Who’s publishing what they give? Complexity, development and the euro crisis; companies v governments; China and Zambia; the Queen v earth summit; climate finance; denial tango: Links I liked

Which donors and NGOs are planning to publish their aid data and how far have they got? Handy graphic (and yes I’m only putting it up cos Oxfam does well – always a pleasant surprise…..)

What does the new atlas of economic complexity tell us about development? Potentially a huge amount – I think this is probably v important, but while I’m trying to digest it, have a look at Ben Ramalingam’s post. And while we’re on complexity, what does managing forest fires and other ecosystems tell us about how to solve the Euro crisis?

Investor-State Dispute Mechanisms sound dull, but could be offering large firms (including Philip Morris, Enron Creditors, Total, Mobil, Shell, Dow Chemical, Chevron, Siemens and Cargill) and lawyers a lucrative way to sue governments who have signed up to dozens of bilateral investment treaties without reading the small print.

Are Chinese-owned mines in Zambia better or worse than non Chinese-owned ones?

The case for a global ‘social protection floor’ and why that’s not the same thing as old-school safety nets

Climate change miscellany: ‘Rio Earth Summit postponed after clash with Queen’s diamond jubilee’. And no, this is not from The Onion, and April Fool’s Day is a long way off. Priorities, priorities.

Where have we got to on the rich countries’ promises in the Copenhagen summit of 2009 of an extra $100bn a year in climate finance? The Economist tries to make sense of the numbers.

‘Men with Day Jobs’ perform ‘Denial Tango’. Maybe the IPCC should change its comms strategy? [h/t John Magrath]

New directions in philanthropy – report from the Bellagio Summit

Summits are clearly losing altitude these days if people like me are getting invited. But when it’s the Rockefeller Foundation’s legendary lakeside conference centre at Bellagio, on Italy’s Lake Como, you’d be crazy to say no – it’s every bit as exquisite as everyone says (see pic).

The Summit in question is on ‘The Future of Philanthropy and Development in the Pursuit of Human Wellbeing’ (catchy, eh?), hosted by Rockefeller, the UK Institute for Development Studies and the Resource Alliance and bringing together philanthropic foundations, ‘impact investors’, NGOs and academics, with a decent geographical spread of people. Here are some impressions, thoughts and half-hearted attempts to spin the conclusions after day one, drawing on the conversation and the pile of background papers available on the Bellagio Initiative website.

First, some numbers. According to a paper by Michael Edwards, foundations provided between $7bn-$9.5bn to ‘international’ or ‘development’-related activities in 2009. Big money, but only 7% of total aid. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation  account for a third of the total – a whopping $2.5bn in 2009. The US is by far the biggest source (total of $6.7bn in 2009). European foundations only mustered a measly $0.5bn in 2007.

And how do philanthropists see development and their role? Some impressions from a rapid series of plenaries and panels:

What’s Hot:

1. The Arab Spring has had a massive impact in highlighting the importance of dignity, well-being, empowerment, citizenship, voice etc etc , along with youth as a crucial change agent (often ignored by the development industry).
2. Networks, systems, complexity etc

What’s Not

1. The State. Philanthropic types may grudgingly acknowledge the need for partnership with the state, but they basically see government officials as a bunch of corrupt parasites, definitely more problem than solution, intent on thwarting the efforts of heroic entrepreneurs to improve the lives of their countrymen and women.
2. Political and historical analysis: I don’t attend many discussions where I find myself wishing for fewer stories, and more analysis, but this was one of them – more NGO than the NGOs when it comes to substituting heart-warming anecdotes for academic rigour.

Perhaps the most interesting theme for me was the rise of the national. The role of domestic philanthropists in developing countries is growing both in volume and recognition, with a rich variety of traditions of giving from the zakat tradition of Islam (see excellent background paper on Islamic philanthropy) to southern Africa’s Ubuntu philosophy. Add to that the rise of middle classes in emerging economies with money to spare. Much of this giving is religiously-inspired, personal, private (it is often seen as very poor behaviour to blow your own philanthropic trumpet) and fragmented, which offers real grounds for improving quality and impact. Beyond raising money directly for philanthropy, there is a wider area of new money stemming from improved tax systems and natural resource revenues. As official international aid declines, financing for development is likely to become increasingly domestic and ’southern philanthropy’ is likely to play a significant role. 

So what future directions for philanthropy emerged from all the bla  bla bla? Two big ones

Innovation: Philanthropists spend their own money so in the words of philanthropist James Chen of the Hong Kong- based Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation, they can take risks and fail: ‘Governments find it hard to pilot and fail – there’s career risk for them -  but we can be an incubator at the pointy end of the stick, and then take our successes and persuade government to adopt them and scale them up.’ But the appetite for risk doesn’t always extend to issues of power and social change. Could that thirst for innovation be applied more often to empowerment and accountability as well as business models and mobile phones or, in the case of the totally charming James (pictured), adjustable glasses?

Advocacy: this is an altogether trickier one, but just thinking about the impact of Bill Gates at the recent G20 summit, or of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, there is no doubt that the philanthropic community could exert far more influence than it currently does if it made a more concerted entry into advocacy (it could do so and easily remain impartial, in terms of party politics, as Oxfam does). For example, it could more actively support active citizenship and accountability. I decided to pitch advocacy on something that seemed a bit uncomfortable (at least for some of the people in the room – philanthropists are of course all different and it’s perilous to generalise), namely what philanthropists could do in leveraging new forms of finance for development. Think about it. Faced with a likely decline in global aid levels, they could:

At Domestic level:  work with religious givers and institutions; push for better corporate giving; advocate for more and more progressive tax systems and closing down loopholes and tax evasion.

At International level: advocate against tax havens and capital flight, work to increase the volume and impact of remittances and giving from diaspora communities, support innovative ways to raise more cash such as the Financial Transaction Tax or carbon taxes.

So will the philanthropy sector come to the same conclusion as the NGOs, who realized some time ago that it was necessary to tackle the structural causes of poverty with advocacy as well as programming? There are signs that this is happening, but judging by yesterday’s conversations, it will mean confronting the deep ambivalence to the state shown by some philanthropists.

Let’s see if any of these ideas survives today’s discussions.

Horror and beauty, crazy climate, Pink Floyd in Phnom Penh and anyone for cricket? Final impressions of Cambodia

My first time in Cambodia, and some powerful memories will linger.

First of course, the genocide, not so much the manicured killing fields at Choeung Ek, where a pair of teeth lay in the mud above a burial

Khmer Rouge cells in a former classroom at Tuol Sleng

pit, newly surfaced after last night’s storm, but the former secondary school at Tuol Sleng, where those destined for the killing fields were held prior to transport for exec ution. The rusty barbed wire, iron bedsteads and manacles are still there, along with gruesome black and white photos of what the liberating army found there in 1979 – mangled bodies hurriedly dispatched by fleeing Khmer Rouge troops. Only 7 people survived out of some 20,000 victims at this one torture centre.

Second, the beauty. This year’s catastrophic floods are receding and the fields are full of families ploughing and planting in the new layer of fertile silt left behind (unfortunately the months until harvest will be hungry ones). The scenery is dazzling – plains of patchwork paddy dotted with palm trees and the extraordinary silhouettes of temples – masterpieces of gold-painted Buddhist bling, their roofs topped with distinctive swan’s neck finials.

Climate change: ‘The weather is crazy. We don’t know when the monsoon will come, or the winter, or anything,’ says one NGO worker. ‘We shouldn’t even be having bad floods this year – they normally come every 12 years, in the year of the dragon, which is next year. We get longer periods of rain and drought, higher temperatures in winter, rain is more variable – both high and low volume, farmers cannot predict what will happen next month. Pest outbreaks are getting worse.’

Dinner of crickets and frogs – and I don’t mean wimpy French-style frog thigh, but the whole frog, as if caught in mid-swim, dipped in batter and popped into a wok. Fried in garlic and spices, the crickets are yummy. If any budding entrepreneurs out there can get past our health and safety laws, they could make a fortune by importing crickets, along with other extreme snacks like ants and scorpions (sadly off the menu that night) for consumption in the bars of Europe.

Finally, the Memphis bar in Phnom Penh, where a brilliant pan-Asian house rock band produces a perfect rendition of Pink Floyd, Springsteen and others, although the ageing French Cambodian lead guitarist’s English vocals are pretty approximate.’ What have we found? The same old fear. How I wish you were here.’

You can listen to (but not see -it’s completely dark) them on this youtube video.

Cambodia: community forestry v land grabs is more complicated than I thought

An edited version of this post appeared on the Guardian Poverty Matters blog yesterday

Last week in Cambodia, some questions on forestry and development came into sharp relief. I visited a region where Oxfam’s local partners are helping local indigenous people develop community forestry and resist the encroachment of foreign companies (as well as Cambodian ones, and the odd party or army boss) intent on logging the native forest and replacing it with rubber plantations. I expected a black-and-white case but, as so often happens, found a much more complex picture. If you prefer your discussion of development restricted to goodies v baddies, better stop reading now.

First the community forestry: the village of O Preah in Kratie province (northeastern Cambodia) is home to 67 families of the Phnong

Hea Samoeun and family

indigenous group who have set up a rather successful Community Resin Association. They tap resin from 3 species of local trees and sell it to varnish and paint producers in Cambodia and neighbouring countries, and since they formed a producer association to market collectively, things have been going well.

Until now. We met Hea Samoeun, chief of the resin collectors, on the veranda of his well-built wooden house on stilts (see pic), above a jumble of 5 gallon drums emitting the pungent perfume of the resin. His account of the conflict was quietly angry:

‘Dong Nai/Dong Pu (a Vietnamese company) has been trying to invade our land since June 2009. We tried to talk to the Commune Council, but they just told us to get jobs on the plantations. I think someone’s bribed them – why else would they support the company? We don’t want to work for the company – resin collecting is what we have done for years. The company tried to negotiate by offering us $3 a tree, but if we agree they will cut down everything, so the community said no. They came back and offered us $200 per family and some land for 2 years for 7 families, or jobs on the rubber plantation, but we still said no.  Why?  Because in one day we can earn maybe $12 from collecting resin and still have time for fishing. The company pays you $3.50 and you work from morning to night.’

Dong Nai/Dong Pu was granted the land under the Cambodian government’s recent ‘Economic Land Concessions’ law – large parcels of land are handed out to investors, usually foreign, for logging and industrial agriculture. The problem here is that the ELC overlaps with the community forest, whose resin trees are also protected by law. But land titles have only been introduced in Cambodia in the last decade (previously all land belonged to the government), so the land rights of Mr Samoeun (as with most Cambodian farmers) are legally murky.

And here’s where the politics and power kick in. The law is only part of the story, and sometimes it seems a fairly minor part (although Mr Samoeun shows us his carefully filed legal complaint, adorned by 67 red ink thumbprints from the largely illiterate villagers). Mr Samoeun again:

‘We’ve met them a few times – they have a Khmer-speaking Vietnamese rep – and they said nicely, but with a warning tone, that this is company land and they will continue logging. But it is illegal under the land law to log resin trees – the Forestry Administration tells us it should be up to 5 years in jail for cutting down a single tree. The government claims the community agreed to give up the land, but has never shown us any document (and the law says it should be published).’

The two sides are currently at a stand-off: when the community went to the forest to protest, the company stopped logging, but only after it had cut down 1,400 of their 3,400 resin trees. The concern now is that they and their allies in government are just waiting for the 2013 elections to be over and the nursery rubber trees to be ready for planting, and then the logging will resume.

Next Mr Samoeun summoned a local car and we headed out down the dirt track to the ELC, past a rudimentary road block and even more rudimentary security. We got to the ELC and the contrast couldn’t be clearer (see pics) – blackened stumps of logged resin trees on a grass plain awaiting planting right next to the tumultuous diversity of the remaining forest, with a single forlorn ‘protect the forest’ sign nailed to one of the trees. I dip my fingers in a resin hole of one of the remaining trees and the intense perfume accompanies me for hours.

So far, so black and white. But wait. On the way back, we pass dozens of neat rows of worker housing and a clinic, all built by the company. The rubber plantation will provide jobs for 20 times (maybe more) as many people as currently make a living from resin collecting – poor Cambodians migrating into the forest from the lowlands. After all, rubber tapping is just a form of organized resin collection. Provided wages and conditions are acceptable, isn’t that development too? The compensation that Dong Nai/Dong Pu offered was better than in many similar situations elsewhere in Cambodia and the company stopped logging at the first protest – that’s not what we’ve seen in far bloodier land grabs in Uganda and elsewhere. One local NGO even holds them out as a model of good practice.

Cambodian activists counter that the plantation jobs are badly paid, and will go to incomers from the lowlands rather than locals (so what?); that the loss of biodiversity and other ‘environmental services’ (don’t you hate that term?) is an issue; that indigenous people do badly when they migrate from their home village. Apples and pears – culture and economics; economic rights v indigenous rights v human rights (all supposedly indivisible). If the process was fair and transparent, it might be possible to argue out the pros and cons, but politics, power and corruption obscure and skew every decision.

As for Mr Samoeun and his people, it’s incredibly hard to see a successful outcome other than dogged resistance + fingers crossed. Formal laws and politics are often a shadow play, while the decisions come from informal and unaccountable power and money.

Can we make a convincing business case for a different approach, and would investors even listen? Could a pro-poor investor make a decent profit and pay decent wages (e.g. for rubber), or buy their products from smallholders (with government or NGO support, as we are currently doing in several countries with Unilever)? And would officials support such an effort (especially if it extended to not paying bribes)? Our outgoing country director thinks this is (one) way forward. NGOs have made some progress on other value chains, e.g. pharmaceuticals, garments or supermarkets, by being propositional and working with progressive businesses to develop the business case. Might it work for forests too?

Like I said, a much more complicated picture than I was expecting – what have I missed?

Cambodia = Singapore or Myanmar? What does the future hold for a people still recovering from the Khmer Rouge?

History is a savage and constant presence in Cambodia, where I spent a few days last week. The Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre is the country’s top tourist attraction, with its ornate stupa enshrining ten floors of skulls excavated from the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge (see pic).

And the history is strikingly recent. In the late 1970s, as I was moping around as a self-pitying would-be intellectual at university in Britain, one woman I met was a teenager fending off starvation in a Khmer Rouge labour camp for children, eating banana trees ‘ leaves, fruit, flowers, bark – all’ to stay alive. Now an NGO activist, she still can’t bear to eat Cambodia’s luscious bananas, or coconuts (her other source of survival). She escaped from the camp and joined the resistance in the forests until Pol Pot fell and she could resume her life.

Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge were overthrown by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, bringing the end of a decade of the deepest imaginable trauma for Cambodians. First the ’American War’, which killed a far higher proportion of Cambodians than Vietnamese, thanks to Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk’s willingness to let his friend Ho Chi Minh use the country as a transport corridor, and Henry Kissinger’s refusal to let a little thing like national sovereignty stand in the way of America’s bombers. Then four years of Pol Pot and the death of about two million Cambodians (no-one really knows for sure) out of a population of about 8 million through hunger, disease, forced labour and execution, deliberately targeting a generation of educated and skilled people.

What effect does that have on a country’s long-term development? Do you have to wait for the next generation – all the bright young scholarship kids heading off to universities in Australia, Europe and the US – to come through into leadership positions before the country can take off?

Pol Pot was replaced by the far less bloody, but still autocratic and occasionally ruthless regime of Hun Sen (see pic), Prime Minister for the last 25 years and today still only 59, but the atrocities of the killing fields live on in a miasma of fear never far from the surface of conversation. Parents tell their kids ‘don’t get involved in politics – it’s like using an egg to break a rock; even if the rock is cracked, you will fail. If anyone speaks out, run far away’. ‘No-one’s cleverer than my government’ says one female activist, ‘they control the media, the judiciary, the education system, everything’.

Cambodians laugh when they get nervous, and discussion of politics gets people giggling in earnest. People seem to avoid pronouncing the name of ‘Hun Sen’ or his party, the Cambodian People’s Party – it feels a bit like Lord Voldemort (‘he who must not be named’) in Harry Potter. One activist accuses me of playing tricks when I ask about politics, invoking a local saying that ‘when old people ask each other questions, they are just trying to catch each other out.’ Cheers.

Among activists, the younger generation seem more resigned than the older ones, only glimpsing a freer Cambodia far off in the future, and even fearing what might happen without a strong leader to keep anarchy at bay. One says the options for Cambodia are Singapore or Myanmar – autocracy is a given, but it could bring economic development, Lee Kuan Yew style, or kleptocracy and poverty, a la Burma.

Right now, it feels like it could go either way – growth is strong, fuelled by demand from China for Cambodia’s natural resources and a garment industry rebounding from the last global slowdown. But corruption and poor governance are endemic. Every government employee, from policeman to minister, reportedly has to pay regular fees to the party on a sliding scale according to their position. With that kind of pressure, who is an official going to listen to – poor people or investors waving wads of notes? It’s almost impossible to buck such an all-encompassing system – everyone is dirty. It certainly makes me sceptical of any technocratic talk of strengthening ‘good governance’ through training or legislative reforms, unless it touches on the underlying structures.

When corruption doesn’t work, intimidation is an option, but violence is seldom necessary.The fear of those in power is either justified, or at least entirely understandable given the traumatic (and recent) past. People follow orders, even if those orders say ignore the law.

But the law is not an entirely empty vessel. Sure, it can be demoralizing when you spend months, if not years, preparing all the legal documentation only to be over-ruled because of some backroom deal in Phnom Penh, but the good guys win sometimes – the PM recently cancelled a dozen big land grabs for failing to live up to their legal commitments.  In practice, what is eventually decided in such cases emerges from the complex and murky interaction legal process, money and power (including the power that comes when poor people organize, as well as donor pressure and state and military might). That interaction will decide which future awaits Cambodia.

Tomorrow: a visit to a land grab + a bit of self doubt

Are crazy drivers as big a development issue as malaria or tuberculosis? The case for a global road safety campaign

This was clearly meant to be. A couple of weeks ago, I was blearily discussing road traffic accidents with a couple of colleagues as we headed in a taxi to get an early morning flight home from the post-2015 discussion in Cairo, when the car went into a horrendous screeching skid, avoiding the car in front by inches. Andy Sumner, in the passenger seat, said it felt like being inside a rather scary computer game. When theory and practice collide like that, it’s time to start blogging.

Is traffic a development issue? You bet. Firstly, it’s a killer. According to Make Roads Safe, the impressive (but not well-known) global campaign for road safety, somewhere in the world, a person dies every 6 seconds – 1.3 million road deaths each year, a fatality rate comparable to Malaria or Tuberculosis. Nine in ten road deaths and injuries are in developing countries. The economic cost to these countries is estimated by the World Bank at up to US$100 billion a year (equivalent to all annual overseas aid from OECD countries).

Research in India and Bangladesh has shown that at least half of families affected by a road death or serious injury fall below the poverty line. The poorest communities are the worst affected, in rich countries and developing countries alike. Pedestrians, cyclists and other vulnerable road users are the majority of those killed and injured.

It’s also a problem with ready-made solutions – no new vaccines to invent, or new technologies to develop. Just speed limits, enforcement, safety standards both for pedestrians and in public or private transport, traffic (and driver) calming measures, changing public norms on things like drinking and driving. And it doesn’t have to be expensive: when researchers put signs in Kenyan minibuses (matatus) urging passengers to criticize reckless driving, injuries and deaths fell by a half (for paper see here).

True, RTAs may take more lives among better off people (including not a few aid and NGO workers) than infectious disease, and so tackling the issue may not be so ‘pro-poor’, but that at least means you have a ready-made constituency with a powerful political voice.
As countries grow richer, they will probably embark on sorting out traffic safety anyway, but meanwhile, millions of people in developing countries are dying or being injured unnecessarily. A bit of public campaigning could speed things up and save a lot of suffering.

The carnage on the developing world’s roads is just one of a number of issues that people in rich countries tend not to think of as ‘development issues’. Tobacco (annual global death toll estimated at 6 million), alcohol (2.5 million), obesity (2.8 million), diabetes, heart disease, cancer, respiratory problems from household smoke (1.6 million) and pollution, depression and other mental illness. The focus on infectious diseases is important, but an awful lot gets left out, some of it relatively simple to tackle.

2011 marks the start of a UN decade of action on road safety. Here’s a 5 minute video that explains what it’s all about, presented by none other than my predecessor at Oxfam, Kevin Watkins

Votes and optimism on sustainability; bribe payers index; Poor Economics interactive; Ethiopia weather insurance; abolishing Kenyan school fees; Baywatch campaigners: links I liked

Sorry if this appeared twice – got my dates mixed up (blame jetlag – I’m in Bangkok)

Want to vote for the winner of the BBC’s ‘World Challenge’ competition on sustainable development? Check out the candidates and pick your favourite – voting closes Friday night.

Reasons to be Cheerful (environment remix): carbon emissions down in the US, consumption down in the UK. China gearing up on green growth, introducing a cap-and-trade system and green taxes.

It takes two to be corrupt, and Transparency International has released a new Bribe Payers Index, which examines the “supply side of bribery” – the likelihood that companies from a given country or sector will offer bribes when operating abroad – and for the first time includes bribes paid between companies, rather than simply to the public sector. [h/t Beyond Aid]

The J-PAL team have mashed up the numbers  behind their ‘Poor Economics’ book into some neat interactive graphics on time use by some of the people interviewed and an 18 country data set highlighting the differences between people in different income bands. Happy time-wasting…..

Oxfam is working with Swiss Re to develop weather insurance for poor farmers in Ethiopia. Case study by the FT.

‘Pupils from poorer households were more likely to attend government schools under free primary education while their more affluent peers were likely to go to private schools after the reform. As marginal pupils entered government schools through one door, affluent pupils exited through the other door.’ A new CGD paper asks (and answers) Why Did Abolishing Fees Not Increase Public School Enrollment in Kenya?

Boatwatch – some suspiciously tonk/hench/buff/fit/(whatever the current word) is Oxfam campaigners subject themselves to public humiliation on so many levels, all to get their message across on the need to reduce shipping emissions. And the hair tossing thing is heavily ironic post feminist, OK? Respect. Just glad it’s not me.

Robin Hood, the G20 and the Greek debt crisis – what came out of last week’s summit?

It’s any campaigner’s nightmare – you work for months to get movement on a big issue at a summit, and then an international crisis blows up and threatens to wreck both the agenda and your plans. But Max Lawson, Oxfam’s head of Policy and Advocacy, reckons that the Robin Hood Tax made significant progress last week at a G20 summit dominated by the Greek debt crisis. Here’s his last day wrap-up from Friday:

It is all over. The diminutive Frenchman has spoken (at length). So what happened?

We heard in the morning from South Africa that the French attempt to have a separate communique on the Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) had run out of time.  Which basically confirmed what has been the theme of the last few days – the ingredients for further movement on the FTT have been there all along but there was simply not enough time or diplomatic head space.  Frustrating, but not surprising.  We also heard that the Brazilians had won support from France on a global minimum for social protection in return for their backing on the FTT, which was interesting and impressive diplomacy by Dilma.

All morning rumours circulated about possible agreements on various things that never came to fruition, mostly about boosting the resources of the IMF.  The emerging powers don’t want to fund the European bailout directly as it is too politically contentious, but they are interested in channelling money through the IMF, in return for a bigger share in the governance of the institution.  For nerds like me this remains fascinating, as the financial crisis continues to accelerate the shift of global power to the major emerging markets.  This is a febrile moment in history, and whilst shrouded in deadly dull financial speak, we are witnessing some major shifts that will shape the next century. 

Mid-morning and NGOs had a briefing from the Gates Foundation staff on the G20 discussion yesterday of development, which took up about 45 minutes.  It seems there was some pretty good discussion and definitely having Bill and his report there meant the FTT got a lot more profile than it would have otherwise.  They confirmed that Germany was saying that they are open to potentially using some of the revenues from an FTT to finance climate change and development, which was good to hear. 

The press conference finally started around 2pm. Just when I thought sitting in this lurid bunker of a press centre could not get any more surreal, it emerged that all of the many men’s toilets you go to in this huge complex have the Star Wars music on a permanent loop. 

Sarkozy spoke first about the euro of course and the commitments of the G20 to boost growth, but announced nothing new. He spoke at length about the action they have taken in naming 11 tax havens, which is of course good but not nearly enough, as it is only beating up on some small island states and ignoring the major companies creaming off profits through these havens and the fact that the biggest tax havens are in the G8, in London especially. Still, it’s good that this crucial issue is getting profile and some progress. It is similar to the FTT in many ways – a popular cause that taps into anger in rich and poor countries alike that companies and the richest individuals are avoiding their responsibilities and failing to contribute, meaning that ordinary people are faced with cuts in services and bankrupt governments. 

Anyhow, then he moved onto the FTT.  He underlined that the FTT was now a mainstream issue, and had made it into the communique.  That there were big fights on this issue in the G20 with many against, but that plucky little France continues to push for it.  That in addition to France, Germany, Spain, Brazil and Argentina, they now had support from South Africa, the African Union, Ethiopia (Meles, the Ethiopian president attends the G20 representing NEPAD) and Ban Ki Moon.  

He underlined that the process at the EU is the main one, and that this will be on the agenda at the EU heads of state meeting in January.  He said that whilst not in favour of the FTT, President Obama agreed that the financial sector should contribute more to the cost of the crisis. He confirmed that he believes that the majority of the revenue should be spent on development.  Later, in questions, he name-checked the Robin Hood Tax campaign, and reiterated that the banks must be made to pay back for the impact of the financial crisis they have caused.

What does this mean?  Well it is definitely progress.  During his brief flirtation with the FTT before he lost the election, Gordon Brown compared taxing transactions to debt cancellation for poor countries.  Debt cancellation was initially the preserve of the radicals, ridiculed and dismissed by economists, but which then over a period of ten years and with a fantastic global campaign made the journey into the mainstream and into actual policy.  Sarkozy made a similar case for the FTT, and I think he is right in many ways, although the time-frame is a lot quicker.  

I had a long debate with one of [UK finance minister] George Osborne’s advisers yesterday about all this, and he conceded that he felt the eurozone FTT was almost certain to go ahead now, and that they are scenario-planning to see whether the UK will benefit from it or not.  Germany are really serious about doing this, as are France, and at the moment what Merkel and Sarkozy want to do in the eurozone is very likely to happen.  In fact there are no major opponents of the tax in the eurozone, with the Dutch having changed their position recently.  All that would have been completely unthinkable two years ago. 

The key question is whether all the fuss this week, and the involvement now of South Africa, Brazil and the other developing countries, is enough to ensure that not just the French, but the Germans and the rest of the eurozone countries agree to spend some of the money on fighting poverty and climate change.  I hope so.  Either way the FTT took a big step in that direction today.  We need to keep the pressure up in the coming few months on Germany and France on the issue of how the revenues are used, and not stop campaigning until they stop talking big about this tax and actually go ahead and do it.  In France especially the pressure should be on Sarkozy to implement the FTT nationally too and stop hiding behind other countries. 

Lots to do, but for now I am hanging up the bow and arrow and heading off for some vin, pain and the usual Gallic shrug when I ask whether they have a vegetarian option.

Post-2015 continued: do’s and don’ts for deciding what comes next (and some likely candidates)

How can a post-2015 agreement be designed to generate traction on both national and global decision makers? Global approaches are needed to tackle issues that ignore borders, like climate change. A global approach can also try and change the norms and values prevailing at an international level, and generate healthy competition and peer pressure among leaders. But many decisions are taken at national or subnational level (e.g. land reform or spending more on girls’ education).

One way of getting the best of both worlds is to define loose general global goals, normative principles and minimum standards, and then require each country to debate and set targets (so improving the level of national ownership). You could include some form of peer review to prevent countries opting for an easy life and setting targets that are ridiculously low. For the cross-border issues, specific global targets would be needed.

Do’s and Don’ts

Do: Go national:  we need to hear much more from national governments, civil society etc, rather than have a top-down UN process that is then ‘rolled out’ to a largely indifferent world.

Go global: Put crudely the MDGs were designed in the North, for implementation in the South. As ‘North-South’ rapidly becomes as redundant as the ‘East-West’ divisions of the Cold War, the post-2015 framework has to apply to all countries, with a reasonable possibility of exerting some influence even on the powerful ones.

Go local: tap into existing trends and devise some kind of popular monitoring mechanism using mobile phones or other vehicle for crowd sourcing, Ushahidi-style. It’s more democratic and interesting, and it saves money in times of austerity.

Don’t: Think of post-2015 in isolation. It is only one among an enormous number of international agreements, declarations, conventions and processes of widely differing effectiveness. Some, like the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, rather successfully percolate through into national legislation and social norms. Many of these constitute important ‘symbolic battlegrounds’ – you don’t need to go through the pain, agony and high likelihood of failure of trying to conduct these battles via the post-2015 negotiations, if they are already doing reasonably well somewhere else. One important parallel process is the Rio+20 debate on sustainability and the push to agree ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ to replace the MDGs.

Ignore opportunity costs: Individuals and institutions working on the MDGs could be doing something else instead. Don’t just pile in because it is there, but assess what can actually be achieved, compared to other processes.

What issues lend themselves to inclusion?

For global targets: Some issues should not be included because the politics are toxic and there is no chance of progress (e.g. migration). Others are already dealt with elsewhere in the multilateral system and including them in post-2015 would not add greatly to their prospects (e.g. intellectual property, climate change).

Issues that might benefit from inclusion are:

Technology transfer (inc clean energy), where it’s possible to find win-wins, or trade off short term sacrifices for long term benefits (eg giving away technology that creates long term markets).

Those aspects of the international financial system that are most relevant to poor countries and therefore should not be left to the G20 – tax havens and illicit financial flows.

International aspects of Finance for Development: aid (whatever replaces the Gleneagles promises, new (non DAC) donors); the quantity and quality (in terms of development) of migrant remittances; innovative sources of international finance such as the Robin Hood Tax.

For global goals with nationally-agreed targets

A basic minimum standard of Social Protection (on which countries can then build)

MDGs continued: Cluster, clarify and roll over the current MDGs rather than abandon them, but where possible, make them a floor on which countries need to improve.

Tobacco, alcohol, road safety, mental health, non-communicable diseases: Take issues previously seen as mainly rich world concerns; and speed up the transplant and adaptation of northern solutions. Why? Because the solutions are known, and speeding up their adoption with an international agreement could make a real difference (as in saving many lives), even in a weak-traction environment.

Extend ‘responsibility to protect’ thinking to a general effort to reduce volatility and shocks through eg social protection, financial inclusion, disaster risk reduction. Why? Because governments North and South already have appetite for learning how to manage the increasing variety, frequency and depth of shocks.

Jobs and investment pacts: jobs and growth were included in the MDGs but largely ignored,  because they are more national, and less linked to aid. This time round, a more nationally-driven approach could fill in that important gap.

Finance for Development: national aspects such as domestic taxation, natural resource revenues, transparency, financial inclusion.

Clean energy: low carbon renewables and/or dirty household stoves and heating, which kill a remarkable number of people, an issue already picked up by Hilary Clinton

And one really bad idea: Pick the global issues we don’t really know how to tackle – Inequality, conflict, fragile and predatory states Why? Because a ‘weak traction’ exhortatory instrument like the post-2015 agreement is not going to overcome the major political intellectual hurdles to sorting these out.

I can’t decide on whether it’s visionary or insane to include migration. Probably both. There is a divergence between economic reality (aging populations in rich countries will be increasingly reliant on young migrants to beef up their labour force) and political/cultural reality (hostility to foreigners. ‘they’re taking our jobs’ etc). At some point that divergence will have to close and, unless the birth rate reverses rapidly in the rich countries, migration will have to rise.  But I don’t think setting (and missing) goals for increased migration is the way to go about it – it requires a more subtle and longer term public discussion.

So what’s likely to actually happen? The MDGs required a major international process – a series of big UN conferences in the 90s, the Millennium Summit in 2000, significant political leadership from people like Clare Short. And they focussed on what rising volumes of aid could achieve. None of those conditions apply today so although there is a much lower political investment required in extending and refining an existing process than starting something from scratch, the environment is much more hostile. The MDG story could end in 2015, or, in a time of multilateral paralysis on trade and climate, the goals could become just another international zombie– not dead, but not alive either. Claire Melamed feels that even critics of the goals are starting to recognize the risk that, in the words of Joni Mitchell ‘you don’t know what you got til it’s gone’.

But whether the post-2015 agenda ends up being ambitious, minimal, nothing or the walking dead, over the next couple of years the debate on what comes next will be a crucial arena for discussing how we understand development, and can influence the direction in which the world is headed, so we had better get involved.

Beyond 2015 – what comes after the MDGs?

Last week I spent a couple of days in Cairo at an ODI- and UNDP-organised conference (Chatham House rules, so no names in this post) catching up with the state of debate on the ‘post-2015 agenda’ – aka what comes after the Millennium Development Goals (see graphic), which are set to expire on that date. I blogged on this a couple of years ago, but at that point the debate was muted because donors and others didn’t want to undermine pressure to achieve the MDGs by talking about their successors.

No longer – the post-2015 talkathon is gaining momentum fast and should peak in 2013 when decisions need to be made. So I’ve invited some of the interesting ‘southern voices’ at the event to contribute posts, and will run a couple of my own. Hey, that sounds like a series……

Claire Melamed from ODI set out the questions for the conference in an invaluable overview paper (38 pages) and an excellent two page opinion piece, in which she cautions against jumping into a discussion of goals, targets and indicators (the favoured topic of UN wonks and issue lobbyists), until we’ve talked about some more fundamental issues, which she divides up into three:

• What would a global agreement be for? i.e. which problems should it tackle – the same as the MDGs (mainly poverty and social spending) or ‘new’ ones (jobs, growth, migration, inequality etc)?
• Who would a global agreement  be for? If the MDGs were largely about improving the quantity and quality of aid, and the number of aid dependent countries is falling, how can their successor influence non-aid dependent countries, whether rich or middle income?
• How should a new global agreement link to national level? How can a global agreement be designed both to be ‘nationally owned’ and to influence national governments?

Excellent questions, but I would actually start even further back. The MDGs were gestated in the 1990s and are a child of their time. They epitomise both an expansionary moment when growth and aid were rising, and the latter could provide plenty of carrots to influence behaviour in aid-dependent countries, and the kind of ‘planner’ mentality epitomised by the incoming UK Labour Government, which on taking power in 1997 sprayed the public sector with targets that have since been heavily criticised and in many cases abandoned.

Contrast that with today: we are in a carrot-scarce environment where aid is more likely to fall than rise. That means simply extending the status quo for another decade or two won’t work. The principle driver of MDG progress – aid – is likely to be much less effective, and its targets fewer.

In addition, we have moved a long way from the world of ‘global planners’ in our understanding of development. Whether it’s through Dani Rodrik’s work in identifying a small number of ‘binding constraints’ to growth and attacking those one at a time, rather than concocting ever-lengthening shopping lists of reforms (or MDGs), or the focus on systems thinking, complexity and change as an emergent, inherently unpredictable, and discontinuous process, a lot of this new thinking seems pretty incompatible with the ‘goals, targets, indicators’ approach. Supporting development has to be more nimble and opportunistic – we need to get better at making it up as we go along, not implementing grand plans.

Which links to Claire’s third question. Development remains primarily national, born from the interaction between citizens, state, and other local actors like businesses, churches etc. So (especially given the poor prospects for aid), what kind of agreement is likely to exert effective positive pressure on that interaction, whether to nudge governments to do good things (or deter them from doing bad ones), or to strengthen citizens’ ability to hold them to account, or otherwise encourage development?

Here I think some input from other academic disciplines could really help – international relations, political science or whatever. What do we know about how international agreements influence national decision-making? Does that hold out any lessons for the post-2015 design?

And if there are any historians out there, what can we learn from the kind of reforms that occur at global or national level in or after a shock? Are they different from those that occur in a boom? My limited knowledge of the response to the Great Depression, or World Wars is that candidates include:

• reregulation (e.g. of the US financial system after the Depression)
• the creation of new institutions (UN, G20)
• the enfranchisement of new social actors (e.g. women entering the paid labour force during wars, or getting the vote after war or decolonisation – see pic)
• new forms of revenue raising (eg income tax to pay for wars)
• the introduction of safety nets after widespread traumatic shocks (creation of the UK National Health Service after World War 2)

These might all be candidates and inform the kinds of changes we might seek in a post-2015 agenda. And yes I realize that all this crisis talk may be a bit Euro-centric and that the crisis is mainly affecting what one participant called the ‘formerly-rich countries’ (ouch), but there are few signs of others picking up the baton on the MDGs, and the old guard still dominates the UN and international system.

In getting traction on national leaders, I think one example of a non goal/target/indicator approach well worth investigating is league tables – I have a strong hunch that they have much more influence on policy. Whenever the UK comes bottom of some international table on child welfare or education, press and political opponents have a field day, and the same goes for developing countries, especially when it involves near neighbours. Whatever the issue, if India beats Bangladesh or Pakistan, or vice versa, it is big news.

For this purpose, league tables work best when they are simple – preferably a single number rather than some massive dashboard of indicators that can be mashed up differently by all the players to show themselves in the best possible light. Just suppose the massive investment of political and actual capital in the MDGs had actually gone into refining and promoting an annual index of multidimensional poverty and inequality – a single number (and in the big countries, broken down by regions or states too) that governments could then try and improve by influencing any one of its component parts (essential services, inequality, security or whatever). Every year a big hoopla, with global and regional tables, lists of fastest improvers and the worst decliners, a debate in the UN but a focus on national action. Wouldn’t that have galvanized a lot more activity than the MDGs, and not just in aid dependent states?

I’m sure there are lots of other alternatives, both in terms of non-aid carrots (e.g. a chance for countries to share and spread their success stories like India’s employment guarantee scheme or Brazil’s bolsa familia) and sticks (leaders required to report regularly to the UN or national parliaments on progress against whatever they promise to do, although that could of course also be a carrot if they are doing well). My fear is that the relatively tight timetable will squeeze these out and inertia will deliver a set of tweaked MDGs with relatively weak influence over national decision-making. As so often, I hope I’m wrong.

OK, that’s enough rambling for one post. More to follow on what a global agreement might look like if we stick closer to the current model.