Does the World Bank speak with forked tongue on Land Grabs?

Rob Nash, Oxfam’s Private Sector policy adviser, finds a deep contradiction in the way the World Bank talks (and acts) about land

Last week I was at the World Bank’s Land and Poverty Conference in Washington DC, sitting in one of the most luxuriously appointed office buildings I have ever seen, (and I used to work for Lehman Brothers), as we discussed the land issues that so critically affect many of the poorest people on our planet.

This week, this fine setting will play host to the annual Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group, where land issues will also be a big focus for many of the assembled policymakers, academics, NGOs and private sector investors.

Land is a big deal for Oxfam. Last year at around this time, we published Risky Business, looking at the explosion in channelling development finance to private sector businesses indirectly, using so-called Financial Intermediaries (FIs) like banks and private equity funds. In the paper we identified some worrying characteristics of this arms-length financing – opacity, complexity, focus on financial returns over development impact, focus on financial risk over environmental and social risk, lack of oversight or ability to influence the business practices of investee companies, remoteness from the projects ultimately financed and the impacts they have on poor people. We worried that such poorly governed financing was fuelling land grabs.

Since then a lot has happened. Oxfam has been asking the World Bank to freeze its large agriculture investments until it puts in place measures to tackle the threat of land grabs. Pressure on the World Bank and IFC has increased as civil society organisations around the world have drawn attention to the plight of poor rural communities whose lives are turned upside-down by deals that infringe their rights and take away their land, many of which are backed by Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) like the IFC.

And it isn’t just Oxfam and the NGO community raising concerns. An audit report from the CAO (the watchdog for the IFC) of IFC’s financial sector investments was made public in early 2013. It was measured in tone but quite devastating in its implications for IFC and for FI lending.

The report found that IFC is unable to track whether or not these investments are causing harm to poor people and the environment, let alone measure whether they bring development benefits. It found serious irregularities and compliance issues within the existing policies used by IFC, with many projects persistently failing to comply with the IFC’s standards. It found inadequate transparency, with at times a near-total absence of public access to information, which can make it impossible for communities to find out if the IFC is even involved in a project, much less know that they could access grievance and redress mechanisms through the CAO.

The response by the IFC to the audit failed to acknowledge the gravity of the issues raised or to commit to properly addressing them. As a result, a large number of CSOs have written to the leadership of the World Bank Group calling for it to put its financial house in order.

Which is particularly striking given that, back at the Land and Poverty Conference, the transparency and accountability of land deals has been a major theme of presentations and discussions. Speaker after speaker stressed (to general agreement) that land acquisition deals must be subject to the consultation and consent of communities affected, must be based on a good understanding of the local context in terms of food security and existing use of resources like water and land, and must actively seek business models that contribute to improving the livelihoods of local communities and create opportunities and incentives for shared prosperity.

This welcome recognition is backed by the statement just released by World Bank President Jim Kim, acknowledging that land grabbing is a serious risk, that the World Bank has a vital role to play in tackling land grabs, and that it could look at its own practices and safeguards as well as committing to support the Voluntary Guidelines on the Governance of Tenure (VGs) and new principles for responsible agriculture investment, which are essential to protect communities’ rights. For more background see this post from Oxfam’s Hannah Stoddart.

But the conference discussions often overlooked the use of FI lending. And although the World Bank statement makes some broad remarks about transparency and due diligence for FI lending, it ignores the very serious issues raised by the CAO audit.

Washington, we have a problem. Looks like we have two very different World Banks on land grabs. So who do we believe, Dr Jekyll or Mr Hyde?  Interms of hard cash, the IFC increasingly dominates. There has been a surge in the channelling of development finance to the private sector through FIs in recent years, from IFC and other DFIs. In 2011, 40% of IFC’s portfolio was made up of lending through FIs. That proportion continues to grow as IFC itself takes up an ever-bigger share of the World Bank Group funding pie (annual reports indicate IFC matches the IBRD at around $20 billion of commitments made in 2012).

In terms of public policy, we’re starting to see a lot of good progress in acknowledging the key issues of transparency and accountability and remedy, so the contradictory shift towards FI lending is a big issue for those concerned about land grabs. But it goes deeper than that, touching on the way in which publicly-backed development finance institutions like the IFC perform their role. Is it sufficient for the World Bank and IFC to pursue a narrow agenda of growth (economic growth generally or growth in private sector investment) under the assumption that benefits will trickle down to the poorest or, should they instead pay attention to the quality of that growth and investment? That means acting in part like a public body, actively seeking to ensure its intended beneficiaries are not in fact harmed, that it supports projects and influences policy in a way that upholds peoples’ fundamental rights (including to food, land and water), and targets scarce resources to investments in projects where there will be a clear and shared benefit to local communities (especially marginalised groups and women) and national development priorities as well as financial returns for the recipients of finance.

Ultimately, when it lends public money to FIs, is the IFC just a bank, or is it a development finance institution?

After all, from where I am sitting, as a former banker myself – if it looks like a bank, walks like a bank, and talks like a bank, the chances are… it’s just a bank.

Should men speak on all-male panels? Summary + time to cast your vote

Right, I have now waded through dozens of comments, tweets and my own tangled thoughts on Monday’s post. What stood out?

Boycott v constructive engagement: is it better to politely push conference organizers, suggest female panelists, and express ‘strong disinclination’ to take part in testosterone-fests, or to play hardball with a blanket ban? And is the crime less heinous for a three man panel than a six man one?

Should this approach be extended beyond gender, especially to having representation from developing countries?

Pressure during the event itself: questions from the floor and from panelists should ask organizers to explain themselves and/or panelists should make the effort to ask for female colleagues’ input to the debate and pass it on (duly credited).

Should we add a ban on all-female panels on gender issues?

Don’t blame the event organizers when the real problem is broader – the lack of women at top level in a number of development-related institutions (yes, but a combination of conscious effort and affirmative action by event organizers can be part of redressing the wider problem).

For the moment, I’m coming round to the following position: When asked to participate on a panel, right-thinking men  should

a)      Ask about the current make-up of the panel

b)      If it’s devoid of either women or people from other relevant population groups (depending on the topic), both express serious reservations and try and suggest some names

c)       If they think the organizers are not serious, they should decline, but if they seem to be really trying, it’s OK to say yes

d)      Before the panel, try and get input from colleagues to fill in any potential gaps in the panel‘s analysis due to its grotesquely distorted composition

e)      When speaking on the panel, mention the disparity, and try and ensure a fair spread of questioners (male domination applies to questions at least as much as it does to panelists)

And of course, none of this applies if the panelists are Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela and Jim Kim, but Christine Lagarde is not available that day.

There, that should ensure I never get invited to speak at a panel again. Result.

And since everyone likes voting (judging by last year’s top ten), please could you tell me whether I’ve got it right? The Poll will remain open for a few days. The question is

When asked to appear on panels, men should

a)      Simply refuse to appear on male-only panels

b)      Constructively engage with organizers in the way set out in the blog

c)       Just be grateful, say yes and abandon all this pitiful liberal self-doubt

Should men boycott all-male panels at conferences?

A conversation on twitter this weekend triggered (yet another) ethical dilemma. Gosh it’s exhausting trying to be a do-gooder. Claire Melamed started it by sending round a link to an article arguing that men should sign a pledge stating publicly that they will refuse to take part in all-male panels at tech conferences (which are regularly men-only affairs, apparently). As a regular token NGO speaker at various talkshops, would I make a similar pledge, she asked? Owen Barder is already signed up, she added.

They may not be as extreme as geeky tech events, but lots of development gabfests do indeed feature men on the panel talking to women (and men) in the audience. That violates basic fairness, inhibits the profile and (possibly) career development of half of the potential talent pool, and is likely to distort the agenda and resulting discussion (less focus on care economy, women’s rights etc). So obviously, the answer is yes to a boycott, right?

Except…..

Most people who contact me don’t know the final panel line-up yet. They are in the process of contacting a range of potential speakers, both men and women. Prominent women in the development debate (like Claire and her outgoing boss at ODI Alison Evans) are in huge demand, so presumably have to say no quite a lot of the time. Should I say ‘provisionally yes, but if you end up with a male-only line-up, I’ll withdraw at the last minute’? That seems to me to cross the line from principled to prima donna – pretty unfair on already stressed-out conference organisers who may be trying ever so hard to ensure a balanced line up. Or should I say ‘are you committed to inviting a decent number of women speakers to ensure a gender balance on your panels?’ – everyone is going to say yes, but how do you measure how serious they are?

Then of course there’s the organisational profile thing. In fantasy mode, suppose I get a call saying ‘Barack Obama, David Cameron and Jim Kim are speaking on development, and need a token NGO person, could you do it? Christine Lagarde is busy that day, sorry.’ Am I really going to say no?

And what about a panel with all male speakers and a woman chair (a pretty common occurrence)?

And why privilege gender over eg ethnicity – what about all-white panels on development (which are even more common than all-male ones)?

Oh dear. The torments of the self-obsessed liberal.

Tell me what you think, and depending on the response, I may well set up another online poll to help solve my dilemma. Meanwhile, the interns poll is still getting votes (see right), and the agnostics (NGOs should decide for themselves whether to pay interns) has overtaken the ‘pay all interns’ lobby and is drawing away. Unexpected result – love it.

Why the World Bank should declare a freeze on big land deals

‘Buy land. They’re not making it any more.’ Around the world, a lot of investors are taking Mark Twain’s advice to heart, and the resulting

land rush is doing an awful lot of damage. A hard-hitting, killer fact-tastic Oxfam briefing written by my colleague Kate Geary published today summarizes the stats (as far as we know them).

• In the past decade, an area eight times the size of the UK (203m hectares) has been sold off or leased out globally.
• The land acquired between 2000 and 2010 has the potential to feed a billion people, equivalent to the number of people who currently go to bed hungry each night (Oxfam calculation, all explained in footnotes).
• Two-thirds of agricultural land deals by foreign investors are in countries with a serious hunger problem.
• Two-thirds of foreign land investors in developing countries intend to export everything they produce on the land.
• According to the IMF, most of the land being sold off is in the poorest countries with the weakest protection of people’s land rights.

Once the land has been given away, it becomes a much harder and potentially nastier battle to take it back. The danger is that when the dust settles on this property rights freezing frenzy, millions of people will have l2ost access to land, countries will be saddled with bad deals, and investors will face a resentful population and a legal quagmire. So Oxfam is arguing that we need a freeze on investments involving large-scale land deals while we sort out the mess.

The organization we want to lead this is the World Bank, whose role its new president Jim Kim is currently reviewing. The Bank is the preeminent global development institution, and is ideally placed to send a big signal to governments and investors.

According to its critics, the Bank is also part of the land deal problem. Its private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), has an official complaints mechanism known as the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO). This has seen its case-load triple in the past two years, while in the decade to 2010 over 60 per cent of cases that it assessed related to land conflicts. Oxfam is a co-signatory to three formal land-related complaints to the Bank, one in Indonesia and two in Uganda – here and here.

Moreover, through its advisory services, the IFC encourages governments to streamline and consolidate investment-related policies and activities – in essence to create a ‘one-stop shop’ for investors. Recently, the Bank’s Investment Climate Advisory Services helped to create or support investment promotion agencies (IPAs) in Sierra Leone, Cape Verde, Senegal, Zambia and Tanzania, among others. In

Tanzania’s case, its IPA is mandated to identify and provide ‘available’ land to investors and to set up a ‘land bank’ of some 2.5 million hectares considered suitable for investment. That might all make sense in a well-governed land market, but is not helping if it smoothes the path of the current land rush.

But whatever the views on ‘Bank as problem’, it can most definitely be part of the solution. Its influence is huge, not just through its own actions, but its role in setting standards for other donors and investors. So Oxfam is asking it to declare a 6 month freeze, a time out during which it should review the World Bank Group’s investments, publicly support and help implement the catchily-titled ‘Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Land Tenure’ and lobby other investors to follow suit, overhaul its investment procedures and revise the kinds of advice it is giving to developing country governments.

Over to you Jim Kim

P.S. If you’re in Oxford this evening with nothing better to do, come to Blackwells for 7pm, grab a glass of cheap wine and help me launch the second edition of From Poverty to Power. Details here.

Asia’s welfare revolution; results and complexity; China in Africa; Jim Kim gets blogging; Illicit finance; ignorance on fragile states; celebrating informality: links I liked

Everybody sorted out the gremlins on the new blog format? If you’re still having problems, here’s how to sort it. Even my mum managed it and she’s even more tech-challenged than I am.

‘Asia’s next revolution’ – a classic Economist cover story on the ‘mind-boggling’ speed with which countries like China and Indonesia are building welfare states. Read the editorial or the three page main report.

More good news. The Lancet devotes its cover story to the momentum behind universal health coverage. Editorial here.

‘The main value of a results focus in development is not squeezing greater efficiency out of current service providers; rather it is in enabling people to innovate, experiment, test, and adapt.’ Essential reading on complexity and the results agenda from Owen Barder and Ben Ramalingam

New World Bank president Jim Kim looks like being a prolific blogger (or his press team is – how do we know if they’re ghost written?) On his first overseas trip, (to Cote d’Ivoire) he highlights job creation as a way to rebuild fragile states. Then on to South Africa for a ‘development junkie’ wonkfest.

Illicit financial flows are all the rage at the moment (I mean campaigning on them, not doing them – that’s always been popular). Ann Holingshead has a three part series of prezi presentations that explains how they work (prezi makes powerpoint look terribly staid, but be warned, all that swooping can induce nausea). And CGD Europe is about to start work on flows (and hire a specialist).

I’m always struck about how little we really know about anything important in development, despite the huge investment in development research – what do all those researchers do all day? ‘The Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium has recently produced a series of country working papers which review the evidence on livelihoods, basic services and social protection in seven countries and identify key knowledge gaps. All of the working papers found the country evidence bases on livelihoods, basic services and social protection to have particular areas of weakness. The papers revealed:
1. poor understanding of the relationships between service provision, legitimacy and state-building
2. little evidence on the service delivery and human wellbeing outcomes of external actors’ state-building and capacity development efforts in conflict-affected situations
3. a lack of comparable and longitudinal research into how people are able to maintain or create secure livelihoods during and after violent conflict’

Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities, celebrates the dynamism of the informal economy

Tragic bears; religious migrants; programming in fog; mega capital flight and tax dodging; US drought -> food reserves & climate change; the latest on HIV/AIDs: links I liked

Lots of graphics and visuals today. First, am I alone in finding the arrested Greenpeace polar bear disturbingly tragicomic?

A fascinating interactive map breaks down migration flows from each country by religion (no idea how reliable the data are tho)

How can an aid agency programme when it doesn’t know what works? Examples from San Francisco and Somaliland

Great number crunching from the Tax Justice Network is reaping deserved headlines everywhere. An estimated $7.3tn-$9.3tn of secret offshore wealth is held by residents of developing countries – double their $4tn external debt. In Nigeria it’s $306.2bn – nearly 40 times the country’s total external debt of $7.9bn. Plus the Guardian’s turned it into a handy African capital flight infographic.

As the US heat wave drives up grain prices, and the US stockpile is bare, the always wise Sophia Murphy has a timely piece urging the G20 to get serious about the need for food reserves. Maybe the drought is also behind some big guns weighing in on climate change: Paul Krugman in the New York Times, and new World Bank President Jim Kim in his first big public speech

“I am trained as a scientist. I have to tell you that the data that I’m seeing about changes that are happening today that we didn’t think would happen until we got to two to three degrees, this is extremely disturbing to me. We have to put the science of climate change in front of all our member countries and I guarantee to do that.”

Lots of top analysis of the HIV/AIDS pandemic ahead of this week’s AIDS2012 conference in Washington. The Economist charts (slow) progress on AIDS deaths v access to ARVs [h/t @viewfromthecave] and Sarah Boseley summarizes the medical advances outlined in the new UNAIDS report. Plus a smart video from ONE campaign

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]

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

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]

He can rap, he can dance, but should Jim Yong Kim be the next President of the World Bank?

I’m in Boston and should really be going off to teach a weekend course on How Change Happens at Brandeis University, but I can’t drag myself away from watching Jim Yong Kim on youtube. Kim, a Korean American health expert and currently president of the prestigious Dartmouth College, is Washington’s nomination for the next head of the World Bank, a choice presumably intended to wrongfoot critics of the US’ traditional stranglehold on the nomination (because a) he was born in South Korea and b) he knows a lot about development). The critics are unimpressed: Kevin Gallagher explains why Colombia’s José Antonio Ocampo is better qualified for the job and Lant Pritchett does the same for Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. They’re both pretty convincing.

On the other hand, and talking of nifty footwork, I bet neither Ocampo or Okonjo-Iweala has performed Thriller on stage – watch this to two minutes in to see ‘the only Ivy League president who can dance’ (admittedly, not a very high bar….).  [h/t Global Dashboard]

He can also rap, or at least is willing to give it a go in public (three minutes in)

Not only that but he is not Larry Summers. The man clearly has a lot going for him.

OK, I really must go to work now (more to follow on the Brandeis seminar – really interesting group of students)