve got the kit, doesn’t it still need regulation of some sort to drive faster technology switching than price alone (once sunk capital is taken in to account) will incentivise?

N & S say, “International agreements to share the burden and the benefits of developing better and cheaper low-carbon energy technologies will represent the central focus of international climate negotiations.”  Maybe I’m missing something, but I thought that’s what the negotiations are about (plus add-in adaptation costs of course!)? And, in any case, the key principles underpinning fair shares would be the same whether we’re carving-up emissions space or tech investment shares… To think that somehow the obstacles and pitfalls of existing negotiations over how to sharing the burden will change just because we re-name the burden does seem magical indeed!’

Hacked emails; African remittances; leaving Haiti; the carbon slump; oil isn’t a curse; what happened in Davos; the BASIC coalition and a new ‘triple crisis’ blog: links I liked

The Guardian’s brilliant week-long investigation into the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia climate change team should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in ‘research for advocacy’. Read, weep and learn.

 Sanou Mbaye reflects on the importance to Africa of remittances from its far-flung diaspora

How best to help Haitians? Buy them a plane ticket. Michael Clemens bangs the drum for immigration reform and runs the numbers on Haiti’s prospects. 

 Matthew Lockwood explains why carbon trading is in the doldrums on his excellent new ‘political climate’ blog

Adam Martin argues that the ‘oil curse’ is a myth (and has the research to prove it)

Two good round-ups from the World Economic Forum in Davos by Martin Wolf and Larry Elliott . Tellingly, neither mention climate change. It’s as if Copenhagen never happened…….

David Steven explores the origins and positions of the BASIC coalition on climate change (Brazil, South Africa, India and China)

Another week, another blog, this time the ‘triple crisis’ blog run by Kevin Gallagher of the Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE) at Tufts University (USA), and Jayati Ghosh from India’s Economic Research Foundation (ERF). It has a stable of radical, heterodox economists lined up to explore the crises of finance, development and the environment.

Why militarizing aid in Afghanistan is a bad idea

Along with several other international NGOs working in Afghanistan, Oxfam last week published a powerful paper on the damage being caused by the militarization of aid. In many ways it resembles the debate on how to ensure that Haitian reconstruction builds, rather than undermines, its battered state.

In the last half hour, one Afghan woman died from pregnancy-related complications, another of tuberculosis and 14 children perished, largely from preventable causes. Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, the humanitarian and development needs in Afghanistan remain acute.

Undoubtedly, Afghans have seen some improvements, particularly in the expansion of access to healthcare and education. But while it costs approximately $1 million a year to support the deployment of a single US soldier in Afghanistan, an average of just $93 in development aid has been spent per Afghan per year over the past seven years. Over $1 billion – more than Afghanistan’s combined national budgets for agriculture, health and education, has been committed to the US military’s ‘Commanders’ Emergency Response Program’ (CERP) for this year alone. Even pro-development Europe spends five times as much on military operations in Afghanistan as on aid.

As the political pressure to ‘show results’ grows, the boundaries between counter-insurgency

Mightier than the sword? Handing out pens to Afghan children

and aid are getting ever-more blurred. In “Commanders’ Guide to Money as a Weapons System,” a US army manual for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, aid is defined as “a nonlethal weapon” that is utilized to “win the hearts and minds of the indigenous population to facilitate defeating the insurgents.”

Much of the problem stems from the so-called ‘Provincial Reconstruction Teams’, military-dominated institutions with a mixed record, building some schools with leaky roofs and latrines emptying into community water sources, but also addressing immediate needs for schools and clinics. The trouble is, they are also undermining the process of rebuilding Afghan institutions, by assuming their responsibilities without a clear exit strategy for ensuring that Afghans take their place.

Schools supported or constructed by PRTs are also perceived by Afghans to be at higher risk of being attacked by the insurgents. Many fear that, by extension, the same applies to health clinics and other community facilities constructed by PRTs or other military actors.

There are better alternatives available, such as the Basic Package of Health Services (BPHS), managed by the Ministry of Public Health and introduced in 2003, which seeks to ensure that basic health services are available at the community level and integrated into a national structure of healthcare provision. Or community based education working alongside the Ministry of Education to establish 1,000 schools serving 93,000 students across 20 provinces. Or the National Solidarity Program, which I’ve written about before. NSP provides block grants of up to $60,000 for elected community councils to implement their own projects. But the long-term process of building the capacity and transparency of local institutions is almost as important as the outcomes of these small projects. To date, NSP has expended $1 billion on community development in 22,480 villages across all 34 provinces in Afghanistan.

Sadly all this is being sidelined by the logic of war, and ‘quick fix’ efforts to throw up a few classrooms to undermine support for the insurgents. To be effective and sustainable, development should be determined by Afghan needs and implemented with Afghan participation, even in insecure areas. An army is accepted if it protects people, and if the state it defends is seen as legitimate. The credit earned and skills acquired in providing essential services must go to Afghan institutions.

Are women really 70% of the world’s poor? How do we know?

Doing research for advocacy (which is a large part of my job) is a balancing act. The pressure to come up with clear findings and ‘killer facts’ that speak to policy-makers can easily tip over into something much more questionable.

I once challenged a colleague at another NGO on a ‘fact’ she was using on Bolivia.

London's Senate House, inspiration for Orwell's 'Ministry of Truth'

‘Well, it’s politically true’, she replied with a grin. Should we use facts we know are wrong, because we like their message? Surely the answer has to be no.

I remembered this when mulling over a favourite NGO and UN factoid: ‘70% of the world’s poor are women’. Its source is decidedly murky: the 1995 Human Development Report is often cited, but it gives no reference for how it arrived at the figure, or way of checking it, and contributes to the confusion by saying in the main text ‘more than 70% are female’ (i.e. including girls) but then simply refers to ‘women’ in the executive summary. The 1994 IFAD report “The State of World Rural Poverty” is also named, with doubts expressed at the time about its numbers.

Other friends tell me it was around long before that, but no-one can point me to the original source. But in a way that’s beside the point – these ‘magic numbers’ take on a life of their own through sheer circulation and repetition. Note that this particular figure hasn’t changed in the intervening 15 years – that alone should ring alarm bells.

Let’s assume the HDR means women and girls. With the latest poverty stats, that adds up to 980m women and girls living below the $1.25 a day poverty line, and 420m men and boys. That either means that women-headed households are particularly poor, or that within households more women and girls are poor than men and boys. But as far as I’m aware, official income poverty figures don’t drill down below the household to say ‘in this family, this child/adult is poor, and this child/adult isn’t’ – that would be even harder to do for income (which is what the 70% stat refers to) than for consumption.

So either the number is based on long-lost research on the division of income within a (presumably) fairly small number of households scaled up to a global figure (and if so, please put me out of my misery and send me the reference), or the only explanation of the figures is that families headed by women explain the difference.

But to make the 70% figure stand up, you would need 560 million women-headed households (i.e. the difference between 980m poor women and 420m poor men), all of them below the poverty line. With an average of 2-3 kids per household, that is more than the total number of poor households – clearly the figure is nonsense.

Before you brand me as an incorrigible reactionary (OK, it’s probably too late for that…..), I’m not denying the existence or huge importance of gender inequality. On the contrary, gender is undoubtedly one of the world’s great faultlines of distribution and injustice. Ownership of assets is hugely distorted between men and women (probably much more than 70/30), as is time spent on reproductive activities (child rearing, cooking, cleaning etc). The same is probably true of consumption, and if we could find a credible way of measuring income inside the black box of the household, we might well find a big discrepancy there too. All the more reason to get our facts right, no?

Some ‘political truths’ diverge even further from reality. UNICEF campaigners on street children used to say that Brazil had 7-8 million of them – another stat that rapidly acquired a life of its own. Yet when researchers actually tried to count them, setting out in the middle of the night to the places where street kids sleep rough, they found fewer than 1,000 sleeping in Brazil’s two major cities, Rio and Sao Paulo, combined. Scaling up to the whole country, and scaling up by a factor of 3 in case they missed some, one researcher came up with a total of 38,000. That’s a lot of kids sleeping rough, but only about one two hundredth of UNICEF’s imaginary battalions.

Every expert (feminist economists, poverty researchers etc) I’ve consulted on this agrees the number is dodgy, and yet people just keep on using it, presumably because its message is one they want to promote. But isn’t that short sighted? Sure, any attempt to produce a simple, powerful narrative out of inevitably messy data entails some level of violence to the complexity of real life. And simple narratives are precisely what stick in people’s heads, improve policy, change attitudes and bring about change. Insist too much on the intellectual purity of the ‘everything is complicated, context specific and difficult’ camp and you will be right but completely ineffectual. But depart too far from reality, go too far down the road of ‘political truth’ and you undermine your own legitimacy – why should people believe anything else you say on the issue? I reckon ‘70% of the world’s poor are women’ crosses the line. But please someone, prove me wrong!

For more excavation on the 70% stat, see this paper by LSE professor Sylvia Chant.

Some things governments can do to support development even without spending more money

Before any general election, anyone involved in advocacy indulges in ‘what would my dream manifesto look like?’ fantasies. (And then usually goes off to lobby the political parties and be told why their ideas are silly). 2010 is no exception, with the impending (probably 6 May) UK general election followed by decisive moments this year on climate change (in Mexico in December), on the millennium development goals (UN summit in September) and the 2010 deadline for meeting the G8’s 2005 pledges on aid, debt and universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDs.

But these are straitened times, so in an uncharacteristic burst of fiscal prudence, I’ve confined my shopping list to things that don’t require big dollops of government cash, and may even (e.g. the financial transactions tax) help fill the fiscal abyss:
 
· Support a global commitment of US$150 billion a year in public finance for climate change adaptation and mitigation in developing countries from 2013, not paid for by raiding existing aid budgets. Some of this could come from a new financial transactions tax.

· The said FTT to apply to all transactions at the rate of 0.05% across the Eurozone. At least 50% of the revenues raised will go towards development and climate change (that’s the tricky bit – keeping the chancellor’s sticky hands from grabbing all of it to fill the UK fiscal hole).

· Reform the regulation of UK tax havens and tax avoidance by UK companies, to require information disclosure and reporting by multi-national companies on the taxes they pay in each country. This should generate extra tax revenues for the UK, as well as poor countries.

· Outlaw the actions of ‘vulture funds’ seeking to sue developing countries.

· Improve the predictability and quality of UK aid by, among other things, increasing the percentage of aid we provide to developing countries’ own budgets, reforming harmful donor conditionality; and enabling people in developing countries to hold both the UK and their own governments to account on aid promises, backed up by a newly created aid ombudsman.

· Honour the UK’s existing promise to untie aid from the use of British goods and services.

· Be consistent in condemning war crimes, serious human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, and calling for those responsible to be brought to justice. 

· Press for the successful conclusion of negotiations for an international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) in 2012.

· Work to improve the speed and effectiveness of life-saving humanitarian aid ensuring that it is given impartially and in line with people’s real needs.

· Ensure an effective regulatory framework that encourages responsible corporate behaviour by all British companies and investors, including when they operate overseas.

· Actively promote development as a core issue for G8 and G20 cooperation and ensure that this is covered as a separate agenda item at each meeting of these groups, with at a minimum full representation for the African Union.

· Support the reform of the International Financial Institutions, including ensuring greater representation for poor countries, enhancing their accountability and transparency and ending the practice of attaching economic policy conditionality to lending.

Of course, aid remains vital and necessary, and we will be pushing for whichever party(ies) emerges triumphant to meet and exceed past promises, but isn’t it impressive what a decent government can do, even without big injections of dosh? (and don’t even get me started on migration …..)

Twitter, haiku and the unveiling of the wonku

Sharp eyed readers will have noticed that you can now sign up for twitter feeds of new posts from this blog (under my mug shot to the right of this).

I have no intention of tweeting separately for the moment, partly because my son informed me,

grave of haiku master Yosa Buson

in a voice dripping with scorn, that twitter is ‘just for old people pretending to be young’. Ouch. Also I don’t think I could cope with a 140 character limit. With one exception – why don’t we start a line in development wonk haiku (the 17 syllable Japanese poems – just the right length for a tweet). Added complication is they have to be three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables

We could call them wonku. You know, something like:

‘Conditional cash
transfers. A panacea?
Can’t be that easy.’

Or

‘the Copenhagen
Action Plan: suicide note
from humanity?’

Wonku would provide us with ready-made responses to the dreaded ‘lift question’ (what would you say about your latest report to Ban Ki-moon/Barrack Obama etc if you found yourself in a lift with them?). And they could provide a great alternative to executive summaries. In fact, some of the clunkier titles of Oxfam policy papers are probably already wonku without us even realizing it (must check that sometime). Reckon they could catch on? If so, send me some. Copy of From Poverty to Power to the best (yes, yes, I know, two copies to the worst…..)

For the real thing, see here or this example from Ezra Pound, which has stuck in my head since I read it as a kid.

Haiti Reconstruction: Two cheers (and one big boo) for Paul Collier’s plan

Oxford economics professor Paul Collier is the policy entrepreneur’s policy entrepreneur. The man who coined the phrase ‘bottom billion’ has an unparalleled ability to reach decision makers with cogent, timely and well written arguments. Paul has a long-standing connection with Haiti – he was previously Ban Ki-Moon’s special adviser on the country, (read his January 2009 paper for the UN Secretary General here), so unlike some other commentators he didn’t have to find it on a map when the earthquake hit. On Monday, he set out his stall on Haitian reconstruction in the Financial Times, calling for ‘three essentials – a realistic economic strategy, sufficient money, and effective and dedicated management’. The first two make a lot of sense, but I find the third very worrying indeed.

The two cheers are that Haiti presented a comprehensive cooperation strategy to aid donors in April 2009 (French original here), much of which still makes sense. The UN’s ad hoc advisory group on Haiti produced its own proposals in June 2009. Collier stresses that starting from those, rather than going back to the drawing board, would save months, ensure the plans are properly thought through and recognize the hard work of the many Haitians who helped draw them up. Secondly, find the money – several billion dollars – for both the strategy and the cost of reconstruction. (and make sure there is money for both – far too much of the funds in an emergency are tied to spending in the first months or couple of years, leaving future reconstruction starved of cash).

But his ‘third essential’ worries me and is worth quoting in full:

‘Effective and dedicated management is the most difficult. In the past within Haiti the interests of corruption have postured as the protection of sovereignty, while internationally, every actor has offered to co-ordinate, yet none has wanted to be co-ordinated. What is needed is to pool money into a single “Haiti Fund” that can be used for development. Both the Haitian government and the international community need temporarily to vest authority, both for spending money and for the swift construction of housing, hospitals, ports and power stations, in a single entity, probably co-led by a respected Haitian and a world figure.’

This strikes me as a dangerously technocratic vision, which runs the risk of equating development with management, politics with corruption, and benign leadership with outsiders. It is not a neutral suggestion – it is intrinsically a political project. If you create a parallel authority, it will acquire its own staff, budgets, contractors and identity. Inevitably, it will resist being wound down and power being handed back to the Haitian state. As with Paul’s blueprint for Independent Service Authorities, which he proposed for Haiti in his January 2009 paper, the lack of a clear exit strategy is truly alarming. Worst case is that you set up something you don’t know how to get rid of, and talent, funds and power is drained from the Haitian state indefinitely. Yet we know that development requires an effective and accountable state – technocratic short cuts invariably go sour.

Rebuild the institutions (the buildings can wait)

Not only that, but parts of the Haitian state are actually intact and already working well – the ministry in charge of water is effectively coordinating the response on water and sanitation (where Oxfam’s response is concentrated), convening meetings, allocating tasks etc, prompting one Oxfam staffer to describe it as the best-organised effort he has ever witnessed in an emergency. Rather than bypass the government, why not do a needs assessment, ministry by ministry, and provide cash and French-speaking secondments (Canada and France surely have some spare civil servants!) for rebuilding the capacity of each, preferably well beyond pre-earthquake levels?

Secondly, one source of organization and power that has already proved its worth in the relief effort, Haitian civil society, is largely absent from this scheme (and from Paul’s January 2009 paper). Haiti needs to rebuild society from the ruins and take the opportunity to “build back better”, addressing Haiti’s historic injustices. Many grassroots Haitian organizations are hard at work doing just that, and have been for years – they need to be at the heart of the reconstruction effort.

The Economist last week picked up Collier’s idea: ‘Given the local vacuum of power, this is the best idea around. The authority should be set up under the auspices of the UN or of an ad hoc group (the United States, Canada, the European Union and Brazil, for example). It should be led by a suitable outsider (Bill Clinton, who is the UN’s special envoy for Haiti, would be ideal, perhaps to be followed by Brazil’s Lula after he steps down as president in a year’s time) and a prominent Haitian, such as the prime minister. To provide services, it should work with aid groups.’ Again, no politics, no exit strategy, no voice for Haitian civil society. This is not Bosnia or Afghanistan—Haiti suffered a major disaster but it is not a country at war. This isn’t a conflicted nation where people can’t find sufficient consensus to lead their nation forward. And there are thousands of Haitians with the talent, experience and education to manage the task of reconstruction. Why would they need Bill Clinton to run the show?

Such proposals are often a sincere effort to respond to the urgency and suffering in Haiti, but the ‘just do something’ mentality can lead to big mistakes which we will rue in years to come. The effort to rebuild a Haitian state that is both more effective and accountable than its predecessors has to be led by Haitians themselves. It will be messy, slow, political and difficult, but bypassing the state altogether is not the answer.

How to turn knowledge into policy (without losing your job)

Together with Martin Walsh, our team’s research methods adviser, I’ve been browsing through some of the literature on how to ensure our work has impact……

After a year in which Britain’s top drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, was sacked by the Home Secretary (interior minister) for overstepping the line between providing advice and advocating specific changes to policy, you’d be excused for thinking that in the UK at least, “evidence-based policy-making” was more rhetoric than reality.

Prof Nutt is an academic, and academics in the U.K. are paid by government to produce the evidence that policymakers need, not to contradict their favoured policies. Development practitioners, thank goodness, have a little more leeway. NGOs and think-tanks use research to lobby governments and international agencies, and 2009 was a bumper year for them telling one another how to do so more effectively. Fred Carden’s ‘Knowledge to Policy: Making the Most of Development Research’ is the fruit of a study by IDRC in Canada (kudos to them for making it downloadable) that was originally designed to evaluate and enhance the influence of its own research on public policy in developing countries. Eight years, 23 case studies and several workshops later, IDRC has not only improved its own practice but also shared its hard-earned knowledge with the rest of us. The first section of the book summarises the findings of the study and is crammed with analytic typologies and tips on how to catch the ear of even the most resistant of policymakers. The second section comprises potted versions of the case studies, and the third and final section describes and reflects on the methodology of the evaluation itself.

Fred Carden sensibly concludes that the best way to start is for a would-be researcher to identify which of five ‘policy contexts’ best describes her/his situation, and then adapt research methods accordingly. They are:

1. Clear Government Demand
Implications: Give thanks. A relationship of trust between researcher and policymaker is critical. Researchers need to anticipate issues so their advice is ready on short notice. This requires researchers to be working on issues before they trigger policy interest and to think through policy implications of their findings before getting the policymakers’ call for help. It also requires clarity in communicating evidence and a reputation for delivering reliable work.

2. Government interest in research, but leadership absent
Implications: Think about issues beyond the research itself. What are the institutional and organizational implications of the evidence: if this evidence is going to be used, how will it be used? Where will decisions need to be made? What policy and regulatory changes might be implied and what effect can these have in other quarters (i.e. who are your likely allies and enemies)? Focus on your communication with decision makers, but you may also need strategies for ensuring that the interested public, that is people most likely to be affected by the use of the evidence, are fully engaged and able to assert influence on decision makers.

3. Government interest in research, but with a capacity shortfall
Implications: Propose institutional structures that draw few resources, or identify an economic pay-off that meets a priority need of government, or secure other sources of funds for implementation. You need to exert special communication skills to turn the subject into a high priority issue, perhaps by mobilizing public opinion behind their efforts.

4. A new or emerging issue activates research, but leaves policy makers uninterested
Implications: Focus on other communities that can help to promote the evidence and its merits to decision makers, e.g. advocacy groups, the media, affected communities, the private sector, and educational institutions. Stress the economic and social rewards of research implementation..

5. Government treats research with disinterest (sic), or hostility
Implications: Prepare for the long haul. You will need a strong sense of purpose and commitment to the future. Your research is preparation for a potential change of political interest. It may even be counterproductive to advocate too strongly for a course of action fiercely opposed in policy circles, and better to outlast the resistance and stand ready to seize an opening for influence when it appears.

Judge for yourselves whether other studies and guides provide better advice:

- a recent paper by Andy Sumner and colleagues at IDS, ‘Making science of influencing: assessing the impact of development research’

- the many good things that have come out of the Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) programme at ODI. One of the latest of its products is a briefing paper by John Young and Enrique Mendizabal on ‘Helping researchers become policy entrepreneurs’, summarizing more than five years’ work (involving more than 50 case studies) on ‘understanding how policy processes operate in the real world’, culminating in the development of the RAPID Outcome Mapping Approach (ROMA) as a meta-tool (that incorporates many other existing tools) for translating research into policy.

That enough?

Can you comment on Oxfam’s analysis of the global economic crisis?

Since early 2009, Oxfam has been researching the impact of the global economic crisis on poverty and poor communities, and the way governments and others have responded.

With co-authors Richard King and May Miller Dawkins, I’ve now pulled together focus group discussions and in depth interviews with 2,500 people, 11 country case studies and regional overviews into a draft research paper, The Global Economic Crisis and Developing Countries: Impact and Response.

The paper was published in draft on 27 January, and we have allowed a month (ending 26 February) to get comments and feedback from as wide a group as possible both inside Oxfam and beyond.

After a research workshop back in November, I summarized the initial findings here. They haven’t changed much since then.

What do we want from you? Send the link to anyone you know who is working on the issue, and send us:
· Corrections of fact
· Differences of interpretation of the nature and/or severity of the impact and the effectiveness of responses by governments and others
· References for other sources of analysis, especially on countries not covered in the text – one of the more surprising aspects of the work was finding how little research has gone on into this subject

I’ve got no idea whether this is going to work – releasing a draft for consultation is something of a new departure for us, but we are keen to stimulate as wide a discussion as possible. For that reason we are asking people to do two things

- If you want to send comments in private, email them to research@oxfam.org.au
- If you’re happy for them to be public, post them on this blog.

Be as rude as you like – except when absolutely necessary, we will restrain our urge to contact the libel lawyers……..

Over to you

And for the full collection of research papers, links etc, visit Oxfam’s economic crisis website.