How can aid agencies promote local governance and accountability? Lessons from five countries.

This post also appeared on the World Bank’s ‘People, Spaces. Deliberation‘ blog

Oxfam is publishing a fascinating new series of papers today, drawing together lessons from our programme work on local governance and community action. There are case studies from Nepal (women’s rights, see photo), Malawi (access to medicines), Kenya (tracking public spending), Viet Nam (community participation) and Tanzania (the ubiquitous Chukua Hatua project), and a very wise (and mercifully brief) overview from power and governance guru Jo Rowlands. Here are some highlights:

“Governance is about the formal or informal rules, systems and structures under which human societies are organised, and how they are (or are not) implemented. It affects all aspects of human society – politics, economics and business, culture, social interaction, religion, and security – at all levels, from the most global to the very local.

Most people experience the most immediate impacts, fair or unfair, of governance at a very local level. It is where women experience gender inequalities most keenly, for example in the way that issues that particularly concern them tend to get de-prioritised and their participation obstructed. In most political systems, it is also the place where ordinary people should, in theory, be best placed to participate in governance, for example by voting for their local councillors, taking part in local committees or protesting against laws or actions that they don’t think are fair.

Local people may face barriers of language, ethnicity, gender, class, poverty, access to information, or simply lack the confidence to speak out. They face the visible formal and informal structures of power, such as village or neighbourhood committees, service user groups, tribal councils, dominant families or castes, and formal structures of local government. They also face power dynamics such as business interests or patronage relationships based on debt and obligation.

It is essential for anyone working on governance to make a thorough analysis of local power relations, drawing on history and culture, specific economic realities and the interests of different groups of people. This analysis can then shape the options and approaches that a development programme uses, informed by how change has happened in the past and might happen in the future.

Oxfam differentiates between three key aspects [see diagram, below]: people claiming rights, institutions willing and capable of delivering rights, and people in positions of power with the will to make it happen.

When you deliberately address these relationships and processes, i.e. the arrows in the diagram, interesting things happen to the way issues are tackled in practice. For example, in Kenya, very high levels of mistrust existed between local community members, local councillors and local authority officials. Although there were institutional structures of decentralisation for local decision making, neither community members nor local authority officers knew enough about them to successfully implement them. The tools of social auditing provided a mechanism to address the knowledge gaps and rebuild damaged relationships.

All the case studies show how it is essential to work with both citizens and people in authority in order to achieve positive change in local governance. This might be about finding or creating spaces for constructive engagement between people and authorities, as in the ward meetings organised by women in Nepal. It could involve working with citizens to raise awareness and knowledge about their rights and about how local governance works, so that they can make relevant demands and monitor effectively how resources are used and accounted for, as in Malawi and Kenya. It may require working with officials and elected representatives to increase understanding about how to work accountably and transparently and to understand the benefits of actively involving citizens in planning and monitoring, as in the Tanzania example. Or it might be about working with officials to understand how particular legislation or regulation should work, as in Kenya.

A recurring theme across the individual stories is the importance of focusing action about local governance on the real, tangible interests of local people – health, education, livelihoods, water and sanitation. Women in Nepal moved into participation and leadership in committees and user groups on these issues; in Tanzania, communities became organised around setting up new market spaces for local women to sell produce, or around land rights.

Anyone working on local governance needs to be aware that in many contexts where there is not a culture of speaking out, individuals may be putting themselves at risk if they confront authority.  It is vital to ensure first that individuals who want to take that risk are supported, both from inside and outside the community, and that ideally the demands come from a group that has built the strength, skills and confidence to demand the changes they want to see. In Nepal, women did take a number of risks – facing opposition from husbands, and senior community members – but the support they received allowed them to prove themselves and to join with others in becoming change-makers within their villages.

Accountability and transparency are proving useful entry points for engaging the various actors and processes to help navigate the minefields of power relations. It is also clear that people who take on official responsibilities do not necessarily have the competency to carry out those roles. Therefore, well-targeted support and training for office-holders can go a long way in building better governance relationships.”

Jo identifies some particular ‘issues and challenges’, including:

Culture change: Making change in local governance often requires culture change as much as a change in structures, processes and representation. (particularly true on gender rights and women’s voice).

Access to information: As Maimuna says in the Tanzania case study, “Ignorance is a killing machine”.

Things can take time: Some changes can happen quickly, but the changes in culture and in deeper attitudes required to ensure system and process changes stick can take much longer (decades).

Risk management: Local and national governance are both about political processes, and carry significant levels of risk. This risk can include violence, fear, crack-downs on individuals or groups and a closing of space to operate for particular actors.

Areas where we need to do more thinking? How to deal with patronage systems, corruption and decentralization; improving our understanding of urban governance (the examples are all rural).

Final (very sensible) voice of experience:

“As well as being informed by good analysis, [future governance work] will also be informed by serendipity – watching for the chance combinations of the right person/people, the right moment, the right focus, the right alignment with other events – requiring good judgement and probably inevitably, whatever the expectation about how change will happen, a certain amount of sheer luck.”

How is poverty research changing? Reflections from some clever people

Last year DFID convened some leading UK-based researchers to brainstorm on the lessons, challenges and frontiers for poverty research. The resulting is an interesting blogpost from the ODI’s Andrew Norton (right) and a paper, ‘Understanding Poverty and Wellbeing’.

In his post, Andy explains that ‘the key problem the paper addresses is the mismatch between the complex nature of poverty and the reductionist nature of measures used to track it’. He devotes his post to exploring ‘the significance of [three] big changes in the global context, and what they mean for poverty analysis and research.’

First ‘the shifting geographies of both growth and poverty.  An increasing number of developing countries are comfortably outstripping the growth rates of the developed countries – and sustaining that performance over a substantial period of time. It’s no longer just about the dynamism of ‘BRICs’, ‘CIVETs’, Asian tigers or African ‘cheetahs’– there is a clear economic convergence happening on a global scale.  If you take out countries with significant systemic problems, poor countries are growing faster than rich ones, and inter-country inequality is therefore declining. As a result of these changes, the bulk of the world’s poor are now in middle-income, rather than low-income countries. This means that poverty reduction increasingly requires progress on policies which reduce inequality within countries, and which turn growth into jobs. 

Is urban poverty different?

Second, the impact of increasing levels of urbanisation on a global scale.  Simple ‘money-metric’ measures of poverty struggle to cope with the difference between urban and rural contexts. Does water have to be paid for?  Can rural families gather fuel? Do household members have to pay for transport?  How does the differing environment affect health and the quality of life? Does living in a deprived community right next to a wealthy suburb bring stigma and discrimination? 

A final shift in optics in the past decade concerns our increasing consciousness of risk, shocks and uncertainty and the importance of understanding the factors which give poor people and communities resilience in the face of growing risks from an increasingly volatile climate, from rapid changes in the prices of key commodities (particularly food), and from socio-political change.”

The paper, published by the group as a whole, concludes by proposing areas of focus for poverty research and analysis, namely thinking differently about the ‘what’ of poverty research and about the ‘how’.

First the what:

“Politics, including that of rising middle classes and their preferences for redistribution; the politics of high levels of inequality & related pathologies e.g. conflict; the consequences of elites detached from context for local, national or global social contracts. The securitisation or retreat of the State in many parts of the world and the power of private sector interests in preventing equalising policies. And the contrast with the politics of successful poverty reduction, including the role of democracy, social movements, new communication and information-sharing modalities, and threats to instability.

Poverty measurement, focusing on how the current interest in, and new methodologies for, measuring multidimensional poverty can be honed; how participatory processes can influence poverty measures; how to identify the multidimensional poverty traps that keep people in chronic poverty, and the sequences by which people move out of multidimensional poverty; the relationship between income and other dimensions of poverty; how multidimensional measures can assess the impact of growth on poor people.”

Then the How:

“Longitudinal quantitative and qualitative research is an important new basis for improved poverty diagnostics. This implies improved and extended availability of panel data sets to enable the quantitative tracking of households over time – which has proved invaluable for policy analysis. In combination with this – or separately – longitudinal ethnographic studies provide a rich source of understanding of the factors which reduce or exacerbate poverty over time. Longitudinal studies enable ‘natural experiments’ to emerge from data – where comparisons can be made both between groups and over time which indicate the importance of particular poverty reduction interventions. Much of the early work which indicated the poverty-reducing significance of social protection interventions was of this kind.

In-country capacity building: stronger in-country networks including not only research institutes but research users, research analysts, statistical offices and citizens are needed.”

Best story in development; evidence and aid; who holds the mobile?; tax inspectors without borders; CSR v democracy; Kenya’s Quakers; Living the Language: links I liked

Falling African child mortality – much tweeted ‘best story in development’ (see bar chart, showing average % fall over most recent 5 year period) but only partial and unsatisfactory answers to the really important question – why?

Ian Thorpe summarizes twenty years of agonising on the use of evidence in aid policy 

In the Philippines ‘mobile phone ownership by the farmer is associated with a 5-percent increase in the price received by the farmer for his onions. When we remove outliers, mobile phone ownership by the farmer’s spouse is associated with a 7-percent increase in the price received by the farmer for his onions.’ [h/t Claire Melamed] And (cf best story in development), there’s not much discussion about why that might be true……

Mick Moore applauds the OECD’s idea of creating ‘tax inspectors without borders’ 

Does corporate social responsibility (as a response to resource nationalism) damage democracy in Africa?

A third of the world’s Quakers live in Kenya, and they are developing non-violent direct action as a third way ‘between submission and riot’

Al Jazeera continues to excel as the world’s best development channel. Check out its Living the Language video series, ‘bringing us the stories of indigenous activists and communities throughout the globe who are standing up against stigma and proposing solutions to recover the spaces for indigenous languages’. More background here.  Here’s the 22m video on Aymara identity in Bolivia

I’ve got a new job, but am staying with Oxfam and the blog goes on (and on)

Today I start my new job as Oxfam GB’s ‘senior strategic adviser’ (I still prefer John Magrath’s ‘chief opinionator’ description). I’ll be continuing/expanding some existing areas – this blog, a new edition of the From Poverty to Power book due out in September, a lot of public ranting speaking, media, writing and being a token NGO prized member on a range of panels and advisory boards. I’ll keep doing the ‘horizon scanning’ – following new thinking and reading lots of new books and papers to save Oxfam big cheeses from having to do so. I also want to do some more teaching.

More interestingly, I will be developing the work around theories of change – lots of ideas there, from building up both a strong conceptual framework and a good range of case studies from Oxfam’s experience on the ground, to training packages, publications and websites. Watch this space. I’ll also be working more with other Oxfam International affiliates. Beyond that, we’re going to see how the post evolves, but I’m pretty pumped.

And taking over as head of Oxfam’s burgeoning research empire (well, a few more bright people scattered around the world, anyway) is Ricardo Fuentes Nieva (already a guest blogger here – he doesn’t hang around). Ricardo’s arriving from UNDP, where he has been a senior economic advisor in the Bureau for Africa, leading the research and production of the Africa Human Development Report, launched two weeks ago.

I shall miss being putative head of the research team: as well as being enormous fun, they’ve done some great work in recent years on climate change and doughnuts, food prices, research capacity building or (going further back) the impact of the financial crisis, the case for aid and essential services. I’ll still be working closely with them, of course, but I will no longer have to pretend to be their boss and (sadly) I won’t be able to take the credit for their work any more. Booo.

Wish me luck.

And please fill in the reader survey (red box on the right) – it’s only running for a few more days, and we need maximum sample size, please.

“Be Outraged!” Some big names in development take on the Austerians

This week Oxfam supported the publication of ‘Be Outraged’, an angry and eloquent broadside from some big names in the development scene, including Richard Jolly, Carlos Fortin, Giovanni Andrea Cornia, Diane Elson, Ruth Pearson, Frances Stewart and Stephany Griffith Jones. Many of them led the fightback in the late 1980s against the excesses of the Washington Consensus, working out of UNICEF and producing the hugely influential critique, Adjustment with a Human Face. A generation later, they’re back, vaguely reminiscent of a more gender-balanced version of the Magnificent Seven – battle-weary gunslingers returning for one last shoot-out (over to you, photoshoppers – Richard Jolly as Yul Brynner has to be worth a go).

The targets of their wrath are the TINA Austerians – ‘there is no alternative to austerity’. They critique each aspect of the austerity agenda, then contrast it with inspirational examples of more constructive approaches. Here are some highlights:

“Pushed to extremes, austerity is bad economics, bad arithmetic, and ignores the lessons of history. We, an international group of economists and social scientists, are outraged at the narrow range of austerity policies which are bringing so many people around the world to their knees, especially in Europe. Austerity and cutbacks are reducing growth and worsening poverty. In our professional opinions, there are alternatives – for Britain, Europe and all countries that currently imagine that government cutbacks are the only way out of debt.

Unemployment: A waste for economies and a tragedy for people. Stimulus can increase employment and economic growth. The first phase of stimulus in 2009 and recovery did have positive effects, which should not be ignored. But the stimulus was not maintained – the first failure. It was not backed up with measures to overhaul bank regulation and control – a second failure. And only limited actions were taken to tackle the dangerous trends of financial globalisation, growing inequality and ‘precarisation’ in the labour market – a third failure. The fact that women and care were hardly considered, if at all, constituted a fourth failure.

Examples for Inspiration: In response to the 1997-2000 East Asian crisis, countries such as Korea, Indonesia, Thailand and China vowed “never again!” They strengthened regional institutions and built up reserves. Their response to the current crisis has been to maintain growth and invest heavily in education and in programs for unemployed youth, in contrast to Europe which is often cutting back on opportunities for youth.

The Financial Sector must change from Bad Master to Good Servant. The sector, both national and international, has two main functions. Firstly it should serve the needs of the real economy. Secondly, it should help manage and mitigate risk. In the last two decades it has done neither. Countries need a far smaller, simpler, more transparent and accountable financial sector, focussed on lending to the real economy, not on making exorbitant profits and salaries for outrageously overpaid bankers and banksters.

Examples for Inspiration: In post-World War II USA and Europe, and many developing countries like Brazil and India today, the financial sector has been well regulated and controlled. Well-run public banks have played an important role. It is clear that finance can support and not undermine the real economy, but strong and clear regulation is required.

Extremes of Inequality can be reduced. Levels of poverty and inequality today are staggering. In 2011, salaries, benefits and bonuses of top directors in the FTSE 100 companies increased by an average of 49%, “despite minimal growth in their companies”. The richest 1% (61 million individuals) earn the same amount as the poorest 3.5 billion (56% of the world’s population).

Examples for Inspiration: In the last decade Brazil, Thailand, Malawi, Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, Venezuela and Bolivia have all reduced inequality, through:

• Fiscal policy that aims to balance the budget along with expansionary expenditure
• Minimum wage legislation
• Increasing access by all social groups to secondary and higher education
• Increased taxation and rising tax/GDP ratios, especially from oil and mineral exports
• Social protection measures involving cash transfers to poor people

The care economy and equality for women. The care economy and social infrastructure needs support and investment. Cuts usually leave women to pick up the pieces and children to bear the brunt. Women’s work and support for care can strengthen both society and the economy, if combined with more equality for women. It is counterproductive to sacrifice women’s and children’s rights and support in the name of credibility in financial markets.

Examples for Inspiration: The Nordic countries lead the world in government support for child care and pre-primary education services, including good wages for public pre-school teachers.

[And the final peroration]

Leaders of the world need to regain the vision and determination to strengthen the international system and prevent future crises. State action is also needed to help sustain more dynamic national economies and a more stable and balanced global economy, especially when backed by decisive global and regional action. The key priorities for economic recovery are support for employment, for the poorest people, and for women and children, while avoiding environmental destruction. The crisis will only become more serious as positive action is delayed.

There are alternatives

People are suffering unnecessarily

We can make a difference

Action is needed now!”

Femicide, anger and struggle: stories of women’s activism in Honduras

Guest post from John Ambler, right, Oxfam America’s ‘Vice President, Strategy’ (ooo, can I be one of those?) on his recent trip to Honduras

I woke up early in the morning to the sound of gunshots.  Two, then three more.  I expected to hear sirens, but did not.  The police were taking their own sweet time.  Over 80% of the murders in Honduras go unsolved.  And when the trail begins to get close to the killers, as it did with the murder of the son of the president of the National University of Honduras, the drops of blood often lead to the doorsteps of the police themselves.  In such cases, where the blood stops, the impunity begins.

The murder rate in Honduras is 82/100,000, one of the worst in the world.  San Pedro Sula, in the north-east part of the country is the third most dangerous town in the world, after Kandahar and Ciudad Juarez, on the Mexican side of the American border.  Tegucigalpa, with its plethora of shotgun-armed private security company itself is not a city for walking. 

Women here are particularly vulnerable to all forms of violence and afraid to go out of the house in many rural areas.  In fact, many are not even allowed to go out.  The houses are not sequestered behind fortress-like mud walls, as I saw in Afghanistan, but from listening to the stories of women in Santa Maria de La Paz, three hours’ drive to the north off Tegucigalpa, the isolation, mistreatment, and humiliation women in conservative households endure is strikingly similar to the stories I heard in Ghazni, Shomali, and Kunar in Afghanistan.

The murder rate with female victims has been rising, leading to a small campaign against femicide by women’s groups. Churches (Catholic and Evangelical) sometimes talk about rights, but according to the women I talked to, they never do anything concrete.  Jehovah’s Witnesses were singled out as being particularly patriarchal and unfriendly to women’s rights.  The women in Santa Maria de La Paz complained of the Church suppressing reproductive health information.  One woman had left the Church because of it.  I was really disappointed in the Catholic Church in particular.  There seems to be no new equivalent generation of “Liberation Theology” pastors to champion women’s empowerment, like the leftist firebrands of the 1980s.

Talking about their feminist activism in Santa Maria de La Paz, three of the women mentioned raising their 6, 6, and 11 children, respectively, in addition to being on 4 or 5 committees—the water board, the municipal audit committee, the transparency committee, the school committee, the PTA, the health committee, a savings and micro-credit group, the municipal women’s committee, self-help security group, a blackberry jam enterprise, and others I can’t remember.  There is even a club where pregnant women learn to sew.  They monitor government expenditures on things like the 2% that is supposed to be set aside in the budget for women’s issues, like the “Healthy Floors, Decent Roofs” program. 

Their stories were painful and powerful.  The first woman, the one with 11 children, said in a loud and confident voice that growing up her house had been plagued by incest.  Tears welled up in her eyes and another woman handed her a tissue.  She composed herself and in an even stronger voice said that when still a young teen she married a man who treated her as a slave, as did her mother-in-law, into whose house she moved.  (The scenario sounded eerily similar to the situation one finds in South Asia, where the son is the lord of the house, and his mother terrorizes the poor young bride, making her do all the grunt work, harassing her into submission, or suicide.)  She told of getting only a first grade education (she later learned to read and write); of having to put up with her husband’s wasting their hard earned money on drink and women.  She was often forbidden to leave the house.  She said that women could get no justice, that the police only support the big companies.  “They are not here for the people,” she said.  “They know the law, but they know money better.”  She said that someone had once come to her house with a gun, but she was not afraid.

Another woman said that she was 49 and had been married 35 years already.  She, too, got only a first grade education, but she is interested in politics and is now running for mayor.  She recounted how at the beginning of her engagement with politics she was told to sit in the back and shut up because what did a “dirty woman” know.  But she said that at least there had been no violence in her household, and her husband did not forbid her to go and join women’s groups and committees.  She talked of cleaning up the corruption in local politics.  When I said that politics is dirty, she rejoined, “Only if we are dirty!”  Good answer.

Everyone in the room was a member of the municipal women’s committee, except for two young women who just happened upon our meeting.  They had come to make a denunciation about domestic violence.  In this community of 11,590 people and 34 hamlets, the committee receives about 60 such formal denunciations a year, just the tip of the iceberg, I suspect.  One woman said everyone present in the room wore different colored clothing.  By that she meant that each of their stories had a different twist and turn to it, but that they all shared the basic plot structure:  intimidation, humiliation, exclusion, abuse, violence, exploitation, and sorrow.  Very deep sorrow.  And, many women were from the indigenous Lempa community, which faces even further discrimination from the government in terms of services and expenditures.

But the sorrow is now turning to anger.  The training they have gotten through Oxfam and its partners is helping them to organize and to raise their voices. 

“I am nothing, but all together we are something,” one woman said. 

“We were not organized to make a space for ourselves,”  said a second.

“We are not the shy women that we used to be, thanks be to God,” said another. 

After a rocky start, the women’s audit committee on public budgetary transparency and expenditure gradually gained the trust of the men.  They saw that the women, even though their level of literacy was limited, were actually asking good questions about the budget and following the money like bloodhounds.  The women were gaining real power and influence.

“In the past we were not even taken into consideration.” 

“When we are honest, the men can say nothing against us.”

“We can do this!  The men trust us.” 

This “struggle” (the word lucha was frequently used, the same word that was used during the wars of “liberation” of the 1980s) is not only one of networks and organizational tactics, but also of personal growth and sacrifice. In Santa Maria de La Paz, accompanied by nods and the thin smiles comrades at arms reserve for each other, one woman summed it up, “I am changed.”

And here’s an animation from the femicide campaign

Religion, making babies and ‘peak child’: brilliant new Hans Rosling video

Break out the champagne, the sword-swallowing data guru is back, with a brilliant performance on religion and fertility, delivered, as far as I can tell, in Qatar. Conclusion: ‘religion has very little to do with the number of children in the world’, and fertility is falling rapidly, everywhere (due to women’s education and paid jobs + access to birth control) – the world has reached a 2 billion ‘peak child’ level. Compulsory viewing. And his entire back catalogue of TED talks (including the sword swallowing one) is on his Gapminder website.

update: OMG the Rosling backlash has begun, c/o Aid Thoughts and Lawrence Haddad coming over all grumpy. It just gets better.

Development’s 2 tribes; post-2015; the Big Dope Hunt; Save the Kids v The Economist; the next frontier; Millennium Villages under fire; African take-off: great advocacy videos: links I liked

And please don’t forget to fill in the reader survey to the right – only takes a few minutes, promise.

‘Both camps should show greater humility: macro-development practitioners about what they already know, and micro-development practitioners about what they can learn.’ Magisterial overview from Dani Rodrik of progress in the two great development wonk tribes – the macros and the micros (who just won the World Bank presidency, in the shape of Jim Kim)

New website on all things post-2015 (you know, what comes after the Millennium Development Goals etc)

‘Cannabis worth £5,000 found in bin bag donated to Huddersfield’s Oxfam Wastesaver depot’ A possible successor to the big bra hunt?  [h/t Liz Stuart]

Save the Children’s annual ‘State of the World’s Mothers’ report names Niger as the worst country in which to have kids and promptly gets attacked by the Economist, which makes itself look very silly indeed (read the comments) [h/t Alex Cobham] 

‘What is the next frontier? I would put money on industrial development and, with it, a new breed of industrial policy.’ Chris Blattman says forget RCTs, industrial policy is the next big thing (wait, wasn’t it the last big thing too?)

The blogosphere has been abuzz with critiques of the latest bit of self-serving hype, evaluation from the Millennium Villages Project – here’s a nice example from Aid Thoughts.

Five (interesting) reasons to expect developmental take-off in Africa, from the World Bank’s Africa Can blog.

What makes a top advocacy video (and here’s an example, on rape in the US military) [h/t Global Voices]

The IPCC Special Report on Disasters and Adaptation: more than just climate science

Guest post from one time Oxfam research team member Arabella Fraser, who is currently in the Department for International Development, London School of Economics, writing a PhD on climate risk and vulnerability in informal urban settlements. She is also a consultant on climate adaptation and development issues, working most recently on urban adaptation planning in Latin America and the Caribbean. 

The recent publication of the IPCC’s full SREX report (or Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation) certainly provides researchers and practitioners with a 594 page T-REX of a document to grapple with. The product of 220 authors and over 18 thousand reviewers, it is a ‘state of the science’ juggernaut to fill the gap between the 4th (2007)and 5th (2014) overall IPCC Assessments.

The SREX has already generated much-needed headlines about the increased confidence of climate scientists that extreme weather events can be linked to man-made climate change, and the need for investment and improvement in disaster risk management (some of its authors talk about these main messages here).

It would be a shame, though, if the read-out by the wider climate and development community stopped there. Importantly, what SREX does is shift the terrain of IPCC reports onto a better integration of lessons from the social as well as the physical sciences. This was the first time that the IPCC’s Working Groups One (Physical science) and Two (Vulnerability and adaptation) had worked together on a single document. For the first time they joined forces with experts in disaster risk management. The result draws on a long scholarship in disaster studies that has stressed the unnaturalness of ‘natural’ disasters – climate events only become disasters, after all, when vulnerable people are in the way. One of the key messages is that increased exposure of populations and human assets is driving increased disasters, alongside changes in climatic events (see fig).

SREX also changes the definition of vulnerability used since the 4th Assessment to make more explicit the role of social context, independent of physical events. The semantic change may be a tweak, but it matters. The IPCC’s definition has been ubiquitous in adaptation planning documents. The way ideas about vulnerability are framed also influences international discussions. It will be interesting to see if and how this affects debates about the scope of adaptation funding and the relationship between adaptation and development finance.

Alongside this ‘shift to the social’ SREX turns attention to all that we know about ‘the local’, which comes before the chapters on national and global issues. The report pulls in studies about the way people understand the risks they face and the importance of engaging with this knowledge. It finds both ‘high agreement’ and ‘robust evidence’ for the fact that integrating local knowledge with scientific knowledge improves disaster risk management and adaptation. Communicating risk means, in SREX, sitting down and sharing knowledge rather than simply telling people that they are at risk and what to do about it.

Where now? Too often social vulnerability analysis has been the exclusive preserve of NGO and community work, falling out of the purview of government planners. The problem is partly one of methods. It is a major challenge to incorporate contextual, multi-dimensional, dynamic and often qualitative analysis about risk and vulnerability into planning and evaluation frameworks that mostly demand numbers and high aggregation. In the context of climate change, SREX highlights the benefits of using human ‘storylines’

'Human story lines': farmers in Bolivia

alongside model projections. But what people tell us about how they coped in the past does not necessarily prepare them for an uncertain future, while their ability to cope may also have changed.

No surprise to readers of this blog, bringing what we know about the social and physical worlds together in practice is also a political as well as technical exercise. Not least because it means going beyond risk management policy to seek more structural changes, which get at the fundamental causes of exposure and vulnerability. SREX doesn’t avoid the fact that these causes are often institutional, governmental even. It sets out the evidence for more participation and more decentralisation, but also linking sub-national work better to governance at higher scales. It is hard to imagine a state-ratified report getting much more political than this. At ODI’s event to launch the report summary last year author Mark Pelling alluded to the difficulty of getting even these issues established in the text. Development workers and theorists will have much to add, though, about the workings of power and exploitation in the most vulnerable parts of the world.

Of course, there is more to take from SREX. But that’s my aid to digestion.

‘As serious as a heart attack’: Robin Hood Tax Global Week of Action Kicks Off

Update on substantial progress (and the risk the money raised won’t go to development and climate change) from Oxfam head of advocacy (and generally merry man) Max Lawson

This week sees a Global Week of Action for the campaign for the Robin Hood Tax (aka the Financial Transactions Tax, or FTT). The FTT rose to prominence as a result of the financial crisis, which continues to keep it in the spotlight as Greece stumbles towards the euro exit, not least because journalists are desperate for fresh ways to report a crisis that is simultaneously huge news and desperately dull. So from Cape Town to Paris, campaigners are pulling on their green tights and fat cat costumes, starting with a wedding in Berlin for Francois Hollande and Angela Merkel (right).

In policy land, a revised impact assessment of the FTT by the European Commission was obtained by the Guardian.  The new assessment shows that the EC got its numbers wrong in a previous study that was seized upon by the FTT’s opponents. Recognizing that the majority of small and medium size firms do not rely on financial markets for investment (and so their access to capital would be unaffected by an FTT) reduces the cost to growth of an FTT to a tiny 0.2% reduction on a total predicted growth of about 80% between now and 2050.  Moreover, if the revenues from an FTT (€57 billion a year according to the EC) are invested in creating jobs, then this tiny negative then becomes positive so that an FTT would actually boost growth in Europe. Got that? An FTT is pro-growth. Alas, such positive conclusions are unlikely to make it into any speeches by David Cameron or the front page of the Financial Times.

The pressure on EU leaders is extreme.  The political debate is shifting from austerity to growth, with Angela Merkel faring poorly in some major state elections, and the victory of the socialist party in France. Monsieur Hollande has highlighted the FTT as one of the three main ways to boost growth in Europe.  The FTT is going to figure highly in the EU leaders’ ‘Growth Summit’ on 22nd May. The Wall Street Journal made the link last week, saying that ‘even if they are calling for an FTT, at least the left are talking growth’. 

With millions across Europe facing unemployment and serious suffering, especially in Greece, it is great to finally hear leaders speaking out against the death spiral of austerity and recession.  It is also great that the FTT is one of the key things being cited to help with this.  The Robin Hood Tax has always been about helping the poorest in developed nations as well as helping finance the fight against climate change and poverty in developing countries.  If the proceeds of a tax on the unproductive and destabilising casino behaviour of the financial markets is used in part to create jobs and protect public services in Europe this would be a great redistribution and a great thing.

But this is also the biggest threat.  With global aid levels falling, and the Green Climate Fund sitting empty, revenues from the FTT are vital for global, as well as domestic causes. Before the election, Francois Hollande said publicly he would favour up to 30% being used in this way, but he has been ominously silent since.  Just last week in a closed door meeting with the heads of major NGOs, Chancellor Merkel reiterated her support for doing this.  But the exigencies of austerity and the European crisis make this far from certain.  Green groups in particular need to pile the pressure on France and Germany, ahead of next month’s Mexico G20 and Rio Earth Summit.  

I was in South Africa last week for meetings with civil society and government G20 negotiators.  South Africa has a strong interest in a successful Green Climate Fund. They agreed to speak to Brazil and Argentina as the three countries outside Europe that joined the FTT ‘coalition of the willing’ at the G20 in Cannes, focusing on supporting an FTT for funding development and climate change. Pressure on France and Germany from these governments will be critical.

In the US, the G8 is taking place today, and President Hollande has promised to raise the FTT in discussions with fellow G8 leaders.  The Robin Hood Tax USA campaign is also being launched, by thousands of nurses dressed as Robin Hood, marching in Chicago. Interviewed on US news recently, the head of the US National Nurses Union was asked by the presenter whether she was serious; she replied ‘we are as serious as a heart attack’.

And in place of the customary Bill Nighy video, here’s a nice infographic