Overall impressions?  Lots of really smart and committed people caught between what Oxfam America’s Greg Adams calls the ‘high and low politics’ of aid. High politics is about policy – thoughtful discussions of how to make aid better; low politics is fending off the ‘aid doesn’t work/charity begins at home’ counter attack from right wingers and fiscal conservatives.

In Canada, it felt like low politics is in the ascendant – the aid community seems besieged as the government takes the axe to a number of institutions, including ‘merging’ CIDA with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (feels more like an acquisition than a merger).

The US felt more finely balanced – lots of good reform proposals coming from the Administration, and a really interesting discussion with USAID on how to move from funding relationships to partnerships like its triangular relationship with Brazil, where USAID and Brazil jointly support aid programmes in Lusophone Africa. They’re wondering how to expand that approach as more middle income countries set up their own aid agencies.

For all my admiration for their blogging, I found my day or so at the World Bank pretty depressing in terms of politics and policy. The Bank seems stuck in a ‘technology + private sector = solution to everything’ mindset. I’m not against either, but you have to take politics, power, institutions etc at least as seriously.

A Band for the Bank?

I’ve already covered my exchange with Marcelo Giugnale. At my staff talk, Bank uberblogger Shanta Devarajan stated ‘poverty is a series of government failures’ and came out with examples where ‘governments intervene, but make people worse off.’ Unfortunately his conclusion seemed not to be that the Bank should help strengthen states, but that it should bypass governments/find private sector solutions to everything. An approach that is unlikely to reduce inequality and has little historical foundation, I fear.

As for the evidence debate, Shanta reckoned ‘results always have to be relative to a counterfactual – that’s what they’re about’. So how do you assess things with no counterfactual, like the fall of apartheid, or the invasion of Afghanistan? Or the impact of international conventions on the rights of women?

[update: Shanta says I got him all wrong - see his comment below]

Meanwhile a discussion with the team producing the forthcoming World Development Report on Managing Risk suggested that the Bank still cannot get past its traditional technocratic approach of ‘if a state wants to improve, here are some suggestions’. On fragile states, what if a state isn’t interested in solutions? Reply – private sector + foreign investment. Oh dear. No theory of change for how fragile states turn around, finding nuclei of good governance in otherwise fragile states, building coalitions of civil society, faith-based institutions, media, academia, traditional authorities, shifting norms in the next generation. Nope, just a fairly barren state v private sector dichotomy. Still, these were rushed conversations, and I’d be delighted to be proved wrong.

Other impressions? Great intellectual capacity at the UN, frustrated by the lack of clarity and political constraints of the system. A professor who still remembers her first class with Robert Chambers. Robert had pinned up a map of the world, with the North at the bottom. Then he just sat in a corner as his new students filed in and commented that he’d put the map up upside down. You can imagine the rest. Genius.

And a great suggestion from someone (sorry can’t remember who) – a ‘voices of the activists’ study on lightbulb moments: what were the life-changing experiences that set you on your present course – a meeting with an individual? A personal experience of violence or injustice? A seminar (hey, it happens)? Something you read? That is research I would love to read.

Dogs that didn’t bark? Surprisingly little discussion on the rise of China, depressingly little on climate change. Otherwise, my over-riding impression of the trip is the network of smart, committed people who read this blog, comment, think and argue with passion. Thankyou – you have definitely renewed my commitment to keeping this forum going, even though it can be daunting when (as this morning) I wake up jetlagged, with nothing ready to post. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Update: here’s the video of one version (at Oxfam America) of my ‘what’s hot and what’s not: new thinking in development’ presentation.

How, I asked, has the World Bank apparently cracked it, with 300 bloggers on 32 separate blogs?

Jim Rosenberg, head of the team, argued that this all dates back to 2010, and the World Bank’s broader shift to an open access policy – a default position in favour of external publication, which is slowly gaining ground in Oxfam, but seemingly struggling to get much traction in the UN. Jim characterised the basic message as ‘if you’re good enough to talk at a conference, you should be able to write a blog post.’

The team distinguished various kinds of blog – ‘comms blogging’ to broadcast the Bank’s messages; sectoral blogging, targeting particular demographics such as youth, and ‘community of practice’ blogging for peers on themes such as education or governance (where I have a regular slot).

The discussion revealed the ‘blogging culture’ as an emergent phenomenon, unevenly distributed across the Bank. A crucial part in spreading the culture was the success of early adopters such as Shanta Devarajan and Michael Trucano. But there are still ‘dark zones’, often determined by the culture of a particular unit, or the attitude of its boss.

The Bank has tried to put incentives in place, eg including blogging as a performance objective, but it is uphill work. Many academic disciplines still disapprove. Many Bank staff are still risk averse and reluctant to upset people, especially their bosses. As a result, there are few younger bloggers, and the space is dominated by the senior experts (like Shanta). These celebrity bloggers are great advocates for blogging and very hard to rein in, and so created space for bloggers, but their very status is also inadvertently inhibiting new entrants. ‘No-one under 40 blogs at the Bank’, one staffer told me at another meeting – many of them are on short term contracts and don’t want to endanger their chance of a permanent job. Tricky.

Bloggers described a three tier risk management approach, which is very similar to my own:

-          No go areas: so sensitive that blogging on them will just start a debilitating fight. Not worth it.

-          ‘Professional courtesy’: run drafts past issue leads and experts to correct mistakes and avoid fights

-          Let it flow: low risk areas, just go for it.

As to the comparison with the UN, some reckoned  that, while the Bank has a lot of government staff looking over their shoulders, the UN system is even worse and ‘more political’. They also felt that the Bank bloggers are often recognized experts, who are leading figures in global communities of practice, and that status to some extent insulates them from internal pressures.

One of the key differences is that the Bank has worked hard to sort out its comms governance. Who can start an official twitter account? Who can blog? The system needs to have clear, transparent rules to avoid the UNICEF moment of a comms person who thought (wrongly) that the UN banned blogging by staff.

The team clammed up a bit when I raised some comments on the previous post, which argued that the Bank is doing much worse on twitter than it is on blogging. They seem to use twitter in a more top down way, to ‘amplify’ blog content and corporate messages.

What happens when bloggers screw up? The social media team sees part of its remit as rushing to their defence, and have also won some key test case battles (often, they stress, with support of management), heading off attempts to shut down the more edgy bloggers, even when the result is potentially awkward for the Bank.

The culture feels fairly macho – self-confident experts willing to blog, and shrug off any criticisms. So obvious question – how many of the 300 bloggers are women? And (tut tut) they didn’t know – some room for improvement there, I think. Interesting gender stat on twitter – men are twice as likely to tweet; women are three times more likely to take their tweets down.

There has been lots of interest in the UN post, including a nice follow up post from Ian Thorpe of UNDP. Seems like a lot of people are thinking about the challenges of blogging from within institutions.

But what we didn’t get on to, and which I would love to hear from people on, is what comes next. Is there some successor to blogging in the wings? Or will blogging just become a permanent part of the landscape, alongside more traditional channels. If so, I haven’t seen it. Please enlighten me peeps (and tweeps).

Yesterday I shared a platform with Marcelo Giugale, the World Bank’s Africa Director for Poverty Reduction and Economic Management (right). We were coming from very different places, some might say different planets, which is always stimulating. I did my standard power and politics spiel, focusing on multidimensional poverty, inequality and complex systems and their implications for aid agencies (more on that to follow).

Marcelo responded by saying that this was all a massive distraction, and that we should keep our eyes on the prize of ending poverty. And on this he was relentlessly upbeat, optimistic and pretty apolitical. ‘We can end poverty without blasting the system… we have the technology’ he said.

Marcelo argued that six key developments have made this possible:

• We will know the poor by name, individually. Thanks to a combination of technology and the widespread introduction of cash transfers, governments are increasingly registering all their poor citizens (the mega example being India’s biometric identity card programme – below, left). This allows them to scale up transfers rapidly in the event of shocks.
• We can determine impact, not just outcome. He defined impact as ‘that subset of outcomes that would not have happened without the intervention’ and pointed out that many of them are negative. Eg aid agencies give aid for education, so the education budget is redirected to something less worthwhile.
• ‘The time has come to link people with their natural resources.’ The World Bank seems to be getting behind the ‘doing an Alaska’ proposal to distribute natural resource revenues straight into the hands of poor people. Interestingly their power analysis suggests that the most likely way to overcome domestic political barriers (politicians not wanting to give up their slush funds) is by persuading ‘desperate oppositions’ who do not expect to win to adopt it as a last throw of the dice. Something a bit similar led to the introduction of India’s renowned Rural Employment Guarantee scheme. They think early adopters will ease the political logjam and increase pressure on neighbouring countries to follow suit.
• Equity not Equality: the way to steer a course through the politically polarized terrain of inequality is to focus on children. Hence the Bank’s new Human Opportunity Index, which asks ‘how important are a child’s  personal circumstances  over which he/she has no control or responsibility (e.g., gender, family income, skin colour, birthplace, etc), to his/her probability to access the services without which he/she can’t succeed in life (things like completing 6^th grade on time or having potable water in the first two years of life)?’ I’m not sure about this – is it a way to get at the real causes of inequality, breaking the transmission between generations that has grown so much more rigid in recent years. Or is it a convenient way of dodging politically contentious issues of distribution and redistribution, kicking the can down the road with a new version of the kind of ‘equality of opportunity’ approach (aka the American Dream), which I thought we had left behind?
• Focus on non-cognitive skills, such as punctuality, respect and dedication to understand the reasons for success. Why? Because they are important and becoming more measurable.
• A proliferating set of ‘standards’ for public expenditure will help governments to introduce results-based payments and budgeting.

Most of this is taken from his (freely downloadable) 2010 book The Day After Tomorrow.

Several things struck me about his presentation. Firstly, the overwhelming can-do optimism is very seductive. And the emphasis on technology neatly avoids any difficult political decisions. This is a happy technocratic world of win-wins. In contrast my presentation was all about difficult politics – I’m not sure I had the best tunes.

But in the end, I didn’t buy a lot of it – by invoking the use of ‘we’, as in ‘we can end poverty, by fixing X or Y’, he reminded me of Pierre Jacquet’s great question – who is we? And why assume that ‘we’ have a common agenda?

Marcelo has a remarkably outsiderish view of the ‘we’ – in a follow-up email he defined them as “All those that care about ending poverty, not just 19^th Street, but NGOs, advocacy groups,  faith-based organizations, the college kid that spends a year in a developing country giving a  hand, etc”.

In contrast, I would argue that these are all bit players: the key ‘we’ is within developing countries – political actors, civil society organizations, faith leaders and the rest. There, assumptions of a common agenda are likely to prove unfounded. That’s why we need to go back to school on power and politics. Which all reminded me of Matt Andrews’ critique of the World Bank’s efforts to ‘roll out best practice’ on institutional reform, including the institutions needed to introduce these new technologies.

Today I’m launching the book at the World Bank at 12.30, so expect the debates to continue……

Which is what I expected, because intellectually, I think the UN is in an enormously productive phase. Just thinking back over recent  posts on this blog, there is UNRISD on Social and Solidarity Economy, UNCTAD on finance-driven globalization, UNDP on the rise of the South, UN Women on women and the justice system and regular appearances by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Taken as a whole, this output is innovative and important, both challenging received wisdom and coming up with some of the new ideas and alternatives we so desperately need.

So where are the UN’s bloggers? UN staff certainly read blogs (including this one, I think a lot of people came along just to see what a blogaholic looks like in the flesh). But they hardly ever write them – the only one I regularly read is Ian Thorpe’s excellent ‘KM on a Dollar a Day’ (the KM is Knowledge Management), but that is so unbranded I’m not even sure the UN knows he’s doing it. The only official UN blog that comes up on a quick search is aimed at the general public – photos etc – not much there for wonks.

In contrast, I’m speaking at the World Bank tomorrow and suggested a chat to a few of its bloggers. Tricky they said – there’s 300 of them. Why the enormous difference? Is this about a greater degree of overall confidence and agency among Bank staff, or the institutional and political constraints operating in both institutions, or a mix of the two?

You want me to blog? Must I?

This awoke painful memories of a ‘bloggers’ breakfast‘ between CGD and Oxfam America last year. As we went round the table, CGD researchers raved about how much they enjoyed blogging, the to and fro of debate, the interaction etc. The Oxfamistas came over all Eeyore and said how anxious they felt about bloggin in case they make mistakes or get the organization (or themselves) into trouble. (To be fair, Oxfam America blogs have come a long way since then, including hiring Jennifer Lentfer of How Matters).

The UN staff seem to be in an even more extreme version of that defensive crouch, so worried about going wrong that they don’t even try. One person in a comms team even claimed that blogging is actually prohibited in the UN, only to be told that no, social media was an official priority (they’re doing better on twitter – UNICEF has 1.8m followers). And there’s plenty of would-be bloggers around – when I asked how many wrote private blogs, 4 out of 50 UNICEF people raised their hands.

So (assuming there isn’t some secret management conspiracy to stifle would-be bloggers), how could the UN start blogging, they asked? A few ideas:

Blogging only works if you move ‘from permission to forgiveness’, as the management cliché has it. But in a large institution with a reputation to protect, you can’t just let anyone start blogging under your logo – they need to earn it. How to marry risk management and the freedom and speed needed to blog? A probation period is a good compromise – for the first six months of this blog, I had to get sign off from Oxfam International for every post, then we relaxed a bit. Now if I screw up too often, I know they’ll rein me in, but if I don’t rattle a few Oxfam cages, I know I’m being too bland. There’s a balance to be struck.

Don’t force everyone to blog – if people see it as a chore, the resulting posts are guaranteed to be unreadable.  Why not start with those four private bloggers and get them to kick off the blog?

Give them time: blogs take months to establish, as word of mouth spreads and readers mount up (or not – the market is merciless).

Give them a face: anonymous institutional blogs don’t usually work. Blogs need a personality. If you haven’t got anyone as obsessive as me, try the Global Dashboard model – a stable of bloggers, with an option to sign up the ones you like. That takes the pressure off a bit.

Any more tips?

This should really matter to the UN, in my view. Good research and policy papers don’t disseminate themselves, and the blogosphere is an increasingly important way to get your messages out. By self-censoring in this way, the UN is reducing the impact of some really excellent work. Consider yourselves lobbied.

This is just a subset of a much wider issue – how to attract and retain mavericks/original thinkers in large bureaucratic aid institutions. But my colleague (and uber maverick) Nicholas Colloff has complained about the growing length of these posts, so (see how interactive this is?) I’ll leave that for another time.

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.

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]

I had an interesting exchange with Practical Action’s policy director, Astrid Walker Bourne (right) recently, about one of my (many) hobby horses – technology and its absence from the NGO agenda. Practical Action is trying to fill the gap with a work programme on ‘technology justice’, but a failed recruitment has got her thinking about the wider issues of NGOs and technology. See below. The job is being readvertised by the way, closing date 25th Feb.

Last week, like a lot of people in the UK, the snow prevented me from getting to the office.  Looking out on the cold white landscape, I would have been stuck if I’d not had access to a wide range of technologies: oil to run the heating system, electricity to power the kettle and keep my laptop battery topped up, and broadband to connect to the world via skype, email etc. Instead, I was able to continue working regardless in a snow-bound UK. What has this got to do with development, let alone Duncan’s intro regarding our initial unsuccessful efforts to recruit a senior policy advisor on technology in development?   A few thoughts:

Are we (the NGOs and aid industry) simply useless at linking the role of technology with development? Is it because we think that poor people need, food, better health, education and income, but that somehow technology is a non-essential luxury?  There isn’t an MDG goal for universal access to energy for example, even though many would say that not much development progress is possible without it.  Or is it because we take technologies in all their guises for granted, and as a result, neglect its centrality in so much of what we do?

Or perhaps, as a colleague of mine said the other day, the dominance of social scientists in the development sector means that we ourselves are biased – thinking solely about community power dynamics, culture and social aspects of development.  Perhaps this focus of social issue may be at the expense of the technical “hardware” that has to work effectively if it is to help people get out of poverty?

In Practical Action we are working with a principle of Technology Justice which asserts that:

Everyone should have the right to access the technologies they need to live the lives they value, provided this does not prevent others from doing the same now, or in the future.

Applying the principle of technology justice to the current debate around technology and food production systems might be a way to open a lens on the big choices in front of us, and their potential consequences. It certainly prompts a different set of questions, for example: ‘how universal has the access to the benefits of ‘modern’ technology in agriculture been in the last 50 years?’ Since 1961, in the time it has taken for the world’s population to double, cereal production volumes have tripled and consumers in the developed world have gained access to cheap and reliable food. Yet the Green Revolution has passed million by, and we now face record numbers of hungry people. It’s no coincidence that three quarters of the one billion malnourished people in the world today live in rural communities where agriculture provides a livelihood for nearly ninety per cent of the population.

Income disparities have grown between those farming the best soils and able to invest in and benefit from a wide range of (often subsidised) irrigation systems, hybrid seeds and agro chemical technologies.  Yet those in rain-fed (rather than irrigable) regions, those working the most marginal soils, or those without access to credit to buy inputs (frequently women) have not gained from a similar degree of technological advancement, and they often remain trapped in poverty and food insecurity.

Floating gardens in Bangladesh

Applying a Technology Justice lens asks us to challenge this picture. We need to re-examine a system that relies primarily on commercial incentives to drive the innovation and dissemination of technology. For low-income marginal farmers, there may be many potential improvements to productivity, which could come from better soil fertility and water management techniques, or local seed diversification, but they may be difficult to commodify, and as a result there is little incentive for businesses to invest in research & dissemination.

The principle of Technology Justice is not just about people’s access to the technologies they need to live decently today, but that this should not prevent others now or in the future from doing the same. Of course there are real concerns that current industrial agricultural practices are unsustainable and are undermine the food security of future generations. As the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) puts it: with 1.9 billion hectares of land suffering significant degradation, 1.6 billion people living in water-scarce basins, widespread salinization of soils from poor irrigation practices and with pesticides and fertilisers polluting groundwater and impacting on the biodiversity of rivers and coastal zones, the often unforeseen consequences of an exclusive focus on yields and productivity have undermined the very resources on which food production depends.

The application of the principle of technology justice reveals a picture of a current global food system that is not just unequal but also unsustainable, incapable of feeding the world today and undermining our ability to feed 9 billion people in 2050.

Too many debates around global food production are positioned as opposites –  modern GMO-based technologists versus the traditional organic proponents.  We believe that the future should include a mix of new and old.  Where is the pro-poor investment into nano-technology for pest control; or into ICTs to link poor farmers to long-term satellite-based weather forecasting; or into farmer-based research approaches to enable local adaptive techniques to be developed, and spread; or into marker-assisted breeding (where new technology is used to map desirable genes in “conventional” breeding programmes)?   All of these would be in line with the concept of Technology Justice, helping people meet their needs today, and tomorrow.   We just need to embrace the power of technology in a more positive way.

You can apply the same concept of Technology Justice to the energy sector, with some arguing “only green energy for poor countries”

running a micro-hyrdo scheme in Zimbabwe

while other arguing for a fossil led development path to be continued (see Duncan’s blog on 20^th Oct and the comments posted).

Until those engaged in development can invest more in the debate about the potential that technology offers – the right kind of technology – we’re missing a trick.

Hence, our call to action: we’re looking for a senior policy advisor who can help more development actors to understand and embrace the potential (good and bad) that technology offers the developing world, a technology-to-development translator if you like.  Someone who can pitch our vision for technology justice, wellbeing and equity to mainstream development debates.

Help us find that person: a great development thinker; a big picture policy bod; someone who understands technologies, but is not a geek.  Sounds interesting?  I think so.  The job advert is out now – deadline February 25th.

And if you need more encouragement check out this slideshow of things that people might not always consider when they think of technology.

Ah the perils of age – am I becoming one of those annoying old guys who greets every new idea (however excellent) with a weary sigh and ‘we already did/discussed all that back in the 19XXs’? I ask because I have a distinct sense of ‘here we go again’ as today, a smorgasbord of 100 NGO logos will adorn the press releases for the launch of ‘If’, a big campaign to tackle global hunger. Logotastic, lots of killer facts, a smart video (below) and, wait for it, white wristbands! Yep, it feels a bit like a rerun of Make Poverty History (2005, for the younger readers). I may blog about this properly when I’ve had time to gauge the debates around the launch, but initial impressions are:

What’s the same as MPH?

Northern focus, pegged to this year’s UK presidency of the G8 (although the G8 is not the global steering committee it was (or at least thought it was) back in 2005).

The wristbands and celebs, which should take development debates outside the usual circuits (a good thing, in case more wonky readers are in any doubt).

The big coalition of NGOs managing the tensions of any alliance in terms of pushing their particular priorities while maintaining a clear enough message to get media ‘cut-through’. More subtly, they also have to balance the dangers of over-hyping impact, ‘make poverty history’ style, with the risks of disappearing into an academically rigorous but entirely incommunicable message of ‘hey everything is context-specific, and there are enormous limits to the efficacy of international action, but we think this would probably help a bit.’

The focus on aid – this is a big year, with UK government becoming the first G8 country to meet the international aid target of 0.7% of national income, even as other governments are tearing up their aid promises under the weight of economic crisis.

What’s different

We didn’t say ‘cut through’ back in the day.

Many more technological options for viral campaigning – twitter (#If) being the most obvious. Linked to that is a much greater focus on transparency (helpfully, if clunkily, translated as ‘seeing clearly’ in the campaign literature). And a seriously funky website (left).

If reflects the shifting development agenda: in come tax dodging, biofuels, agriculture and nutrition, out go trade (Doha round going nowhere) and debt (successful cancellation in dozens of countries). More of a focus on the rich countries putting their houses in order (tax, biofuels etc), which has to be a good thing (its lack was one of the main critiques of MPH by Dani Rodrik and Nancy Birdsall, among others). Climate change is one of If’s core issues, whereas in Gleneagles, it was put on the table by the British government, not MPH.

This one feels more UK-centric (at least for now).

No sign of Bob Geldof so far (but the year is young….)

So what do you think?

One other consequence of age: for my generation ‘If…..’ conjures up images of the 1968 film, which ends with a young Malcolm McDowell on a rooftop machine-gunning the parents and teachers of his posh public school (as we call private schools in the UK). It even has a memorable reference to Oxfam. Trust that’s just a coincidence.

Megatrends and Game Changers

Tectonic Shifts

Black Swans

The most novel aspect for me was the focus on the political implications of demographic transitions – NIC reckons aging populations will encourage liberalization and democracy, and reduce levels of conflict. Plausible given the age range of most fighters, but a bit reductionist?