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……

If you read the ERD as a thinktank document, it is pretty underwhelming. The 20 page exec sum (which is all they sent me in advance) contains no killer facts, no big new ideas and not much new reseach. When I asked one of the report’s authors for his 30 second elevator pitch on what was new, he couldn’t answer. So far, so bad (and they really need to get some media people involved on that elevator pitch).

Instead what you get is a decent overview of progressive thinking on inequality, migration, trade, domestic resource mobilization and the role of aid. And a lot of developmental platitudes: the ‘key conclusions’ include ‘a transformative agenda is vital’, ‘national ownership is key’, ‘the children are our future!’ (OK, I made that last one up).

But weirdly, no mention of the Eurozone crisis, and its likely impact on aid, trade and every other aspect of Europe’s relationship with the rest of the world.

There is one exception to the ‘nothing new’ critique – Chapter Two contains four case studies on Nepal, Peru, Cote d’Ivoire and Rwanda, exploring their experience with the MDGs. At first sight, these might go some of the way to filling the evidential vacuum on how international instruments do/don’t gain traction on national policy, so I may well come back to that chapter.

But when I raised these criticisms with the OECD’s Dirk Dijkerman, he told me I was looking at it all wrong. Although the report insists that it ‘does not reflect the official opinion of the European Union or of its Member States’, in fact it has the hands (and logos and funding) of the European Commission all over it. EC staff were involved in negotiating the final text (pretty intensively on some issues). So the ERD is somewhere between an EU White Paper and an arm’s length World Development Report. The positive content on migration, policy coherence etc has a status with the European Union that an independent report (however well-written) will never have . And sure enough, the discussion at the OECD meeting was all about what the ERD means for European policy.

But if that is the case, I’m not sure the report really makes the most of its unique position. A while ago, I raised some issues where an ERD might have particular relevance, but this report largely ignores them in favour of a global development narrative. Might be better if the authors based the report more overtly on the EU’s sphere of influence, both geographically and thematically (and you’d think the Eurozone crisis would be pretty high on any Eurocrat’s agenda).

Anyway, the ERD authors should feel free to reply, and here’s an edited down version of the report’s main message:

Main message 1: A new global development framework is needed.

The MDGs have been instrumental in mobilising global support for development, while the vision behind the Millennium Declaration remains highly relevant. A new development framework should build on these efforts.

Main message 2: The framework should promote inclusive and sustainable development.

Poverty eradication remains a central objective, but its achievement and protection will require development strategies that are both inclusive and sustainable, as long-term poverty cannot be eradicated simply through social provisions. Economic growth is key but it needs to be socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable.

Main message 3: The framework must build on an updated understanding of poverty.

A post-2015 framework will have to tackle absolute poverty and deprivation both from an income and a non-income perspective, which incorporate aspects of social inclusion and inequality.

Main message 4: A transformational development agenda is essential for this vision.

A stronger emphasis on promoting structural transformation and particularly job creation will be crucial.

Main message 5: The global framework should support country policy choices and development paths

The policy space of governments should be respected both in determining national development priorities and in other areas such as development finance, trade and investment and migration.

Main message 6: The deployment of a broad range of policies ‘beyond aid’ is essential.

Policies in areas such as trade and investment, international finance and migration have significant effects on development outcomes and need to be designed accordingly and in a coherent manner. ODA will continue to be important, but more as leverage for other finance.

Main message 7: A range of development finance sources will be required.

Domestic resources are the main source of finance for development, not least because they provide the best policy space. Levels of ODA should be maintained and increased, and ODA should be allocated in ways that maximise its impact.

Main message 8: More extensive global collective action is urgently needed.

Achieving the vision of the Millennium Declaration will require considerably greater international collective action to tackle global issues that directly affect the ability of individual countries to achieve development outcomes (eg. development finance, trade, investment and migration).

Main message 9: Processes to address global challenges need to be mutually reinforcing.

Several international processes are probably required to respond to multiple global challenges and support inclusive and sustainable development. A post-2015 agreement may best be conceived as a framework that brings together a series of interlocking and mutually reinforcing agendas.

Main message 10: Over and above its ODA effort, the EU’s contribution post 2015 should also be assessed on its ability to promote PCD and promote conducive international regimes.

The EU’s most valuable contribution to a new global framework for development will be in a range of policies beyond development cooperation (e.g. in trade, migration, PCD, knowledge sharing, climate change, promoting global collective action, and contributing to the establishment of development friendly international regimes) while still maintaining and improving its development cooperation. In particular the EU will need to adopt internal policies that support inclusive and sustainable development at the global level.

And here’s a rather leaden 4m summary video

Some useful numbers to demonstrate the extent of the shift: From 1980 to now, developing countries’ share of global GDP rose from 33% to 45%, their share of world goods trade from 25% to 45%, and South-South trade as a % of the world total rose from 8% to 26%.

How has this happened and so what? The HDR’s approach is to learn from the success of 18 of the more than 40 countries in the developing world that have done better than expected in human development terms in recent decades, with their progress accelerating markedly over the past ten years. Not just China and India, but countries like Turkey, Ghana and Mauritius. Again, nothing new there – the Growth Commission had a go at that five years back – but still infinitely preferable to maths-led regression-tastic nonsense that ignores history and politics.

Compared to the Growth Commission, the HDR’s conclusions are more interventionist, and more political. The Report identifies 3 main drivers shared across the success stories:

1. A proactive developmental state

2. Tapping into global markets

3. Determined social policy innovation

On the role of the state, successful countries ‘share some key characteristics. Most were proactive “developmental states” that sought to take strategic advantage of opportunities offered by world trade. They also invested heavily in human capital through health and education programs and other essential social services. More important than getting prices right, a developmental state must get policy priorities right. They should be people-centred, promoting opportunities while protecting against downside risks.’

In case you missed it, that’s a not-very-subtle two fingers to the Washington Consensus and its preference for ‘getting the prices right’.

Oops, wrong South

The report points to some downside risks that threaten this progress: ‘short-sighted austerity measures, failures to address persistent inequalities, and a lack of opportunities for meaningful civic participation.’ But overall, as the South rises, the focus will shift to ‘long-term challenges shared by industrialized countries of the North’ – both commonly shared issues like ageing and jobs, and collective action problems like climate change.

Its recommendations for continuing this amazing progress include

1. Developing countries need to move their focus from ‘growth first’ to human development

2. Enhanced South-South learning and integration

3. Greater representation for civil society and the South in the international system. Global institutions have not yet caught up with this historic change (the international system’s loss rather than the BRICS’). China, with the world’s second largest economy and biggest foreign exchange reserves, has but a 3.3 percent share in the World Bank, less than France’s 4.3 percent. India, which will soon surpass China as the world’s most populous country, does not have a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. And Africa, with a billion people in 54 sovereign nations, is under-represented in almost all international institutions.

And in a nice table-turning touch, the report ‘urges the convening of a new “South Commission” where developing countries can take the lead in suggesting constructive new approaches to effective global governance.’

Nothing earth-shattering, but a useful exercise in synthesizing the evolving understanding of development and repositioning the multilaterals within it. So what have I missed?

And here’s the rather frenetic animated version

Land Grabs and Fragile Food Systems

Sophia argues that the globalization and the free trade agreements of the last 20 years have combined with fears over climate change to create the conditions for the current wave of land grabs. But the immediate trigger was the 2008 food price spike, which eroded the confidence of food-importing countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that they could rely on the trading system to feed their people (so many of them started grabbing land instead).

The problem with the WTO is that its insistence on removing import tariffs (which we campaigned on when prices were low) was not matched by any effort to discipline export controls, making it completely irrelevant when prices rose and exporting countries slapped on export taxes to try and keep the food at home, thereby compounding the price spike. Sophia also takes a swing at the WTO’s inability/unwillingness to do anything about corporate concentration in the food sector. When the price spike hit ‘the four companies that between them control an estimated 75 percent or more of the inter­national grain trade saw their profits soar.’

Failures in other areas have aggravated the problem. Food reserves have been run down, biofuels have added a new degree of uncertainty by tying food prices to those of oil and gas (when fossil fuel prices rise, more land gets turned over to biofuels, so less food is produced, so food prices rise). Climate change, both current and rapidly approaching, has only added to that sense of vulnerability on food security.

How to reduce the pressures that are driving the wave of land grabs? The report has a rather convincing policy shopping list arising from this analysis:

• Reformed trade rules that ensure export measures are subject to transparency and predictability requirements and that allow all countries policy space for food security policies. She also proposes ways to ease food price spikes by reducing biofuel production during price surges
• Publicly-managed grain reserves to dampen the effects of supply shocks
• Readily accessible funding for the poorest food importers, which would be triggered automatically when prices increase sharply in international markets
• The development of strong national and international laws to govern investment in land, respecting the principles and guidelines set out in the Voluntary Guidelines on Land Tenure. Tanzania’s recently announced limits on how much land foreign and domestic investors can lease is a hopeful example of a national government taking the initiative to get serious about regulation.

At 12 pages, a very useful addition to the land grabs literature. And in case you missed it here’s what the fuss is about.

As I queued to get through immigration yesterday, I read the Economist’s recent special report on Africa by Oliver August. It’s a really nice piece of econo-wonk travel writing, travelling by land across 23 countries (see map) and mixing impressions with analysis. It’s very much an outsider looking in, but that can be interesting too.

It gets a bit close to a Panglossian ‘gee, look at the GDP, isn’t everything great’ tone at times, but overall, offers a readable, geographically-based commentary on some of the big issues – war and conflict (Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Sierra Leone); corruption and good governance (Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana and Nigeria); poverty and civil society activism (Niger, Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Sudan); state v market(Ethiopia and Kenya); managing mineral wealth (Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana) and a separate section on South Africa. Some random snippets to give you a taste:

‘At the end of the cold war only three African countries (out of 53 at the time) had democracies; since then the number has risen to 25, of varying shades, and many more countries hold imperfect but worthwhile elections (22 in 2012 alone). Only four out of now 55 countries—Eritrea, Swaziland, Libya and Somalia—lack a multi-party constitution, and the last two will get one soon.’

‘The journey covered some 15,800 miles (25,400km) on rivers, railways and roads, almost all of them paved and open for business. Not once was your correspondent asked for a bribe along the way, though a few drivers may have given small gratuities to policemen. The trip took 112 days, and on all but nine of them e-mail by smartphone was available.’

In Nigeria, ‘The transformation of Lagos is worth trumpeting. Its economy is now bigger than the whole of Kenya’s. Tax revenue has increased from $4m to $97m a month in little more than a decade. Tax rates have stayed the same but the amounts being collected have risen dramatically thanks to the deployment of private tax “farmers” who get a commission.‘

‘Climate change is a further worry. No inhabited continent will be more affected by it than Africa. Deadly droughts, flash floods and falling water tables are recurring themes in conversations across the continent. South Africans are especially worried. “In 20 years this will all be desert,” says the owner of a vineyard near the Cape, standing among verdant vines.’

And his conclusion?

‘Africans rightly worry about unemployment, inequality and a host of other problems. But over the past decade winners have outnumbered losers, and the view from the road suggests they will go on doing so. Your correspondent reaches Cape Town in a hired car on a rainy afternoon, finding the waterfront alive with once-rare tourists from other African countries. “Soon our home will look like this,” says an Angolan father of three, pointing out a cluster of high-rise buildings to his teenage children. “I brought them here to see their future.”’

So, who’s on for a beer then?

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.

The paper summarizes the key trends and flashpoints in global resource use, including:

• Resource trade has grown nearly 50% from a decade ago in weight terms owing to expanding trade in oil, iron and steel, coal, oilseeds and cereals
• Large-scale resource extraction remains concentrated in a handful of countries (China, the United States, Australia, the European Union, Brazil, Russia, India and Indonesia)

And then boils it all down into 5 ‘key findings’:

Volatility is the new normal

Volatility (see graph), driven by shrinking ‘buffers’ (eg reserve stockpiles) is spurring resource nationalism and needs to bedampened down by government and international action. The report has some clever ideas on how to design price smoothing mechanisms for oil, food and metals.

Environmental change and degradation are challenging traditional approaches

Environmental boundaries are starting to bite, notably climate change and water scarcity. Not much new in the way of ideas here (remove fossil fuel subsidies, improve water-sharing agreements etc), more ‘just do it’.

Trade as a frontline for resource conflicts

‘Trade is becoming a frontline for conflicts over resources’. Interesting – trade wars on the way back, eg over unilateral export bans by food producers, but in a different guise from the old WTO style struggle over import liberalization

Resource politics matter

‘Resource politics, not environmental preservation or sound economics, are set to dominate the global agenda and are already playing themselves out through trade disputes, climate negotiations, market manipulation strategies, aggressive industrial policies and the scramble to control frontier areas.’

Likely flashpoints that will need international action include resource production in highly eco-sensitive areas like the Arctic and ‘extreme engineering’ such as weather modification. The report picks up Alex Evans’ suggestion for a high profile annual ‘State of the World’s Resources’ report.

Collaborative governance is the only option

The report’s main big idea, in terms of policy proposals, is to set up a ‘new club of the world’s principal resource-producing and -consuming countries to fill existing governance gaps on resource and scarcities governance. This ‘Resources 30’ or R30 grouping, conceived as a ‘coalition of the committed’, would comprise leaders and officials from thirty countries of systemic significance as resource producers, consumers, importers or exporters.’

And here’s report co-author Bernice Lee introducing the findings

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?

Updating a book on contemporary events can be unnerving. In the intervening years, events and new thinking combine to expose theweaknesses of any text. Even more so with a book like ‘From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World’ (henceforward, FP2P), whose second edition has just been published. In trying to present an overall NGO narrative on development, it offered a particularly rich variety of hostages to fortune.

FP2P’s core argument was that the driving force behind development (understood in the Sen formulation as ‘freedoms to do and to be’) is a combination of active citizens and effective states. Why active citizens? Because people living in poverty must have a voice in deciding their own destiny, fighting for rights and justice in their own society, and holding the state and private sector to account. Why effective states? Because history shows that no country has prospered without a state than can actively manage the development process in terms of infrastructure, rule of law, human capital and industrial upgrading. In addition, the first edition stressed the importance of inequality and redistribution, both in terms of social and economic waste, and social justice.

The three shocks, and a slow-motion train wreck

What’s new in the second edition? An update chapter covers the main events of the intervening years, which it identifies as three shocks: the global financial crisis; the food price spike(s) and the Arab Spring; and a slow-motion train wreck in the form of climate change.

The global financial crisis was a watershed event, triggering historic geopolitical change, including the shift from G8 to G20 and the rise of the emerging powers. It drew attention to the risks of an excessively ‘financialized’ global economy, but 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. More broadly, the advent of the G20 has failed to re-energise the multilateral system, with global talks on climate change, trade and arms control all paralysed. Some commentators are even talking of a ‘G zero’, with no one in charge.

The food price spike, which in many countries traumatized the lives of poor people to a much greater extent than the financial crisis, reversed a decades-long trend of low and falling prices, thus threatening the long-term progress on hunger and nutrition.  This has led to renewed attention to food security worldwide, but with 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 citizenship in processes of change, and made us think much harder about the role of women (who were very active) in Islamic contexts, along with the granular and complex nature of social movements.

But an even more intriguing aspect of updating the book has been trying to identify how these events, along with the research and ‘public conversation’ of the development world, have changed the way we think about development.

Taken together, the three shocks, along with the growing frequency of extreme weather 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 building resilience, and trying to dampen or prevent them in the first place. Shock absorbers, from social protection to food reserves to ‘circuit breakers’ in financial markets, have become a much more central part of the development debate.

Accounting for complexity: shifts in thinking and communicating

But it goes deeper than that. The unpredictability and systemic nature of the shocks has driven home the inadequacy of development thinking predicated on linear processes of change. That raises real challenges for traditional systems of planning and measuring results. Oxfam recently sent a complexity physicist to visit its programme in northern Kenya, and the insights from this kind of interdisciplinary work are likely to play an important role in transforming our thinking in coming years.

A further consequence of systems thinking is that we are trying to work out the implications of seeing the world’s ecosystem as a closed system, operating within clear planetary boundaries. Kate Raworth’s work on how to combine these planetary boundaries with a ‘social floor’ has great promise in this area.

Over the last five years, the nature of authorship itself has been transformed by technology. The From Poverty to Power blog, initially launched to promote the first edition, has rapidly acquired a life and readership of its own. It has also provided the first draft of many of the updates incorporated into the second edition. Twitter has only added to the daily churn of links, ideas and opinions. Wrestling to impose a coherent narrative on the greatly increased information flood is one of the growing challenges of authorship.

So how has the first edition survived the assault of history?

I think the central argument still holds—that development happens primarily through the interaction of citizens and states, with aid and the global system playing only a second order role. However climate and finance are two examples of collective action problems that cannot be resolved at national level. The paralysis of international action in those areas is perhaps the darkest cloud on the development horizon, threatening to reverse sixty years of unprecedented human progress.

Inequality and redistribution have become far more mainstream debates, with even the IMF weighing in on how high levels of inequality imperil both growth and stability. Tighter constraints placed by ecosystem boundaries (for example on the right to pollute), further heighten the importance of who gets which slice of the pie.

Many people, both inside and outside Oxfam, have questioned the absence of the private sector from the citizen-state binary. My response has been that an effective state creates the enabling conditions in which private enterprise can flourish. However, I now think that I, along with many others, confused and conflated the roles of private sector, markets, and economic power. The lacklustre response to the financial meltdown has demonstrated the central role of economic power, and we do need to make the visibility and regulation of economic power a more central part of our narrative.

Finally, one area of the first edition has expanded enormously in the last five years, its focus on ‘how change happens’. Better understanding of processes of change, and the accompanying analysis of the distribution and redistribution of different kinds of power within change processes, is rapidly becoming a central component of development thinking at Oxfam and many other development agencies. It is also the subject of my next book—now there’s a hostage to fortune!

And in case you missed it, here’s me coveringe the same ground on video, reading an autocue, waving my arms and looking slightly deranged

Ed Cairns, an Oxfam senior policy adviser, looks back on a very mixed year in the response to humanitarian crises.

You might not have noticed it from the headlines, but this year Oxfam has responded to more crises than ever before. Not megadisasters like Haiti’s earthquake in 2010, but the daily struggle for survival that has just got worse in places like the West African countries of the Sahel. The dearth of headlines may of course also be because much of the world has been preoccupied with its own problems – the Eurozone in crisis, China slowing down, and the US teetering on its fiscal cliff. Perhaps that is why the UN expects this year’s humanitarian appeals to end 2012 around 63% filled. That’s $3 billion of aid to save lives not given – no worse than last year, but significantly down from the pre-recession days of 2007, ’08 and ’09 when such appeals reached more than 70% of their targets.

This year, one crisis came on top of another – sometimes literally. Like northern Mali’s rebellion in April which has forced some 360,000 from their homes, including 160,000 seeking refuge in Mali’s impoverished neighbours. For – without even mentioning Syria – 2012 has not really been a good year for peace. Last week, the UN launched a review of its peacekeeping in Congo after its mission let rebels force 140.000 people from the city of Goma. According to Tariq Rieb, an Oxfam colleague in Congo, the UN’s performance fell ‘way short of what anyone would expect.’ And this only a month after another UN review slammed the UN role in Sri Lanka, where UN and other aid workers failed to do what they could to protect civilians in 2009.

Too many aid workers still think their responsibility ends with providing material necessities, while in many crises what people ask for, even more, is safety. Twenty years after we searched our souls in Bosnia for sending aid to the ‘well-fed dead’ – who nobody was protecting from murder and rape – we still have a long way to go. Although humanitarian aid has come on by leaps and bounds in quality and professionalism, the dilemmas of working in conflicts are proving more stubborn. While what has come to light in Sri Lanka and Congo should prompt a profound look at why the UN, including peacekeeping, is not better at protecting people from, to quote its founders in 1945, the ‘scourge of war’.

Not everything of course is so bleak. Gaza at least got a ceasefire. And in other humanitarian crises, there is a real sense that governments and organisations on the ground are getting better at coping with disasters. Tragically, this month hundreds were killed by Typhoon Bopha in the southern Philippines, but the local Humanitarian Response Consortium went immediately into action to get safe water to the stricken areas, and launch cash-for-work programmes so that families could buy food, clothing and shelter. The local authorities too were well prepared,

tangible proof of how the Philippines has built its national capacity to handle disasters since 2009.

Just as well actually, because the Philippines, like so much of the world, is likely to see more such weather-related disasters in future. So it was not good that, a few thousand miles away in Doha, the world failed to agree much of anything at the latest talks on climate change. There was no big new commitment to cut emissions, while the earth continues, on its current trends, towards the 2C temperature rise that most scientists warn us about. If those trends continue, we can expect more climate-related disasters, and a lot more humanitarian need. And perhaps most worrying of all, coastal areas, like parts of Bangladesh, going under water – despite the progress that has been done to make them less vulnerable to disaster. In one part of south west Bangladesh, Oxfam is leading a consortium building 11,000 shelters, homes and latrines on plinths above flood levels. But if the world fails to tackle climate change, will that really help? We don’t honestly know. And because of that, this year’s greatest humanitarian disaster was probably in… Doha.