Is doughnut economics too Western? Critique from a Latin American environmentalist

Apologies for the blog going offline yesterday – some server glitch which has now been rectified. On with the discussion on Kate Raworth’s new paper. Here Latin American environmentalist Eduardo Gudynas takes on the doughnut from a deeper green perspective for uncritically accepting western concepts of ‘development’.

The discussion paper just launched by Oxfam, ‘A Safe and Just Space for Humanity’, has many positive aspects that can be shared with organisations and movements in the Global South. It also contains elements that are in line with Oxfam’s commitment to eradicating poverty and protecting the environment.

The document proposes a doughnut, which adds a pastry to the mix of sustainable development recipes, and we should review it thoroughly.

Let’s begin by pointing out that this approach is ambitious, since it claims to offer a new perspective on sustainable development: the articulation of human rights and environmental limits in a just and safe ‘space’.

But just how ‘new’ is this perspective? The idea of an environmental ‘space’ was first considered in the 1990s, by both academia (in the early work of the Wuppertal Institute in Germany) and social movements (in this case Friends of the Earth, a point acknowledged in Oxfam’s paper).

Furthermore, the idea of linking human rights and environmental issues is older still. To give you an example, in 1974, amid the hubbub of debate about development and the environment, a group of prominent academics and politicians issued the Cocoyoc Declaration. It was a very important contribution at that time, and held that the future of humanity lay in finding a balance between the environmental ‘outer limits’ and the ‘inner limit’ of fundamental human rights.

This type of problem, where the new is not so new, and the key background seems to have been forgotten, has become commonplace in the current cooking of sustainable development. My impression is that the discussions, about Rio+20 in particular, have great difficulty in recovering the long tradition of debates on development and the environment. I say this not because I am concerned about this tradition, but because in many cases it seems as if we are starting from scratch, and the trials and errors of the recent past have been forgotten. 

Many believe that it all started with the Brundtland report in 1987, which led to the disappearance of the fertile discussions of the 70s and most of the 80s. This amnesia is reinforced by many governments and by the way in which UNEP deals with sustainability.

These points are relevant, as the origin of the concept of sustainability was an environmental criticism of development. It was a questioning that forced a redefinition of ‘development’. Thus, any discussion of sustainability necessarily involves an intense debate about the ideas of development.

Starting with this concern, although there is a description of ‘sustainable development’, and that development in the 21st century must eradicate poverty, I’m not exactly clear on what the idea of ‘development’ is in the doughnut, At times the paper seems to suggest that it is not necessary to discuss the basic ideas of ‘development’, but rather that our notion of development should be reduced to the components of the doughnut.

But in my view, a discussion about sustainability requires the idea of development to be questioned, especially the Western conception of development. There are undoubtedly many ways of understanding development, and we have seen capitalist programmes with varying emphasis (neoliberal, Keynesian, neo-Keynesian, etc.), as well as socialist programmes (e.g. the Soviet model and all its variants), and even complex hybrids (like that of China). These tendencies have significant differences in terms of the role of state, the concept of property, and ways of redistributing wealth. The ‘right to development’ was also spoken about, which would greatly complicate the doughnut. But what is striking is that they all share a set of basic ideas, all of them Western, such as the belief in progress, the appropriation of nature, and the dream of material comfort. ‘Development’ involves common principles for organising society, production, and the relationship with the environment.

These different ‘developments’ may diverge in their instrumental management choices, but in the end they all share a common belief with regard to progress and the efficient appropriation of nature. This is plainly evident, in all its drama, with the position of the World Bank’s current chief economist, Justin Yifu Lin, a Chinese native who first trained as a Marxist economist in Beijing and later at the neoliberal Chicago school of economics. Lin advocates a mix of Marxism and Keynesianism, of State communism and corporate capitalism, in which there is no room for sustainability. This he does openly in public, and even more so, from the World Bank. [Guest post from Justin here]

This makes it evident that the ideas of development are deeply rooted in contemporary culture. A radical criticism must be aimed at these foundations, like that of sustainability. Without such questioning, there is a risk that the ‘doughnut’ version of sustainability will be branded as a new example of alternative development. It will join the list of other attempts at reform, such as human development, local development, endogenous development, etc., which started off with a certain radicalism, but ended up being co-opted by the conventional position. Would it be a success in the future if the UNDP published a doughnut index, as it does today with human development?

The social and environmental crisis is so serious that it is now time to put aside minor adjustments and reforms, and instead address the root causes of resistance to the idea of development. We must adopt an approach whereby the term ‘sustainable development’ no longer requires the suffix ‘development’. The civil society programme in Rio+20 should not focus simply on fixing the superficial problems of development: it is necessary to look for alternatives to the entire body of ideas about development.

In this effort, the ethical dimension is key, and this point appears in the references to the norms of the doughnut. But here also it is necessary to delve a little further into the ingredients of this recipe.

If sustainable development strengthens its demands for change, it must abandon the traditional idea of development and thus break with the anthropocentric ethics that are characteristic of Western cultural tradition. Conventional development needs anthropocentrism, as within this concept, it is man alone who can give value and, as a consequence, man asserts his authority over nature, women, children, etc.

The solution to this position lies, among other things, in recognising the rights of nature. This is an essential ingredient in the environmental components of a critical proposal on sustainable development. We cannot talk seriously about the environment without first acknowledging the rights of nature. In this area, Oxfam’s Discussion Paper must review recent experiences in South America, especially with regard to the recognition of those rights in the new Constitution of Ecuador. Under this new ethic, in these kitchens there would not be doughnuts separating environmental components from social ones, but rather some would be contained within others.

These and other examples show that sustainability also requires more multicultural recipes that do not rest so much on Western traditions. But these are matters for another post on this blog..

Eduardo Gudynas is a senior researcher at the Latin American Center of Social Ecology (CLAES), based in Uruguay. His expertise is on sustainable development and alternatives to development. Read his blog here.

Last chance to vote for aid blogger of the year – closes at noon today

Completely missed this one, and as this blog’s on the shortlist, (as are lots of other great posts, twitters, blogs etc etc), you know what to do……….

To vote, go to the ABBAs – the wonderfully contrived ‘Aid Bloggers Best Awards’.

‘The doughnut ‘compass’ is a powerful idea’: Earth scientists respond to the doughnut…….

Some initial thoughts on yesterday’s post on doughnut economics from Mark Stafford Smith and Will Steffen. Mark (left) is Science Director of the Climate Adaptation Flagship at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, and is Co-chair of the upcoming Planet Under Pressure: New Knowledge towards Solutions conference in London, March 2012. Will Steffen (right) is Executive Director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, and Senior Research Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He is a co-author of the original paper on nine planetary boundaries.

The original ‘planetary boundaries’ concept focused on biophysical factors: there was some internal logic to this – it aimed to identify the conditions under which we couldn’t expect the planet to continue supporting us, regardless of how we care to organise ourselves as a human race.  But of course, as soon as you ask practical questions about how we might manage our interaction with these boundaries, social and economic issues come into the picture.  Hence the idea of linking a biophysical ceiling with a social foundation is a great one, and the image of a doughnut containing the safe and just space for humanity is a great visualisation of this.

And visualisations are genuinely important, because people need to grasp an issue intuitively before they can really act on it.  One route for action that Kate mentions is through establishing a set of global ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) that are currently proposed as part of what comes after the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). [previous post on SDGs here]

So, how would we move from these great insights to some SDGs?

The key point is that many of the social and environmental boundaries interact profoundly, and we cannot go on talking of sustainable development but acting on development and sustainability separately. 

These interactions can be positive or negative.

Positive and synergistic interactions represent key opportunities:  for example, clean energy can replace smoky cooking fuels, and not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric pollution, but also improve the health of the poor and provide more time for women and children to gain an education.  In cases like this, social and environmental outcomes can be delivered together, and potentially at a much lesser cost than if they were tackled separately.

Of course other interactions represent challenging trade-offs: we know that if world poverty is tackled by simply bringing everyone up to the level of GDP enjoyed by today’s richest using today’s technologies, then our environment would be devastated.  However, as Kate points out, major improvements in equity can be gained with relatively little additional consumption if appropriately targeted, and our attention is focused on appropriate measures of well-being and levels of equity. 

In short, whether the interactions are negative or positive, if the social and environmental aspects are tackled in consort, we are likely to handle their interactions much more efficiently and effectively than if we try to do them independently.

So a challenge for the doughnut is, how to depict the interactions that really matter across the safe and just operating space?

A practical way to develop SDGs is probably to articulate a small number (5 or 6?) high level integrated goals, and then have sub-goals that dissect out the interactions, deliberately separating areas of synergy and trade-off so they can be addressed properly. 

The high level goals are ultimately a matter for policy, but they should really link social and environmental outcomes.   For example, perhaps equitable and healthy access to low carbon energy – not just any energy, but from low carbon sources that reduce neighbourhood pollution.  Perhaps food security for all whilst improving ecosystem resources – not food at any environmental cost, but a focus on avoiding waste and devising food production systems that trade off a little ‘efficiency’ for supporting other ecosystem services.  Perhaps access to meaningful employment that supports environmental outcomes – here’s one that might be truly synergistic.

Each of these high level goals then needs dissection.  For example, food security for all whilst improving ecosystem resources: this could have a synergistic sub-goal that relates to managing the global phosphorus cycle (a planetary boundary concern with big impacts on ecosystem services) in ways that improves the equitable distribution of fertilisers globally (an equity concern).  Meanwhile a more challenging sub-goal might deal with the trade-off between high production levels and the use of water resources.

We shouldn’t over-complicate the SDGs, though, because many issues are linked. Improvements in education mostly go along with improvements in health; likewise improvements in managing the nitrogen cycle in farming will often be correlated with improvements in managing phosphorus too.  In fact, we wonder whether a focus on managing key planetary boundaries at the same time as really focusing on equitable outcomes across geographies, generations and genders might not get us 80% of the way there, given the other factors that would come in their wake.

Meanwhile, the initial discussion of SDGs in the Rio+20 zero draft makes it sound as if these are a simple environmental add-on to the MDGs.  This approach would be a profound failure.

The doughnut concept must be a call to arms, to devise SDGs which truly link the doughnut’s floor and its ceiling.  Then these will become the real supportive pillars of sustainable development.

What do you think these integrated pillars should be?

Can we live inside the doughnut? Why the world needs planetary and social boundaries

This post (and commentaries over the next few days) presents some important new thinking by my research team colleague, Kate Raworth. It summarises her new Discussion Paper, published by Oxfam today. 

When crossing unknown territory, a compass can be pretty handy. Achieving sustainable development for nine billion people has to be high on the list of humanity’s great uncharted journeys. So here’s an idea, in a new Oxfam Discussion Paper, for a global compass to point us in the right direction (Fig 1).

Fig 1. Planetary and social boundaries: a safe and just space for humanity

Source: Oxfam, inspired by Rockström et al (2009)

What’s going on here? Start with the outer ring. In 2009, a group of leading Earth-system scientists (aka Rockström et al) proposed a set of nine Earth-system processes (like freshwater use, climate regulation, and the nitrogen cycle) that are critical for keeping this planet in the stable state which has been so beneficial to humankind over the past 10,000 years (that’s the Holocene, and it’s nothing to sniff at: it gave us agriculture, and all that has followed…).

Putting excessive stress on these critical processes could lead to tipping points of abrupt and irreversible environmental change, so Rockström et al proposed a set of boundaries for avoiding those danger zones. Together, the nine boundaries constitute an environmental ceiling – what their authors call ‘a safe operating space for humanity’.

That’s a compelling approach to environmental sustainability, but humanity is glaringly absent from the picture. After all, an environmentally safe space could be compatible with appalling poverty and injustice.

So how about combining planetary boundaries together with the concept of social boundaries? (now focus on the inner ring of Fig. 1) Just as there is an environmental ceiling, beyond which lies unacceptable environmental degradation, so too there is a social foundation, below which lies unacceptable human deprivation.

Like what, exactly? Well, human rights provide the cornerstone for defining that, and identifying the top priorities is the focus of debate over renewing the Millennium Development Goals after 2015, and creating Sustainable Development Goals at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) this June. But a first glimpse of 21st century consensus on unacceptable deprivations comes from the issues raised by governments in their submissions to Rio+20: they prioritised 11 dimensions of human deprivation, and so these form the inner ring of Fig 1.

Between the social foundation and the planetary ceiling lies an area – shaped like a doughnut – which is the safe and just space for humanity to thrive in. The 21st century’s unprecedented journey is to move into that space from both sides: to eradicate poverty and inequity for all, within the means of the planet’s limited resources.

Where are we now? Far outside the doughnut

Every compass needs a needle – and boundaries need metrics. Rockström and co. stuck their necks out when they had a first go at quantifying 7 of the 9 planetary boundaries (acknowledging huge uncertainties in doing so) and estimated that three have already been dangerously crossed: on climate change, biodiversity loss, and nitrogen use. 

So I’ve stuck my neck out, too, suggesting indicators for 8 of the 11 social boundaries. Humanity is falling far below the social foundation on each one, as depicted in Fig. 2. Take food, for example: 13% of people in the world are undernourished – that 13% is represented by the blue gap below the social foundation. Likewise, 21% of people live in income poverty and an estimated 30% don’t have access to essential medicines.

Fig 2: Falling far below the social foundation

So that’s the doughnut on a plate: planetary and social boundaries combined to create a safe and just space for humanity to thrive in.

But what does all this bring to the debate? Two messages for starters.

1. Who’s stressing the planet? The rich, not the poor. Bringing everyone alive today above the social foundation need not stress planetary boundaries.

• Food: Meeting the calorie needs of the 13% of the world’s population facing hunger would require just 1% of the current global food supply
• Energy: Bringing electricity to the 19% of people who currently lack it could be achieved with less than a 1% increase in global CO2 emissions
• Income: Ending income poverty for the 21% of people who live on less than $1.25 a day would require just 0.2% of global income.

The real source of stress is excessive resource use by roughly the richest 10% of people in the world – backed up by the aspirations of a rapidly growing global middle class seeking to emulate those unsustainable lifestyles. Thanks to the extraordinary scale of global inequality, widespread poverty coexists with dangerous planetary stress.

2. Growth on trial: The aim of economic development must be to bring humanity into the safe and just space, ending deprivation and keeping within safe levels of resource use. Traditional growth policies have largely failed to deliver on both accounts: far too few benefits of GDP growth have gone to people living in poverty, and far too much of GDP’s rise has been at the cost of degrading natural resources.

If respecting planetary and social boundaries is the objective, then – in wealthy economies at least – the onus falls on those promoting unlimited GDP growth to show that it can bring humanity within the doughnut. The G20, among others, stand for the vision of ‘inclusive and sustainable economic growth’, but no country has yet shown that it is possible. If unlimited GDP growth is to have a place in doughnut economics, it has a long way to go to prove itself.

Any verdicts on the doughnut? Are social boundaries a useful complement to planetary boundaries? Does the combination bring a useful perspective to 21st century challenges? And what is it missing? Take a bite or toss it away – I’d love to know…

Kate Raworth is Senior Researcher at Oxfam GB. Download the full Discussion Paper: A Safe and Just Space for Humanity: can we live within the doughnut? A discussion paper does not necessarily represent Oxfam policy, but is intended to encourage public debate, in this case, in the run-up to the UN conference on sustainable development (Rio+20) in June.

And here’s Kate talking through her Big Idea:

Three top books on Innovation: what lessons for development agencies?

So since we are always being told to be more innovative (has anyone ever asked you to be less innovative?) I thought I’d see what some innovation gurus have to say. I could pretend this is part of my New Year’s Resolution to read more books and fewer papers, but I’d be lying– I read these last summer and never got round to writing it up.  The three are Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: the natural history of innovation and John Kay: Obliquity: Why our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly.

My favourite was Tim Harford, who provides an eclectic mix of incredibly readable stories and convincing argument. He shows the dangers of sclerosis with a discussion of the US military in Vietnam:

“When the US Army faced the ‘disruptive innovation’ of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, there was great reluctance to accept that it had changed the nature of the game, making obsolete the Army’s hard-won expertise in industrial warfare. As one senior officer said, ‘I’ll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war.’”

That sets the tone for a riveting account of the random-walk quality of economic history – ‘Few company bosses would care to admit it, but the market fumbles its way to success’. Toyota began as a manufacturer of looms.

He buys into markets-as-evolutionary process (see my rave reviews of Eric Beinhocker’s work on this) and sees ‘the evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wild gambles as the best possible way to search for solutions.’ He quotes biochemist Leslie Orgel ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are’ and says ‘formal theory won’t get you nearly as far as an incredibly rapid, systematic process of trial and error.’

In this view, the failure of the Soviet Union is down to the death grip of the Planners – ‘its pathological inability to experiment’. Harford  is also a big critic of planning on issues like climate change – he sees unintended consequences, loopholes and own goals everywhere. Evolution will automatically attack the rules and find their weaknesses.

So what? ‘Adaptive organizations need to decentralize and become comfortable with the chaos of different local approaches and the awkwardness of dissent from junior staff.’ How to do this? Harford comes up with a ‘Three step recipe for successful adapting: try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; make failure survivable, because it will be common; and make sure that you know when you have failed…… distinguishing success from failure, oddly, can be the hardest task of all’

As an example, he holds up up the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as a model funder of innovation, by funding people not projects and minimising the number of strings attached. Subsequent analysis shows HHMI funding generated research that was important, unusual and influential. Unfortunately it is also a rarity – the world lacks ‘the two elements essential to encourage significant innovation in a complex world: a true openness to risky new ideas, and a willingness to put millions or even billions of dollars at risk.’

Johnson covers some of the same ground in more opaque language, giving particular emphasis to openness and connectivity, which he argues ‘may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms… we are often better served by connecting ideas than protecting them.’ He has no time for intellectual property laws that inhibit this connectivity. He ends with some homely, and to my mind rather useful advice:

‘Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent.’ Sounds like a blogger to me…..

John Kay’s is a one-idea book from a prolific popular academic and regular FT columnist.Directness doesn’t work – it leads to the kind of modernist architectural horrors of Le Corbusier or the Soviet planning system or Pol Pot; muddling through, lateral thinking and improvisation are better. Notre Dame was built bit by bit over several centuries – no-one started out with a plan.

‘It is hard to overstate the damage done in the recent past by people who thought they knew more about the world than they really did. The managers and financiers who destroyed great businesses in the unsuccessful pursuit of shareholder value. The architects and planners who believed that buildings could be designed from first principles, that vibrant cities could be drawn on a blank sheet of paper, and that expressways should be driven through the hearts of communities. The politicians who believed they could improve public services by the imposition of multiple targets. Acknowledging the complexity of the systems for which they were responsible and the multiple needs of the individuals who operated these systems would have avoided these errors.’

The books coincide in several respects – a rejection of planning; predictability of linear chains of causation as a figment of planner’s imagination and/or a post hoc justification by those who actually followed their instincts and made sense of it afterwards; a celebration of chance and experimentation, of ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’.

All three books also share a common weakness – they are largely power-free. The evolution of the economy is portrayed as a fair fight between variants (may the best mutant win), rather than taking place on a landscape heavily tilted towards those with power and control, even if they are less fit. That absence of a sense of politics and power may also explain Tim Harford’s fondness of the charter city idea – if it’s an experiment, it must be good.

A lot of this strikes me as highly relevant to development work. They argue that we should shift  to a model of experimental pilots + triage that spots the promising ones early on, and kills off the failures (a bit like our accountability programme in Tanzania), but as Steven Johnson argues in his book, we would need to learn to ‘fail faster’ – one of the mantras of the internet startup world. And NGOs just aren’t set up to fail like the private sector is: last word to Harford: ‘The acceptability, even desirability of failure lies at the heart of capitalism – the corporation, limited liability and bankruptcy laws.’

Any further thoughts on their relevance (or otherwise) to our work?

And for those of you who don’t read books, here’s a 3m presentation from Tim Harford, followed by Steven Johnson doing one of those brilliant RSAnimate videos

An optimistic take on fragile states

Nice to see some upbeat–but-expert thinking on fragile states, which are all well on their way to becoming the biggestheadache/impossible problem in development. By the way, has anyone realized that the acronym for Fragile and Conflict Affected States is …… FRACAS? If not, remember you read it here first……

Anyway, back to the optimism. This is from a new paper by Laurence Chandy of the Brookings Institution, Ten Years of Fragile States: What Have We Learned?

Chandy reflects on what has changed since the World Bank established a taskforce to examine how to deal with what were then called LICUS (Low-Income Countries Under Stress). They don’t call them that any more, not least because many of them (Pakistan, Yemen) are middle income. But this group of countries suffers from name changes and constantly evolving typologies more than any other. (Another aside, DFID at one point created a ‘poor performers’ team, and then wondered why no-one wanted to work for it…..). That matters because it affects aid flows, which are twice as volatile for FRACAS as aid flows to stable countries.

And here’s his optimistic conclusions:

“Today, there is mounting evidence that aid to fragile states can work. Furthermore, with less than a dozen stable low-income countries left, donors no longer have the same excuse for overlooking the needs of the 30 or more fragile states. These needs loom ever larger. Over just the past six years, the share of the world’s poor living in fragile states is estimated to have doubled from 20 to 40 percent. No fragile state has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal.

Nevertheless, donors still face a difficult decision in determining whether to aid fragile states, and if so, by how much. Achieving results in these settings almost certainly requires greater expertise and time, which translate into higher cost and risk. A successful start to the second decade of fragile states policy would see donors redesign their resource allocation models to capture this reality. New models should:

•             Recognize that fragility does not end with graduation to middle-income status. Where donors make special allocations to low-income fragile states compared to low-income stable countries, an equivalent policy should be employed to distinguish allocations between fragile and stable middle-income countries.

•             Allow for more stable financing to fragile states. Donors should avoid trying to pin a trajectory on each partner country and instead concentrate on mitigating the instability inherent to fragile states by providing stable aid flows, supported by improved approaches to risk management. Aid commitments should be embedded in country compacts, which can serve as a useful tool for stabilizing flows.

•             Reassess the cost-effectiveness of aiding fragile states. There is an enormous potential for aid to help fragile states if it is properly designed and managed. This potential needs to be weighed up against an accurate sense of the costs of aid delivery. The effectiveness of aid flows to fragile states could be enhanced further by establishing a more systematic approach to documenting and learning from development interventions. This effort should be carried out under the supervision of the g7+ and focus on interventions with significant scope and scale.”

The g7+, by the way, is a group of 19 FRACAS that has organized itself to lobby for improved aid – a big improvement on donors and others speaking for such states in their absence. Check out its website, which houses this  slightly weird 3 minute youtube pitch to the recent Busan aid conference. And here’s the Broker’s scorecard of how Busan performed on FRACAS – not great, it seems.

Crises in a new world order: challenging the humanitarian project

Ed Cairns, Oxfam’s senior policy adviser on this kind of thing, introduces a big rethink of Oxfam’s humanitarian work

When it comes to humanitarian crises, Oxfam specializes in the appropriate acronym of ‘WASH’.In 2011, hundreds of Oxfam staff delivered water and sanitation and other relief to millions of people afflicted by drought, floods or earthquakes. But in much of the world, a growing proportion of our humanitarian aid flows through local organisations, and the proportion is rising rapidly. In West Africa, it went from 1% to 30% of Oxfam GB’s humanitarian spend between 2003-4 and 2010-11. And other Oxfam affiliates have had a long history of supporting local humanitarian organisations. The expulsion of Oxfam GB and other INGOs from Darfur in 2009 is a well-worn story. Rather less so is Oxfam America’s continuing support for local organisations in Darfur, who are struggling with limited funds, political pressures and conflict.

Many have talked recently of a ‘new business model’ for humanitarian action that values Southern capacity more than ever before. At the end of 2011, the President of MERCY Malaysia – a major INGO based in Kuala Lumpur– argued that ‘a greater role for Southern, national and local NGOs’ is the only way to respond to increasing disasters, and the realisation that climate change adaptation, preparedness and risk reduction are as ‘humanitarian’ as immediate relief. He might have added that traditional Western humanitarian donors, gripped by economic crisis, are not likely to continue to increase their funding to match a rising tide of humanitarian need.

For all these reasons, the centre of humanitarian gravity is moving Southwards. That shift is well under way in many countries. In Bangladesh, the government provided 52 per cent of the response to 2009’s Cyclone Aila (with 37 per cent from INGOs and nine per cent from the UN). Oxfam entirely welcomes that shift, but recognises the challenges – ethical and practical – as it gradually becomes more of a ‘humanitarian broker’, supporting others more than doing aid itself. Its latest briefing paper – Crises in a new world order: challenging the humanitarian project – sets out both sides of that coin.

Building up capacity is a long-term challenge.  It doesn’t free humanitarian agencies of the imperative to act fast when disasters strike in the meantime. In December, tropical storm Sendong killed more than 1000 people in the Philippines. Prompted by a previous disaster – typhoon Ketsana – two years earlier, the Philippines government had been doing a lot to improve its capacity. And Oxfam, in parallel, had seen itself increasingly as a supporter of local NGOs, rather than a direct provider. But when a storm strikes in an area where the local government is totally unprepared, as it did in December in Mindanao, Oxfam found itself having to do more than it planned.

Equally, the traditional Western humanitarian’s tendency to assume that the local response will be slow and ineffective is usually wrong. National Red Cross and Red Crescent societies alone reached 45 million people in 2009. Evaluations of crises up to Haiti’s 2010 earthquake have regularly found that international donors and agencies have paid too little attention to local knowledge and action. As one of my colleagues in Oxfam America asked, “Why is the humanitarian community able to improve in some areas but not this?”

Even in difficult circumstances local civil society can deliver results. In Ga’an Libah in Somaliland, a local organization supported pastoralists whose livelihoods were collapsing in the face of drastic

environmental degradation. With support from Oxfam, they helped the pastoralists construct stone terraces to minimize water runoff, and helped bring about the revival of grazing management and reforestation. The livestock grew heavier and more numerous, and the pastoralists used the new income to send more children to school.

But working in effective states with significant capacity and a determination to help all their people

is one thing. Working in fragile states or those that are seen as illegitimate or corrupt will always be fraught with difficulty. All of this varies case by case, but in general terms, the different models of states and international responses can be summarized by this table, which Oxfam developed in 2011 to help guide its humanitarian programming.

None of this is easy. And as the new paper makes clear, Oxfam has not always found it easy either. But there is no turning back. The humanitarian world will never again be the Western-dominated thing it once was. INGOs will be as vital as ever. But their greatest responsibility will be to help build Southern capacity. And their greatest challenge will be to do that while responding to the new crises that don’t wait for that capacity to be built up.

Here’s Ed talking about the paper:

World Bank tests Cash on Delivery; evil lawyers; Uganda land grab progress; Brautigam v the Economist; African taxes >> aid; Stuff ex-pat aid workers say: links I liked

The World Bank dips a $1bn-a-year toe in the water of Cash on Delivery aid, with its new Programme for Results (which rather begs the question what are the other programmes for……)

“[Gibson Dunn Crutcher] immediately went on the offensive, beginning a tireless campaign to unearth evidence to try to discredit the plaintiffs and exonerate their client.” American Lawyer magazine explains why it named Gibson its top litigation department of the year. The client in question is oil giant Texaco-Chevron; those pesky plaintiffs are 30,000 Amazonian residents who have been living among Texaco-Chevron’s waste for 40 years and are now trying to take Chevron to court. The US is just a different place. Oxfam’s Chris Jochnick updates on the Chevron case. Texaco-Chevron has 39 different law firms working on the case.

Progress on the Uganda land grab covered previously. At the request of the grabbed communities, the World Bank’s Office of the Compliance Adviser/Ombudsman(CAO) has announced it will launch an independent investigation.

Deborah Brautigam destroys the China-in-Africa bit of an Economist survey of ‘state capitalism’

‘On average, Africa has managed to raise an estimated $441 in taxes per person per year while receiving $41 per person annually in aid’ – that’s got to be good news.

Oh dear, I think I’m about to get into trouble again, but ’sxxx ex pat aid workers say’ is worth it. Just for the record, I have never met anyone who resembles either of these two…….

Why seasonality is back and that’s a good thing

A Welsh friend of mine once came back home after a long stint in Nicaragua. A mate picked him up at the airport and on the long drive back to Cardiff, Alun turned to him and asked ’so, how’s the harvest been this year?’ His friend looked at him as if he’d gone mad. Which brings us seamlessly to this guest post on seasonality from John Magrath……

Seasonality describes the fact that rural livelihoods in developing countries undergo regular, predictable, and often massive, changes according to the pattern of the seasons. In particular, the annual rains bring about – or bring to a peak – all sorts of effects – most of them adverse if you are poor. These include starvation, energy depletion, increases in sickness, migration, shortage of money and going into debt.

It was a regular theme in development studies from the late 1970s – when it was pioneered by the great Robert Chambers at the UK’s Institute of Development Studies – to the 1990s. Then it rather fell from favour. Now a new book, Seasonality, Rural Livelihoods and Development, the result of a conference at IDS in 2009, aims to revive the topic.

I declare an interest, as the book opens with a scene setter of a chapter written by myself and Steve Jennings about the growing influence of climate change. It draws on Oxfam research to describe how farmers in many countries perceive that their seasons are changing, throwing up new challenges.

Advocates for taking seasonality more seriously argue that, by showing how “normal” seasonal vulnerabilities underpin tip-overs into crisis when the weather is particularly bad, seasonality can be a powerful argument for proper planning to even out seasonal variations and enable people to have “a-seasonal” livelihoods.  Furthermore, seasonality affects every aspect of people’s lives, and understanding the complex and ratcheted (to use Robert Chambers’  favourite word) interactions enables one to intervene holistically, rather than sectorally.

But seasonality has always been neglected by governments and by aid workers because they don’t tend to live in rural communities – especially not during the rains. There are urban,  “tarmac” and  dry season travel biases in their understanding.

Then on top of those, in the 1990s interest faded away, largely because of the precipitate decline in public investment in agriculture generally.  With that went the abolition of many of those counter-seasonal measures that actually were in place (though not always effective), like grain reserves.

Many things have changed since the 70s: the growth of towns, communications that reduce isolation, the spread of social protection systems such as India’s employment guarantee schemes.  But the seasons have not gone away. Stephen Devereux, Rachel Sabates-Wheeler, Richard Longhurst and the other authors argue that understanding and building seasonality into policies is still relevant – in fact maybe more relevant than ever as climate change bites. And that still isn’t happening; they say that disaggregated data on seasonal poverty is still hard to find, and one of their recommendations is that poverty statistics should reflect seasonal variation, instead of reporting a single poverty headcount for a given year.

They also make the point that seasonality isn’t, fundamentally, about “blaming the weather”; rather, the weather exposes fundamental inequalities in resource distribution – that is, social injustice. But maybe the fact that seasonality is triggered by weather has made campaigners for social justice wary of embracing the subject and contributes to its neglect.

As I say, I declare an interest because I think that seasonality is one of those things that is staring us in the face so closely that we don’t see it properly; we take it for granted as “just another thing poor people have to put up with” when it could illuminate our understanding, analysis and practice. But am I right? Or do people working in development say a) we recognise seasonality but actually, we don’t see it as particularly important compared to other influences on poor people’s lives, or other ways into helping them tackle their problems? Or b), we think it is important but we think that it is already incorporated sufficiently into planning for long-term development, humanitarian response and, in particular, social protection initiatives?

The Democratic Developmental State: Goal, Utopia, or somewhere in between?

There’s nothing more disturbing than belatedly realizing that you’ve written two papers in close succession that contradict each other. Does it make you an open-minded liberal, or just a confused dimwit? Judge for yourself based on these two papers: one, an internal paper for Oxfam, tries to capture and update the argument of From Poverty to Power that development arises from the interaction of active citizens and effective states. The other, a chapter for the latest Commonwealth Secretariat annual  ‘Commonwealth Good Governance’ is much more cautious about the difficulties in achieving a ‘democratic developmental state’, born of precisely that combination. I suppose you could argue that they represent the clash between respectively optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect. Or that I’m really out of my depth. Either way, it’s been niggling away at me for years. See what you think and if anyone can shed light on how to reconcile the will and the intellect, bring it on.

Excerpt from How Development Happens

‘Why focus on effective states? Because history shows that no country has prospered without a state than can actively manage the development process. The extraordinary transformations of countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Botswana, or Mauritius have been led by states that ensure health and education for all, and which actively promote and manage the process of economic growth. After twenty years of erosion by deregulation, one-size-fits-all ‘structural adjustment programmes’, and international trade and aid agreements, many states are weak or absent. But there are no shortcuts; the road to development lies through the state, and neither aid nor NGOs can take its place.

Why active citizenship? Because people working together to determine the course of their own lives, fighting for rights and justice in their own societies, are critical in holding states, private companies, and others to account. As an integral part of ‘development as freedom’, active citizenship also has inherent merits: people living in poverty must have a voice in deciding their own destiny, rather than be treated as passive recipients of welfare or government action.

True development emerges from the interaction of effective states and active citizens. Economic growth is not enough if it comes at the expense of other freedoms. The system – governments, judiciaries, parliaments, and companies – cannot deliver development merely by treating people as ‘objects’ of government or other action. Rather, people must be recognised as ‘subjects’, conscious of and actively demanding their rights, before true development In its full sense can come about.’

Excerpt from ‘The democratic developmental state: Wishful thinking or direction of travel?

“We are left with an unpalatable conclusion. While effective states, in the Commonwealth as elsewhere, are historically a sine qua non for economic development, measured in terms of income per capita, active citizenship and democracy are equally essential to achieve development in the wider sense – an accumulation of freedoms ‘to do and to be’ (Sen, 1999).

But there are likely to be trade-offs between these two goals, even though its nature and extent is probably changing over time, in response to cultural shifts on attitudes to human rights, technological changes in access to information, decentralisation and the partial encroachment into national political spaces of international governance norms. High levels of growth are more likely to be achieved with the sacrifice of some freedoms, and vice versa.

Yet, at the very least, it seems plausible that the transition from an exclusive to an inclusive state can occur earlier in a country’s development trajectory than in the past. Aid can help or hinder this process (and most likely do both). Moreover, on this occasion, the author hopes his analysis proves unduly pessimistic, and that Mkandawire’s fiery optimism carries the day:

The experience elsewhere is that developmental states are social constructs consciously brought about by political actors and societies. As difficult as the political and economic task of establishing such states may be, it is within the reach of many countries struggling against the ravages of poverty and underdevelopment. The first few examples of developmental states were authoritarian. The new ones will have to be democratic,and it is encouraging that the two most cited examples of such ‘democratic developmental states’ are both African – Botswana and Mauritius (Mkandawire, 2001).”

Any thoughts?