Ford v Toyota – is it time to change the way we do research for development?

I took part in a conference on fragile states last week. Because it was held under Chatham House rules, I can’t say much about it, (except for the excellent on-the-record presentation by Tom Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which I blogged on at the time), but it got me thinking about a wider issue. Do we need a new model for conducting research that can be absorbed by aid workers?

To caricature, here’s the problem: on the one hand, a research establishment whose funding and career incentives generate mountains of long, closely argued papers and books that look horribly off-putting and inaccessible to many non academic aid workers. Pressure from people who don’t settle down with a sigh of satisfaction to read 80 page technical papers with lots of annexes has meant that these are now accompanied by executive summaries and a proliferating number of ‘one pagers’ and ‘two pagers’ for policy makers, aid workers and others.

Is that the best we can do? It means that research is conducted, written down in a paper, heaped on a conference table or uploaded to a website, and then the researcher’s work is largely done. The aid worker or other harassed, time-constrained person is then expected to find it, pick it up, read, digest and apply it to their own lives. In practice, that often doesn’t happen – partly because of the length of the paper, but partly because of the indigestibility of so much external information and analysis that is not tailored to the aid worker’s needs. If it was in a classroom, it would be called ‘chalk and talk’. We need to come up with better ways to encourage ‘knowledge absorption’ by practitioners.

A comparison: research is essentially a Fordist exercise, churning out hundreds of standardized products – the model T Fords of

knowledge generation. Model Ts have their place of course – research of this kind sets agendas, shapes debates and can be absorbed by people who really want to do so, and (to mix metaphors) eventually finds its way into the political and practitioner bloodstream. But it’s uphill work – what would post-Fordist, ‘Toyotist’ (OK, maybe I need to change that comparison) research products look like, customized to the needs and preferences of the user?

At the moment customization occurs largely through outsourcing – an aid agency pays a consultant to do its thinking for it, and produce a report. But that doesn’t transfer skills or make the aid agency better next time.  So why not try ‘co-production’ – a researcher and an aid worker travelling, researching and talking together, challenging each other, and then writing up the results? Think farmer field schools for aid workers. IDS has probably done more thinking on this than most development outfits – John Gaventa made his name organizing ‘participatory action research’ in the Appalachians, and Andrea Cornwall has tried this kind of thing with NGOs in Brazil (see below).

One problem with this model is expense – NGOs just can’t afford the IDS’s of this world, without some kind of subsidy, and if the knowledge generated applies purely to that specific example, then the research could be very expensive indeed. But if we really want practitioners to absorb and apply research, we should find a way to pilot more of these approaches, perhaps working with less expensive research institutions in developing countries.

Any positive experiences of co-production that people can point to? Best example I’ve seen so far is ActionAid’s Knowledge Initiative.

And to show just how different such a process could look, here’s one small example of co-production at work from Andrea Cornwall at IDS:

‘The project began as a long, slow conversation between Sue Fleming, DFID social development adviser in Brazil at the time, Jorge Romano, country director for ActionAid at the time, Alex Shankland who used to work for Health Unlimited in Brazil and had just been working with IDS and myself.  Our conversations were about Brazilian experiences of citizenship and how to make them legible to an international audience, and about how to bring together a diversity of perspectives on what had happened in the period since the dictatorship to understand social movements’ struggles and contribution to Brasil’s democratization.

We started by putting together a workshop with a selection of activist-researchers, activist-intellectuals and activist-practitioners. About thirty of them. Those invited came from our professional (ActionAid partners, DFID social development grantees, academics and activists we’d all worked with) and activist networks. 

The workshop was structured as follows:
-   practitioners were given the floor to share their experience, with academics as discussants who prodded them for more information, asked questions, drew out interesting syntheses and analyses from what the practitioners said. It worked really well.
-   we had various participatory exercises on concepts and buzzwords that helped clarify what we meant by terms, but also create a common (critical) language
-   we had a few presentations at the start on the historical trajectory of participation and citizenship in Brazil and in international development as a backdrop against which the practitioners’ stories could be told and understood, which really helped contextualise them.

We then selected four case studies & created teams to research them. They consisted of:
-   the practitioner as protagonist at the heart of the action
-   a Brazilian academic with an interesting perspective on the issue
-   a researcher/practitioner representing a perspective from international development

The practitioner told their story to the researchers. The researchers listened and came up with a checklist of things they thought were especially interesting about the story. The practitioner then added to the checklist and refined the questions, answered some of them and sent the researchers off to research the others, pointing them in the direction of particular people, gathering secondary information for them to read, and generally orienting them – sometimes attending interviews to make introductions and cut through the crap, sometimes sending researchers off on their own. The process was iterative, over the course of a very intensive week, with daily meetings and discussions, refining questions, gathering more information, asking more questions, drawing out the analysis.

The researchers then took the lead in writing up the case study, with inputs from the practitioner.

This was presented at a workshop at which the four cases were brought together with a series of short papers about the trajectories and victories of Brazil’s social movements.

In such a very short time, I gained more of an insight as a researcher than I could ever have imagined – and the insights we were able to feed back helped the council to reflect and possibly also make changes.’

An effective public campaign (on palm oil)

You know you’ve had an impact when the Economist devotes three pages to your campaign, so hats off to Greenpeace and the other organizations featured in this week’s spread on palm oil. Here are some excerpts:

“Palm oil is a popular, cheap commodity, which green activists are doing their best to turn into a commercial liability. Companies are finding them impossible to ignore.

Early on April 21st 2008, Greenpeace activists dressed as orang-utans stormed Unilever’s headquarters in London to draw attention to the damage done to Indonesian tropical rainforests by the production of palm oil, an ingredient in many of Unilever’s products. It was effective: soon after the orang-utan invasion the company said it would draw all its palm oil from “sustainable” sources by 2015.

The charges against palm oil are serious: environmental groups regard it as a danger not only to Asian wildlife but also to the health of the planet. Between 1967 and 2000 the area under cultivation in Indonesia expanded from less than 2,000 square kilometres (770 square miles) to more than 30,000 square kilometres.

In Sumatra and Borneo, palm-oil expansion threatens elephants, tigers and rhinos, as well as orang-utans. Enormous amounts of carbon dioxide are released as forests and peatlands are destroyed. Deforestation makes Indonesia one of the world’s largest carbon-dioxide emitters. On the bright side, it is true that palm oil has contributed to economic growth in the countries that produce it. But even that has been tarnished in some cases by social conflict, for example when locals or indigenous groups have been turfed off their land to make room for plantations.

Such matters are increasingly difficult for buyers of palm oil to ignore. Even though it takes only 4% of the global total, Unilever is the world’s biggest buyer, making it an obvious target for activists. Kraft and General Mills, two big American food companies, HSBC, a huge bank, and Cargill, an American agribusiness giant, have also come in for criticism. In the past few months, Nestlé, another food giant, has been attacked in a spoof online advertisement that shows an office worker eating a finger of KitKat. The chocolate digit turns out to belong to an orang-utan, with bloody consequences.

These attacks are proving potent. Nestle suspended purchases from suspect suppliers after the KitKat video had been viewed 1.5m times and prompted 200,000 e-mails of protest. According to Daniela Montalto of Greenpeace, “We had been asking Nestlé to stop buying products from rainforest destruction for two years before we launched our campaign. Nestlé cracked within just two months because the overwhelming public response made the company listen.

Companies are changing their buying policies in response, and paying more attention to the distant reaches of their supply chains. And the lessons may reach far beyond palm oil. With oil of a different type continuing to spew into the Gulf of Mexico, companies’ environmental responsibilities have never been more public.

Because of palm oil’s connection to deforestation, environmentalists are unlikely to reduce the pressure on companies that use it. WWF publishes an annual scorecard of the palm-oil policies of 59 European companies. At the bottom are companies such as Danone, a French dairy-goods company, and E. Leclerc, a hypermarket chain. Some, such as Aldi, a German retailer, and Géant Casino, another French hypermarket group, decline to answer questions about their palm-oil policies.

The Forest Footprint Disclosure project, supported by the British government and several charitable foundations, has just started an annual call for companies to indicate the extent to which their procurement policies for palm oil, soya, timber, beef, leather and biofuels are linked to deforestation. In the first year most companies chose not to respond. However, the project has the endorsement of institutional investors holding assets of $4 trillion. These sign a letter requesting disclosure, which will be sent annually to several hundred companies. This might become influential, especially now that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill has focused fund managers’ minds on environmental risks. In June a group of British MPs of green inclination called for pension funds to be forced to reveal more about such risks.

There are other forces at work besides pestering from greens and governments. One is attitudes within companies. Mr Poynton believes an important reason why Nestlé changed its policy was the opinion of its staff. For years companies have been saying that a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) can improve the quality of staff that they can recruit. It follows that these recruits then care about the behaviour of the company that employs them.

What happens from now on will depend on whether pressure is kept up on all parts of the industry. Clearly, the industry would not have moved so far, so fast, without pressure from green activists. Several companies have learned that they are vulnerable, politically and therefore commercially, when they do not control the distant ends of their supply chains. Mr Poynton may be overstating the case when he says: “Most of the environmental and social issues are embedded in products at extraction, at the resource level.” But he is surely right when he adds: “It is no longer possible to ignore that end.””

And here’s the highly effective (and truly revolting) Kitkat ad

Urban Vodou; climate change technology; the meaning of McChrystal; big bad (and good) pharma; blogs and Facebook and marshmallow-induced agony: links I liked

Urban Vodou: Politics and Popular Street Art in Haiti, a book of photographs by Pablo Butcher, published today, reveals the beauty that lies behind the earthquake imagery

Political Climate provides some lessons on technological innovation to combat climate change (and they apply to development too)

McChrystal-izing a Problem: The Militarization of American Statecraft [h/t Paul O’Brien]

The good, the bad and the ugly among big pharma transnationals, according to the Access to Medicines Index

‘The future for blogs may be special-interest publishing, with pockets of densely linked sites. These pockets form around public subjects: politics, law, economics and knowledge professions.’ The Economist ponders the impact of Facebook on the blogosphere

And apropos of absolutely nothing, marshmallow-induced agony, aka torturing children in the name of science, c/o Chris Blattman. Tee hee.

How important is growth to improvements in health and education? Not at all, says a new UN paper

The first batch of background papers to this year’s big Human Development Report has just been published. The one that caught my eye is by George Gray Molina and Mark Purser. “Human Development Trends since 1970: A Social Convergence Story” crunches a big dataset of Human Development Indicator (HDI) numbers and comes up with some pretty heretical conclusions. It finds that that the links between economic growth and improvements in health, education and life expectancy are not nearly as clear as people often assume (in fact the correlation between economic growth and changes in the non-income components of human development over their period of study is nearly zero). So there’s more to life (and development) than growth – like state action, for example. Here’s the highlights:

“We consider whether trends in human development are different from trends in economic growth. To answer these questions, we assemble a 111 country data set from 1970 to 2005 that makes HDI changes comparable both within and between countries.”

Findings: “There is evidence of poorer countries catching-up with rich countries, particularly with respect to life-expectancy and literacy. In addition, we find that the income and non-income components of HDI change are uncorrelated, thus undermining the common view that they occur jointly.

Only one country (Zambia) experiences a reversal in its human development level over the 35-year period; 110 countries experience advances. Achievements are faster for the pre- 1990 period, and are faster in Asia and the Middle East throughout the whole period. Progress on HDI achievements tends to be literacy-led, while progress in Asia tends to be life-expectancy-led. Improvements in Latin America and Eastern Europe are mixed. These results contrast with the conventional portrait of development progress, largely inferred from the economic growth literature.

We also contrast the top 10 performers in HDI with the top 10 performers for GDP per capita. The exercise highlights the differences between growth-led and HDI-led development. The most rapid improvements in life expectancy and literacy are not occurring in the fastest growing economies of the world. They are occurring in a subset of lower and middle income countries in Asia, the Middle East and northern Africa.

Three results emerge from the second part of the paper, focusing on determinants of HDI trends. First, we find evidence of convergence of human development over time. Does “income matter” as a driver of human development? We find that income is not a significant predictor of life expectancy… the drivers of improvements in health and education differ from the forces that lead to income growth.

Although correlated, we do not find evidence to suggest that human development trends can be explained by factors associated with economic growth…. social factors seem to be driving the aggregate human development story.”

I must admit, I’m a bit baffled by this, given the big literature that says growth is crucial to poverty reduction, and poverty reduction to improvements in health and education – anyone care to try and explain the discrepancy?

[update: seems like I missed another very important finding from the paper - 'changes in gender roles --proxied by female literacy and fertility-- are the best predictors of accelerations in life expectancy and literacy achievement' See comments from John Magrath and George Gray Molina]

Other background papers in this batch are:

Human Development Concepts

• Alkire, Sabina, “Human Development: Definitions, Critiques, and Related Concepts”

• Neumayer, Eric, “Human Development and Sustainability”

HD Data and Trends

• Pineda, José and Francisco Rodríguez, “Curse or Blessing? Natural Resources and Human Development”

HD and Governance

• Pritchett, Lant, “Birth Satisfaction Units (BSU): Measuring Cross-National Differences in Human Well-Being”

• Jayadev, Arjun, “Global Governance and Human Development: Promoting Democratic Accountability and Institutional Experimentation”

• Walton, Michael, “Capitalism, the state, and the underlying drivers of human development”

HD in Europe

• Stewart, Kitty, “Human Development in Europe”

HD in Africa

• Fosu, Augustin Kwasi and Germano Mwabu, “Human Development in Africa”

For  more on the Human Development Report - data bases, blogs etc go here

Social protection – have aid agencies got it wrong?

‘Has social protection in sub-Saharan Africa lost its way?’ asks a brilliant new paper from a consortium of thinktanks, including IDS and

ODI. Their overall finding is that donors’ preference for evidence and pilots, and lack of engagement with national political realities, have undermined their impact. Hard to summarize – it’s a treasure trove – but here are some highlights:

Where are we at? ‘The 2002/03 humanitarian crisis in southern Africa was the trigger for a big push by the international community on the then emerging social protection policy agenda, which has since gone through two broad phases. In the first phase (roughly 2002-05), the strategic objective of certain donors to prevent food aid from swamping the region was successfully achieved, social protection was established on the policy agenda in many countries, some governments initiated national social pension schemes or ‘productive safety net’ programmes, and donors invested heavily in building the evidence base for social transfers, and in enhancing the capacity of government partners to deliver social protection programmes.

The second phase (2006-10) has been more erratic. Many countries now have social protection strategies; ‘emergency cash transfers’ have displaced or complemented food aid in food crises; some large-scale programmes have been introduced while others have been consolidated. But in other countries pilot social transfer projects have not scaled up and face uncertain futures, while several African governments remain resistant to institutionalising national-level social transfers, often revealing a strong preference for input subsidies and public works instead.

As for the development community, we cannot agree among ourselves on how to move the social protection agenda forward – some take a ‘rights-based’ perspective while others want to implement a needs-based ‘social floor’; some favour unconditional cash transfers while others want to introduce conditions; some argue for social pensions while others target ‘orphans and vulnerable children’ (OVC) or the poorest 10%; and in some countries different approaches are being ’piloted’ in different districts simultaneously, not informed by any national vision.’

6 current approaches, and why they have largely failed:

1) Financing pilots and demonstration projects: governments suspect (reasonably enough) these are Millennium Village-style ‘Potemkin projects’, designed (and funded) to succeed, that can’t be scaled up. ‘We know of no cases where such a pilot or demonstration project has become a government-owned social protection programme with national coverage.’

2) Building the evidence base: governments have not been persuaded by the evidence – not least because policy choices are influenced by lots of other, messier, things like politics, election cycles etc (would never happen here, eh?).

3) Building the capacity of implementing ministries: no good when the relevant ministries are so far down the government pecking order, with negligible influence over the ‘Ministries of Money.’

4) Mobilising civil society: few success stories – CSOs are usually seen by governments as junior partners or service providers

5) Engaging directly with Ministries of Finance: they only listen to macroeconomists, and the macroeconomists won’t buy into SP until you can show it boosts growth (rather than just reduces poverty and suffering).

6) Lobbying parliamentarians: has not translated into government action.

So what’s the problem? The paper turns the spotlight on ‘outsiders like us’ and asks ‘What’s wrong with the way outsiders are engaging in social protection in Africa?’ It offers five options for improving our performance:

(1) Learn from government-driven programmes and work with governments to monitor, evaluate, improve and extend them; find out where the energy is, and build on this. When governments in Lesotho and Swaziland introduced national social pensions, they had to do so against the advice of donors and with no external financial or technical support.

(2) Work through appropriate institutional mechanisms, at regional and national levels (but remember that the final decisions are almost always national).

(3) Learn lessons for national implementation, rather than from pilot projects. What is needed now is not more evidence of impact from small experiments: it is practical experience that will inform implementation at national scale.

(4) Be driven less by instruments and locate social transfers within a broader national social policy agenda, by paying more attention to social protection objectives – including reducing vulnerability

(5) Find new levers for supporting African governments, based on a more sophisticated understanding of the political economy in each national context. Identify the ‘drivers’ of social protection policy processes: key stakeholders, government priorities and constraints – national food security, electoral cycles etc -  informal as well as formal institutions, complex patterns of allegiance and competition involving domestic and external actors.

By understanding and working with the grain of national politics, social protection advocates will achieve far more than if they insist on parachuting in technocratic approaches, however well designed.

What distinguishes a nice technology from a nasty one?

Gave a short presentation to the Westminster Food and Nutrition Forum last week on the thorny topic of food security, innovation and safety. The speakers and audience were mainly on the science/policy interface, (a very different epistemic community from last week’s EU aid gabfest, but the powerpoints were just as bad). Most of the discussion concerned the UK, rather than international issues, but there were messages of relevance to a development wonk.

In particular, everyone stressed the need to move beyond ‘pure’ research focussed on technological fixes for food production, and adopt more participatory, holistic and inter-disciplinary approaches. But they acknowledged that in reality, the academic incentives all point in the other direction – status (and research funding) stems from citations in prestigious journals, not impact on the real world; research funding pushes people towards single discipline approaches, because interdisciplinary work takes much longer (building all that trust, learning each other’s academic languages and mindsets) and so is more expensive; the push to link up universities and the private sector means less research being made publicly available.

I discussed the ‘technology as magic bullet v double-edged sword’ dichotomy that is always present, though often implicitly, in NGO thinking. I started off with a positive example (h/t Steve Jennings): access to reliable, appropriate seasonal weather forecasts (with support to farmers on how to use the information) has been shown in various countries to increase agricultural production by 10-20% without any other intervention. This is because it provides information that allows farmers to make better decisions. As climate change makes traditional knowledge of the weather less useful, that impact is only likely to increase. For an example from Mali, see here, and hop to page 59.

Lessons from this?:

Technology doesn’t have to be ‘new’ to make a big difference – mobile phones or old-school radios can do the trick

‘Good’ technology empowers poor people and reduces inequality

The discussion got me thinking about why (to caricature grotesquely) NGOs tend to see some technologies as ‘nice’, others as ‘nasty’.

Nice: IT, internet, mobile phones, vaccines, renewables
Nasty: GM, nanotech, geoengineering, biofuels, nuclear

I had previously assumed that the distinction is arbitrary, but actually, the division makes a lot of sense – the ‘good’ technologies

empower poor people, while the bad ones tend to be under centralized control (often corporate, via patents or the massive investments required) and can often exclude poor people or actually damage them (e.g. biofuel plantations driving small farmers off the land).

So rather than good and bad technologies per se, it comes down to good and bad governance. Another possible dividing line is that ‘bad’ technologies raise fears of irreversible negative consequences, (contamination of non-GM crops, nuclear accidents) whereas ‘good’ technologies are dispersed and less likely to cause havoc (apart from mobile phones making it even harder to have an intelligent conversation with teenagers). Can anyone recommend anything to read on this?

And one nice soundbite I nicked from Lawrence Haddad at IDS – in research on food systems, we need to find ways to move the focus away from the billion bottoms (obesity) to the bottom billion (poverty).

Where have we got to on fragile states and what comes next?

Another week, another conference. This time it’s hosted by the UK development ministry, DFID, which among other things, has an impressive track record of funding research on development issues (declaration of interest – I worked for DFID for a year in 2004, and sometimes advise them on research issues). This week’s gabfest is called ‘The Politics of Poverty: Elites, Citizens and States’, and it is being held to pull together the findings of four large DFID-funded projects over the last ten years. So in terms of epistemic communities, we’re talking political scientists – the conversation so far has been pretty much an economics-free zone.

The synthesis paper of all that research is on DFID’s Research for Development website, along with links to the four research centres involved in the work.  It shows what can be achieved by a sustained research funding on a particular topic and  I’ll try and summarize/pick out highlights at some future date. For now, here are my notes on a great presentation from Tom Carothers, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Tom’s a guru on democracy and development. Sorry for the long post, but he’s worth it.

First, how did the debates stand ten years ago, when this research project got under way? Tom took note of the ‘huge movement towards ‘politics matters’’ in the development aid community, one that started in the 1990s and gathered considerable steam in this decade. The evolution of the governance debate in the 1990s meant that donors felt that they understood what policies were required to trigger development, but were frustrated by states’ incapacity to implement them. This led to a focus on state-building, but when the first efforts led to technocratic failures, aid donors began to think that political process must hold the answer, sometimes to the extreme that ‘politics became a metaphor for everything we didn’t know – everything that wouldn’t fit in the equation.’

Secondly, the rise in importance of post conflict situations meant that in countries like Mozambique, Angola, Liberia, and Cambodia, politics was ‘hitting them in the face’. Over the course of the decade, this concern with post-conflict morphed into the concept of fragile states. The focus on fragile states gained so much attention that it sometime overshadowed consideration of governance issues in non-fragile states.

Thirdly, there has been a big response to the question ‘Can we prove that good governance leads to better development outcomes?

How far have we got on these three points?

1. We have broken politics apart into more useful/researchable questions:

-         Understanding the incentives of elites and how they shape politics

-         Mapping the different forms of state-society relations

-         Understanding institutions in a political light, eg when do governments introduce progressive or substantial taxation systems?

-         Grasping the role of informal institutions

But Tom saw a deeper question: maybe having an ‘ideal’ for state-citizen evolution is neither necessary nor ideal. Are we getting to a world where we have no template, a ‘deeper anarchism’ in which we don’t know what the end of state-building should be, given that our ‘ideal forms’ seem unrealistic and many non-ideal forms are producing results in some areas?

2. Violence: three areas of progress

-         we have to understand ‘political settlements’ as the glue that keeps states together

-         there are certain core elements of the first stage of state-building: security, revenue collection etc

-         the importance of inclusion and inequality as drivers of conflict

3. He finds the question of the evidence about the value of good governance for development ‘surprisingly unsettled’, although he sees a ‘rich vein of argument and discussion’. It has been easier to prove impact at micro level, but proof at the national level has been very elusive. ‘It is impossible to explain why some regions do well without good governance, or that if good governance is introduced, it leads to growth’. That’s a pretty big hole.

Has all this research been translated into practice? Citing a recent article by Sue Unsworth in the Journal of International Development as a rich source of analysis on this question, and drawing on his own experiences, Tom pointed to DFID’s research on ‘drivers of change’ in Nigeria, where what is now called ‘political economy analysis’ helped DFID make some basic changes in its work to reflect a new understanding of the importance of coalitions as potential agents of change in a context where the entrenched elites show no incentive for developmental reforms. So yes, it has had an influence, but only on some governments and projects. Why has it been so hard to introduce political thinking more generally into donor behaviour?

-         Aid organizations have a huge historical investment in technocratic approaches – that is very hard to change

-         This knowledge (on complex political interactions between states and citizens) is hard to know what to do with as an outsider. Research always stresses ‘there is no recipe’, because of complexity and context – not much help for policy makers.

-         It involves acceptance of much more limited goals for development actors – a very difficult lesson for the development industry.

More heretically, he thinks there may be a fundamental conflict between the Paris and Accra principles on aid effectiveness and taking politics seriously, which requires ‘infiltrating aid much more intensively in local political realities.’

Finally, he stood back and gave us the really big picture: these discussions are rooted in a post-Cold War interregnum characterized by a ‘certain benignness in international relations’. That assumed

-         we knew the direction of history and economic policy

-         the international community was involved in mopping up old Cold War conflicts

-         donors could get more involved in politics as governments around the world accepted the benefits of higher levels of pooled sovereignty.

But in the period that we’ve been trying to understand the political dimensions of development, these assumptions have become invalid, as part of a larger international shift away from the post-Cold War period into something different. There is much less confidence on what constitutes ‘sound economic policy’; it has become clear that conflicts are metastasizing and multiplying – Thailand, Mexico, Kyrgyzstan are not cold war hangovers. Finally, there is a ‘huge backlash’ against political intervention by outsiders, especially aid donors

So although we’ve moved far, the international context, and therefore the research questions we’re asking are changing underneath our feet. What new questions should we be asking?

And there frustratingly, hemmed in by his 20 minute limit, he left it. What are the equivalent questions on the politics of development for the next decade? Given what we now know, what political or other interventions in fragile states can an economically ailing West realistically undertake, with a decent chance of success? Answers, as ever, in the comments, please.

Postscript: see here for Foreign Policy magazine’s 2010 ‘fragile states index’, out this week, topped by Somalia, Chad and Sudan, with interactive map.

Climate change – where next? + some good news; the dismal consensus; everyone hates charter cities; modern and mobile; losing leaders and the fear of Jolie: links I liked

A long, but thought-provoking post from Alex Evans on the state of the response to climate change

And some good climate news (for a change)? New Scientist reports that low lying Pacific islands seem to be responding to rising sea levels by growing

Dani Rodrik finds some new data showing just how bad the Washington Consensus years have been for Latin America

A big, new and probably silly idea: Ranil Dissanayake at Aid Watch lambasts Paul Romer’s proposals for charter cities (here’s my take on them).  Laura Freschi at Aid Watch is more polite, but just as damning.

‘Almost all English words for money come from the world of pastoral nomads. Cattle, chattel and capital come from the same root. Pecuniary comes from the Latin word for cattle, pecus.’ IIED turns stereotypes upside down in a refreshingly positive take on Africa’s 50 million livestock producers in ‘Modern and Mobile’.

Chris Blattman looks at research that losing leaders can trigger civil wars (so drone warfare may not be such a good idea)

And a delightful spoof on the Western celebs adopting African kids theme [h/t Africa is another country]

How can a whole developing country switch to renewables? The example of Tonga

Continuing the theme of renewables, here’s a (small) developing country which has decided to pursue an energy transformation. I bumped into a Chatham House researcher called Cleo Paskal the other day, who was singing the praises of the Pacific island of Tonga. She wrote a piece for the Toronto Star on this – here’s a précis.

Tongans are fiercely independent – it’s the only unconquered country in the Pacific – and they decided that they didn’t want to be beholden to the one thing that seems to keep even the world’s largest countries captive: imported energy.

And so, the Prime Minister, Dr. Feleti Vaka’uta Sevele, with the blessing of the King, convened a cabinet subcommittee to look at all renewable energy options available to Tonga. And a target was set for 50 per cent renewable energy in Tonga by 2012.

This involved rethinking its relationship with aid donors. For decades, Tonga has been on the receiving end of international aid, but often what is given, and where it goes, is decided by the donors. For example, $30 million came into the country for solar panels, but that went to people living on outlying islands, while 80 per cent of the population lives in the capital. Also, it was mostly for lights, which were not a high priority for locals compared to, say refrigeration or communications.

The prime minister declared that he didn’t want any more of the sort of aid and established a new renewable energy department, headed by a respected Tongan, `Akau’ola.

One of his first orders of business was to reinvent the relationship with aid partners. “Often, the first thing development partners do when they come here is to tell the government that it is duplicating and wasting resources,” `Akau’ola explains. “But they themselves do exactly that. In order to get around that, we decided to identify a sector, in this case the energy sector, and have all development partners coordinate solutions through one organization, in this case the World Bank.”

Those solutions are not limited to a massive rollout of appropriate renewables. Also being considered are regulatory and institutional changes, and whether Tonga should develop a strategic energy supply, or hedge on energy prices. In another innovation, the country is going to have an energy poll, in which the population is asked exactly what its energy priorities are.

And the energy sector isn’t the only one in which Tonga is leading the way. The Environment and Climate Change ministry is in the process of conducting one of the world’s most comprehensive national assessment of environmental change impacts. By talking with experts, from scientists to village elders, they are finding evidence of coastal erosion, coral bleaching, saltwater infiltration of groundwater, flooding, and more. Far from a mere list of ills, the research is being used to coordinate a wide ranging defence against the changes including everything from erecting sea walls to cyclone insurance.

For more see the Tonga Energy Roadmap 2010-20.

Now – as usual – I expect someone will tell me why this is too good to be true.

Are renewables the answer to Africa’s energy deficit?

Thanks for the feedback on yesterday’s post – let’s continue this mini-series of posts on energy. A new paper from the energy wonks at the World Bank. ‘The Economics of Renewable Energy Expansion in rural Sub-Saharan Africa‘ asks whether renewables (solar, hydro, wind and so on) are mainly an issue for the rich north, or a potential solution to energy poverty in poor countries.

The authors argue that, whether through carrots or sticks, the pressures on poor countries to decarbonize are likely to grow:  “we are moving into an era when zero- or low-carbon renewable energy will command a market premium based on its ability to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) by replacing fossil fuels. This premium may be realized directly, for example through imposition of carbon taxes on fossil energy sources in developed countries, or indirectly, through payments for “offset” emissions due to substitution of renewable for fossil fuel as implemented in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) within the UN’s Kyoto Protocol for GHG control.”

What does the report conclude? 

Short Version: Accelerating development in Sub-Saharan Africa will require massive expansion of access to electricity – currently reaching only about one-third of households. The authors conclude that decentralized renewable energy will likely play an important role in expanding rural energy access. But it will be the lowest cost option for a minority of households in Africa. Decentralized renewables are competitive mostly in remote and rural areas, while grid connected supply dominates denser areas where the majority of households reside (and urbanization is only likely going to increase). They conclude that there is a need to de-carbonize the fuel mix for centralized power generation as it expands in Africa at the same time as promoting renewables in remote areas.

Slightly longer version: “We have tested the conventional view that renewable power remains too costly for large-scale applications in countries where poverty alleviation is the primary objective. Current power grids draw heavily on fossil power sources and are clustered in densely-populated areas, where fixed costs can be amortized over large numbers of consumers. However, the incremental cost of electric service rises rapidly as the grid is extended to settlements whose population falls along a standard rank-size distribution. In contrast, wind and solar power, exploitable in stand-alone units or minigrids, may be broadly distributed across rural areas. Diesel generator power is potentially available anywhere.

Even if a renewable power source has a higher unit production cost than fossil power, it may be cost-competitive in many areas once its local costs are compared with those from extension of the centralized grid.

In the Ethiopian case, we find that decentralized wind power is already cost-competitive with power from an extended central grid in a large share of the country’s area. Estimates for Ghana and Kenya—not discussed in the paper but summarized in Appendix 2—show similar patterns. We also find that solar photovoltaic power may become competitive in large parts of the country.

But our scenarios, based on realistic unit costs, also show that for a majority of households, decentralized power supply is unlikely to be cheaper than grid supplies any time soon. Levelized costs for wind energy are very low, but wind potential is limited to a relatively small share of each country. Solar PV would cover less than ten percent of all households under realistic technical change scenarios over the next 20 years. Furthermore, carbon taxes or equivalent premiums for renewable investments are unlikely to make the difference.

Two more general conclusions are warranted: First, stand-alone renewable energy technologies will be the lowest-cost option for a significant minority of households in African countries. These will be mostly in rural and more remote parts of the country.

Second, the economics of grid-supplied electricity in more densely populated areas remain compelling, especially as the concentration of population in Africa is likely to increase rather than diminish (World Bank 2008b). From a climate change perspective, therefore, our analysis highlights the importance of reducing the carbon intensity of grid-supplied energy generation.” [or as Gordon Gecko almost said, ‘grid is good’….]

John Magrath, our in-house renewables watcher, is a bit mystified by this approach:

“Decarbonising the grid is the big issue for rich, developed countries if they are serious about tackling carbon emissions, hence climate change. Providing energy to energy poor people in rural sub-Saharan Africa right now will add barely a jot to carbon emissions. And even decarbonising SSA’s urban grids, while important, is like the parable about advocating removal of a mote from someone else’s eyes whilst being blind to the beam in your own.

You have to feel glad that the Bank is acknowledging renewable energy has a place. However, campaigners would no doubt wearily ask, so why don’t they put more of their money where their mouth now is? The Bank is still fossil-fuel fixated in its loans, as illustrated in new report from Friends of the Earth US – Capitalizing on Climate: The World Bank’s Role in Climate Change & International Climate Finance.

And second, this purports to be a paper on Renewable Energy Expansion in Rural Sub-Saharan Africa – so why does it only do half a job? The Bank seems fixated on electricity, as if that is the only form of energy that matters. In rural SSA just as urgent a need is to find energy sources and technologies that will replace biomass and three-stone stoves for cooking, and electricity won’t do that.

It’s also important to think through the different uses of electricity and different ways to provide it. You can distinguish between the small amounts needed for household lighting and how to provide that (e.g. solar lanterns), the larger amounts for schools and clinics (e.g. solar panels/small wind) and the even larger amounts needed to power machinery (for which, frankly, diesel is best). Too many schemes in rural SSA muddle them all up and end up doing nothing very well. (See the new book by Teo Sanchez of Practical Action, The Hidden Energy Crisis, how policies are failing the world’s poor).”