Three top books on Innovation: what lessons for development agencies?

So since we are always being told to be more innovative (has anyone ever asked you to be less innovative?) I thought I’d see what some innovation gurus have to say. I could pretend this is part of my New Year’s Resolution to read more books and fewer papers, but I’d be lying– I read these last summer and never got round to writing it up.  The three are Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: the natural history of innovation and John Kay: Obliquity: Why our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly.

My favourite was Tim Harford, who provides an eclectic mix of incredibly readable stories and convincing argument. He shows the dangers of sclerosis with a discussion of the US military in Vietnam:

“When the US Army faced the ‘disruptive innovation’ of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, there was great reluctance to accept that it had changed the nature of the game, making obsolete the Army’s hard-won expertise in industrial warfare. As one senior officer said, ‘I’ll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war.’”

That sets the tone for a riveting account of the random-walk quality of economic history – ‘Few company bosses would care to admit it, but the market fumbles its way to success’. Toyota began as a manufacturer of looms.

He buys into markets-as-evolutionary process (see my rave reviews of Eric Beinhocker’s work on this) and sees ‘the evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wild gambles as the best possible way to search for solutions.’ He quotes biochemist Leslie Orgel ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are’ and says ‘formal theory won’t get you nearly as far as an incredibly rapid, systematic process of trial and error.’

In this view, the failure of the Soviet Union is down to the death grip of the Planners – ‘its pathological inability to experiment’. Harford  is also a big critic of planning on issues like climate change – he sees unintended consequences, loopholes and own goals everywhere. Evolution will automatically attack the rules and find their weaknesses.

So what? ‘Adaptive organizations need to decentralize and become comfortable with the chaos of different local approaches and the awkwardness of dissent from junior staff.’ How to do this? Harford comes up with a ‘Three step recipe for successful adapting: try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; make failure survivable, because it will be common; and make sure that you know when you have failed…… distinguishing success from failure, oddly, can be the hardest task of all’

As an example, he holds up up the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as a model funder of innovation, by funding people not projects and minimising the number of strings attached. Subsequent analysis shows HHMI funding generated research that was important, unusual and influential. Unfortunately it is also a rarity – the world lacks ‘the two elements essential to encourage significant innovation in a complex world: a true openness to risky new ideas, and a willingness to put millions or even billions of dollars at risk.’

Thomson covers some of the same ground in more opaque language, giving particular emphasis to openness and connectivity, which he argues ‘may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms… we are often better served by connecting ideas than protecting them.’ He has no time for intellectual property laws that inhibit this connectivity. He ends with some homely, and to my mind rather useful advice:

‘Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent.’ Sounds like a blogger to me…..

John Kay’s is a one-idea book from a prolific popular academic and regular FT columnist.Directness doesn’t work – it leads to the kind of modernist architectural horrors of Le Corbusier or the Soviet planning system or Pol Pot; muddling through, lateral thinking and improvisation are better. Notre Dame was built bit by bit over several centuries – no-one started out with a plan.

‘It is hard to overstate the damage done in the recent past by people who thought they knew more about the world than they really did. The managers and financiers who destroyed great businesses in the unsuccessful pursuit of shareholder value. The architects and planners who believed that buildings could be designed from first principles, that vibrant cities could be drawn on a blank sheet of paper, and that expressways should be driven through the hearts of communities. The politicians who believed they could improve public services by the imposition of multiple targets. Acknowledging the complexity of the systems for which they were responsible and the multiple needs of the individuals who operated these systems would have avoided these errors.’

The books coincide in several respects – a rejection of planning; predictability of linear chains of causation as a figment of planner’s imagination and/or a post hoc justification by those who actually followed their instincts and made sense of it afterwards; a celebration of chance and experimentation, of ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’.

All three books also share a common weakness – they are largely power-free. The evolution of the economy is portrayed as a fair fight between variants (may the best mutant win), rather than taking place on a landscape heavily tilted towards those with power and control, even if they are less fit. That absence of a sense of politics and power may also explain Tim Harford’s fondness of the charter city idea – if it’s an experiment, it must be good.

A lot of this strikes me as highly relevant to development work. They argue that we should shift  to a model of experimental pilots + triage that spots the promising ones early on, and kills off the failures (a bit like our accountability programme in Tanzania), but as Steven Johnson argues in his book, we would need to learn to ‘fail faster’ – one of the mantras of the internet startup world. And NGOs just aren’t set up to fail like the private sector is: last word to Harford: ‘The acceptability, even desirability of failure lies at the heart of capitalism – the corporation, limited liability and bankruptcy laws.’

Any further thoughts on their relevance (or otherwise) to our work?

And for those of you who don’t read books, here’s a 3m presentation from Tim Harford, followed by Steven Thomson doing one of those brilliant RSAnimate videos

An optimistic take on fragile states

Nice to see some upbeat–but-expert thinking on fragile states, which are all well on their way to becoming the biggestheadache/impossible problem in development. By the way, has anyone realized that the acronym for Fragile and Conflict Affected States is …… FRACAS? If not, remember you read it here first……

Anyway, back to the optimism. This is from a new paper by Laurence Chandy of the Brookings Institution, Ten Years of Fragile States: What Have We Learned?

Chandy reflects on what has changed since the World Bank established a taskforce to examine how to deal with what were then called LICUS (Low-Income Countries Under Stress). They don’t call them that any more, not least because many of them (Pakistan, Yemen) are middle income. But this group of countries suffers from name changes and constantly evolving typologies more than any other. (Another aside, DFID at one point created a ‘poor performers’ team, and then wondered why no-one wanted to work for it…..). That matters because it affects aid flows, which are twice as volatile for FRACAS as aid flows to stable countries.

And here’s his optimistic conclusions:

“Today, there is mounting evidence that aid to fragile states can work. Furthermore, with less than a dozen stable low-income countries left, donors no longer have the same excuse for overlooking the needs of the 30 or more fragile states. These needs loom ever larger. Over just the past six years, the share of the world’s poor living in fragile states is estimated to have doubled from 20 to 40 percent. No fragile state has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal.

Nevertheless, donors still face a difficult decision in determining whether to aid fragile states, and if so, by how much. Achieving results in these settings almost certainly requires greater expertise and time, which translate into higher cost and risk. A successful start to the second decade of fragile states policy would see donors redesign their resource allocation models to capture this reality. New models should:

•             Recognize that fragility does not end with graduation to middle-income status. Where donors make special allocations to low-income fragile states compared to low-income stable countries, an equivalent policy should be employed to distinguish allocations between fragile and stable middle-income countries.

•             Allow for more stable financing to fragile states. Donors should avoid trying to pin a trajectory on each partner country and instead concentrate on mitigating the instability inherent to fragile states by providing stable aid flows, supported by improved approaches to risk management. Aid commitments should be embedded in country compacts, which can serve as a useful tool for stabilizing flows.

•             Reassess the cost-effectiveness of aiding fragile states. There is an enormous potential for aid to help fragile states if it is properly designed and managed. This potential needs to be weighed up against an accurate sense of the costs of aid delivery. The effectiveness of aid flows to fragile states could be enhanced further by establishing a more systematic approach to documenting and learning from development interventions. This effort should be carried out under the supervision of the g7+ and focus on interventions with significant scope and scale.”

The g7+, by the way, is a group of 19 FRACAS that has organized itself to lobby for improved aid – a big improvement on donors and others speaking for such states in their absence. Check out its website, which houses this  slightly weird 3 minute youtube pitch to the recent Busan aid conference. And here’s the Broker’s scorecard of how Busan performed on FRACAS – not great, it seems.

Crises in a new world order: challenging the humanitarian project

Ed Cairns, Oxfam’s senior policy adviser on this kind of thing, introduces a big rethink of Oxfam’s humanitarian work

When it comes to humanitarian crises, Oxfam specializes in the appropriate acronym of ‘WASH’.In 2011, hundreds of Oxfam staff delivered water and sanitation and other relief to millions of people afflicted by drought, floods or earthquakes. But in much of the world, a growing proportion of our humanitarian aid flows through local organisations, and the proportion is rising rapidly. In West Africa, it went from 1% to 30% of Oxfam GB’s humanitarian spend between 2003-4 and 2010-11. And other Oxfam affiliates have had a long history of supporting local humanitarian organisations. The expulsion of Oxfam GB and other INGOs from Darfur in 2009 is a well-worn story. Rather less so is Oxfam America’s continuing support for local organisations in Darfur, who are struggling with limited funds, political pressures and conflict.

Many have talked recently of a ‘new business model’ for humanitarian action that values Southern capacity more than ever before. At the end of 2011, the President of MERCY Malaysia – a major INGO based in Kuala Lumpur– argued that ‘a greater role for Southern, national and local NGOs’ is the only way to respond to increasing disasters, and the realisation that climate change adaptation, preparedness and risk reduction are as ‘humanitarian’ as immediate relief. He might have added that traditional Western humanitarian donors, gripped by economic crisis, are not likely to continue to increase their funding to match a rising tide of humanitarian need.

For all these reasons, the centre of humanitarian gravity is moving Southwards. That shift is well under way in many countries. In Bangladesh, the government provided 52 per cent of the response to 2009’s Cyclone Aila (with 37 per cent from INGOs and nine per cent from the UN). Oxfam entirely welcomes that shift, but recognises the challenges – ethical and practical – as it gradually becomes more of a ‘humanitarian broker’, supporting others more than doing aid itself. Its latest briefing paper – Crises in a new world order: challenging the humanitarian project – sets out both sides of that coin.

Building up capacity is a long-term challenge.  It doesn’t free humanitarian agencies of the imperative to act fast when disasters strike in the meantime. In December, tropical storm Sendong killed more than 1000 people in the Philippines. Prompted by a previous disaster – typhoon Ketsana – two years earlier, the Philippines government had been doing a lot to improve its capacity. And Oxfam, in parallel, had seen itself increasingly as a supporter of local NGOs, rather than a direct provider. But when a storm strikes in an area where the local government is totally unprepared, as it did in December in Mindanao, Oxfam found itself having to do more than it planned.

Equally, the traditional Western humanitarian’s tendency to assume that the local response will be slow and ineffective is usually wrong. National Red Cross and Red Crescent societies alone reached 45 million people in 2009. Evaluations of crises up to Haiti’s 2010 earthquake have regularly found that international donors and agencies have paid too little attention to local knowledge and action. As one of my colleagues in Oxfam America asked, “Why is the humanitarian community able to improve in some areas but not this?”

Even in difficult circumstances local civil society can deliver results. In Ga’an Libah in Somaliland, a local organization supported pastoralists whose livelihoods were collapsing in the face of drastic

environmental degradation. With support from Oxfam, they helped the pastoralists construct stone terraces to minimize water runoff, and helped bring about the revival of grazing management and reforestation. The livestock grew heavier and more numerous, and the pastoralists used the new income to send more children to school.

But working in effective states with significant capacity and a determination to help all their people

is one thing. Working in fragile states or those that are seen as illegitimate or corrupt will always be fraught with difficulty. All of this varies case by case, but in general terms, the different models of states and international responses can be summarized by this table, which Oxfam developed in 2011 to help guide its humanitarian programming.

None of this is easy. And as the new paper makes clear, Oxfam has not always found it easy either. But there is no turning back. The humanitarian world will never again be the Western-dominated thing it once was. INGOs will be as vital as ever. But their greatest responsibility will be to help build Southern capacity. And their greatest challenge will be to do that while responding to the new crises that don’t wait for that capacity to be built up.

Here’s Ed talking about the paper:

World Bank tests Cash on Delivery; evil lawyers; Uganda land grab progress; Brautigam v the Economist; African taxes >> aid; Stuff ex-pat aid workers say: links I liked

The World Bank dips a $1bn-a-year toe in the water of Cash on Delivery aid, with its new Programme for Results (which rather begs the question what are the other programmes for……)

“[Gibson Dunn Crutcher] immediately went on the offensive, beginning a tireless campaign to unearth evidence to try to discredit the plaintiffs and exonerate their client.” American Lawyer magazine explains why it named Gibson its top litigation department of the year. The client in question is oil giant Texaco-Chevron; those pesky plaintiffs are 30,000 Amazonian residents who have been living among Texaco-Chevron’s waste for 40 years and are now trying to take Chevron to court. The US is just a different place. Oxfam’s Chris Jochnick updates on the Chevron case. Texaco-Chevron has 39 different law firms working on the case.

Progress on the Uganda land grab covered previously. At the request of the grabbed communities, the World Bank’s Office of the Compliance Adviser/Ombudsman(CAO) has announced it will launch an independent investigation.

Deborah Brautigam destroys the China-in-Africa bit of an Economist survey of ‘state capitalism’

‘On average, Africa has managed to raise an estimated $441 in taxes per person per year while receiving $41 per person annually in aid’ – that’s got to be good news.

Oh dear, I think I’m about to get into trouble again, but ’sxxx ex pat aid workers say’ is worth it. Just for the record, I have never met anyone who resembles either of these two…….

Why seasonality is back and that’s a good thing

A Welsh friend of mine once came back home after a long stint in Nicaragua. A mate picked him up at the airport and on the long drive back to Cardiff, Alun turned to him and asked ’so, how’s the harvest been this year?’ His friend looked at him as if he’d gone mad. Which brings us seamlessly to this guest post on seasonality from John Magrath……

Seasonality describes the fact that rural livelihoods in developing countries undergo regular, predictable, and often massive, changes according to the pattern of the seasons. In particular, the annual rains bring about – or bring to a peak – all sorts of effects – most of them adverse if you are poor. These include starvation, energy depletion, increases in sickness, migration, shortage of money and going into debt.

It was a regular theme in development studies from the late 1970s – when it was pioneered by the great Robert Chambers at the UK’s Institute of Development Studies – to the 1990s. Then it rather fell from favour. Now a new book, Seasonality, Rural Livelihoods and Development, the result of a conference at IDS in 2009, aims to revive the topic.

I declare an interest, as the book opens with a scene setter of a chapter written by myself and Steve Jennings about the growing influence of climate change. It draws on Oxfam research to describe how farmers in many countries perceive that their seasons are changing, throwing up new challenges.

Advocates for taking seasonality more seriously argue that, by showing how “normal” seasonal vulnerabilities underpin tip-overs into crisis when the weather is particularly bad, seasonality can be a powerful argument for proper planning to even out seasonal variations and enable people to have “a-seasonal” livelihoods.  Furthermore, seasonality affects every aspect of people’s lives, and understanding the complex and ratcheted (to use Robert Chambers’  favourite word) interactions enables one to intervene holistically, rather than sectorally.

But seasonality has always been neglected by governments and by aid workers because they don’t tend to live in rural communities – especially not during the rains. There are urban,  “tarmac” and  dry season travel biases in their understanding.

Then on top of those, in the 1990s interest faded away, largely because of the precipitate decline in public investment in agriculture generally.  With that went the abolition of many of those counter-seasonal measures that actually were in place (though not always effective), like grain reserves.

Many things have changed since the 70s: the growth of towns, communications that reduce isolation, the spread of social protection systems such as India’s employment guarantee schemes.  But the seasons have not gone away. Stephen Devereux, Rachel Sabates-Wheeler, Richard Longhurst and the other authors argue that understanding and building seasonality into policies is still relevant – in fact maybe more relevant than ever as climate change bites. And that still isn’t happening; they say that disaggregated data on seasonal poverty is still hard to find, and one of their recommendations is that poverty statistics should reflect seasonal variation, instead of reporting a single poverty headcount for a given year.

They also make the point that seasonality isn’t, fundamentally, about “blaming the weather”; rather, the weather exposes fundamental inequalities in resource distribution – that is, social injustice. But maybe the fact that seasonality is triggered by weather has made campaigners for social justice wary of embracing the subject and contributes to its neglect.

As I say, I declare an interest because I think that seasonality is one of those things that is staring us in the face so closely that we don’t see it properly; we take it for granted as “just another thing poor people have to put up with” when it could illuminate our understanding, analysis and practice. But am I right? Or do people working in development say a) we recognise seasonality but actually, we don’t see it as particularly important compared to other influences on poor people’s lives, or other ways into helping them tackle their problems? Or b), we think it is important but we think that it is already incorporated sufficiently into planning for long-term development, humanitarian response and, in particular, social protection initiatives?

The Democratic Developmental State: Goal, Utopia, or somewhere in between?

There’s nothing more disturbing than belatedly realizing that you’ve written two papers in close succession that contradict each other. Does it make you an open-minded liberal, or just a confused dimwit? Judge for yourself based on these two papers: one, an internal paper for Oxfam, tries to capture and update the argument of From Poverty to Power that development arises from the interaction of active citizens and effective states. The other, a chapter for the latest Commonwealth Secretariat annual  ‘Commonwealth Good Governance’ is much more cautious about the difficulties in achieving a ‘democratic developmental state’, born of precisely that combination. I suppose you could argue that they represent the clash between respectively optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect. Or that I’m really out of my depth. Either way, it’s been niggling away at me for years. See what you think and if anyone can shed light on how to reconcile the will and the intellect, bring it on.

Excerpt from How Development Happens

‘Why focus on effective states? Because history shows that no country has prospered without a state than can actively manage the development process. The extraordinary transformations of countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Botswana, or Mauritius have been led by states that ensure health and education for all, and which actively promote and manage the process of economic growth. After twenty years of erosion by deregulation, one-size-fits-all ‘structural adjustment programmes’, and international trade and aid agreements, many states are weak or absent. But there are no shortcuts; the road to development lies through the state, and neither aid nor NGOs can take its place.

Why active citizenship? Because people working together to determine the course of their own lives, fighting for rights and justice in their own societies, are critical in holding states, private companies, and others to account. As an integral part of ‘development as freedom’, active citizenship also has inherent merits: people living in poverty must have a voice in deciding their own destiny, rather than be treated as passive recipients of welfare or government action.

True development emerges from the interaction of effective states and active citizens. Economic growth is not enough if it comes at the expense of other freedoms. The system – governments, judiciaries, parliaments, and companies – cannot deliver development merely by treating people as ‘objects’ of government or other action. Rather, people must be recognised as ‘subjects’, conscious of and actively demanding their rights, before true development In its full sense can come about.’

Excerpt from ‘The democratic developmental state: Wishful thinking or direction of travel?

“We are left with an unpalatable conclusion. While effective states, in the Commonwealth as elsewhere, are historically a sine qua non for economic development, measured in terms of income per capita, active citizenship and democracy are equally essential to achieve development in the wider sense – an accumulation of freedoms ‘to do and to be’ (Sen, 1999).

But there are likely to be trade-offs between these two goals, even though its nature and extent is probably changing over time, in response to cultural shifts on attitudes to human rights, technological changes in access to information, decentralisation and the partial encroachment into national political spaces of international governance norms. High levels of growth are more likely to be achieved with the sacrifice of some freedoms, and vice versa.

Yet, at the very least, it seems plausible that the transition from an exclusive to an inclusive state can occur earlier in a country’s development trajectory than in the past. Aid can help or hinder this process (and most likely do both). Moreover, on this occasion, the author hopes his analysis proves unduly pessimistic, and that Mkandawire’s fiery optimism carries the day:

The experience elsewhere is that developmental states are social constructs consciously brought about by political actors and societies. As difficult as the political and economic task of establishing such states may be, it is within the reach of many countries struggling against the ravages of poverty and underdevelopment. The first few examples of developmental states were authoritarian. The new ones will have to be democratic,and it is encouraging that the two most cited examples of such ‘democratic developmental states’ are both African – Botswana and Mauritius (Mkandawire, 2001).”

Any thoughts?

The climate dice are becoming more loaded – new evidence on extreme weather events

From a new paper by J. Hansen, M. Sato and R. Ruedy

“The “climate dice” describing the chance of an unusually warm or cool season, relative to the climatology of 1951-1980, have progressively become more “loaded” during the past 30 years, coincident with increased global warming.  The most dramatic and  important change of the climate dice is the appearance of a new category of extreme climate  outliers.  These extremes were practically absent in the period of climatology, covering much  less than 1% of Earth’s surface.  Now summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three  standard deviations (σ) warmer than climatology, typically cover about 10% of the land area.  Thus there is no need to equivocate about the summer heat waves in Texas in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, which exceeded 3σ – it is nearly certain that they would not have occurred in the absence of global warming.  If global warming is not slowed from its current pace, by midcentury 3σ events will be the new norm and 5σ events will be common.”

Plus some pretty hard-hitting writing in the body of the paper:

“One of the major candidates in the current Presidential primary in the United States has declared that human-made global warming is a hoax, and he has issued an official Proclamation: ” I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on those days for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.”

Science cannot disprove the possibility of divine intervention. However, there is a relevant saying that “Heaven helps those who help themselves.”"

[h/t Steve Jennings]

Can leaders sing?; IPad pie chart; ‘lazy Africans’?; Cairo gloom; the next World Bank president; Borgen rocks; the world according to Lant: links I liked

So Barack can do a mean Al Green, but can other world leaders sing? [h/t Rob Bailey]

Where does the price of your iPad go? Only 2% to Chinese workers

Here’s a lesson in how to increase your blog traffic. Call a post You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum! Then sit back and watch the comments roll in – 583 at the last count (at least it puts the swimming pool in perspective). And it’s beautifully written too (by Field Ruwe, a US-based Zambian media practitioner and author) [h/t Malcolm Spence]

“Things are getting worse rather than better for people who took part in Egypt’s revolution last January, and the new government doesn’t seem to be a stabilising force.” IDS researcher Mariz Tadros offers a gloomy view of the revolution’s first anniversary.

And they’re off! Follow all the gossip on the race to be next World Bank president on this dedicated website.

This week’s nothing-to-do-with-development slot: imagine a feminist West Wing set in continental Europe, with plenty of agonizing over foreign aid and human rights. Welcome to Borgen, the latest amazing Danish drama on BBC4 – female prime minister (and she’s not a bit like Meryl Streep) juggles the dictates of power and principles. Brilliant.

You can rely on Harvard’s Lant Pritchett to be provocative and thoughtful, (and pugnacious – see this exchange in the comments when I mildly criticized Harvard a couple of years ago) so worth watching this interview on the ‘Cambridge Nights’ channel. University nights are clearly more, um, cerebral in the US……

Sustainable Development Goals: easy win or slippery slope?

Making sense of UN communiqués is never easy at the best of times, but it’s particularly hard when you are not involved in the process and so can’t decode the bland summit speak – a mind-numbing array of frameworks for action, toolkits, partnerships, dialogues and the like. So it’s hardly surprising that reading the draft ‘zero draft outcome document’ (what language do these people speak? – sure ain’t Shakespeare) for the Rio+20 summit in June made my head hurt. As far as I can make out, it is almost entirely made of up a series of vacuous ‘best endeavours’ non-commitments, roughly adding up to ‘we will do our best to save the planet, but no promises’.

Politically, that may be the best approach, even though the climate change clock is ticking, and won’t wait for political conditions to become more propitious. With US elections due later this year, and every  Northern economy forced by austerity and fear of a double dip recession into a highly introspective and tight-fisted mood, no summit is likely to produce ambitious outcomes this year.

Which brings us to the proposed ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, discussed by Alex Evans in a new paper. The sudden rise to prominence of the SDG idea is partly down to energetic advocacy by the Colombian government – who first mooted the idea of SDGs – and also to negotiators’ desperate search for some kind of ‘announceable’ in Rio. At a recent ‘intersessional’ (UN speak again, sorry) everyone from Canada to Botswana weighed in to support the SDGs (although the BRICS and the US opted to remain silent (at least in the official proceedings). They also feature prominently in the zero draft outcome document, which proposes they be finalized by 2015, the date when most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) currently in place are due to expire.

At first sight, the SDGs seem an admirable idea. There is indeed a problem that the current MDGs neglected scarcity and sustainability and in general,- environmental solutions need to be equitable (e.g. secure access to natural resources for people in poverty; action by rich countries to cut their consumption footprint), so let’s bring sustainability and development together, right?

But Alex sees the SDG idea as fraught with political perils: to make sense they would have to apply to all countries, not just the developing ones (cue US veto); they might muddy the waters (and blur the poverty focus) as the UN tries to agree on the successors to the MDGs. At worst they could just add to the proliferation of meaningless sustainability language (see graph).

His conclusion? ‘While there are good reasons to explore a more comprehensive and integrated set of Goals beyond 2015, policymakers should use Rio+20 to focus on broad principles and on raising the level of ambition – not on attempting to rush into specifics without adequate preparation. This is a time to play a long game, not to go for quick wins that could all too easily backfire.’

In this case, kicking the can down the road might actually be the best approach.

Wrapping up the great Nairobi guesthouse pool debate

Wow. Hit a nerve there. I’m both gratified and slightly appalled by the level of interest generated by Wednesday’s post on the development-critical issue of whether Oxfam should keep the pool at its Nairobi guesthouse shut. For those people without the time or inclination to trawl through over 60 comments, here’s a summary.

First the voting – deeply unscientific, self selecting, but at least the software doesn’t let you vote more than once from the same machine. Of the 654 votes cast to date:

• ‘Open the pool, provided it operates at zero cost to Oxfam’ gets 59%

• ‘Open the pool right away’ gets 26%

• ‘What are you wasting space on the blog on such a trivial issue?’ gets 8%

• ‘Keep it shut’ gets 7%

Now for the comments: I read through everything up to number 60, and got the following approximate breakdown:

• Open the pool: 20

• Open the pool + lateral thinking (open it to the public, charge other NGOs, privatize it etc): 11

• Humorous (at least in intent): 9

• Completely random and hard to categorize: 9

• Keep it shut: 6

• Other stuff Oxfam does is much worse: 3

• Why not just go to a pool somewhere else? 2

The lateral suggestions are interesting and creative, but they are only worth considering if they fulfil one overriding criterion – Oxfam is in the middle of a major emergency, helping some 3 million people get through the drought in the Horn of Africa and Nairobi is the headquarters of that effort. So if anything distracts one iota of management attention from that effort, forget it, at least until the drought is over.

As for going elsewhere – in Nairobi  anywhere further than walking distance seems to require an hour in a taxi stuck in traffic.

And here are three of my favourite comments:

Calvin: ‘Use the pool but don’t enjoy it’

Ros: ‘How we all agonize that we are not Gandhi’

But by popular acclaim, the prize for best comment goes to Matt for this gem:

A) Form a swimming pool collective with a rotating chair, with use of the pool to be voted on every week. Pool to be funded by bake sale at the local international school.

B) Divide the pool surface area into 100 square use rights – sell rights to the staff and/or guests, who are only allowed to swim within their allotted area, unless allowed to by other freeholders. Let residents buy and sell these rights to each other and let the market reach an efficient outcome

C) Let NGO workers use the pool, but constantly make them feel guilty about it: surround the pool with posters of photos from recent/ongoing drought. Actually, this could be a win win situation – if you run into anyone who seriously objects to the idea of Oxfam using a pool, let *them* stand on the side and heckle the swimmers.

D) Randomly allocate 50% of your guests with passes to the pool. Use pre and post survey data on stress levels, health, etc to evaluate the actual impact of pool usage. If you’re concerned about financial viability, charge a high price and then randomly distribute vouchers of varying levels to the treated group to tease out the demand curve for pool usage.

So what happens next? Errrmm nothing, necessarily. I’m just a humble head of research and for some reason the big cheeses tend not to manage Oxfam via online referenda, but I think this exercise will eventually have an influence. Right now, those in charge undoubtedly have better things to do, but I know they read the blog (far more often than they ever read my emails….) and this exchange has definitely made a few waves. I’ll keep you posted.

And by the way, yes, this was an interesting exchange on a genuine dilemma facing an INGO, but if you want to read about a rather more pressing dilemma, try why everyone (including us) was late in responding to the drought and what we can do about it.

Right, now I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks (and yes, there will be pools involved). I’ve set up a bunch of roboposts to keep wasting your time while I’m away and Richard King will manage the blog. Anything goes wrong, it’s his fault.