Oxfam’s Humanitarian Policy Adviser (right), introduces ‘No Accident’, Oxfam’s new paper on resilience and inequality

Asking 50 Oxfam staff what they think of resilience will get 50 different responses. These will range all the way from the Sceptics (“just the latest buzzword, keep your head down and it’ll go away”), to the Deniers (“really nothing to do with me”) to the Pioneers (“it’s obvious, we’ve been doing this for years”).  But probably the biggest category would be the Unsure Interested – “well, I suspect it’s pretty important, but I’m really not clear what it means for me.”

Answering that last point is key, and at a recent Oxfam get together, a humanitarian colleague gave a wonderful example.  He spoke about a tropical storm which had devastated a rural area of Honduras; Oxfam humanitarian staff had responded quickly and effectively with water and sanitation, cash-for-work, and essential household items to help people get back on their feet. But when he visited the area, and talked to the community, he found that the problem was less about flooding, and more about agribusiness.

Local communities had been displaced by massive sugar and melon plantations, denuding the land of trees, diverting water sources and thus altering the local hydrology.  The companies had employed cheaper Guatemalan labourers from over the border, so people no longer had either land to farm or paid labour, leaving them without livelihoods and impoverished.

All the tropical storm did was to expose the deepening vulnerability of the community.  So while Oxfam’s humanitarian response helped the community to cope with the flood, it would leave them in no better position for when the next inevitable storm/flood came.

People in a waterside house raised on stilts in a slum in Manila. © Robin Hammond / Panos

A programme with ‘resilience’ as the desired outcome would look at the underlying factors for people’s vulnerability.  Critically, it would look at power dynamics and inequality (the latter extremely high in Honduras: for index geeks, a Gini coefficient of 55).  These are too often left out of the resilience debate, which so far has focused more on technical measures.  Yet Oxfam’s new report, No Accident, shows that countries with higher income inequality have populations which are more vulnerable to climate change, natural hazards and conflict.

The link between inequality and vulnerability is no doubt complex and defies simple correlation or causation.  But using language like ‘risk being dumped on the poor’ opens up a new way of looking at vulnerability.  At the international level it’s easy to see – rich countries reap the economic rewards of pumping carbon into the atmosphere, but poor countries bear the highest burden.  So whilst the impact of climate change by 2100 is estimated to cause GDP losses of 12-23% in poor countries, in the richest countries, the impact will be a range of 0.1% loss to a benefit of 0.9% of GDP.

Biofuel production and excessive speculation on food commodities is another way of exporting risk.  Food price spikes cause misery and hunger for poor people yet agribusiness firm Cargill’s profits surged during the global food crisis of 2007-8 and the US drought of 2012.

And at national level, big business and local elites can manipulate markets and governments to privatise the profits and socialise the risks. Clearly big business is not always bad but it can be.  In Peru, water supplies are dwindling as glaciers melt, but much is siphoned off or contaminated by mining companies, leaving local communities short of clean water.

The current response – at national and international level – is not good enough.  Climate change is picking up speed, food and commodity markets are more volatile than ever, environmental degradation is increasing, and more and more people are exposed to risk – either through population growth or migration. Whilst global poverty is declining, inequality is not.

States have the legal and political responsibility to reduce the risks faced by poor people, and ensure that they are borne more evenly across society.And note that equality is NOT about everyone having the same resources and support.  Disadvantaged people require more services and support simply to give them equal life chances (see pic, right).

Clearly targeted support, plus social protection, health, education – which one might call key building blocks of resilience – cost money.  Brazil is bringing down its (still high) inequality through concerted efforts by the government, including major increases in the minimum wage, and social protection schemes including a universal pension and the Bolsa Familia.  This is possible in part because there’s enough money – the tax-to-GDP ratio is approaching 35% in Brazil, compared to only 9-10% for Bangladesh and Pakistan.  Increasing tax revenues through progressive taxation has a key role to play in redistributing risk.

In terms of the aid sector – at the risk of oversimplifying, humanitarians are good at risk, and development experts are good at power.  But what we need is both.  Development thinking has often been blind to the shocks, changes and uncertainties that poor people face, and naïve in assuming that development takes place in largely stable environments.  Long term programmes need to internalise shocks and hazards (instead of sticking them in the risks/assumptions column of a logframe and then ignoring them) and then scale up and down as appropriate.

The newly fashionable focus on resilience can help communities not only to cope but to thrive despite the shocks and stresses, but only if the current resilience dialogue and practice is broadened out to tackle inequality, redistribute risk and stop risk dumping.

And here’s Debbie doing the increasingly obligatory video exec sum for wasters 3m piece to camera

I got a glimpse of the background on Wednesday at a meeting of the Ethical Trading Initiative, which brings together big brand retailers, including garment companies, trades unions and INGOs like Oxfam to work on wages and conditions in company supply chains. The Accord got some pretty rave reviews – ‘absolutely historic’, said Ben Moxham of the UK Trades Union Congress; comparable to the 1911 Chicago factory fire, according to one of the big clothes retailers at the meeting.

So what does it say? The Accord covers independent safety inspections, publicly reported; mandatory repairs and renovations; a vital role for workers and trade unions, including a commitment to Bangladesh’s Tripartite Plan of Action on Fire Safety (a national initiative). A key, and controversial aspect is that the Accord will include a legally binding arbitration mechanism, which wins a lot of trust from civil society and trade unions, but has spooked a number of companies based in the litigation-tastic USA (not all though –  part of Tommy Hilfiger’s in there, while Abercrombie and Fitch have said it they will join).

30 companies  signed up ahead of Wednesday’s midnight deadline, including Primark, (who were buying clothes from Rana Plaza), Tesco, Sainsburys, M&S, Inditex (eg Zara), NEXT, C&A, Carrefour and PVH (part of Tommy Hilfiger). There are some holdouts – Walmart is insisting on going it alone and doing its own factory inspections, which is disappointing, not least because it is focussing on the short term problem and missing the need for longer-term coordinated political engagement. And of course, nothing legally binding there.

Given my current work focus, I fell to musing on the theory of change that underlay this apparent breakthrough. Obviously, the immediate driver is a particularly grisly ‘shock as opportunity’. But other factors worth noticing include:

1. The ETI’s prior existence of a forum that established a high degree of trust between traditional antagonists (companies, unions and NGOs). This allowed people to get on the phone to each other and get things moving, without  first having to overcome barriers of distrust.
2. Prior work on some kind of accord had been going on since 2011, but had got nowhere due to lack of urgency and trust – the Rana Plaza disaster massively escalated the pressure to act.
3. A nascent national process (the National Action Plan for Fire Safety), that gave outsiders something to support and build on.
4. Energetic leadership from two new international trade unions, IndustriAll and UNI Global Union, helped get the right people in the room.
5. The organizers set a rather arbitrary, but very effective 15 May deadlineto prevent the response getting kicked into the long grass. A number of companies are feeling bruised by the pressure for immediate action, so there will be some fences to mend there once the Accord is up and running.

An interesting underlying challenge, reflecting my ramblings last week on change, complexity and national ownership, is how to combine the catalytic effect of a massive shock, with the need for slow, painstaking construction of new/improved institutions from within Bangladesh – the only way to ensure that whatever emerges is not just another bit of corporate spin. Peter McAllister, ETI’s Executive Director, reckons that the circle can be squared if the shock is primarily used to get all the international actors lined up behind the Accord, but that the implementation process needs to be slower and nationally owned.

Next steps? The Accord lays out a 45 day period to come up with an implementation plan, involving a crucial shift from being internationally to locally driven.

The TUC’s Ben Moxham hopes the accord, and the ensuing government agreement to relax restrictions on trade unions, will help consolidate and strengthen Bangladesh’s chaotic garment workers unions (39 separate unions by his count).

Others at the meeting hope that the Accord could act as a model for both other garment exporters (Bangladesh is world number 2, after China), or for other sectors within Bangladesh – collapsing buildings are not confined to garment factories.

One last thought – in this conversation between companies, unions, NGOs and the ILO, where is the UK Government? So far pretty quiet, but you’d think that coming in behind a business-led response like this with some matching funding would be a pretty attractive ‘announceable’ for a Conservative Party minister, not least because the Accord could head off other short-term, and ultimately damaging exits like Disney, where companies stop buying from Bangladesh to protect their brand, but leave thousands of women without jobs. How about some constructive engagement, DFID?

This guest post comes from Exfam colleague and education activist Swati Narayan

This summer, India missed the historic deadline to implement the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. This landmark law, the fruit of more than a decade of civil society activism, has many path-breaking clauses. For the first time, it bans schoolteachers from offering private tuition on the side – a rampant conflict of interest. It also legally prohibits corporal punishment.

Most powerfully, it insists that every private school must reserve 25 percent of classroom seats for children from poorer or disadvantaged families in the neighbourhood. This quota is by no means a silver bullet. After all, eighty percent of schools in India are government-run and in dire need of teachers, infrastructure and more.

Nevertheless, this masterstroke, which aims to piggyback on the rest of the mushrooming for-profit private schools, single-handedly opens the door for at least 1 million eligible children each year across the country to receive 8 years of free education.

Despite strident opposition from school management and parents’ associations, the Indian Supreme Court last year upheld this visionary clause. Though it may not (yet) be as internationally renowned as the United States’ Brown versus Board of Education ruling, its ripple effect will be no less important in a country as socially stratified as India.

In the last three years, apart from resorting to the courts, private schools have used every trick in the book to deny children their rightful admissions (see video). Despite a ban, some have held separate evening classes to accommodate students from poorer families. Others have sent eligible parents literally in circles over admission paperwork. As a result, last year, Maharashtra state, for example, filled only 32 per cent of reserved seats.

One bone of contention is who will foot the bill? The Act is categorical that the state will reimburse private schools only based on what it spends per pupil in government schools, which is typically much less. For-profit private schools are therefore keen to pass on the burden and increase their already inflated fees for the remainder of the class. Unfortunately, this has pitched wealthy parents against semi-literate ones, further aggravating tensions across the class and caste divides.

On the other hand, many civil society activists are disappointed that the legislation only reserves 25 percent and does not embrace the more inclusive concept of a ‘common schooling system’.

But, even this diluted, watered-down 25 percent reservation clause offers an unprecedented window of opportunity to break the shackles of centuries of social prejudice, which has pigeon-holed and stymied educational, occupational and social opportunities for generations. For the first time, there is a genuine effort to ensure that that children — rich and poor, upper and lower caste — are schooled together at an impressionable age, perhaps laying the basis for India to overcome centuries of divisions.

Even today, children of marginalized castes and tribes are less likely to attend pre-primary and primary school and the quota defines them as primary beneficiaries of the new legislation. The law also supports the entry of children with disabilities. In addition, some states have devised truly progressive rules. Tamilnadu, for instance, has recognized transgender children as eligible. Andhra Pradesh explicitly includes orphans, street and homeless children. Gujarat has clarified that teachers should be professional trained and sensitized for the proper integration of children and warned that schools which discriminate could face closure.

These gems in the rulebook could revolutionize private education in India.

Sister Cyril’s award-winning elite Loreto School in Kolkata, has over the last three decades, already showcased first-hand the transformational potential of integrating street children in mainstream classrooms.

Now, the key to the success of this dream to create inclusive classrooms lies with the burgeoning Indian middle class — to support rather than oppose — this transformative initiative to build the foundation for a more integrated India.

Swati Narayan is a social policy analyst

(SfC) is one of Oxfam America’s flagship programmes, reaching 680,000 members, mostly women, in 13 countries. Here Sophie Romana, Oxfam America’s Deputy Director of Community Finance, reports on some findings from an innovative qualitative and quantitative survey of the groups in Mali, published today (click through to summary or full report)

How do you save money and borrow when you live in rural sub-Saharan Africa?  Millions of women do just that every week, through their Savings Group.  Formed and monitored by teams of field agents from local organizations, 20 to 25 women gather every week at the same time and place to put a few cents in a wooden “savings box”. Once there is enough money in the box – i.e. the saving fund – members who need a small, short-term loan come in front of the self-managed group to explain the purpose of the loan (food purchases, life’s emergencies or working capital for an income generating activity).  The loans are paid back to the group with interest, which provides them with a return.  In a nutshell, savings groups provide basic financial services to poor rural women underserved or ignored by commercial banks and microfinance institutions.

But does belonging to a group actually improve the lives of members, their families, and their villages? To answer this, Oxfam America and Freedom from Hunger commissioned Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) at the University of Arizona to conduct a unique piece of joint research on Saving for Change groups in Mali: a randomized controlled trial (RCT) combined with a qualitative longitudinal study, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  The RCT included 500 villages: in 210 of them we introduced SFC, the other 290 were “controlled” (intentionally left out of the intervention) to try and measure the difference, hence the impacts. The qualitative survey focused on 19 villages included in the RCT and interviewed members, husbands, women non-members, villagers etc… This mixed-methods approach combines the benefits of ‘quant’ and ‘qual’ to try and get under the skin of the impacts of savings groups.

The findings of the three-year study (see chart) show encouraging results in terms of increased saving (up 31%) and lending (12% more women took a loan from a savings group), increased food security, and an increased investment in livestock (households in SfC villages own on average $120 more in livestock, which buys you four goats, three ewes or one calf).  The findings also demonstrate that savings groups reach the poorest of the poor with 82% of households in study villages living on less than $1.25 a day.

The results from the RCT also show that there was almost no change in income and health and education expenses. We hope that these results will come with longer study, but we are not sure.

Social capital, one of the outcomes most valued by group members, is proving to be a puzzle. The group offers a safe space for women to share family problems and seek advice from each other. Outside the meeting, women have also reported over the years that they tend to greet each other more in the village, and engage with each other more often than before they joined.  But here’s our evidence puzzle: this is what the anthropological findings support, but they were not captured at all by the quantitative-RCT.

Take up rate: how do groups get created in zones where we don’t run the program?

Based on feedback from our partners and staff, Oxfam started to train “volunteer replicators” members who themselves train new groups. They have been responsible for SfC “going viral” In treatment zones the take up rate is 40.5% of women – by comparison in other similar approaches such as microcredit, the take up rate is 15% to 22.5%.

But the replicators have unexpectedly ‘spilled over’ into control villages, far away from a treatment village. This may mess up the control zones by “contaminating” the sample for the RCT, but it’s potentially good news for the women in those villages, and a testament to the attraction of savings schemes like SfC.

Depending on how strict a definition of a Saving for Change group we used (other traditional groups resemble SfC groups), we see a take up rate in control zones varying from 6% to 12% of women.  So how did that happen?  Did a conversation in the market lead to the replicator offering to go and create a new group there?  Did a member get married, move to another village and start a group there? Did a woman decide to help her daughter in another village to set up a group? Traveling to another village to form a group is challenging for many Malian women, yet SfC groups were created with no encouragement or promotion from the project, no visits from paid field agents.

We also found that women who are more socially integrated and already have an income generating activity are more likely to join earlier, but that more marginalized women do indeed join later on. When women want to save money together, they find a way to make it happen.

Are members of SFC more resilient?

Whatever your own personal definition of resilience may be, in the Sahel any sign of resilience is a success. The study took place in the Segou region of Mali, where 40% of the households experienced a ‘shock’ last year (food price increase, drought, or illness) and 40% are food insecure (unable to produce or buy nutritious food). Households in SfC villages experienced an 8% increase in reported food security and were also eating more during the hungry season – spending 39¢ more per adult per week on food during this difficult time of year and eliminating the seasonal dip. In Mali 39¢ buys you a plate of nutritious beans or a few large cassava roots.  We also found that this impact is greatest for one of the most marginalized groups of women, those women married to younger brothers in large households.

From my point of view as a program manager, I see a value in combining an RCT with a qualitative study because I need to know if the program produces the impacts we designed it for and if it does not, what needs to be corrected.  However I do have a lot of questions around the findings, which I regularly debate with my Monitoring, Evaluating and Learning colleagues. That being said, would I run another RCT if a donor asked for (and funded!) one? Why not? Would I look for funding to run another RCT? Not necessarily – there are other less expensive tools to measure program impacts.  But for the time being, I’ll say with the confidence that only statistical evidence can give me: belonging to a savings group does make your life better!

Sophie Romana. with Janina Matuzeski and Clelia Anna Mannino. Today also sees an important Mali donor conference. Oxfam report here.

The past five years has been a period of extraordinary global turbulence.

The turmoil has struck as three “shocks” — the financial crisis, a breakdown in the world food system, and the Arab Spring — combined with a slow motion train wreck in the form of the seemingly inexorable onset of chaotic climate change. Together, these are having a profound impact on our understanding of how the world works.

Just how much has changed was one of the overriding impressions from updating my book From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World, first published in 2008.

The global financial crisis was a watershed event. It triggered historic geopolitical change in the rise of the emerging powers such as China and India. It also drew attention to the risks of an excessively “financialized” global economy; but it failed to lead to a reining in of the excessive size and volatility of “hot money,” condemning us to future financial crises, possibly starting with Europe in the coming months.

Simultaneous with the financial crisis, the world witnessed a food price spike. In many countries this traumatized the lives of poor people to a much greater extent than the shenanigans on Wall Street, and reversed decades of low and falling prices, threatening long-term progress on hunger and nutrition. That has led to renewed attention to the basic issues of food and hunger, and some unfortunate side effects such as “land grabs” across the developing world by investors from rich countries.

The Arab Spring confirmed the importance of active citizens in driving social and political change, and made us think much harder about the role of women (who were very active) in majority-Muslim societies.

Taken together, these events have made us much more aware of the impact of volatility, risk and vulnerability on the lives of poor people. That leads both to a focus on trying to prevent shocks from occurring in the first place and to dampen their impacts when they occur. “Shock absorbers,” from social protection to food reserves, to help for poor farmers to adapt to climate change, have become a much more central part of development thinking.

Inequality and redistribution have become mainstream debates, with even the International Monetary Fund weighing in on how high levels of inequality imperil both growth and stability. And the levels are breathtaking. I recently calculated that the amount the world’s richest 100 people added to their wealth in 2012 ($240 billion) would be enough to end extreme poverty for the 1.4 billion people living below the international $1.25 a day poverty line ($66 billion according to the Brookings Institution), four times over! With that focus has come renewed interest in how tax systems and reforms can reduce or exacerbate inequality, both at the national level, and through the international system of tax havens.

Finally, these changes are feeding into a deeper questioning of the nature of poverty itself. As the World Bank’s path-breaking and unsurpassed “Voices of the Poor” study in the 1990s showed, to be poor is as much about anxiety, vulnerability and shame as about income levels. And that anxiety has only been heightened by the turmoil of recent years.

In response, governments around the world increasingly acknowledge the limitations of income or GDP per capita as a measure of well-being, and are developing much more sophisticated metrics — aid agencies are rather lagging behind national governments in this regard.

This more subjective, people-based understanding of well and ill-being may be one explanation for a greatly increased focus on issues of power and agency in development, often linked to issues of the basic rights that are (or are not) enjoyed by poor people. The spread of “rights thinking” on areas such as gender, disability, ethnicity and sexuality appears to be a global phenomenon, bringing significant changes in national legislation and practice in many countries. The challenge for aid agencies is to ensure that their plans and methods, including the pressure to demonstrate “results” and “value for money” reflect this more human understanding of the nature of poverty and power. As the title of my book makes clear, we need to move “from poverty to power” in both our thinking and our practice.

Are we successfully completing an “age of development” or seeing the prize slip from humanity’s hands in an economic and climatic meltdown? It is hard to recall a period when developmental optimism and pessimism co-existed to such a high degree.

The stakes could not be higher. The coming decades will show whether poverty enters the history books, joining slavery and the fight for women’s suffrage, or whether an age of chaos and scarcity starts to reverse the wonderful progress of the last 70 years.

Duncan Green is the author of the book From Poverty to Power and Oxfam GB’s senior strategic adviser. He is launching his book and giving a public lecture at the University of Ottawa on Friday May 10. The event is sold-out, but a recording of the event will be made available soon on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/CCICable.

Claire Melamed responds to my ‘bah humbug’ opener on post-2015

I spend most of my working life thinking about post-2015 so this is a slightly nerve-racking experience.  What if Duncan convinces me?  Let me first respond to his arguments, then set out what I think is to be gained from the post-2015 circus… and then we’ll see if I’m still working on post-2015 at the end of it.

I’ll start with the magical thinking.  Yes a lot of what’s being said in the name of post-2015 is a bit ‘if everything was nice everything would be nice’.  But think of it this way: people everywhere, not just wonks like us – are getting involved in serious debates at national, regional and global level, about poverty, about politics, about economics and about the environment.  We don’t know where it will lead yet.  Some of it will lead nowhere.  But don’t write off all that energy and commitment because it’s a bit unfocused, rather celebrate the fact that so many people want to get involved in political debate and action (even be, um, active citizens….).

In any case, that is about the campaign and the public debate, not the goals, and the two shouldn’t be confused.   If the outcome is important, being annoyed at the tone and strategy adopted by campaigners has to be a reason to get in there and change that, not to walk away.

So is it important?  Will a new agreement have any effect? It depends on what.  If it’s a specific change – say a new law on land rights, or criminalisation of gender violence – in a given country you’re after, quite obviously you don’t work on any multilateral process.  You work through national politics, if you’re a local organisation or in solidarity with those local organisations if you’re outside the country. Many organisations and individuals do just that, brilliantly.

But that’s not what we’re trying to do here.  Both Duncan and I, and millions of other people over the years, have also taken part in campaigns, research and advocacy dedicated to improving the global context for those national politics – for example by improving global trade rules or forgiving debt.  This is one of those.  Multilateralism will never be the fastest or most certain route to national change, but it’s a contribution.  Even if the changes are marginal in any given country, taken in lots of countries together that can add up to something quite big.

Of course you can’t know in advance, for any agreement or institution, how those global changes are going to work out in any given situation.  But you have to take a punt on the basis of (almost always partial) evidence, and go for it.

And so to the evidence.  Should, as Duncan suggests, post-2015ers have considered all the available options for multilateral instruments before embarking on this particular course?  Well, the next time someone asks me to design a multilateral system from scratch, then of course I will do that research.  Maybe we can do it together.

But this is not about fantasy multilateralism.  Yes post-2015 is about goals, because that’s what’s on the table.  That’s what governments, in the UN, in regional organisations, in bilateral forums, are negotiating.  Other instruments are available – if it’s laws you want, have another shot at the WTO, or if it’s league tables, there’s always the HDI.  They exist, they have an impact, and plenty of people work on them.  But the political opportunity of post-2015 is about goals, not any of those other instruments.

So why do I (and, by the way, a large number of the world’s governments and the whole UN system, not really the ‘sidelines’) think it’s worth working on goals for post-2015? Apart from the impact on aid, which everyone seems to agree on – there are at least three other reasons to think that the current MDGs have done some good in the world, and therefore why it’s worth investing in a new agreement.

More and better information.  The MDGs, and in particular the indicators linked to each goal and target, created a huge global effort to assess progress on the basis of commonly agreed metrics.  Information has improved in every way since then. The common set of indicators agreed as part of the MDGs allowed us to compare countries to each other and over time.  They created incentives to invest in data, and, probably, reduced the tendency to reach for GDP alone as the all-purpose indicator for human progress.  And more data improved advocacy, policy making , and sometimes led to a race to the top between governments  – all ways that this particular multilateral agreement has an impact at national level.  A new agreement could do this for information on gender violence, or on employment, to take two examples of very important things on which the data is terrible.

More campaigning.  There was campaigning before the MDGs and there would have been campaigning in their absence.  But the combination of goals and targets have been used as an extra bit of ammunition for national campaigns – and again, been one small part of changes in national politics and policy.  Advocates for education and for health services have probably been the keenest users of the MDGs.  It’s rare to read a description of the campaign for free universal primary education in Kenya, for example, that doesn’t mention the education goal as one of the factors that helped push the politics in the right direction (pdf).  Without the MDGs they would have had one fewer stick to beat governments with, and progress may well have been slower.  Campaigners for universal health care, for example, think a goal or target on this would be helpful as they try to push policy in that direction in particular countries.

More and better consensus.  In the 1980s and 1990s growth was king, income was the only thing that mattered, and, according to some of the architects of structural adjustment programmes, it was justifiable to actually make poor people’s lives worse in the short term in the name of ‘development’. The MDGs were the moment that the world agreed that this was not ok, and that social development, as defined in the goals, should be an equal priority for international efforts.  A new agreement can make a move to achieving a similar consensus on inequality, for example, or on the need to make sure that we keep to within environmental limits.  This stuff matters – look at how norms, and then laws and actions, on human rights have changed in the last 20 or 30 years.

A post-2015 agreement is not going to change the world overnight.  Nothing, sadly, will do that.  We can’t know in advance exactly what changes it will bring, and to who, and how.  It may all end horribly and pointlessly, and even if we get a good agreement, it will be a big and unwieldy thing, with an impact that’s felt through many channels over many years.  But within the range of global processes that it’s currently possible to influence, this seems to me to be pretty good investment of my time.  A thousand words later, I’m still convinced.  You?

So over to you for the inevitable poll. As on the results one, I couldn’t think of suitably nuanced revealing questions, so let’s just see if you agree more with Claire, me both or neither. And I think I can assure you, the result will have absolutely no influence over the post-2015 process!

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).

UNRISD Deputy Director Peter Utting introduces the theme of his organization’s big conference in May

Having had my professional and political interests shaped during the somewhat heady days of the 1980s in Sandinista Nicaragua, I’ve long been interested in the potential and limits of collective action—of people organizing and mobilizing through associations, unions, cooperatives, community organizations, fairtrade networks and so on. The Sandinista “revolution” soon gave way to the “neoliberal” 1990s. As in much of the world, collective action went on the backburner or assumed new forms via NGO networks and identity politics. Fast forward two decades and we are witnessing a significant rebound in collective action associated with workers, producers and consumers. Whether in response to global crises (finance and food), the structural conditions of precarious employment or new opportunities for cultural expression and social interaction afforded by the internet age, old and new forms are on the rise.

The term social and solidarity economy (SSE) is increasingly being used to refer to a broad range of organizations that are distinguished from conventional for-profit enterprise, entrepreneurship and informal economy by two core features. First, they have explicit economic AND social (and often environmental) objectives. Second, they involve varying forms of co-operative, associative and solidarity relations.  They include, for example, cooperatives, mutual associations, NGOs engaged in income generating activities, women’s self-help groups, community forestry and other organizations, associations of informal sector workers, social enterprise and fair trade organizations and networks.

In addition to diversification, we see signs of upscaling. SSE appears to be moving beyond its niche, peripheral, project or community-level status, and becoming more significant in terms of macro-economic, commercial and social-economic indicators, as charted in a 2011 ILO report:

• In the UK some 62,000 social enterprises contribute £24 billion ($37.1billion) to the economy and employ 800,000 people.
• In Europe; 2 million SSE organizations represent about 10% of all companies.
• In India, over 30 million people (mainly women) are organized in over 2.2 million self-help groups; and the country’s largest food marketing corporation, the cooperative organization Amul, has 3.1 million producer members and an annual revenue of $2.5 billion.
• In Nepal, 5 million forest users are organized in the country’s largest civil society organization.
• The global fairtrade market has grown to €4.9 billion ($6.4 billion) and involves some 1.2 million workers and farmers producing certified products.
• Mutual benefit societies provide health and social protection services to 170 million people worldwide.

Beyond the statistics, why the growing interest in SSE? Theory and anecdotal evidence tell us that such an approach can be a key mechanism through which poor or disempowered people in society gain greater control over resources and decision-making processes that affect their lives. Economists and political scientists have long espoused the benefits that can derive from co-operation or group behaviour in terms of addressing market failures and making demands on more powerful entities. Sociologists have emphasized other virtues related to social cohesion, identity and job satisfaction.

But the contemporary interest in SSE also relates to the fact that we are living in an era that seems to be crying out for new models of development. Not only have we to deal with multiple and recurring crises (finance, food and energy), but there is growing recognition that today’s normative agenda has to be much more encompassing. Some may hark back to the glorious days of post WWII “embedded liberalism”, of welfare states protecting citizens and corporations upholding some principles and practices of “decent work”. But for all its benefits and ongoing pertinence, this model ignored some key issues related to gender equality and environmental pollution, and is struggling to reproduce itself in contexts of economic liberalization and informalization of labour markets.

The discussions and debates taking place in the build-up to 2015—the date that has been set for a new or revised set of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—signal that the old development formula of economic growth plus social protection is no longer sufficient. Other aspects, associated with the realization of rights, empowerment, equality, women’s care burden, and transformations in production and consumption patterns, need to be factored in. The theoretical attraction of social and solidarity economy lies precisely in the ways it lends itself to addressing these multiple dimensions of development. It simultaneously fosters economic dynamism, social and environmental protection and socio-political empowerment.

But achieving in practice what is promised on paper is another ballgame. SSE’s recent revival has been, organic, a largely grassroots phenomenon.  And therein lies the rub—in two respects. First, collective action needs to connect at multiple scales via networks, movements and alliances. If the SSE is to be sustained, enabled and scaled-up on terms compatible with its values and objectives, action cannot remain local; it must cohere at other levels (municipal, provincial, national, regional and global) where governance, advocacy and politics play out. Second, in order to expand and really move beyond the fringe, the SSE must interact far more with states, for-profit enterprise and global value chains. Such interactions inevitably generate tensions and dilemmas given differences in development priorities and approaches, as well as differentials in bargaining power.

For a graphic illustration of these tensions, look no further than fair-trade. In 2011 there was a major split in the international fair trade movement asthe US labeling organization (then known as Transfair USA) left the international federation, FLO (since renamed Fairtrade International).

Closer integration with powerful market actors underpinned the split. Fair-trade had expanded significantly over the years but quite different approaches were being promoted. The US organization leaned towards engagement with corporations like Starbucks and was keen to source from large commercial tea and other plantations, something not possible under FLO rules. Such relationships with big business had implications for the price that buyers were prepared to pay to small farmers and the quality of sustainability standards. Meanwhile, various labeling organizations and producer groups that were key stakeholders in FLO wanted to stick to the original principles and practices of fair trade, based on smallholder empowerment and agro-ecology.

What immediate policy implications stem from this reflection? Governments and international organizations clearly need to be paying far more attention to the SSE, and question how its developmental and emancipatory potential can be realized. And they should also be asking themselves whether current priorities or biases in policy approach in the field of development are not missing, or indeed undermining, what could be a major new game in town. These include the tendency to focus on

i) individuals or entrepreneurship, rather than groups,

ii) economic, rather than political, empowerment;

iii) idealize the integration of small producers and communities in global value chains; and

iv) social (and environmental) protection, rather than equality and emancipation.

It is these and other issues we’ll be debating at UNRISD’s conference on Potential and Limits of Social and Solidarity Economy from 6-8 May at the ILO in Geneva.  Please join us!

Peter Utting is writing in his personal capacity.

Boston

29 April, The Heller School, Brandeis University, Boston, 12.15pm-1.45pm. More details

29 April, Harvard University, Boston (private event)

New York

2 May, Columbia University, NYC, 1:00pm-2:00pm. More details

2 May, UN Women, NYC (private event)

3 May, UNICEF, NYC (private event)

3 May, UNDP, NYC (private event)

3 May, The Rockefeller Foundation, NYC (private event)

Washington DC

6 May, SIT Grad Institute, Washington DC (private event)

7 May, Society for International Development, Washington DC Chapter, 10:00am-12:00pm. More details

7 May, Oxfam America, Suite 600,1100 15th St NW, Washington DC,12.30pm-2.30pm, email vwangai[at]oxfamamerica.org if you want to come

7 May, World Affairs Council, University of California – Washington DC, 6:30pm-8:00pm. More details

8 May, Centre for Global Development, Washington DC (private event)

8 May, World Bank, Washington DC (private event)

9 May, USAID, Washington DC (private event)

9 May, Johns Hopkins University,1619 Massachusetts Ave, Washington DC,12:30pm-2:00pm

9 May, GW University, Elliott School for International Affairs, Washington DC, 5.30pm-7:00pm. More details

Ottawa

10 May, University of Ottawa, 2.30pm-4.30pm. More details

As for the rest of you, there may be the odd interruption to service, but  I’ll try and keep blogging while I’m on the road. First up next week, a friendly wonkwar – me v Claire Melamed on the post-2015 circus.

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