Europe’s technodreamers; seeing like a statistician; Bill Easterly luvs aid; tax havens explained; slapping the CAP; water grabs; the last lonely dictator: links I liked

Paul Krugman explains why Europe’s ‘technocrats’  (like technocrats everywhere) are actually dangerous dreamers, not seekers after truth.

This worries me – I am increasingly thinking like a statistician (see right)……. [h/t Grandiloquent Bloviator]

Bill Easterly defends aid; man bites dog etc.

Excellent new website on tax havens – definitions, killer facts, policy solutions and a funky Prezi presentation (must get round to learning how to use it)  [h/t Caroline Pearce]

George Monbiot goes through the numbers on the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy to show that it’s still shoveling public money to the plutocrats and aristocrats of Europe (and weirdly, a pile of water companies).

‘African governments are signing away water rights for decades with insufficient regard for how this will affect millions of local users, including fishing, farming and pastoralist communities. The water rights often feature in the growing number of large land deals that governments are signing with investors as many of these areas require irrigation to be viable.’ IIED demonstrates that land grabs are often about water, as much as soil. The Guardian discusses.

As ever, thanks to Chris Blattman for bringing a little randomness into our lives, in this case in the shape of a delightful Nando’s ad from South Africa

Can Durban be the bridge to a better future on climate change?

Tim Gore, Oxfam’s Climate Change policy adviser sets the scene for this week’s climate summit in South Africa

It’s now two years since the frantic campaigning and manic diplomacy that led to the Copenhagen climate change conference, and the blame games that followed its inadequate result. As the next UN climate talks get under way this week in Durban, South Africa, we need a new script to explain what has been achieved since 2009 and what must come next in the fight to tackle climate change.

The good news is that the UN talks on climate change are not a re-run of the zombie negotiating process in the World Trade Organisation. But the ten year anniversary of the launch of the ‘Doha development round’ should give us pause for thought about where we want the multilateral climate change regime to be ten years after Copenhagen, and whether we are on track to get there.

The agreements struck last year in Cancún did not deliver everything needed to address the perils of our warming world, but they are leading to action.

New targets for emissions cuts have been set by an unprecedented range of countries, and for the first time developing countries have pledged greater reductions than developed countries against projected emissions levels. New institutions – most notably the Green Climate Fund – are being created to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change.

In no small part as a result, China is leading the race to invest in renewable energy, Brazil and Indonesia are serious about tackling deforestation, Australia has finally put a price on carbon, and the EU is planning for near complete decarbonisation of its economy by 2050. Poor countries in all continents are starting to build the need for adaptation to climate change into their development plans, and facing up to the grave implications of doing so.

The problem is that none of this is going far enough nor happening fast enough. Global emissions are growing faster than ever, despite the economic crisis. The International Energy Agency recently warned we have five years left to change course before the lock-in effect of carbon-intensive infrastructure pushes out of reach the 2°C limit to global warming set by governments in Cancún. The gap between projected emissions in 2020 and the levels scientists say are needed to have a chance at staying within the 2°C target – let alone the 1.5°C needed – is actually widening.

So what can be delivered by governments in Durban to make a difference? An agreement is needed which builds on the past, plans for the future and delivers here and now in the present.

First, governments must ensure that the Kyoto Protocol continues as the bed-rock of the multilateral climate change regime. As the product of ten years of negotiation, it is an achievement of international diplomacy which cannot be dismissed. Critically, it establishes legal commitments according to common rules for emissions reductions, which provide mutual assurances for its parties that others are taking action, binding countries beyond the term of any one government, and giving the long-term certainty that business says is needed to invest in a low carbon future.

It is vital that the agreement in Durban builds on this achievement, and does not roll back the existing legal architecture for tackling climate change. It is largely in the EU’s hands to ensure it does not.

Second, governments must plan for the future by signalling that all countries will take on legally binding commitments. The EU is demanding a roadmap to such an agreement as part of the Durban package, for which the timeline is all important. Many are suggesting 2015 as the deadline, as the culmination of a review period built into the Cancún agreements, and following the publication of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report.

We should be clear that such an agreement is needed as soon as possible. But the critical question is not which year such an agreement would be signed, but whether it contains new targets for emissions cuts that go beyond the most ambitious of the current pledges, and whether those new targets enter into force before 2020. A new agreement which applies new targets only after 2020 will not be sufficient to close the emissions gap we face. They would take effect too late for 2°C.

Finally, governments in Durban must deliver on the urgent needs of poor people struggling against climate change here and now. Critically, they must take decisions which ensure the Green Climate Fund will be fully operational by 2013, and they must start to mobilise the long-term finance rich countries have promised to fill it.

The $100 billion per year developed countries committed to mobilise by 2020 need not all come from stretched government budgets. A deal is possible in Durban to generate billions from applying a fair carbon charge to international shipping and aviation, if negotiators can seize it. Governments can also find new revenues for climate and development finance by implementing financial transaction taxes at home, as seems increasingly likely in Europe.

It is tempting to say that every UN climate change conference presents a turning point for the world. But Durban must re-establish a narrative of where we have come from in the fight against climate change, deliver on present needs and make clear where we are going. If governments deliver, ten years after Copenhagen we might yet have a multilateral climate change regime which is fit for purpose.

In other pre-Durban reading:  The Guardian kicks off its Durban coverage with a podcast and a Q&A, while Matthew Lockwood gloomily surveys the incentives of the players gathering at the Durban climate summit and reckons not much will get agreed.

Power and change – how do they fit in development work?

This is a summary of a briefing paper I bashed out for last week’s discussion on ‘how change happens’ with Oxfam’s big cheeses (with thanks to Jo Rowlands and Thalia Kidder for their help). It’s work in progress, so all comments and suggestions very welcome.

In the last few years, ‘how change happens’ (HCH)  has gone viral as a development fuzzword. In meetings and documents, people earnestly enquire ‘what’s your theory of change?’ and you’re in trouble if you don’t have an answer. So, apart from being able to answer your tormentors, why should we be thinking about HCH?

• Making explicit our assumptions and default preferences about HCH, and comparing them with other possible models of change helps us to challenge, discuss and improve our analysis of the shifting spaces and possibilities for programming and advocacy.
• Recognizing our preferred theory of change and understanding those of others (often very different from our own) is essential in building understanding and trust between staff and with allies and partners.
• Funders increasingly want evidence that any proposal has a thought-through change strategy, along with ways to test and improve it

First, some caveats:

• There is no one ‘Theory of Change’. Nor is it a one-off ‘do the HCH, write the document and tick the box’ exercise. It is a permanent way of thinking, seeking to introduce new ideas, more rigorous analysis and faster feedback loops in recognizing and expanding the range of tools we use to bring about change.
• Often, the problem confronting poor people (and Oxfam) is ‘How Change Doesn’t Happen’. HCH is equally relevant to analysing stasis as progress.
• Not all change is good. HCH and power analysis can be just as helpful in ‘trying to stop bad stuff’, as in promoting positive change.

Power Analysis
Power is subtle and pervasive force field connecting individuals, communities and nations, in a constant process of negotiation, contestation and change. It takes different forms: visible, invisible (norms and values) and hidden (behind the scenes). It operates in different spaces – decisions made between different fractions of the elite, or where poor people are invited to participate by those in power, or where in contrast, they demand and create their own space (more here).

Power lies at the heart of change or its denial. Oxfam’s work is based on the understanding that unequal power relations are one of the main underlying drivers of injustice, poverty and suffering. One of Oxfam’s aims is to transform power relations, so that poor men and women have greater influence over the policies, structures and social norms that affect their lives.

However, unequal power relations manifest themselves in many different ways: from unfair trade regulations that disproportionately benefit rich countries, to the social norms that cause young girls to suffer malnutrition because they are only allowed to eat after their brothers have had their fill. One way to disentangle this complex web is through power analysis.

A power analysis identifies and explores the multiple power dimensions and actors that affect a given situation, so as to better understand the different factors that interact to alleviate (or reinforce) poverty.

Some key questions to ask

1. WHO? Actors, Organisations, Institutions
Who are the main actors involved (poor communities, decision makers, private sector companies)? Beyond these leading players, what other individuals or institutions (media, religious institutions, intellectuals, traditional leaders, celebrities) are relevant and influential, either as potential allies of change, or as blockers, or as ‘shifters’ – potentially important players who can be convinced to support the change.

2. WHERE? Levels, Spaces
In what kinds of “spaces” are those seeking (and blocking) change operating? Is it formal/closed, invited, created/claimed from below? Do the relevant changes and decisions take place at household, community, local government, national government, regional or global levels?

3. WHAT? Sectors, Issues, Power
Which aspects of poverty and marginalisation are being addressed? What change is Oxfam and its partners trying to affect? Which kinds of power relations are relevant? (e.g. visible, hidden, invisible/internalised). What are the gender dimensions of these power relations?

4. HOW? Strategies, Methods, Models
Power analysis helps us arrive at some hypotheses about how the desired change is likely to occur, and what initial change strategies Oxfam could adopt to help. There is a potentially endless range of models of change, and strategies to apply. Some of the key parameters that need to be discussed include:

Alliances: What combination of likely and unlikely allies will maximise the chances of success? A traditional partnership with a local CSO or NGO? Building broad NGO coalitions? Forging relationships with sympathetic individuals or ministries within government? A joint approach with private sector companies?
Approach: What is most likely to influence the target individuals and institutions whose support is necessary to bring about change:  is the barrier to change created by laws and policies, or social norms, attitudes and beliefs? Is the issue one of providing rigorous research evidence for the benefits of the change we seek? Would a successful example (e.g. a pilot project or evidence from a neighbouring country) persuade? Or is this more likely to be about contestation than cooperation – political mobilisation, numbers of people in the streets etc?
Events: Is change most likely to occur around a specific event, whether foreseeable (e.g. an election campaign) or unforeseeable (eg the death of a leader, a natural disaster, economic crisis or conflict)? How do we prepare for and respond rapidly to the opportunities to promote change created by such ‘shocks’?
Complexity: Is the change we seek relatively simple (government abolishes user fees), or complex and messy (How to help people feel less disempowered and excluded from decision-making)? The former lend themselves to traditional approaches such as demonstration pilots and public campaigning. The latter are less predictable and will require more improvisation and experimentation, e.g. supporting a range of experiments to identify successful models, competitions and prizes for good ideas etc (see this example from Tanzania).

Understanding where we are coming from: the importance of frames
Discussions are almost never entirely neutral, objective and rational. Instead, the people in the room bring to the discussion their underlying and enduring ways of seeing the world and its motors of change. Part psychology, part intellectual formation, the deep frames underlying our thinking are often unacknowledged (and sometimes explain why we feel like we are ‘talking past each other’). Recognizing and learning to accommodate them is useful; trying to ‘convert’ those with different paradigms to our own probably isn’t. Some common frames:

• Conflict v cooperation: Does change come about through struggle or through discussion and mutually-agreed reforms?
• Optimist v pessimist: Do we see progress everywhere, and seek to accelerate its path, or is development really a losing struggle against power and injustice, where defeat is highly likely?
• Bottom up v top down: Is lasting and legitimate change primarily driven by the accumulation of power at grassroots/individual levels, through organization and challenging negative norms and beliefs? Or can it be achieved more simply by reforms at the levels of laws, policies, institutions, companies and elites, or simply by identifying and supporting ‘enlightened leaders’
• Market-based development: improving poor people’s incomes and assets, for example through enhanced power in markets.
• Modernization v tradition: is the aim of development to include poor people in the benefits of modernity (money economy, technology, mobility) or to defend other cultures and traditions and build an alternative?

Conclusion
Running an HCH analysis is not a one-off exercise, a magic crystal ball that enables you to plan unerringly for the next 10 years. Instead it is a feedback loop for constantly checking and improving our models of change (see diagram). Running a programme or campaign in an uncertain world is more like sailing a boat along a coast, with bad visibility and poor navigation tools (Thanks to John Ambler for this analogy). Storms blow up, and require adjustment. The boat springs a leak and needs repair. Crew members leave and new ones arrive. At regular intervals you need to stop, take stock, and adjust course. HCH analysis is the compass that provides those course checks and corrections.

Soccer, mobile workshops and struggle: how change happens in Bolivia

I’ ve been locked away all week with Oxfam’s big cheeses, who meet twice a year for a week’s deep thought, collective therapy and an avalanche of management-speak. The theme this time was ‘how change happens’ (HCH): everyone arrived with a programme story + analysis of the change process. They were fascinating, and I’ll probably run them as part of a series on the blog once I’ve finished writing them up, but in the meantime, here’s one I made earlier. I used it as a case study in From Poverty to Power, but it bears repeating, so I recycled it this week. I’ll intersperse the narrative with some of the points it raises on how change happens.

On 3 July 2007, after twelve years of unremitting and often frustrating struggle, the Chiquitano people of Bolivia – numbering some 120,000 people – won legal title to the 1m-hectare indigenous territory of Monteverde in the eastern department of Santa Cruz. Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president, and several ministers attended the ceremony. So did three elected mayors, ten local councillors (six women, four men), a senator, a congressman, and two members of the Constituent Assembly – all of them Chiquitanos.

Such an event would have been unthinkable even a generation ago. Until the 1980s, the Chiquitanos lived in near-feudal conditions, required to work unpaid for local authorities, landowners, and the Church, and prevented from owning land.

The Chiquitanos are best known outside Bolivia as an indigenous group that survived some of the worst impacts of colonisation on Jesuit reducciones (missions), where they became adept baroque musicians and built extraordinary churches that still attract tourists to the region (see pic). Their story was told in the 1986 film The Mission.

But the Jesuits were driven out, and the Chiquitanos enslaved. Despite the radical revolution that swept the highlands in 1952, in the isolated East, indigenous families continued to be bought and sold along with the estates where they worked.

Change began to stir through the unlikely vehicle of sport: the Chiquitanos were allowed off the farm to play soccer against other farm labourers (presumably because their ‘owners’ wanted to keep them fit). On the margins of the games, they started to compare notes on their situations, and a common sense of grievance began to emerge.

In the 1980s, indigenous identity slowly began to replace the class-based peasant identity promoted by the nationalism of the 1952 revolution. For the first time, the Chiquitanos began to identify themselves as indigenous people, with their own particular demands, and rapidly built their own Chiquitano Indigenous Organization (OICH), representing more than 450 communities. The continent-wide upsurge in indigenous identity around the 1992 quincentenary of Columbus’ landing in the Americas was a contributory factor.

[Lesson: shifting notions of identity and culture can be a crucial driver of change]

This process was unexpectedly boosted by the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s, which boosted migration and increased contacts between the Chiquitanos and other indigenous groups, and saw unemployed and highly politicised mineworkers move to the lowlands, where in many cases they started to organize locally.

[Lesson: unintended consequences are often important]

Following the lead of other social movements, lowland peoples organised a march to the capital La Paz in 1990, which, as one participant put it, ‘demonstrated that the indigenous peoples of the East exist’. Literally and politically, indigenous people were on the move.

[Lesson: acquiring ‘power within’ – a sense of rights – is often the first step towards ‘power with’- collective action]

The 1990s saw some unorthodox measures within the hard-line Washington Consensus policies, including a new law that greatly facilitated participation in local government, and an acceleration of agrarian reform, all of which helped boost indigenous movements.

[Lesson: unintended consequences again]

In January 1995, the Chiquitanos presented their first legal demand for title to Monteverde under a new concept, ‘Original Community Territory’. A year-and-a-half later, a second indigenous march won parliamentary recognition for the concept. Years of tedious legal procedures followed. However, by the time of the third march of indigenous peoples from the East in 2000, ferment was growing across the country. Privatisation of water services in the city of Cochabamba led to a fully-fledged uprising, which chased the water company from the city and triggered a wave of protest nationwide.

At another march in 2003, the Chiquitanos put forth national demands and established national alliances. ‘We met with one of the highlands leaders,’ recalls Chiquitano leader, now Senator, Carlos Cuasase, ‘and we said, “Look brother, you have the same problems that we do, the same needs.” We agreed not only on [the law to nationalise] hydrocarbons but also to defend the rights of indigenous people of both highlands and lowlands.’

[Lesson: coalitions and alliances are often essential to get national change]

After protests toppled President Sánchez de Lozada in October 2003, identity documents became easier to obtain and candidates were allowed to run independently of traditional political parties, which led to major gains for indigenous peoples in the 2005 municipal elections. In December of that year, Bolivia elected Evo Morales as its president. People who had never before dreamed of serving in high-level posts became ministers. The election marked a sea-change in the fortunes of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples, including the Chiquitanos.

[Lesson: even an apparently long-term change process of incremental progress will be punctuated, and often accelerated by, shocks and discontinuities, such as a radical change of government, financial crisis, natural disaster etc]

The discovery of large reserves of natural gas contributed to a general perception that the country was on the threshold of a historic opportunity.

[Lesson: economic context matters. Sometimes change is easier in a boom – easier to redistribute wealth from a growing pie]

Political strategy was also essential. Aware of Bolivia’s history of military coups followed by violent repression, Chiquitano leaders sought to emphasise the country’s equally strong tradition of negotiation. Their main intent was to pressure the national government to fulfil its role as the duty-bearer of rights, and they insisted on legal procedures despite the tricks of adversaries and delays of judges. The challenges now are to implement the indigenous rights framed in the new constitution, to manage indigenous territory sustainably, and to prepare a new generation of men and women leaders.

Oxfam played a bit part in all this, working with and supporting indigenous organizations, including the Chiquitanos. This included support for what were termed ‘mobile workshops’ (presumably to stay within funding guidelines), which on subsequent inspection by baffled evaluators turned out to be the long distance marches of the Chiquitanos to La Paz, later seen as turning points in the rise of the movement.

[Lesson: give thanks for maverick staff prepared to bend (sorry, I mean ‘interpret’) the rules]

After the Chiquitanos won their land rights, and in view of the increased flow of resources from other sources, Oxfam closed the Chiquitano programme.

[Lesson: no wonder NGOs moan all the time. Whenever a country or community does well, we leave.]

One final vignette: it’s not often you are sitting in a bar with an indigenous activist who leans over and animatedly declares ‘the indigenous part of me woke up when I read ILO Convention 169’ [on indigenous and tribal peoples].

[Lesson: change springs from some pretty unlikely sources]

Particular thanks to Eduardo Caceres for his paper on the Chiquitanos and other help with this study.

The future of aid – what’s at stake in Busan

The next couple of weeks see big international conferences on aid effectiveness (Busan) and climate change (Durban), providing a chance to take the temperature of the multilateral system. Here Gideon Rabinowitz of the UK Aid Network assesses the prospects for Busan.

From 29 Nov-1 Dec over 2,000 aid policy-makers and practitioners – including over 100 Ministers, amongst them Hillary Clinton – from across the world will gather in Busan, South Korea for the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4).

HLF4 will review the success and challenges of recent efforts to make the $120-$150 billion of aid delivered globally every year more effective and identify future priorities for taking these efforts forward. Its significance lies in a range of factors, including the new prominence of developing country donors such as China; the challenge of stemming wavering public support for aid across many developed countries; and questions about the future status of landmark agreements such as the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action.

If the significance of HLF4 hasn’t caught your attention this may be down to our failure to move beyond the notoriously dry jargon of the aid world and the fact that aid’s general significance seems to be on the wane.

However, as we move into the final two weeks before Busan attention is growing (see these European Voice and Guardian pieces) and tense negotiations in a number of areas are making increasingly clear how vital it will be for key donors to increase their lukewarm political ambitions for Busan.

First, a point on the significance of aid to development. Whilst it is clear from analysis, such as that in Actionaid’s recently published Real Aid 3 Report, that dependence on aid is falling as countries raise more of their own revenues, it is important to recognise that in the short to medium term it will still be hugely important to a number of very poor countries. Real Aid 3 itself highlights that in 30 countries aid still accounts for at least 30% of public spending, with sectors such as health and education commonly even more aid-dependent. Aid has been responsible for some very significant development impacts – it does still matter and there is much to be gained from making it better.

So, to the issues at stake at HLF4:

AID TRANSPARENCY – The first area is aid transparency, widely recognised as the foundation for aid effectiveness, but currently far below the levels required. The most transformative proposal on the table is for Ministers to support the implementation of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Present aid information systems do not adequately cover all aid flows, involve significant time lags and don’t meet the information needs of developing countries. IATI is an aid information standard which aims to address these issues. Whilst it has broad support from aid recipient countries and donors delivering 30% of global aid are already (including the UK) / will soon be (many NGOs, including Oxfam) reporting against this standard, a number of donors are blocking broad endorsement at Busan. Japan and some smaller European donors have formally expressed their opposition, France is making increasingly negative noises and the USA’s intentions are still unclear, although efforts to move its position forward are apparently taking place. A failure to endorse IATI at Busan will send deeply negative signals about the willingness of donors to be more transparent and accountable to their taxpayers.

TIED AID – requirements by donors that aid be spent on goods and services provided by companies based in their own countries – is among the most controversial issues being discussed in the HLF4 negotiations. At least 20% of bilateral aid (c$15-$20 billion) is tied, most of it from the US, Germany, Italy and Japan. Tying reduces the purchasing power of aid by 15%-40%, fails to invest directly in local economies, creates obstacles to donors pooling funds with governments and heightens he risk of unsuitable goods and services being delivered. In a valiant attempt to move the slow pace of untying forward, the OECD has proposed that at HLF4 donors commit to untie all their aid by 2015, which aid recipient countries have supported whilst calling for the deadline to be 2013.

In addition, the NGO coalition Betteraid – who uniquely have a seat at the table in the negotiations – have been prominent in calling for commitments to ensure more aid is spent in recipient countries, as untying often simply means other developed countries win aid contracts. The response of donors to these proposals has been mostly negative, with Japan, US, Germany and Italy, amongst others, opposing full untying on political grounds and showing limited interest in concrete proposals for promoting local procurement. Donors, including those who have already untied their aid, seem content with general commitments to speed up untying that are unlikely to achieve much.

MONITORING IMPLEMENTATION OF AN HLF4 AGREEMENT – The significance of the Paris Declaration lay not just in its wide-ranging programme for aid reform but also its detailed implementation monitoring framework, which included monitoring indicators and related targets on which donors and recipient countries will be assessed. Few other international agreements have attracted such intense monitoring of the implementation of individual signatories. Although not without its weaknesses this monitoring framework is recognised to have played an important role in strengthening country level monitoring and accountability efforts and putting a political spotlight on the commitments made in Paris (and Accra). Whilst, donors have been relatively supportive of proposals for an HLF4 monitoring framework to be agreed, EU member states and other donors are calling for a scaling back of monitoring ambitions and for no new global indicators to be agreed. That could block accountability for any new commitments agreed at Busan and smacks of donors not wanting to be regularly judged on their performance.

These tensions and donor intransigence in negotiations on aid effectiveness mirror quite closely the dynamic ahead of at the last HLF in Accra in 2008, when a number of prominent donors were blocking proposals made by developing countries. Yet a progressive agreement eventually emerged in large part down to the eagerness of a number of EU Development Ministers (essentially those from the UK, Netherlands and Nordics in addition to EC officials) to robustly challenge their recalcitrant counterparts.

What is perhaps most worrying as HLF4 looms is that a more ambitious and progressive donor voice has been slow to emerge and there seems limited appetite from many EU donors to fight for ambitious commitments beyond those that provide an easy story to sell to their taxpayers, e.g. transparency and results. The joint EU position for HLF4 announced on 14th November proposed few specific time-bound commitments and completely ignored tied aid and conditionality.

Of course a strong recipient country voice will be vital to getting a good agreement in Busan, but weak donor political leadership is likely to threaten the chance of HLF4 delivering a step-change in aid effectiveness.

The next week will make clear what decisions donors have made on their ambitions on aid effectiveness and whether they have helped make HLF4 a success.

Water fights; creative Diasporas; untranslatable relationships; magic mobiles; Bangladesh land grabbers; online data on doing evil/good; cash transfers and pregnancy; sympathy for the vulture: links I liked

Two useful briefings in this week’s Economist. On the gloomy side, a survey of rising water conflicts in South Asia. More positive, a look at how international diaspora networks of migrants are some of the most creative, dynamic players in the global economy, which these days are more likely to link host and home country economies than to leave one for the other.

“Cafuné (Brazilian Portuguese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone’s hair; Ilunga (Bantu): A person who is willing to forgive abuse the first time; tolerate it the second time, but never a third time.” Top ten untranslatable-into-English words about relationships. Worth it, despite the plodding commentary.

Mobile magic bullets again: ‘While M-Pesa users do not reduce consumption when faced with a negative shock, non-M-Pesa users reduce consumption by 7 to 10 percent’ Mobile phones as portable ultrasound scanners and social protection against shocks – does anyone use them just to talk to each other any more?

OK, this is tricky – Bangladesh is getting into the land grabs business to feed its people

Interactive map of the bribes paid in every Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case, totalling $4bn, by country and/or sector (arms, energy etc). In contrast, no map (yet), just a huge spreadsheet, but Oxfam is dipping its toe in the waters of data transparency, publishing data on all its projects.

‘Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) outperformed Unconditional Cash Transfers (UCTs) in terms of improvements in schooling outcomes, BUT rates of marriage and pregnancy were substantially lower in the UCT than the CCT arm.’  Berk Ozler gets into some fascinating detail on what we know about cash transfers.

Never thought I could feel sympathy for a vulture fund type, but Greg Palast really is an obnoxious interviewer, and what’s with the Raymond Chandler/private dick outfit? If you can’t see the video below, click here. Blanket coverage in Guardian of Vulture Fund activities in the DRC starts here.

Poles Apart: why climate change journalism varies so much between countries

My friend James Painter has a new report out, so my colleague John Magrath has kindly reviewed it to avoid any accusations of favouritism…..

Why is media coverage of climate change – and other scientific issues – so radically different in countries across the globe? And what are the social and political implications of such uneven and contrasting reporting?

To explore these questions James Painter and colleagues at Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism have mapped the differences in the amount of sceptical voices in newspapers in six countries – in two papers apiece in the USA, Brazil, China, France and India, and across all papers in the UK. They also looked at where sceptical voices appeared, in the news pages or in opinion pieces. In all they analysed over 3,000 pieces of journalism.

Some of the findings are pretty obvious. Sceptical voices get a lot more coverage in the US and UK (and in some papers, are the predominant voices), particularly around the so-called “Climategate scandal” in 2009. In contrast, in the other countries, although climate change coverage is generally less substantial, sceptical voices barely get a look-in.

What was more interesting  was the exploration of why this might be so, going beyond the politics of the newsroom to examine wider cultural frameworks and reference points within which different societies (perhaps unconsciously) function, and which influence how science and scientists are seen. 

The ability of sceptics to get their views across in the US media reflects not only the influence of organised and wealthy lobbies but underlying attitudes and an “historical trajectory of climate scepticism or denialism…linked to other scientific issues”.  Scepticism in (and of) science is a good – and essential – thing, but this has tipped over into denialism. Attitudes include distrust and questioning of government and authorities, rejection of mainstream thinking and perceived conformity in favour of individualism and alternative views.

At the report launch Graham Lawton of New Scientist magazine pointed out that evolution, for example, clashes with long-standing and deep cultural frames of reference that extol US exceptionalism and the virtues of Capitalism. Climate change challenges cherished values and aspired-to lifestyles, so it is felt as a very personal threat. But science-denial isn’t the sole prerogative of the Right. In the US and UK most vaccine denialism is a Left-wing phenomenon, because of deep-rooted distrust of Big Pharma.

In Brazil reporters pointed  to a journalistic culture of strong science and environment reporting that carries great weight within newspapers. In India too, scientists are reported “straight”. The prominence of Dr Pachauri as chair of the IPCC has weight. Environmental groups are influential and vocal about climate change risks. And it helps that in a wider sense, people in Brazil and India, whilst they might feel threatened by climate change, don’t feel that they are to blame for causing it. 

Several questions emerge from all this. Who – ultimately – has the healthier media? We can despair about UK and US papers giving undue credence to denialists, but are journalists in other countries too deferential? One Chinese journalist quoted in the report said she personally did not include sceptical views as she had had guidance “from the renowned Chinese scholar Luo Yong that we should not listen to sceptics”. On the other hand, journalists elsewhere regard much US and UK coverage with bemusement, perceiving our media as constantly over-reacting to events with a herd mentality that whips up irrational frenzies.

And what role does the blogosphere play in influencing both social attitudes and, directly or indirectly, the mainstream media? Journalists at the launch acknowledged its influence but seemed reluctant to downgrade the pre-eminence of their newspapers – perhaps understandably. Tom Clarke, the science correspondent for Channel 4, thought that the blogosphere “has made the world a more confusing place”. Thomas Friedman in the New York Times recently wondered if the Internet “has made participatory democracy and autocracy so participatory, and leaders so finely attuned to every nuance of public opinion, that they find it hard to make any big decision that requires sacrifice. They have too many voices in their heads other than their own”.

The biggest question though is, what happens next for climate change – and more generally for science – reporting? What needs to change to get better coverage? At the report launch Graham Lawton said that the public in the UK “are fed up with the stuff” (talk of climate change, that is).

The Left has been poor at (re)framing climate change in a way that appeals to many people but Lawton, for one, feels that this might change with economics and with new thinking. He cited the film Carbon Nation as “a brilliant piece of polemic” that avoids mention of climate change entirely, but frames the issues in terms of energy, and the potential jobs, business and investment opportunities and national security factors that go with energy.

So, could there be a “Sputnik Moment” for the USA as Saleemul Huq recently asked?  As the US sees China pulling ahead dramatically in renewable energy, will the US react as it did when Russia shocked the Western world by sending a satellite into space and the US realised that it had to catch up? US Energy Secretary Steven Chu seems to think such a moment is needed. Testifying to the Energy and Commerce Committee last Thursday, he said “When it comes to the clean energy race, America faces a simple choice: compete or accept defeat. I believe we can and must compete” (see chart).  

Perhaps in the near future the way to get action on climate change (in Anglo-Saxon societies at least) will be to focus on the other, linked issues that really register with people – jobs, energy, and avoid mention of the climate change ‘stuff’. If so, would that mean that the denialists had won? If so, how much would it matter?

Poles Apart: the international reporting of climate scepticism is available from the Reuters Institute. The Executive Summary can be downloaded free, but you have to cough up £20 if you want to read the whole book.

The Spider Trees of Sindh

An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders have climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters. Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs.

People in this part of Sindh have never seen this phenomenon before but they also report that there are now far fewer mosquitoes than they would expect, given the amount of stagnant, standing water that is around. It is thought that the mosquitoes are getting caught in the spiders web, thus, reducing the risk of malaria.

Otherwise the news is grim – the UN’s appeal for the floods is only a quarter funded and relief supplies are in danger of running out. Nine million people have been affected and the cash is essential to help them get onto the path of recovery. Part of the problem is lack of media coverage, because Pakistan already had floods last year – what a depressing world we live in.

[h/t John Magrath]

Why don’t more NGOs work on water? Guest post from Dan Yeo, WaterAid

Daniel Yeo, Senior Policy Analyst at WaterAid (twitter handle @yukinosaru), indulges in some outrageously blatant lobbying about why Oxfam should do more on water.

A few weeks ago, Duncan posted his reflections on Oxfam’s discussions on water. As pleased as I am about Oxfam’s interest, it begs the question, why haven’t more development NGOs dived into water already? 

We can all relate to water – and any traveller can tell you about bad water and poor sanitation, and water shortages cause problems even in developed countries.  Having the runs may make for a few embarrassing holiday anecdotes, but it’s no joke that diarrhoea is the biggest child killer in sub-Saharan Africa. Preventable diarrhoea associated with dirty water and poor sanitation kills more children than AIDS, malaria and TB combined. 

And it’s not just kids – water is fundamentally a gender issue. Women and girls bear the biggest burden of WASH poverty – walking long distances in rural areas, queuing in line for hours in urban slums. Poor water, sanitation and hygiene undermines maternal and child health and nutrition. In education, 443 million school days are lost to water related diseases. Girls are more likely to stay in schools with separate female toilets.

These failings in human development impose a cost on the economy, through lost lives, school days, work days and burden on health systems. The UN estimates that every $1 invested in water generates $8 in wider economic benefits.

Without water we have nothing.

And that’s just water for drinking and health – water is also an economic resource – vital for food (70% of globally available freshwater is used for agriculture) – and livelihoods. It is a critical ingredient for industry – almost every manufacturing process needs water. Finally, it’s intertwined with energy – and not just through hydropower. Thermal power stations need water for cooling and for the steam needed to turn turbines.

But water can also be a destroyer – witness the floods in Pakistan and drought in the Horn of Africa. The impacts of climate change will be felt through and on water – too much, too little and the wrong type (e.g. salty rather than fresh).

All of this is not to say that having safe water is the silver bullet – but countries will make increasingly limited progress on health, education and economic development without commensurate investment in water and sanitation.

So if it’s so important – why is water so often ignored? As with many things, it’s about sex and money.

First, sexiness. Shit doesn’t sell. Water and sanitation engineers are seen as techy and boring – most people have limited personal experience of them and they are undervalued in comparison to teachers or doctors. (Declaration of interest: I’m an engineer by training! Although I’d prefer to think of myself as an engineer in the classical sense – a solver of problems, but that’s for another post…)

Value. There is no money to be made in providing water – there are limited rent seeking opportunities. It’s not worth a lot of money and most people don’t pay enough for their water. Even in the UK only about a third of the population have a water meter.

But it’s also about visibility. We in the North don’t think about water in the way that millions elsewhere do. We turn the tap, it flows. We don’t even think of it as something we pay for. Our water supply is so assured that we don’t even notice, so it’s hard to get people to think of it as an issue. You don’t see people dying of thirst, instead the tragedy of WASH poverty kills invisibly, mainly through diseases like cholera, where you literally shit yourself to death.

Finally, it’s complex – water is linked to so many agendas that there’s often no focus and competition between water ’sectors’, rather than making a case as a whole.

The good news is that low cost, sustainable solutions exist, so it’s not a lack of technology – what’s missing is the recognition by politicians of the centrality of water and the capacity of governments to deliver sustainable basic services.

To tackle the first issue, we need to make water visible. Fortunately, the wind is in our favour. Water is “cool” at the moment. Business and the media have begun to pick up on water – but as an economic resource, and largely driven by attention to climate change. There is a risk that the human dimension is again forgotten here, but we have an opportunity to use the oxygen of this attention to drive home the centrality of water to human development.

Secondly, we need to work with governments to build a sustainable sector. The potential for change is huge if done right – the Liberian

government, working with Liberian community representatives and through the Sanitation and Water for All partnership (SWA) have developed a credible national plan to deliver exactly this through the able leadership of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The hope is that donors and NGOs will work to this common plan to make the most of their resources and drive a step change in eliminating WASH poverty.

What could Oxfam do? It has the opportunity to contribute to both of these goals – to raise voices about the injustice of a solvable problem that, together with poor sanitation, is the biggest killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa; and more importantly to deliver – working with a range of sector specialists, like WaterAid, to create a step change in progress.

Duncan’s reflection looks at Oxfam’s potential programming and work around water (in addition to their existing work) – but rather than ‘do WASH’, Oxfam should do what it does best – speak up for the voice of the poor in global scarcity. You’re already halfway there with the GROW campaign – food, energy and water are linked by the same dynamic, a focus on scarcity rather than solutions to secure access for the poor.

Oxfam could also work with others to drive change that takes the energy that exists around scarcity issues and uses it to drive real change for the poorest around the world. Oxfam’s breadth means they are well-placed to act as common ground and to help others cross boundaries: between professions (humanitarian/development); across sectors (water/health/education/livelihoods); within sectors (WASH/Water Resources).

And, lastly, Oxfam needs to push its advocacy weight behind the global End Water Poverty campaign and give the same priority to water as the poor do.

What all of this can do is to deliver what really matters – whole solutions that work on the ground to make people’s lives better.

So what are you waiting for? C’mon in, the water’s warm…

For further information, WaterAid has published the ‘Off-track, off-target’ report and launched the Water Works campaign.

So how many of the world’s people are hungry? Dunno. Work in progress…….

Richard King, my highly numerate colleague, grapples with the confusion surrounding the FAO’s hunger numbers.

Global hunger numbers must be among the most widely quoted and over-interpreted of all the indicators at development wonks’ and campaigners’ disposal. ‘One billion people (one in seven of the world’s population) go to bed hungry’ is a compelling headline and is used variously to argue for more effective social protection mechanisms, increased investment in smallholder agriculture, and effective measures to curb food price volatility. All are urgent causes, and all are worthy of a punchy ‘killer fact’ or two.

In fact, so powerful is the draw of a current big-scary-number that until recently the World Bank’s website displayed a ticking ‘hunger clock’, which extrapolated the (then) latest hunger estimate from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and portrayed a situation getting graver by the second. In April the same clock was displayed several metres above the heads of Washington pedestrians in the lead-up to the Bank’s Spring Meetings. But for all the power of a big number, and all the urgency of the underlying situation, is this metric anything more than smoke and mirrors?

Over at Global Dashboard, David Steven has succinctly summarised what we don’t know about how many people are hungry. He notes that the FAO’s estimates for the number of undernourished people in 2009 and 2010 have been withdrawn and no figures for 2011 have been estimated. As David puts it:

“In the midst of the first ever global food crisis… the lights have been turned off. 837m people were probably hungry four to six years ago. Maybe. That might have gone up above a billion, or perhaps it didn’t. Hunger is either resurgent or it isn’t.”

Whilst it is frustrating as an advocate to have no current global data with which to bash people over the head, this isn’t all bad news.

First, the FAO should be applauded for revoking their problematic 2009 and 2010 estimates.

In probable response to political pressure for data relating to the food price crisis of the time, these guesstimates departed from the usual estimation method and leaned heavily on a USDA trade model that was based on expectation of global economic collapse in 2009. Largely as a result of this economic conjecture, the number of ‘hungry people’ topped one billion for the first time. As it transpired, the sky didn’t fall in, economic projections improved, and the 2010 hunger projections consequently returned below the billion mark to 925 million people. To leave this model-based yo-yoing in the historical record would be deeply misleading, and I am pleased to see these figures scrubbed out.

Second, with the lights currently out and FAO statisticians back at the drawing board, the rest of us should take the chance to pause and consider how we have been using the FAO’s Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) indicator (the proper term for the 1 billion number). In truth, this has never been suited to tracking hunger in anything like real-time, and has been routinely over-interpreted.

How is such a global figure arrived at? By asking people if they’re hungry? By sampling people’s nutritional intake? No. As the otherwise excellent technical background paper for the recent Committee on World Food Security round table on monitoring food security rather abstrusely notes,

“The calculation is an exercise in model-based statistical inference: A probability distribution model is assumed for the annual average dietary energy intake of a representative individual in the population and its parameters are estimated on the basis of the best available data. Required data include: (a) the total availability of food in the population, (b) the demographic structure of the population (by sex and age-classes), (c) information on the distribution of food access within the population, and (d) a normative level of minimum dietary energy requirements to set a lower bound of adequate nutrition. Once the probability distribution is characterized and the threshold is set, the proportion of the population that is likely suffering from chronic food deprivation, PoU, is estimated as the probability mass that falls below the threshold.”

Right. In other words, no hungry people were harmed (or even consulted) in the making of this number. The calculation relates not to any real person, household, or other group experiencing any actual hunger but instead to a ‘representative’ individual within a population. Equally, because the reference period is a year, the calculation is not equipped to capture the impacts of acute food shocks due to factors such as price volatility, or climatic events, or even due to regular, seasonal, waxing and waning of hunger.

And because the calculation is based on the food available to a whole population, rather than actual access to food, it doesn’t account for intra-household inequalities, or food wasted or spoilt in the home, or even food produced for subsistence consumption. The calculation is also very sensitive to errors in food balance sheets (used to calculate the total availability of food), which measure food consumption from a food supply perspective. There are several weaknesses of a food balance sheets approach, not least that if changes to food storage are not accurately captured (which is difficult to do) this throws off the rest of the calculation. This is why hunger estimates (until 2008) were averaged across three years, to try to minimise any distortions from year-to-year inaccuracies in storage data. Couple these limitations with the time taken to collect other food distribution parameters from nationally representative household surveys, and it’s soon apparent that this FAO measure is poorly suited to the timely tracking of current food insecurity.

So where next? Following the CFS Round Table, the Committee endorsed a proposal to create a richer suite of core food security indicators and strongly recommended that the FAO improves its current measure of undernourishment. According to the FAO’s State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011 report:

FAO will make several adjustments, including in the estimation of how changes in food access due to changes in income and food prices affect undernourishment. Work is also underway to improve the construction of food balance sheets. A large number of household expenditure surveys are being processed to provide improved estimates of the distribution of food consumption within a country. FAO’s measures of undernourishment will also be complemented with a number of other indicators intended to better capture the multifaceted nature of food insecurity.

But all this will take time to overhaul, and will likely still result in indicators that are more suited to measuring recent chronic food insecurity rather than current acute hunger. For that, we may have to turn to more subjective indicators, such as those in the Gallup World Poll surveys recently analysed by IFPRI, in which people were asked: “Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy the food that you or your family needed?” (yes or no). This is an imperfect alternative, not least because ‘food’ and ‘need’ are more abstract than counting calories and are likely to be interpreted differently depending on respondents’ location. And, because the question is asked of the household unit as a whole, this still fails to capture gender-based inequalities in food insecurity. If nothing else, let’s hope that the FAO review finally gives us an indicator that helps us to track this particularly crucial dimension of hunger…