What does the British Conservative Party think about development?

This week I attended the launch of ‘One World Conservatism’, a ‘Green Paper’ (i.e. discussion document) in which the Conservative Party (who if you believe the opinion polls, are highly likely to take over from Gordon Brown’s Labour at the next election, due before next June) set out its thinking on international development.

The Green Paper is the product of four years of internal thinking within the Party. One of the more interesting earlier (2007) outputs was ‘In It Together‘ the report of the Globalisation and Global Poverty Policy Review Group, chaired by Peter Lilley MP.

The Green Paper’s three sections cover aid, wealth creation and conflict, stabilisation and peacekeeping (this last section essentially channels Paul Collier’s thinking in Bottom Billion and War, Guns and Votes).

Perhaps most striking was the level of consensus on development within British politics. Despite any opposition party’s need to try and distinguish itself from the party in power, David Cameron, the party leader, pledged:
- to keep the Department for International Development (DFID) as a separate ministry with a seat in the cabinet
- to stick to the aid target of 0.7% of national income by 2013 and avoid any attempt to change its definition in order to massage the figures (see G8 post on Silvio Berlusconi’s proposed Whole of Country Approach). We asked David Cameron specifically on this and he answered: ‘this is a commitment of the government budget, defining aid in the same way as the current government’, which seems pretty categorical.
- to stick with DFID’s attempts to increase the stability of aid through three-year commitments and indicative ten-year projections

But the Tories (as the Conservative Party are popularly known – half the readers of this blog are from outside the UK) realize that raising aid when the government has to cut elsewhere is going to be a political hot potato, so a lot of the Green Paper is devoted to how to buttress public support through an independent aid watchdog, increased transparency (DFID publishing far more information online + ‘DFID funding can and should act as a battering ram for transparency across the world’) to counter what they call a ‘chronic lack of feedback and accountability’, and even a ‘MyAid’ competition in which the public vote to boost funds for their favourite aid project (limitless possibilities for gerrymandering there!).

The MyAid idea is part of a flirtation with what the paper calls ‘post-bureaucratic innovation’ – a brand of ‘wiki-aid’ that tries to circumvent bureaucracies through use of internet, mobiles etc. Hence big support for peer-to-peer lending like Kiva – the paper even floats the possibility of ‘providing matching funding for peer-to-peer loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.’

They are also much impressed by the ‘cash on delivery’ proposal being developed by Owen Barder and Nancy Birdsall at the Washington-based Centre for Global Development. (For the latest CGD update on Cash on Delivery, see here and for CGD boss Nancy Birdsall’s comments on this post, see here). They explain it as ‘for example, £100 for every extra child who attends school, or for every extra mother who gives birth in a proper medical facility’. They hope this will help them shift what they see as Labour’s ‘endemic tendency to focus more on inputs than on outputs’. I’m going to have to read up on this, but at first sight it seems easier said than done and likely to be dogged by issues of attribution – if school attendance drops, how do you decide if it is because of government incompetence or because a recession is forcing parents to pull their kids out of school? And it is always politically difficult to cut aid when things are going badly.

One of the most controversial proposals – introducing aid vouchers that poor communities can redeem with a supplier of their choice for water, health clinics, schools etc – was downplayed in the document, as it’s already received a lot of criticism (see press story here). This is likely to be a flashpoint with NGOs and others who will probably fear a move to privatisation by stealth – the Paper argues that ‘we stand ready to work with public, not for profit and private sectors’ in providing health education, purely on the question ‘does it deliver for the poorest?’ But that begs a number of crucial questions, not least, timescale. A short term fix by privatising service provision may only be achieved at the expense of eroding the longer term effort to strengthen state systems that can deliver universal access to schools, hospitals etc.

Oh, and they love NGOs. Get ready for weird lobby meetings in which NGOs are arguing for channelling funding for essential services via the state, rather than via NGOs……

Click here for Oxfam’s official response to the paper.

How do you get a job in a development NGO (starting with one in my team)?

I’m prompted to post this partly because there’s a job coming up in my team at Oxfam. We’re looking for a research methods adviser to build the skills of our staff around the world who commission and/or conduct smart research to inform Oxfam’s programmes and advocacy. If you’re interested, read more here, and you need to get a move on – the deadline is this weekend.

Otherwise, promoting From Poverty to Power over the last year has involved a lot of talks to bright young things in universities, and in almost every Q&A, the question comes up ‘how do I get a job at an NGO?’ (or more alarmingly, ‘how do I get your job?’). Firstly it’s not easy right now, as the crisis in the UK has hit NGOs’ funding and jobs are more infrequent. The official answer is that people should have a look at our website, but here are some unofficial (and anglocentric – this is about Oxfam GB) tips.

First, decide what kind of work are you interested in. Programme work on the ground? Emergencies (conflict refugees, disaster reconstruction etc)? Advocacy and lobbying? Campaigning?

Next think what kinds of experience will help – experience often marks you out more than gaining another post graduate qualification, but you have to find some way to get over the inevitable first-rung problem of ‘how can I get experience when I haven’t got enough experience to land a job’ – it’s not easy, but it can be done.

For emergencies and programme work, try and get out there and get some experience in developing countries – it’s very hard to arrange that from this end, unless you have a particular network (eg a Church) that you can call on, so many people just try and sort something out on the spot. For campaigners, a record of activism at university or afterwards is always helpful.

For advocacy work, NGOs are often impressed by people who have worked in other sectors, especially the institutions we are keen to influence – governments north or south, multinational companies. Many of them are much larger than Oxfam, and have good graduate entry schemes – a further advantage if you’re trying to get your foot on the ladder. Many are highly competitive, but check out the schemes for DFID, the World Bank, or the Overseas Development Institute.

And remember that research, advocacy and campaigning jobs are often the most sought after and competitive. It may be advisable to try to get a foothold by applying for more ‘corporate’ areas such as marketing, HR and finance, and then start from there.

Finally, show your face. Putting in a spell as an intern may add to your student debt, but it enables you to make your mark and prove your commitment. It also enables you to apply for jobs that are only advertised internally, including short term jobs that help you get on the paid employment ladder. But be choosy who you intern for, and what jobs you accept – even if there is no pay involved, you are offering skills and time to an organization, and should demand things in return.

By way of illustration, our research team includes one ex ODI fellows, one ex UK government number cruncher, one ex intern and one recruit from an environmental thinktank. Plus one mystery appointment (me).

Good luck! (P.S. there are other ways to get a start, like driving a cab). See some more advice (on the UN) from the indefatigable Chris Blattman who also quizzed some MSF colleagues. And check out the Working World blog. Any other good links and ideas welcome.

What’s the development debate like in Australia?

I’ve just finished a week of debates, seminars and book launches in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. My overall impressions include firstly the huge importance of policy debates over Australia’s Indigenous peoples on wider development thinking, not least because meetings in government, academia and NGOs now begin with the chair intoning variations on the formula ‘I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting and pay respects to their elders both past and present.’ At first this seemed a bit tokenistic, but it accumulated over the course of my visit and must impinge in some subtle way.  Read More …

Complexity, Chaos, Catastrophes and Change: Is the New Physics much help to development wonks?

One of the unfinished tasks in From Poverty to Power is developing a better model for analysing processes of change, so I’ve been going back to my prehistoric roots as a physics undergraduate, and reading about complexity and chaos. Exploring the Science of Complexity is a newish (February 08) paper from the Overseas Development Institute that wrestles with the question posed by Robert Chambers back in 1997, does the new physics provide ‘a deep paradigmatic insight, an interesting parallel, or an insignificant coincidence’ for development practitioners? Read More …

So what do other people think of the book?

I’m nearing the end of the initial series of launches + discussions with NGOs in the UK (CAFOD, Christian Aid, World Vision, WaterAid, ActionAid) and at DFID (the UK’s development ministry). What’s emerging (apart from powerpoint poisoning)? Read More …