Doing a big Alaska: the case for a global social protection fund

Olivier de Schutter, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, is consistently interesting and provocative. This call to action is currently circulating on the interwebs (although the paper it’s based on came out last October):

‘If protecting human rights could be translated into a single political action, the creation of comprehensive social protection schemes would be it.

Health care, unemployment insurance, food aid, disability benefits: these are some of the services that characterise durable human development and distinguish today’s most prosperous societies from those living one hundred, or even fifty, years ago.

Yet many of the world’s poorer states have not adopted anything like a comprehensive social safety net. Some 80% of the world’s poorest people remain without any access to basic security against poverty and the risks associated with illness, old age, or unemployment. In low-income countries a small increase in food prices can leave the poorest no longer able to put food on the table. Worse, they cannot turn to the State for help. The injustice is particularly acute if considered that, for as little as 2 per cent of global GDP, basic social protection could be provided to all of the world’s poor.

So why are we not achieving faster progress in the establishment of social protection schemes in developing countries? Some countries have failed to invest in social protection because the development models supported by major international institutions have pushed States to lower government spending and reduce the size of the State. Elsewhere it is limited infrastructure and a low ability of local populations to pay into a contributory system that holds States back.

But for others, particularly least developed countries, the main disincentive is the risk of economic or environmental shocks. In small developing countries a large portion of the population is often susceptible to the same risks of natural disasters, epidemic diseases or extreme food price increases, leading to simultaneous surges in demand for social protection and decreases in State export and taxation revenues. States have a legitimate concern that they will not be able to pay out – or will be bankrupted in the process of doing so.

But social protection is too crucial a building block of development to be allowed to fall asunder on this uncertainty, and the multiplier effects of a decent social safety net – for human development and sustained economic growth – are too great to miss out on.

Global solidarity is needed to break the deadlock.  Wealthier nations must assist States for whom the costs are too big to absorb alone. The Global Fund for Social Protection that I have proposed, alongside Magdalena Sepúlveda, UN Special Rapporteur for Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, would allow poorer States to draw on international funding to meet the basic costs of putting social protection in place, while the Fund could also be called upon to underwrite these schemes against the risks of excess demand triggered by major shocks.

States can no longer claim to believe in human rights protection while failing to invest in social protection, for the two are intimately linked. There are many ways and means of funding a decent social safety net – now we need the political will.’

De Schutter’s missive dropped into my inbox just as I was having similar conversations here in South Africa about the case for a universal Basic Income Grant. Could it be funded from mining royalties, people were wondering? I told them to look up the CGD’s ‘oil to cash’ proposal for just that. Call it ‘doing an Alaska’. The CGD/South African proposals are national, de Schutter’s global. One obvious problem with the global proposal is the lack of discussion on how it could be funded. ‘As little as 2% of global GDP’ works out at $1.4 trillion – 10 times the global aid budget. You would probably need to put together all the proposals for international taxation (on financial transactions, arms trade, airlines etc) to pull it off, and what kind of political coalition is going to do that? Which probably explains the lazy reference to ‘political will’ at the end of de Schutter’s email. Politically, doing an Alaska at national level looks a lot more realistic.

And here’s CGD’s Todd Moss trying to do a Hans Rosling in a 4m video explaining oil to cash.

How poor people get through crises: some excellent ‘rapid social anthropology’ from IDS and the World Bank

On Wednesday, I spoke at the launch of a new book, Living Through Crises: How the Food, Fuel and Financial Shocks Affect the Poor, by Rasmus Heltberg, Naomi Hossain and Anna Reva. It’s a joint World Bank and IDS publication, also available for free online. I think it could prove quite influential.

The starting point for the book is that we live in a world increasingly characterized by shocks (economic, political, climatic), rather than steady incremental change, but there is a huge hole at the centre of our what this means for poverty. With a few exceptions (e.g. the early warning system on malnutrition), we have only the vaguest idea of how such shocks are affecting poor women, men and children in real time. Instead, the ‘poverty community’ relies on some decidedly blunt instruments – models (poverty rises by X million every time GDP falls by Y%) or household surveys with significant time lags. Moreover both these tools generally reveal little about the lived experience of being poor – the social exclusion, anger, shame, humiliation and fear that can lead to revolutions or despair. Yet through this fog of ignorance, policy makers and aid donors must take decisions in real time – what can be done?

Living through Crises tries to show how that gap can be filled, with 8 country case studies and a global synthesis on the impact of the multiple crises of food and fuel prices, and financial systems, that rocked numerous economies from 2008-11. The studies are both rigorous and qualitative (not an oxymoron, whatever some quants say) in what Robert Chambers in his excellent foreword terms an exercise in ‘rapid social anthropology’. The methodologies are varied, but typically involve focus group discussions, repeated over a period of months or years, in a sensitive, skilled effort to dig into the experience of poor people living at the sharp end of a global economy in turmoil.

What does this add to the traditional ways of exploring the impact of crises? Firstly, some surprises, for example that the informal sector is hit harder than the formal sector, even though a global economic slowdown hits international trade and finance first; that informal, local safety nets (religious organizations, communities, family and friends) are in general more significant sources of support than the state.

Second, this exercise in ‘deep listening’ identifies and fills some important gaps in our understanding – that indebtedness to microfinance organizations can become an acute burden in a crisis, or that intra-family violence (men on women, adults on kids) is likely to increase.
This approach identifies the importance of social capital and relationships: ‘marginalized and poor people with weak social capital experienced the most severe and irreversible hardships’. But it also points to the erosive nature of coping – for all their energy and invention in confronting shocks, poor people run down their assets as well as their stock of social capital, with knock-on consequences for their future well-being. Rapid social anthropology also identifies gender differences, for example in the impact of crises on the care economy, which are usually overlooked altogether by conventional analyses.

Food riots in Mozambique

All this echoes Oxfam’s own faster (we published two years ago) but less in-depth qualitative research on the gender and wider impacts of the crises, and there is overlap in both past work and future plans (we are just starting a 10 country follow up to the qualitative work on food prices conducted with Naomi Hossain at IDS last year).

The book launch (in a venerable committee room at the House of Commons), generated some thought provoking discussion:

Role of the State: the research finds that the state is often ‘absent’ during a crisis. Rather than turn to the authorities, poor people turn to family and friends, their religious organizations, and other community structures. So does that mean we give up on state provision of social protection, crisis response etc etc? No. But we need to think differently. For example, adopt a ‘Portfolios of the Poor’ approach of researching what community ‘social coping’ mechanisms function well and support those, as well as identifying gaps that the state needs to fill directly; or identify which aspects of state provision are effective and back those – school feeding programmes emerged as really significant.

Beyond the state: but the research does suggest looking beyond the state and seeing how to cooperate with the other institutions that matter. What about providing disaster management training to religious leaders? Putting money into community savings schemes as a way of getting cash quickly into a shock-hit village? I blogged on a discussion with Robert Chambers on this a while back, and the ideas still make sense (at least to me).

The links to structural adjustment: Those of us who worked on structural adjustment programmes in the 80s and 90s recognized a lot of similarities with the social impact of (and response to) structural adjustment programmes – e.g. Caroline Moser’s work on their erosive impact in Ecuadorian shanty towns. The other link is that SAPs in some cases increased vulnerability to shocks, for example by liberalizing financial markets, privatizing state banks and thus reducing the range of levers available to governments.

More coverage of the launch in the Guardian.

Where has the social protection debate got to? What’s still missing?

I always find debates around social protection strangely slippery. The language is fuzzy, the boundaries vague (what’s the difference between social protection and social policy? Depends who you ask). So a couple of weeks ago, I was secretly appalled when asked to give a 5 minute blogger’s input to a big IDS conference on ‘Social Protection for Social Justice’. Luckily I’m an early riser, so to avoid embarrassment I got up early to find out where this bit of the SP debate is heading, by reading all 57 abstracts. These academics are seriously productive, but they do tend to confuse outputs (papers) with outcomes (protecting anyone). Some impressions (with the caveat that it’s sometimes hard to judge a paper from the abstract – note to authors, please include your conclusions in the abstract as it may well be the only bit of your paper that gets read):

SP advocates (SPistas?) are all scrambling out of their siloes and developing ideas and programming around ‘SP plus’ – SP and climate change adaptation; SP and inequality; SP and gender empowerment; ‘transformative’ SP (me neither). The motive behind this is laudable – recognizing both that seeing SP simply as a technical exercise (eg cash transfers) misses out on its potential to change social relations for the better (or worse – see below), and that even supposedly apolitical SP systems have complex and important social and political repercussions – who gets the money? What do the neighbours think? How humiliating is the process?

So far so good, but it feels like SP still has a way to go:

1. Very little consideration of the politics: when do/don’t governments listen and take up all these excellent ideas and why? How politically sustainable are they – can you ensure that the next government doesn’t scrap its predecessor’s scheme? Does enshrining it in law or the constitution make it politically stickier? Or will a social pact/cross party agreement do the trick? All too often, advocates fall back on exhortation and an implicit notion that ‘we know what’s needed, and if you don’t agree you are either stupid, corrupt or both’. Not the best advocacy strategy.

2. SP remains an overwhelmingly state-led project. SPistas sometimes behave as if nothing else is going on – poor people are just sitting there waiting for the cash transfer person to knock on the door. But our research on the impact of the global economic crisis and studies like Portfolios of the Poor reveal a rich ecosystem of what could be termed ‘informal social protection’ – savings groups, churches, burial societies, microfinance groups, families and friends. It seems almost inevitable that the introduction of a state SP system is going to have a significant effect on this ecosystem, and that it could be positive (more to share around) or negative (targeting creates jealousy and erodes trust). One example of how this changes conventional wisdom – research in Zimbabwe found that recipients were much more likely to share food parcels with their neighbours (building social capital), whereas they tended to hang on to cash transfers, potentially causing division. A few papers started to explore this fascinating topic (e.g. this 3 country study by Ian MacAuslan and Nils Riemenschneider) but it’s clearly a crucial and neglected topic.

3. I’m all for creative ambiguity, fuzzwords etc, but the boundaries on SP are too blurred even for me. Does it comprise all social policy? Or go even wider – after all, the tax system is a vital tool of redistribution, so should that be included? For once, I would actually advocate a narrower definition so we all know that we are discussing roughly the same thing.

4. Out of the 57 papers there were remarkably few straightforward case studies, recording in plain English the views of poor people about the impacts (both good and bad) of different SP programmes on their lives. What case studies there were were either much more conceptual and less participatory than that, or demonstrated some spectacular researcher herding from Brazil’s Bolsa Escola (so last decade) to SP’s new poster child, India’s MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). Please can we hear more from ‘beneficiaries’, especially in low income countries?

Finally a nice cautionary note from the LSE’s Prof Thandika Mkandawire, warning against the deceptive simplicity of SP: ‘SP encourages the view that you can intervene in Africa and skip the elites to reach poor people directly – we have enough trouble doing it from our capitals, how can you hope to do it from London?!’ I’m sure the Africa Power and Politics Programme would approve.

Cash Transfers: what does the evidence say?

DFID, the UK’s Department for International Development, produces some really excellent research (and in case you’re wondering, our research team doesn’t see any of DFID’s research dosh, so I’m not singing for my supper here). The latest example is a really useful ‘evidence paper’ on cash transfers, summarizing a literature that is expanding at a bewildering speed. Here are the highlights from the exec sum, (but if you want to read the full 134 pages, be my guest).

“Over the past 15 years, a ‘quiet revolution’ has seen governments in the developing world invest in increasingly large-scale cash transfer programmes. These are now estimated to reach between 0.75 and 1 billion people. While this expansion began in middle-income countries (MICs), governments in low-income countries (LICs) have also started to develop cash transfer programmes.

This rapid spread has been driven by a range of forces. Firstly, there is growing recognition that while global economic integration brings poor households opportunities, it also brings increased exposure to stresses (e.g. volatile food and fuel prices) and shocks, which can push many into poverty. In this context, transfers are seen to play a role in reducing transitory poverty.

Secondly, there is growing evidence that transfers can help people escape chronic, often inter-generational poverty; in part by leveraging gains in non-income, human development outcomes.

Finally, there is recognition that in situations of chronic food insecurity (e.g. Ethiopia), institutionalised transfer programmes are more efficient and effective than repeated annual emergency food aid.

There is convincing evidence from a number of countries that cash transfers can reduce inequality and the depth or severity of poverty. There is an increasing volume of research into how cash transfers might support ‘graduation’ from poverty for those of working age. Evidence from Bangladesh and Ethiopia suggests that transfers are unlikely to achieve graduation without complementary interventions (e.g. skills training or agricultural extension) to promote livelihoods.

There is robust evidence from numerous countries that cash transfers have leveraged sizeable gains in access to health and education services…. Cash transfers also have a proven role in supporting specific vulnerable groups (people living with HIV and AIDS, orphans and vulnerable children).

However, transfers have had less success in improving final outcomes in health or education…. they cannot resolve supply-side problems with service delivery (e.g. teacher performance or the training of public health professionals). Cash transfers therefore need to be complemented by ongoing sectoral strategies to improve service quality. Nutrition may be an exception: households receiving transfers spend more on food, resulting in significant gains in children’s weight and height in several countries.

[CTs] have helped poor households to accumulate productive assets, avoid distress sales, obtain access to credit on better terms and in some cases to diversify.

There is very little evidence that cash transfers in developing countries have had negative effects on labour market participation or fertility. [i.e. they don't stop people looking for jobs, or encourage them to have more babies]

Transfers can influence gender relations and empower the poor to make their own decisions…. And may contribute to conflict prevention and peace-building

Finally, there is growing interest in including cash transfers and other social protection measures (e.g. insurance) within integrated approaches to strengthening resilience to climate change.

While conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have achieved considerable success, it is not yet clear whether conditionality itself contributes…. This debate matters as conditionalities create costs for governments, in monitoring, and for recipients, in demonstrating compliance.

Public works programmes can respond quickly to shocks and the need to generate employment to tackle transitory poverty in fragile or post-crisis situations [but] In practice, however, PWPs in many Low Income Countries (LICs) have not performed well.

Evidence from South Africa, India, Kenya and Liberia has demonstrated that electronic payment systems involving smartcards or mobile phones can significantly reduce costs and leakage, while promoting financial inclusion of the poor.

[CTs] require fiscal space and domestic political support. While electoral politics play a major role in Latin America and increasingly in Asia, this has not been the case in Africa.

Most developing countries spend one to two percent of GDP on social transfers. However, this conceals significant variation in absolutespending. For MICs, two percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to finance national cash transfer programmes that reach 25 percent othe population with proven effects. By contrast, LICs struggle to melevels of need from a smaller tax base.”

And if you’re wondering what this means for DFID’s work

“Over the coming years DFID plans to support cash transfers in 16 country programmes, with emphasis on building sustainable, nationally-owned systems. Recognising that appropriate solutions are highly context-dependent, DFID will seek to avoid prescriptive blueprint approaches to design.”

This is probably just the first instalment from me on social protection, as I’m attending a big conference on ‘SP for social justice’ at IDS later this week (I reviewed some previous IDS work critical of current SP thinking here). IDS Director Lawrence Haddad has some good reflections here, including the need to focus more on the ’social’ in SP and the possibility of using collective, rather than individual, conditions in conditional cash transfers (hey we could even apply that to governments… oh no, that doesn’t work). The conference is also the UK launch of the new 2011 European Development Report on (you guessed it) SP for Inclusive Development. Finally the World Bank is continuing its fiendish policy of death by consultation with an online forum to help it finalise its 2012-2022 SP and Labor strategy.

What does global aging mean for development?

Following on last week’s post on obesity, here’s another trend that’s rarely talked about (at least in development circles, with the honourable exception of Helpage International) – global aging. c/o Phillip Longman in Foreign Policy magazine.

“The global growth rate dropped from 2 percent in the mid-1960s to roughly half that today, with many countries no longer producing enough babies to avoid falling populations. Having too many people on the planet is no longer demographers’ chief worry; now, having too few is.

It’s true that the world’s population overall will increase by roughly one-third over the next 40 years, from 6.9 to 9.1 billion, according to the U.N. Population Division. But this will be a very different kind of population growth than ever before — driven not by birth rates, which have plummeted around the world, but primarily by an increase in the number of elderly people. Indeed, the global population of children under 5 is expected to fall by 49 million as of mid-century, while the number of people over 60 will grow by 1.2 billion.

Today we see that birth rates are dipping below replacement levels even in countries hardly known for luxury. Emerging first in Scandinavia in the 1970s, what the experts call “subreplacement fertility” quickly spread to the rest of Europe, Russia, most of Asia, much of South America, the Caribbean, Southern India, and even Middle Eastern countries like Lebanon, Morocco, and Iran. Of the 59 countries now producing fewer children than needed to sustain their populations, 18 are characterized by the United Nations as “developing,” i.e., not rich.

Indeed, most developing countries are experiencing population aging at unprecedented rates. Consider Iran. As recently as the late 1970s, the average Iranian woman had nearly seven children. Today, for reasons not well understood, she has just 1.74, far below the average 2.1 children needed to sustain a population over time. Accordingly, between 2010 and 2050, the share of Iran’s population 60 and older is expected to increase from 7.1 to 28.1 percent. This is well above the share of 60-plus people found in Western Europe today and about the same percentage that is expected for most Northern European countries in 2050. But unlike Western Europe, Iran and many other developing regions experiencing the same hyper-aging — from Cuba to Croatia, Lebanon to the Wallis and Futuna Islands — will not necessarily have a chance to get rich before they get old.

One contributing factor is urbanization; more than half the world’s population now lives in cities, where children are an expensive economic liability, not another pair of hands to till fields or care for livestock. Two other oft-cited reasons are expanded work opportunities for women and the increasing prevalence of pensions and other old-age financial support that doesn’t depend on having large numbers of children to finance retirement.

Surprisingly, this graying of the world is not by any means the exclusive result of programs deliberately aimed at population control. For though there are countries such as India, which embraced population control even to the point of forced sterilization programs during the 1970s and saw dramatic reduction in birth rates, there are also counterexamples such as Brazil, where the government never promoted family planning and yet its birth rate went down even more. Why? In both countries and elsewhere, changing cultural norms appear to be the primary force driving down birth rates — think TV, not government decrees. In Brazil, television was introduced sequentially province by province, and in each new region the boob tube reached, birth rates plummeted soon after. (Discuss among yourselves whether this was because of what’s on Brazilian television — mostly soap operas depicting rich people living the high life — or simply because a television was now on at night in many more bedrooms.)

Those who predict a coming Asian Century have not come to terms with the region’s approaching era of hyper-aging. Japan, whose “lost decade” began just as its labor force started to shrink in the late 1980s, now appears to be not an exception, but a vanguard of Asian demographics. South Korea and Taiwan, with some of the lowest birth rates of any major country, will be losing population within 15 years. Singapore’s government is so worried about its birth dearth that it not only offers new mothers a “baby bonus” of up to about $3,000 each for the first or second child and about $4,500 for a third or fourth child, paid maternity leave, and other enticements to have children, it has even started sponsoring speed-dating events.

China, for now, continues to enjoy the economic benefits associated with the early phase of birth-rate decline, when a society has fewer children to support and more available female labor for the workforce. But with its stringent one-child policy and exceptionally low birth rate, China is rapidly evolving into what demographers call a “4-2-1″ society, in which one child becomes responsible for supporting two parents and four grandparents.”

The pics are taken from the rather nice accompanying photo essay http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/11/the_grayest_generation

There’s a striking pattern here. Whether it’s aging, obesity, falling fertility and mortality rates or improving literacy, the transitions (both good and bad) that a country typically goes through as it develops are happening at lower and lower levels of GDP per capita, raising new development challenges (e.g. aging without pensions, obesity coinciding with hunger).

And what does aging mean for policy? Off the top of my head, it should shift us away from just thinking about jobs and growth to broader aspects of well-being that are more relevant to older people, such as social and pensions; a more welcoming attitude to immigration in population deficit countries; working with and supporting self organization by older people (who are often more politically active anyway). And it may even help out in tackling climate change. But I’m sure Helpage and others will have lots of things to add ……

Social Protection for Cows?

Cows, camels and goats are a crucial store of value in many countries. They provide meat, milk and clothing, they can be a quasi currency and can be passed on to children. In some countries, they are used as a kind of high interest revolving loan – you borrow a pair of breeding animals, look after them til they have young, then return the breeding stock and raise the calves yourself. The economic role is buttressed by cultural factors – owning livestock brings status and respect.

So livestock are valuable, multi-purpose assets (like money, only cash or bank accounts don’t provide you with milk) but, unlike other assets (houses, machinery, pots and pans, money), animals can die and lose their value overnight, especially during droughts or floods.

An interesting recent BBC piece on hunger in Niger mentioned in passing that the FAO is distributing animal feed for people’s cows as part of its anti-famine work. The FAO cattle-feeding programme will both keep the cows alive, and discourage people from distress-selling their assets at the rock bottom prices that characterize a crisis.

This got me thinking about the importance of smoothing the impact of shocks on livestock as well as more directly on people. Which prompts the thought, what else could be taken from our burgeoning interest in social protection (see recent post) and applied to livestock?

Possible: child benefits could become calf support grants. Cash transfers (presumably to humans, not cows) could be made conditional on having your livestock vaccinated. Any other candidates?

[Unlikely: cow pensions, unemployment benefit]

And if people do have to sell their cows, could governments, perhaps using aid money, buy them at decent prices and set the same price for restocking after the rains return?

Presumably lots of social protection-type stuff is happening already – over to the livestock community to fill us all in

We love road blocks; flushing toilets and murder rates: random facts about Latin America

The Economist has a big report on Latin America this week, to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the start of its struggle for independence (unfinished business, some would say). Here are some of the more striking statistical nuggets and other bits and pieces.

The region has 15% of the world’s oil reserves, a large stock of its minerals, a quarter of its arable land (much of it unused) and 30% of its fresh water.

Marketing people are beginning to talk about a “Latin American decade”. But there are at least three big worries. First, since 1960 it has seen the lowest growth in productivity of any region in the world, not least because around half of all economic activity takes place in the informal sector. Second, despite some recent improvement, its income distribution is still the most unequal anywhere. This has acted as a drag on growth and caused political conflict. Third, it suffers from widespread crime and violence, much of it perpetrated by organised drug gangs.

Today the average Mexican woman has two children, compared with seven in the 1960s. In 1960 four-fifths of Mexican homes had at most two rooms and no toilet; now 60% have three rooms or more and have a flushing lavatory.

Chile Solidario, a programme aimed at eradicating extreme poverty, shows signs of becoming the flagship for a new generation of social protection policies, going beyond Brazil’s iconic Bolsa Familia scheme. It puts the destitute in touch with social workers to make sure they benefit from programmes including job training, education and housing as well as income support. Colombia has set up a similar scheme. In Peru a programme in the poorest parts of the southern Andes has reduced child malnutrition. These programmes are more complicated and costly than conditional cash transfers (CCTs) but they can be more effective, especially in cities. Ricardo Paes de Barros, who advises Marina da Silva, the Green Party candidate in October’s presidential election, wants to see such a scheme in Brazil. He says it could deploy an existing network of community health agents. With Bolsa Família “for the first time we managed to identify a group of the poor who weren’t visible before. Now we can make sure the poor receive social assistance in a joined-up way,” he says.

[In Colombia] Between 2002 and 2008 the murder rate halved and killings of human-rights activists and trade-union leaders abated. Brazil has come up with some answers. In the decade to 2008 the murder rate in São Paulo state fell by 70%. Economic growth helped, but so did better police management. The police gave priority to catching murderers, with the clear-up rate for killings rising from 20% in 2001 to 65% in 2005

15 big cities generate more than half of Latin America’s GDP

In a recent poll 22% of respondents outside Lima approved of blocking roads as a form of protest.

That’s enough random stats for the moment (but feel free to add your own). Meanwhile I’m in Addis Ababa at a UN ‘expert group’ (ha!) meeting on eradicating poverty (although just getting our UN credentials seemed an almost insuperable challenge - ending world poverty might take a little longer….). My traditional conference whinge will come in due course, followed by what will hopefully be a more interesting account of the ensuing field trip (literally – the fields are being used to grow roses and coffee) to talk to farmers organizations and the like.

Last post from Manchester: social protection and how do we get to grips with politics and power?

More thoughts (increasingly incoherent as workshop fatigue sets in) from the Manchester conference. What are the big changes in thinking from ten years of research on chronic poverty in dozens of countries?

First, social protection, which has mushroomed from fringe issue to magic bullet with extraordinary speed. If the SP advocates really have won the argument on this, the next stage will involve a lot more experimentation and evidence. What kinds of SP? Who for? How much does it cost? Who benefits? Do shocks and crises provide the best conditions for its introduction? What sort of political contexts help/hinder? Sub-categories of SP and SP research will develop further: SP and gender/children/older people; urban v rural; SP and climate change; SP for migrants; SP and disability. How can SP be scaled up from local to national to global? When is SP counterproductive, eg feeding clientilism or welfare dependence, or exacerbating gender disparities? Lots of this is already being studied, but plenty still to do.

Second, poverty dynamics: look under the bonnet of poverty and there is a heaving, churning universe as people enter/emerge from poverty due to shocks, luck, hard work or their phase of life. Caroline Moser touched on this when she discussed her great book (reviewed here) on 30 years of research in a shanty town in Ecuador. During that time, she changed from seeing her neighbours in terms of poverty to thinking in terms of ‘asset accumulation’. The first asset people try and acquire on arriving in a city is housing. Once migrants have a house, they move on to accumulating other assets – financial, physical, human and social capital. Once the basics are achieved, the second generation develops different needs and expectations – what matters are secure jobs (and alienation from the lack of them), social cohesion, crime and distrust. Aid donors and local authorities prefer to focus on more tangible and do-able first generation issues – roads, street lights, playgrounds and health and education. So do local politicians, because new slums mean new votes, whereas in the established communities, party loyalties are more fixed. So all the attention is on the new shanty towns on the rim of the city, with nothing left for the rotting tenements or crumbling second generation settlements further in.

Finally, I asked a panel of chronic poverty gurus how we get onto the subject of politics and power, and actually stay there (see yesterday’s moan). What we need is a Chronic Politics Research Consortium, moving on from vague words like “governance” and “political will”, which have no explanatory power and are better seen as words to describe our areas of ignorance. Just as CPRC has dug into ‘poverty’ and ‘poverty reduction’, the CPRC 2.0 would get beneath the bonnet and explore the political roots of chronic poverty’s reduction or persistence. Here are their answers to where a CPRC 2.0 might start.

Andrew Shepherd: First we need to understand the interaction between research and politicians, (i.e. not just with policy makers), including via public opinion. We need to build strong research capacity in developing countries, so that national researchers can become more influential actors. As for the content of the research agenda, political parties and movements (and accountability mechanisms) often matter more than formal policy design process, producing the ‘underlying politics where norms and moral issues are being shaped’.

Myles Wickstead acknowledged the difficulties of aid donors funding work on parliamentary processes, and focussed on how little we understand elites. In many countries, local elites are largely unaware of the realities of their own poor people. What might trigger a revolution in attitudes?

Caroline Moser decided to go on the offensive (that’s definitely the last time I’m nice about one of her books): part of the problem is convergence. Why are researchers supposed to be advocates, and vice versa. Why did Oxfam do the global economic crisis research, rather than a university? Interesting question. Short answer is because UK universities are too slow and expensive, while we did work with universities in some of the case study countries. And we do know our limits – the research niche we aim for is generally rigorous qualitative work that builds on our programme experience. No point in us trying to compete on the big data gathering exercises. Longer answer is is watch this space – Caroline and I then had lunch to discuss how we might work together in future – that’s the real  benefit of conferences like this.

Random Highlights from the Manchester War on Poverty Conference

Some random observations from the ‘Ten Years of War Against Poverty’ conference in Manchester, before I head off to Edinburgh for tomorrow’s conference on ‘Making the Most of Scotland’s Aid (it’s that time of year…)

Ravi Kanbur (one of my heroes for his paper on why NGOs and the  big institutions disagree all the time) has an intriguing proposal for every country to run a ‘social protection assessment programme’ (SPAP). Analogous to the standard financial sector assessment programmes, these would run a stress test of existing social protection systems against possible crises (economic meltdowns, political crises, epidemics, civil conflict etc) to identify likely pressure points and put in place and improvement programme. This adds a dynamic shock-management aspect to the ‘steady state’ approaches of poverty reduction strategies and the like.
 
He also suggests a pre-qualified line of credit to finance social protection systems during shocks, what he calls a ‘deferred draw down option’ to be run by the World Bank for both low and middle income countries – governments can draw it down once certain triggers have been reached. A bit like the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund, it means that money would be on tap immediately in a crisis, avoiding delays as governments and international bodies pass the hat round.

Standing back, this felt like another tentative step on the road to an emerging (and ad hoc) global welfare state. In today’s rich countries, shocks have always played a key role both in triggering the spread of welfare systems, (see recent post on Sweden) and in the introduction of taxation (see separate posts on that). Are we witnessing the global equivalent? A lot of big ad hoc processes, like the rise of import substitution, are only understood, and rationalised in retrospect, so the fact that we don’t realize what is happening is not unusual.

Other notes: The conference so far has seemed unable to grapple with issues of politics and power. Every time someone raises these issues (for example the seasoned Kenyan lobbyist asking why everyone was assuming that governments are motivated entirely by poverty reduction, and merely lack the evidence from disinterested academics, when we all know that is nonsense), the discussion veers back rapidly to the comfort zone of technical themes of measurement and best practice economic and social policy. There is still a long way to go in getting the development scene to take political economy seriously.

There may be a ‘branding’ problem with the term ‘chronic poverty’. One well connected Bangladeshi academic had to start calling it ‘extreme poverty’ before policy makers would take any notice – he thinks ‘chronic’ sounds too permanent, intractable and expensive to deal with.

India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme seems to be ousting Brazil’s Bolsa Familia as PhD students’ social programme of choice, judging by the proliferation of papers on its origins, structure and impact.

A rhetorical question from Andy Sumner in a panel on the MDGs that lingers in the mind. ‘Whose ethical responsibility are poor people in countries where the elites have the capacity to help them?’ As inequality within countries continues to grow, that’s going to be one we keep coming back to, I think.

Oh and the novel sight of Joe Stiglitz sitting quietly in the audience listening to other people’s presentations (even mine, on – you guessed it – the global economic crisis). Not often that Nobel laureates stick around after their plenary speeches. Impressive.

New books on development: bad microfinance; climate change and war; what works; inside the World Bank; mobile activism

One of the perks of writing a blog is that I can scrounge review copies of development-related books. I’m sure they’re all fascinating and I really want to read them but alas, they don’t come with extra hours in the day attached. So I now have a growing pile by my desk that is in danger of becoming a health hazard (pet cat crushed under falling tomes etc). In post holiday clear-out mode, I am therefore going to assuage my guilt by giving them all a plug after a cursory skim.

Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism, by Milford Bateman (see here for reviews of his previous work) is a passionate polemic that takes on a development shibboleth – sometimes it feels as though doubting microfinance is as heretical as criticising Nelson Mandela. But Bateman does so, arguing that microfinance doesn’t actually work, relies largely on hype, and is uncritically welcomed because it fits with an anti-state, pro-market mindset of the Washington Consensus (shades of de Soto and the debate on property rights). He thinks that microfinance has squeezed out more beneficial and effective approaches, such as local-level industrial policy. One minor criticism – he doesn’t seem to distinguish between microcredit and other, genuinely useful activities such as microsavings – it’s the microcredit bit that has been massively oversold.

Update: For another survey of the evidence, which finds a more mixed balance of success and failure (apparently independent, though funded by the Grameen Foundation), see Taking Another Look, by Kathleen Odell, summarized on his blog by CGD’s David Roodman.

Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic and Political Crises will Redraw the World Map, by Cleo Paskal of Chatham House (and author of the Tonga renewables article I posted on a while ago) links up debates on security, development and environment, exploring the intersection between geopolitics and climate change: will it accelerate the decline of the West and the move to a multipolar world? Will it alter global trade routes and the geopolitics that they shape? How will shifting rainfall patterns and rising sea levels change Asia and the Pacific?

What Works for the Poorest? Poverty Reduction Programmes for the World’s Extreme Poor, by David Lawson, David Hulme, Imran Matin and Karen Moore, showcases some of the excellent research by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre (see here for more on its work). It focuses on the 400 million or so ‘chronic poor’ – the people who are likely to be stuck below the $1.25 global poverty line for decades or lifetimes. Trickle-down economic growth often doesn’t work for groups such as the impoverished elderly, disabled people, or excluded ethnic or religious groups. The book seeks practical solutions elsewhere, with case studies of the nitty-gritty of targeting (in Bangladesh and Kenya), cash transfers and other social protection systems (Chile, Viet Nam), women’s empowerment in Gujarat, the inevitable chapter on India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, decent work (South Africa) and health equity funds (Cambodia). Finally it tackles finance with chapters on microfinance and domestic resource mobilization.

The World Bank Unveiled: Inside the Revolutionary Struggle for Transparency, by David Ian Shaman is a bit long (568 pages) and shrill for my taste, but at least it is written by an insider – Shaman was involved in trying to improve Bank transparency through an internet-based broadcasting station putting out unedited internal discussions and debates to the public. As can be imagined, that hit a lot of internal opposition, leading Shaman to conclude ‘I believe there are two World Banks. One recognizes mistakes and limitations; the other rejects its own fallibility, promotes its superiority and shelters itself within the confines of its authority.’ Sounds about right.

And finally, something altogether different and exciting: SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa, by Sokari Ekine (editor, and one of Nigeria’s top bloggers), is a brief edited set of case studies of how activists are using mobile phone technologies to change Africa. It’s a ‘try these ideas in your campaign’ manual, with examples from Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uganda, Kenya and the DRC. Well worth a trawl.

Apologies for cursory reviews, and if readers know of more serious treatments, please add links in the comments section. If any of the publishers feel short-changed and want their copies back, they only have to ask.