FP2P greatest hits: top posts & comments by theme (ag, inequality, results, education etc) now available

Oh boy, I have a greatest hits album. This blog was launched back in 2008 to help promote the first edition of From Poverty to Power, but rapidly

Easily confused.....

acquired an identity and readership of its own. I reckon there’s about half a million words or so up there now, and some of them have to be worth reading (monkeys, typewriters etc). So my long-suffering colleagues Sarah Minty read the lot, and grouped together relevant posts under categories such as Agriculture, Climate Change, Inequality, or Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning. The links take you through both to posts and (just as important) comments.

Pdf with links to posts in all categories here.

Some categories are not currently included, but probably should be:

• Posts that stoked most controversy within Oxfam (example)
• Videos that my nephews and nieces enjoyed (example)
• Funnies (example)

The pubs team made a special effort to get this out for next week’s Politics of Evidence conference, as January’s big debate between Ros Eyben, Chris Roche, Chris Whitty and Stefan Dercon (plus dozens of highly qualified commenters) on this topic has proved particularly popular with students, academics and practitioners.

Any suggestions for further refining the categories are of course, welcome.

Land Grabs: the Coldplay version

Monday’s post had Rob Nash arguing that the World Bank has got itself into a tangle on land grabs. Now Coldplay have decided to add their rather more harmonious voice, with the help of crowd-sourced footage from 7000 supporters in 55 countries.

The Bank has promptly responded to Coldplay (not to Rob, sorry Rob) with a tweet ‘@WorldBank: .@coldplay protecting the rights of farmers worldwide is key to ending poverty. Learn more abt work on this front: http://ow.ly/hs448‘. So at least now, we have their attention.

I’d be interested in your views on this kind of popular/cultural campaigning.

Why has economic crisis produced a new left in Latin America, but not elsewhere?

For a wonk parent it’s hard to beat the heart-warming experience of seeing your book referenced in your son’s university essay. In this case, junior had the task of trying to understand the link between neoliberalism and the rise of a new left in Latin America, so he cited Silent Revolution, a book I first published in 1995, when he was 3 years old.

But his essay also got me thinking. Citing Polanyi, he put the rise of Chavez, Morales, Lula et al down to the ‘commodification’ of land, labour and money. Through privatization, deregulation etc, the Washington consensus over-reached itself, trying to commodify things like jobs that have much deeper human significance than just being tradable items. That provoked the backlash that became Latin America’s centre left, while simultaneously undermining the unions that were the backbone of the previous ‘old left’.

Nice thesis, but surely if that was true, the centre left would be much more of a global phenomenon, given that commodification is hardly confined to Latin America? So what, specifically, about Latin America has led to the rise of such an interesting range of political movements and governments over the last 15 years? Candidates include:

- The depth of prior trauma from hyperinflation meant that people were less willing to go for slightly friendlier variants of neoliberalism and ready to pursue more radical solutions

- Disillusion with more orthodox forms of ‘bourgeois democracy’ because in Latin America, the return to democracy from military rule coincided with the debt crisis and economic stagnation of the 1980s

- The particular depth of progressive social capital: the radical Catholic Church, the fight back against military rule, the rise of identity movements (indigenous, black, women) created new political expressions outside the previous structures

- The concept of ’social debt’ – the new left successfully argued that the legacy of military rule was a degree of inequality that was unacceptable, and they won that argument even with the middle classes. As a result, Latin America is the one region in the world where inequality has been falling.

Hold on, what's HE doing there?

And of course, (sorry, son) it’s very dangerous to generalize about the whole region (even in an undergraduate essay). For a start, there are at least two ‘new lefts’: a more social democrat ’sensibilist’ left, epitomised by the PT under Lula, and the more fire-breathing ‘Bolivarian’ left of Morales, Chavez and friends (see left). One reason why Venezuela and Bolivia were able to depart further from the Washington Consensus was at least partly because they were enjoying massive oil and gas royalties, so felt much freer of fiscal constraints. Brazil, traumatized by memories of hyperinflation, pursued a different combination of radical social policy and cautious economic policy. Argentina, as always, is a special case, buying itself fiscal space by defaulting on its debts after the 2000 meltdown, but is now having trouble maintaining it (and the Peronists are virtually indestructible, and have so far headed off any new political challenges).

Not that Silent Revolution is much help in understanding all this. One painful aspect of being an author is that your thinking is captured at a fixed point, even as time moves on. The first edition in 1995 lamented the Latin American left’s inability to move from ‘protesta a propuesta’ (protest to proposal). The second edition in 2003 saw much more evidence of a crisis in the prevailing paradigm, but failed to find any clear signs of what was emerging. Oops.

Any other thoughts on the origins of Latin American exceptionalism? (Don’t worry, junior’s already handed in his essay, so he can’t be accused of crowdsourcing.)

Do hunger and malnutrition make you want to cry? Time to get your HANCI out

Today sees the launch of the Hunger and Nutrition Commitment Index (HANCI), produced by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) with funding from Irish Aid and DFID. It looks like it could become one of the more useful annual league tables.

It may not be seen as a progressive view in the UK, but I’m a big league table fan, especially when they’re combined with access to new information. They use political rivalry to motivate politicians, the media love them, they allow good guys to be praised, as well as under-performers to be slapped, and they hand civil society some useful ammunition. The post2015 circus might be well advised to spend more time designing an effective league table, rather than adding yet more issues to its Christmas tree.

The HANCI assesses governments both by intention and action, examining policies and programmes, legal frameworks and public spending in 45 developing countries across 22 indicators (see chart). It uses separate analyses for hunger and undernutrition, and stresses the differences between them.

Guatemala wins the beauty parade, coming ‘a resounding number one’ both on hunger and undernutrition. The report hails ‘a range of efforts by the Government of Guatemala:

• Ensuring high level of access to drinking water (92% of the population)
• Ensuring good levels of access to improved sanitation (78%);
• Promoting complementary feeding practices, and ensuring over nine out of ten pregnant women are visited by a skilled health personnel at least once before delivery;
• Investing substantially in health and having a separate nutrition budget line to make its spending accountable to all;
• Putting in place a Zero Hunger Plan that aims to reduce chronic malnutrition in children less than 5 years of age by 10% in 2016;
• Ensuring that public policy is informed by robust and up to date evidence on nutrition statuses;
• Establishing a multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder coordination mechanism that is regionally recognised as an example of good practice.’

In contrast Guinea Bissau is at the bottom of the heap. Other findings include:

• Big variation between countries (eg within the BRICS, South Africa is the hero, and India the zero)
• Economic growth has not necessarily led to a commitment from governments to tackle hunger and undernutrition

• Conversely, countries with low per capita GDP and relatively slow growth, like Malawi, can demonstrate commitment (Malawi came second after Guatemala)
• Very low level of correlation between performance on hunger and on nutrition (not clear what to make of that)

Here’s the full index (keep clicking to enlarge a bit):

The HANCI raises lots of questions about the patterns that emerge. All 3 Latin American countries are in the top 5, but the Asian and African countries are much more intermixed. What other features are worth studying? The link to political regimes? Aid dependence? Conflict? It’s a good index and will provide lots of, errm, food for thought.

(And for non-English speakers wondering about the title of this post, it’s a pun on hankie. Geddit?)

Why I’m not blogging today

Hopefully back tomorrow to review the new European Report on Development

What questions help us understand how change happens?

How do we analyse the stories of change that we all use in development? Such stories shape narratives, illustrate approaches and enrich our understanding of how change happens. Regular readers of this blog will know that this is a running theme, but I’m now about to step it up, working with colleagues across Oxfam and beyond to collect and use case studies of change to sharpen our thinking and practice.

What emerges when you do this is the problem of ‘retrospective coherence’. Asked to remember what happened, people rearrange and reinterpret a change story. Typically they downplay the importance of failure and unexpected events, and the role of individuals (eg champions within state institutions). They also tend to minimize the role of actors outside the civil society-state interaction – faith leaders, academics, media, private sector, traditional leaders. What remains is a smooth, well-planned and executed project that bears little resemblance to the messy reality faced by people working in real time. So part of the effort in collecting such stories is to recapture what actually happened.

I’ve got case studies coming out of my ears at the moment – working with Oxfam Novib, in East Asia, and with the campaigns and advocacy team – and will be blogging about them as they develop. But in the meantime, here’s the latest version of the guidance questions I send round to kick off the process – I would really appreciate any suggestions for sharpening them up, references etc. They’re also available as a Word document here.

Starting Point

What change did Oxfam seek? Where/how did the idea originate? Was it specific (eg improving livelihoods for X women) or systemic (changing government policy, prevailing norms)? Was it primarily economic, political, social or a combination?

The remaining questions help you work your way round the power and change cycle, which helps in analysing a wide range of change processes (see graphic)

Power Analysis

What was the nature of the redistribution of power involved in the change? Was it primarily about ‘power within’ eg empowering women to become more active social agents, ‘power with’ (collective organization) or ‘power to’ (e.g. supporting CSO advocacy)?

What was the power analysis of the key forces driving/blocking such a change? What economic or political interests were threatened/promoted by the change? Which groups were drivers/blockers/undecided? Was their power formal (eg elected politicians) or informal (traditional leaders, influential individuals)? Was it visible (rules and force) or invisible (in people heads – norms and values) or hidden (behind the scenes influence)

Which individuals played key roles, either as allies or opponents?

Change Hypothesis

What aspects of (or changes in) political, economic, social context made the desired change more or less likely (eg functioning institutions, political leadership, new technologies, new threats or opportunities)

What was the hypothesis for how the change was likely to come about? What alliances (eg with sympathetic officials or politicians, private sector, media, faith leaders or within civil society) could drive/block the change? What tactics were likely to work best (cooperation v conflict, research v street protest)?

What were the pivotal moments/windows of opportunity (eg new governments; changes of leadership; crises and scandals; election timetables)?

Change Strategy

What was Oxfam’s role in promoting change? As an active player or supporting partners? One programme approach, or advocacy/programme only?

Who were our partners – were they ‘usual suspects’ (local civil society organizations and NGOs), ‘unusual suspects’ (private sector bodies, local/national government, faith leaders) or a mixture of both? What was Oxfam’s contribution eg helping them develop a clearer theory of change; bringing partners together with other actors to build alliances; building particular aspects of their organizational capacity; funding?

Implement and Evaluate

What did we/partners actually do (as specific as possible, please!)

What was unexpected? Few change processes go according to plan (although we often rewrite them to make them look that way!) What unforeseen events or realizations (e.g. that something wasn’t working) led to a change of approach? How did the original plan change as the work developed? Were there unintended outcomes and impacts?

Were there early wins that helped build confidence and momentum in the work?

Looking back, what would you have done differently?

How did you monitor and evaluate impact? What evidence can you provide to persuade someone who questions whether your actions actually led to the change described?

What are the top lessons you would draw from this experience for development workers in other contexts?

The poorest countries are under renewed threat from WTO rules on access to medicines (and yes, this is 2013)

This week is acquiring an oddly retro flavour. Wednesday had me reminiscing about the Access to Medicines campaign of the last decade. Now it turns out that the issues it raised have recently erupted again. In short, the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are trying to get another extension to be free from implementing the WTO’s Intellectual Property (TRIPs) agreement. The current stay of execution, agreed in 2005, is coming to an end in June this year and the LDCs have put forward a very sensible  proposal asking for a waiver until they graduate from LDC status, so that they don’t have to bother any more with artificial deadlines.

So far, Oxfam trade warriors are lobbying hard and more than 300 groups have signed a joint NGO letter to WTO Members, because access to medicines, educational resources, seeds or climate change adaptation technologies could all be affected if these countries were to implement the TRIPs agreement any time soon. There are many other reasons why they should not have to implement TRIPs: WTO members owe this to them after failing to deliver on their other promises in the Doha Round (see what I mean about retro?); LDCs don’t have to make any commitments under the parallel agreements on Agriculture and on Non-Agricultural Market Access (NAMA – ah, a wonk’s nostalgia for the acronyms of youth!), so why should they have to implement TRIPs? And anyway, as Ha-Joon Chang has exhaustively documented, all developed countries were IP pirates when they were at a similar stage of development.

The LDC proposal has strong support from other developing countries including the BRICS. In addition, UNDP, UNAIDS and WHO have spoken in favour of the extension. And so has the industry through the CCIA (international IT lobby group, representing Google, Facebook and Microsoft). But (surprise, surprise) the EU, US, Japan and Canada are doing their best to water down the proposal, proposing a short term extension instead, or to include a ‘no roll back clause’, or to differentiate between LDCs. They freely admit in private that they have no economic interest but are pushing this for ideological reasons. Plus ca change.

More background from IPWatch. [h/t Romain Bennichio]

Food price volatility and obesity – a new development challenge?

Continuing on the ‘new development threats’ theme of yesterday’s post on Big Tobacco, the latest issue of the World Bank’s Food Price Watch looks at the links between increasing food price volatility and obesity. A blog post by the Bank’s José Cuesta starts with a nice counter-intuitive quiz (below).

The correct answers, by the way are C, B and C.

Food Price Watch report explains:

‘Overweight and obesity constitute a global epidemic even in a world of high and volatile food prices. The prevalence and numbers of people affected by overweight and obesity have increased in the last three decades, during both periods of low and high international food prices. So as one malnutrition problem, undernourishment, is falling, others, overweight and obesity, are increasing rapidly (figure 2). In 2008, the number of overweight adults was 1.46 billion, of which 508 million were obese. Even conservative projections predict truly shocking numbers in the future if current trends are unabated: 2.16 billion adults might be overweight and 1.12 billion obese by 2030. And such increases should be expected across all regions and in countries like China and India (figure 3).

As food prices remain high and, arguably, increasingly volatile, unhealthy calories tend to be cheaper than healthy ones. This is the case of junk food in the developed world, but also of less nutritious food substitutes in poor households in developing countries coping with recurrent food (and other) crises. In fact, overweight is not an epidemic restricted to rich countries. Half of the world’s overweight people live in nine countries, including the United States and Germany, but also in China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, and Turkey. Regions with the highest obesity prevalence — exceeding 25% of the adult population — include North Africa and the Middle East, Central and South America, and southern sub-Saharan Africa.

Policy responses so far have only partially addressed the epidemic. Responses have ranged from doing nothing to punishing overweight people by, for instance, imposing fines on employers when employees exceed certain waistline limits in Japan. Taxes, outright bans, or restrictive legislation on certain foods and ingredients along with clearer standards for food labels and awareness campaigns are attempts to veer consumers toward healthier foods. Yet, it is not evident that reducing obesity is among the top global policy priorities. Nonetheless, the current multilateral discussions on the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals (along with the UN high-level meeting on the prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases) offer an unprecedented opportunity for integrating global and national collective action to fight all forms of malnutrition, from stunting to obesity. This integrated and collective action has, nonetheless, a tall order: it must help prevent this double burden — triple, if micronutrient deficiencies are considered — from increasing as the world becomes more prosperous.’

Fascinating and important, but a nightmare in terms of communications for any organization wanting to work on it!

Top April Fool – Guardian Goggles

Let us do the thinking, while you got on with the living…… [h/t Calum Green]

Brit aid rocks; economists’ letters; out of order; gods v condoms; what did dev pundits get wrong?; carbon taxes; land grabs + bent pols in Malaysia: links I liked

I generally tweet links these days (@fp2p if you want to follow), but for the untwittered, here are a few recent highlights:

A wonderful (and politically inexplicable) thing happened last week. Amid gloom and austerity, the UK government kept to its promises and increased aid to 0.7% of national income – the first G8 country to do so. It barely warranted a mention in the press coverage, but Owen Barder had a nice piece + graph showing the turnaround (right, from 1960 to present, turnaround is 1997).

Oxfam did its bit as part of the IF campaign, sending in 500 George Osbournes to spread the word, and persuading 100 economists to sign a letter supporting the move. Save the Children also got a pile of economists to sign up to a letter on why inequality should be at the centre of the post2015 debate. But be warned, these are economists – only a matter of time before they start charging.

A smart Australian campaign – slapping ‘out of order’ signs on vending machines of bad companies (here, Coca Cola. Allegedly).

Religious leaders are up to their old tricks in Kenya, getting TV to drop a USAID and UKAid-funded advert encouraging condom use. Sigh.

Alex Evans lists ten things development pundits like him missed/got wrong in the 2008/9 food/finance meltdown. Excellent corrective for anyone involved in the bla bla business.

The gulf between reason and politics is nowhere greater than on climate change. The Financial Times had a well-argued editorial making the case for carbon taxes. Anyone listening?

Some great investigative campaigning from Global Witness on corruption and land grabs in Sarawak (Malaysia). Got a mention in this week’s Economist too.