Do the MDGs influence national development policies?

Expect a lot of soul searching around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) this year, in the run up to the UN high level event in September (see previous posts here and here). A recent issue of the IDS bulletin covered ‘The MDGs and Beyond’. The piece that caught my eye was an analysis of national Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr (former director of the Human Development Report, now an academic at the New School in New York).

Fukuda-Parr wanted to find out if all those international conferences and agreements exercise real traction over what matters, what governments do and say? To do this she analysed the PRSPs of 22 countries, and the aid policies of 21 bilateral donors (to see if they took the MDGs seriously too). Her findings?

‘The analysis found a high degree of commitment to MDGs as a whole but both PRSPs and donor statements are selective, consistently emphasising income poverty and social investments for education, health and water but not other targets concerned with empowerment and inclusion of the most vulnerable such as gender violence or women’s political representation.

The strategy in the majority of the PRSPs focus on economic growth and investment in the social sectors and reflect an assumption that ‘trickledown’ would achieve the poverty reduction objectives of the MDG agenda. Most did not contain a strategy for ‘pro-poor growth’ and pro-poor social investments. Nor do they contain strategies of building democratic governance – creating an environment to empower the poor and addressing institutionalised obstacles to their participation in economic, social and political life.’

Fukuda Parr argues that ‘a new, ninth Goal needs to be added – to reduce inequality’, though I’m not convinced that this can be done in any easily communicable way – the paraphernalia of gini indices etc is much harder to convey than ‘halve world poverty’ or ‘get all kids into primary school’.

What do I take from this? That a process of dilution and selection inevitably kicks in, from the original UN Millennium Declaration to the choice of targets for the MDGs, from those targets into what is picked up in the policies of donors and national governments and then (going beyond what Fakuda-Parr was examining), how those national policy statements are themselves implemented on the ground. What finally results may bear little resemblance to the original global declaration.

But the findings were more encouraging than I’d expected – I’ve always suspected that the MDGs meant more to donors than to developing countries, but the goals, a bit like the PRSP process itself, have become to some degree owned (and adapted – lots of PRSPs have morphed into national development plans, and countries have added extra goals to the MDG core list) and look like they’ve had a real, though partial, impact.

Urinals; development songs; nail salons; economics v physics; state-building; Obamacare; Global Health Fund; apologies to Haiti; guns and anthropologists and more data for aid geeks: links I liked

A graphic history of the urinal [h/t a seriously underemployed John Magrath]

It’s a brave man who publishes his musical preferences, so hats off to IDS director Lawrence Haddad for this list of top development songs

Job  clusters among US immigrants – Bill Easterly finds that Vietnamese work in nail salons and Chaldeans (Roman Catholics from northern Iraq) in liquor stores

‘Economics achieved coherence as a science by amputating most of human nature. Now economists are starting with those parts of emotional life that they can count and model (the activities that make them economists). But once they’re in this terrain, they’ll surely find that the processes that make up the inner life are not amenable to the methodologies of social science. The moral and social yearnings of fully realized human beings are not reducible to universal laws and cannot be studied like physics.’ David Brooks lays it on the line in the New York Times  [h/t John Magrath again]

‘State weakness in Africa may be exacerbated by attempting to graft the West’s idea of a 20th century developmental state onto structures not fully capable of providing the basic bits of law and order.’ Chris Blattman wonders if we’ve got it wrong on state building and should be putting rule of law ahead of health and education.

David Steven draws lessons from the US healthcare reform soap opera for anyone who wants the US to do anything.

Jeff Sachs argues for expanding the Global Fund for TB, Malaria and HIV/AIDS into a single Global Health Fund, and putting in the necessary cash (an extra $12bn a year)

‘”It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake,” Bill Clinton apologises for dumping US rice on Haiti throughout the 1990s, leaving the country unable to feed itself. Better late than never I guess. [h/t Phil Bloomer]

Smart power and the military-industrial complex, aka why arms manufacturers are hiring anthropologists and legal rights advisers, c/o Aid Watch. Scary.

Calling all aid data geeks: AidData catalogues nearly one million projects that were financed between 1945 and 2009, adding or augmenting data on $1.9 trillion of development finance records. We currently have data from 87 different donors, and data from even more donors will come online every few months. Happy crunching.

Final Thoughts on Vietnam and the American War

As you’ll probably have realized by now, I spent last week in Vietnam, managing to take in everything from debating industrial policy with the IMF in the Hanoi Hilton to discussing survival strategies with lottery ticket sellers in the slums of Ho Chi Minh City (working for an NGO can be amazing sometimes).

Everywhere you go, the ‘American War’ hangs unspoken over a foreigner’s experience of visiting Vietnam – the historic names like Danang and Dien Bien Phu; the Mekong Delta and Saigon are now holiday destinations, NGO project locations or people’s homes, rather than battlefields. ‘What did you do in the war?’ is the question you dare not ask whenever you talk to anyone over 45, because no-one ever mentions it, scarcely even to long-term foreign residents. Even when they are married to them – our country director in Vietnam, Steve Price Thomas, could not work out why his Vietnamese wife Hoa was so anxious when they were stuck in a traffic jam next to Heathrow, until she described the Hanoi air raids of her childhood.

But then we visited the ‘War Remnants Museum’ in Saigon, renamed from ‘The Museum of American War Atrocities’ after the normalization of US-Vietnam relations in 1995. Room after harrowing room record the deaths of some 3 million Vietnamese (vs 58,000 Americans), and the maiming of countless others by Agent Orange – malformed babies are still being born due to the Dioxin dropped on the country 40 years ago. I’ve chosen the least upsetting photos, believe me. Foreigners and locals rub shoulders at the museum, there’s no security – are Vietnamese not angry, or is the trauma so deep that only psychic burial can allow the country to bustle forward? In an individual, my psychotherapist wife would probably say that level of repression is bound to do them damage, but maybe as a country it is necessary to function.

Gangs of bubbly Vietnamese schoolkids were industriously photographing the exhibits and far from confronting me, they came up to ask what I thought of the exhibition, and if they have their photograph taken with me, in front of the grainy images of their country’s purgatory. I didn’t know what to say to them. Disturbing end to a brilliant visit.

What makes Vietnam’s informal economy tick?

Inside Vietnam’s
informal economy
- heroic struggles!

Spent Wednesday talking to a range of people in the ‘informal economy’ of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). I was accompanying our excellent Vietnam team, who together with Action Aid Vietnam, are running a 5-year ‘poverty monitoring programme’ in 9 rural and 3 urban sites, including this one. More on that in another post – this one is just impressions.

We talked to three separate groups: motorbike taxi drivers (all men); lottery ticket sellers (mostly disabled or blind) and street vendors

A competitive market

(all women). With each we had a semi structured focus group discussion for about 90 minutes, running through issues of work, finance, access to essential benefits, housing and the like. Discussions took place in cafes and people’s houses, on chairs and on the floor, and at various degrees of sweltering.

Key themes that emerged?

1. The importance of papers: virtually everyone we talked to was a migrant from other parts of Vietnam, without permanent residence or, in most cases, even temporary registration. That excludes them from a range of benefits like health insurance, food parcels, and political participation (no-one tells them when the meetings are). The state bureaucracy appears remote, incomprehensible and ‘not for people like us’. If you care about active citizenship, it’s hard to think of a better development intervention than helping people sort out their status, allowing them to escape this twilight world and appear on the radar of officialdom.

2. The educational gradient: all saw finishing secondary education as the way out of poverty for their children, while most had failed to achieve it themselves. Many lamented the lack of options created by not having finished secondary school.

3. The invisible networks of finance: discussions bore out the findings of Portfolios of the Poor: poor people are remarkably active financial managers, but they do so through a range of mechanisms that lie largely outside both the official system and the much vaunted networks of microfinance institutions. People lend and borrow constantly to smooth out their incomes, to friends, relatives and work colleagues and if necessary, the local loan shark. We found only one woman who had a bank account, which she needed to put her son through police training college in Hanoi. Not one mention of microfinance.

4. Rapid bounce back from the global economic crisis, although several mentioned issues like increased competition (more people entering the informal economy), falling demand (more people using public transport instead of motorbike taxis) that could be the result of the crisis.

A hard slog

5. Vietnam Rising: hours were achingly long (one of the street sellers rises at 2am to start making the tofu for her street stall) and take-home profits were typically of the order of $3-6 for each group, but they all had a stake in what one of the lottery sellers called the ‘modern world’ of mobile phones and consumer goods. Those who had returned to their villages had swiftly returned to the city. The houses we sat in were scruffy and overcrowded, but had electricity, clean water, tiled floors and tin roofs. Even the lottery sellers, most of them disabled and largely outside the system, saw life getting better in Vietnam – when the World Bank asked people in 23 countries in the Voices of the Poor project whether their lives were improving, Vietnamese were the only ones to answer with an unequivocal ‘yes’. After today, I can see why.

How to insure crops with a mobile phone – an experiment from Kenya

For technophiles everywhere, an uplifting story from a recent issue of The Economist:

‘One of the things holding back agriculture in developing countries is the unwillingness of farmers with small plots of land to invest in better seed and fertiliser. Only half of Kenyan farmers buy improved seed or spend money on other inputs. Many use poor-quality seed kept from previous harvests. That is understandable when drought or deluge can destroy their crop, but it has the effect of reducing yields. A new microinsurance scheme promises to help.

Kilimo Salama, which in Kiswahili means “safe farming”, uses a combination of mobile phones and 30 automated solar-powered weather stations to provide crop insurance. It has been set up by UAP Insurance of Kenya, Safaricom, Kenya’s biggest mobile-network operator, and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, part of a big Swiss agribusiness group. After a successful trial with 200 farmers last year, Kilimo Salama has just been expanded in the hope of attracting 5,000 farmers in western and central Kenya this year.

Farmers pay an extra 5% to insure a bag of seed, fertiliser or other things like herbicide against crop failure. MEA Fertilisers and Syngenta East Africa, two agribusinesses hoping to benefit from higher sales of their products, match the farmers’ investment to meet the full 10% cost of the insurance premium.

The clever bit, however, is the administration. Local agents register a policy with UAP by using a camera-phone to scan a bar code on each bag sold. A text message confirming the policy is then sent to the farmer’s handset. Farmers are registered at their nearest weather station, which transmits data over the mobile network. If weather conditions deteriorate, a panel of experts uses an index system to determine if crops will no longer be viable. At that point payouts are made directly to the handsets of farmers in the affected areas using Safaricom’s M-PESA mobile-money service.

With no field surveys, no paperwork and no middlemen, transaction costs are minimal. The scheme is designed to be self-financing. And clear terms should help Kilimo Salama overcome farmers’ distrust of previous insurance schemes, says James Wambugu of UAP. So should word of mouth. The trial scheme was hit by one of the worst droughts in decades, triggering compensation payments of 80% of farmers’ investments. The average amount of insured seed in the area has now risen from 2kg per farmer to 4kg.’

And here’s a video from the Kilimo Salama website

Over to the technosceptics – what are the downsides?

How does change happen in Vietnam?

Fascinating talk with an academic insider in the Vietnamese establishment, who set out some thoughts on how big changes happen in Vietnam (eg the introduction of the Doi Moi process of economic opening or the land reform of the early 1990s). Particularly important because Vietnam’s record on growth with equity, and poverty reduction, is second to none.

He saw certain features as characterizing big change processes in Vietnam
1. Reforms are typically driven by crisis, as in the near collapse of the economy before Doi Moi, or the combination of lost Soviet aid and the oil price spike during the first Gulf War that triggered the land reform.
2. But the Vietnamese method, like China’s, is to use trial and error to assess a range of options, drop the worst ones and go large on the ones that work. So from 1979-86, various experiments were piloted, but only scaled up when crisis hit. He saw trial and error as particularly important in a large country like China or Vietnam, as you need learning and consensus to spread across the economy if you are to make these changes successfully – a real aversion to shock therapy, there.

The latter aspect reminds me of the discussion on whether development should model itself on venture capitalism. Rather than think you can predict the future and pick development winners, it’s better, like a venture capitalist, to invest in 20 small ones, in the expectation that one or two will flourish. The trick then is to spot losers and cut them adrift, freeing up the resources to allow you to keep experimenting. It also resembles the evolutionary model of change that arose from Eric Beinhocker’s book ‘the Origin of Wealth’, which I previously reviewed at some length.

So what changes might emerge form the current crisis (from which the Vietnamese economy is fast emerging)? He thought now might be the moment for the government to take on the job of restructuring economic institutions to sort out Vietnam’s problems of corruption, inefficiency and macro-instability. He reckoned Vietnam might follow the Chinese model, which he saw as getting the economy onto a high speed growth path, then sorting out the economic institutions and finally the political institutions. In China, he sees the first stage as more or less complete, the second as under way (eg the emphasis on public administration reform, or rediscovering equity and a harmonious society) requiring twenty years, and the third, fifty. He didn’t offer a timescale for Vietnam, but is proposing ideas for piloting a range of governance reforms on a small scale, involving things like new legal frameworks (he seemed very keen on the British legal system), and direct elections at local levels (something that is already happening to some extent).

On future drivers of change in Vietnam, he saw the emerging middle class, both rural and urban, as the backbone of future change, with a knowledge of rights and ‘something to protect’. He said all the hardest questions in the National Assembly come from the business community.

Vietnam is nothing if not ambitious – the government plans to treble per capita GDP by 2020. On past performance, and despite some big new challenges like climate change, I wouldn’t bet against it.

The IMF debates the crisis and industrial policy

The Hanoi Hilton,
IMF, Robert Wade and
jet lag. One strange day.

[any feedback on these wonku summaries, introduced in response to the reader survey?]

My week in Vietnam kicks off with a weird jet-lagged day at the Hanoi Hilton c/o the IMF and the Vietnam State Bank, who organized a conference on ‘Post Crisis Growth and Poverty Reduction in Developing Asia’. The conference was very formal - all suits and ties and long panel discussions punctuated by lunch at the neighbouring Hanoi Opera (wonderful old building left over from the French colony – Ho Chi Minh addressed the crowds from its balcony) and a dinner with some haunting music and a rather unsettling attempt at Vietnamese flamenco – the frilly skirts were right, but the serene smiles and stately, graceful movement gave it an unreal, underwater quality. After lunch, all the long distance travellers (including me) struggled to stay awake, evoking a scary future in which all the big global decisions are taken by jetlagged zombies. I presented our findings on the global economic crisis, but I think the blog has probably had enough about that. What were other people saying?

The IMF, led by big cheeses John Lipsky and Anoop Singh, talked like the World Bank, (as it tends to these days), stressing poverty reduction, inequality, social protection and climate change, as well as the need for growth, growth, growth and macroeconomic stability. It seems particularly keen to stake a claim to climate change funding via a $100bn Green Fund. Heck, the conference was even carbon neutral (I asked how much all that offsetting cost, and the IMF guy said, ‘it better not come to over $10,000……).

The big surprise of the day was the keynote by Robert Wade of the LSE. Robert is a long time proponent of industrial policy, which is hardly the IMF’s favourite theme, so I was intrigued at his invitation. And he pulled no punches. Starting off with this New Yorker cartoon on the role of the state, Robert argued that the rise of Asia pretty much demolishes the Washington Consensus view that the state should confine itself to a regulatory role. With Alice Amsden and Ha-Joon Chang, he’s been making that argument for the best part of 20 years, and I think they’ve made a lot of headway.

But what caught my attention was the distinction he drew between two kinds of industrial policy – ‘leading the market’ and ‘following the market’. Leading the market is South Korean style picking winners – we want a steel or chip industry, so we’re going to spend big time and just make it happen. That worked in the Korean case, but has failed in many others. Following the market, on the other hand, is a much less risky form of industrial policy, based on systematically ‘nudging’ firms to upgrade their technologies through incentives, performance requirements, or the state playing a brokering role putting firms in touch with foreign investors. Robert saw this as a third way (sorry) between the command and control of South Korea, and the passive laissez faire of the traditional World Bank view that governments should stick to sorting out the ‘enabling environment’ of property rights and keeping the bureaucracy in check. Robert held up Taiwan as a model of successful following-the-market type industrial policy.

James Adams for the World Bank politely demurred, stressing that elements of the Washington Consensus (eg cautious macroeconomic management) have withstood the test of the time. Think I may have to dig out John Williamson’s original list of Washington Consensus policies and give them marks out of ten in light of the global crisis – or has someone already done that?

As for how the discussion in Vietnam varies from that in the UK – growth and infrastructure were the big themes. Hard to imagine getting any interest in all that limits to growth stuff – it was all how to shift from 6 to 8% per annum, with no acknowledgement at all that at some point, that might just be relevant to carbon emissions.

Oh, and I just checked, and yes, the Hanoi Hilton meant something else entirely during the Vietnam war.

Today’s World Water Day, and here’s what you need to be reading/watching

It’s world water day
Bad watsan ruins lives but
gets ignored. So act!

Today is world water day, and reader Steve Cockburn, coordinator of a global coalition called End Water Poverty, of which Oxfam is a member, has kindly done my job for me by sending over some links and analysis. This is all him, not me: 

‘UNICEF/WHO last week released their Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation report tracking progress in the sector. Plenty in there but the main headline shows that although water is on track globally (but certainly not in Africa), to meet the sanitation Millennium Development Goal (“Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking-water and basic sanitation”), the sanitation target won’t be met for another 200 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. That puts it up there with maternal mortality as oneo f the most off-track MDG targets on the continent.

This raises questions around the processes of policy-making that make sanitation in particular so neglected in terms of investment and prioritisation at all levels (donor and recipient governments, international institutions, but also NGOs) when theoretically everyone understands it is central to child health (28% of child deaths due to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)-related causes, according to the WHO), girls education (half the school girls dropping out in Africa do so because of poor facilities), and nutrition. You see it all the time. [Steve, you’re going to have to spell out your answers to those questions in the comments section!]

Globally, there is a push to create a new global platform, not dissimilar to Education for All (EFA) or the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), to improve the sector’s performance and political presence. It’s called Sanitation and Water for All: A Global Framework for Action (SWA), and you can read more on our semi-private Google Site that we use to share info with partners. On April 23 there will be the first ‘High-Level Meeting on Sanitation and Water’ to kick this off, though big questions remain about whether governmetns will use it as a chance to turn words into deeds - see our ‘manifesto‘ for the event. 

Finally, there’s the first truly global campaign on sanitation to try and step up the public pressure. We’re coordinating a campaign in 70 countries around the theme of The World’s Longest Toilet Queue, mobilising people to stand up for their rights to safe sanitation, and to seek to influence that high-level event one month later. Hopefully it can help put sanitatation back into the mainstream debate where it belongs.

Some other reports/resources that may be useful reference, sorry for the bombardment!:

•          WaterAid’s ‘Silent Killer’ Report – the hidden effect of sanitation on child deaths:

•          WaterAid’s ‘Fatal Neglect’ Report – looking at aid flows for child health compared to disease burden

•          WHO’s: ‘Safer Water, Better Health’ – latest stats and info on impacts of poor WASH’

Thanks Steve, and if that if doesn’t convince you, check out this great World Vision youtube on dirty water – couple of years old, but as powerful as ever

What do readers think of this blog? Results of audience survey

Executive wonku (see below):
Lots of folk like it
but want fights, shorter posts and
more southern voices

Wow. As promised here are the results of the online survey of users of this blog, crunched by the amazing elves in Oxfam’s market research department. Just as well, as the response was far greater than I ever anticipated – 266 completed questionnaires, and a pile of really useful suggestions. In the spirit of transparency etc etc, here are the summary powerpoint and full collection of comments. Happy digging.

Here’s the headlines, plus my running commentary. And please remember throughout that this is a self-selecting sample of ‘people with time and willingness to fill in surveys’, and so may not fully represent the monumental indifference of the full range of readers. First, the stats

Who reads it (and answers surveys)? The top 3 types of blog reader are

‘Academic/students’ (28%), ‘other (i.e. non Oxfam) NGO staff’ (22%) and ‘other’ (18%). The ‘other’ responses were generally consultants and researchers. Oxfam staff make up 16% of the blog readership. The male/female split is 54/46, (more balanced than I feared, given heavy male bias of bloggers on development).

Main age range of respondents is 25-34.

Most of you read the blog 1-3 times a week (52%) or more than 4 times a week (34%).

78% of you describe the blog as ‘very useful’ or ‘slightly useful’. Why did the rest of you bother to take the survey? And as for the 1% who find it ‘not useful at all’, I think you three saddoes need to think about how you spend your time.

The majority of readers (81%) think that the amount I blog at the moment is ‘about right’ and (74%) think that it is successful in ‘provoking debate and conversation about development issues’.

You prefer ‘original articles’ (1.61), ‘summaries of other research’ (2.68) and ‘summaries of Oxfam research’ (3.5) more than other post topics. Thought so – the more work required from me, the more you like it. Sadists.

The other blogs you read are Chris Blattman, Aid Watch and Owen Barder. However 12.7% of YOU only read the FP2P blog (check out the blogroll to the right, guys – it’s worth it).

And some of the most useful comments?

1. The posts are too long! Sorry folks, will try and do some shorter ones, but also a very good suggestion to provide a one sentence summary of the main ‘takeaway’ at the top of the longer pieces. I might even do it as a wonku – see top of this post.

2. More voices and experiences from the South. Yep, you’re right. Except when I travel (and I’m off to Vietnam next week, so expect some stuff from there), it’s all a bit too DFID, World Bank, northern academic and Oxfam HQ in tone. Could readers please help by pointing me to the best alternative sources? And you NGO-ers, I’m looking to you for some help with this. Ditto for volunteers and suggestions for guest bloggers, especially from the South.

3. I should a) be more controversial and b) respond to comments. There are limits on my willingness to pick fights, however entertaining, partly due to my wimpy temperament and partly by this being an Oxfam-hosted blog (though not always an on-message one). Responding to comments is always a good idea, it’s just the time issue, but I will try and be more interactive in future (maybe I can use the time freed up by writing shorter posts).

4. Excavating the archive a bit more: people want to be able to explore past content, what’s been most popular etc. Will talk to blogmaster Eddy about that and a number of the other technical suggestions and beefs.

5. Translate it into Spanish? No need – my opposite number at Oxfam Intermon in Spain, Gonzalo Fanjul, is up and blogging (and is much cleverer and funnier than I could ever be)

As for the person who wants me to provide ‘more critical analysis of OGB material’ – nice try, but it ain’t gonna happen on this blog. Sorry.

An enormous thanks to everyone who took the time to fill it in – I will do my best to make it worth your while by listening to the suggestions. Starting with today’s executive wonku. But not the short post. Sorry.

Why no-one believes what scientists tell them

The Guardian’s George Monbiot is a former environmental scientist turned journalist-activist. Many moons ago I studied physics, before joining the development and human rights dark/light side (depending on your point of view). So his recent meditation on the nature of science and ‘public reason’ as Amartya Sen would call it, struck a chord, (and not just with me, if the 1200 comments on the article are anything to go by). It also echoes the discussions I regularly have with NGO colleagues.

The prompt for his musings is the extraordinarily successful counterattack by climate sceptics on the scientific evidence for climate change. What Monbiot realizes is that, as with so many contentious issues of public policy, this discussion is only partly a rational argument, the outcome of which is determined by the evidence available. As I am finding with the debates on the Financial Transactions Tax, discussions may go through the motions of examining the evidence, but beliefs are fixed, emotional and largely impervious to new information or analysis.

Why is that? Monbiot thinks that partly, it’s the employment structures behind public debate: ‘Views like this can be explained partly as the revenge of the humanities students. There is scarcely an editor or executive in any major media company – and precious few journalists – with a science degree, yet everyone knows that the anoraks are taking over the world.’

But he is too intelligent just to blame the media, and points to the way science itself has evolved. ‘The detail of modern science is incomprehensible to almost everyone, which means that we have to take what scientists say on trust. Yet science tells us to trust nothing, to believe only what can be demonstrated. This contradiction is fatal to public confidence.’

I would go further on this point – as Karl Popper argued, good scientists inhabit a world in which no law can ever be definitively proven to be true – it can only be proven to be false. Until that time, they can use the law as a working hypothesis. That is hardly guaranteed to reassure a general public desperate for certainty.

Monbiot goes on to echo recent discussions on behavioural psychology from George Lakoff and others: ‘Those who see themselves as individualists and those who respect authority, “tend to dismiss evidence of environmental risks, because the widespread acceptance of such evidence would lead to restrictions on commerce and industry, activities they admire”. Those with more egalitarian values are “more inclined to believe that such activities pose unacceptable risks and should be restricted”.

These divisions, researchers have found, are better at explaining different responses to

It's not him, it's us

information than any other factor. Our ideological filters encourage us to interpret new evidence in ways that reinforce our beliefs. “As a result, groups with opposing values often become more polarised, not less, when exposed to scientifically sound information.”’

All this leads him to a deeply pessimistic conclusion: ‘Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science. The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don’t want to know, nothing and no one will reach them. There goes my life’s work.’

I think the people who work for NGOs come from both sides of the divide. There are plenty of enlightenment-rationalists, looking for evidence, believing in progress, both human and technological. But there is also a deep strain of those whose ‘ideological filters’ make it simply impossible for them to accept that technology X could be positive, whatever the evidence.

Evidence-based policy making, anyone?

This hostility is often based (with some justification) on the ways control over new technologies exclude poor people and exacerbate inequality, but I also think it reflects deeper belief systems. On some technologies there is a broad consensus (IT and renewables good; weapons bad). But on many others, partly to maintain internal peace, the rationalists in NGOs have to settle for (at best) agnosticism and fence-sitting on issues such as GM, nanotech, nuclear power or geo-engineering. I am doubtful evidence will ever allow us to reach consensus on those – the Georges (Monbiot and Lakoff) are  right.

That worries me, not least because of the missed opportunities to channel science for the benefits of poor people, and because we risk surrendering the issue to the bad guys. Got a feeling I might get a few comments on this one…..