So Jim Kim is the new World Bank president: what’s in his in-tray?

Elizabeth Stuart (@ElizStuart), Oxfam’s Bank-watcher in Washington, reflects on the challenges facing the new World Bank president.

To the surprise of precisely no one, the next president of the World Bank is Jim Yong Kim, an American doctor, anthropologist, academic, activist and organizational leader. As lots of commentators including Oxfam have said, the process by which he was chosen was a sham, which is a great shame as the man himself is a development hero. Thumbs-up to the pick, thumbs-down to the process by which he was chosen.

So what kind of leader will Dr Kim be? By all accounts, he has an impressive history of getting things done in complex institutions: he himself has called his alma mater, the WHO, “one of the most complicated bureaucracies in the world”. Sharp elbows will serve him very well in the Bank, a place where management lines are notoriously nebulous, both because of its complex structure of matrices, anchors, regions and hubs, and the difficulties of negotiating the executive board made up as it is of different coalitions and interests (the primary divide on the board is advanced and developing/emerging economies, but often countries split differently on different issues). And then there’s the US Congress – which continues to try to micromanage relatively minor aspects of the Bank’s work – to assuage.

Problem number one is a paradox. Development is complex and multi-dimensional. The World Bank, by its very nature, needs to be across all aspects of development. One of its latest pushes is on road safety for instance, and with good reason: 1.3m people are killed on roads each year, 90% of whom are in developing countries. But this is just another issue to add to the seemingly never-ending list of Bank initiatives. One reason why the institution has not achieved the big development successes that might be expected is its overreach. So how to be an expert on everything without trying to actually do it all?

Another very real dilemma he’ll have to negotiate is infrastructure. Lack of roads, electricity, ports, railway networks etc remains a massive issue for developing countries, and for most of them private sector finance, which often demands double-digit returns, is just not feasible. The BRICs say getting their hands on affordable finance to build what they need to grow it is a key reason for their setting up their own development bank, which could, in part, rival the Washington one. But lending for infrastructure is very hard for the World Bank. How to ensure that the maximum number of people have access to affordable energy, for instance, without harming – often the most vulnerable – populations in the process is a very difficult issue indeed.

Dr JimYong Kim

And then there’s the problem of keeping emerging countries engaged, bearing in mind this is where almost three-quarters of the world’s poor live. They’re already looking elsewhere for finance (see above: in future it’s not just going to be Africa that looks to China for cash). How can the Bank compete, especially when it has just given the institutional blow-off to Africa, Latin America and Asia’s choice for president? One solution being proposed by a Center for Global Development working group: expand IDA (the Bank’s very low interest loans and grants) to middle income countries, provided it’s very tightly targeted at fighting poverty.

Let’s hope that he will successfully square these differing and competing demands, as there’s lots to be done. Every organization will have a list of priorities for a Kim Bank, and here are Oxfam’s top three:

1, get rid of health user fees. Poor people can’t afford to pay out of pocket to see a doctor and the World Bank needs to work with countries to make healthcare free

2, stop investing in land grabs which displace poor people, and affect their ability to feed themselves

3, help countries make the transition to low carbon economies

Just a few more demands to add to Dr Kim’s welcome pack.

Elizabeth Stuart is head of Oxfam International’s Washington DC office.

And Chris Blattman perfectly captures the irony of the debate over the ‘contest’ for the job with a tweet from @JustinSandefur: “#WB race = strange bedfellows: free-market economists 4 3rd world democracy vs pub health humanitarians 4 US imperialism?”

Barbara Stocking (my big boss) adds her bit on the FT blog

Fossil fuels and political suicide; latest global internet stats; David Cameron and post-2015; results; AWID meets in Turkey; Welcome move from Wellcome; One Day on Earth: Links I liked

Why sensible economics is suicidal politics: Mathew Lockwood looks at the political minefield that is reducing fossil fuel subsidies

A third of the world’s people are now using the internet

David Cameron is going to chair a new UN committee charged with drawing up the post-2015 set of global development goals. Sigh, this one really isn’t going away, is it?

The results agenda (because that isn’t going away, either). Owen Barder neatly summarizes the main concerns (and how to manage them) as well as the benefits of focusing more on results

“Transforming Economic Power to Advance Women’s Rights and Justice”, the 12th AWID International Forum, with 2000 women’s rights leaders and activists from around the world, takes place from April 19 to 22 in Turkey. An important event, but as far as I can tell from the website, there will be nothing streamed online for those without time or money to go to Istanbul – impressively old school. (If I’m wrong, please send the URL for livestreaming etc.) More background here.

‘Some very clever people have put up with a very silly system for far too long.’ Has the Wellcome Foundation terminally breached the ridiculous firewall that allows academic publishers to restrict the flow of knowledge by paying authors nothing while gouging massive profits from readers? Hope so, although some of the coverage suggested that a new business model might be to charge authors in a form of academic vanity publishing…….

One Day on Earth, a new feature-length documentary film — the first to include footage filmed in every country on earth captured all on the same day, debuts this Sunday – aka Earth Day, April 22 – at screenings in more than 160 countries.  The trailer’s understandably manic, but quite moving.

Why are rich countries trying to silence alternative economic voices at the UN?

The UN system is normally a terribly polite sort of place, but something is seriously amiss at UNCTAD. Despite its name (The UN Conference on Trade and Development), UNCTAD is a permanent body founded in 1964, which even at the height of Washington Consensus orthodoxy, provided developing countries with an invaluable source of thinking on alternative, heterodox policies on trade and finance (see my recent post on its latest hard-hitting report).

Now, it is under threat in the run-up to its big once-every-four-years conference, which kicks off in Qatar on 21st April. Developed countries stand accused of trying to narrow its mandate and effectively shut down its role as an alternative voice. On Wednesday, a phalanx of former senior staff and other big economic cheeses like Dani Rodrik went public with a press conference in Geneva and presented the following statement.

“Statement by former staff members of UNCTAD, Geneva, 11 April 2012

Silencing the message or the messenger …. or both?

Since its establishment almost 50 years ago at the instigation of developing countries UNCTAD has always been a thorn in the flesh of economic orthodoxy. Its analyses of global macro-economic issues from a development perspective have regularly provided an alternative view to that offered by the World Bank and the IMF controlled by the west.

Now efforts are afoot to silence that voice. It might be understandable if this analysis was being eliminated because it duplicated the work and views of other international organizations, but the opposite is the case – a few countries want to suppress any dissent with the prevailing orthodoxy.

No multilateral institution is perfect, but UNCTAD’s track-record of analysis and warnings on global trends and problems certainly stands up to those of other organisations. As otherwise unfavourable commentators have occasionally admitted, UNCTAD was ahead of the curve in its warnings of how global finance was trumping the real economy, both nationally and internationally. It forecast the Mexican tequila crisis of 1994/5. It warned of the East Asian crisis of 1997 and the Argentinian crisis of 2001. It has consistently sounded the alarm of the dangers of excessive deregulation of financial markets. It has stressed the perils of rapid, non-reciprocal trade liberalization by developing countries. UNCTAD economists have not had to suffer the psychology of denial so prevalent in other organisations.

So why is the UNCTAD message so unwelcome? The fact that UNCTAD has no formal responsibility for the global management of the international economy and none of its own funds to dispense means that its analysis is free of vested interests. No organisation correctly foresaw the current crisis, and no organisation has a magic wand to deal with present difficulties. But it is unquestionable that the crisis originated in and is widespread among the countries that now wish to stifle debate about global economic policies, despite their own manifest failings in this area.

Because of the crisis, we do now have a better explanation of the inter-relationships between the real economy and the world of finance. Those explanations are now a good deal closer to what UNCTAD has been saying for nigh on three decades about the dangers of finance-driven globalization. And it is precisely in its analysis of interdependence that UNCTAD brings added value to an understanding of how the functioning of the global economy impacts on the majority of the world’s population who live in developing countries. Given the current pressure on the organisation and its secretariat, that contribution could now be gone for good.

Why now? UNCTAD is about to have its next quadrennial conference (Doha, 21-26 April). UNCTAD conferences are a shadow of their past, being now simply a time to agree on secretariat work programme priorities for the next four years. But that is precisely what is at stake.

Developing countries in Geneva, again, are struggling to resist the strong pressure piled on them by OECD countries and to defend the organisation to which they had been “umbilically” tied. They are not fully succeeding, in spite of the BRICS pledge of support manifested at its recent summit. So the developed countries in Geneva have seized the occasion to stifle UNCTAD’s capacity to think outside the box. This is neither a cost-saving measure nor an attempt to “eliminate duplication” as some would claim. The budget for UNCTAD’s research work is peanuts and disparate views on economic policy are needed today more than ever as the world clamours for new economic thinking as a sustainable way out of the current crisis. No, it is rather – if you cannot kill the message, at least kill the messenger.

All of the undersigned have worked as senior officials for UNCTAD at one time or another. Individually, we may not necessarily have agreed with what UNCTAD was saying on specific issues. We have no vested interest in this matter except that we all fervently believe in the value of maintaining an independent research capability that serves to focus inter-governmental debates on how the workings of the global economy affect developing countries.

At time when pluralism is finally being meaningfully discussed in the election of the President of the World Bank, it is ironic that OECD countries are endeavouring to stifle freedom of speech within another multilateral organization.

If those who were proud to work for UNCTAD do not speak out now, who will?”

If true (and the signatories are serious people), the attack on UNCTAD feels more like some G8-led skirmish from the 1990s than a response to a global economy in turmoil. Surely now, more than ever, we need new thinking, and power and voice needs to shift to the developing countries? I’m genuinely baffled by why thisis happening now – if anyone from DFID or elsewhere cares to explain, feel free. More background in the Guardian from the LSE’s Robert Wade.

Are aid cuts inevitable and if so, what should aid campaigners do about it?

While I was snowed in in a holiday cottage last week (quite fun actually, especially when you’ve packed your West Wing box set just in case), the 2011 OECD aid numbers came out (see table).

The numbers show total aid falling in real terms for the first time since 1997. What was also striking was the variation between OECD members, with crisis-hit Greece and Spain slashing aid by a third, while oddly, Italy increased it by the same amount (due to a one-off rise in debt forgiveness, as well as an increase in refugee arrivals from north Africa, according to the FT).

I won’t repeat the standard criticisms of governments breaking their aid promises (Oxfam press release here). Instead, just a couple of observations:

Firstly, this is remarkably in keeping with previous World Bank research on the impact of banking crises in donor countries in 24 financial crashes spread over the 30 years to 2007. This found that aid budgets behave like wily coyote running off the end of a fiscal cliff, continuing to rise for 2-3 years before going into free fall (see graph). We appear to have reached that point now – the FT reports that Spain, Canada, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands are seeking to reduce their aid budgets further this year.

Secondly, what should we be doing about it? In particular, should we be changing our language or emphasis on aid? One option is to focus on minimising the decline, for example by highlighting the differences between countries in standard heroes-and-zeroes press work. History is not destiny and maybe this time we can avoid poor countries taking the hit for the failings of global finance. But damage limitation is hardly the stuff to inspire campaigners.

Another option is to shift the focus onto quality of aid, rather than the emphasis on overall quantity that has dominated NGO messaging in recent years (see this new website on US aid for ideas). The problem here is that the experimental/innovative kinds of aid are likely to be the first to be cut, while the bad stuff (tied aid, aid linked to security or other political self interest) is likely to be the last to go. An aid downturn may not be a propitious moment for trying to improve quality.

A third (probably my favourite) is to look for alternative sources of revenue. At an international level, closing down tax havens and introducing a Robin Hood Tax can ease the pressure both on aid and the domestic spending of cash-strapped OECD governments . And since aid is just a small part of raising finance for development, let’s look much more at domestic sources of revenue through tax reform, natural resource royalties etc.

A fourth option, of course, is to decide that campaigning on aid is just too much of a downer and give up altogether, but that strikes me as a pretty lousy choice. Extracting those aid promises at Gleneagles back in 2005 was a massive achievement and should not be abandoned lightly. One way or another, poor countries are going to need finance, including aid, to develop. Any views?

If change requires both cooperation and conflict, can we really do both?

I’ve been thinking about my recent trip to Honduras, how change happens, and the discussions there (and with some other country teams since then) about what I am calling the ‘cooperation-conflict cycle’ (see pic). The default mode in Oxfam and most large NGOs is generally uncomfortable with conflict, but research by John Gaventa and others shows that conflict is an essential part of many processes of progressive social change.

This cycle is drawn from Jonathan Fox’s work on ‘transitions to accountability’ in Mexico. Fox found that progress depended on a cycle of conflict and cooperation – a conflict would break out, and then a more progressive section of local state officials would talk to more approachable protest leaders and a period of reform would ensue. When those reforms ran out of steam, or new issues emerged, conflict would reemerge and the whole cycle would start again in a process of ‘interaction between the thickening of civil society and state reformist initiatives’.

If true, and assuming that NGOs see their role as subsidiary, (i.e. they are not the main actor in the drama) this theory of change poses some serious challenges. If they want to be present and playing a constructive role over the whole cycle, NGOs may need to use very different tactics and language in the conflict and cooperation phases, and forge different alliances and partnerships.

In the conflict phase, the language and tactics will probably need to be more polarised and confrontational (us and them, good guys and bad etc), and the alliances are likely to be more horizontal – pulling together a large network of civil society organizations around some common aims, perhaps with some support from alternative media and radical churches.

By contrast, in the cooperation phase, the language and tactics will need to be more constructive and propositional, and avoid alienating potential supporters in other camps. Alliances will need to be forged with actors in other spheres (local state officials, politicians, private sector). Even media and church alliances may need to be different, pulling in more mainstream, conservative fractions than in the conflict stage.

But can the same organization really do both, moving coherently from one to the other and back again? Staff tend to opt for one or the other, and find it hard to change gears. Loyalty to allies in one phase will inhibit moving to the next. And life is of course a lot messier than the ‘cycle’ suggests, with conflict and cooperation both present at most points in a change process. 

What to do? In practice, I suspect a lot of NGOs and others tacitly opt for a division of labour – they either specialize in the conflict phase or the cooperative phase. But that may mean a lot of wasted effort when the cycle swings the other way.

Not sure if this is so abstract as to be virtually meaningless – do you recognize any of these issues from your own work?

Oops, just posted this by mistake. Sorry to post twice in a day – will take a day off tomorrow out of consideration for your inboxes.

Ocampo for president; IMF in Judea; de Soto is wrong on property rights; where are legal systems pro-poor?; Afghan girl-boys; oil rush in East Afica; No Women, no Peace: links I liked

Interesting – Jose Antonio Ocampo is running first in a Guardian online poll on who should be the next president of the World Bank. Voting closes in about 12 hours

An IMF report on Judea, circa 33 AD. Easter satire from Bill Easterly (keep clicking to expand).

Another research nail in the coffin of Hernando de Soto’s influential work on the need to get informal firms to go formal (see The Other Path). After paying a bunch of informal firms in Sri Lanka to register, researchers went back regularly for 31 months and found ‘firms were no more likely to obtain credit, participate in government programs, or get government contracts. However, we do find formalizing led to firms doing more advertising, keeping receipt books, and having more trust in local government.’

The Economist summarizes an intriguing new World Bank paper that tries to calculate the impact of legal systems on inequality in five countries. It finds that the law is strongly pro-poor in India and South Africa, roughly neutral in Brazil and Indonesia, and strongly anti-poor in Nigeria. The Authors blog about their findings here. [h/t Swati Mishra]

Tahir Qadiry discusses ‘the long-standing Afghan tradition of Bacha Posh – disguising girls as boys’. [h/t Kate Cronin-Furman]

‘”We will make sure that the oil in Kenya is a blessing for the people of Kenya and not a curse,” Kenya’s energy minister Murungi said, in reference to other countries whose people remain mired in poverty despite having struck oil.’ Kenya strikes oil and another experiment with the resource curse begins. The Economist reviews East Africa’s new hydrocarbon ‘el Dorado’.

No Women No Peace. Nice campaign video [h/t Anne-Katrin Arnold]

Forget microcredit: microsavings work much better

Update: Jeff Ashe responds in the comments section to some excellent comments from readers

Microcredit has been getting a bad press recently – criticised for eye-watering interest rates, high indebtedness levels, and excessive hype in terms of its development impact. Oxfam America reckons it has a much better alternative – helping poor people to save first and then borrow. Last week, I interviewed Jeff Ashe (right), who runs Oxfam America’s renowned Savings for Change initiative. Here are some key points:

What does SFC do? The methodology turns traditional microfinance inside out. Instead of creating vast institutions, SFC trains groups of women in how to run basic savings groups and then gets out of the way and lets them get on with it. 

How do SFC groups differ from the traditional community rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) in most parts of the developing world? ROSCAs typically consist of a group of women putting in the same amount every week, and taking it in turns to receive the pot. SFC is more complex –women elect their own officers, write their bylaws, keep records and meet weekly. The big difference from ROSCAS is that members can take out loans when they need them, choose the amount they want and then pay interest. Savings plus a share of the interest income is then distributed to members when they most need the cash, between the planting and the harvest. The return on savings in Mali runs at 30% or more every year.

How many women are involved? That’s the astonishing part. The scheme has gone viral and now reaches 560,000 women in 5 countries in Africa, Central America and Asia. Mali is the biggie, with 400,000 women involved in about 4,500 villages. According to Jeff, who has been working in microfinance since 1980, ‘this dwarfs anything I’ve worked in.’ A number of other NGOs are engaged on similar schemes, probably reaching about 5-6 million people in total, mostly in Africa but with increasing numbers in Latin America and Asia.

How much does it cost? Jeff puts the cost at about $20 per woman, compared to $200 of start-up costs per borrower for typical microfinance institutions, and $12,000 per household in a Millennium Village.

What’s the impact? SFC has been heavily evaluated, with a big randomised control trial currently under way in Mali (let’s hope that isn’t messed up by the current political upheaval there). Although the RCT result won’t be ready until early next year, other research shows:

-          Income smoothing, e.g. over the course of the crop cycle, leading to improved food security

-          Women acquire greater voice in household decision-making and (to a lesser extent) within the community

-          The savings groups report that they value the increased solidarity and mutual support as much as the actual savings – this is an exercise in social capital accumulation, and likely to lead to wider benefits in terms of women’s organization.

What happens when the funding runs out? We’re about to find out. The Gates Foundation has been funding animators and local NGOs to deliver training packages, and that money is now coming to an end. According to Jeff, conventional donors and microfinance institutions don’t like the lack of institutions or technology (they keep urging SFC to be trendy and adopt mobile banking). So we will now see what happens when the savings groups are cut loose (Oxfam America will try and at least find enough money to keep monitoring impact).

Jeff has already seen what happens when the funding gets cut. He got the original idea for SFC when he stumbled across a USAID-funded scheme in Nepal run by an INGO called PACT. There too, the scheme had gone viral. ‘I was stunned – day by day all my preconceptions collapsed; microfinance shibboleths fell crashing to the ground. Poor people can save; they will repay their loans, external loans are not needed, the savings groups will start a movement.’

Bizarrely, USAID decided to cut PACT’s funding and invest the money in hydro projects instead, so the savings groups were abandoned. When a researcher went back eight years later, she found that two thirds of the original groups had survived, and new groups had formed, bringing the numbers back to those at the time the project had ended. The average number of women had risen from 22 to 26, and the average loan fund had quadrupled in size.

Which in terms of the evolutionary model discussed previously on this blog, suggests that these schemes are a fit variant that is likely to survive and replicate. Jeff is confident – ‘I want to watch where it goes, how it develops’ (see previous post on the positive deviance emerging in the scheme).

Too good to be true? I ask him what the main criticisms of the scheme are and he lists a few:

1. It’s not adding much, merely repeating the ROSCA system (see above on that one)
2. The amounts saved, an order of magnitude smaller than microcredit loans, are too small to make a difference (according to the evaluations, not true, especially for income smoothing, but hopefully the RCT will nail that one)
3. It’s not really financial inclusion because no new institution is being created (that sounds a bit silly)

But he is a man with a mission, and probably not the best source to criticise his baby – any other doubts/concerns?

Last word to Jeff: ‘In 1980, I helped establish the framework for conventional microfinance, working in Latin America for Acción. That evolved into regulated financial institutions, including Compartamos. I would love to just out-compete them on savings groups – I love that kind of stuff!’

NGOs and blogging on development: Why do we find it so hard?

I went to a fascinating ‘bloggers breakfast’ in Washington last week, hosted by Lawrence MacDonald of CGD and Oxfam’s Paul O’Brien. A bunch of development bloggers from the Center for Global Development, Oxfam America and a few others chewed over a mixture of blogging dilemmas and CGD’s muffins and fruit. V pleasant way to start the day (actually I had started it an hour earlier reading endless Thomas the Tank Engine books (see right) to a delightful three year old by the name of Lawrence – great way to start the day). What emerged?

My over-riding impression was just how much of a struggle blogging is for NGO types: many (not all) NGO bloggers just don’t enjoy the experience. They find it hard to keep to length or strike a suitably conversational tone. But much more problematic is how they feel about the exercise – overwhelmingly anxious. Constrained by feeling they face a conflict between finding their personal blogger’s voice and having to write to what one Oxfamista called ‘the editorial voice’ (I didn’t even know we had one…..). People talked of ‘writing what I think is appropriate from Oxfam’s point of view, and not in my own voice’. ‘I’m just so nervous and afraid of having my true voice out there, so I get really conservative.’ Ouch. Not surprising, then, that so many great bloggers inside Oxfam choose to set up their own personal blogs instead, but I think that’s a shame too, if it means fewer people get to read them.

These difficulties show in the numbers – a lot of NGO blogs really don’t do very well on traffic or on reputation (the ABBAs were dominated by academic blogs – NGOs barely got a mention). So what can we do about this? First distinguish between the different purposes of blogs and manage them differently. Some categories (please add your own refinements) include:

1. Discursive, trying to set or change agendas (Gramsci would have made a great blogger), raise new issues, but feeling free to express doubts (yep we all have them), and not hammer home specific policy demands (what Owen Barder caricatures as ‘flogging not blogging’). I would put FP2P into the (very) discursive category. For these you need to give the blogger license and avoid heavy sign-off processes. If you’re worried, then monitor authors over a probationary period and if they don’t screw up, progressively loosen the reins.

2. Issue specific-policy blogs – Oxfam’s new Global Health Check is doing rather well in this category, getting decent numbers and lots of positive feedback from health officials and other target audiences. In this case the writers should know the no-go areas better than anyone – so set the bloggers free. In this category, doubt and diversity may not work – if you’re trying to persuade health officials, it’s no good having one post saying user fees are terrible, then another saying ‘well, on the other hand….’

3. Witness bearing: one of NGOs’ niches ought to be blogging ‘from the field’ in a way that communicates the reality of life in developing country communities to people who live elsewhere (mainly in rich countries). If these are really crude ‘thank you Oxfam for giving me a new goat’ type blogs, they probably won’t reach many people – nuance and ambiguity is a good thing when trying to describe real life. But some of them can be extraordinarily powerful, like the blogs from Oxfam staffer Mohamed Ali during the Gaza blockade in 2009. Sign-off here should be limited to avoiding risk to staff or partners in country.

There are some inevitable and pretty fundamental tensions. Campaigners are always itching to use blogging in a rather instrumental way, e.g. get everyone blogging on the same issue or directed at the same target, but on some level, that really goes against the nature of blogs. ‘Authenticity is key’ asked one participant, ‘but how do you coopt authenticity?’ No blogger (or indeed sentient human being) agrees with their organization’s ‘line’ all the time.

And there is more to life (and social media) than blogging. Owen Barder usefully described blogs as ‘part of a set of conversations’, including twitter, facebook etc. He sees the particular niche of blogs as setting out arguments, rather than having conversations – twitter is better suited to that. I came back from the US finally accepting that I am going to have to start using twitter for more than the current ‘robo-tweet’ alerts of blogposts.

Overall, I would say that NGOs need to think about the bloggers not the blog. Blogs need human faces and personality, which seems to go against an instinctive corporate urge to suppress ego, promote the Oxfam brand and speak anonymously in ‘the Oxfam voice’. According to in-house blogging guru Eddy Lambert, this doesn’t work: ‘‘We have no evidence that people want to develop relationships with ‘brands’. It’s people, problems and ideas every time. However much we may wish otherwise, we struggle (as do others) when we place our brand at the centre and obsess over style/tone of voice etc.’ 

If you have multiple bloggers on a site , at least follow Global Dashboard’s model of giving prominence to them as individuals, and letting subscribers pick and choose who they want to hear from.

Finally, this has to be fun, not a chore (or it shows). Don’t force people to blog if they hate it. Would-be bloggers need encouragement, mentoring (especially on the first few posts) and, yes, empowerment. NGOs have to shift from ‘permission to forgiveness’ – a big but essential organizational shift (practice makes perfect – I’m getting quite good at asking for forgiveness….). Unless we can make these kinds of changes, I fear NGOs are going to continue to struggle in the blogosphere.

Your thoughts?

Robin Hood Tax update: more campaign success on the Financial Transactions Tax

The RHT campaign continues to show the remarkable ‘how change happens’ potential of a response to shocks (in this case, financial crash + austerity = governments desperate for new sources of revenue + impending collapse of aid flows from many donors + massive public antipathy towards the banking sector = perfect time to campaign for a new tax on banks). Here’s a summary of the latest briefing from Sherwood foresters Max Lawson and Jasmine Burnley. Full briefing here.

• Despite fierce opposition and lobbying by the financial sector, there is a good chance that a coalition of 9 countries (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain), representing 90% of Eurozone GDP, could push ahead and implement an Financial Transactions Tax (FTT, the official name for the Robin Hood Tax) in 2012. This could raise 38 billion euros. All of the nine finance ministers wrote to the Danish Presidency to ask them for the FTT to be fast tracked and bypass EU27 blockers such as the UK.

• France has passed legislation to implement an FTT of 0.1% on shares at national level, which will come into force in August. This is explicitly proposed by President Sarkozy as a first step towards a broader FTT at EU level. There is nothing in the legislation to link the revenues to development and climate change. The French Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, who is front runner to win the election, has said publicly to spend he would spend a third of an FTT on development and climate change and there was a public commitment from the French Minister for Cooperation to give increasing levels of the FTT to development and climate change from the start of 2013.

• German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble has said clearly that it is unlikely to reach agreement in the Eurozone, and is open to a stamp duty like tax, which includes derivatives as a possible compromise. This would be an FTT by any other name and would raise significant revenue, but it would of course be better if it covered all transactions not just equities. Schauble is now speaking publicly about going ahead this year with the coalition of 9 countries, although there is not a unified German government agreement, as the junior partner, the FDP, remains opposed.

• New research by former JP Morgan city figure Avinash Persaud overrides EC Impact Assessment’s claim that FTT will result in a drop in growth by demonstrating FTT will lead to a rise in growth of 0.25%

• Support for an FTT grows in the US against backdrop of increasing resentment over unemployment, lower than needed growth and the costs of the financial crisis – US Robin Hood Tax campaign to be launched at G8 with Chicago rally of unions and CSOs

• Fast-track to end June: There is a strong likelihood of a European FTT although opposition is fierce– the major challenge is to get a portion allocated to development and climate change.

Monkeys v baboons; World Bank president; climate change states; everyone hates poverty researchers; catalysts for change; food v planet: links I liked

[I'm off on holiday this week, but have scheduled a few posts in my absence. Any probs, please email research@oxfam.org.uk.]

‘Monkey still working. Baboon gotta wait small.’ Oxfam’s Muyatwa Sitali presents (and explains) his pick of Africa’s wonderful election slogans.

Nancy Birdsall poses some nice sharp questions for the three candidates to be the next World Bank president and Lant Pritchett sets out the tactics for making sure Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala wins, rather than US nominee Jim Kim. The Economist also weighs in behind Ngozi.

Is climate change one of the issues that will drive a change in the role of the state in the 21st century?, asks Matthew Lockwood.

‘There have also been signs of a “political cycle” in the critiques. When our up-dates (at three-yearly intervals) [of global poverty numbers] find little (or seemingly modest) progress against poverty, some of our more right-leaning critics come up with some argument as to why we are systematically underestimating that progress. The left-leaning critics are more accepting at these times. By contrast, when we find progress, such critics come up with arguments as to why we are over-stating that progress. We don’t get much critical attention from the right at these times.’ The World Bank’s Martin Ravallion ruefully ponders the fate of researchers on poverty – someone is always going to object to your findings.

Can games change the way we think about the future? From April 3-5, (i.e. tomorrow), the Rockefeller Foundation will be holding a global public online game, called Catalysts for Change, to identify a thousand new paths out of poverty in just 48 hours of gameplay with hundreds of players from all walks of life. The game is open to everyone, anywhere in the world. Register to play at game.catalyze4change.org. Follow the game on Twitter (@catalyze4change) and on Facebook.’  Flyer here. How to play instructions here. Short video promo below

How to feed the world without destroying the planet – neat video from the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change,  launching its new report. My remaining brain cells can’t cope with comparing this model with the doughnut – any offers? [h/t John Magrath]