Climate change gets real in the US; flights v steaks; good governance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; the future of capitalism and why clean stoves can save 1.6m lives a year: links I liked

Climate change becomes real politics in the US, according to Paul Krugman (is he the only Nobel laureate economist with his own tribute song on youtube?) 
 
Cut out meat or air travel asks Owen Barder? You decide (unfortunately I’m addicted to both – any other options?)

Dani Rodrik argues that the crisis proves that good governance isn’t that relevant to growth (but it’s still a good thing in itself)

Martin Wolf reads the runes on the future of capitalism

Alex Evans has a way to cut global warming and save 1.6m lives a year – clean stoves

Big UN conference on the global crisis is postponed – why?

At the last minute, the UN has postponed its ‘Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development’ from 1-3 June to 24-26th June, still in New York. This will allow it time to sort out the draft conclusions and try and convince a respectable number of world leaders to attend.

The process for arriving at an ‘outcome document’ for the meeting has been, to put it kindly, chaotic. First Joseph Stiglitz’ Commission of Experts released their recommendations in March (see my post here). The second, 111 page draft is now up on the UN website (haven’t had a chance to read that yet). Then Father Miguel d’Escoto, the President of the General Assembly (and former Sandinista Foreign Minister), produced a draft outcome document that went so much further than Stiglitz (e.g. it proposed establishing 8 new global institutions – enough to make any international negotiator blanch) that it caused uproar.

Now there’s a second, much watered-down draft, half the length of the first draft, vague on detail and sidelining many of Stiglitz’ proposals. Officially, it has been jointly drafted by Fr d’Escoto and the conference ‘co-facilitators’, the Netherlands and St Vincent and the Grenadines, but it bears little resemblance to d’Escoto’s earlier draft.

The overall tone shifts away from Stiglitz’ repudiation of the IMF and his call for it to be replaced by the UN (always likely to be an uphill task given the central role already handed to the IMF by the G20, backed up with an extra $500bn). Instead, the new draft seeks to secure a louder and more coordinated UN voice in the response to the crisis, along with improved coordination between the UN and the IFIs. Given where we are right now, and the need for rapid action to ease the development impact of the crisis, that probably makes sense.

The only big idea from the Stiglitz Commission to survive more or less unscathed into the new draft text is the proposal for a new ‘Global Economic Council’, which would ‘provide coordination and oversight of concerted responses in addressing the broader range of global challenges’. i.e. an economic version of the UN Security Council which, if fully implemented, would give the UN a much greater role in global economic governance.

Otherwise, Stiglitz’s proposals for a new Global Reserve Fund, Global Financial Regulatory Authority and a Competition Authority are kicked into the long grass of seven proposed ‘ministerial and technical level working groups’. Father d’Escoto’s Global Public Goods Authorities and Global Tax Authority disappear without trace.

Fr d’Escoto has called on UN members to finalise the text by 15 June – let’s see if it’s watered down further or toughened up by then (don’t hold your breath - negotiations don’t usually produce a stronger text!)

All the drafts for the meeting can be found here.

Update 9 June: A Reuters piece on the blame game surrounding the summit

What’s different about the current spate of land grabs in poor countries?

This week’s Economist has an excellent overview of the issues surrounding what it calls ‘outsourcing’s third wave’ (the first two were manufacturing and services) – deals in which foreign investors are buying up huge tracts of land in poor countries to produce food to ship back home (see map). Some highlights:

Saudi investors are spending $100m to lease land from the Ethiopian government to produce wheat, barley and rice. From 2007-11, the World Food Programme is spending $116m on food aid for 4.6m Ethiopians threatened by hunger and malnutrition. (Shades of Ireland exporting food to England during the great famine of the 19th century).

Compared with previous styles of foreign investment in agriculture (think banana companies in Central America), the current deals are different because of:

1. Scale: Sudan is setting aside about a fifth of its agricultural land for Arab governments. In total, between 15m and 20m hectares of farmland in poor countries have been subject to transactions or talks involving foreigners since 2006. That is equal to France’s total agricultural land. These deals are worth an estimated $20 billion-30 billion—at least ten times as much as an emergency package for agriculture recently announced by the World Bank and 15 times more than the American administration’s new fund for food security. The food produced could account for almost a fifth of world cereal trade.

2. Most of the deals focus on food and biofuels, whereas foreign investors previously focussed on cash crops (coffee, tea, sugar, bananas).

3. In the past, most foreign investment was private. Although some of today’s big deals involve multinationals (Morgan Stanley bought 40,000 hectares of the Ukraine in March), many more of the current crop involve government-government deals or parastatals like Sovereign Wealth Funds.

The obvious motives for the deals are the spike in food prices and the subsequent decision of governments in several key producer countries to restrict their exports, threatening the food security of food importing countries such as the Gulf states, China and South Korea (the main participants in the deals). However, water shortages are another, hidden driver. Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, claims: “The purchases weren’t about land, but water. For with the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal.” He calls it “the great water grab”.

Governments are promising would-be investors that the land is ‘empty’, but it often supports herders who graze animals on it. Land may be formally owned by the state but contain people who have farmed it for generations. Their customary rights are recognised locally, but often not accepted in law, or in the terms of a foreign-investment deal.

Various bodies, including the FAO, IFPRI and the African Union are developing codes of conduct to improve the terms of the deals, covering issues such as respecting customary rights; sharing benefits among locals (ie, not just bringing in your own workers), increasing transparency (current deals are shrouded in secrecy) and abiding by national trade policies (which means not exporting if the host country is suffering a famine). According to the Financial Times, Japan also intends to raise the issue at the forthcoming G8 summit in Italy.

Fine, but it’s going to be extremely hard to enforce such promises between players of such disparate power.

For a much more detailed (110 page) report on land grabs in Africa, check out the new report ‘Land Grab or Development Opportunity?’, jointly published by IIED, FAO and IFAD.

For previous posts on land grabs in Madagascar, see here. Global Dashboard and Javier Blas at the FT have also regularly covered the issue.

Update 11 June: The UN Special Rapporteur on Food issued a set of 11 principles that should govern land grabs.

What are African leaders saying about the impact of the crisis? Latest overview

The African Development Bank is doing some excellent analysis and has just updated the paper submitted to the April G20 Summit by African Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors (new paper here, original paper for G20 here). Main points:

‘For the first time since 1994, per capita income will contract in 2009 for the continent as a whole. Indeed a growth crisis has set in. The revised forecasts put Africa’s growth at 2.3 percent for 2009.

The biggest concern is that the growth crisis may degenerate into a development crisis as the recession deepens.

Effective crisis response requires a scaling up of resources in addition to delivery of planned development aid.

Exports from the continent are expected to fall by more than USD 250 billion in 2009. Oil and mineral exports will suffer the largest losses. Mineral and coffee exporters will also be hit.

Trade taxes will fall dramatically. In 2009, the continent will suffer a shortfall in trade tax to the tune of USD 15 billion, representing 1 percent of GDP and 4.6 percent of government revenue. Oil and non-oil exporting companies will be equally affected.

The one relatively bright spot in this gloomy picture is that remittances appear to be relatively more resilient to the economic downturn [see my recent post on remittances for the explanation]. The relative resilience of remittances and their direct impact on household incomes, calls for increased attention to this form of external financing by policy makers. The focus should be on policies to reduce transactions costs for remittances transfers. Remittances can contribute to increasing the pool of long term finance, notably by channeling them into infrastructure bonds and Diaspora bonds.

The crisis threatens to undermine macroeconomic stability due to widening current account and budget deficits. The Bank projects a budget deficit 5.8 percent of GDP, down from a surplus of 2.8 percent in 2008. The current account balance will deteriorate from a surplus of 2.7 percent of GDP in 2008 to a deficit of 5.3 percent of GDP in 2009. The widening “twin deficits” severely limit the ability of African governments to undertake needed crisis response initiatives and to sustain their development programs.

While the banking sector had been spared the first-round effects of the financial crisis, it is now experiencing second-round effects through a surge in non-performing loans [resulting in] contraction of credit.

With lower commodity prices and reduced access to credit, farmers will be unable to buy fertilizers and seeds. This leads to reduced productivity and lower food production. In some countries, farmers are already cutting back on the cultivated area, as a result of rising fertilizer and fuel prices. Few farmers have been able to take advantage of the higher food prices by raising production.

What to do?
Just to achieve the pre-crisis growth rates, African countries would need USD 50 billion [per year] to finance the investment-saving gap. To achieve the 7 percent growth rate that is deemed required to achieve the MDGs, the financing gap rises to USD 117 billion. Fulfilling the preexisting aid pledges is not enough to meet the rising demands from African countries; aid needs to be scaled up.

Africa still has opportunities to continue growing. However, this requires promoting growth driven by domestic investment and consumption. The policy focus should be on: i) sustaining adequate levels of public spending; ii) pursuing efforts to improve the business environment; iii) increasing domestic resource mobilization; iv) alleviate supply side bottlenecks, especially by increasing investment in infrastructure and increasing access to credit for the domestic private sector; v) fostering regional economic integration.

In addition, African countries need to pursue prudent capital control strategies to promote private capital inflows while minimizing the risk of abrupt capital reversals.’

Fire brigades or arsonists? A UN debate on the economic crisis

I spoke at an UNCTAD symposium on the global crisis in Geneva this week (Oxfam’s pre-conference submission is here). A laudable attempt to get a conversation going with civil society organizations, but a classically frustrating UN event – dozens of developing country delegates mingling with NGOs and others, but any real exchange was deadened by a format of interminable lists of speakers, poor chairing of long vacuous ‘questions’ from the floor, vast airless halls and little real debate. People agreed with each other too much (in the kingdom of the UN, Stiglitz is king); there was too little power present in the room (no speakers from IMF, World Bank or G8 governments).

Still, at least the fire brigade metaphor continues to blossom. I had an exchange on this with Stiglitz back in March – I said the IMF was the only feasible fire brigade for the crisis, essential to squirt jets of cash into beleaguered developing country economies. Stiglitz said how can you leave it all to the IMF fire brigade when it employs the pyromaniacs who set the fire in the first place?

At the UNCTAD symposium, Peter Wahl of WEED (World Economy, Ecology and Development) went into metaphorical overdrive. The response to the crisis consists of a fire brigade in which each major economy runs its own fire engine, but they are decades old and getting obsolete; the IMF has a hand pump, but has mixed 10% of gasoline into the water; the EU has a few buckets, but most of them have holes in. His point was that the multilateral system has been exaggerated – the response to the crisis remains largely national (e.g. through the various fiscal stimuli), and success lies in coordinating those national reponses (and self identified groups of nations – plurilateral in the jargon).

Given that we were taking part in a valiant effort to increase the UN’s role in the response to the crisis, I asked him what kind of fire equipment the UN system represents. His answer – a youth fire brigade of 14 and 15 year olds, which maybe once they’ve grown up, will be capable of putting out the fire. I hope he’s right.

So we’re left with a dilemma between legitimacy and speed of response. There isn’t time to create a new institution for the short term response, so which is easier, make the IMF more legitimate or make the UN lean, mean and quick? No easy answers, surprise, surprise.

The UN seems to be doing better on research than on politics, helping to fulfil one speaker’s desire for the UN to provide a ’second opinion capacity’ for developing countries not satisfied with the advice they get from the IMF or World Bank. Apart from the Stiglitz commission, good work is emerging from the ILO, UNEP and now other UN agencies like UNESCO and UNRISD are lumbering into action, as well as UNCTAD. The symposium was part of the run up to a big UN event in New York in early June, where the Stiglitz Commission will present its report. More on that later.

US aid reform takes off

Shortly after the US election, I blogged about the promising discussions on US aid reform in Washington. Those are now starting to bear fruit. In late April, Howard Berman, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced a bill (The Initiating Foreign Assistance Reform Act of 2009–HR 2139). Here are some of his covering remarks:

‘This legislation is an important first step to reforming and improving the U.S. foreign assistance program, particularly with respect to developing countries. I call it a first step because I intend to work with my House and Senate colleagues later this year on a broader reform effort that will include a comprehensive rewrite of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.

There is broad consensus that the U.S. foreign assistance program is in need of a significant overhaul. Currently, foreign assistance programs are fragmented across 12 departments, 25 different agencies, and nearly 60 government offices. The current foreign assistance structure is characterized by duplication, fragmentation, and conflicting purposes and objectives.

In order to begin addressing these issues, this bill requires the President to develop and implement a comprehensive National Strategy for Global Development, which will define and streamline the roles of each department and agency engaged in development policies, programs and activities overseas. In addition, the strategy will establish a process to review and improve coordination among the various departments and agencies involved. The strategy will also establish objectives for our development programs, with the goal of reducing poverty and contributing to broad-based economic growth in developing countries. Most importantly, it will spell out the connection between reducing poverty in the developing world and advancing U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.’

If you’re a US citizen and want to email your representative to voice your support for the bill, click here.

If the bill becomes law, the next step will be to ensure decent content gets into any national strategy for global development. Oxfam and the Center for American Progress brought together a bunch of the development great and good to flesh out what this might mean. See their recommendations for a national strategy here.

And if you’re still hungry, click here to find out more about Oxfam America’s advocacy work on the US aid system.

How do we get the institutions right on climate change?

Normally, I find the use of scenarios to think through policy issues pretty shallow and unhelpful. But a new paper on the institutional architecture for climate change, by Alex Evans and David Steven, has a horribly plausible and thought-provoking scenario among its three possible futures. A slightly truncated version follows in a couple of paras time.

Evans and Steven argue that while all the attention on climate change has so far been on the science (c/o the IPCC) and the economics (c/o Nicholas Stern), it will be ‘getting the institutions right’ to manage the use of carbon that will determine our collective fate. Read the paper to find out how far they get on filling that void (my view, a good start, but not much more than that), but here’s their first (and not even grimmest) scenario:

Scenario 1: The Age of the Climatocracy
‘After talks continued without a break for almost 24 hours at the climax of the Copenhagen summit, negotiators emerged from their exhausting marathon of plenary and breakout sessions to tell the waiting world: the talks had ended in triumph. Kyoto 2 had been agreed.

Developed countries would take on binding targets from 2012 to 2020. Major financial commitments on adaptation, technology transfer and avoided deforestation had been made, while a pilot sectoral approach for the global cement industry was in prospect. Best of all, the agreement stated that emerging economies would consider binding targets in the next Commitment Period.

True, it was regrettable that Canada and Russia had declined to sign, while NGOs were critical that the targets amounted to an aggregate developed country reduction of only 16% below 1990 levels, rather than the 25-40% they had hoped for. But most observers agreed that Kyoto 2 was a bold step in the right direction.

The problems started not long afterwards. Which of the BRICs and middle income countries would take on targets, and when? This question turned toxic in the bruising ratification battle that was fought in most of the rich countries. As the global economic slump led to steadily increasing protectionism, almost every country became convinced it hadn’t got a fair deal.

Even so, there was jubilation in 2014 when the Copenhagen treaty finally came into force (albeit with Australia opting out once more, and a two-year break having decimated fragile carbon markets). Governments proclaimed that emissions – already constrained by economic slowdown – would finally begin to come down.

Sure enough, with the treaty in force, funds for adaptation and technology transfer began to flow, with a hodgepodge of competing multilateral agencies, bilateral donors and developed country environment ministries fighting to control them. The attempt to stitch together a global carbon market also hit obstacles, but at least the European market was up and running, with a US market not far away. Then it would simply be a matter of integrating them with each other, and with the reformed Clean Development Mechanism, in order for a global carbon price to be (more or less) established.

In retrospect, the Paris Declaration of February 2015 reads like something of a tame document. At the time, however, it was both a bombshell and a tipping point. Five hundred scientists came together to denounce in coruscating terms both the ‘creeping politicisation’ of the IPCC and the failure to finalise a fifth assessment report. The world was losing its grip on the problem, they claimed. Implementation of the leaky ‘solution’ was now a joke.

Suddenly, it was open season on what one commentator dubbed the ‘global climatocracy’. Soon the world’s media was leading on climate corruption. One President of a low income country, it turned out, had used carbon funds to buy a fleet of private planes. And the US carbon market had been rigged by investors – four of whom were sentenced to 65 – yes, 65 – years in jail.

Something had to be done. And something was, after a while at least. In 2017, a world summit was convened in New York to try to retrofit a strategy onto climate’s increasingly creaky institutional structure. The dynamics at the summit were acrimonious. Rich countries wanted more regulation of climate funds. Poor countries wanted more action by those developed countries who were off-track on their targets.

The one outcome that all countries did prove able to agree on, though, was a timehonoured one: to set up a new UN agency, in this case a World Environmental Organisation, bringing together the UN Environment Programme, the Commission for Sustainable Development, and a number of multilateral environmental agreement treaty secretariats.

Environment ministers provided less clarity on what the new WEO would actually do, however – and in any case, the agencies involved in the merger spent most of the next two years working out the logistics of transferring their operations to a new home in Nairobi.

There wasn’t much appetite for Kyoto 3, but a review summit was held in Luanda in 2020. Scientists pointed out that emissions were still far from peaking and that radical action would be needed to stabilize concentrations even at 650ppm. The problem was that richer countries had already emitted the lion’s share of the amount of carbon available to meet that target. The implication: there weren’t that many emissions left for a deal to carve up.

But that didn’t stop progress towards another agreement – this time focused on support for clean technologies, rather than binding targets or carbon prices. But as critics noted, policymakers seemed to have fallen into the trap of throwing money at the problem rather than trying to start a ‘race out of carbon’.

In 2025, the unthinkable happened: methane hydrates, hitherto frozen safely at the bottom of the ocean, began to thaw and escape into the atmosphere, adding massive quantities of a potent greenhouse gas into the air. Emergency sessions of the Security Council and the G13 were convened, but the scope for action was minimal. By 2030, the Climatocracy had clearly failed to deliver. Geo-engineering projects looked like the last remaining option. Whether or not they would work remained to be seen…’

Let’s hope you didn’t read it here first…..

Should aid workers fly business class?; latest on land grabs; dodgy regressions; Chinese carbon emissions; how to set up your own tax dodge and a great climate change youtube: links I liked

Chris Blattman has kicked off a heated debate on whether aid officials should fly business class, see here for example

Over on global dashboard, Mark Weston provides an overview on land grabs

William Easterly applies his tests for dodgy regressions to Paul Collier’s latest book and Chris Blattman (again, when does he work or sleep?) joins in the fun by adding Karl Popper’s guidelines for scientific inquiry. 

Paul Krugman gets exercised about Chinese carbon emissions

And some youtube fun: watch an intern at a US NGO set up a tax-dodging corporation in Panama

or finally, if all the graphs don’t convince you, watch this youtube on climate change (and send the link to your friends) 

How is the recession hitting remittances from migrant workers?

Remittances sent to developing countries in 2008 from migrant workers overseas came to a massive $305bn – two and a half times greater than the (record) volume of global aid. But how are they weathering the global crisis? I’ve just been reading the World Bank’s latest (OK, end of March – I’m playing catchup as usual) Migration and Development Brief. Main findings:

A sharp decline of 5‐8 percent predicted for 2009 compared to 2008. This compares with double digit growth in previous years (see graph).

Some regional variation in both timing and severity:  A slowdown in remittance flows to Latin America and the Caribbean began early in 2008 and deepened in the third quarter. In contrast, remittance flows to South Asia surged in 2008. In 2009, South Asia is expected to experience a sharp slow down. In fact, all regions are expected to see a decline in remittance flows in 2009. The worst hit region is Eastern Europe and Central Asia, with a 10% fall predicted in 2009. Overall, the two big groupings of low income and middle income countries both see falls of about 5%. South‐South remittances from Russia, South Africa, Malaysia and India are especially vulnerable.

Despite the fall, remittances are much more resilient than other flows such as private debt and equity flows and foreign direct investment. Why?

(a) Remittances are sent by the cumulated flows of migrants over the years, not only by the new migrants of the last year or two. This makes remittances persistent over time. If new migration stops, then over a period of a decade or so, remittances may stop growing. But they will continue to increase as long as migration flows continue.

(b) Remittances are a small part of migrants’ incomes, and migrants continue to send remittances even when hit by income shocks.

(c) Because of a rise in anti‐immigration sentiments and tighter border controls, especially in the U.S but also in Europe, the duration of migration appears to have increased (presumably people don’t want to risk trying to cross more closed borders, so stay where they are).

(d) If migrants do decide to go home, they are likely to take back accumulated savings. [Yes, this does sound contradictory – if more migrants were returning home before, that should lead to more remittances on this argument, but less on the previous one!]

(e) Several high‐income OECD remittance source countries are likely to undertake large fiscal stimulus packages in response to the financial crisis. This increase in public expenditure, if directed to public infrastructure projects, will increase demand for both native and migrant workers.

Despite anecdotal reports of migrants returning home, new migration flows are still positive, implying that the stock of existing migrants continues to increase. Migrants may prefer to stay on in the host country even after losing employment and look for jobs in other sectors as the situation in the home country may be even worse.

Building women’s leadership – what works?

What can an NGO like Oxfam do to help build women’s grassroots leadership and participation? Just been reading a series of case studies from around the world, which throw up a strikingly similar set of conclusions. Drawing on experiences in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the UK, the study finds that progress relies on tackling structural barriers to women’s participation – for example over 40 countries have now adopted quota laws to set minimum targets for the selection and election of women to political office. Making sure these are implemented has proven a fruitful area for activism. Decentralization processes also offer a lot of opportunities for increasing women’s representation.

Other barriers are cultural – stereotypes about women’s roles (often held by women as well as men) which see public office as a man’s job. In shifting these attitudes actions often speak louder than words – demonstrating the impact of women in leadership roles can be more persuasive than a dozen workshops (see the case study below). Identifying male ‘champions’ in positions of authority is another effective tactic. Other barriers include women’s ‘time poverty’ especially women with young children`- offering free childcare can have a huge impact on women’s participation.

Women getting into office is only half the battle – once elected, women frequently find that they are left to fend for themselves in what can be a very hostile environment. Many drop out. So establishing support networks for women in office can be vital: in Cambodia, Oxfam’s partner ‘Women for Prosperity’ established regular Female Councillor Forums where local councillors can gain experience of speaking in public and learn from and be supported by other councillors.

One of the most striking examples comes from the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel (OPTI). Arab-Israeli women are one of the most marginalised and invisible groups within Israeli society. Many have been adversely affected by the ‘Wisconsin Plan’, a welfare-to-work programme introduced by the Israeli government in 2005, that Oxfam’s partner, Sawt el-Amel (the Labourer’s Voice), has been active in opposing.

Under the Plan, which aims to cut public spending on welfare benefits by a third, people receiving state unemployment benefits now have to attend the Wisconsin Plan centres for up to 40 hours a week, and have to accept any job offered to them by the employment agencies, or participate in voluntary work. Anyone who fails to do so loses the right to claim benefits. If a family is dependent on state benefits, both spouses have to attend, even if one is fully occupied caring for young children at home. This is what particularly enraged women – even if they were not seeking paid work, they had to leave their children unattended and go to the Wisconsin Centre in order for their partners to continue to receive welfare payments.

In response to the hardship that the plan has brought to themselves and their families, women have become active in leading popular opposition to the Plan. Early on in the campaign, a ‘Women’s Platform’ was formed, rapidly becoming a source of leadership for the campaign as a whole. This is a significant and unprecedented move in conservative communities, where women’s presence in the public sphere has traditionally not been accepted.

The campaign has scored some notable victories, winning a number of important test cases in the courts. In addition, lobbying informed by the Women’s Platform and its members’ experiences of the Wisconsin Plan has resulted in legislated changes to the Plan, meaning in particular that unemployed single women with children under the age of 12 are now no longer expected to attend the Wisconsin Centre full-time.

One interesting aspect was that much of the anger came from the way the Plan was seen as an attack on women’s traditional roles in home and family. This allayed men’s opposition to the women getting involved and led to a painless, but ‘unprecedented social revolution’ in gender relations and the attitudes of men towards women taking a more active role in public life, according to one Sawt el-Amel publication (although it doesn’t offer any evidence for this). The Oxfam analysis wryly concludes ‘As a strategy for bringing about change, it is debatable whether prompting a direct discussion on existing gender roles would have been anywhere near as effective.’

I’ve seen this elsewhere – in Argentina, the mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo were able successfully to defy a bloody military dictatorship and protest at the disappearance of their children and grandchildren because they were acting in their traditional roles. Accustomed to preaching the benefits of ‘family and fatherland’, the generals did not know how to respond, and the madres opened up the first cracks in the dictatorship.

In the OPTI case, although there has clearly been a strengthening of women’s role in public and political life, but the way they’ve achieved this has also relied on traditional gender divisions in the family. The sustainability of these new roles, and efforts to strengthen women’s economic independence, will also depend on whether there are accompanying shifts in power relations between women and men at household level, with men and boys taking on some of the unpaid care work. There are indications that this is happening but it definitely needs more research. Otherwise, women could end up with the debilitating ‘triple day’ of unpaid work in the home, paid work in the economy, and community activism.