Signing off with some Inspiration for Christmas and a big 2009

I’m taking a two week break from the blog over Christmas, (should be long enough to get over any withdrawal symptoms). This blog was originally designed to help launch From Poverty to Power. That is largely done now – the book is in its 4th printing and doing fine, the Spanish edition is out, with Italian and Portuguese versions due out next year.

But I’ll keep the blog going on general development issues in 2009 because it promises to be a landmark year for development (and also because blogging is fun….). The financial and economic meltdown is likely to deepen, perhaps providing the kind of shock needed to galvanize leaders (e.g. at the G20 summit in April) into overhauling a system that has proved dangerously volatile and delivered far too little for poor people everywhere. In December in Copenhagen a new deal on the way the world uses and abuses carbon has to be struck if catastrophic climate change is to be averted.

I don’t really do oratory (more of a self-doubt and glass-half-full type of person), so I’ll leave the inspirational last (tongue in cheek) word to the people who do it best – Hollywood (thanks to Global Dashboard for the link). In fact a bargain 40 inspirational speeches in 2 minutes – can you name them all?  See you in 2009.

What did Poznan mean for progress on climate change?

I didn’t attend last week’s climate summit, but I’ve talked to a few Oxfam staff who did, and got to thinking about how the talks compare with other negotiations, especially on trade. (For a more specific debrief on the Poznan outcome see here). Read More …

Some killer facts (and some life savers) on Health in Malawi

And unfortunately, I mean killer, although there is progress to report too. This cup half full/half empty analysis comes from a new country study for Oxfam’s Essential Health Services Campaign. Read More …

Reasons to be Cheerful: progress on international justice, arms control, economic and social rights and democracy in Africa

After Monday’s fairly depressing post, I thought I’d add some good news, from an unlikely source. Perhaps because it can break free from its heavy ideological baggage of laissez faire, the further the Economist strays from economics, the better it gets. This week’s issue has some really nuanced reporting on the impact of the International Criminal Court (ICC), on the cluster bomb treaty, and some good news (so far) on Ghana’s elections. Read More …

How Change Happens: a framework, some case studies, and some reading

Why are ‘change studies’ not a recognized academic discipline? Politicians, social movements and NGOs think about little else, and portray themselves as ‘change agents’, but the intellectual basis for thinking about political and social change seems particularly arbitrary and threadbare. In discussions on this issue at various book launches and seminars, a few people have asked for references, so here goes: Read More …

3 crystal ball overviews on global security – not looking good

The futurologists (from NIC, ippr, and DCDC) have been busy, with varying degrees of success. The US Government’s National Intelligence Council has a good report out, ‘Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World.’  Media coverage has focussed on its predictions of US decline and the ‘rise of the East’, but it’s much richer than that. Here are a few examples from the two page summary table of ‘relative certainties’ and ‘key uncertainties’ (known knowns and known unknowns in Rumsfeld-speak): Read More …

A definitive overview of education in the developing world

My predecessor at Oxfam, Kevin Watkins, went off into the labyrinth of the UN system where he has produced a series of monumental reports. At UNDP he led (i.e. wrote) a series of landmark Human Development Reports on International Cooperation, Water and Sanitation and Climate Change. From there it was off to UNESCO where his latest tome, the Education For All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report 2009, has just been published.  It offers a fantastic overview of the state of education provision in the developing world. Read More …

Cuba beats USA again, this time on child welfare

I’m no apologist for the Cuban government, but it’s noteworthy that despite its much lower GDP per capita, Cuba keeps beating much richer countries in social and environmental league tables drawn up by some highly respectable NGOs. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Oxfam America contrasted the carnage in New Orleans with Cuba’s extraordinarily effective disaster response. Then the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s 2006 Living Planet report identified Cuba as the only country that achieved high levels of human development while living within its environmental footprint. Now Save the Children UK has developed a new Child Development Index (CDI) and sure enough, there is Cuba at number 20, the highest placed developing country and three slots above the USA. Read More …

Why my wife is half-right on the Tobin Tax

I’ve always been a bit of a Tobin Tax sceptic, which made for interesting domestic dynamics when my wife Cathy was director of War on Want, one of the main TT advocates in the UK (she’s since moved on to become a psychotherapist – I say it’s a natural progression from NGOs; she doesn’t think that’s funny). Now, however, even Dani Rodrik is weighing in on the issue, so it’s time to have another look. Read More …

Wales in the World: what can a small country do on climate change, trade etc?

I’ve just got back from promoting the book in Wales – the universities in Aberystwyth and Swansea, followed by a launch at the National Assembly of Wales. Since the Assembly was established in 1999, it seems to have galvanized a sense of nationhood – Welsh is much more widely spoken these days and more schools are teaching it – and that has also tapped into Wales’ long tradition of internationalism. Many Welsh socialists and communists went off to fight in the Spanish civil war in the 1930s, and in the 1970s Welsh trade unionists took in Chilean refugees who fled the Pinochet dictatorship. Discussion revolved around what international role a relatively small country can play, when it has limited powers (e.g. the Assembly has no foreign affairs responsibilities) and only counts as a sub-national entity in places like the UN and EU. Read More …