The Simpsons and aid; biofuels update; shooting camels from helicopters; food geopolitics; poor countries out-promise rich ones on climate change; me and my suit; aid is how much? Links I liked

Simpsons Quotes for aid agencies [h/t John Magrath]

Alex Evans miscellany: Nice (and optimistic) update on biofuels. Why would Australians shoot camels from helicopters? To combat climate change. Of course, how silly of me….. More on positive framing and climate change.

Lester Brown on the new geopolitics of food (h/t Kate Raworth and John Magrath)

A new study for Oxfam reveals that developing countries are pledging to cut their emissions of greenhouse gasses by more than developed countries. Oxfam estimates that over 60 per cent of emissions cuts by 2020 are likely to be made by developing countries. Full background paper here.

Here’s me and my NGO suit in action on Reuters TV, introducing the GROW campaign from the heart of Canary Wharf

Nice vox pop on UK Aid spending from the One campaign

Is the blogging bubble about to burst?

I’ve been worrying about the viability of blogging recently. Partly it’s finding myself squeezing this kind of thing in before breakfast and wondering if I really ought to get a life (although I’ve always thought work-life balance was over-rated – depends on the work, depends on the life….). But it was also the raised eyebrows (and envious tones) from a few colleagues in other development agencies, whose tone suggested that blogging was some kind of extraordinary self-indulgence that Oxfam should really clamp down on.

At the same time, like everyone else in this corner of the blogosphere, I was shocked when Bill Easterly and Laura Freschi announced that they were closing down the popular Aid Watch blog due to Chinese meal syndrome – they wanted to stop snacking and free up more time for longer research pieces. Interestingly, they also cited the urge to move from talking about aid to talking about development. Is aid-bashing fatigue breaking out? Elsewhere a few political blogs have been closing down in the UK recently, citing the increasing nastiness of the blogosphere and the lack of a business model that can allow people to earn a living from blogging.

So is the blogging bubble about to burst? Am I finally going to have to learn how to use twitter? Or just go back to writing books and 40 page policy papers? Don’t think so and to explain why not, here are some suitably self-justificatory thoughts about the role of blogging on development.

First, there are plenty of benefits to the blogger, and I don’t just mean a license to scrounge review copies of new books. Blogging forces you to read stuff more carefully and come to a view, it provides an immediate (though fairly small) audience for exchanges of daily thoughts and opinions, and you build up an archive of links + virtually every intelligent thought you’ve had (and a few others) for the last 3 years. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the big cheeses in Oxfam take more notice of something on the blog than if I send them the same thought in an email…… Feeding the blogbeast is undoubtedly a pressure, a daily monkey on your back, but in my experience, it’s a creative one.

But enough about me, what’s the wider organizational cost-benefit of having a (part time) blogger on your payroll?

There are some tangible benefits – there’s enough feedback to suggest that some posts get picked up by the media, or influence academics, other NGOs and (occasionally) policy makers. But I think it goes a bit deeper than that kind of direct (and attributable) impact. Blogging has turbocharged a part of the development discussion best described as the ‘ideas space’ – the daily churn of ideas, buzzwords, priorities, spins and slants which serves to accelerate the evolution of the conventional wisdom of the day. Remember variation, selection and amplification – the three elements of evolution? Blogs are probably best at the selection bit, chewing over new ideas, sifting and rejecting, setting agendas. Some go viral (think ‘Bottom Billion’ or Andy Sumner’s paper on where poor people live these days), while most sink rapidly into well-deserved oblivion.

That chatter influences the views of pundits, politicians and aid workers alike. Over eighty years ago, Keynes memorably pointed out  that ‘Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.’ That’s still true – decision makers often resemble living fossils of the dominant schools of thought at the time when they went to university. But now the thoughts of last week’s bloggers are overlaid on that deeper, more immovable frame of thought. Gramsci would have blogged from prison.

I’m not sure NGOs have sufficiently woken up to the increased importance of the ideas space. Look at the wonky end of the developmental blogosphere and they are noticeable by their absence. Are we clinging too much to policy paper land, albeit with added press work? NGO blogs tend to be unengaging – either gushing or leaden. Or anonymously corporate – the best-read blogs have a face and a personality, and institutional blogs, whether from thinktanks or NGOs can be pretty dull affairs.

Given the demands of solo blogging, it may be that the most sustainable option is to assemble a group of faces, rather than an institution or an individual. A View from the Cave reckons CGD has got the right  balance between individual personality and institutional identity. Global Dashboard is another example of an a stable of bloggers that produces enough (too much?) output without killing anyone. Any others?

So although periodic shake-outs are inevitable, blogging has to evolve a bit to become more sustainable, and individual bloggers will always drop out through exhaustion, boredom or life changes, I reckon this particular form of cyber soap box is here to stay. Sorry.

Update: look, I really wasn’t fishing for compliments, (at least not consciously), but thanks anyway…….

Responding to some of the criticisms of GROW

When you launch a big campaign like GROW, you generally get both good reviews and a few attacks, and since the advent of the blogosphere, those attacks have got more virulent. This time around, we must be doing something wrong, because the handful of diatribes I’ve seen (do tell me if I’ve missed some) are actually disappointingly thin. But in case you’re interested, here are a few reflections and responses.

The general tone is familiar from previous campaigns on economic issues – true believers in the untrammelled market trawl through Oxfam materials, welcome anything that promotes liberalization (end European and US farm subsidies, drop damaging targets for biofuels, stop patents blocking technology transfer) and lambast anything that advocates state intervention. It must be wonderfully reassuring to believe in such a simple market-good/ state-bad world, but really, can’t we think a bit harder? Dani Rodrik’s recent book is a fine demonstration that actually, you need both, and the right combination varies according to context – nature of the country, stage of development etc. Is that really so hard to grasp?

Sifting through what I’ve read to date, and sticking to the bigger picture rather than nit-picking, two accusations stand out: that Oxfam has become a bunch of beard-and-cardigan hippies, peasant romantics who think organic smallholders can feed the world, and second that we have jumped back 40 years to the kind of neo-malthusian doomstering epitomised by Paul Ehrlich and his dire ‘Population Bomb’ predictions.

First, the peasant question, raised in particular by Tim Worstall. Today, the world’s 500 million smallholder farms support around two billion people, almost one third of humanity, according to IFAD. But many of them are among the world’s poorest people and (ironically given their job) often go hungry.

People draw two diametrically opposed conclusions from that – one group, which includes Oxfam, concludes you should invest more in small farms, the other group (including Grow’s critics) says only big farms can feed the world, and the sooner the little guys leave the land, the better for them and everyone else.

I think the pro-smallholder position has history on its side. Countries generally need to get out of agriculture in order to grow and develop, but if you look at how take-off countries such as Vietnam have done that, as Ha-Joon Chang has done in a multi-country study for the FAO, they have generally done so by first investing in smallholders, which generates the surplus needed to industrialize. Smallscale agriculture can be a springboard to development, not a ball and chain. And as Vietnam’s experience showed compared to, say, China’s, investing in smallholders means you can grow without massively increasing inequality. The added bonus is that then people can choose to leave the grinding life on the land through choice, rather than migrate through desperation.

And what’s the alternative? The big farmists are pretty vague about where the 2 billion displaced people would end up. I once had a truly jaw-dropping conversation with a World Bank economist in Sri Lanka, who explained that the country’s rice farmers, comprising 60% of the population, were low productivity dinosaurs who should give up farming and hand over to the big guys. What were those 10 million people to do, I asked, given that they couldn’t all work in garment factories? ‘Ah, at the World Bank, we don’t pick winners’, came the prompt reply. But happy enough to pick losers it seems……

But needless to say life, and Oxfam’s thinking, is a good deal more complicated than just ‘back small farmers’. Industrial agriculture has a crucial role to play, both in producing food and generating jobs for the landless labourers who are often the poorest group in rural areas (though it must be reformed to make it sustainable from both a social and an environmental perspective). A crude polarized debate on smallholder versus industrial farming as “the solution” also obscures the potential of complementarities between them. In several countries, often working with companies like Accenture, Oxfam is helping smallholders improve their incomes by getting into value chains for everything from coffee to sesame seed to dried veg. So no, we aren’t anti business and no, we aren’t smallholder fundamentalists. Sorry.

As for the Reverend Malthus, it’s true that the last major bout of Cassandra-like predictions of a hungry future came around the last major food price spike in the early 1970s. So what happened? Answer, technological improvements in irrigated agriculture, collectively known as the Green Revolution, rode to the rescue, more than outpacing global population growth. That experience fuels a touching faith in the hearts of people like Matt Ridley or The Spectator, that technological magic bullets will always appear in time to deal with all future threats.

Technologies, both specific products and new approaches, do indeed have a crucial role to play (and need much more R&D investment in areas such as the low carbon transition), but it’s remarkably naive to just assume they can solve any problem, including food supply. As they say of share prices, the past is an unreliable guide to future performance. The Green Revolution boom is rapidly running out of steam, yield growth has slowed dramatically, and none of the new technologies seem to hold similar potential (including The Spectator’s beloved GM), especially for small farmers.

Other things have changed since the 1970s – global resource consumption has risen much faster than population, pushing and in some cases crossing the planetary boundaries in areas such as nitrogen and phosphorous use. Most notably, we are well past the limit of sustainable greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not population growth driving these things, but excessive consumption in the rich countries. Oh and if you’re thinking of accusing us of crying wolf, remember what happened to the boy in the story – he did indeed cry wolf, but eventually the wolf showed up and ate the sheep, and in some versions the boy.

Apart from these points, the critics either misread the report, or attacked what they expected to see, rather than what was actually there. Matt Ridley thinks we are anti-science (we’re not) and obsessed with organics (barely mentioned in the report). Tim Worstall gets completely the wrong end of the stick, concluding that we want to drive all businesses out of supply chains and inject the dreaded state instead. Nuanced it ain’t.

But in case you think this a bit too defensive, here’s one point that I think has, errm, a point. Tim Worstall says the figure that ‘three big multinational agricultural companies control nearly 90% of the grain trade’ is too crude. And indeed it is. Given the lack of public information on the stocks which agribusiness companies hold, it is extremely difficult to provide detailed numbers – estimates are all that is possible. Admittedly, we have taken one of the higher estimates – an alternative figure from the Australian Wheat Board, based on research from the Boston Consulting Group, was that the 4 largest firms controlled 73% of global grain trade in 2003.

This is an issue that would benefit from more research – and greater transparency from agribusiness companies would help (and would also support better global governance of food stocks if more data was available). The point, however, does remain – as Tim Worstall says – that it is these agribusinesses who actually hold the global food stocks, who control the grain elevators and the transport systems, and are involved in supplying seeds and fertiliser to farmers. This represents a powerful source of dominance over the global food system. One could argue that as long as the system works for all, this does not constitute a problem (though economists don’t like oligopolies). However, the system is currently failing for millions of producers and consumers.

So where does this leave us? Can’t say the critics have said much to change my mind, but then, I dare say they’ll feel much the same about this post. That’s blogging for you.

Oh, and the most memorable press coverage of the whole launch was not an attack, but a weird piece by the Telegraph’s share tipster, Garry White. Under the headline ‘Oxfam said yesterday that decades of steady progress in the fight against hunger is now being reversed as demand outpaces food production’ he advised ‘Genus is a buy.’ Genus, as he helpfully explained ‘provides farmers with high-quality bull and pig semen to use for breeding’ and should cash in as the world starves. You couldn’t make it up.

Vaccines save lives but is GAVI getting value for money? Guest post from Max Lawson

Today the replenishment conference for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI) kicks off in London.  The last few weeks have seen significant campaigning by a broad range of organisations to secure more money for GAVI, which is running out of cash, with the requisite NGO brinksmanship being cranked up – ‘four hours to save four million lives’ according to Save the Children this week.  

GAVI is an excellent initiative, which has successfully vaccinated millions of children in the poorest countries, and saved 5 million lives as a result. But there is a long way to go – one in five children still gets no vaccine at all. Oxfam fully supports GAVI getting the money it needs from rich nations to continue and expand this sterling work.  

But (there’s always a but). DFID is one of GAVI’s major sponsors, and in its recent multilateral aid review, GAVI scored well.  However, DFID also said that GAVI should be doing more to drive down the prices it pays for vaccines. We agree. One of the reasons GAVI is running out of money is because it has paid too much for them. Scaling up HIV/AIDS treatment is not just about raising money but also ensuring, through competition, the lowest possible price for anti-retroviral medicines.

Oxfam and Medecins Sans Frontieres have been pressing GAVI to take three steps to address this problem: first, full transparency about the prices GAVI pays; second, forceful action by GAVI to use competition to get a better deal; third, all pharmaceutical companies should step down from the GAVI Board because of their clear conflict of interest.

There has been some great progress in recent weeks.  UNICEF is the primary procurer of vaccines for GAVI, and has recently published all of the prices it has historically paid.  This transparency will now be a prerequisite for all future contracts. 

The move is already doing its job in adding weight to the other two issues of prices and governance.  According to the Wall St Journal the pricing data revealed significant differences. For one common paediatric vaccine used to prevent several diseases including hepatitis B, Serum Institute of India last year charged UNICEF 40% less per dose than Crucell, a Dutch company owned by Johnson and Johnson.  With three doses per child, and millions to immunise, such price differentials really matter.

Last week, partly in response to this more robust approach, and with big contracts with UNICEF in the offing, there were a series of welcome announcements by several vaccine manufacturers voluntarily lowering their vaccine prices.  Yet we can’t rely on these ad hoc moves by companies.  Systematic action by GAVI to drive down prices is also required. GAVI is publishing a new ‘market shaping’ strategy in late June, for consultation and then agreement by the Board in the Autumn, a real opportunity for it to shift up a gear. 

Perhaps the thorniest issue is that of governance. There are two seats for Pharmaceutical companies on the GAVI board.  Crucell, which earns up to 60% of its income from GAVI contracts (like the hep B vaccine mentioned earlier), is replacing GSK on the board this July.  Both GSK and Crucell have fiercely resisted the moves towards price transparency, according to the FT. Given the 40% differential such resistance is hardly surprising.

An element of conflict of interest is commonplace on many boards, and normal practice is for that board member to absent themselves for that particular decision.  The problem here is that it is hard to think of any significant decision taken by the GAVI board that would not have a direct impact upon the bottom line of vaccine suppliers to the alliance.  Oxfam fully recognises the value of GAVI working closely with the pharmaceutical industry, but we do not believe that the best interests of the millions requiring vaccinations are best served with this continued clear conflict of interest.  The new Chair of the Board and the new Chief Executive have both said they want to tackle the governance issue, and we urge them to do so.

With donor budgets squeezed ever more it is vital we get maximum value for money – that means as many kids as possible vaccinated per aid dollar. GAVI is a great initiative, and must be fully supported by donors today, but in return for clear steps to ensure that it is paying the lowest possible prices for vaccines.

Max Lawson is Head of Development Finance and Public Services for Oxfam GB

Update: Very interesting response from Owen Barder, who thinks we are wrong on this

The first ever World Disability Report – what took them so long?

North-South convergence is undeniable (and a bit of a development cliche), but it’s not just about economies or political power. There’s also a growing recognition that social issues look increasingly similar across the North-South divide. Similar, but not identical – obesity may be on the rise in countries like Mexico and South Africa, but there, it coexists with hunger and malnutrition. Other issues that are bound to rise up the development agenda, especially if income poverty continues to fall, include mental health, ageing, reproductive rights, or discrimination on the basis of sexuality (think of the recent controversies over gay and lesbian rights in various African countries). They will join other social issues around gender, ethnicity or religion that have long been recognized as relevant to the development debate.

Another such topic is disability – most people who have travelled much will have been struck by both the number of people with disabilities in poor countries, and how often they are ignored, locked away or maltreated.  But somehow this often failed to make it onto our priority list. Until now. The first ever World Report on Disability was published yesterday by the WHO and World Bank. Some highlights:

There has been a paradigm shift in approaches to disability. In recent decades the move has been away from a medical understanding towards a social understanding. Disability arises from the interaction between people with a health condition and their environment. The emphasis should be on removing environmental barriers which prevent inclusion.

There are over one billion people with disabilities in the world, of whom between 110-190 million experience very significant difficulties. This corresponds to about 15% of the world’s population and is higher than previous World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, which date from the 1970s and suggested a figure of around 10%. [did you get that? The first estimate in 40 years – now that’s what I call neglect].

The prevalence of disability is growing due to population ageing and the global increase in chronic health conditions. Patterns of disability in a particular country are influenced by trends in health conditions and trends in environmental and other factors – such as road traffic crashes, natural disasters, conflict, diet and substance abuse.

Disability is more common among women, older people and households that are poor. Lower income countries have a higher prevalence of disability than higher income countries. According to the Guardian’s coverage of the launch, 20% of the world’s poorest people have disabilities and nearly 80% of people with disabilities live in low-income countries.

The  recommendations are based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of persons with Disabilities (CRPD) and are pretty much what you would expect – governments need to spend more, have a national disability strategy and plan of action etc. The report talks about involving and consulting people with disabilities, but I didn’t see anything on supporting them to organize independently, at least in the summary materials, which is a worrying omission.

Possible wider implications for development agencies? Get out of your development comfort zone, look at the issues that are salient in the rich countries and try to understand them better, because albeit in slightly different forms, they are coming our way. We can get a headstart by supporting organizations and states in developing countries to learn about and adapt approaches in the rich countries, rather than starting from scratch.

And here’s one story from the billion – a powerful video about wheelchair users in Tanzania

The Globalization Paradox, a great new book from Dani Rodrik

Dani Rodrik is one of the handful of heterodox heroes, prominent economists who took on the lazy thinking of the Washington Consensus in its prime, and continue to dance productively on its grave. His latest book, The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States and Democracy Can’t Coexist, feels like a Big Book, one that may shape a new way of thinking about the global economy.

It draws together several strands of Rodrik’s previous work on the WTO, growth take-offs, and the origins of the Global Financial Crisis into a single coherent whole. The result is one of the best critiques I’ve seen of the Washington Consensus. As he points out, with a paralysed global trade round, the collapse in financial globalization, and the rise of un-liberal China, the ‘stabilize, liberalize, privatize’ mantra of the early 1990s is wracked by self-doubt and well past its sell by date. A paradigm shift would seem imminent, but the old ways linger on partly for lack of a clear alternative. In The Globalization Paradox, Rodrik tries to address that gap.

The central argument is that the global economy faces a ‘trilemma’. We cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national self-determination and what he terms the ‘hyperglobalization’ of the last 30 years. You can have any two of three: nation states can hyperglobalize, opening up fully to global flows of capital and goods, but the result will include periodic crises and popular unrest that will have to be crushed if openness is to be preserved – democracy is inevitably the loser.

For Rodrik, the preferred combination is a no-brainer: ‘democracy and national self-determination should trump hyperglobalization’, which should be put back in its box. Instead we should return to a new version of the ‘shallow multilateralism’ of the Bretton Woods system that held sway from 1950-80 and delivered unprecedented growth and social progress, with its pluralistic acceptance of capital controls, national opt-outs and industrial policy – what is now called ‘policy space’. That room for manoeuvre, and acceptance of diversity, is essential to restore stability to the global economy, disrupted by the monoculture of liberalization and one-size-fits all thinking. Rodrik likens this ‘thin version of globalization’ to keeping the windows open, but with a mosquito screen. You get the fresh air, but keep out the bugs.

Beyond that, he rehearses his ‘growth diagnostics’ – that the road to success lies not in the ever-lengthening shopping lists of reforms advocated by the globalizers, but instead in identifying the ‘binding constraints’ – the most important bottlenecks in the economy – and focussing all your energy on them. As each bottleneck is dealt with, another will appear and must be tackled in turn. He credits such approaches (rather than the subsequent liberalization) for India’s remarkable economic take-off since the 1980s.

But his ‘so what’ chapters go much further than this, first setting out seven general ‘principles for a new globalization’ and then looking specifically at how they could be applied to four big challenges: trade, finance, the rise of China and migration (the one area where he passionately advocates more, rather than less, globalization).

Rodrik doesn’t just dwell on policies and institutions, but on mindsets. In particular, he takes up Isaiah Berlin’s division of thinkers into two camps – the foxes who know lots of small things, and the hedgehogs who know one big thing. Rodrik is a militant fox, and blames many of the failures of the economics profession on its tendency to rampant hedgehogism – economists who, while aware of the nuances and caveats on any argument, still default back to ‘better to liberalize than not’. Or as Rodrik acerbically asks ‘why do economists’ analytical minds turn to mush when they talk about trade policy in the real world?’ When their recommendations don’t work, the hedgehogs say ‘that’s because we didn’t liberalize enough’ – after all ‘there is always something on the list that they haven’t gotten quite right and on which the crisis can be blamed’. Post Washington Consensus hedgehogisms include microfinance and individual property rights.

The style is conversational, but sweeping and authoritative – professorial in the positive sense. Rodrik is less of a polemicist than Ha-Joon Chang, preferring to stay inside the tent, but he can pack a polite punch when necessary.

It’s also historical – on top of the contemporary debates, you get the grand historical sweep of globalization from the 17th Century to the present deftly thrown in. If you haven’t read Rodrik’s previous work, this is a good place to start.

I found the book more of a work of synthesis than genuinely surprising. One exception was his striking observations on China, where he ties the present arguments over global imbalances directly to China’s entry to the WTO. At that point, it had to drop its old forms of industrial policy (quotas, subsidies etc) and went for an undervalued currency that acted as an effective export subsidy and import tax combined. Result? Global instability. By his reckoning, eliminating the undervaluation of the Renmimbi would knock 2% a year off China’s GDP – no wonder its leaders are resisting pressures to devalue. Scrapping WTO restrictions and allowing China to return to a wider range of industrial policies would allow it to achieve its growth without destabilizing the global economy.

Rodrik is only mortal, and an economist at that, so I felt mildly frustrated that even though he dwells on the central role of the state, he didn’t get into how effective states emerge, or are blocked, and what can be done about that. Without an effective state to heed his advice, you’re rather in ‘assume a can opener’ territory. He also proposes a pretty crude division of the world into democracies and non-democracies, with different rules for the two, which I’m not sure would withstand much scrutiny.

But these are minor quibbles – the book is excellent. Last word to Rodrik:

“We can and should tell a different story about globalization. Instead of viewing it as a system that requires a single set of institutions or one principal economic superpower, we should accept it as a collection of diverse nations whose interactions are regulated by a thin layer of simple, transparent and commonsense traffic rules. This vision will not construct a path toward a ‘flat’ world – a borderless world economy. Nothing will. What it wil do is enable a healthy, sustainable world economy that leaves room for democracies to determine their own futures.”

And here he is launching the book at the Peterson Institute a couple of months ago. Powerpoint for the presentation is here

If you still want more, Rodrik posted a number of other reviews on his blog. Or you could just read his book.

How can you do influencing work in one party states?

Fascinating conversation during a recent visit to East Africa about how we work in Rwanda and Ethiopia, both arguably effective but authoritarian states, with little time for ‘people on the streets’- style campaigning. Does that mean it is impossible to influence the state’s policies and practices? Definitely not, but you need to do things differently, in terms of how you think, your model of change etc. The discussion echoes similar ones with our staff in Russia and Vietnam. So here are some off-top-of-head thoughts about NGOs working in (for want of a better word) one-party systems.

1. One party states can be more open to robust evidence than multi-party ones. Disturbing, I know, but these governments often appear more interested in hard evidence than their more democratic counterparts. Petitions and emails won’t do it – you need data, though individual impact stories can work quite well too. Let’s not get too starry-eyed though, there will be areas that are off limits, and you need to know what they are.

2. Research will have more influence if it is done by an organization the government trusts – such as the parastatal Academies of Social Science in Vietnam and China and major Moscow-based universities. In any system, the messenger matters as well as the message, but these governments seem to specifically use such parastatals as channels to gather new knowledge.  Such research institutions are also often hungry for connections with external agencies so you’re pushing at an open door.

3. Your political economy analysis had better be good: understanding how decisions are taken in Addis or Moscow is absolutely critical. Personalities, relationships (both personal and professional), the histories, cultures and incentive systems of different leaders or ministries. Until you have a confident grasp of these, your influencing is highly likely to go wrong (always with the risk of backlash).

4. The importance of symbolism, pride and sovereignty. Traditional NGO name-and-shame tactics are as likely to lead to a counter-productive backlash as a breakthrough.  Instead, offer things that work. Find the Achilles’ heel that the government recognizes as a weak spot and focus on that. They can be surprisingly grateful for suggestions.

5. Alliances with non-state actors: in terms of citizens, most authoritarian regimes are keenly aware of issues of legitimacy, if not of direct accountability, and acts of citizenship are far from absent even when elections are either not held, or perfunctory. Building alliances with other actors (academics, churches, private sector) is just as important as in more open state systems.

6. Online campaigning and coalition work often offers more space for activism than marching on the streets. Cultivate an avatar with a particular niche, or enjoy safety in numbers working as part of a group that is harder to divide and conquer online. The use of anonymous websites, facebook groups and twitter accounts for example can be effective in creating public concern beyond the immediate community being affected. These tools can help raise awareness and motivation for people to act on the ground.

7. Persistence matters. You need a slow, steady, drip drip drip of information, invitations to roundtables, offers of secondments for mid-level officials who are the doers and internal influencers of their bosses, but not the deciders. 

8. Play to your advantages – use an international front person when talking with international organisations re the policies of the state in question. Go local when dealing with ministries – you will get further if you avoid antagonising national sensitivities.

Feel free to add your own thoughts

What Brits say v what they mean – handy de-coding device

A handy guide for our fellow Europeans, and others trying to fathom weaselly Brit-speak. Suggest you have this to hand at the next meeting [h/t Nicholas Pialek]

Africa is big; interactive Arab Spring; DIY glasses; gendercide and global imbalances; IMFboss.org; blaming China; mass lipsynching American Pie: links I liked

The true size of Africa (keep clicking to enlarge). That Mercator’s got a lot to answer for. More examples of ‘immapancy’ here. [h/t Martin Walsh and Richard King].  

The Arab Spring at your fingertips – brilliant interactive timeline from the Guardian

DIY specs for the developing world, but why do they have to be under patent?

Claire Melamed explains why the selective abortion that is skewing the ratio of boys v girls in India and China also undermines global financial stability

Gripped by the race to be next head of the IMF? Then visit imfboss.org

How will the UK achieve a 50% carbon cut by 2027? By getting someone else (mainly China) to make our stuff. And then blaming them. George Monbiot lays it all out.

The development ideas hype cycle, applied to RCTs

Another one of those extraordinary crowdsourced music videos (see Black Eyed Peas version here). This time the entire population of Grand Rapids (wherever that is) lipsynchs American Pie. Epic, moving and entirely pointless – wonderful, especially if you’re my age and know all the words. Still don’t understand what they mean though. [h/t the Grandiloquent Bloviator]

Why is the new Oxfam campaign called ‘GROW’? The importance of framing

What kind of a campaign calls itself ‘GROW’? Answer, a different kind. My first reaction on hearing the aural equivalent of puffs of smoke was a small jolt of surprise, and then a pleasurable ‘hey, that could be interesting.’ I’ve seen the same baffled curiosity on a few other people’s faces when they hear the name, so I’ve talked to some of the people responsible to find out how Oxfam arrived at ‘Grow’ rather than some variant on ‘Hungry for Change’ (Oxfam’s 1980s food campaign) or even (shudder) ‘Food Justice in a Resource Constrained World’ – the new campaign’s working title for the last year or so.

The campaign’s identity, summed up in its strapline ‘Grow: Food, Life, Planet’ marks a significant shift in thinking about how public campaigning brings about change. It moves from a focus on specific policy changes (e.g. on trade rules or debt relief), to something much deeper – changing the way people think. And not just (or even mainly) activists – the target audience is a much wider global audience of ‘world aware’ people. The intention is to tackle the underlying issue of ‘framing’ – the way people see the world, rooted in individual and collective psychology, culture and experience, not just the comparatively restricted and arcane world of ‘evidence-based policy making’ that we normally inhabit.

To be honest, as more of a policy wonk than a campaigner, I struggle to grasp the full implications of framing, but it’s prompted a lot of interest among NGOs (see this paper co-authored by Martin Kirk, head of Oxfam’s UK campaigns). What I think it is saying is that any campaign has to operate on multiple levels – sure you target bad guys, policy changes, etc, but over the long haul, the messaging has to reinforce the kind of world views that are needed for lasting progress, and not undermine them. And for that, tone matters at least as much as content. Positive or negative? Threat or opportunity? Caring or angry? The classic example is fund raising – ‘poverty porn’ images of misery and starvation may raise more cash in the short term, but they create a frame of passivity and hopelessness that is both misleading and insulting, and which undermines long term progress.

Where it gets interesting is that when we (or rather some professional pollsters) went out and tested these theories in eight countries, five of them developing (India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico, along with the USA, Netherlands and Spain) we got a common response on the kind of frame that would attract people to a campaign – a positive vision for the future, with a focus on sharing. None of the original ideas for the campaign identity worked on this level, so we ditched them. ‘Grow‘ emerged from the subsequent soul-searching/brainstorming and then stuck in people’s heads.

What about all the normal language of activism – justice, rights, end this, stop that? Turns out it is just that – the language of activists, but non-activist-but-potentially-sympathetic people (North and South) often find it harsh and offputting – all throwing rocks and donning hair shirts, and not much joy.

Yet to achieve ‘food justice in a resource constrained world’ a degree of conflict is inevitable. Greed, short-sightedness and the increasing likelihood of distributive conflicts over land, water or license to pollute make that certain. Food riots in 30 countries in 2008 show the limits to the Big Hug approach. We will need to make sure that the emphasis on positive, sharing, win-win type campaigning does not downplay the struggles that are unavoidable if we are to end poverty while staying within planetary limits.

That means finding a language that works both for that wider public and for activists. It won’t be easy – I felt that tension in the media work around the launch, where being repeatedly asked ‘who are the bad guys?’, ‘what’s the problem?’ etc reinforces a crisis narrative that rapidly squeezes out any positive vision.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the campaign title is the way it deliberately takes on the issue of economic growth. We want to reclaim the ‘grow’ in ‘growth’ for what really matters – growing good food to eat, watching your children grow up healthy and fulfilled, ensuring that planet and people flourish in the long term. That means recapturing the true meaning of ‘grow’ from the dead hand of GDP, which still holds sway over decision makers, despite doubts creeping in on the margins, expressed in the ‘beyond GDP’ and well-being work of Stiglitz, the OECD and others. On the other side of the debate are the hairshirtists and degrowthers, whose negative framing – limits to growth, degrowth etc – has signally failed to get much purchase. In the run-up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit next June, we’ll be trying to find a way through this minefield. Daunting but very exciting.

My only remaining fear? An avalanche of bad puns on the go/grow theme – grow figure; grow well etc etc. This could get ugly.

So over to you, the target audience (sort of – you’re probably all a bit too wonky). Vote on the poll to the right and let’s see if ‘Grow’ passes the test (no idea what we do if it fails……..).

And here’s a nice little animation that illustrates what we’re on about.