‘Convening and Brokering’ in practice: sorting out Tajikistan’s water problem

In the corridors of Oxfam and beyond, ‘convening and brokering’ has become a new development fuzzword. I talked about it in my recent review of the Africa Power and Politics Programme, and APPP promptly got back to me and suggested a discussion on how convening and brokering is the same/different to the APPP’s proposals that aid agencies should abandon misguided attempts to impose ‘best practice’ solutions and instead seek ‘best fit’ approaches that ‘go with the grain’ of existing institutions in Africa. That discussion took place yesterday, and it was excellent, but that’s the subject of tomorrow’s blog. First I wanted to summarize the case study I took to the meeting.

The best example I’ve found in Oxfam’s work is actually from Tajikistan, rather than Africa, but it’s so interesting that I wrote it up anyway. Here’s a summary of a four page case study. Text in italics is from an interview with Ghazi Kelani, a charismatic ex-government water engineer who led Oxfam’s initial work on water and is undoubtedly an important factor in the programme’s success to date. Ghazi is currently Oxfam’s Tajikistan country director.

Water is a key resource in Tajikistan, providing energy, irrigation and drinking water, but its management is chaotic, characterized at both national and local level by paralysis, multiple institutions with overlapping mandates and a state of disintegration in much of the supply network. In many communities, people have reverted to taking water directly from irrigation canals and rivers, and diarrhoea is the most common disease in the country.

Oxfam began working in Tajikistan in 2001, in response to 2 years of drought. Water and sanitation (WatSan) formed an important part of its programme. Concerns over sustainability prompted a review of the work after five years, producing dismaying findings. Oxfam decided to publish these and organized a conference at which it became clear that INGOs, state and private sector providers were all struggling to manage the institutional chaos.

People were knocking on Oxfam’s door saying ‘your water system is broken, please come and fix it.’ That prompted us to ask why they were still saying ‘your’. It raised issues of sustainability. Publishing the findings of the evaluation was the big moment – our own doubts resonated with others.

The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the leader in the WatSan sector in Tajikistan, got involved, calling in its experts to check Oxfam’s research and develop a plan for how to address the issues raised. SDC asked Oxfam whether we would be interested in running a 3-5 year project, but Oxfam persuaded them to extend this to 10 years, due to the scale and nature of the challenges.

The resulting project (TajWSS) developed a theory of change that would now be described as ‘convening and brokering’.

The network meets every two months. We always have guests, and hot topics, keep it dynamic – a full afternoon, 1.30-4.30pm, and then an extended coffee break so people can network. We get a minimum of 55 people from different sectors – 17 government ministries and agencies; the UN family; INGOs; academia; the media; Tajiki civil society organizations; the private sector; parliament. Now the ‘big questions are flowing’. Lots of other stuff emerges from the side conversations, the coffee breaks. For example, private sector companies working with network members to develop local chlorination, or getting local banks to help communities with finance for investment. Maybe we should add vodka to the menu to keep people there a bit longer!

Central to the new programme is that its work is not framed as a project, but rather about building sustainable institutions. Improving the communications between government actors and other stakeholders in the water and sanitation sector all contributed to building a better environment on decision making.

This approach is not as easy as it sounds, and requires a particular skill set from the facilitator:

Everyone agreed with the overall idea. Of course, when you raise issues that affect the pocket, for example proposing tax exemption for investment in infrastructure projects, the Ministry of Finance gets irritated and opposes. There are always winners and losers and the losers try to push back by any means they can. Some Ministers get pissed off and try to make trouble. We deal with it case by case – we have to be patient, diplomatic, absorb their anger. We try to keep everyone calm! We use participatory techniques, task groups to help on this. Sometimes the best solution is to ignore someone; sometimes to go to them twice a day and explain we are doing this for Tajikistan. By creating forums to tackle contentious issues, TajWSS has become the only well-functioning game in town.

Project Impact

The initial impact was institutional, with more practical impacts following later. TajWSS helped set up an Interministerial Co-ordination Council (IMCC), established by presidential decree, with membership from 14 ministries and government agencies. This meets four times a year to discuss policy and make decisions. TajWSS facilitates the meetings and helps the Chair (who is the Minister of Water). (Without our facilitation it wouldn’t happen).

Our biggest victory so far is the Water Law.  We didn’t draft it – it has been there for years in somebody’s drawer. The network raised the importance of having a law, and someone dug it up, and we decided it was good enough for a start.

Why does a water law matter? Previously there were laws on water and agriculture, water and energy, but not on drinking water. This creates chaos, everyone claiming water supply rights, providing without any quality control. The law frames the issues, establishes who’s in charge, who regulates, who is the service provider and targets monopolies. It is bringing order to an important subsector.

Our other major breakthrough is on construction permits for rural infrastructure. Currently it is really unclear, even for the biggest company. Getting a permit takes a minimum of 2 years and needs 3 separate permits for land acquisition, the license to exploit natural resource and the license to build infrastructure. And people in rural areas have to go to the capital to get the permit, because local government is not empowered to make decisions. So we found some nice work from USAID and the World Bank on ‘single window reform’, proposing a 200 day maximum for approval, and we used that as the basis for our proposal. We mapped 72 procedures and started to cost each one and weed out the unnecessary ones. It’s now down to 19 steps, and 180 days, and we’re still trying to simplify further, e.g. a fast-track procedure for small scale infrastructure. The inter-ministerial council has already approved it and the president has signed off (presidential decree no. 282.)

These institutional breakthroughs are now starting to deliver concrete results, according to Ghazi

We have now got the government to co-fund the water infrastructure programme. The Minister of Finance wrote to the president saying ‘we will support the Oxfam initiative and contribute 30% of capital costs’. The other 70% is SDC money channelled via Oxfam. The first 3 constructions were finished in December 2012 and handed over to communities for service provision (operating and maintaining) and making an income. Three more are in the pipeline. The water has started flowing – initially to 9,000 people in 7 villages. By August 2013 at least 30,000 people will get access to sustainable water provision.

Lessons

• It’s comparatively rare for NGOs or aid agencies to adopt the approach of ‘we all see there’s a problem, but we’re not sure how to fix it, let’s work something out together’. In this case, though, that seems to work better than either service delivery, or advocacy based on a shopping list of ‘policy demands’.
• In this area, for credibility, being operational as Oxfam is really important
• Acknowledging failure, and going public with it, created the basis for a coalition to find new solutions
• Oxfam’s role in convening/brokering has managed to bring players together and build trust, leading to an emerging set of initiatives, both in public policy, and partnerships. Part of that is Oxfam’s international brand: ‘The reason we can convene is our credibility and knowledge but also our international brand. Before meetings people go and google Oxfam and when they see what we are doing, it gives them confidence. It also matters that as Oxfam we are not vulnerable to political pressure, whereas a local NGO might be.’
• Building on existing legislation (e.g. the shelved Water Law) can often be a faster route than starting from scratch.
• Good research and killer facts (eg on permit procedures) can create conditions for policy change.
• Synergise and build on others projects rather than re duplicating or re-inventing the wheel
• I learned that facilitation and support of a network means taking care of each member organisation separately and in some cases individuals inside the member organisation.

I’m keen to collect more examples of this ‘problem without solution’/convening and brokering approach from NGOs and others – if you’ve got any, please let me know. Part two of this post tomorrow will report back on the ensuing discussion.

Confronting scarcity by managing water, energy and land: the new European Report on Development

I have skimmed a few of the curtain raisers for next week’s Earth Summit in Rio, and sure enough, they fall into the familiar pattern of ‘If I ruled (or at least ‘managed’) the world’ documents: a summary of the research evidence, a call to arms (in this case save planet and species, preferably both), and a shopping list of policy recommendations.

In such reports, all solutions seem to be win-win. Beyond vague appeals for political will, there is almost no discussion of politics (there’s an election going on in the US – do you think that might be germane?), power (who gets to decide what, and what are their motivations) or the chain of events (shocks, elections, scandals, cumulative pressure from citizens, peer pressure from governments) that might possibly lead to something being agreed. Reports typically employ the passive tense – ‘innovation/cash/leadership is needed’, neatly avoiding having to identify just who has to do it, and why they might decide to do so.

Exhibit A: ‘Confronting Scarcity: Managing water, energy and land for inclusive and sustainable growth’ is the latest European Report on Development. I’ve been a bit rude about the ERDs in the past, but within the limits of the genre (see previous para – the exec sum has 84 uses of ‘manage’ or ‘management’, but only 8 of ‘politics’, ‘political’ or ‘empowerment’), this one’s actually quite good, in that it joins up issues and thinks in terms of whole systems. I think the ‘DSER framework’ (see below) may also stick. Highlights:

“This Report focuses on water, energy [actually, only renewable energy] and land (see graphic). It examines the constraints on each, the interrelationships between them and then considers how they can be managed together to promote growth in developing countries that is both socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable.

All actors must consider the full range of options in managing pressures on water, energy and land. So far the focus has been on partial solutions: Businesses emphasise the opportunities in increasing supply and raising resource efficiency; the green economy concept at Rio+20 highlights enhancing the resource base, resource efficiency, and sustainable consumption and production; NGOs highlight fair resource shares for the poor; others emphasise resilience against climate shocks. This ERD argues that the scale and urgency of the problems require transformative action in a combination of four pillars (DSER):

•  influencing demand patterns to reflect scarcity values (e.g. sustainable consumption and production by cutting waste and changing lifestyles)
•  improving the quantity and quality of supply (e.g. partnerships on renewable energy, soils, water storage through appropriate finance, regulation and knowledge sharing)
• increasing efficiency (e.g. technology transfer, national innovation systems)
•  increasing resilience against shocks and benefits for the poorest (e.g. benefit-sharing, social protection, Corporate Social Responsibility, inclusive land policy)

Action is particularly required in five areas:

1. Radically reduce the environmental footprint of consumption (especially, but not only, in developed countries such as the EU) to promote inclusive growth without increasing resource use.
2.  Promote innovation to increase agricultural productivity to feed more than 9bn people sustainably by 2050 and scale up renewable energy technologies that help to deliver sustainable energy for all by 2030.
3. Establish or reform institutions for an integrated approach towards managing resources.
4. Push for inclusive land policy to ensure access to land and water for the poorest and most vulnerable.
5.  Price natural resources and services comprehensively and appropriately (e.g. using instruments such as payments for ecosystem services, PES), whilst safeguarding the welfare of the poorest.

And a couple of other choice quotes:

“The new context for the management of natural resources poses severe risks for both inclusiveness and sustainability. The world has already trespassed three of the nine planetary boundaries within which it can operate safely: biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus loading and climate change. Ocean acidification and freshwater boundaries are expected to be next in the coming 50 years. The risk that tipping points are being reached, or will soon be reached, will jeopardise the future wellbeing of the poorest, who will be the hardest hit by environmental degradation. Applying the technology that lay behind the Green Revolution of the 1960s will not sustainably produce food for 9.3 billion people by 2050. The Earth’s natural resource base does not allow developing and emerging economies to reach consumption patterns that developed countries have followed and continue to follow (e.g. a reliance on meat consumption), hence distributional issues will have to be addressed, especially since technological progress has not been sufficient to decouple consumption of natural resources from economic growth.”

“Countries and groups that possess relevant assets will have new opportunities, but these come with social and environmental risks. Less well-endowed countries, regions and groups face different types of risks and opportunities (e.g. parts of northern China, India, Middle East and Southern Africa have little water, while countries such as Ethiopia, Ghana, Madagascar and Sudan have large tracts of land).”

There are good case studies on biofuels, managing the WEL Nexus in Kenya (see video) and the Brazilian ag boom.

Has anyone read any other particularly good curtain raisers, preferably with at least some discussion of power and politics? (and no, you’re not allowed to suggest your own…..)

What’s the state of the world’s water and land? New FAO report.

This is encouraging. Alex Evans has been banging on for a while about the need for a ‘World Resources Report’ that charts the state of planetary resource stocks (not flows, like all the other reports). Now the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has done exactly that. The State of Land and Water Resources (SOLAW) is FAO’s first flagship publication on the global status of land and water resources. New editions will be published every 3 to 5 years. Here’s the summary: 

“The world’s cultivated area has grown by 12 percent over the last 50 years. The global irrigated area has doubled over the same period, accounting for most of the net increase in cultivated land. Meanwhile, agricultural production has grown between 2.5 and 3 times, thanks to significant increase in the yield of major crops.

However, global achievements in production in some regions have been associated with degradation of land and water resources, and the deterioration of related ecosystem goods and services. These, include biomass, carbon storage, soil health, water storage and supply, biodiversity, and social and cultural services. Agriculture already uses 11 percent of the world’s land surface for crop production. It also makes use of 70 percent of all water withdrawn from aquifers, streams and lakes. Agricultural policies have primarily benefitted farmers with productive land and access to water, bypassing the majority of small-scale producers who are still locked in a poverty trap of high vulnerability, land degradation and climatic uncertainty.

Land and water institutions have not kept pace with the growing intensity of river basin development and the increasing degree of inter-dependence and competition over land and water resources. Much more adaptable and collaborative institutions are needed to respond effectively to natural resource scarcity and market opportunities.

Toward 2050, rising population and incomes are expected to call for 70 percent more food production globally, and up to 100 percent more in developing countries, relative to 2009 levels. Yet, the distribution of land and water resources does not favour those countries that need to produce more in the future: the average availability of cultivated land per capita in low-income countries is less than half that of high-income countries, and the suitability of cultivated land for cropping is generally lower. Some countries with rapidly growing demand for food are also those that face high levels of land or water scarcity. The largest contribution to increases in agricultural output will most likely come from intensification of production on existing agricultural land. This will require widespread adoption of sustainable land management practices, and more efficient use of irrigation water through enhanced flexibility, reliability and timing of irrigation water delivery.

The prevailing patterns of agricultural production need to be critically reviewed. A series of land and water systems now face the risk of progressive breakdown of their productive capacity under a combination of excessive demographic pressure and unsustainable agricultural practices. The physical limits to land and water availability within these systems may be further exacerbated in places by external drivers, including climate change, competition with other sectors and socio-economic changes. These systems at risk warrant priority attention for remedial action simply because there are no substitutes.

The potential exists to expand production efficiently to address food security and poverty while limiting impacts on other ecosystem values. There is scope for governments and the private sector, including farmers, to be much more proactive in advancing the general adoption of sustainable land and water management practices. Actions include not just technical options to promote sustainable intensification and reduce production risks, they also comprise a set of conditions to remove constraints and build flexibility. These include (1) the removal of distortions in the incentives framework, (2) improvement of land tenure and access to resources, (3) strengthened and more collaborative land and water institutions, (4) efficient support services including knowledge exchange, adaptive research, and rural finance, and (5) better and more secured access to markets.

Widespread adoption of sustainable land and water management practices will also require the global community to have the political will to put in place the financial and institutional support to encourage widespread adoption of responsible agricultural practices. The negative trend in national budgets and official development assistance allocated to land and water needs to be reversed. Possible new financing options include payments for environmental services (PES) and the carbon market. Finally, there is a need for much more effective integration of international policies and initiatives dealing with land and water management. Only by these changes can the world feed its citizens through a sustainable agriculture that produces within environmental limits.”

Main risks summarized in the map below (click on the link to get a decent sized version), plus lots of interactive maps on eg water scarcity here [h/t Richard King]

SYSTEMS_AT_RISK_MAP

Why don’t more NGOs work on water? Guest post from Dan Yeo, WaterAid

Daniel Yeo, Senior Policy Analyst at WaterAid (twitter handle @yukinosaru), indulges in some outrageously blatant lobbying about why Oxfam should do more on water.

A few weeks ago, Duncan posted his reflections on Oxfam’s discussions on water. As pleased as I am about Oxfam’s interest, it begs the question, why haven’t more development NGOs dived into water already? 

We can all relate to water – and any traveller can tell you about bad water and poor sanitation, and water shortages cause problems even in developed countries.  Having the runs may make for a few embarrassing holiday anecdotes, but it’s no joke that diarrhoea is the biggest child killer in sub-Saharan Africa. Preventable diarrhoea associated with dirty water and poor sanitation kills more children than AIDS, malaria and TB combined. 

And it’s not just kids – water is fundamentally a gender issue. Women and girls bear the biggest burden of WASH poverty – walking long distances in rural areas, queuing in line for hours in urban slums. Poor water, sanitation and hygiene undermines maternal and child health and nutrition. In education, 443 million school days are lost to water related diseases. Girls are more likely to stay in schools with separate female toilets.

These failings in human development impose a cost on the economy, through lost lives, school days, work days and burden on health systems. The UN estimates that every $1 invested in water generates $8 in wider economic benefits.

Without water we have nothing.

And that’s just water for drinking and health – water is also an economic resource – vital for food (70% of globally available freshwater is used for agriculture) – and livelihoods. It is a critical ingredient for industry – almost every manufacturing process needs water. Finally, it’s intertwined with energy – and not just through hydropower. Thermal power stations need water for cooling and for the steam needed to turn turbines.

But water can also be a destroyer – witness the floods in Pakistan and drought in the Horn of Africa. The impacts of climate change will be felt through and on water – too much, too little and the wrong type (e.g. salty rather than fresh).

All of this is not to say that having safe water is the silver bullet – but countries will make increasingly limited progress on health, education and economic development without commensurate investment in water and sanitation.

So if it’s so important – why is water so often ignored? As with many things, it’s about sex and money.

First, sexiness. Shit doesn’t sell. Water and sanitation engineers are seen as techy and boring – most people have limited personal experience of them and they are undervalued in comparison to teachers or doctors. (Declaration of interest: I’m an engineer by training! Although I’d prefer to think of myself as an engineer in the classical sense – a solver of problems, but that’s for another post…)

Value. There is no money to be made in providing water – there are limited rent seeking opportunities. It’s not worth a lot of money and most people don’t pay enough for their water. Even in the UK only about a third of the population have a water meter.

But it’s also about visibility. We in the North don’t think about water in the way that millions elsewhere do. We turn the tap, it flows. We don’t even think of it as something we pay for. Our water supply is so assured that we don’t even notice, so it’s hard to get people to think of it as an issue. You don’t see people dying of thirst, instead the tragedy of WASH poverty kills invisibly, mainly through diseases like cholera, where you literally shit yourself to death.

Finally, it’s complex – water is linked to so many agendas that there’s often no focus and competition between water ’sectors’, rather than making a case as a whole.

The good news is that low cost, sustainable solutions exist, so it’s not a lack of technology – what’s missing is the recognition by politicians of the centrality of water and the capacity of governments to deliver sustainable basic services.

To tackle the first issue, we need to make water visible. Fortunately, the wind is in our favour. Water is “cool” at the moment. Business and the media have begun to pick up on water – but as an economic resource, and largely driven by attention to climate change. There is a risk that the human dimension is again forgotten here, but we have an opportunity to use the oxygen of this attention to drive home the centrality of water to human development.

Secondly, we need to work with governments to build a sustainable sector. The potential for change is huge if done right – the Liberian

government, working with Liberian community representatives and through the Sanitation and Water for All partnership (SWA) have developed a credible national plan to deliver exactly this through the able leadership of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The hope is that donors and NGOs will work to this common plan to make the most of their resources and drive a step change in eliminating WASH poverty.

What could Oxfam do? It has the opportunity to contribute to both of these goals – to raise voices about the injustice of a solvable problem that, together with poor sanitation, is the biggest killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa; and more importantly to deliver – working with a range of sector specialists, like WaterAid, to create a step change in progress.

Duncan’s reflection looks at Oxfam’s potential programming and work around water (in addition to their existing work) – but rather than ‘do WASH’, Oxfam should do what it does best – speak up for the voice of the poor in global scarcity. You’re already halfway there with the GROW campaign – food, energy and water are linked by the same dynamic, a focus on scarcity rather than solutions to secure access for the poor.

Oxfam could also work with others to drive change that takes the energy that exists around scarcity issues and uses it to drive real change for the poorest around the world. Oxfam’s breadth means they are well-placed to act as common ground and to help others cross boundaries: between professions (humanitarian/development); across sectors (water/health/education/livelihoods); within sectors (WASH/Water Resources).

And, lastly, Oxfam needs to push its advocacy weight behind the global End Water Poverty campaign and give the same priority to water as the poor do.

What all of this can do is to deliver what really matters – whole solutions that work on the ground to make people’s lives better.

So what are you waiting for? C’mon in, the water’s warm…

For further information, WaterAid has published the ‘Off-track, off-target’ report and launched the Water Works campaign.

What should Oxfam be doing on water?

Just spent an intense couple of days at Oxfam Reflects, a biannual event where a mix of staff, partners and a sprinkling of professors and

other wonks shut themselves away to talk through a thematic issue that is confusing the organization and needs a bit of kicking around.

This one was on water – trying to cover both Oxfam’s traditional specialism in water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), especially in emergencies (think Indiana Jones engineers getting clean water flowing within 48 hours of an earthquake) and broader concerns about long term access to water, whether for personal use or agriculture.

I won’t bore you with a conference report, but after battling through a blizzard of unfamiliar acronyms and concepts, here are some random (and very superficial) highlights and impressions.

First the problem analysis: (Relatively) good news on water, terrible news on sanitation. The number of people without access to clean water is down to 900million, but we’re now up to 2.6 billion people (one in three) who lack access to decent sanitation. Probably no accident that with sanitation as the most off-target MDG, the health targets are next worse.

Stand back, and water is one of the pinch points in a resource constrained world – it is going to be extraordinarily difficult to find enough to grow the crops to feed the world, and a global water crunch is well advanced, with climate change as an accelerator.

Then the obvious point that (even poor) people in rich countries are far more water secure than those in poor ones, but as always, any sense of history is weirdly absent – how have now-developed countries achieved water security? Surely there’s a case for some examination of the roles of state, private sector, civil society, war/other shocks, technology etc in water take-offs? References welcome.

One new and alarming fact on North v South – the extraordinary differences in rainfall variability, which is far higher in poor countries than in most rich ones and takes a large chunk out of the economy, according to work by David Grey (one of the profs). Potential for a bit of geographical determinism there, I fear.

What is Oxfam already doing? Much more than I realized, and not just on emergencies. True, most WASH spending is humanitarian (about ¾), but we still spent £16m on non-humanitarian WASH last year. In terms of numbers of people, I was a bit baffled by the numbers, but we seem to be reaching upwards of 6 million on humanitarian, and 2 million with some degree of long term support. Blimey, that’s a lot of people. There was also an unusual degree of self-congratulation on innovation in longer-term WASH work (I’ll cover that in a separate post). Another post is in the pipeline on some fascinating work in Tajikistan, where Oxfam has functioned as a convenor, brokering discussions between all the players, rather than a lobbyist, with some spectacular results.

It wasn’t all positive though (self-doubt is our product?). There was the usual lament about the divide between emergency work, long term development and advocacy, and the difficulty of bridging it (Indiana Jones hasn’t always got a lot of time for participatory processes…..). But has any organization overcome that and if so, how? Are there not genuine reasons for such a divide (such as the kinds of people you need)? When I asked this, the examples people gave of organizations that move across all three were all national civil society organizations (rather than international players) – interesting.

Worth comparing the received wisdom on access to water with those on health and education: there seems to be much more of a need to prove competence on the ground before trying to engage government or private sector. In fact it is debatable whether the distinction between programming and advocacy makes sense in water – influence happens as much through conversations between engineers (theirs and ours) as through traditional campaigning. There is also a much greater acceptance of a role for private sector and market mechanisms. That’s particularly true of domestic companies, as foreign investment has largely failed to materialize (or been a disaster, as in Cochabamba). It would also be interesting to cross fertilize between thinking on water security and food security.

And finally, what could be Oxfam’s niche? A lot of agreement in the room on seven areas: work in urban areas, not just rural; develop approaches based on recognizing that water insecurity is more often long term and/or cyclical than one off (e.g. floods in South Asia, droughts and floods in East Africa); design programmes that foster innovation; think about multiple use systems (eg the same well providing drinking water for people and cattle); focus on advocacy both at national and global level; water resource management in agriculture and finally, concentrate on addign gender equality and women’s rights to an often gender-blind debate.

I found the complexity mind-boggling – grow more food; generate more energy; use less water; emit less GHGs. How is it going to happen? There were a few discourses in the room: technology as a get out of jail free card; trust in markets – prices will sort it out; avoid generalizations and do it one place at a time – context specificity as all; or just try harder to become more benign and omniscient planners. The first two ignore equity, the third just ducks the question and we all know about planners. What’s the alternative? Concentrate on social mobilisation to redistribute power, so that all four solutions are more likely to benefit poor people?

Don’t panic, no decisions were made (hey, this was an NGO meeting…….), and Oxfam won’t suddenly start building thousands of wells, or

go large on water campaigning. Change in a big organization happens more subtly (and slowly) than that. This will all be chewed over at length before being swallowed/spat out. Still, it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Finally, my top recommendation.  A global campaign against water-guzzling golf courses in Kenya, the Philippines, pretty much anywhere (except Scotland, no shortage of rain there). Just think of the punning potential – teed off about golf? Join the club…….

And here’s a bit of traditional WASH work in action – getting clean water into last year’s cholera outbreak in Haiti

How do we talk about resource limits, fair shares and development?

Fascinating morning earlier this week discussing Alex Evans’ new paper for WWF and Oxfam on ‘Resource Scarcity, fair shares and development’. Alex summarizes the paper in the Guardian, so I won’t rehearse his arguments for adding ‘fair shares’ to the more accepted topics of responding to resource scarcity by increasing production and strengthening resilience. Instead, here are some reflections coming out of the discussion + paper.

First, language is a minefield on this topic – taboos and neuralgic issues are everywhere. On the left, ‘scarcity’ offends the Amartya Sen fundamentalists who insist that ‘there’s enough food/water etc and distributional justice is all that matters, (and always will be)’; on the right, any talk of ‘limits’ leads to accusations of neo-Malthusian scaremongering – ‘scarcity will lead to price rises, which in turn will send signals to the market to innovate or substitute for expensive resources, so relax and above all, avoid regulation!’ Whether explicitly or implicitly, both left and right assume away limits – the cake can go on growing forever. I caricature, but not much.

The reaction from some of the government officials present on the question of limits was pretty discouraging. As one government rep at the meeting said, ‘even if limits are a subtext, the message is tainted. Zero sum games are just not attractive to politicians’. I ended up thinking that, in Europe at least, it may well be easier to talk about fair shares and distribution, than to broach the issues of resource limits.

On a more positive note, Alex adds a nice twist in his paper by portraying the problem of scarcity as a transitional one. The world faces impending resource crunches on atmospheric space, water, land, energy etc. In the end, the price signals and technological responses, combined with a plateauing and then decline in world population, may well eventually respond, but only with time lags. In the meantime, we need to think about how to protect poor people who are likely to come off worst in world of resource limits – the ‘fair shares’ agenda.

Second, I found myself wondering what an Andean peasant would make of all this talk of scarcity as if it is something new. We need to be clearer on the distinction between ‘new scarcity’ and ‘old scarcity’ and how they connect. Any poor person can talk to you about resource constraints – on water, land, energy etc and in many cases these are more immediately pressing than the ‘new scarcity’ produced by humanity approaching planetary boundaries. Old scarcity is local and political. New scarcity is both local and global, and has an absolute quality missing from old scarcity which, as Sen pointed out, is largely socially determined. Focussing exclusively on the global ‘new scarcity’ aspects would be a mistake – for example only talking about land in terms of land grabs by foreign investors, when in many cases the grabbers are local elites, and they have been doing it for centuries – this is just the latest price-driven twist in a long history.

Linked to this point is the need for a clearer typology of scarcities. It might be helpful to think about scarcity as lying along at least two axes: local to global in terms of where the responses are most effective, and in terms of the nature of the problem – public good to private good (i.e. whether the good can be privately owned like land, or is a common good, like air, or is somewhere in between, like water). Plotting this on a standard 2×2 matrix (see right for a very rough go at this) suggests that climate change/ limits to atmospheric space is the exception – most of the scarcities we are talking about are more local than global in their solutions, and more private than public in their nature. That suggests that we should be careful about lumping them all together or going too global, especially when it comes to solutions.

Final point. While lumping them together may not be a good idea, comparisons certainly are – cross fertilization can throw up some interesting ideas. Is water scarcity best approached purely through building adaptation and resilience, or is there (learning from climate change) something equivalent to mitigation – cutting water use, at least at national level? Would a water or land equivalent of the International Energy Agency be worth thinking about? Parallels with other major crises also might be helpful – why are limits so hard to accept on the use of resources, when they are seen as common sense in financial management – time for some eco-Thatcherite ‘you can’t live beyond your means’ messaging? In teh same vein, there’s eco-bubbles, eco-meltdowns, but sadly no eco bailouts.

And some weekend background viewing, a TED talk from Johan Rockstrom, the author of the ‘Planetary Boundaries’ concept – fascinating science and determinedly upbeat about the possibilities of survival if we act now. We could have done with him at the seminar……. [h/t Phil Bloomer]

Hans Rosling and co on Water – justice, development and liberation through washing machines

Last Tuesday was world water day, and I get the sense that water is one of those issues that is only going to rise further up the development agenda, both in terms of watsan (drinking water and sanitation), and because water is one of the key and ever-tighter pinchpoints of resource scarcity in farming and food systems. So in catch-up mode (and because a new Hans Rosling lecture is always worth a post). Here are a few links

Water and Justice: a 4 minute trailer on the struggle for water in the slums of Delhi, from the STEPS Centre

“Water supply and sanitation are extremely important, but water is also important for energy security, food security and basic urban security. So we’re seeing this integrated view of water as a central core development issue emerging more and more.” An overview of current debates from a big water conference in Cape Town.

“Almost 1 billion people lack access to safe water supplies, and 2.6 billion are without access to basic sanitation. Approximately 10% of the global burden of disease worldwide could be prevented with improvements to water, sanitation and hygiene and better water resource management…… hygiene and sanitation promotion cost respectively $3 and $11 per DALY averted (disability adjusted life year – a measure of overall disease burden), compared to $922 per DALY for the provision of antiretroviral therapy against Aids for example.” Sophie Trémolet the lead author of a new OECD report on the benefits of investing in water and sanitation, blogs here

And the incomparable Hans Rosling works his magic: What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? The washing machine, by turning wash day into a day of learning. Watch it – well worth 9 minutes of your life.

The world’s next 20 years on one slide – and it’s pretty scary

This is the summary slide from a recent powerpoint on the global challenges facing humanity between now and 2030. It sets out the key questions (easier to read if you click on the slide). The answers to any one of which might well be ‘no’, with scary consequences. And please don’t try and dismiss this as ill-informed climate alarmism. It’s from Prof John Beddington, chief scientific adviser to the UK Government and Head of its Government Office for Science. Full powerpoint here (but best to go make yourself a cup of tea while it downloads…..). [h/t Kate Raworth]

Today’s World Water Day, and here’s what you need to be reading/watching

It’s world water day
Bad watsan ruins lives but
gets ignored. So act!

Today is world water day, and reader Steve Cockburn, coordinator of a global coalition called End Water Poverty, of which Oxfam is a member, has kindly done my job for me by sending over some links and analysis. This is all him, not me: 

‘UNICEF/WHO last week released their Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation report tracking progress in the sector. Plenty in there but the main headline shows that although water is on track globally (but certainly not in Africa), to meet the sanitation Millennium Development Goal (“Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking-water and basic sanitation”), the sanitation target won’t be met for another 200 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. That puts it up there with maternal mortality as oneo f the most off-track MDG targets on the continent.

This raises questions around the processes of policy-making that make sanitation in particular so neglected in terms of investment and prioritisation at all levels (donor and recipient governments, international institutions, but also NGOs) when theoretically everyone understands it is central to child health (28% of child deaths due to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)-related causes, according to the WHO), girls education (half the school girls dropping out in Africa do so because of poor facilities), and nutrition. You see it all the time. [Steve, you’re going to have to spell out your answers to those questions in the comments section!]

Globally, there is a push to create a new global platform, not dissimilar to Education for All (EFA) or the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), to improve the sector’s performance and political presence. It’s called Sanitation and Water for All: A Global Framework for Action (SWA), and you can read more on our semi-private Google Site that we use to share info with partners. On April 23 there will be the first ‘High-Level Meeting on Sanitation and Water’ to kick this off, though big questions remain about whether governmetns will use it as a chance to turn words into deeds - see our ‘manifesto‘ for the event. 

Finally, there’s the first truly global campaign on sanitation to try and step up the public pressure. We’re coordinating a campaign in 70 countries around the theme of The World’s Longest Toilet Queue, mobilising people to stand up for their rights to safe sanitation, and to seek to influence that high-level event one month later. Hopefully it can help put sanitatation back into the mainstream debate where it belongs.

Some other reports/resources that may be useful reference, sorry for the bombardment!:

•          WaterAid’s ‘Silent Killer’ Report – the hidden effect of sanitation on child deaths:

•          WaterAid’s ‘Fatal Neglect’ Report – looking at aid flows for child health compared to disease burden

•          WHO’s: ‘Safer Water, Better Health’ – latest stats and info on impacts of poor WASH’

Thanks Steve, and if that if doesn’t convince you, check out this great World Vision youtube on dirty water – couple of years old, but as powerful as ever

Putting the history back into economics: good new book from the FT’s Alan Beattie

‘False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World’, by Alan Beattie, the world trade editor at the Financial Times is published tomorrow in the UK and is already doing well in the US. It explores the historical backstory to current economic debates on trade, corruption, the ‘curse of wealth’ in oil and mineral producing nations, the rise of Russia, China and India etc.

In my favourite chapter, he revisits the global trade system through the concept of ‘embedded water’. A large part of agricultural trade in particular is really a transfer from wet places to dry ones of ‘virtual water’ (a concept developed by academic Tony Allan) embodied in food and other products. Alan muses that this trade is one reason why the oft-heralded ‘water wars’ have failed to materialize – countries have traded water, rather than fought over it.

The book points out that producing a ton of vegetables needs 1,000 cubic metres of water, compared to 42,500 for a ton of beef. What with that and cattle’s contribution to climate change, I really am going to have to become a ‘political vegetarian’ at some point.

One of the craziest things that emerges from water accounting is that Australia, the second-driest continent on earth after Antarctica, is the world’s largest net exporter of virtual water. There has been good coverage on this in the Economist recently – although Australia has a relatively sophisticated water trading system, it restricts farmers ability to sell water rights to industry and the cities, so they keep growing water-thirsty crops like rice and cotton and exporting them, while Australians suffer from severe water restrictions.

Alan writes about history with real relish (he studied history before he went onto economics) and a particular fascination with the East India Company that launched Britain’s imperial conquest of India. He also presents a nice version of the ‘why did the US flourish and Argentina collapse?’ story, contrasting the economic paths of two countries that started from relatively similar points (big countries, settled from Europe with destruction of native societies, lot of agricultural potential etc) but diverged massively since the early 20th century.

He’s a bit more of an orthodox free trader than Ha-Joon Chang, whose Bad Samaritans covers some similar ground (I would love to see them go head to head on import substitution, which Alan thinks is a dead end, but Ha-Joon sees as an essential part of almost all successful economic take offs).

Overall, it’s stronger on historical explanation than policy prescription (the summary of the book’s ‘so whats’ is pretty standard stuff), but it’s a good corrective to the ‘all you need is the right policy ideas’ tendency in development circles, and pacily written – all in all, a good candidate for policy wonk summer reading.