Channel 16: a new crowdsourcing initiative on disasters and conflict

This is exciting – a new crowdsourcing initiative on humanitarian emergencies that combines wikipedia, youtube and Ushahidi to dig deeper, be more user-generated and more linked to taking action than standard media coverage. It’s called Channel 16, and here’s the blurb:

“Named after the broadcast frequency of an international distress signal, Channel 16 creates a new frontline for responding to global crises. Via Channel 16, people can see reports from the epicentre of humanitarian emergencies and long term crises and learn what actions they can take to help.

Channel 16’s international network of eyewitness bloggers provides a view from the ground, not a newsdesk. This access to unmediated, direct news makes Channel16 a unique source, unembedded in any army, uncensored by any regime, unprejudiced by any agenda other than to help those in need.”

For a taste, read this account by an aid worker of surviving the chaos of Mogadishu on the 50th anniversary of Somalia’s independence.The remit is humanitarian, with pages on the Pakistan floods, child soldiers hunger and floods in the Sahel, and education and conflict. Channel 16 is looking for original content -  text, stills or video – uploaded from areas of humanitarian emergency by email, text, twitter, phone or online. It’s geared to advocacy and action on humanitarian issues, as well as raising awareness. And it’s also available in French and Spanish. Check it out.

[declaration of interest: Channel 16 is an independent organization, but Oxfam is supporting the initiative, along with War Child, Merlin, the International Crisis Group and lots of others]

What will this year’s World Development Report say about Conflict?

The WDR is published in the fall, but this year’s WDR director, Sarah Cliffe, gave a preview of its contents at Harvard recently. The Report will focus on ‘conflict affected countries’ (CACs). What most caught my attention was her typology of three types of ‘neglected violence’ that offer particular challenges for policy-makers (comments from Ed Cairns, our conflict guru, in square brackets):

1. Repeat cycles of violence: since the late 1990s, a high percentage of ‘battle deaths’ have occurred after ceasefires. [The proportion of deaths from direct violence and from increased, for example, disease and malnutrition/destroyed services seems to vary a lot from conflict to conflict.  In Iraq, most fatalities are 'battle deaths', but in the DRC it's more typically the other way round.  And this point of course links to the point made by Collier et al that a sizeeable proportion of peace deals collapse and revert to armed conflict within a few years. There are cycles of violence, and many countries are stuck in a state of half war/half peace in between.]

2. Interlinked violence: Most CACs suffer multiple forms of violence, often 3 or 4 from a list of gang-based violence, local violence, political violence and organized crime. Yet typically different ministries are responsible for tackling different elements of these, producing serious coordination problems in already weak states. [Yes, and perhaps interlinked levels of violence as well.  For example, our work in Afghanistan has shown how local violent disputes feed and are fed by the national conflict between the government and Taliban  -  and therefore it's been a big mistake of the international community not to put more effort into local peacebuilding.]

3. Cross-border violence is far broader an issue than terrorism (e.g. Uganda’s LRA, or organized crime), but is very hard for the aid system to tackle, as it works on the basis of nation states. [The LRA is not so much cross-border because it's no longer based in northern Uganda.  It's more like violence has itself become displaced - moved from Uganda to DRC, Central African Republic and southern Sudan.  But surely it's true that aid needs to take a regional approach in response.]

Another tricky issue is the reform/risk profile: reforms that in the long term will reduce the likelihood of violence, eg by tackling inequality, typically increase risk in the short term, not least by provoking backlash and destabilization. So the WDR will spend some time considering what sequence and pace of reforms best minimise this risk.

For more, check out the WDR 2011 website or its blog

What happens when negotiations fail to prevent 2 million deaths? Not much, apparently

Suppose weapons of mass destruction had taken 2.1 million lives over the last three years. International diplomacy would surely be at fever pitch, the UN would be in constant session, leaders would be shuttling to and fro trying to bring a halt to the slaughter.

Wrong. Conventional arms have, directly or indirectly, killed that number of people, and yet international talks on an Arms Trade Treaty, which kicked off in December 2006, are stuck in the slow lane. As Jan Egeland, Former UN Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs writes in the foreword to a new Oxfam report by my colleague Ed Cairns, published today:

‘They will tell us, again and again, that it cannot be done. That the proliferation of conventional weapons cannot be controlled through a global negotiated effort. That we have to live with automatic guns and other weapons of mass misery traveling from conflict to conflict, without effective controls, with a trail of death and destruction among defenceless civilians.

I remember the same was said when the efforts to curb the scourge of landmines and cluster bombs started. But like-minded governments and civil society made inter-governmental agreements possible that may signal the beginning of the end for those horrific types of arms.’

The decision to begin work towards the ATT marked the recognition by a majority of nations that the current patchwork of laws, regional agreements, and embargoes is ineffective, and insufficient to limit the catastrophic effects of easily available weaponry. It was a moment of hope, promising that an ATT would follow in the footsteps of the 1997 landmines ban treaty or the Convention on Cluster Munitions, (signed in 2008 after just two years of negotiations). Three years on, and governments face a stark choice. move to formal negotiations and actually agree a treaty that will save lives, or stay in the slow lane while thousands more people die from conventional arms fire.

Clearly, the ATT won’t end all those deaths, but it would definitely help restrain the kinds of arms sales that fuel war, for example transfers of arms and ammunition to Chad by France, Israel, and Serbia since 2006, including the reported transfer from Serbia in 2006 of 48,610kg of cartridges worth around $900,000, despite the substantial risk of diversion to armed groups. The risk of diversion was apparent at the time of the transfer: in January 2006 the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan reported that Darfuri armed opposition groups ‘have continued to receive arms, ammunition and/or equipment from Chad’, and in 2007 the UN Panel proposed that the UN Security Council impose an arms embargo on eastern Chad. Some of these Israeli and Serbian weapons were indeed diverted.

Every conflict is unique. Every lawless city or region needs its own solution. But one universal route to reducing armed violence is to control the flows of weapons and ammunition in circulation around the world. For more info on the arms trade treaty, visit the Control Arms Campaign website.

Paul Collier on post conflict reconstruction, independent service authorities, how to manage natural resources and the hidden logic of the G20 London Summit

Paul came to give a talk to Oxfam’s big cheeses last week based on his new book War Guns and Votes (see my review here) and they invited me along. Here are some highlights:

Post Conflict Reconstruction: The conventional sequence is ‘build the politics first, then the economics will follow’. Collier thinks the order should be reversed. Conflict is a zero sum game, he says – someone else’s gain is your loss. It takes a decade of steady growth to shift politics to the positive sum game of mature democracies, and to weed out the bad guys who were attracted to politics under the old regime.

The key to cleansing the political system via the economy is to focus on a small number of essential things: jobs (especially for young men) and essential services, with possibly food security as a third component, but no more complicated than that. Post-conflict states are highly uncompetitive so target non-tradables rather than export industries – construction ticks all the boxes (jobs for young men, non tradable etc), but don’t ask the Chinese to do it (they bring their own workforce). Governments should identify bottlenecks that increase prices in the construction sector (skills, land, cement, finance etc) and concentrate on freeing them up.

Independent Service Authorities (ISAs) for Essential Services: State-building in post independence Africa was based on a 1950s European model of a single all-providing state in education, health etc. It didn’t work. The answer is to unbundle that state model into
a) setting policy (stays with government)
b) allocating money to providers (ISAs)
c) service delivery (all welcome – churches, not for profits, private sector etc)

The debates and doubts largely surround the intermediate role of ISAs. Paul sees them as free standing, with boards made up of government, donor and civil society representatives. ISAs can ‘spot winners and scale them up, fire as well as hire and pay people properly’. See here for his latest paper on the ISA proposal.

The discussion on ISAs revolved around what happens to a short term fix as the years go by. There have been lots of questions on an exit strategy – would ISAs eventually pass control back to a strengthened central government, or would they become entrenched as a parallel system? Collier responded ‘there doesn’t have to be an exit strategy. This may be the right way to deliver services in the long term’. i.e. it may not about moving from Liberia (fragile state, ISA created to channel donor funds) to Ghana (effective state, donors hand over money to the government). You create a mechanism that may never graduate, a parallel system that lasts for ever.

And what about power? ISAs will control the money, so the powerful and corrupt will gravitate towards them – what’s to prevent them being captured by vested interests, doling out the goodies to their allies, and becoming even less accountable than governments? Paul puts his hopes on donors to discipline the ISAs and prevent capture. ‘At the heart of this is that the ISA must take good decisions, and donors have to keep it so, at least for the first few years.’ This smacks of the desperate search of the technocrat to somehow magic away messy issues of power and politics that get in the way of good decisions.

Although he thinks civil society organizations should sit on ISAs, there is little sense of countervailing power from below in holding governments (or ISAs) accountable– is this the missing piece – an Independent People’s Authority rather than an ISA? On ISAs I came away from the discussion more sceptical, not less. They sound a bit like food aid – a seductive, short term solution that can easily turn into a long term trap.

Resource Charter: Paul calls his work on this his ‘biggest pride’. Resource transfers are an order of magnitude larger than aid, but receive far less attention. The problems are much greater, as is the dispersion of performance in different countries (from Botswana’s excellent management of diamond wealth to Nigeria’s lamentable performance on oil and gas). He concludes ‘we need to get a range of decisions right over a generation in everything from how to explore to how to spend the revenue.’

The resource charter group has come up with 12 ‘precepts’ that offer guidance on the key decisions that governments face, with different levels of details for decision makers, policy wonks, and civil servants. The Charter has a technical group chaired by the nobel laureate Mike Spence, who also chaired last year’s Growth Commission, and is soon to announce a board of 3 eminent people from natural resource countries (he didn’t divulge names, sorry).

Global Economic Crisis: ‘The G20 deal in April looks bizarre until you recognize that the guiding principle was that anything agreed must not add to the spending figures of G20 governments’. So the deal to increase the IMF’s finances through a new issue of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) was ‘quantitative easing on a global scale’. To the World Bank, the G20 said ‘take more risk – lend more on same capital base’. i.e. exactly the opposite of their advice to the commercial banks. No new money was agreed for bilateral aid agencies like DFID, because that would count as spending.

War, Guns and Votes: what to make of Paul Collier’s latest book?

War, Guns and Votes builds on the strongest section of Collier’s best selling ‘Bottom Billion’ – his investigation of the ‘conflict trap’ that afflicts a disproportionate number of the poorest counties, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa (Collier’s real passion). The book is in equal measure hugely stimulating and deeply exasperating. Stimulating because he is an original thinker and a brilliant communicator, as well as a policy entrepreneur who always tries to get back to the ‘so what’ on any issue. He defies easy left/right pigeon-holing – he is a free trader, yet admires Julius Nyerere (if not his economic policies) and is a fan of UN peacekeeping.

Frustrating because of his eccentric attitude to evidence: he looks for statistical relationships, runs dozens of cross country regressions, establishes correlations between different variables (income, conflict, geography etc) and plausible directions of causation, but then blithely ignores other disciplines or qualititative research methods and as he freely admits, ‘guesses’ about the explanations for them. You could sum up his method as ‘correlate, then speculate’. To be fair, he may be doing all sorts of reading in other disciplines and just keeping it to himself, but the absence of footnotes makes it impossible to say.

So what’s his basic argument? That the international community has got overly obsessed with elections, which can actually set back the process of post-conflict reconstruction (he wanted to call the book ‘Democracy in Dangerous Places’, but for some reason the publishers vetoed it), and that a new approach to international intervention is required to drag bottom billion countries, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, out of their various traps (poverty, conflict, commodity dependence etc).

Here’s some of the detail:

Above a per capita GDP of $2700 per annum, democracy systematically reduces the risk of politial violence (riots, political strikes, assassinations, guerrilla insurgencies, civil war and coups). But below that level, democracy makes the society more dangerous. ‘Democracies get safer as income rises, whereas autocracies get more dangerous.’

Elections don’t necessarily lead to democracy, not least because autocratic leaders in the bottom billion countries are increasingly adept at playing the system: ‘In the typical election in one of the developed (OECD) countries, the incumbent government has a chance of reelection of about 45%. In the average election held in a society of the Bottom Billion, despite the fact that voters usuallly have many more grounds for complaint, it is 74%. In the worst governed BB countries, it is 88%.’

Small and ethnically diverse countries are most at risk from conflict: ‘elections tend to work better in societies that have larger populations and fewer ethnic divisions. They also tend to work better in polities with checks and balances on the power of government, and in particular where the elections are properly conducted. Elections without properly enforced rules of conduct in small, ethnically divided societies, typically retard reform rather than accelerate it.’

Aid donors and others should pay particular attention to the months and years after a conflict ends: ‘the post-conflict decade is dangerous and there seems to be no clear political quick fix. In particular, elections and democracy, at least in the form found in the typical post-conflict situation, do not bring risks down. Economic recovery works, but it takes a long time. The one thing that seems to work quickly is international peacekeeping for the length of time needed for the economy to recover…..Post-conflict aid is significantly more effective than aid at other times.’

He’s a big fan of peace-keeping by the UN and other organizations: ‘An annual expenditure of $100m on peacekeepers reduces the cumulative ten-year risk of reversion to conflict very substantially from about 38% to 17%. The ratio of benefits to costs is better than four to one. Peacekeeping looks to be very good value.’

He’s particularly impressed by what he calls ‘over the horizon guarantees’ such as Britain’s role in Sierra Leone, or the old French ‘informal security guarantee’ to its former colonies. The French guarantee reduced the risk of conflict by about 75%.

Coups are a much cheaper and preferable alternative to war (he’s long abandoned his youthful fascination with ‘armed struggle’) – they cost on average about 7% of GDP before the economy reverts to normal, whereas wars cost far more. ‘Unless the rebels are unquestionably a whole lot better than the government, then the cost inflicted on the society for the one-in-five chance that the rebellion will lead to the government being overthrown is far too high, and so the rebellion should be discouraged. But coups are a different matter: they have to be judged predominantly by whether they improve governance.’

He has a fascinating historical essay on the rise of European states (which suggests he does in fact read pretty widely), arguing that hundreds of microstates came together through war. The only way to fund wars was through taxation + borrowing. The only way to raise that money was by conceding successful greater levels of political accountability to tax payers or lenders – ‘the consequence of warfare was the spread of fiscal accountability.’ So the evolution of the modern state was driven by the twin logic of violence and fund-raising. ‘Step by step, the predatory ruler of the mini-state had evolved into the desperate-to-please, service-promising, modern vote –seeking politician.’

Contrast this with Africa’s post-colonial proliferation of ministates, with fragmentation more common than amalgamation. Why have they not followed the Europe’s path of integration through war and accountability? Perhaps easy access to natural resources and aid has obviated the need to raise taxes and concede accountability. Even when Mobutu or Mugabe run out of cash, they prefer the printing press to taxation, for that very reason.

But these days, following the European war-driven route to state building with modern military technology would be a bloodbath. ‘So what are the realistic options? Surely the best is the route taken by President Nyerere of Tanzania: political leadership that builds a sense of national identity. Astonishingly, Nyerere achieved this without resorting to the notion of a neighbouring enemy: indeed, he emphasized a Pan-African as well as a national identity.’ But ‘unless the states of the Bottom Billion can forge themselves into nations, they will need some deus ex machina that introduces accountability.’

And so we come to Collier’s proposals for what should be done about all this:

1. Smart external intervention: For countries below the $2,700 per capita threshold, ‘key members of the international community [US, UK, France] would make a common commitment that should a government that has committed itself to international standards be ousted by a coupe d’etat, they would ensure that the government was reinstated, by military intervention if necessary.’ [comparing with post-war Europe, the proposal is more NATO than Marshall Plan].

And conversely, if the government reneges on its promises, the international community would rescind its promise, essentially sanctioning a coup against the government.

2. Privatization of essential services by separating overall policy (which stays with government), the allocation of money to specific activities (by a new independent agency bringing together donors, government and civil society), and the actual supply of activities (open to churches, NGOs, local communities, philanthropists and presumably – though he doesn’t specify – the private sector).

3. Donors should tax military spending by bottom billion governments ‘each dollar of increase would be taxed by a 40% reduction in aid, which would be redistributed to other countries, and each cut in spending would be correspondingly rewarded.’

Of the three proposals, (1) has been rubbished as ‘deeply dotty’ by Peter Preston in the Observer and worries the boss of Human Rights Watch too, but I think is at least worth thinking about. Option 3 is interesting but surely there’s a level of military spending which is legitimate for any government? (See this recent Oxfam paper on what this might be). But I’m very concerned at number 2, simply because history shows that in the end universal essential services have to be steered, but also largely provided by, the state, and there seems no plausible exit strategy for folding Collier’s proposed ‘independent services authorities’ back into the relevant ministries. Instead the proposal would create honeypots for the powerful and corrupt, and create new constituencies that would then lobby like mad to prevent that happening (look at the opposition President Obama currently faces on his health care reform proposals from the US health industry).

Paul gave a great talk at Oxfam last night, which touched on some of these issues. I’ll return to that tomorrow.

Natural disasters will hurt 50% more people by 2015. Why? Climate Change + Inequality

There has been some striking progress in reducing the death toll from natural disasters in recent decades. While Cyclone Sidr killed around 3,000 people in Bangladesh in 2007, similar or weaker storms killed 100 times that number in 1972 and 45 times more people in 1991, largely because governments and local communities have since taken action to reduce risk. Read More …

How are effective states going to emerge in Africa?

[Sorry to anyone who got a premature alert yesterday - hit the wrong button!]

There’s nothing like a visit to Africa – in this case ten days of book promo and financial crisis impact interviews in South Africa and Zambia, to get you thinking about the role of the state. In Southern Africa, as on earlier launches in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia, discussions invariably turn to leaders – is it inevitable that even good politicians will betray us when they come to power? Where will the next Mandela come from? It brought to mind a quote from American Revolutionary Patrick Henry on the purpose of the US Constitution: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” A good constitution is designed not for good leaders, but for bad ones. State building is about the long dull slog of building institutions – perhaps in some ways Mandiba did Africa a disservice by encouraging its endlessly frustrating search for the providential leader. Read More …

Harrowing blogs from Oxfam staff in Gaza

To get a feel for life in besieged Gaza right now, have a look at some riveting eye witness accounts here.

Oxfam staffer Mohamed Ali writes
‘We have one day left of food and the nappies I bought two weeks ago are nearly gone. They are not good quality as little has been able to enter this strip of land since the blockade was imposed on us eighteen months ago. Bad quality nappies means unpleasant leakages, and for the last few days the little ones have had to be bathed in freezing cold water.

We are now eleven, huddled together in my parents’ dining room. My brother and I and our families moved there, thinking that the first floor may be the safest option. There is a saying in Arabic, which says, ‘ death in a group is a mercy’, I guess if we die together maybe just maybe we will feel less of the pain than in doing so alone.

I have had 8 hours sleep since the beginning of this conflict; we can hear attacks almost every minute.
I am not afraid of dying – I know that one day we all must die. But not like this, not sitting idly in my home with my children in my arms waiting for our lives to be taken away. I am disgusted by this injustice.’