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.

Can environment and development really come together next week in Rio?

This week is Earth Summit week on the blog, making my small contribution to the wonk feeding frenzy already in full flow in advance of next week’s Rio+20 event. Every organization is spewing out bulletins, position statements and curtain-raisers as if their lives depended on it (which I guess they do, in a way). I’m doubtful how many people actually read these – the press rooms are often carpeted with them, and I’ve always argued that NGOs can have more impact by keeping their powder dry and churning out immediate post mortems after the summit. That way they can help to write the history, while the competition is usually too sleep-deprived to produce anything. Here’s an example from the London G20 summit at the height of the global financial crisis.

But just in case you are hungry for more, there’s a South Centre bulletin on the ‘key issues’, a piece from Lawrence Haddad and the World Bank’s list of essential reading (several weeks’ worth) on sustainable development.

I’ll also review a couple here on the blog, starting with ‘Separated at Birth, reunited in Rio?’, an excellent 8 page paper from Claire Melamed, Andrew Scott and Tom Mitchell at the Overseas Development Institute, looking at whether the summit can ‘bring environment and development back together’. Some highlights:

“2015 will be a defining year for international policy on development and the environment. The negotiation of both new goals and a new agreement on climate change offer an opportunity to finally reunite the twin tracks of development and environmental policy, which have remained stubbornly separate since the first Rio conference in 1992.  Rio+20 will set the stage for the approach to 2015.

However, the history of trying to link development and environmental objectives through actual policy initiatives is not encouraging. ‘Sustainable development’, a concept originating in the Brundtland Report of 1987, has become the mantra in global policy circles since the first Rio conference in 1992, but it has  had remarkably little impact on actual policy.  Despite much academic work and many innovative ideas in this area, the two have remained stubbornly separate on the terrain of politics and implementation.”

The paper contrasts the state of development and environmental debates (see table):

“[Despite caveats on climate change, food prices and the financial crisis] Current trends in development are remarkably positive. Thanks to both economic growth and effective policies, income levels and social outcomes are improving everywhere. For the environmental sector the news is almost unrelievedly gloomy.  The challenge at the heart of bringing together environment and development – the reason why it is so essential and yet so difficult – is the apparent fundamental contradiction in these trends. More resources are needed as economies grow, the population (in some countries) increases, and living standards rise… These pressures will push the world further towards – or over – the planetary boundaries, and the consequences, in terms of climate change and resource depletion will, in turn, make progress against poverty harder, and may even send it into reverse.”

“Most of the increase in resource consumption will take place amongst middle and high income groups. Reducing extreme poverty in Africa or Asia will have little immediate impact on the scale of global resource use or on carbon emissions: numerous studies have highlighted that the effect may be marginal. So policies to tackle residual poverty and avoid critical environmental thresholds need to focus on quite different parts of the global demographic in the short term.”

The authors then delve into the different world views underlying the development and environment debates – one speaks the language of morality, the other of science:

“The problems of poverty and development are mainly normative –  the basis for the international effort towards poverty eradication is that, worldwide, governments and people have  decided that it is morally unacceptable for people to live  below a certain minimum standard in a world where the  alternative is possible. By contrast, the problem in the environmental  sphere is defined less on the basis of moral norms (at  least for the mainstream environmental movement),  and more on the basis of the science and scientific  knowledge about how changes are likely to impact on  the global climate or other systems.”

And they operate on different planes of experience: “For the development sector, the unit of analysis of the measurement of progress is almost always the individual level, and norms relate to what individual people have, or what services they can access, or how they feel. The unit of analysis for environmental problems is generally a whole system.”

A gulf also separates the two camps on time frames: for the environmentalists “much of the action called for now is based on the impact of inaction on future generations…. On the development side, progress is called for on the basis of the needs of current generations.”

These fundamental differences produce very different political environments for change:

“In the absence of rapid technological change, the environmental agenda implies the rationing of resource use, both through the operation of the market and through policy instruments. This makes the politics quite toxic. At a global level, there is a deep suspicion among some low and middle income countries that environmentalism is simply a cover for old-fashioned mercantilism, and that calls to develop differently are nothing more than disguised calls to develop less.

By contrast, the focus on growth and improving living standards in the development field means that many of the decisions made in the name of development in both developing and developed countries are politically popular, at least with some groups.  The issues are less around direct trade-offs and more around how to distribute a rapidly expanding pie.   In recent years, perhaps reflecting the general mood of optimism about positive trends, the focus within international development policy-making has been on technical issues: how to design appropriate programmes or how to roll out large scale vaccine campaigns.”

Inevitably, the diagnosis of the problems is a lot more detailed and convincing than the proposals for overcoming them. These include starting with agreement on a ‘best 2050 world’ and working backwards; agreeing new global goals; new financial and market regulation and new institutional architecture. At Rio, it thinks the most promising discussions are on green growth and ‘sustainable development goals.’ These proposals risk banging up against the political and economic setting for Rio (more on that to follow).

A nostalgic debate on globalization and development

When did talking on the subject of ‘globalization and development’ start to feel so retro? I got that distinct sensation at a lunchtime discussion at IPPR yesterday. The trench warfare of yesteryear – on the WTO, the Doha round, trade liberalization, protectionism etc, has somehow acquired a nostalgic glow. Most odd.

In the room were a random collection of NGOs, think tankers and centre-left types, all chaired by coming man Will Straw (son of Jack), who’s chairing a set of discussions leading to a report in January on global governance and globalization. The project is headed by former EU Trade Commissioner and UK Business Secretary, Peter Mandelson and describes its purpose as ‘to re-examine who benefits from globalisation and how a more even distribution of these benefits – both between countries and within countries – can be encouraged.’ Yep, a very last-decade kind of gig.

The ensuing discussion mixed a reprise of some of the topics the NGOs have been banging on about ever since Seattle (1999), (and on which they have largely been proved right), but with some interesting new additions.

The old tunes:

Development is deeply pluralist – different countries follow different paths, involving a wide variety of institutional recipes, with different amounts of state and market; autocracy and democracy etc. But the role of the state is often central, as is technological upgrading to higher value economic activities. Implications? The global system, including aid, must encourage pluralism, not try to narrow it down through aid conditions or imposed rules on trade and investment liberalization or restrictive intellectual property laws. A Global Debate with no right answer is more productive than a Consensus in Washington or anywhere else. (Dani Rodrik was the most-referenced guru).

The ‘new’ ones:

Managing climate change has become a more central litmus test of global governance than trade and investment.

We have to think of the global system as – erm – a system. Is increasing volatility and importance of risk/resilience (eg climate, finance, food prices) a sign that it is too tightly coupled and if so, which connections need to be loosened through the creation of circuit breakers/fire breaks? Complexity and systems theory have become much more prominent in this debate than they were a decade ago (and no wonder, given the financial crisis).

Linked to that emphasis on volatility is a revived focus on shock absorbers – policies and institutions that cushion poor people against shocks, whether personal or societal. That includes social protection, access to finance and insurance, and disaster risk reduction.
Equity is about much more than income – access to environmental goods and services (like the right to emit carbon) is going to be increasingly contested. Pricing carbon may be a sensible way to curb emissions, but only if it doesn’t lead to a world of carbon haves and have-nots.

Global Governance is about much more than a simple shift from G8 to G20. We seem to have ended up with a form of ‘a la carte multilateralism’ – substantial conversations in some areas, paralysed ones in others, and an absence of discussion in the rest. The architecture varies from G-192 (UN) to G-zero (no-one in charge) depending on the issue.

My favourite line? As the UK prepares for its inevitable slide down the global pecking order, it should focus on values, human rights, and good global citizenship – it can start by approaching any foreign policy issue with the question ‘What would Norway do?’

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding. Review of Charles Kenny’s new book

Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding—And How We Can Improve the World Even More, published this month, is an exercise in ‘framing’ – trying to shift the way we feel, as well as think, about development and aid. It does it rather well. Two big frames:

1. Lives are getting better everywhere, including in Africa. People are healthier, live longer, lose fewer children, learn to read and write, and have more rights. The negative discourse of crisis epitomised by Tony Blair’s disastrous ‘Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world’ soundbite is factually wrong, as well as patronising and counter-productive in making aid seem like a waste of money.

2. The best way to spend aid is on areas where we know it works. That means encouraging the spread of relevant technologies and ideas. Interestingly, Kenny accepts that we don’t know how to create growth and so advises against it being a focal point for aid. Stick to vaccines and education, much of it delivered by the public sector. It’s a seductive message which reminds me of the speech by Mr and Mrs Gates in London last year, which had me sorely tempted to say ‘forget all that politics and power stuff, let’s just get the vaccines out there.’

Sample quote: ‘Abandoning an excess focus on income as a catch-all of development progress might, in the end, be the best way to achieve more rapid growth in the incomes of the poor.’ Not only that but he’s one of those economists who delights in ridiculing the excesses of his profession, from the ‘conga-line of formulae [required before a paper] is worthy of publication in the American Economic Review’ to their abiding belief that worldwide incomes will converge, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Wonder what his colleagues at the World Bank make of him downgrading the role of growth? Kenny’s a fellow at CGD, on sabbatical from the Bank – hope his job’s still there when he gets back.

As an unabashed polemic, he goes over the top in places (at one point I thought ‘Dr Pangloss, I presume?’ might be a better title), ignoring or dismissing evidence that runs against his views, and skating over holes in the argument. The biggest sleight of hand is on resource constraints (no mention of water scarcity, for example) and climate change, where he dismisses concerns as just another bit of misguided ‘neo-Malthusianism’. On the contrary, there is a pretty overwhelming scientific consensus that they represent a real game-changer – development is going to have to happen differently, North and South, in a resource-constrained world.

I’m caricaturing a bit here – Kenny stresses that the issue is consumption, not population: ‘A doubling of the incomes of the World’s poorest 650 million people would take the same resources as adding a little under one percent to the incomes of the World’s richest 650 million’. Hence his recipe for population control: ‘Sterilize the world’s billionaires first, then move on to a one-child policy for Switzerland, Luxembourg and the US’. But joking aside, he doesn’t pursue the issue.

[Malthus’ writing style is a revelation by the way – I wish development people wrote this well. Check this out:

‘The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.’]

And of course, there’s not much in the way of power and politics, which probably falls into both the ‘too messy and unpredictable’ and ‘too hard to measure’ baskets. That matters when it gets to recommendations for what health ministries and others should/shouldn’t do, as there is no discussion of which they might adopt/reject, and what to do about that.

His writing is good ‘pop economics’ – chatty, humorous and at times elegant, praising ‘the beautiful banality of health, learning and security’. He’s also an ace killer fact merchant and a voracious trawler of research and stats – definitely a gold mine for time-starved development advocates.

In passing, ‘Getting Better’ even provides an excellent run-through of the shifting (and frequently circular) tides of received wisdom on growth and development. The resulting picture reminds me strongly of the complexity literature – growth as an emergent property of a complex, tightly interconnected system, which means that it is essentially impossible to predict when and how it will occur (so similar policies in different countries at different times will have completely different outcomes). Sounds about right. Needless to say, Keynes got there first:

“We are faced at every turn with the problems of organic unity, of discreteness, of discontinuity—the whole is not equal to the sum of the parts, comparisons of quantity fail us, small changes produce large effects, and the assumptions of a uniform and homogeneous continuum are not satisfied.”

That was written in 1933 – does that make JMK the unwitting father of complexity theory? (Although there’s usually an Adam Smith quote to trump him.)

On technologies (broadly defined), he stresses the simple stuff: ‘vaccines, boiling water, civic organization, basic education’, and is damning about internet kiosks and other examples of excessive techno-whizzery. He points out that because of the spread of these, a better quality of life can be achieved at a lower level of economic output than in the past, and growth is not the main story in the improvements that do occur: ‘a country that saw absolutely no income growth over the entire century would still have experienced a near two thirds decline in infant mortality over [the last] hundred years.’

Getting Better distinguishes between process and product technologies: ‘Process technologies—institutions—are central to increasing GDP per capita. But the second set of technologies—ideas and inventions—have played the central role in improving health, education and security in developing countries to date.’ And process technologies are much harder to export and transplant, whereas ideas and simple products flow like water around the globe.

The result is that whereas growth is country specific, improvements in human development are largely accounted for by global ‘tides in the affairs of men’ – ideas and inventions etc. ‘All country-specific factors added together can account for only about one seventh of the average change in infant mortality across 68 countries for which we have data between 1950 and 2000. The other six sevenths of mortality change in these countries can be better accounted for by the global pattern of decline.’ In economist-speak, growth is largely endogenous, whereas human development exogenous.

This is not to say that nothing needs to be done – that influx of exogenous ideas and technologies has been propelled by an increased state role in health and education (of which Kenny approves) and legions of healthworkers and social entrepreneurs.

On health he goes further: the evidence suggests that primary care, health education and the spread of ideas (give babies with diarrhoea more to drink, not less) has far greater impact than building hospitals. Kenny thinks the key is boosting public demand for healthcare and education, not just building stuff. Despite record growth, health in China has deteriorated because the country has moved from ‘a system that once provided near-universal access to basic care to one that now provides limited coverage which extends to expensive, often unnecessary, medical techniques—all at seven times the price.’ Sounds a bit like the US…….

That spread of ideas and inventions can be accelerated by social marketing: ‘social marketing programs have shown strong results over the last thirty years in promoting the use of sugar-salt solutions to treat diarrhea, breastfeeding over bottle feeding and the use of contraceptives. A diarrheal disease control program which focused on social marketing in Egypt in the early 1980s saw the number of targeted mothers which recognized the danger of dehydration rising from 32 percent to 90 percent. In addition, within the first year of the marketing campaign, the number of mothers who used oral rehydration solution correctly increased from 25 to 60 percent.’

Finally, he has some neat ideas for how to speed up that flow of appropriate technologies and ideas that drives improvements in human welfare. Why not take the CGIAR global network of public agricultural research institutes and do the same for child mortality, or innovative forms of social marketing?  What about a Global Innovation Bank, which uses advance market commitments, prizes etc (as well as more traditional research funding) to push pro-poor R&D  – sounds like an argument for taking the Gates Foundation into (global) public ownership – globalization rather than nationalization?……

Africa’s four different kinds of economies

I’m a sucker for typologies. I guess they’re a wonk’s equivalent of those ‘what were the ten best punk/ska/heavy metal albums of all time?’ discussions in the pub. Here’s a nice one from ‘Lions on the Move’, a breathlessly upbeat new McKinsey report on Africa. It finds four clusters of African economies + a few outliers. Click on the scatterplot for a clearer picture.

The clusters are
1. Undiversified oil exporters (Angola, Libya)

2. Diversified, successful exporters (South Africa, Tunisia)

3. Transition countries (Ghana, Kenya, Senegal) en route to joining group 2

4. What are somewhat euphemistically called ‘pre-transition’ countries like DRC and Ethiopia

McKinsey uses a measure of economic diversification and exports per capita as the two axes. The colour of the blobs shows GDP per capita, the size of the blob shows total GDP. As you go up the y axis to higher levels of exports per capita, GDP per cap also grows, but countries split into two groups – the oil exporters and the diversified economies.

It’s noticeable that the two classic ‘African success stories’, Botswana and Mauritius, don’t sit neatly in any of the clusters. Botswana has high exports per capita from diamonds, but has managed to diversify somewhat, while Mauritius is more diversified and a bigger exporter than even the ‘diversified countries’.

Of course, compared to yesterday’s post, this is all terribly static. Would be great to see how these clusters have evolved over time. Anyone want to have a go?

What is the point of conferences?

Last week I sat dazed through an EU conference on aid, grappling with presentations in Spanish, English and Portuguese and fending off powerpoint poisoning (the acute version produced by academics putting up page after page crammed with tiny text and saying ‘you probably can’t read it, but what the table says is…..’). During brief periods of consciousness, I reflected on the role of conferences. After all, I (and lots of other people) spend several days per month at them, so they probably serve some purpose, but what is it?

First let’s dispose of the obvious one – they are only of limited benefit as places to acquire detailed knowledge – you’d normally learn much more from reading the papers on which the presentations are based and in the international ones, half the people are usually too jetlagged to take in much anyway.

So here’s an alternative. Conferences play a crucial role in the formation and renewal of ‘epistemic communities’ – transnational networks of knowledge-based experts who define for decision-makers what the problems they face are, and what they should do about them (in this case, aid and development).

At these tribal gatherings, two main processes occur. Firstly, evolution of the system of ideas and opinions: think of the conference as an intellectual ecosystem full of competing ideas. A conference brings them together and allows them to interact – some grow stronger, others weaker. Following the ecosystem analogy, the random mutation of ideas is subject to selection, and the winners multiply. This matters because, as James Ferguson wrote in ‘the Anti-Politics Machine’, ‘the thoughts and actions of development bureaucrats are powerfully shaped by the world of acceptable statements and utterances in which they live’.

Hostile ideas (‘aid is bad’) are rapidly surrounded by the conference equivalent of white blood corpuscles and killed off. The assassination

dealing with heretics

is usually polite (speakers ignored, academic putdowns about opinions being ‘counterintuitive’, that sort of thing), but more vigorous epistemic communities (economists for example), can be quite brutal.

The second process is about individuals and their institutions. Conferences are beauty parades where pecking orders constantly evolve. This happens at all levels – speakers, questioners, and the networking over long coffee breaks and meals. ‘That was a good question’ ‘Loved your presentation, could you send me the powerpoint?’ ‘Didn’t think much of X’. By attending them, you brush up your language and buzzwords, find out what’s in and what’s out. Apart from the strokes/slaps to individual egos, re-positioning in the pecking order affects research funding (for academics), consultancies (for consultants) or your access to decision-makers (for NGOs).

And if you work for an organization like Oxfam, you try and influence that evolution by nudging things in a certain direction – last week, stressing how much political trust Europe would lose if it breaks its aid promises was probably more important than my more evidence-based presentation of our research on the global economic crisis (our final paper on that is now out by the way – see here).

If you think of the epistemic community as an organism, conferences thus help it evolve, develop cohesion and adapt to shifting external threats and opportunities, fending off hostile attacks and improving and renewing ideas and pecking orders. Without them the community would atrophy. Just don’t expect to learn much.

Recession, development and climate change: the big picture

This article of mine first appeared in the 25th October issue of the Scotsman.

If the 1930s are any guide, the seismic shock hitting the global economy has a long way to go. First came the plummeting stocks on Wall Street, then the social trauma of mass unemployment, soup kitchens and skid row. But they in turn triggered much deeper changes. Read More …

Is the Buzzword mightier than the Sword?

‘When ideas fail, words come in very handy’. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

By coincidence, I’ve been doing a lot of seminar-ing this last week, mostly under Chatham House rules (see previous post). When you’re sat in a room full of policy wonks, one of the more enjoyable pastimes is jotting down all the new candidates for development ‘buzzwords’. This week brought up some new ones (at least to me): ‘feral cities’; ‘choice edit’ (what advertisers, supermarkets, governments etc do to consumers); ‘happy 21st’ (possible outcome for this Century); the ‘red card test’ (will governments accept rulings that go against them?); ‘celanthropists’ (Bono, Geldof et. al.) and so on. Read More …