Avoid economists; SA’s condom boom; will Holland chop aid this week?; scientists v policy makers v pastoralists on climate change; throwing rocks at Kony 2012 in Uganda: links I liked

Lawrence Haddad (an economist, btw) reckons the next World Bank pres should not be an economist and Urban Dictionary defines ‘economist’  in a pretty unfriendly way – if you are one, probably best not to click……

“National surveys show the proportion of young South African men aged 16-24 who reported using a condom at their last sexual encounter leaping from 20% in 1999 to 75% in 2009. This, more than an equally dramatic rise in anti-retroviral treatment, is the “most significant factor” in the fall of new infections [of HIV]”

This week the Netherlands’ aid budget (which has already been cut) goes on the block in the government’s spending cuts negotiations. Click here if you want to see why cutting aid is a bad idea (and do a bit of lobbying via twitter).

ODI’s Tristan Stubbs discusses the ‘chaotic conversation’ (try dialogue of the deaf?) between climate scientists and policy makers from a ‘knowledge cafe’ event (what on earth is that? I prefer the greasy spoon variety, myself)

What do Kenya’s pastoralists think is happening to their climate?

The Guardian describes two very contrasting approaches to improving rice yields – ducks paddling in the paddy v high tech transformation of the rice plant’s method of photosynthesis

More on Kony 2012 from Al Jazeera, which is rapidly eclipsing all other news channels on development. AJ has set up a map of Ugandans’ texted votes for or against the video (they don’t seem to like it much in Kampala, but the North is more divided). But what happened when the video was screened in Northern Uganda? Puzzlement turned to anger and rock-throwing [h/t Tom Murphy].

And h/t to Matt at Aid Thoughts for posting this extraordinary Invisible Children Kony 2012 video – the high school dance version. Watch til at least 2 minutes and you will never be able to take them seriously again, promise. Sublimely ridiculous. And I checked, it isn’t a spoof.

Agricultural policy, poverty and the role of the state: the OECD responds

Today Jonathan Brooks author of the OECD’s new book on agricultural policy and poverty reduction, responds to my rather critical review. (For footie fans, the photo behind him is taken in a Brazilian bar, and celebrates the lobbing of the English goalkeeper David Seaman by Ronaldinho in the 2002 World Cup)

Duncan, Thanks for this review, and the opportunity to reply.

I wouldn’t make quite so much of the counterpoint with Ha-Joon Chang’s book, as we at OECD would concur on the general need for countries to be able to adopt agricultural strategies that are tailored to their structural circumstances and stage of economic development, and would agree that there is no one-size-fits-all development template.

In policy terms, our main point is that direct interventions in markets – be that through subsidies for seed and fertiliser or price guarantees – are not ideal in the long term, for precisely the reasons you quote. In that sense, you’re right that we see a narrow role for government in directing markets. However, we see a potentially much broader role in getting those markets to function properly. It is perhaps worth adding, for readers not familiar with OECD, that while we are direct in our policy advice, we have no formal powers to limit a country’s “wiggle room”.

In terms of broader strategy, I think there were more areas of agreement at the meeting than of controversy:

Because smallholder farmers dominate the rural economies of poorer countries, and because many of them are poor, raising their productivity is critical to poverty reduction strategies. I fully accept Michael Lipton’s point that smallholder farmers are operating efficiently given the constraints that they currently face. The key challenge is to ease those constraints. You can’t do many things better than build a road that enables the farmer to get her product – and the majority of them are women – to market.

Equally, I would endorse the view that there is a need to reverse decades of underinvestment in agriculture. The good news is that the potential for that investment to pay dividends is better than it has been for many years. High food prices have imposed real hardship on poor consumers, and on the large numbers of farm households who are net buyers of food. Yet our current Agricultural Outlook, which we produce jointly with FAO, projects that prices will remain strong for the foreseeable future. In the long-term, that has to be an opportunity for developing country farmers. For decades we have complained about the effects of low food prices on developing country farmers, and it is worth remembering that there were 850 million undernourished people in the world in 2006 – when world food prices were at an all-time low.

But our main message – and I think the discussion could have picked up on this better – is that focusing on agriculture is not enough. All countries that have developed and raised incomes from a few hundred dollars per capita per year to a few thousand dollars per year have developed their agricultural sectors, but they have also diversified their economies and created better paid jobs outside farming.

Much is made of the need for a Green Revolution in Africa, to follow the Green Revolution in Asia. This is absolutely necessary. If agriculture is the heartbeat of the economy and the heart is not working properly then you need to fix it. Yet forty years after its Green Revolution, much of India’s rural population remains mired in poverty and more than 40% of children are underweight. Although India’s economy is growing rapidly, and generating unprecedented wealth, agriculture has been effectively excluded. Indeed, the sector accounts for nearly two-thirds of all employment, yet commands just 16% of national income. And India is not unique: two-thirds of the world’s poor live in middle income countries where rural incomes languish. What we were suggesting – and this is something that agriculture specialists often accept grudgingly – is that in addition to raising agricultural productivity we need to hook rural populations into wider engines of growth. If we seek to generalise from the circumstances of the poorest agriculture-dependent economies, such as Ethiopia and Malawi where there are few sources of potential employment outside agriculture, then we risk missing a vital route to resolving the global poverty problem.

Steve Wiggins’ point is an interesting one. The difficult question – and we don‘t pretend to have all the answers here – is when do the investments that he describes smooth the transformation of the sector and when do they impede it? The package of investments he outlines – with roles for government, the private sector, donors and NGOs – can help broaden agricultural growth. But it is important that new development projects can survive the expiration of funding and that they do not deter farmers from seizing opportunities elsewhere.

To sum up, we need a broader strategy that widens opportunities both within and outside farming, and creates diversified rural economies, so that rural incomes catch up and we do not witness distress migration to squalid shanty towns.

I’ve never been to a Trotskyist meeting or belonged to a religious sect, but I agree that some of the discussion became a bit esoteric. I think that reflects the propensity of agricultural economists (and I confess to being a member of that particular sect) to become embroiled in technical questions such as the optimal farm size, and in some cases to view any wider discussion of multi-sectoral dynamics as somehow “anti-agriculture”. Agricultural development is necessary – but it is not sufficient.

OECD versus Ha-Joon Chang on agricultural policy and poverty reduction: I’m with Chang

A recent launch discussion at Chatham House (but mercifully on the record) on the new OECD book, Agricultural Policies for Poverty Reduction, (powerpoint presentation by author Jonathan Brooks here - keep clicking til it comes up) provides a nice counterpoint to the FAO study discussed over the last couple of days.  The contrast is pretty striking, especially on the role of the state, where Ha-Joon Chang’s focus on policy space and the virtues of pluralism is replaced with a much more grudging acceptance of deviations from ‘sound policies’, which should preferably be closed down as a country starts to develop.

The OECD line (and it is pretty linear, in its view of history) is deeply influenced by its understandable dislike of US and European farm policies, where it advocates a pretty minimalist role for the state of tackling market failures at source, providing public goods like roads and functioning legal systems and introducing safety nets for those who lose out. But not getting involved in the market directly (so it doesn’t much like the CAP or the US farm bill). It does, however accept that poor countries need a bit more wiggle room:

‘In low income countries, however, it has been suggested that – because of weak institutions and endemic market failures – market interventions might also be warranted. Price support, price stabilisation, and input subsidies have been proposed as ways of addressing short-term objectives with respect to incomes, poverty and food security, and of promoting long-term economic development.

In the short-term, price policies provide an easy lever for government, but are inefficient at addressing income concerns. Price support for food products is a blunt instrument because, among the poor, there are net sellers and net buyers of food – in many poor countries, the majority of farm households are net buyers. Price stabilisation (as opposed to price support) can limit the impact of adverse shocks on producers and consumers, but often proves to be fiscally unsustainable. A preferable option for the poor – both producers and consumers – is targeted social programmes, including cash transfers, although these may be difficult to implement in the poorest economies. At the same time, agricultural investments can improve farmers‘ resilience to risk.

Over the long-term, market interventions treat the symptoms of market failure and underdevelopment, rather than the causes. Price stabilisation can provide a more stable investment climate, but thwarts the development of private risk management, and can export instability onto world markets. Input subsidies can redress failings such as the under-development of infrastructure, missing markets for credit and inputs, and a lack of knowledge of the benefits of using improved seed and fertiliser, but can impede the development of private markets. In both cases, the benefits and costs of intervention need to be judged relative to the benefits and costs of tackling the underlying problems directly.

Finally, there are dangers in using market interventions to address multiple economic and social objectives. Such programmes can become an easy target for interest groups, outliving their original justification and becoming a budgetary millstone. An important priority is that expenditures on market interventions should not crowd out essential investments in support of long-term agricultural development.’

This is all reminiscent of the parallel discussion on industrial policy between those (like Dani Rodrik and Ha-Joon Chang - he does get around) who argue that policy space and pluralism are being harmfully infringed by an array of advice, trade and investment agreements, economic orthodoxy etc and those at the World Bank or in G8 governments who go for the ‘grudging acceptance of a tiny bit of wiggle room’ line. Ha-Joon Chang’s analysis  finds a much wider range of paths to success on ag than on industry, producing a more pluralist, less statist conclusion. But the minimalists (grudging wigglists?) sound remarkably similar on both issues.

The launch meeting had some fine interventions by ag policy gurus like Michael Lipton and Steve Wiggins. Lipton has little time for all these general debates and says if you want to understand agriculture you have to get into the details of farming – water, seeds, fertilisers, soils, harvest, markets and all the rest. He sees smallholders as very efficient in what matters, like managing labour and output per hectare and believes this underpins the drift to small farms in developing countries (the opposite of what is happening in the OECD). Smallholder ag’s biggest problem is dealing with the market, which is where the state and aid donors need to help out.

Wiggins expanded on his thoughts by email (as I hadn’t quite got them right first time around):

“Sort out the rural investment climate, provide rural public goods and about 10% of smallholders will be ready to go … but there’s another 25% or so [numbers vary by place, obviously, but they give a sense of scale: they're probably right plus or minus 10%] who may need a bit more from the state, NGO or socially responsible corporation, if they are to succeed.

What’s ‘a bit more’? Access to credit, technical assistance, help with marketing, etc. — links to supply chains where many smallholders are initially at a disadvantage since they are small fry living remote from cities, sometimes not speaking the same language as the bigger fish, etc. — again it will vary with circumstance.

The big point is this: we need to strive to bring that extra 25% into agricultural development, so we have around one third of smallholders going forward as largely full-time farmers, with decent livelihoods. That then allows a gentle agrarian transition — the other 2/3rds of the rural population can then either increasingly earn their livelihoods from the non-farm economy, or move to towns and cities — many of them still keeping a part-time farm, that with time will increasingly become a hobby farm and a country home as they gradually lend, rent, or sell their land to their full-time farming neighbours.

The alternative, in which up to 90% of the rural population are trying to gain most of their livelihoods off the land would be far less gentle, with rural areas resembling those of England before the 1870s — desperate poverty, many landless labourers struggling on minimal incomes, etc.”

I think I was witnessing a polite academic battering of the OECD’s arguments, but I’m not really sure (witness Steve needing to put me straight) – ag economists have been arguing over this stuff for decades, and speak in code: a single word (e.g. ‘productivity’) can be the signal for a sudden spurt of irritation and antler-locking. Trying to make sense of what’s going on is a bit like watching arguments among Trotskyists or religious sects (cue Life of Brian clip).

Limits to history’s lessons: What’s missing from Ha-Joon Chang’s take on agricultural policy? Guest post by Sally Baden

Sally Baden, Oxfam’s women and agriculture specialist, takes another look at the new book on agricultural policy reviewed yesterday

After some lobbying from Duncan, I sat down to read Ha-Joon Chang’s book in January. Sadly reading weighty tomes on agricultural policy is something I don’t have the luxury of doing very often since my younger days as a student of agricultural economics. But, in this instance, I was glad in to do so, having greatly enjoyed some of HJC’s more popular works. 

In many ways,  I share Duncan’s enthusiasm about the timeliness and relevance of this book and its challenge to the ‘New Conventional Wisdom’ (NCW). I’m not sure there is as much consensus around the NCW as HJC’s device suggests (perhaps it’s a bit of a ‘straw man?’). Wasn’t there a mea culpa around the 2008 World Development Report (WDR) for the Bank’s earlier overzealous promotion of market liberalisation as the solution to agricultural development?    

But hell, if straw men help to shake more people out of complacency and lazy orthodoxy, the need could not be greater. As with the financial crisis, the food price crisis has exposed some critical failures and fatal consequences – for some – of policy makers’ thinking about developing country agriculture.  Even hardened market believers are – to some degree anyway – being forced kicking and screaming into considering (if not actively implementing) more interventionist approaches.   

The historical evidence underlines the degree of hypocrisy in now industralised countries’ prescriptions to others. Their agricultural development has relied heavily on state intervention and – huge subsidies and other support that – at $252 billion in 2009 – dwarfed the level of official aid to developing county agriculture – only $9.8 billion in the same year.   

But is the main reason why developing countries are not being more interventionist due to the NCW? While it may be true that the intellectual influence of the ‘NCW’ is pervasive among developing country policy makers, this standpoint perhaps understates the role of national actors themselves. At the same time, the wider global context – and the systemic challenges which this poses to agricultural development (notably liberalised trade; climate change, global market volatility, degradation of natural resources, the spread of pandemics) are clearly not amenable to national public policy interventions alone but require global public policy responses. 

The analysis and examples focus on a range of policies within the agricultural sector itself (with some passing reference to education and trade policies). While recognising that not all of these are relevant or applicable today, there is nevertheless a primary argument that a basic ‘menu’ exists from which technically informed choices could be made.  This leaves the wider forces at play largely unexplored. 

The account is relatively light on the political economy of why particular policies might be favoured – or be feasible – in different contexts and how changes in the type of agricultural public policy or reforms being applied have come about  – or might take place in future.

The NCW and associated undermining of ‘policy space’ in agriculture in many instances comes from wider macroeconomic policies or international trade agreements. At national level there is often a lack of policy coherence e.g. between land policies and investment prerogatives. While smallholder land rights may exist in theory, in practice governments often over-ride the needs and rights of specific populations when they want to pull in large investors. 

There is allusion to the weak power of agricultural ministries (in the face of finance ministries – a tendency only strengthening in these days of austerity in the north) but the wider issue of power and politics in public policy formulation and implementation is not very explicit. While there are some encouraging tendencies here, such as decentralisation of decisions and resources to local governments that may be more responsive to small farmers’ needs; democratisation and the spread of mobile technologies; the enhanced capacities of small scale farmers to organise and share information – there remains a wide gulf between government bureaucracies and poor rural populations, particularly the more marginalised groups among these. 

Political elites are not generally either representative of, or hugely responsive to, rural populations and as urbanisation proceeds apace this seems unlikely to change. Within organised agricultural lobbies, small farmers’ voices are frequently excluded or submerged, particularly where medium and large scale farmers are a significant part of the landscape as in much of Latin America and southern Africa. Getting the voices of rural women heard by policy makers in ways that actually effect change is a struggle which is still in its infancy,  at least in Africa. 

And on some key issues history may have less to tell us about public policy on developing country agriculture going forward: 

• The fundamental idea – core to Oxfam’s GROW campaign – that we are operating in a world of resource constraints – and particularly natural resource constraints – is largely absent from the book. Specifically, there is almost no mention of the threats to the sustainabilty of agriculture and thereby to food security posed by climate change or peak oil. Instead we have a rather ‘modernisation-as-usual’ paradigm underpinned by support for subsidies for chemical fertilisers as a means of policy intervention (rather than, say, incentives to adopt more agro-ecological approaches).  Governments need to prioritise policies, investments, and technologies which sustain the natural resource base on which small farmers and hungry populations depend, and – with international financing – focus investment resources in adaptation to climate change on small scale, vulnerable farmers.    
• HJC’s book does not at all address how state policies as well as market systems have often acted to marginalise particular social groups – especially women farmers. For example, cooperative laws and practices that exclude women as farmers in their own right, thus reinforcing patriarchal social norms; extension and other services that don’t reach women; entrenched social and legal inequalities in land rights. The huge issue of unpaid work performed by rural women due to gendered social norms and lack of basic services is not addressed, or the – related – gender gap in agricultural productivity. Looking forward, as the Committee on World Food Security proposed last October, Goverments need to promote women’s rights and recognition as farmers and enact changes that redistribute services and resources towards women smallholder farmers, in particular those which alleviate time poverty. At the same time they need to better understand processes of demographic and social change in rural areas and how these will affect the future of agricultural systems.
• We have moved from a situation of a lack of both public and private investment in agriculture to private funds actively seeking opportunities in developing country agriculture. But quite often this investment is driven by biofuels mandates, lack of other investment opportunities, the promise of increasing land values or by food-importing countries’ and companies’ concern with security of supplies of food and commodities, rather than the concerns of long-term agricultural development. Governments need to responsibly promote and regulate this investment with an eye to its consequences for small–scale farmers and national food security. European governments need to stop providing indirect incentives for landgrabbing and developing country governments need to provide adequate safeguards – for both people and the environment – from predatory or speculative investment. 

Overall, though, HJC’s latest book is to be commended for putting smallholder agriculture at the centre of the policy debate. And it brings into the spotlight in fascinating detail the lesser known story of the heterogeneous range of agricultural policies and institutional innovations tried in both developed and developing countries. Combining such rich historical analysis with deeper understanding of current challenges, opportunities, trends and constraints, can also help us to imagine complex and diverse future scenarios in our food and agricultural system. We can indeed hope (as HJC does) that it will ‘free the imagination’ of developing country policy makers, researchers and students. An invaluable resource – as long as history remains the servant of new thinking, not the master.

What agricultural policies worked in today’s successful economies? Important new book from Ha-Joon Chang

OK, time for a series of posts on agricultural policy. Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan (as well as friend) of Ha-Joon Chang. Routledge recently published a book edited by Ha-Joon that I think is very important indeed. Unfortunately, it’s only come out in very expensive hardback (a snip at £85), and the FAO, which funded it, is not known for its publicity machine, so here’s some background and excerpts.

‘Public Policy and Agricultural Development’ aims to do on agricultural policy what Ha-Joon’s 2002 book ‘Kicking Away the Ladder’ did on industrial policy, namely reclaim the lessons of history to refute the ideas of the Washington Consensus and instead suggest a much more activist role for the state (although its conclusions on ag are less statist than Ha-Joon’s work on industrial policy in books like Kicking Away the Ladder).

The book builds on detailed case studies of 11 developed countries in their earlier stages of development and the experiences of 10 developing and transition economies in the last half century. It presents six detailed case studies of agricultural policy in the last half century in two Latin American countries (Chile and Mexico), two African countries (Ethiopia and Ghana), and two Asian countries (India and Vietnam).

It covers a huge range of ag policy issues, including land policy (land tenure reform and land quality improve¬ment), knowledge policy (research, extension, education, and information), credit policy (specialized banks and agricultural credit co-operatives), physical inputs policy (irrigation, transport, electricity, and divisible inputs such as fertilizer, seeds, and farm machinery), policies intended to increase farm income stability (price stabilization measures, insurances, and trade protection), and policies intended to improve agricultural marketing and processing.

The core message is that ‘despite distinctive country-specific issues, agricultural policy challenges that confront countries at earlier stages of economic development, today and in the past, are remarkably similar across countries….. today’s rich countries all grappled with landlessness, fragmentation of holdings, lack of irrigation and other rural infrastructure, backward technologies, limited availability of credit to small farmers, excessive price fluctuations, limited availability and poor quality of farm inputs (especially fertilizers), poor warehousing and marketing facilities (which often force farmers to sell at the wrong time and wrong prices), food insecurity, and trade shocks.”

This means that there is a lot that countries can learn from other experiences, both historical and contemporary’. It frees our “policy imagination” by showing that the range of policies and institutions that have produced positive outcomes for agricultural development has been much wider than any particular ideological position – be it the pre-1980s statist one or the pro-market ‘New Conventional Wisdom’ of the Washington Consensus (NCW) – would admit. It also shows that the willingness to experiment with new policies and institutions, and the willingness to learn from other countries’ successes and improve upon their solutions, were important in all agricultural success stories.

‘Rethinking Public Policy in Agriculture’ has the potential to be highly influential in changing the way we think and talk about agriculture and development, reclaiming the lessons of history, and providing a rich set of experiences and ideas for policy and institutional reform. At the core of these experiences is the role of smallholder agriculture, and what governments need to do to help them become a driver of development. At first glance, that fits in very well with some of the core messages of the GROW campaign, but Oxfam’s women and ag specialist, Sally Baden, will address that tomorrow.

And if you’re still hungry for more, here’s a bit more detail from Ha-Joon’s overview chapter.

“Land reform is today supported in only very muted and market-based forms (e.g. no ownership ceilings), but Japan and other East Asian countries had a very successful comprehensive land reform system that included strict landownership ceilings.

State-backed specialized rural banks and credit subsidies are only reluctantly accepted by the NCW, but all of today’s rich countries used these devices. Profit- driven micro-finance is favoured over credit co-ops in the current orthodoxy, but many of today’s rich countries used the latter successfully. Ghana’s rural banks, half owned by the government and half by the local community, are an innovative variation on the theme.

While marketing boards are routinely denounced by the orthodoxy, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, Denmark and some other European countries had benefited from effective export marketing boards.

Co-ops are these days not exactly discouraged, but the central role that they played in the development of agro-processing and marketing in Denmark, Germany, Sweden and Japan are not sufficiently emphasized by the proponents of the NCW.

Price stabilization measures are frowned upon by the NCW, but many of today’s rich countries used them and some had great success with them, such as the USA and Japan. More recently, Chile has used a very effective price stabilization scheme.

Facilities like state-subsidized agricultural insurances, public provision or subsidization of warehousing facilities, and input (e.g. fertilizer) quality control were some of the very effective policies used by today’s rich countries (and some of today’s developing countries, like Chile in the case of state-subsidized insurances). These policies are not actively objected to by today’s orthodoxy, but they are not given sufficient attention.

All these issues suggest that the contents of the agricultural policy tool-box for today’s developing countries will be significantly enriched if history is taken more seriously.

Third, our study reveals that the exact institutional forms of successfully delivering critical needs of the agricultural sector vary enormously across time and space.

There were successes with all forms of delivery in all sorts of countries – public provision (e.g. agricultural research in the USA, extension in the Netherlands, irrigation in Vietnam, seeds in Mexico, rural credit in Germany), private provision (e.g. marketing services through contract farming in Zambia, machinery services in Egypt), private delivery subsidized by the state (e.g. agricultural insurances in Chile, certain types of research in The Netherlands), public– private partnerships (e.g. irrigation in Sweden), cooperatives (e.g. butter and bacon processing and marketing in Denmark, credit co-ops in Germany), state–cooperative partnerships (e.g. rural banks in Ghana, export marketing in Denmark, fertilizer supply in Korea) – which suggests that the standard dichotomy between the public sector and the private sector is crippling our policy imagination.

Likewise, our study reveals cases of failures with many of these delivery modes. Public provision failed miserably in agro-processing in Ghana before the 1980s. Private provision failed spectacularly in fertilizer supply in post-socialist Hungary, agricultural education in post-socialist Ukraine, and extension and fertilizer supply in post-reform Ghana. Sometimes both the public sector and the private sector failed in the same area, suggesting that the causes of the problem lie deeper than ownership form – rural credit in Zambia and seed supply in Ghana. Cooperatives in many developing countries were not very successful, giving them a bad name.

All these examples suggest the importance of a pragmatic approach not hidebound by pro-state or pro-private sector ideologies. Indeed, one important common characteristic of success stories is their willingness to pick solutions that do not neatly fit into ideological boxes.”

Or you can read his summary in the Journal of Peasant Studies.

How can we get better results from working with consultants?

OK this is a bit internal, but I thought it was interesting. We had a great 3 day session in Oxford last week with our rapidly expanding Global Research Team (see right – the prominent fella in the front is Martin Walsh, who’s our Global Research Adviser and your best point of contact if you want to talk to them). They’re a bunch of bright sparks from every corner of the globe with a big challenge: to make sure Oxfam’s thinking, programming and advocacy is informed by the best possible evidence. That means training and supporting other staff (lots of people in Oxfam commission or conduct research), working with partners who commission research, sometimes with Oxfam money, plus (increasingly) seeking research funding [note to all you academics out there – need a partner for your next research proposal with people and contacts on the ground and a strong global communications and advocacy capacity? Please form an orderly queue.....]

So what (other than the general excitement at seeing the team all together) stood out from the conversation (or at least the bit of the meeting which I managed to join)? Above all, just how hard it is to get good results from consultants:  the standard model for development research is to outsource it to specialist researchers. Some of them are local, some are expats, and all of them present a tricky management task. Often they are really expensive, with fees inflated by big aid donors all desperate for quality analysis. Many are unreliable, reporting late and often not sticking to the terms of reference. And then they disappear with all that acquired knowledge and all you have to show for your money is a bit of paper and a Word document.

It doesn’t have to be like that – I know and have worked with some great consultants. We’ve though a lot about this and even published a book on it, but it doesn’t seem to get any easier. So what makes sure you get value for money?First, be clear why you are putting everyone through this. Commission research to answer clear questions, not to avoid decisions – it should never be a substitute for direction, or a means of prevarication.

Second, take time to find the right consultant; ask around; have preliminary chats with possible candidates; don’t just call the person you always use. Insist on competitive bids (although sometimes you have to skip that if a local guru is clearly the right person for the job and will tell you to get lost if you demand lots of CVs and form-filling). As with any appointment, hiring the right person is 90% of the battle.

Third, take time on the briefing: write very specific Terms of Reference, avoiding broad questions like ‘what is the role of agriculture in country X’ that allow them to regurgitate the literature and don’t help you take decisions. Don’t ask them to do your job for you (‘design an advocacy campaign on Y’).

Finally, don’t give them a contract and say ‘come back when you have a draft report’ – you need regular contact to avoid nasty surprises. Here are some top tips from my colleague Kate Raworth:

 As research manager, your attitude should be “eyes on, but hands off” – that is, engaged in the process but not trying to influence the actual findings.

 Is there a possibility for any staff or interns to work alongside the researcher for part of the work, to learn from them, and to get involved in the issues?

 Ask the consultant to present an early draft of the findings to a group of colleagues. Discuss the results and help the researcher keep focused on the key questions (but don’t be tempted to add new questions now – it is not fair to add to the TOR unless you extend the contract).

 When commenting on the first draft of the report, make sure you don’t simply ask a list of new questions. Look back to the TOR: have these original questions been answered? What other specific information is needed to complete the answer?

Do all that, and you’ll often get good results, but not always. We should also explore the alternatives, like hiring staff on short term contracts as a (perhaps) more manageable and cheaper alternative. We need to get better at working with PhDs and other forms of slave labour students – their language and timescale is often just so different from our own that we don’t manage to sort anything out. Has anyone worked out how to collaborate to both sides’ benefit? What about commissioning high-end local journalists instead, given that sometimes everything we commission seems to need a rewrite into more accessible language?

And often we are not even the ones commissioning the research. Instead, we are funding partner NGOs who in turn hire consultants, and there the challenge is even greater, especially with partners who are understandably prickly about funders trying to backseat drive and micromanage.  How to ensure quality control without Oxfam control? Lessons there include being proactive – offer to go and talk to partners, take part in meetings etc. Building relationships with both partners and their consultants is more likely to work than trying to order people about. Accompanying partners or consultants on a field trip can be a great way to build relationships and see what is going on.

And just in case you think I’m laying all the blame on them, a shout out to all those consultants out there: what advice would you give NGOs and agencies  about how to be better research contractors?

And here’s a Dilbert strip about management consultants – not the same thing at all, but who cares?

Blattman on Kony 2012; weird nutrition; good news on poverty; who needs ‘Official Views’?; food modelling; women and blogging; Rodrik v Harvard students; Make Bradford British: Links I liked

‘Let’s suppose for a moment that, on balance, everyone conforms to their worst stereotypes: the badvocacy organization is simplistic, self-aggrandizing, and adolescent; and the academics are so busy being nuanced and obscure that they are useless. (These are not hard things to suppose.) Could, in spite of it all, the KONY 2012 campaign still lead to the right solution? I think the answer might be yes.’ Chris Blattman takes a break from his holiday to shed some light on Kony 2012.

‘There is something odd about the burden of malnutrition. While in hungry households just over a quarter of children under five are too short for their age—a classic symptom of malnutrition—a third are overweight, malnourished in the opposite sense. Tyre is suffering malnutrition and obesity simultaneously.’ The Economist uncovers some striking trends in nutrition in the Middle East (see chart)

Good news on poverty – for the first time ever, it’s falling everywhere (but mainly in China). 6 page backgrounder  from World Bank here. Critique of the numbers from Brookings Institute here [h/t Richard King]

Why must the World Bank, (or big NGOs, I guess) have ‘Official Views’? Fascinating post from Ben Ramalingam

What, you mean modelling might actually get it right sometimes? Tim Wise on Triple Crisis claims to have unlocked the secrets of food prices. Only trouble is his model predicts more price rises and volatility

Abba czar Tom Murphy muses further on women and blogging

Dani Rodrik argues against the ‘fetishization of globalization’ by experimenting on Harvard students……

At last, a progressive(ish) reality TV show – Make Bradford British takes a cross section of one of Britain’s most multicultural and divided cities and sees what happens when they have to live together. Moving and fascinating.

The only interesting question on Kony 2012 – why did it get 60 million hits?

Like everyone else, I watched it, albeit skimming, and was fascinated and appalled. Fascinated (and yes, envious) at the skill of the storytelling. Appalled by just about everything else – the use of his son, the cheesy self righteousness of the tone, the depiction of Africa, the profound ignorance and lack of interest in why things are the way they are. I won’t go on. But virtually every Hollywood film about (or at least set in) the developing world leaves me feeling like that (though the feeling is usually less extreme). In the end, the only question that has stuck with me is why has it been so successful as a viral phenomenon (the 60m will doubtless have gone up by several million the time you read this)? Some thoughts, but I would really like to hear those of others.

First it’s a steroidal version of the ‘recipe for campaign success’ a former boss once gave me – all you need for a good campaign is a problem, a solution and a villain. Kony 2012 delivers that in stark relief – problem: this guy turns kids into killers; solution – take him out; villain – enough said. No mess, no nuance. It’s Robin Hood v the Sheriff of Nottingham and we are all Robin Hood.

Second: it adds dollops of Hollywood feelgood schmaltz to that equation – ‘we can do it!’ ‘Hey, they’re just like us!’ ‘Feel the love!’ ‘Kids are cute!’

Third: celebrity twitter massively ramped up the viral spread (see chart).

Fourth: momentum – famous for being famous.

No idea what the legacy of all this is. Millions of mainly young people around the world have just absorbed a particular, highly distorted story about what is going on in Africa. For many, it will be the first time they have taken an interest in a human rights or development issue. What happens next?  I just hope it sows the seeds of a new generation with a real interest in how Africa and its people can progress, in understanding why the world is like it is, not ‘lots of Africans just kidnap and kill each other, but white people can help.’

Oh and if you want to actually know about Northern Uganda and the LRA, Chris Blattman (who tragically, has been on a junk in the South China Sea when one of his big issues went galactic) provides some reading.

For a minute by minute live blog on the phenomenon, check out the Guardian on Friday, including the thoughts of our protection guy in Goma, Stephen Van Damme:

“What we want to highlight is the lack of development in the area that we’re talking about, where people have a lot of concerns – including the lack of access to hospitals, roads and schools – with this impacting massively on these people,” Van Damme said. “And so, any solution has to look at wider development in the area, and that seems to be where there’s a lot less attention and a lot less funding and political support. The LRA problem goes way beyond a purely military solution and has to tackle all of these matters that basically boil down to a very underdeveloped region.”

But then reality is just too messy and complicated sometimes isn’t it? And no, I’m not linking to it (a futile gesture – it went up by two million while I was writing this - but what the heck).

Do research funders have to chose between rigour, innovation and impact?

Another day, another committee discussing funding for development research (again, no details, sorry). This one produced a really interesting conundrum, perhaps even a trilemma, that suggests it may be impossible to simultaneously achieve three ‘Good Things’ sought by research funders: innovation, rigour and policy impact.

First, rigour: Western research funders do their level best to judge the rival merits of research proposals based on the importance to poverty reduction of the research, and its methodological rigour. They require lots of detail on the methodologies to be employed, rely on anonymous peer review and deliberately ignore or minimise the importance of reputation – whether of the institution or the lead researcher. Only fair, surely? The last thing we want is a nepotistic old boys (and girls) network of decent chaps who all went to college together bunging each other research grants with no questions asked, right?

Up to a point, Lord Copper (sorry, Scoop reference – feel free to ignore). Suppose you want to fund innovation: as Tim Harford argues in Adapt, it may be better to find and back innovative people, even if they don’t have a nicely worked out project. Harford points to the outstanding record of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which explicitly urges (and finances) ‘researchers to take risks, explore unproven avenues, to embrace the unknown’. And the best innovators may well be at the start of their careers (Einstein and Newton did their best work in their 20s). In the UK, the Wellcome Trust uses this approach with its ‘New Investigator Awards’ that “support outstanding researchers who are no more than five years from appointment to their first academic position, but who can already show that they have the ability to innovate and drive advances in their field of study.”

who ya gonna fund?

But what about policy impact, increasingly sought by funders of research? Evaluations of why some research has more impact on policy and practice add another personalistic element. The distinguishing factor between research that sinks without trace, and research that has impact is often the relationships of the researcher with decision-makers, and that favours well established researchers, who know everyone (and taught half of them as students). There’s a link to the idea that research has maximum influence after a shock (scandal, collapse of a previous policy, financial crisis, natural disaster, conflict etc). In such circumstances, decision makers are winging it, desperately looking for new ideas, and they are much more likely to turn to people they already know and trust (like their old professor) for those ideas.

That goes for institutions too: in many countries, if you want to influence the state, who does the research matters at least as much as how good the research actually is. Will officials trust the source? Working with parastatal thinktanks in countries like China and Vietnam is often the best way to ensure research finds a fast-track to policy influence.

If a funder wants to pursue three such contradictory goals, what can they do? They could decide to fund larger projects with separate components, but I’m not sure such different approaches and personalities could work together. Or they could create different funding pots. The difficulties include being more willing to accept higher failure rates or being less insistent on methodological rigour (in the case of backing innovators).

As for the risks, what can be done to prevent this just becoming a pretext for some lazy nepotism? All thoughts welcome.

International Women’s Day – what to celebrate, what to condemn?

It’s international women’s day today and the media and blogosphere are bouncing with ‘glass half full’ and ‘glass half empty’ discussions of the state of women’s rights. So let’s look at both halves of the glass (for a more pop version, this Independent on Sunday curtain-raiser is hard to beat, and I loved my friend Claire Melamed’s tirade against IWD cupcake feminism).

In the optimist camp, there are some encouraging signs at the international level, epitomised by the creation of UN Women in 2010 under the leadership of Michelle Bachelet, and the focus of the 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development. At a regional level, the African Union Protocol on the Rights of Women has been a significant rallying point for African women’s organizations.

That global recognition is reflected in huge progress in terms of legislation at national level. According to UN Women’s most recent ‘Progress of the World’s Women’ report:

‘In 1911 [the year of the first IWD], just two countries in the world allowed women to vote. A century later, that right is virtually universal and women are exercising greater influence in decision-making than ever before. Alongside women’s greater political influence, there has been a growing recognition of women’s rights, not only political and civil, but also economic, social and cultural rights. Today, 186 countries worldwide have ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), signalling their commitment to meeting the human rights of women and girls, breaking down the barriers to gender equality and justice.’

Donors such as DFID have also moved to place greater emphasis on girls’ education and maternal mortality, among other themes. Debates have also grown around the gender impact of different religious institutions, with some seeing a ‘war on women’ emerging from many quarters, while others argued for wider recognition of different forms of ‘religious feminism’ operating in many faiths.

On the ground, there is huge progress in girls’ education and inspiring and fascinating news from all quarters. The mighty We Can campaign on violence against women in South Asia and the work of the numerous partners in Oxfam’s Raising Her Voice project are just a tiny part of a worldwide movement whose day it is today.

Moving from half full to half empty, there are doubts about some of the ‘progress’. To what extent is educating and employing women seen as a way of generating growth (women for development) rather than reshaping economic and financial systems to improve the rights, power and lives of women (development for women)? Feminist economists have had little success (at least, compared to their environmental counterparts) in mainstreaming issues such as the care economy, while the undoubted gains of the Arab Spring remain fragile and will depend for consolidation on the kind of political, social and economic norms that emerge in its wake.

Fully in the half empty category, there is the continuing disparity in the daily lives of men and women, who have increasing participation in the paid workforce even as they continue to  shoulder the bulk of care in the home (see cartoon from the World Bank/Water and Sanitation Program’s 2012 calendar [h/t Lucy Russell, via John Magrath])
And there remains of course a horrendous litany of horror stories, from acid attacks to FGM to maternal mortality, which unlike most other MDGs is scarcely falling. A thousand women die in childbirth every day, almost all of them avoidably and in low income countries.

Whether it is progress or protest that motivates you, gender equality is one of the great causes of the age, and Oxfam is pretty involved – a few examples:

A memorable comparison between Gender Mainstreaming and Basingstoke from a workshop report by Caroline Sweetman, editor of the excellent Gender and Development journal, and a video slot from gender guru Caroline Moser from the same workshop.

‘Gender equality: it’s your business’: A new gender briefing for business, also available in groovy ebook formats

And from the Raising Her Voice programme, a couple of video slices of life: a 6 minute taste of the daily struggle to confront domestic violence and build women’s participation in Honduras (I’m going there next week, so expect more on the blog)

And 5 minutes on women in Pakistan using the courts to get their voices heard on the zakat committees administering charitable funds

And for something more light hearted, nothing beats the unforgettable EQUALS video featuring James Bond. Respect Daniel Craig.