Anyone fancy a post-2015 wonkwar? Me v Claire Melamed on the biggest development circus in town

I’ve been good friends with Claire Melamed for ages, but recently we’ve found ourselves on opposite sides of the post-2015 debate. As ODI’s growth and inequality supremo, Claire is deeply immersed in the ever-proliferating discussions, whereas I decided early on that I had massive reservations about the whole process. So for your amusement (and who knows, perhaps enlightenment), we’ve decided to air our differences in public. I’ll kick off,

Claire responds, and we hope that will produce a load of comments and a life and death struggle for the last word (which I shall of course win, because it’s my blog).

What’s my beef? The post-2015 discussion typifies the kind of ‘magical thinking’ that abounds in aid circles, in which well-intentioned developmentistas debate how the world should be improved. These discussions and the mountains of policy papers, blogs etc that accompany them, are often based on what I call ‘If I ruled the World’ (IRW) thinking. IRW, then I would do X, Y, Z – Rights for (disenfranchised group of your choice)! More Infrastructure! Better Data! Jobs!

The high/low point of this for me came last year, when I had to MC an interaction between 250 civil society lobbyists and the High Level Panel on post-2015 – we managed to squeeze about 80 interventions into the allotted hour of consultation, which produced a Christmas Tree (Claire’s term, much copied) of issues that had no chance of making it onto the final post-2015 agenda.

But in any case, so what if they do? Because what is missing from this is any consideration of power and politics. What, after all, is the point of the post-2015 process, beyond creating (another) international forum for debating development? The MDGs were primarily about improving the quantity and quality of aid, and arguably they were quite successful in this. What is much less certain is the extent to which they influenced government policy (as in, persuaded governments to do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise). Rich country governments have systematically ignored MDG8 (the one on global partnership), while the evidence of ‘traction’ on developing country governments is really rather flimsy (more on that here).

Who exactly is 'we'? And what if 'we' don't agree?

In particular, I was astonished to find that there is no rigorous research comparing the traction exerted on national decision-making by the various different kinds of international instrument (laws, conventions, regional league tables, norms, academic exchanges). So the post-2015 circus is busily debating what ‘should’ happen without first establishing whether/how its conclusions will affect national decision-making. And this blind spot is massive – you can go entire days in the bubble of post-2015 discussions without ever hearing anyone mention any other international instrument on development or rights.

When I raised this at a recent OECD post-2015 conference, Claire wearily replied ‘There isn’t an answer – there is no single thing that we can say ‘if you do it like that, it will have traction’. It is very hard to predict beforehand which mechanisms for any given agreement will get traction.’ So that’s a relief then, can we just ignore these annoying questions about actual impact and get back to decorating the Christmas Tree?

That really isn’t good enough. It is certainly possible to know much more than we do about attribution through more rigorous qualitative research. For example, in-depth interviews with policymakers could investigate the traction exerted by a range of external and domestic forces on their decisions. I have yet to locate such research. (And rocking up and asking developing country ministers leading questions like ‘how have the MDGs affected your decision-making?’ most definitely does not constitute rigorous research.)

So if it can’t generate national traction, what could the post-2015 process achieve?

-       Aid still matters, albeit to a diminishing group of countries, and post-2015 could bolster the case for aid (under siege from the Austerians), and continue to improve its quality

-       Intellectual hegemony matters, so general debates on development are always good (hey, they’re my bread and butter)

-       It may help break the logjam on collective action on everything from climate change to migration (but don’t hold your breath)

But by ignoring the primacy of national politics and avoiding serious political economy questions on traction, it feels like the post-2015 process hasperhaps inadvertently relegated itself to the sidelines – a bit player in a drama that is increasingly national and beyond the reach of the aid industry.

Over to you Claire (and for the sake of my peace of mind, and a natural urge to run away and joint the post-2015 circus, this is one argument I would really like to lose).

Make Inequality History? What would change if we focussed on inequality rather than poverty?

Last week I spoke at a Brussels conference on inequality, organized by the Belgian NGO coalition 11.11.11. Inequality is flavour of the month right now, showing surprising staying power within the post-2015 process and elsewhere. Inequality gabfests usually involve violent agreement that inequality is indeed a Bad Thing, lots of evidence for why this is the case, and polite disagreements on what inequality we should target first – often along the lines of ‘because inequality is really important, we should all work on X’, where X just happens to be the thing that person works on anyway. A more retro variant involves ritual combat between supporters of equality of opportunity (aka American Dream) v equality of outcome (Socialist Paradise). Cynical, moi?

But in Brussels, I had a more difficult, but interesting job: what, if anything, should we do differently if our focus is on inequality rather than, say ‘getting to zero’ on poverty? So let’s imagine. It’s 2015, the UN has signed off on a shift in focus from poverty (MDGs) to inequality (post-2015). True, the commitment is a little vague (hey, this is the UN we’re talking about), but now NGOs and official donors are charged with the task of turning this into a viable campaign and lobbying exercise. What might a Make Inequality History campaign look like?

Firstly, as poverty reduction starts hitting the hard core of chronic poverty, both poverty and inequality campaigning will have to look more at targeting excluded groups (disabled, mental health, elderly, ethnic minorities.) For some people, the debate stops right there.

But compared to poverty, there could be a number of additional and pretty fundamental conceptual shifts

• Inequality is all about relationships (a single individual can’t be unequal!), meaning a greater emphasis on power and politics within/between countries
• Inequality is a universal challenge – within countries, it involves everyone; internationally it obliterates North-South distinctions
• That in turn means ‘whole of society’ interventions become more important: aid agencies would do more on norms (do children have rights?); prejudice and discrimination (eg against women, indigenous, disabled); disabling environments (eg violence; market failures that exclude poor people);
• Inequality is structural – what kind of economy do we have/want? What’s balance between disequalizing sectors (finance, extractives, capital intensive agriculture) and equalizing sectors (smallscale ag, labour intensive manufacturing, smallscale retail)

In terms of specific themes:

• Taxation is the standout issue. A focus on the distributive imapct of how governments raise reveneue would be a necessary complement to the traditional focus on how they spend it. At the moment, there’s real potential for reforming the global system of tax evasion. But at national level, many tax systems are going in a regressive rather than progressive direction.
• More focus on ratchet mechanisms that drive up inequality – eg hyperinflation or shocks when the rich typically have more access to smoothing mechanisms (credit, social protection)
• Would there be a focus on ceilings as well as floors, eg on land ownership (South Korea) or Oxfam’s recent cheeky proposal for an end to ‘extreme wealth’?

time to change the title (and maybe lose the mullet)?

The shift to a more overtly political and relational approach to development might be welcome by campaigners (if not by their fundraisers), but it won’t be easy. INGOs and (even more) official donors would have to learn to strike a fine balance between becoming more explicitly engaged on issues of power, politics and redistribution, and being thrown out for meddling in internal politics. There are ways to do this:

• Work with and through local partner organizations and curb any messianic tendencies in our own staff
• Focus on the ‘enabling environment for redistribution’ (promoting norms and values for social cohesion, rule of law, governance, access to information, freedom of expression), rather than specific redistributive campaigns that might prompt a greater backlash
• Build the state’s capacity to redistribute (eg domestic resource mobilization): this includes supply (training, technical assistance), demand (eg citizens watchdogs) or a mixture of both
• Develop skills in ‘convening and brokering’, ensuring the voices of poor people and their organizations are at the table by bringing together dissimilar players to build trust and find collective solutions

• Compared to specific campaigns, society-wide interventions are a lot harder to communicate and inspire people about: ‘what do we want? New norms!’
• A shift to a more universalist and political project could seriously damage levels of political and financial support for aid agencies, where it is currently based on a rather unthinking (and disingenuous) ‘aid is about helping people, not politics’ narrative
• Many of these things demand skills more than cash – aid, with its pressure on a small number of aid agency staff to disburse large chunks of funding, may even be counterproductive to the long-term, subtle political engagement required to tackle the structural roots of inequality. This was definitely the trickiest question for those in the room in Brussels – can aid agencies find a way to spend the money, and still free up brain time for the more politically sophisticated, long term, rooted work needed to confront inequality? If not, is the conclusion that more money is a mixed blessing? Or can we divide up our approaches into aid-dependent low income countries (business as usual) and non-aid dependent unequal countries (new inequality lens, needing less money and more knowledge)?
• If engaging in domestic redistributive processes proves just too politically risky and complex for aid agencies with large budgets and limited attention spans. What about a renewed focus on global inequalities – collective action problems such as climate change, tax havens, trade, intellectual property rights, migration? But here the obstacles to change often seem even greater (contrast dynamic national progress with multilateral paralysis on numerous issues).

Conclusions? This is still churning around in my head, but it feels to me like MIH would be right but difficult, banging up against all kinds of institutional constraints including communications, fund-raising and coalition-building. A three tier approach might well emerge:

1. Make Poverty History: ‘Business as usual’ poverty reduction in low income, aid dependent countries
2. Make Inequality History: A more politically engaged MIH in middle income and other fast-growing countries with falling aid dependence
3. Make Externalities History: A global campaign for collective action on climate change, tax havens, intellectual property, arms trade etc

So over to you. With limited resources, and taking into account both the opportunities and the obstacles to success in each, which of the three approaches should aid agencies adopt? And to avoid the ‘both, and’ syndrome, you’re only allowed to vote for one option.

And here is the undoubted highlight of the Brussels show, ‘India’s first youtube star’ Wilbur Sargunaraj with the catchiest song I’ve heard on poverty and redistribution. OK, the only song…..

More Wilbur videos on the Why Poverty? Site – well worth it

Government Spending Watch – a new initiative you really need to know about

I’m consistently astonished by how little we know about the important stuff in development. Take the Millennium Development Goals – the basis forinnumerable aid debates, campaigns, and negotiations. A large chunk of the MDG agenda concerns the size and quality of public spending – on health, education, water, sanitation etc. So obviously, the first thing we need is to know how much governments are spending on these things, right?

Well no actually, because we don’t have those numbers. Until now. Oxfam has teamed up with an influential and well-connected NGO, Development Finance International, which advises developing country governments around the world. Working with a network of government officials, DFI has pulled together and analysed the budgets of 52 low and middle income countries (With another 34 to follow). The result is a new database, called Government Spending Watch, (summary of overall project here) and a report ‘Progress at Risk’, previewed in Washington last Friday in a joint DFI/Oxfam America event to coincide with the IMF and World Bank Spring meetings. The full report won’t be ready ‘til May, but an initial draft exec sum is available, and here’s what it says.

The data cover seven sectors (agriculture/food, education, environment and climate change, gender, health, social protection and water/sanitation), from 2008 to 2015 (including medium-term forecasts). They examine planned and actual spending, disaggregated by types (recurrent and capital), and sources of funds (government revenue or donor funding). There are some major gaps (see map), so the first call is for donors (who are often the worst culprits) and governments to collect and publish more and better data.

The report looks separately at countries with and without IMF programmes (although attributing the differences to the IMF is tricky, and the report avoids doing so). Headline findings are:

• Most countries have been increasing revenue and spending as a % of GDP, but this is now going into reverse
• The sources of government finances have shifted from grants to loans, including more expensive domestic borrowing, raising fears about growing debt burdens (although no new debt crisis is imminent)
• Countries with IMF programmes have raised less revenue, are cutting deficits faster and have seen less positive trends in MDG spending. Agriculture and health spending are now much higher as a percentage of GDP, and education and social protection spending are rising faster in non-IMF countries. Other MDG sector spending is stagnating compared with GDP or total spending.
• For all MDGs, the vast majority of developing countries are spending much less than they have promised or than international organisations have estimated is needed. Only one third of countries are meeting any education or health goals, and less than 30 per cent are meeting agriculture and WASH goals. Trends have been even less positive for gender and sustainable development.
• Some of the spending has been funded by rapidly growing aid – especially in education, health, WASH and agriculture. Progress in these areas is threatened as OECD aid flows are now declining in real terms, and are increasingly moving away from MDG sectors to infrastructure and growth.
• In most countries, actual spending is substantially less than the amounts announced in budgets (see table). This is particularly true in the health, agriculture and WASH sectors, reflecting delays in donor funding, and absorptive capacity problems in sector ministries and decentralised government agencies.
• Types of spending show two worrying patterns. Some sectors (WASH and agriculture) are dominated by investment, raising the need to increase recurrent spending dramatically to maintain buildings and equipment. Others (education, health and social protection) are dominated by recurrent spending on wages and supplies. Especially if donors reduce budget support, which funds much recurrent spending in many countries, governments will need to make even greater revenue efforts to maintain recurrent spending and keep delivering progress.

If the excitement around last week’s prelaunch is anything to go by, this is going to be a really important initiative. According to report author and DFI boss Matthew Martin:

“We had conversations with officials from about 20 IDA countries about their relative performance in terms of spending and transparency and all of them were anxious to see the full data and report, and to improve their performance. Senior donor government officials were also energised about being able to use these data to see country spending inputs for the MDGs and for the post-2015 framework.

Major global campaigns on education and health were anxious to see and use the data. The DC development research community (Brookings, CGD, IMF, World Bank) as well as USAID, MCC and the African Development Bank  were very excited by the data and want to organise further seminars after the full report is published and consider using the data for their own research and policymaking.

We also had great conversations about potential partnerships with the International Budget Partnership (who run analysis and campaigns on budget transparency and accountability), and the BOOST team in the World Bank (who help countries produce much more detailed geocoded data and would like to code it for the MDGs).

All in all, an amazing week: it has felt like standing on a snowball which is rolling faster and getting bigger every day – we start again with the New York academic and UN community next (i.e. this) week.”

Looking ahead, citizens and social movements in poor countries will now be able both to see what their governments are promising and delivering, and to compare that with other countries in the neighbourhood. International bodies will be able to track the extent to which warm words translate into cash on the ministerial table. Internationally, Oxfam will certainly be using the database as a vital new tool to help local citizens and civil society actors ensure their governments actually deliver the goods.

In addition to scaled up advocacy and campaigns, the plan now is for GSW to expand the database to cover more countries and years, and to publish regular updates. But to do that we will need to find funders and advocacy partners. Please form an orderly queue……

Learning the Lessons: Why is change NOT happening in the response to hunger crises?

I know I go on all the time about ‘how change happens’, but often in development the important question is ‘why doesn’t change happen?’, and we need to get better at answering it. On Tuesday Oxfam published Learning the Lessons, an analysis of the response to the 2012 Sahel food crisis, which affected some 18m people across 9 countries. It’s a serious piece of work, drawing on interviews with 30 external bodies – donors, governments etc, other published research, focus group discussions with affected communities and perspectives from civil society.

Compared to the ‘too little, too late’ response to previous crises in the region in 2010 and 2005, the report finds some improvements: early warning systems had improved and raised the alarm earlier, and governments in the region reacted in good time – Niger, for example, appealed for support six months earlier than it did during the 2010 crisis.

But there were still problems with governments, donors and the aid system. Governments in the region still lack the financial and technical capacity to really be able to lead. As for donors:

‘There was still disagreement about the likely severity of the crisis. Some donors, such as the European Community’s Humanitarian Office (ECHO), acted earlier than in previous years, but overall, donor funding was no more timely than before. By the beginning of July 2012 and the peak of the crisis, the UN appeal remained just under 50 per cent funded.’

This really matters: 5.6 million people didn’t get the seeds and tools they needed in time to prepare for the 2012 harvest cycle.

Interestingly, the report sees the roadblock as conceptual, and argues that this can be overcome by changing the way we think about such crises to emphasise the concept of ‘resilience’ – very much the current buzzword in a lot of development circles. ‘Learning the Lessons’ reckons a ‘resilience lens’ would allow donors to:

-          Develop a shared understanding of vulnerability to food insecurity so that support is targeted to the poorest and responses can be launched rapidly;

-          Break down barriers between humanitarian and development actors so that long-term and emergency programmes effectively support each other;

-          Invest in strengthening the capacity of national and local actors so that governments can deliver large-scale, sustained support to their citizens.

I must admit I was initially sceptical that the answer to such a profound failure is a new buzzword. But actually, I think the authors may be on to something.

The most useful framework I’ve found for understanding the roots of inertia (aka ‘why change doesn’t happen’) is the ‘3i’ model of ideas, institutions and interests. A combination of these three underlies the kind of paralysis we’ve seen in the Sahel response.

Institutions: there is still a deep division between the ‘humanitarian/emergency’ and ‘long term development’ wings of the aid business. This is reflected in funding structures, which are completely different for the two silos. The polarization makes it hard to take a long-term approach to reducing the vulnerability to the inevitable future crises.

Interests: if you work in an aid agency, there are clear risks to responding early to a crisis – what if the rains come, you are accused of crying wolf etc? In any case, your political pay masters often only start banging the table when the grim TV images start to roll (by which time it is often too late, and certainly much more expensive, to respond). There is also still something of a macho ‘I’m here to save lives, get out of my way’ approach to humanitarian work which can all too easily brush aside national governments and local knowledge that are crucial to understanding the long-term roots of crises, and building institutions to deal with future ones. National governments need to be at the heart of efforts to address food insecurity, but that is likely to threaten the power relations of the status quo,

Ideas: The institutional silos reflect a crippling conceptual dichotomy. Cyclical crises such as those affecting the Sahel really can’t be described as ‘emergencies’, in that they are predictable and regular. But the underlying thinking in the aid business is still ‘is that an emergency, or is it long term development? Do we send in the engineers or the economists?’

One of the things I’ve noticed about climate change is that it is a ‘disruptive idea’. Disruptive ideas can’t be fitted into existing entrenched mental and organizational frameworks, and so often prompt violent rejection, but also the possibility of paradigm shifts. Because climate change doesn’t ‘belong’ to any existing camp, it makes it easier to bring people together (development and environment, for example) to think differently about how we respond to it without prompting accusations of turf wars and interference. Is ‘resilience’ also a disruptive idea, with the potential to bypass the humanitarian/development divide?

I’m sure there is a big literature our there about the characteristics and impact of disruptive ideas. Any links appreciated.

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.

Are international conferences getting any better? A bit – thanks to some sparky new tech

For a ‘club of rich countries’, the OECD spends a lot of time thinking about development. It’s Development Cooperation Directorate does the number crunching on aid; the OECD Development Centre publishes annual Economic Outlooks on Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, or Latin American revenue statistics.

Last week I spent a couple of chilly days at its Paris HQ at the 5^th Global Forum on Development discussing the inevitable topic – post2015 and what comes after the MDGs (background papers here). I’m trying to resist the post2015 bandwagon, but it’s generating a hell of a slipstream.

But why did they even invite me? After all, my main reaction to the last OECD conference I attended was to write a post on the awfulness of such international events (a series of soporific panels in a lightless room), and whether they can be salvaged.

So was this one any better? Yes in a few important ways. OK, it was still 300 people in an underground bunker flicking through their emails and half-listening to panels that over-ran and ate up question time, but the organizers had added some nice IT spice to the mix.

The first was a twitterwall – tweets with the conference hashtag appeared on the same screen as the speakers (and on the monitors that the speakers used to see their own powerpoints). The sense of realtime connectedness increased further when speakers wove responses to tweets into their presentations.

This really alters the dynamic of a conference, not least because people (whether inside the room or watching online) feel much freer to be critical on twitter than in Q&A. The tweets are anonymous, but interestingly, a staffer told me many of the most critical ones were from junior OECD staff who would normally defer to the big cheeses on stage – a real democratising influence, even within the host institution.

In me at least, especially if everyone’s agreeing with each other, the twitterwall also induces a kamikaze urge to be rude and see it come up on the screen. The adrenalin certainly keeps sleep at bay.

The second innovation was asking people to sign up to an app (wisembly.com) on their smartphones (it even worked on my blackberry). This allowed the 200 people who did so to vote on questions and issues as they emerged during the seminar, including to ‘like’ the various tweets: the most popular were then passed to the panel for responses.

But ‘death by panel’ remained, an apparently immovable object in the international conference format. The standard story is that ‘it’s all about the networking in the coffee breaks’, but then why are the coffee breaks so brief, even before they are further shortened by panel over-run? There must be a reason for this particular way of renewing epistemic communities, but I honestly can’t explain it. Given the huge investment in these events, and their inefficiency in terms of debate and knowledge-sharing, they must fulfil some other deeper function, but what is it? I ended up suggesting to the hosts that the OECD invites an anthropologist to observe their next conference to try and work out what is actually going on.

As for my role in all this, I got lucky, moderating a panel on social cohesion with great speakers. Shirin Chaudhury, Bangladesh’s Minister of Women and Children’s Affairs, gave an inspirational account of her country’s affirmative action policies and efforts to mainstream gender analysis into everything from macroeconomic policy-making to stipends for schoolgirls  and ‘info ladies’ going door to door to tell women about the various government services. Pierre Jacquet of the Global Development Network was music to my ears as he called for an end to ‘useless normative statements on post2015 that start with ‘we should’’ and stressed the need to influence national political processes. Alan Hirsch from the University of Cape Town gave a balanced overview of what has/hasn’t been achieved since the end of apartheid and wondered why ‘reconciliation has not led to social cohesion’. Trinh Cong Khang of Vietnam’s Ethnic Minority Policy Department described how the government is trying to build social cohesion with previously excluded groups. All top stuff, and I may try and generate some blog fodder from them.

At a more meta level, my main takeaway from this and other panels was that people always stress the need for national ownership (eg of any post2015 goals), which usually involves adapting  whatever is globally agreed to meet national circumstances. But they then deny any trade-offs with global goals. But is that credible? If every country adapts a global instrument differently, they just become part of national political processes (and a good thing too), but lose international comparability.

At the same time, the list of global public goods/collective action problems keeps growing (finance, climate change, drugs trade, trade, tax havens etc etc). At some point, maybe there is need for a parting of the ways, with global processes focussed on collective action problems, while leaving the rest to national politics, backed where necessary by aid. Not that collective action problems are any easier to solve, of course, but it’s just that they won’t be solved anywhere else.

My other gig was an odd one – after dinner speaker with the intimidating brief to a) not repeat anything said in the conference b) be provocative and c) keep people awake. Here’s my talking points (keep clicking til they come up). I couldn’t hear any snoring at the end, so I guess I achieved at least one of my goals.

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]

6 million deaths a year – where’s the global campaign on Big Tobacco?

Since I wrote recently on the major sources of death in the developing world, I keep spotting things about tobacco that are crying out for action. Take this from last week’s Economist:

‘This month Chile became the 14th Latin American country to ban smoking in enclosed public spaces.

Chile’s conversion is significant, since it is something of a smokers’ corner. The World Health Organisation says over 40% of Chileans smoke, compared with 27% of Argentines and 17% of people in Brazil, where curbs on smoking began in the late 1990s. Chile’s health minister, Jaime Mañalich, says that treating tobacco victims takes a quarter of the $10 billion public health-care budget.

Chile’s smokers are getting younger. According to the Tobacco Atlas, a study of the industry, nearly 40% of girls aged 13-15 in Santiago, Chile’s capital, smoke cigarettes. That is up from just 20% in 2003, and is the highest rate in the world. Growing prosperity is partly to blame. Mr Mañalich also points to a cultural change: “Chile has always been a very macho country but that is changing. For women, smoking in public is somehow a sign they are liberated.”

Latin America’s new curbs on smoking face resistance from the industry. Philip Morris International, an American tobacco company, has filed a claim against Uruguay at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, an arm of the World Bank, claiming that the country’s anti-smoking measures violate a bilateral investment treaty. Brazil, the world’s third-biggest producer of tobacco leaf, faces pressure from its planters to protect their jobs.

The anti-smoking lobby wants to see pricing and taxing of cigarettes be co-ordinated across Latin America, to discourage contraband. With income varying widely among countries, that would be hard. But governments could discourage smoking with other steps, such as curbs on advertising, bigger health warnings and subsidising nicotine-replacement therapy.

“Only Satan can grant man the faculty of expelling smoke through the mouth,” declared the Spanish Inquisition in imprisoning Rodrigo de Jerez, one of Columbus’s sailors, and the first person to bring tobacco to Europe. Latin American governments now seem to agree.’

Did you do a double take on para 4? If not, why not? A major tobacco company, Philip Morris, is trying to block the Uruguayan Government’s attempts to limit the devastation. According to a briefing by IISD, the company brought the case  in 2010  and ‘is challenging three provisions of Uruguay’s tobacco regulations: (1) a “single presentation” requirement that prohibits marketing more than one tobacco product under each brand, (2) a requirement that tobacco packages include “pictograms” with graphic images of the health consequences of smoking (such as cancerous lungs), and (3) a mandate that health warnings cover 80% of the front and back of cigarette packages.’ Philip Morris’ own version of events confirms this.

The ICSID says that the suit is ongoing, with a tribunal meeting in Paris last February.

Now tobacco is the world’s number one killer, claiming 6m lives a year (over 3 times the number of deaths caused by HIV/AIDS). When Big Pharma tried to restrict access to HIV/AIDS medicines, campaigners jumped all over them, with considerable success (as this week’s landmark ruling against Novartis in India shows). The standard Oxfam recipe for a good campaign is that you need a problem, a solution, and a villain. Big Tobacco would seem to tick every box, don’t you think?

What is the impact of women’s collective action? Evidence from 3 African countries

A day in the life of a woman agricultural policy adviser in West Africa

Sally Baden (left, in the white shirt), Oxfam’s former Senior Adviser on Agriculture and Women’s Livelihoods, summarizes the findings of a new Oxfam report and research project on women’s collective action in agriculture.

As an Oxfam policy adviser in West Africa (2001-8), I worked with many different kinds of farmer organization. These included cotton farmers, pastoralists and rice growers, grouped in informal enterprises as well as more formal associations and cooperatives.

On occasion, they were women-only groups – such as the organic Shea butter producers of Songtaaba in Burkina, one of a small but growing number of women-led collective businesses. But most farmer organizations were mixed sex – which in practice often meant male dominated, providing plentiful anecdotal evidence that led me to question whether, in fact, women benefit.

• In a meeting with national level producer leaders, the proposal from a (lone) women farmers’ leader that women members be targeted for literacy training led to one (male) farmer storming out of the room, such was his fury.
• When facilitating a planning workshop with leaders of pastoralist groups from different countries in the Sahel, it was clear that the few women present were reluctant to speak.  During the lunch break, one woman grabbed my arm and whispered in a panicked tone, ‘You must help us: If the men get better access to markets, they’ll use the money to buy more wives’.

• When interviewed separately during a funders’ visit to a cotton-farmer cooperative, a group four or five women, expressed their disenchantment with the coop. They felt they are used as free labour and to cook food for meetings and village festivities but have limited say in decisions and derive little benefit.  (Back in the room, the men, by contrast, said they favoured women’s involvement!)

These experiences, plus similar ones from other colleagues led us in 2009 to launch the ‘Researching Women’s Collective Action’ (RWCA)  project to understand which women participate in collective marketing groups – in Ethiopia, Mali and Tanzania – how they benefit, and what NGOs and others are doing to support women’s engagement in markets. We first did an extensive literature review, organized stakeholder dialogues and conducted scoping research in 15 agricultural sectors. Then we carried out surveys of nearly 3000 women (members of marketing groups and non members with similar characteristics – as a control) focused on one subsector in each country, as well as in-depth case studies of 12 groups, via focus groups and interviews with key informants.

The RWCA’s results are published today in a new Oxfam research report.

Are the examples above an unfair caricature of patriarchal attitudes (especially coming from a European feminist)? Yes, up to a point: Oxfam’s RWCA research found that male leaders’ and husbands’ support has been vital to those women who have been able to actively participate in and benefit from collective action groups, including as leaders.  Whether to engage their support, or to mitigate their opposition, strategies to promote women’s empowerment ignore men at their peril.

In more detail, the findings included:

Women’s participation in collective action groups delivers significant economic benefits, but the choice of market is critical: High value products (vs.staples or traditional exports) which have local as well as national or international markets are likely to yield more benefits. This is true for producer organizations in general, but women in particular.  Women in groups gained high returns from the vegetables sector in Tanzania:  up to $340 per annum for women who joined groups compared to those not in groups.  The estimated monetary value of increased gains from sales was lower in Mali (Shea butter) and Ethiopia (honey) but still significant, at $12 and $35 a year respectively. Those sectors were also relatively easier for women to enter, as they do not require control over land.

Wealthier, higher status women are more likely to join groups, unless measures are taken to target the less well off: Group membership rules of ‘one member per household,’ requiring land ownership, or only admitting married members, indirectly discriminate against women or certain categories of women.  In Ethiopia, unmarried women were able to access groups because NGOs and government specifically targeted female heads of household. Married women’s participation dramatically increased after local lobbying for ‘dual membership’ per household led to changes in cooperative by-laws.

Participation in informal women’s groups increases the likelihood that women will join formal marketing groups and reinforces the benefits they derive: Building on traditional institutions such rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), burial societies (iddir – in Ethiopia) or labour-sharing groups, informal groups help women to develop confidence and leadership skills as well as accumulate savings, which facilitate marketing of their produce.   However, as the basis for collective marketing such groups have limitations: collective enterprises require different skills, strong networks, group investments and legal recognition.  Linking informal women’s groups with mixed marketing groups can be an effective hybrid strategy, as we found in Ethiopia.

Women rarely have equal say in or leadership of mixed groups, while women-only groups may face challenges with business viability: Women themselves recognize these tensions: when the Matumaini A group in Tanzania lost most of its male members due to ‘women’s dominance’, members recognized that this also meant losing valuable skills, resources and networks. In Mali, ostensibly women-only groups had one or two male members, deployed for tasks such as negotiating with village chiefs where women were prohibited from crossing the threshold. One such group was even named after their token man!

Participation in marketing groups leads to improved incomes, but weak effects on empowerment: In contrast to the economic benefits, we found limited evidence of a clear link between women’s empowerment and group participation.  To assess this, we adapted elements of the ‘Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index’, an innovative methodology called developed by the Oxford Human Poverty Institute (OPHI) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) – explanatory video here.

Graph comparing women group members control over different areas of decision making vs. non members (Mali)

Our research showed that empowerment was greater when women participate in informal as well as formal groups.

Control over credit was the one area where women’s decision making was enhanced by group membership across all three countries. Other dimensions of empowerment – such as mobility – were affected, though less consistently. Women reported increased control of incomes from the sale of Shea butter, honey or vegetables, but this didn’t seem to extend to wider household incomes, except in Ethiopia. And it was only in Mali that stronger women’s rights over land were linked to group membership.

Learning from such experiences, development actors  – including Oxfam – need to adopt flexible approaches to supporting collective action, taking the wider context into account, and supporting women’s own initiatives.  We also need to pay more attention to the policy environment, enshrining clear principles of equality in cooperative laws, setting explicit targets to address women’s participation and leadership, making membership rules and procedures more flexible, and protecting the space for informal association.

So: Does organizing groups of rural women producers contribute to rural women’s empowerment as well as increasing their incomes?  My answer is a qualified ‘yes’; it can be a step towards increased empowerment, for some women, under the right conditions.  But we are only just beginning to understand the relationships between markets, collective action, intra-household relations and ‘women’s empowerment’.  More innovation and more research are (of course) needed.