Government Spending Watch – a new initiative you really need to know about

I’m consistently astonished by how little we know about the important stuff in development. Take the Millennium Development Goals – the basis forinnumerable aid debates, campaigns, and negotiations. A large chunk of the MDG agenda concerns the size and quality of public spending – on health, education, water, sanitation etc. So obviously, the first thing we need is to know how much governments are spending on these things, right?

Well no actually, because we don’t have those numbers. Until now. Oxfam has teamed up with an influential and well-connected NGO, Development Finance International, which advises developing country governments around the world. Working with a network of government officials, DFI has pulled together and analysed the budgets of 52 low and middle income countries (With another 34 to follow). The result is a new database, called Government Spending Watch, (summary of overall project here) and a report ‘Progress at Risk’, previewed in Washington last Friday in a joint DFI/Oxfam America event to coincide with the IMF and World Bank Spring meetings. The full report won’t be ready ‘til May, but an initial draft exec sum is available, and here’s what it says.

The data cover seven sectors (agriculture/food, education, environment and climate change, gender, health, social protection and water/sanitation), from 2008 to 2015 (including medium-term forecasts). They examine planned and actual spending, disaggregated by types (recurrent and capital), and sources of funds (government revenue or donor funding). There are some major gaps (see map), so the first call is for donors (who are often the worst culprits) and governments to collect and publish more and better data.

The report looks separately at countries with and without IMF programmes (although attributing the differences to the IMF is tricky, and the report avoids doing so). Headline findings are:

• Most countries have been increasing revenue and spending as a % of GDP, but this is now going into reverse
• The sources of government finances have shifted from grants to loans, including more expensive domestic borrowing, raising fears about growing debt burdens (although no new debt crisis is imminent)
• Countries with IMF programmes have raised less revenue, are cutting deficits faster and have seen less positive trends in MDG spending. Agriculture and health spending are now much higher as a percentage of GDP, and education and social protection spending are rising faster in non-IMF countries. Other MDG sector spending is stagnating compared with GDP or total spending.
• For all MDGs, the vast majority of developing countries are spending much less than they have promised or than international organisations have estimated is needed. Only one third of countries are meeting any education or health goals, and less than 30 per cent are meeting agriculture and WASH goals. Trends have been even less positive for gender and sustainable development.
• Some of the spending has been funded by rapidly growing aid – especially in education, health, WASH and agriculture. Progress in these areas is threatened as OECD aid flows are now declining in real terms, and are increasingly moving away from MDG sectors to infrastructure and growth.
• In most countries, actual spending is substantially less than the amounts announced in budgets (see table). This is particularly true in the health, agriculture and WASH sectors, reflecting delays in donor funding, and absorptive capacity problems in sector ministries and decentralised government agencies.
• Types of spending show two worrying patterns. Some sectors (WASH and agriculture) are dominated by investment, raising the need to increase recurrent spending dramatically to maintain buildings and equipment. Others (education, health and social protection) are dominated by recurrent spending on wages and supplies. Especially if donors reduce budget support, which funds much recurrent spending in many countries, governments will need to make even greater revenue efforts to maintain recurrent spending and keep delivering progress.

If the excitement around last week’s prelaunch is anything to go by, this is going to be a really important initiative. According to report author and DFI boss Matthew Martin:

“We had conversations with officials from about 20 IDA countries about their relative performance in terms of spending and transparency and all of them were anxious to see the full data and report, and to improve their performance. Senior donor government officials were also energised about being able to use these data to see country spending inputs for the MDGs and for the post-2015 framework.

Major global campaigns on education and health were anxious to see and use the data. The DC development research community (Brookings, CGD, IMF, World Bank) as well as USAID, MCC and the African Development Bank  were very excited by the data and want to organise further seminars after the full report is published and consider using the data for their own research and policymaking.

We also had great conversations about potential partnerships with the International Budget Partnership (who run analysis and campaigns on budget transparency and accountability), and the BOOST team in the World Bank (who help countries produce much more detailed geocoded data and would like to code it for the MDGs).

All in all, an amazing week: it has felt like standing on a snowball which is rolling faster and getting bigger every day – we start again with the New York academic and UN community next (i.e. this) week.”

Looking ahead, citizens and social movements in poor countries will now be able both to see what their governments are promising and delivering, and to compare that with other countries in the neighbourhood. International bodies will be able to track the extent to which warm words translate into cash on the ministerial table. Internationally, Oxfam will certainly be using the database as a vital new tool to help local citizens and civil society actors ensure their governments actually deliver the goods.

In addition to scaled up advocacy and campaigns, the plan now is for GSW to expand the database to cover more countries and years, and to publish regular updates. But to do that we will need to find funders and advocacy partners. Please form an orderly queue……

How can a post-2015 agreement drive real change? Please read and comment on this draft paper

The post-2015 discussion on what should succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is picking up steam, with barely a day going by without some new paper, consultation or high level meeting. So I, along with Stephen Hale and Matthew Lockwood, have decided to add to the growing slush-pile with a new discussion paper. We want you to read the draft (see right) and help us improve it. Contributions by 5 November please, either as comments on the blog, or emailed to research[at]oxfam.org.uk.

The paper argues that there’s an urgent need to bring power and politics into the centre of the post-2015 discussion. To have impact, any post-2015 arrangement has to take into account the lessons of over a decade of implementing the existing MDGs, and be shaped by the profound global change since the MDGs were debated over the course of the 1990s and early noughties.  We’re hoping that this will be at the centre of this week’s discussions in London linked to the High Level Panel and in Berlin at the Berlin Civil Society Center on Development post 2015.

The most significant shift is that the new arrangements have to be designed to influence governments, whereas the main impact of the MDGs was on the aid system. Why the shift? Because aid is becoming less important, both because it is likely to decline in volume over the next few years, and because governments’ dependence on aid as a percentage of revenues is falling even faster than aid itself. In any case, aid is a pretty ineffective way of influencing government behaviour, beyond the actual expenditure of donor dollars.

So if influencing governments is the goal, what can we learn from the experience of the MDGs? The first thing to note is a startling lack of research. Many reviews blur the distinction between ‘MDGs’ and ‘MDG policies’/’MDG planning’ (in effect, social welfare). Analysis of the data on improvements in health, education, and other key sectors largely ignores the vital question of how much of that improvement can be plausibly attributed to the MDGs, rather than to other factors such as national politics, economic growth, or technological innovation. Given the substantial political and financial investment in the MDGs, and the need to design an effective post-2015 framework, being unable to attribute – with any certainty – progress due to the MDGs is a truly lamentable gap in our knowledge.

There is even less research on (and less anecdotal or circumstantial evidence for) the impact of the MDGs on the policies and behaviours of rich countries, beyond changes in their aid budgets. There is scant evidence that MDG 8’s commitment to a ‘global partnership for development’ has had any impact on rich country behaviour. Understanding this failure is vital, given that many proposals for the post-2015 regime seek to place more obligations on rich countries in areas such as climate change and resource consumption.

What we know is that some governments have adopted the language of the MDGs and have customized them to fit national priorities, while civil society groups have increasingly used them as advocacy tools.

Beyond that, many post-2015 participants seem to think it is not possible to give a more complete answer to the traction question because of the missing counterfactual (how can we know what would have happened without the MDGs?). Not so. It is certainly possible to know much more than we do about attribution through more rigorous qualitative research. For example, in-depth interviews with policymakers could investigate the traction exerted by a range of external and domestic forces on their decisions (avoiding any leading questions on the MDGs). We have yet to locate such research.

So much for the MDGs, what about whatever comes next? International instruments can exert influence in three key ways:

1. By changing national norms in areas such as women’s rights. However intangible, norms matter, leading to long-term changes in what society considers acceptable or deplorable, which then leads to changes to laws, policies and behaviours.
2. By directly influencing government decision making, through any of a number of possible carrots (aid, contracts, acceptance, approval) or sticks (sanctions, disapproval).
3. By giving civil society organisations and other domestic actors more tools with which to lobby, campaign, and secure action by their governments.

In most cases, the main drivers of change will be domestic – the result of national politics and culture. But international initiatives are second-order factors that can nudge things along. We identify six kinds of instrument at global and regional levels.

Big global norms: rallying cries intended to influence the underlying attitudes of decision makers and citizens, such as ‘zero poverty’ or ‘zero hunger’.

Global goals and targets: as encapsulated by the MDGs.

Regional goals and targets: the African Union has been particularly energetic in agreeing regional targets, setting out what its member governments should be aiming for on the Rights of Women (AU Protocol, 2003),or their allocation of spending to agriculture (Maputo Agreement 2003), health (Abuja Declaration 2001) and similar commitments on social protection, and water and sanitation.

Global league tables: the international community and/or civil society can simply collect and publish data allowing a comparison between different countries’ absolute situation and rate of progress, as in the UNDP’s Human Development Index. Anecdotal evidence (and long NGO experience) suggests that league tables can be effective both in attracting public and media interest, and in goading politicians into action – there is nothing a leader likes less than to be seen to lose out to a rival nation.

Data transparency: according to some architects of the MDGs, perhaps their greatest legacy will be the improved quality, collection and dissemination of social data. One option would be to make this the centrepiece of a post-2015 arrangement, and leave it to others (national or regional bodies, international institutions) to ‘mash up’ the data into different indices and use it to advocate for progressive policies.

International law: Most governments are already signatories to dozens, if not hundreds, of international conventions and the role and influence of international law appears to be on an inexorable upward curve, steadily encroaching on previously untouchable areas of state sovereignty.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of these options in influencing norms, decision making or civil society activism? Here we are basically into guesswork/gut feeling, captured in the table below. We’d be interested to hear your views, and very grateful for links to any relevant research.

Possible options for international instruments to drive change post-2015

Over to you for comments, links etc

What have the MDGs achieved? We don’t really know… Heretical thoughts from Matthew Lockwood

A second instalment in Matthew Lockwood’s series of valedictory boat-rocking blogs (his first was on fossil fuel subsidies) as he leaves the IDS Climate Change team for a new role in the UK energy sector. This time, he asks why the results agenda often stops short of being applied to the big picture stuff like the MDGs.

One of the interesting things about having come back to the international development field after some years away is the greatly increased emphasis on results, across all areas of activity, including not only projects and programmes, but also policy making, research, and advocacy.

Many people and organisations are interested in the results agenda, including the big foundations such as Gates, influential bloggers like Owen Barder, my boss Lawrence Haddad, and DFID’s Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell. In his first big speech in office, in Washington in June 2010, Mitchell said “we’re also fundamentally redesigning our aid programmes so that they build in rigorous evaluation processes from day one.”

Like many others, I think aspects of the results agenda are important, reasonable and politically wise, although there are also some interesting critiques of the approach. But I also think that, if you really take it seriously, it throws up some challenges and dilemmas.

For me, this is clearest in the case of development’s big frameworks and policy directions. One prime example is the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and their proposed replacement with more development goals after 2015. As most readers will know, the MDGs are a set of human development goals, with subsidiary targets and indicators, formally adopted by the UN in 2000.

There is pretty broad agreement that progress towards meeting the MDGs is partial and uneven – some of the goals have been met or look very likely to be met, in some countries, while other goals (such as the target reduction in maternal mortality) may not. Asia, especially East Asia, has done better than Sub-Saharan Africa.

However, applying the results agenda to the MDGs is not simply a matter of asking whether the goals will be met. Rather, it is about asking whether the goals have been met as the result of the MDGs having been adopted. The purpose of having high level goals, including any that come after the current MDGs, is to create political will, the mobilisation of resources, policy change and delivery, all of which should bring about a positive change relative to what would have happened in their absence.

Many in the aid world would say that, of course, the MDGs have had a major impact, and that it is absurd to even raise the question. However, a rigorous assessment of the evidence suggests that it is actually quite hard to make a strong case.

First, the evidence that the MDGs may have made a difference is, at best, mixed. The most comprehensive and rigorous independent assessment is by Andy Sumner and Charles Kenny for the Center for Global Development. They look for significant differences in outcomes and impacts before and after 2000, when the MDGs were adopted.

The clearest effects were on aid levels (which are not an ultimate impact but an intermediate outcome). Compared with the previous decade, official aid increased in the post-2000 period, but not as a proportion of rich country GDP. More aid went to the poorest countries, including to Africa. There was a small shift in the share of aid going to the social sectors, on which the MDGs tend to focus, and this happened soon after 2000.

There is plenty of evidence of the influence of the MDGs on policy discourse, if this is measured by mention of the goals or their presence in donor policy documents, PRSPs and developing country government goals. However, the effects on actual policy change are less clear. Sumner and Kenny find it “hard to detect a trend” in low income country government spending on health and education. They also find no trend in the quality of developing country policy making, as measured by the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment ratings.

On the actual impact indicators themselves – such as income poverty, malnutrition and mortality rates, educational enrolment etc – Sumner and Kenny’s most relevant assessment is whether progress was faster pre- or post-MDGs, and whether progress post-MDGs has been faster than what would have been expected based on past trends. Again, results are inconclusive. The data “suggest that in no case is there an obvious sign of a significant break towards faster progress since 2000. Nonetheless there has been somewhat faster global progress on income, primary completion rates, child and maternal mortality over the post-Declaration period”. A study by Fukuda-Parr and Greenstein of country level data gives a similarly mixed picture. The comparison with predicted rates of progress based on historical analysis implies slightly better than expected outcomes post-MDGs on primary education and gender equality in education, but worse on maternal mortality.

Second, there is the problem of attribution. As Sumner and Kenny put it, “even ignoring the very limited evidence of faster progress since 2000 in the average (unweighted) developing country, it is a considerable step from ‘more rapid progress’ to ‘the MDGs caused more rapid progress’”. In other words, bilateral aid may have increased somewhat, some indicators have improved, but how do we know that these changes are due to the MDGs, and not to some other factor?

It is not possible to know what would have happened in their absence. This is not a case of running randomised controlled trials across a number of interventions. And as Richard Manning points out, it is hard to separate out the potential effects of the MDGs from the environment that produced them.

In some areas, such as vaccination or primary education enrolment in sub-Saharan Africa, the links between the MDGs, the mobilisation

and focusing of additional aid, and subsequent impacts seem convincingly close. But in others, the links seem less plausible, especially where there are also good alternative candidates that may explain changes in indicators better than the effect of MDGs. Poverty reduction in Asia, for example, is more likely to have been driven by the extraordinary period of sustained economic growth in China, than by a set of UN targets. It is also plausible that China’s growth will have pulled along a number of countries in its wake, including commodity exporters in Africa. The rapid reduction of poverty in Brazil is due in part to the development of social safety nets such as the Bolsa Familia. When I recently asked Romulo Paes de Sousa, Brazil’s former Deputy Minister for Social Development, and closely involved in the design of the Bolsa, whether it was the result of the MDGs, he dismissed this immediately, saying it was the outcome of a domestic debate that emerged from the minimum wage.

Yet despite the lack of clear, strong evidence of the impact of the Goals, and the difficulties of attribution, the MDGs are routinely hailed as a success. Most importantly, this success is asserted in the context of discussion about a new set of post-2015 development goals. When it was announced that David Cameron would be co-chair of the UN High Level Panel on post-2015 goals, Andrew Mitchell hailed the “huge progress that has been made through the Millennium Development Goals” and “the successes of the current goals”.

When challenged with the point that attribution is often difficult in cases such as these, and that you can’t compare counterfactuals, many proponents of the results agenda recognise the problem. However, their argument is that, in such circumstances, it is the duty of those proposing any particular approach to be explicit about their “theory of change” – that is, be explicit about the full chain of causal linkages you think is going to run from your intervention (here adopting international goals) and the impacts you hope for. Identify your assumptions. Assess the evidence for and against those assumptions, and weigh up the risks.

If done properly, this wouldn’t be just about ticking a box. The point of such an analysis should be to help understand how to make such goals more effective. It should look at why some goals were easier to meet than others (gender equity on education as opposed to access to clean water or reductions in maternal mortality) and in some countries than in others. It should look in a systematic and rigorous way in how the goals were used (or not used) and where there is evidence that they failed to lead to a result, explore alternative, potentially more effective “pathways to impact”.

The point here is not that the MDGs are somehow a bad thing, or that there should not be a new set of goals. In any case, it is not seriously in question that there will be further goals post-2015, of some form. Too much political capital has been invested in them for this to be the case, regardless of the ambiguity of the evidence base. The results revolution will not change the reality that some policies and initiatives are often inevitably driven by more than evidence, and that politics plays a major role.

Nor am I advocating a view that we should not try to measure impact or wrestle with the problem of attribution. What I am saying is that I think the example shows that really, really applying the agenda of results and evidence-based policy consistently and rigorously can be more difficult than the current discourse acknowledges.

Matthew Lockwood is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. From October 2012 he starts work on a four year project on innovation and governance in the UK energy sector. 

Waiting for Superman in Lahore: do poor people need private schools? Guest post by Justin Sandefur

Public v Private provision of education is a hot and divisive topic. So let’s get started. Today, CGD’s Justin Sandefur (right) puts the case for private. Tomorrow Kevin Watkins of the Brookings Institution responds. Be warned, their posts are pretty long and very passionate. Fasten seatbelts please:

While traveling in Pakistan a couple weeks ago, I took advantage of a brief flicker of electricity to check my twitter feed, and found this from Duncan.

 
 
After years of watching broken public school systems fail to educate their children, parents in Pakistan and many other parts of the developing have taken matters into their own hands.   Low-cost private schools are growing by leaps and bounds, especially in rural areas.    The number of private schools grew by nearly ten-fold in Pakistan from 1983 to 2000, reaching about 35% of public enrollment,  doubled in India from 1993 to 2003, and tripled their enrollment share in Kenya from 1997 to 2006 — at the same time fees were abolished in Kenyan public schools! 
 
Pearson’s plan is to invest in these low-cost private schools springing up across Africa and Asia, starting with a chain of schools in Ghana and Kenya.  Perhaps not coincidentally, Pearson’s Chief Education Advisor, Michael Barber, is also the architect of DFID’s support for a government voucher program in Pakistan that enables poor children to attend low-cost private schools.
 
The development industry is reflexively resistant to such private sector initiatives, as illustrated by the #dumbideas hash-tag and the quotes in the Guardian piece.  Here are three reasons to overcome that reflex.
 
Three myths about education in poor countries
 
Myth #1. The push for universal primary education (UPE) has been pretty successful. 
 
If success is defined as herding kids into classrooms, then yes, maybe.  By one count, over half of countries were on track to meet the MDG for primary education as of 2011.  But going to school is not an end in and of itself.  And the push for universal primary school enrollment has been an abject failure in terms of what really matters — learning. 
 
Kenya is a good example, where enrollment and learning diverge.  Behold the following challenging reading passage from Kenya’s public school curriculum.  
 
According to a national survey by Uwezo Kenya, only half of children in grade 3 can read this type of paragraph, although it’s on the grade 2 syllabus.  So while it’s great that only 3 to 4% of primary-school aged children in Kenya are not in school, it’d be nice if they could also read.
 
But the real scandal here, as highlighted by my CGD colleague Lant Pritchett and co-author Amanda Beatty, is not that half of third-graders effectively can’t read, it’s that staying in school doesn’t help much.  This is what Pritchett and Beatty call the ‘flatness of the learning curve’.  Of Kenyan children who couldn’t read the paragraph above in grade 3, only a third will learn to do so in grade 4 — in India, Pakistan, and Tanzania only 1 in 5 will learn to read with an additional year or schooling, and in Uganda only 1 in 12.  Even after 8 years of schooling in India, almost 1 in 3 pupils still won’t be able to read a simple paragraph like this.
 
Kids are going to school; they’re just not learning anything.
 
Myth #2. There is “very little evidence that private schools provide a better service than the public sector.”  
 
The Guardian attributed this view to Kevin Watkins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.  While I have enormous respect for Mr. Watkin’s work on UNESCO’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report –it’s worth a read — this statement is increasingly out of date.
 
For places including India, Pakistan, and Kenya, there are at least two types of evidence that private schools offer much better service.  Call them the direct approach and the indirect approach.
 
The direct approach simply compares test scores between public and private schools.  The figure below shows learning achievement among students at the Bridge International Academies in Kenya — one of the schools Pearson will support –relative to their neighbors.  By grade 3 they’re scoring roughly 90% higher on reading fluency and 45% higher on comprehension. 

The obvious follow-up question is whether this is just “garbage in, garbage out”, whereby private schools pick the best pupils and produce the best scores.  To test this hypothesis, my colleagues Tessa Bold (Goethe University), Mwangi Kimenyi (Brookings), GermanoMwabu (U of Nairobi) and I did some relatively simple analysis of the gap in test scores between public and private schools.  We find a performance gap between public and private schools of roughly one full standard deviation, which is more than seven-times larger than the impact of the best-documented, successful interventions to improve public schools in Kenya, which find an effect of about 0.14 standard deviations. More importantly, this gap does not appear to due to selection of smart kids into private schools.  When private enrollment goes up in a district, overall test performance rises as well — a phenomenon that can’t be explained merely by sorting of good pupils into good schools.
 
In a similar study of test scores in India, Alex Tabarrok from George Mason University finds not only that private primary schools vastly out-perform public schools,  but again, that this result is mostly not due to “cream skimming” of the best pupils.  As more and more students flock to private schools — exceeding 70% of all pupils in some districts — the public-private gap doesn’t narrow.
 
The direct approach clearly signals huge gains from private schooling.  How but the indirect approach?  
 
By economists’ logic of ‘revealed preference’, the stampede of pupils from the public to the private sector would seem to be a strong indication of what parents think of the quality of public schools.  A study by Michael Kremer of Harvard and Karthik Muralidharan of UCSD found that over 80% of government-school teachers in India send their own children to a private school.     
 
As Muralidharan summarized for a New York Times reporter, “What does it say about the quality of your product that you can’t even give it away for free?”
 
Myth #3.  Private schools are too expensive for the poor.
 
Particularly for readers in the UK, the association between private schools and class snobbery is, I suspect, pretty hard to overcome.  But the explosion of new, low-cost private schools since the 1990s in South Asia and parts of Africa has very different class dynamics. 
 
Research by TahrirAndrabi (Pomona College), Jishnu Das (World Bank), and AsimKhwaja (Harvard) shows that the average fee of a rural private school in Pakistan is less than a dime a day (Rs.6).  They also find that villages where private schools emerge have a significantly smaller gender gap in enrollment.   In Kenya, my colleagues and I examined fees paid by parents, and calculated that two-thirds of private schools cost less to operate than the median public school.
 
In India, the previous study by Kremer and Muralidharan finds that provinces and districts with lower per capita incomes have higher rates of private schooling.  Rather than being driven by wealth and privilege, they find that demand for private schooling is associated with the failure of public school systems. Private schools are significantly more likely to emerge in villages where public school teachers are frequently absent, or frequently not teaching when they show up. (See the graph.) 

 
 
There is nothing egalitarian about consigning the poor to shoddy public schools where teachers are chronically absent, classrooms are overcrowded, the school day is short, and very little learning takes place.
 
The elephant in the room
 
There’s a risk of overselling the case for private schools.  After all, they do charge fees.
 
Separating the provision of education (by private schools) and its financing (by government), requires initiatives like voucher programs and charter schools.  That’s a whole separate post, but the challenges of designing a good voucher or charter school program are not trivial.  Countries as diverse as Sweden and Colombia have introduced vouchers in a way that improves overall quality without compromising equal access.  Chile got things wrong — after introducing vouchers, Chile saw a massive exodus to the private sector, and increased socio-economic stratification between schools, arguably because Chile allowed schools receiving vouchers to conduct selective admissions and charge top-up fees, encouraging schools to compete on who they could attract, not what they taught. 

The real frontier in research is not about whether private schools work, but how we can support this market so it ends up looking more like Sweden’s rather than Chile’s.

From Lahore to rural Balochistan, and Nairobi to the farthest reaches of the Rift Valley, parents are no longer waiting for superman.  They have accepted that neither the public sector nor the aid industry is going to sweep in and save their children from broken schools, so they’re taking matters into their own hands.  Hats off to DFID and Pearson for trying to figure out a way to help them.

And tomorrow Kevin Watkins fights back. Which one is Superman? Which one is Lex Luthor? Think we may have to have a vote once the dust has settled.

What kind of sustainable development goals should emerge from Rio?

This post was also published today on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog

I attended an ‘expert panel’ discussion recently on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Originating in a proposal by the Colombian government for what comes after 2015, when most of the Millennium Development Goals expire, some initial progress on the SDGs is being increasingly seen as one of the few wins from a rather forlorn-looking Earth Summit in Rio next week. The essence of the proposal is that global goals help focus leaders’ attention and galvanize aid, but that this time around, they need to bring together development and environment into a single set of targets.

The most likely result in Rio is a paragraph or two in the final summit document, kicking off several months/years of talks to design and approve a new set of goals before the MDGs’ sell-by date arrives. But I’m worried that much of the discussion is taking place in a political vacuum, ignoring the political and economic context that will shape any decision and opting instead for the comforting-but-illusory safety of wonkish debates about indicators and metrics. Here’s the gist of my pitch to the meeting.

Firstly, the context is totally different to when the MDGs were agreed (late 1990s). The rich countries are in recession (compared to a long boom) and the US is in a presidential election campaign; there is no prospect of EU leadership to rival that of the Utstein group and (later) the UK and US governments in the late 90s; there is G-zero drift at the multilateral level (i.e. no-one taking global responsibility, contrasting with post Cold War dynamism in the 90s); and poverty is now mainly a middle income country phenomenon (and so ending it becomes more an issue of domestic redistribution). Finally, any agreement is likely to be more shock-driven, in terms of needing crises (political or economic) to generate the necessary momentum for agreement and implementation.

Secondly, the MDGs were largely about increasing the quantity and quality of aid. That is an implausible mission in the next 10 years. The graph shows World Bank research on the impact of previous banking crises on donor aid flows – aid typically rises for a couple of years and then falls of a cliff, not returning to its former levels for 15 years. The latest global aid numbers suggest a repeat of that pattern could be under way, so goals and targets are unlikely to have the same impact this time around.

So third, we need to think about what instruments have historically been born out of, or worked in, a downturn. Candidates include:

- Long term norm setting
- New sources of revenue, whether international or national, eg the financial transaction tax, closing down tax havens, increased royalties from natural resources, or domestic tax reform
- Re-regulation of financial sectors and introduction of social safety nets (cf the New Deal, born out of the Great Depression.)
- Creating the ‘enabling conditions’ for local people’s movements and others to put pressure on governments, eg access to good quality data, reporting requirements on governments
- Low/zero cost forms of pressure, eg league tables or peer review that use name and shame to create a race to the top between neighbours and rivals.

Add all this together and I think the most sensible approach to the SDGs is to aim for an ‘inspirational envelope’ in Rio, accompanied by low-cost commitments that will become sources of progressive traction (rather than explicit targets), primarily on national governments, forcing them to pay increased attention to issues of poverty eradication and sustainability.

Using Claire Melamed’s handy typology, that means agreeing a big ‘Bulls Eye’ end goal – zero hunger (Ban Ki Moon); zero poverty (WEF); human security (IDS); universal basic services; sustainability (or hey, how about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?). That could build on Kate Raworth’s doughnut framework (see yesterday’s post), combining development goals and planetary boundaries (see graphic).

Add to that, agreements on data and process to put in place the enabling conditions for future progress. Finally, and hardest to pin down, is it possible to create mechanisms that allow governments, the multilateral system or citizens to respond to shocks by accelerating progress? Not sure quite what this would involve, but the current MDG-type construct is very incremental/steady-state, whereas we know that a lot of social progress comes during and after shocks – can that be reflected in the SDGs in some way?

One other thought: it will soon be 20 years since the World Bank conducted ‘Voices of the Poor’, a ground-breaking study of more than 60,000 poor people in 60 countries that changed our understanding of the nature of poverty. Could Rio agree that it is time for a re-run to see how much has changed/remained the same?

This is all light-years away from the kind of SDG lists that are circulating, which more closely resemble Claire Melamed’s ‘Christmas Tree’ category. My concern is that this is more due to intellectual inertia (let’s take the MDGs and add some more) than a real attempt to understand the possibilities in the current political and economic context.

What should a European Voice on Development actually say?

Had a slightly frustrating session (but they’re often the most productive) at ODI recently on the next-but-one (2013) European Report on Development, which will be on the post-2015 debate, aka what comes after the MDGs (ODI’s doing lots on this).

My frustration sprang from the contrast between the avowed mission of the ERD – to open up a space for a European Voice on development, presumably to counterbalance overwhelming US dominance, and their plans for the report, which gave me little sense of distinctive European-ness, in terms of lessons from Europe’s own experience, whether historic or current, a different way of seeing the world, or the areas in which other parts of the world might see Europe as naturally credible - quality universal health and education maybe, sound economic management – not so much.

So here are a few thoughts for what a distinctive ERD might contain:

A European approach: how about focusing much more on the political economy of development, rather than an economic report which just berates leaders for not adopting all those ‘first best’ policies that economists love to recommend? For example, how about looking at post-2015 in terms of what kinds of reforms are most feasible in a downturn? Aid is highly likely to fall over the next decade or so, and the austerians are likely to remain dominant, so it seems pretty pointless to ask for more aid money. But economic shocks in the past have led to lots of other interesting reforms – re-regulation, new forms of revenue raising etc. Why not start there?

What’s going on in our neighbourhood? Europe is within a few miles of one of the most exciting development stories of recent years – the Arab Spring. What did it tell us about development? (e.g. if you have a rapidly improving university system, but no jobs for young people plus lots of corruption, watch out). Or about how the aid system reacts to sudden shocks and windows of opportunity? (by ignoring them, in general). Could we get away from the planner’s paradise of the MDGs and discuss complexity and emergent, unpredictable changes and how the international community and aid system respond?

Where does Europe have credibility? Asking a range of developing country thinkers would be the place to start, but my short list of possible would include welfare systems; conflict prevention through integration; getting (relatively) serious on climate change; food (UK excepted); much better cinema than Hollywood; Social democracy/welfare capitalism, social contract etc.

Then of course, a European Voice could concentrate on improving Europe’s own developmental impact, e.g. by reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, reforming financial markets, dropping counterproductive biofuels mandates, CAP reform, or stopping using trade negotiations to inhibit tech transfer. Don’t hold your breath on that one, but even if they did devote the ERD to it, would it really have much impact? (after all, look how little has been achieved by 30 years of research and criticism of the Common Agricultural Policy).

This all matters because I think the ERD’s underlying proposition is sound. Europe’s voice needs to be louder, but I see little evidence that the reports have found that voice yet. They began in 2009, and have covered fragility in Africa (2009), social protection (2010). Snappy title award goes to this year’s report, ‘”Effective natural resource management for inclusive and sustainable growth in the context of increased scarcity and climate change: what role for the public and private sector?”. My impression is that they are more ‘me too’ exercises than distinctive contributions, but feel free to set me straight – which ERDs have you heard of or used in your work?

Sustainable Development Goals: easy win or slippery slope?

Making sense of UN communiqués is never easy at the best of times, but it’s particularly hard when you are not involved in the process and so can’t decode the bland summit speak – a mind-numbing array of frameworks for action, toolkits, partnerships, dialogues and the like. So it’s hardly surprising that reading the draft ‘zero draft outcome document’ (what language do these people speak? – sure ain’t Shakespeare) for the Rio+20 summit in June made my head hurt. As far as I can make out, it is almost entirely made of up a series of vacuous ‘best endeavours’ non-commitments, roughly adding up to ‘we will do our best to save the planet, but no promises’.

Politically, that may be the best approach, even though the climate change clock is ticking, and won’t wait for political conditions to become more propitious. With US elections due later this year, and every  Northern economy forced by austerity and fear of a double dip recession into a highly introspective and tight-fisted mood, no summit is likely to produce ambitious outcomes this year.

Which brings us to the proposed ‘Sustainable Development Goals’, discussed by Alex Evans in a new paper. The sudden rise to prominence of the SDG idea is partly down to energetic advocacy by the Colombian government – who first mooted the idea of SDGs – and also to negotiators’ desperate search for some kind of ‘announceable’ in Rio. At a recent ‘intersessional’ (UN speak again, sorry) everyone from Canada to Botswana weighed in to support the SDGs (although the BRICS and the US opted to remain silent (at least in the official proceedings). They also feature prominently in the zero draft outcome document, which proposes they be finalized by 2015, the date when most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) currently in place are due to expire.

At first sight, the SDGs seem an admirable idea. There is indeed a problem that the current MDGs neglected scarcity and sustainability and in general,- environmental solutions need to be equitable (e.g. secure access to natural resources for people in poverty; action by rich countries to cut their consumption footprint), so let’s bring sustainability and development together, right?

But Alex sees the SDG idea as fraught with political perils: to make sense they would have to apply to all countries, not just the developing ones (cue US veto); they might muddy the waters (and blur the poverty focus) as the UN tries to agree on the successors to the MDGs. At worst they could just add to the proliferation of meaningless sustainability language (see graph).

His conclusion? ‘While there are good reasons to explore a more comprehensive and integrated set of Goals beyond 2015, policymakers should use Rio+20 to focus on broad principles and on raising the level of ambition – not on attempting to rush into specifics without adequate preparation. This is a time to play a long game, not to go for quick wins that could all too easily backfire.’

In this case, kicking the can down the road might actually be the best approach.

Post-2015 continued: do’s and don’ts for deciding what comes next (and some likely candidates)

How can a post-2015 agreement be designed to generate traction on both national and global decision makers? Global approaches are needed to tackle issues that ignore borders, like climate change. A global approach can also try and change the norms and values prevailing at an international level, and generate healthy competition and peer pressure among leaders. But many decisions are taken at national or subnational level (e.g. land reform or spending more on girls’ education).

One way of getting the best of both worlds is to define loose general global goals, normative principles and minimum standards, and then require each country to debate and set targets (so improving the level of national ownership). You could include some form of peer review to prevent countries opting for an easy life and setting targets that are ridiculously low. For the cross-border issues, specific global targets would be needed.

Do’s and Don’ts

Do: Go national:  we need to hear much more from national governments, civil society etc, rather than have a top-down UN process that is then ‘rolled out’ to a largely indifferent world.

Go global: Put crudely the MDGs were designed in the North, for implementation in the South. As ‘North-South’ rapidly becomes as redundant as the ‘East-West’ divisions of the Cold War, the post-2015 framework has to apply to all countries, with a reasonable possibility of exerting some influence even on the powerful ones.

Go local: tap into existing trends and devise some kind of popular monitoring mechanism using mobile phones or other vehicle for crowd sourcing, Ushahidi-style. It’s more democratic and interesting, and it saves money in times of austerity.

Don’t: Think of post-2015 in isolation. It is only one among an enormous number of international agreements, declarations, conventions and processes of widely differing effectiveness. Some, like the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, rather successfully percolate through into national legislation and social norms. Many of these constitute important ‘symbolic battlegrounds’ – you don’t need to go through the pain, agony and high likelihood of failure of trying to conduct these battles via the post-2015 negotiations, if they are already doing reasonably well somewhere else. One important parallel process is the Rio+20 debate on sustainability and the push to agree ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ to replace the MDGs.

Ignore opportunity costs: Individuals and institutions working on the MDGs could be doing something else instead. Don’t just pile in because it is there, but assess what can actually be achieved, compared to other processes.

What issues lend themselves to inclusion?

For global targets: Some issues should not be included because the politics are toxic and there is no chance of progress (e.g. migration). Others are already dealt with elsewhere in the multilateral system and including them in post-2015 would not add greatly to their prospects (e.g. intellectual property, climate change).

Issues that might benefit from inclusion are:

Technology transfer (inc clean energy), where it’s possible to find win-wins, or trade off short term sacrifices for long term benefits (eg giving away technology that creates long term markets).

Those aspects of the international financial system that are most relevant to poor countries and therefore should not be left to the G20 – tax havens and illicit financial flows.

International aspects of Finance for Development: aid (whatever replaces the Gleneagles promises, new (non DAC) donors); the quantity and quality (in terms of development) of migrant remittances; innovative sources of international finance such as the Robin Hood Tax.

For global goals with nationally-agreed targets

A basic minimum standard of Social Protection (on which countries can then build)

MDGs continued: Cluster, clarify and roll over the current MDGs rather than abandon them, but where possible, make them a floor on which countries need to improve.

Tobacco, alcohol, road safety, mental health, non-communicable diseases: Take issues previously seen as mainly rich world concerns; and speed up the transplant and adaptation of northern solutions. Why? Because the solutions are known, and speeding up their adoption with an international agreement could make a real difference (as in saving many lives), even in a weak-traction environment.

Extend ‘responsibility to protect’ thinking to a general effort to reduce volatility and shocks through eg social protection, financial inclusion, disaster risk reduction. Why? Because governments North and South already have appetite for learning how to manage the increasing variety, frequency and depth of shocks.

Jobs and investment pacts: jobs and growth were included in the MDGs but largely ignored,  because they are more national, and less linked to aid. This time round, a more nationally-driven approach could fill in that important gap.

Finance for Development: national aspects such as domestic taxation, natural resource revenues, transparency, financial inclusion.

Clean energy: low carbon renewables and/or dirty household stoves and heating, which kill a remarkable number of people, an issue already picked up by Hilary Clinton

And one really bad idea: Pick the global issues we don’t really know how to tackle – Inequality, conflict, fragile and predatory states Why? Because a ‘weak traction’ exhortatory instrument like the post-2015 agreement is not going to overcome the major political intellectual hurdles to sorting these out.

I can’t decide on whether it’s visionary or insane to include migration. Probably both. There is a divergence between economic reality (aging populations in rich countries will be increasingly reliant on young migrants to beef up their labour force) and political/cultural reality (hostility to foreigners. ‘they’re taking our jobs’ etc). At some point that divergence will have to close and, unless the birth rate reverses rapidly in the rich countries, migration will have to rise.  But I don’t think setting (and missing) goals for increased migration is the way to go about it – it requires a more subtle and longer term public discussion.

So what’s likely to actually happen? The MDGs required a major international process – a series of big UN conferences in the 90s, the Millennium Summit in 2000, significant political leadership from people like Clare Short. And they focussed on what rising volumes of aid could achieve. None of those conditions apply today so although there is a much lower political investment required in extending and refining an existing process than starting something from scratch, the environment is much more hostile. The MDG story could end in 2015, or, in a time of multilateral paralysis on trade and climate, the goals could become just another international zombie– not dead, but not alive either. Claire Melamed feels that even critics of the goals are starting to recognize the risk that, in the words of Joni Mitchell ‘you don’t know what you got til it’s gone’.

But whether the post-2015 agenda ends up being ambitious, minimal, nothing or the walking dead, over the next couple of years the debate on what comes next will be a crucial arena for discussing how we understand development, and can influence the direction in which the world is headed, so we had better get involved.

Beyond 2015 – what comes after the MDGs?

Last week I spent a couple of days in Cairo at an ODI- and UNDP-organised conference (Chatham House rules, so no names in this post) catching up with the state of debate on the ‘post-2015 agenda’ – aka what comes after the Millennium Development Goals (see graphic), which are set to expire on that date. I blogged on this a couple of years ago, but at that point the debate was muted because donors and others didn’t want to undermine pressure to achieve the MDGs by talking about their successors.

No longer – the post-2015 talkathon is gaining momentum fast and should peak in 2013 when decisions need to be made. So I’ve invited some of the interesting ‘southern voices’ at the event to contribute posts, and will run a couple of my own. Hey, that sounds like a series……

Claire Melamed from ODI set out the questions for the conference in an invaluable overview paper (38 pages) and an excellent two page opinion piece, in which she cautions against jumping into a discussion of goals, targets and indicators (the favoured topic of UN wonks and issue lobbyists), until we’ve talked about some more fundamental issues, which she divides up into three:

• What would a global agreement be for? i.e. which problems should it tackle – the same as the MDGs (mainly poverty and social spending) or ‘new’ ones (jobs, growth, migration, inequality etc)?
• Who would a global agreement  be for? If the MDGs were largely about improving the quantity and quality of aid, and the number of aid dependent countries is falling, how can their successor influence non-aid dependent countries, whether rich or middle income?
• How should a new global agreement link to national level? How can a global agreement be designed both to be ‘nationally owned’ and to influence national governments?

Excellent questions, but I would actually start even further back. The MDGs were gestated in the 1990s and are a child of their time. They epitomise both an expansionary moment when growth and aid were rising, and the latter could provide plenty of carrots to influence behaviour in aid-dependent countries, and the kind of ‘planner’ mentality epitomised by the incoming UK Labour Government, which on taking power in 1997 sprayed the public sector with targets that have since been heavily criticised and in many cases abandoned.

Contrast that with today: we are in a carrot-scarce environment where aid is more likely to fall than rise. That means simply extending the status quo for another decade or two won’t work. The principle driver of MDG progress – aid – is likely to be much less effective, and its targets fewer.

In addition, we have moved a long way from the world of ‘global planners’ in our understanding of development. Whether it’s through Dani Rodrik’s work in identifying a small number of ‘binding constraints’ to growth and attacking those one at a time, rather than concocting ever-lengthening shopping lists of reforms (or MDGs), or the focus on systems thinking, complexity and change as an emergent, inherently unpredictable, and discontinuous process, a lot of this new thinking seems pretty incompatible with the ‘goals, targets, indicators’ approach. Supporting development has to be more nimble and opportunistic – we need to get better at making it up as we go along, not implementing grand plans.

Which links to Claire’s third question. Development remains primarily national, born from the interaction between citizens, state, and other local actors like businesses, churches etc. So (especially given the poor prospects for aid), what kind of agreement is likely to exert effective positive pressure on that interaction, whether to nudge governments to do good things (or deter them from doing bad ones), or to strengthen citizens’ ability to hold them to account, or otherwise encourage development?

Here I think some input from other academic disciplines could really help – international relations, political science or whatever. What do we know about how international agreements influence national decision-making? Does that hold out any lessons for the post-2015 design?

And if there are any historians out there, what can we learn from the kind of reforms that occur at global or national level in or after a shock? Are they different from those that occur in a boom? My limited knowledge of the response to the Great Depression, or World Wars is that candidates include:

• reregulation (e.g. of the US financial system after the Depression)
• the creation of new institutions (UN, G20)
• the enfranchisement of new social actors (e.g. women entering the paid labour force during wars, or getting the vote after war or decolonisation – see pic)
• new forms of revenue raising (eg income tax to pay for wars)
• the introduction of safety nets after widespread traumatic shocks (creation of the UK National Health Service after World War 2)

These might all be candidates and inform the kinds of changes we might seek in a post-2015 agenda. And yes I realize that all this crisis talk may be a bit Euro-centric and that the crisis is mainly affecting what one participant called the ‘formerly-rich countries’ (ouch), but there are few signs of others picking up the baton on the MDGs, and the old guard still dominates the UN and international system.

In getting traction on national leaders, I think one example of a non goal/target/indicator approach well worth investigating is league tables – I have a strong hunch that they have much more influence on policy. Whenever the UK comes bottom of some international table on child welfare or education, press and political opponents have a field day, and the same goes for developing countries, especially when it involves near neighbours. Whatever the issue, if India beats Bangladesh or Pakistan, or vice versa, it is big news.

For this purpose, league tables work best when they are simple – preferably a single number rather than some massive dashboard of indicators that can be mashed up differently by all the players to show themselves in the best possible light. Just suppose the massive investment of political and actual capital in the MDGs had actually gone into refining and promoting an annual index of multidimensional poverty and inequality – a single number (and in the big countries, broken down by regions or states too) that governments could then try and improve by influencing any one of its component parts (essential services, inequality, security or whatever). Every year a big hoopla, with global and regional tables, lists of fastest improvers and the worst decliners, a debate in the UN but a focus on national action. Wouldn’t that have galvanized a lot more activity than the MDGs, and not just in aid dependent states?

I’m sure there are lots of other alternatives, both in terms of non-aid carrots (e.g. a chance for countries to share and spread their success stories like India’s employment guarantee scheme or Brazil’s bolsa familia) and sticks (leaders required to report regularly to the UN or national parliaments on progress against whatever they promise to do, although that could of course also be a carrot if they are doing well). My fear is that the relatively tight timetable will squeeze these out and inertia will deliver a set of tweaked MDGs with relatively weak influence over national decision-making. As so often, I hope I’m wrong.

OK, that’s enough rambling for one post. More to follow on what a global agreement might look like if we stick closer to the current model.

African public opinion on food security and the MDGs

I heard a really interesting presentation by Andrew Rzepa of the Gallup opinion poll company recently, sampling public views in 2009 in 18 Sub-Saharan African countries with the following questions:

· Could you please rank the following elements on this card in order of importance for you as an individual? 1 being the most important and 6 the least important
· What is the most important issue the government should address in the next 12 months?
· Do you agree or disagree with the following statements?
· The price of food has increased significantly over the last few months
· In the next six months it will be harder for my family to eat because food prices have increased
· Because of these price increases, we can no longer afford 3 meals a day
· The government of this country is doing enough to help people to get food
· Have there been times in the past twelve months when you did not have enough money full to buy the food that you or your family needed?
· Over the past year, how often, if ever, have you or your family gone without enough food to eat?

The full presentation is here, but some highlights are:

Poverty and hunger topped people’s priorities (see table, right). Interestingly, new technology came bottom, but unfortunately (from my perspective, if not Andy Gray’s), second bottom was gender equality.

Asked without prompting what their governments should focus on, agriculture and jobs came top (bar chart, left)

Two thirds of people felt their governments were not doing enough to help people get food, but the variation within Africa is striking, with Malawi’s government apparently earning approval for its fertilizer and seed subsidies (see Max Lawson’s recent post on this). (bar chart, right)

In the previous 12 months, 60% of adults had experienced not being able to buy the food their family need. Think about that for a minute.

They’re repeating the exercise this year – should be interesting to see how views have changed (if at all).