Science Girl; Starbucks and tax; NYC carbon; adaptation in America: videos I liked

Some Friday video light relief (well, light-ish) on climate change (with an eye on dismal dialogues in Doha) and tax evasion.

First the totally adorable Science Girl on climate change, clean energy + a surprise upside – wildfires melt Barbie & Ken before your very eyes

Next up, a sweet and funny Starbucks tax sting – two Welsh Activists decide it should return its 28% tax dodge to its customers. Background here

If greenhouse gases were visible, would it be easier to persuade publics and politicians to take them seriously? This smart video from New York City suggests the answer is yes. [h/t John Magrath]

Finally, climate change adaptation in America. Vicki Arroyo from the Georgetown Climate Center in a rather disturbing TED talk. Makes you wonder if some kind of climate survivalism is on the way

Robert Chambers on the Fifth Power (the power to empower)

Some thoughts from Robert Chambers, from whose wonderful new book I recently posted several excerpts.

People tease me for being pentaphiliac.  They notice that I love fives of a thing.  Well, it’s true.  If there are six, I boil them down to five.  If there are only four I rack my brains to find a fifth.   So the four types of power have been a challenge:

Power over      needing no explanation

Power to          agency, meaning being able to decide to do something and then do it

Power with      collective power when people come together

Power within   self-confidence or something like that

There had to be a fifth.  Power to Empower, linking some of these? Can people be empowered to gain power within and power with which then combine as new power to?

In workshops I have invited participants to put some flesh on this power to empower.  They brainstorm lists of verbs to complete the sentence

As an ‘upper’, to empower ‘lowers’ you can  ………..

Uppers includes people who are dominant or powerful in a situation or relationship , with power over and power to, and lowers means people who are subordinate and relatively powerless in a situation or relationship.  There are innumerable upper-lower pairs (parent-child, teacher student, …..).  So what can uppers do to empower lowers?   You may want to make you own list.

Some verbs come up again and again- listen, respect, trust, inspire, coach, mentor, give responsibilities…

Some are behaviours from the PRA (Participatory Rural Appraisal) tradition

• Sit down, listen, learn
• Facilitate  (fundamental to good management behaviour, to transforming relationships…?)
• Hand over the stick (or pointer, baton, marker pen, chalk, powerpoint clicker, microphone…even megaphone  -yes really, with large groups….)  (Duncan wrote to me that he still feels funny inside when he does this – a mixture of excitement and reluctance! I know the feeling.  It is also often relaxing as you hand over responsibility).
• Ask them!  – as an upper, ask lowers what they know, their priorities, their ideas, advice and views.   Often they come up with ideas new to the upper.  Power relations are reversed or levelled.  Uppers discover that ‘They Can Do It’ – that lowers have unsuspected capabilities.
• Shut up!  The empowering power of silence – surprisingly hard to practice – ‘suffering the silence’ but worth a try

Other less obvious ones don’t always come up:

• Make simple empowering rules.  Take codes of conduct for a workshop, for instance.  These can give voice to those who hold back and restrain and limit the big talkers.   With ‘Senior Silence’ no senior person or upper is to speak.  Lowers come into their own and uppers are sometimes amazed at what they know and say.

A neatly self-regulating  system comes from Nepal.  Every time a person speaks a sweet is put in their mouth.  Sucking only – no high-speed crunching allowed.   The Director of an NGO was so frustrated that he crunched, and became known as ‘our sweet-crunching friend’.

• Convene  -  invite people to come together and share knowledge and ideas, co-generate knowledge and gain solidarity.  This happens again and again with women’s groups, leading to Power To and action
• Broker             act as mediator, intermediary, conciliator…
• Ask empowering questions.

Here’s an example. The Country Director of an INGO on arrival sent a message to all 150 or so of her staff.  She asked them what they would like her NOT to do.  Wow!  It paid off, and how.  She received guidance from over a hundred responses.  And now that INGO has for two successive years received the award for the best managed organisation in the whole country, beating all competition in the private sector!

Is there a synergy here?  Can these behaviours by uppers balance or reverse power relations, generating a synergy of power with, power within and power to?

So can power to empower be a win-win?  Used well, can it liberate uppers, reducing the stresses of responsibility and control?  And can it lead to better ideas, better performance, better management, a better life?

Pie in the sky?  Or realism?  What is your experience?  What do you think?

The World Bank’s new chief economist on redistribution, taxation, economists, climate change and, errm, multi-player sudoku

The World Bank’s new chief economist, Kaushik Basu (right), came through London last week and had a good initial exchange of views with some NGO wonks. I went to a similar exercise with his predecessor, Justin Lin (blogpost here), and the comparison was interesting. Whereas Justin focussed on industrial policy and structural upgrading, Kaushik talked a lot about governance, inequality, taxation and growth. Justin focussed more on the economics; Kaushik on the politics – how to get governments (and his World Bank colleagues) to do the right thing. That probably reflects their different backgrounds (China v India; Kaushik just crossing over from a period in the Indian Ministry of Finance where he learned to understand ‘the hierarchy of government’) more than any great change in public debate in the last four years.

Kaushik suggested a change of tone was needed among the Bank’s economists and researchers – paying as much attention to policy-makers’ need for narratives and big ideas as to demonstrating your mastery of whizzy maths. Damnit, not only have they nicked our killer facts techniques, but now they’re going to start telling good stories too! Throughout, he stressed the importance of the battle of ideas, ‘consciousness’ and ‘raising awareness’. Gramsci on 18^th Street? He was also keen to push climate change and environmentalism, which he thinks is probably still insufficiently prominent at the Bank.

He received some good, pointed questions from the wonks. Peter Chowla from the Bretton Woods Project (the premier Bank watchdog in the UK, maybe anywhere) pushed him on the role of the Bank’s researchers in ‘paradigm maintenance’ – Peter argued that the Bank has a good varied set of research outputs (it probably allows a freer exchange of ideas than the UN, or for that matter, most NGOs and Kaushik is determined to protect that), but there’s some kind of institutional filter in place which squeezes out the heterodox fringe, and amplifies the neoclassical core, especially as ideas start to reach Bank country programmes. Everyone got a kick in on the Bank’s notorious Doing Business report, which Kaushik defended (he says it, along with the World Development Indicators, were the two documents he found most useful in government). He did however acknowledge that there might be some ideological ‘Trojan horse agendas’ being introduced.

Kaushik acknowledged that ‘if you begin in neoclassical economics and you don’t have enough imagination, you get locked into things like rational expectations’, but argued that lots of economists have quite sufficient imagination to think outside these reductionist stereotypes.

Where I started to get worried was on his apparent acceptance of the ‘race to the bottom’ on corporate taxation. This reflects his experience in his home state, West Bengal, where despite a Communist government committed to poverty eradication, the demands on industry were so severe that industry fled the state and poverty and unemployment remained high. But surely a key role for the Bank is to take up these kind of collective action problems?

However he does support redistribution. ‘I am not a trickle down believer, you need direct action on inequality’. He thinks that while we have to be mindful of the risk of capital and skill flight, there is scope for more efficient and redistributive forms of tax. There ought to be some inheritance tax, he believes, because to allow people to be born poor and destined to poverty as happens in today’s world is akin to a caste system. He reckons that with current levels of wealth ‘basic food should now be a fundamental right and access to healthcare is close to that.’

I think he could prove to be an interesting and innovative voice at the Bank, introducing an Indian sensibility on rights, human development and governance – he recently suggested an approach on bribery rather similar to decriminalizing cannabis: make it legal to pay bribes, but not to receive them, so that people forced to pay bribes would no longer be deterred from denouncing graft. You can follow him on twitter at @kaushikcbasu

One final revelation from the meeting – a diligent wonk had uncovered Kaushik’s true claim to fame, as inventor of a multiplayer version of Sudoku, clunkily named Duidoku (left). If that catches on, he may end up explaining to the Bank why he has single-handedly destroyed decades of global progress on productivity…….

What are the ingredients of democratic breakthroughs?

Don’t know much/anything about the politics of the United States Institute of Peace (but handle with care – in the US, any institution with ‘peace’ or ‘freedom’ in the title is usually pretty suspect), but it has a very interesting paper out on ‘Democratic Breakthroughs: the Ingredients of Successful Revolts.’ It’s a bit reductionist, but identifies some potentially informative patterns. This from the summary:

The cases of successful breakthrough examined in this study are the Soviet Union in 1991 and Russia in 1993, Poland in 1989, Serbia in 2000, Ukraine in 2004, Indonesia by 1999, Chile in 1988, and South Africa by 1996. Cases of failed and then ultimately successful democratic transition are Ghana by 2000, Mexico by 2000, South Korea by 1987, and Turkey by 1983. Finally, the cases of failed transition examined are Algeria in 1991, Iran in 1979, China in 1989, and Azerbaijan in 2005.

■ Ten domestic influences were found to be common to each of the successful cases of democratic breakthrough examined in this study, including incremental reform victories preceding breakthrough attempts, the presence of coherent oppositions, economic distress and poor service delivery, rising expectations and increasing levels of literacy and education, mass mobilization, a growing influence of civic actors, preservation of independent information flows, reform offers by regimes that only embolden oppositions, robust “get out the vote” and “protect the vote” efforts, and breakthroughs that are largely free from violence.

■ Seven types of external influence were identified as influential, including passive factors, such as economic shocks, diffusion, and the influence of norms and ideas; and active factors, such as direct democracy aid, diplomatic influence, economic influence, and reputational influence.

■ Even though all of these domestic factors and most of the external ones featured in every successful case of breakthrough, the impact of these precipitants varied in influence from case to case. (see fig 1)

■ Moreover, the balance of influences ranged considerably. For example, in South Africa, external variables such as diplomatic and economic pressure, democratic socialization, and direct democracy assistance were critical in pressing the regime toward a pacted solution, whereas in Turkey, breakthrough was driven almost entirely by domestic considerations.

■ Contributing to the peaceful conduct of breakthroughs is in the interests of the conflict resolution community as much as it serves as an important objective of democracy promotion.

■ Implications for democratization policy include the need to identify a breakthrough paradigm to avoid diffuse, poorly coordinated, and sometimes counterproductive external assistance efforts; the importance of providing long-term and fast-track democracy assistance; and the importance of preserving free information flows, especially in states with breakthrough potential.

■ Implications for democracy assistance in the field include recognizing the importance of preconditions and sociopolitical context, not overlooking “irregular communities” of dissent, and being willing to utilize liberation methodologies in conjunction with liberation technologies as required.

■ Applying the criteria, the countries with the best prospects for successfully completing democratic breakthrough among current Arab Spring revolts are Tunisia and Egypt, with democratic movement, if not breakthrough, possible in Yemen. Libya also holds the potential for completing breakthrough, but the challenges are formidable.

■ Important reforms are likely in Morocco and Jordan, where King Abdullah II has become more vulnerable to pressure for political reforms in recent months, and Bahrain may yet host additional democratic reforms in the coming year.

■ Little progress is likely in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Algeria, and Syria continues to be convulsed by violence with few prospects for stability in the near future, leaving the region a mix of success stories, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and retrenched autocracies.

And here’s their summary table on North Africa and the Middle East

Small arms psychedelia; innovation Tourette’s; Women and Food; Post-2015; DRC; inconvenient corruption; Why Authors Fail; 4 degree world; Africans for Norway: links I liked

Psychedelic infographic on small arms and ammunition trade by country [h/t Chris Blattman]

Innovation Tourette’s – the latest occupational disease in the aid industry

Some Oxfam news: We’re half way through a provocative two week online debate on women and the food system and we’ve just tidied up and published our in-house research guidelines on ethics, interviewing, writing exec sums & killer facts, terms of reference, house style etc. Handy.

The political economy of post-2015. Final version of my new paper, written with Stephen Hale and Matthew Lockwood, is now out. It incorporates comments from more than 500 downloads of the draft – unpaid consultancy crowdsourcing rocks.

What to read on the DRC? Guardian has handy FAQs and a nice ‘what next after the fall of Goma’ piece by David Smith

The ODI’s Marta Foresti has some good ‘inconvenient truths’ on corruption

Excessively tetchy response by Acemoglu & Robinson to Jeff Sachs’ critical review of their book, Why Nations Fail, triggers much more civilized series of parallel discussions on twitter – Jeff Sachs like some kind of developmental chess grand master playing numerous games at once

New World Bank report says world will heat up by 4 degrees by end of century and poor will suffer most

OK, you’ve probably already seen this, but what the heck. To show the difference between hazard and vulnerability, I sometimes point out that Europe has a natural disaster every year – winter. But this lovely (and really rather gentle) spoof, takes it one step further. Big it up for Radi-aid, aka ‘Africans for Norway’. And to the Norwegian aid agency for funding it. Martin Plaut has more background [h/t Sally King and numerous others]

Love, death and violence against women in the DRC (and elsewhere): what are we missing?

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, so expect a rash of stories about sexual violence in the DRC’s current conflict. Here Rachel Hastie, Oxfam’s protection adviser,  cautions against a simplistic ‘heart of darkness’ narrative, and argues for a more nuanced and human understanding of the phenomenon.

There’s a lovely photograph in the atrium of the Oxfam office. It shows Masumbuko, a 36 year old man, draping his arms around his wife, Grace’s, neck as she shyly looks to the camera. It was taken by fashion photographer Rankin for the exhibition ‘From Congo with Love’. Masumbuko says “I fell in love with my wife the first time I saw her. There was something about her – the way she was talking, the way she was walking, her nose, her ears…. I can’t go a day without looking at her.”

It’s sweet and lovely, and all the more so because they live in eastern Congo, which has been described as ‘the rape capital of the world’ – Rankin’s photo gives me a glance into the lives of these two people that jars with the protection reports and field assessments sitting on my desk just a few metres away.

Whether it be Bosnia, Liberia, Darfur, or DRC, sexual violence has been an aspect of many of the conflicts and humanitarian responses I’ve been involved in during my time with Oxfam. Rape and other forms of sexual violence are an appalling violation, devastating in their immediate and long term consequences for individuals and their families and communities.

In recent years there have been some significant gains in getting sexual violence in conflict onto the international agenda, largely won by the many women’s groups, organisation and individuals who have campaigned tirelessly in the face of hostility, indifference and derision. There is still a long way to go, as news reports from Syria, eastern DRC, and Mali illustrate, but who would have thought just 10 years ago that we would now have a Special Representative to the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict – the formidable Zainab Hawa Bangura, a security council resolution with a ‘naming and shaming’ mechanism, and a sitting Head of State indicted by the ICC for rape as crime against humanity?

There has been a huge amount of public campaigning to make the extent of rape in war and its consequences more visible, to galvanize more concerted action from donors, policy makers, the international community and Governments around the world. Yet there is something that makes me very uneasy about the way the issue is being raised and what the long-term consequences of that might be.

Masumbuko and Grace

Just a couple of weeks ago The Guardian ran a story that one-third of Congolese men admit committing sexual violence. Can this be true? In a country of with an estimated population of more than 20 million men and boys aged 15+ are there really almost 7 million who admit to being rapists? Well, no it’s not true of course, of the 708 men interviewed in and around Goma, including in a military base in the conflict-affected east of the country, a third admitted to committing acts of sexual violence. This in itself is shocking, the levels of disclosure give an indication of the extent of acts of sexual violence, and how little sanction these men expect from their peers and community, but it does not equate to a third of all Congolese men being rapists. Similar headlines periodically appear from conflict zones around the world, and the aid agency assessment reports all too frequently portray conflict zones as populated by violent male rapists where women only exist as passive victims.

This news coverage has not done justice to the report of the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), from which the statistic was sourced. IMAGES has produced a very intelligent, and thoughtful report that deserves much more careful consideration. The researchers themselves highlight that sexual violence is a commonplace occurence and 9% of men and 22% of women they interviewed had experienced it during the conflict. Sexual violence isn’t experienced in isolation – killings, torture, lost homes, livelihoods and the death of family members are all part of people’s experience of conflict. Rigid gender roles create vulnerabilities for women and for men, and the report’s authors call for greater focus on the impact of disempowerment of men and how gender relations are affected by conflict in order that the root causes and drivers of such violence are addressed.  Three quarters of the men they spoke to said they felt ashamed to face their families because they can’t provide for their basic financial means.

There’s no shortage of similar analysis: a fascinating and comprehensive report from The Nordic Africa Institute provides a compelling study on how an aggressively militarised masculinity is promoted during times of conflict and of its impact on gender relations and violence against women, as well as against men who do not conform to that ideal. HEAL Africa’s research highlights the disparity between idealised masculinity and the reality of men’s lives, again making the link to male violence in conflict and the community.

The study’s author calls on humanitarians to recognise the interdependent and interactive nature of gender, but we do seem to prefer it simplistic: men as the perpetrators of evil, women as the pathetic victims, without looking at the root causes of violence and how we need to address them in order to have any positive impact. There’s also little space for the men and boys who are themselves victims of (largely) male violence, and those men who are working to promote greater gender equity and to care for and support women and girl survivors of violence. There’s something quite alarming about how comfortable we are in portraying African men and women in this way – reminiscent of a ‘heart of darkness’ narrative of African men as barbaric savages incapable of loving and caring for their wives, daughters and mothers.

All these reports give us a good insight into gender relations in conflict, the impact of militarised masculinity, the economic stresses that prevent men providing for their families, the underlying cultural and social relations, beliefs and assumptions that create startling gender inequalities and the link to violence against women and girls. So why don’t we use this knowledge to develop better understanding, cleverer programmes, and campaigning on the issue? In asking that question, I’ve encountered resistance and occasional hostility and aggression that has left me with some difficult questions to ponder.

Are the gains that have been made in women’s rights and on sexual violence in particular still so tenuous that we have to keep using shock statistics to get attention and action? Can we keep negating and colluding in the invisibility of the sexual and other violence targeted at men and boys in places like the DRC in order to make the violence against women and girls more visible?  And how does that impact on our understanding of gender relations and the root causes of such violence which lies at the heart of any effective work to tackle gender-based violence?

I’d like to take a more sophisticated approach to the understanding of gender in conflict, to really start taking on board some of the excellent research carried out in recent years. For all the horror stories, the rapists and the murderers, whose acts of violence are depicted in horrifying detail in the growing stack of reports on my desk, there are also thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people like Masumbuko and Grace, who fall in love with each other, marry, have children, care for and love each other, and they need a place in this narrative too.

Satirographics on development – here’s a couple, but where are yours?

It was bound to happen. With the boom in infographics, along comes a satirical fringe. These are a gift for blogs and powerpoints, so please send in your favourites (I’ll post the best ones).

First up, success and the wonders of ‘retrospective coherence’ [h/t Innovation Network]

Next, obfuscatory logic models (aka follow the chimp). Click twice if it’s too small to read.  [h/t Chris Roche]

A Muslim tiger? Turkey’s rising power and influence

Oxfam Private Sector Adviser Erinch Sahan (right) is blown away by Turkey’s rising influence across the Muslim world

Turkey is on the rise. It’s become a confident middle power with visions of becoming a regional super-power. The one time ‘sick man of Europe’ is expanding its influence, across region and beyond and is seen as the leader of choice across the Muslim world.

Nowhere is Turkish influence more evident than across the Turkic-speaking countries of Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Last month, while walking the streets of Azerbaijan, I was overwhelmed by the amount of Turkish music, restaurants, television channels and football jerseys I came across. As a native Turkish speaker, I was delighted that every Azeri I came across understood every word I said. “It’s because all we watch is Turkish television and our kids go to Turkish schools”, one man informed me.

This growth in soft power is not restricted to Azerbaijan. From Dubai to Cairo, Damascus to Beirut,  Islamabad to Bosnia, audiences are glued to screens depicting scenes from Turkey’s past and present. Turkish drama has hit the screens in 76 countries since 2005. Perhaps more importantly, there are now over 1,000 Turkish schools linked to the movement led by Turkish preacher Fetullah Gulen, in 130 countries.

The growth of Turkey’s economic power is even harder to ignore. With the economy growing at 8.5 and 9 per cent over the last two years, Turkey is set to continue to lead the OECD growth tables. Turkish firms aren’t shy in expanding overseas either. Turkish company, TAV, the world’s 4th largest airport contractor, is expanding aggressively. Turkish construction companies now have operations in 94 countries and $25b in Turkish investment now reaches 109 countries. HSBC predicts that Turkey will jump six spots to become the world’s 12^th largest economy by 2050. The expansion of Turkish economic power will continue well into this century.

Why does it matter?

If you work in the Muslim world or in Africa, you cannot ignore Turkey.

Turkey as an economic actor

Turkish business is at the frontiers of development. Turkey’s trade with sub-Saharan Africa has gone through the roof in the last 10 years, from $750m in 2000 to $7.5bn in 2011. Turkish investment is also reaching all corners of the continent. Kolin, a major contracting company, has started a $140m infrastructure project in Uganda and is looking at opportunities in South Africa and Kenya. The Turkish conglomerate Koc Holding (which includes BEKO appliances) acquired South African appliances giant Defy for $324m in 2011.

Will Turkish firms become ideal ‘lead firms’ in value chains projects? Could you partner with them to further develop social and environmental standards in Africa? Should we be looking at discussing public private partnerships with them? Increasingly, it’s worth considering.

Turkey as a trusted donor

Turkey is a rapidly growing aid donor. Interestingly, as an OECD member, it has not joined its aid committee, the DAC, despite meeting the criteria of official aid exceeding $100m (I wonder if it’s the transparency requirements that puts Turkey off). In 2011, Turkey spent $1.3b in aid. This is not insignificant – about the same levels as Austria or Finland.

Big in Bosnia: steamy scene from Turkish soap 'Forbidden Love'

But the volume of aid is only half the story. Turkish aid seeks places where it can leverage its soft power and increase its influence. Until recently, most Turkish aid went to Central Asia and the Balkans, to former Ottoman domains and fellow-Turkic speaking nations. However, Turkish aid to Africa and the Middle East is rapidly growing.

Turkey has quickly become a mover-and-shaker in Somalia.

Last year, Prime Minister Erdogan became the first non-African leader to visit the country. A similar story can be told in Yemen.For a Muslim nation, it’s a novelty to receive aid from a fellow-Muslim nation. Turkish aid makes the news in Muslim countries. It is received with a trust not afforded to western donors and carries greater influence. Turkey is seen as an honest broker across the Muslim world.

According to a Pew survey in July 2012, PM Erdogan is the most popular leader in the Muslim world . Moreover, most Muslims believe that Turkey is promoting democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. 78 per cent of Egyptians think Turkey is promoting democracy in the region. In contrast, the billions of US aid poured into Egypt over decades has bought them a measly 37 per cent of Egyptians accepting that America is promoting democracy in the Middle East.

Turkey as a moral leader

Such unparalleled positive perception among Muslim peoples and leaders, coupled with growing Turkish aid to the region, makes Turkey a formidable power that can shape the institutional future of the Muslim world. Whatever your view of the quality of democracy in Turkey, it’s miles ahead of most of the Muslim world. And it seems an overwhelming majority of Muslims agree.

“We called ourselves conservative democrats. We focused our change on basic rights and freedom… This stance has gone beyond our country’s borders and has become an example for all Muslim countries.” Erdogan proclaims. According to the exiled leader of Hamas, the Turkish government has shown the “bright face of Islam” -Erdogan is not only the leader of Turkey but also a leader of the Muslim world. The Turkish PM is greeted like a rock-star whichever Middle Eastern or North African capital he visits.

Should you be knocking on the door of the local Turkish embassy to partner-up in delivering governance programmes? Should you be lobbying to influence Turkey’s position, hoping they’d throw their weight behind your agenda? Should you be dropping in some positive examples of reforms in Turkey the next time you put together an advocacy message? Or perhaps, aligning your message with Turkey’s official line on democracy and reform? I would suggest yes. Because if you’re working in the Muslim world, you cannot ignore the influence of Turkey.

Lant Pritchett v the Randomistas on the nature of evidence – is a wonkwar brewing?

Last week I had a lot conversations about evidence. First, one of the periodic retreats of Oxfam senior managers reviewed our work on livelihoods, humanitarian partnership and gender rights. The talk combined some quantitative work (for example the findings of our new ‘effectiveness reviews’), case studies, and the accumulated wisdom of our big cheeses. But the tacit hierarchy of these different kinds of knowledge worried me – anything with a number attached had a privileged position, however partial the number or questionable the process for arriving at it. In contrast, decades of experience were not even credited as ‘evidence’, but often written off as ‘opinion’. It felt like we were in danger of discounting our richest source of insight – gut feeling.

In this state of discomfort, I went off for lunch with Lant Pritchett (right – he seems to have forgiven me for my screw-up of a couple of years ago). He’s a brilliant and original thinker and speaker on any number of development issues, but I was most struck by the vehemence of his critique of the RCT randomistas and the quest for experimental certainty. Don’t get me (or him) wrong, he thinks the results agenda is crucial in ‘moving from an input orientation to a performance orientation’ and set out his views as long ago as 2002 in a paper called ‘It pays to be ignorant’, but he sees the current emphasis on RCTs as an example of the failings of ‘thin accountability’ compared to the thick version.

In a forthcoming paper (which I will definitely link to when it’s published), Lant defines thick accountability as ‘an “account” in the sense of a justificatory narrative of my actions, the story of my actions I tell to those whose opinion of me is important (including myself, but including family and kinsmen, friends, co-workers, co-religionists, people I respect and desire admiration from) that explains why my actions are in accord with, and deserving of, a positive view of myself.    In contrast, thin accountability is “accounting”, which is that small part of the account about which objective facts can be established.’  He sketched out the inevitable 2×2 matrix for me

The challenge in most development work is to move from top left to bottom right. There are occasions when thin accountability/high performance works – typically routine functions like delivering mail or building roads. But anything involving the messiness of people and institutions requires thick accountability, involving deep bonds of trust and reciprocal relationships that are likely to be defined by a setting’s unique history and geography – what he calls ‘folk practices, from which formal organizations can (re)emerge’.

He argues that the randomistas just don’t get this. His critique of RCT culture ranged pretty wide:

• The politics of RCTs: ‘RCTs are a tool to cut funding, not to increase learning.’  ‘Randomization is a weapon of the weak’ – a sign of how politically vulnerable the argument for aid has become since the end of the Cold War. ‘Henry Kissinger wouldn’t have demanded an RCT before approving aid to some country.’ And I can’t see the military running RCTs to assess the value for money of new weaponry before asking for more cash (mind you, if they did, that might at least save some money on Trident….).
• The lack of interest in theory: ‘the randomistas are going back to alchemy – atheoretic experimentation’.
• RCTs test at most a few project variants using ‘project vs non-project’, whereas interventions are typically multiple, overlapping and synergistic (i.e. the whole cannot be reduced to a sum of parts).
• No-one evaluates the evaluators. At the very least, given how much RCTs cost, you need to know that the findings are useful elsewhere (so-called ‘external validity’). But once you have multiple RCTs on the same issue (and their spread is starting to produce such comparable studies), you find very little external validity – the results of an RCT in one country and time are not replicated elsewhere (with the possible exception of deworming in schools, but even that iconic RCT story is contested). This is the big contrast with real science, where replicability is a key condition of validity.

Patronising? Overpromising? Nah....

In another recent paper, he argues instead for ‘structured experiential learning’, which involves rigorous and intelligent conversation, rather than the illusory certainty of numbers. Get people in a room, agree what the problem is, agree to try out some experiments to solve the problem, and set up rapid feedback to identify failure and/or build on success. In another recent paper, he calls this ‘Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)’. It sounds very similar to the conclusions of the Africa Power and Politics Programme, which I reviewed recently. In yet another paper (he’s horribly prolific), he also draws a neat distinction between experiments and experimentation:

‘Perhaps surprisingly, the experimentation and experiments approaches are not at all the same. I argue that experiments, while a terrific method for generating PhD dissertations and published papers, will have impact on development and development practice only insofar as they are embedded in an experimentation approach (which they are often not).’

The feeling I got from these conversations was of two tribes encamped and preparing for battle. That line from Henry V comes to mind: ‘from camp to camp, through the foul womb of Boston night, the hum of either army stilly sounds.’ On one side are the ‘best fit’ institutionalists and complexity people, with their focus on path dependence, evolution and trial and error. On the other are the ‘universal law’ experimentalists, offering the illusory certainty of numbers, and (crucially) comfort to the political paymasters seeking to prove to sceptical publics that aid works. It’s hard to see how they can both be right, or happily coexist for long. Time for a wonkwar on this blog, I think…..

Commodities of War: What the people without guns say about life, death and fear in the DR Congo

I was supposed to be in the Democratic Republic of Congo this week, with today being devoted to visiting the Kanyaruchina camp (right) for ‘internally displaced people’ (IDPs) near Goma. Instead, the trip’s been cancelled, I am still in London and Kanyaruchina has been abandoned, as some 30,000 people have fled (again).

The reason is the sudden escalation in fighting between the M23 guerrilla group and the Congolese government, with the M23 advancing to the outskirts of Goma over the weekend.

A BBC report from the deserted camp gives a taste of the human impact of the fighting. It’s great television, but it’s still the standard format – local people providing the backdrop to the white reporter or researcher. An Oxfam report out today takes a different approach, ‘bearing witness’ through focus groups and interviews to collect the views of over 1,300 people in 32 conflict-affected communities (and then working with those communities to help them address their concerns).

The ‘protection assessment’ exposed alarming levels of abuse of men, women and children by armed groups, including through forced recruitment, forced labour and continuous illegal taxation in one of the world’s most under-reported and egregious human rights situations. In areas subject to attack by armed groups, people expressed fears about killings, looting and abductions. In areas largely controlled by the state, people reported exploitation, including extortion under threat of violence, by the very state services which are supposed to protect and support them.

This chaos has exacerbated a trend in which communities themselves have increasingly become ‘commodities of war’ (the title of the report), fought over by armed groups – both state and non-state – and by authorities seeking to control lucrative opportunities to extort their money and possessions.  In several areas, people have felt compelled to take security and justice into their own hands due to an abusive or absent state, adding to the growing numbers of new armed groups.

The annual report, (the sixth since 2007) “identified the following protection themes emerging over the past year:

• The civilian population has increasingly become a commodity of war, as those who are fighting vie for the right to extort money and goods from people in areas they control. Abuse of power is pervasive in state-controlled as well as rebel-controlled areas, and violent extortion and coercion are rife.
• Violent attacks on civilians continue, including inter-ethnic revenge killings.
• Coping mechanisms are strained. People report increasing vulnerability and their livelihoods seriously threatened as they lack safe access to their fields and local markets.
• Men, women, and children experience insecurity differently. For example, girls expressed fears about sexual exploitation and violence, while boys talked of the risk of violence associated with killings, arbitrary arrests and illegal detentions, forced labour, and fear of forced recruitment. For women such experiences come on top of their ongoing challenge to ascertain their rights, which is linked to cultural custom and limited access to justice;
• The security situation is worse in areas that frequently change hands between government and rebel control. Most people preferred a FARDC presence to the lack of it.
• In the absence of an effective state authority, many people reported feeling abandoned by central government. In some cases, the lack of a state presence, or abuses perpetrated by the state, prompted people to take justice into their own hands.
• Many areas that have seen increasing stability over recent years have become more insecure since early 2012 as armed groups have moved into areas vacated by the army.”

I’m always reluctant to talk about ‘innocent civilians caught between two fires’ as people usually have strong views of their own on what political change might improve their lot. But in this case, reality may well approach the journalistic cliché. It will be one of the things I try and get to the bottom of when I finally get to Eastern DRC (hopefully in January).