Latest from Duncan Green's blog

So since we are always being told to be more innovative (has anyone ever asked you to be less innovative?) I thought I’d see what some innovation gurus have to say. I could pretend this is part of my New Year’s Resolution to read more books and fewer papers, but I’d be lying– I read these last summer and never got round to writing it up.  The three are Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From: the natural history of innovation and John Kay: Obliquity: Why our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly.

My favourite was Tim Harford, who provides an eclectic mix of incredibly readable stories and convincing argument. He shows the dangers of sclerosis with a discussion of the US military in Vietnam:

“When the US Army faced the ‘disruptive innovation’ of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam, there was great reluctance to accept that it had changed the nature of the game, making obsolete the Army’s hard-won expertise in industrial warfare. As one senior officer said, ‘I’ll be damned if I permit the United States army, its institutions, its doctrine and its traditions to be destroyed just to win this lousy war.’”

That sets the tone for a riveting account of the random-walk quality of economic history – ‘Few company bosses would care to admit it, but the market fumbles its way to success’. Toyota began as a manufacturer of looms.

He buys into markets-as-evolutionary process (see my rave reviews of Eric Beinhocker’s work on this) and sees ‘the evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wild gambles as the best possible way to search for solutions.’ He quotes biochemist Leslie Orgel ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are’ and says ‘formal theory won’t get you nearly as far as an incredibly rapid, systematic process of trial and error.’

In this view, the failure of the Soviet Union is down to the death grip of the Planners – ‘its pathological inability to experiment’. Harford  is also a big critic of planning on issues like climate change – he sees unintended consequences, loopholes and own goals everywhere. Evolution will automatically attack the rules and find their weaknesses.

So what? ‘Adaptive organizations need to decentralize and become comfortable with the chaos of different local approaches and the awkwardness of dissent from junior staff.’ How to do this? Harford comes up with a ‘Three step recipe for successful adapting: try new things, in the expectation that some will fail; make failure survivable, because it will be common; and make sure that you know when you have failed…… distinguishing success from failure, oddly, can be the hardest task of all’

As an example, he holds up up the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as a model funder of innovation, by funding people not projects and minimising the number of strings attached. Subsequent analysis shows HHMI funding generated research that was important, unusual and influential. Unfortunately it is also a rarity – the world lacks ‘the two elements essential to encourage significant innovation in a complex world: a true openness to risky new ideas, and a willingness to put millions or even billions of dollars at risk.’

Thomson covers some of the same ground in more opaque language, giving particular emphasis to openness and connectivity, which he argues ‘may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms… we are often better served by connecting ideas than protecting them.’ He has no time for intellectual property laws that inhibit this connectivity. He ends with some homely, and to my mind rather useful advice:

‘Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent.’ Sounds like a blogger to me…..

John Kay’s is a one-idea book from a prolific popular academic and regular FT columnist.Directness doesn’t work – it leads to the kind of modernist architectural horrors of Le Corbusier or the Soviet planning system or Pol Pot; muddling through, lateral thinking and improvisation are better. Notre Dame was built bit by bit over several centuries – no-one started out with a plan.

‘It is hard to overstate the damage done in the recent past by people who thought they knew more about the world than they really did. The managers and financiers who destroyed great businesses in the unsuccessful pursuit of shareholder value. The architects and planners who believed that buildings could be designed from first principles, that vibrant cities could be drawn on a blank sheet of paper, and that expressways should be driven through the hearts of communities. The politicians who believed they could improve public services by the imposition of multiple targets. Acknowledging the complexity of the systems for which they were responsible and the multiple needs of the individuals who operated these systems would have avoided these errors.’

The books coincide in several respects – a rejection of planning; predictability of linear chains of causation as a figment of planner’s imagination and/or a post hoc justification by those who actually followed their instincts and made sense of it afterwards; a celebration of chance and experimentation, of ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’.

All three books also share a common weakness – they are largely power-free. The evolution of the economy is portrayed as a fair fight between variants (may the best mutant win), rather than taking place on a landscape heavily tilted towards those with power and control, even if they are less fit. That absence of a sense of politics and power may also explain Tim Harford’s fondness of the charter city idea – if it’s an experiment, it must be good.

A lot of this strikes me as highly relevant to development work. They argue that we should shift  to a model of experimental pilots + triage that spots the promising ones early on, and kills off the failures (a bit like our accountability programme in Tanzania), but as Steven Johnson argues in his book, we would need to learn to ‘fail faster’ – one of the mantras of the internet startup world. And NGOs just aren’t set up to fail like the private sector is: last word to Harford: ‘The acceptability, even desirability of failure lies at the heart of capitalism – the corporation, limited liability and bankruptcy laws.’

Any further thoughts on their relevance (or otherwise) to our work?

And for those of you who don’t read books, here’s a 3m presentation from Tim Harford, followed by Steven Thomson doing one of those brilliant RSAnimate videos

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Nice to see some upbeat–but-expert thinking on fragile states, which are all well on their way to becoming the biggestheadache/impossible problem in development. By the way, has anyone realized that the acronym for Fragile and Conflict Affected States is …… FRACAS? If not, remember you read it here first……

Anyway, back to the optimism. This is from a new paper by Laurence Chandy of the Brookings Institution, Ten Years of Fragile States: What Have We Learned?

Chandy reflects on what has changed since the World Bank established a taskforce to examine how to deal with what were then called LICUS (Low-Income Countries Under Stress). They don’t call them that any more, not least because many of them (Pakistan, Yemen) are middle income. But this group of countries suffers from name changes and constantly evolving typologies more than any other. (Another aside, DFID at one point created a ‘poor performers’ team, and then wondered why no-one wanted to work for it…..). That matters because it affects aid flows, which are twice as volatile for FRACAS as aid flows to stable countries.

And here’s his optimistic conclusions:

“Today, there is mounting evidence that aid to fragile states can work. Furthermore, with less than a dozen stable low-income countries left, donors no longer have the same excuse for overlooking the needs of the 30 or more fragile states. These needs loom ever larger. Over just the past six years, the share of the world’s poor living in fragile states is estimated to have doubled from 20 to 40 percent. No fragile state has yet achieved a single Millennium Development Goal.

Nevertheless, donors still face a difficult decision in determining whether to aid fragile states, and if so, by how much. Achieving results in these settings almost certainly requires greater expertise and time, which translate into higher cost and risk. A successful start to the second decade of fragile states policy would see donors redesign their resource allocation models to capture this reality. New models should:

•             Recognize that fragility does not end with graduation to middle-income status. Where donors make special allocations to low-income fragile states compared to low-income stable countries, an equivalent policy should be employed to distinguish allocations between fragile and stable middle-income countries.

•             Allow for more stable financing to fragile states. Donors should avoid trying to pin a trajectory on each partner country and instead concentrate on mitigating the instability inherent to fragile states by providing stable aid flows, supported by improved approaches to risk management. Aid commitments should be embedded in country compacts, which can serve as a useful tool for stabilizing flows.

•             Reassess the cost-effectiveness of aiding fragile states. There is an enormous potential for aid to help fragile states if it is properly designed and managed. This potential needs to be weighed up against an accurate sense of the costs of aid delivery. The effectiveness of aid flows to fragile states could be enhanced further by establishing a more systematic approach to documenting and learning from development interventions. This effort should be carried out under the supervision of the g7+ and focus on interventions with significant scope and scale.”

The g7+, by the way, is a group of 19 FRACAS that has organized itself to lobby for improved aid – a big improvement on donors and others speaking for such states in their absence. Check out its website, which houses this  slightly weird 3 minute youtube pitch to the recent Busan aid conference. And here’s the Broker’s scorecard of how Busan performed on FRACAS – not great, it seems.

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Ed Cairns, Oxfam’s senior policy adviser on this kind of thing, introduces a big rethink of Oxfam’s humanitarian work

When it comes to humanitarian crises, Oxfam specializes in the appropriate acronym of ‘WASH’.In 2011, hundreds of Oxfam staff delivered water and sanitation and other relief to millions of people afflicted by drought, floods or earthquakes. But in much of the world, a growing proportion of our humanitarian aid flows through local organisations, and the proportion is rising rapidly. In West Africa, it went from 1% to 30% of Oxfam GB’s humanitarian spend between 2003-4 and 2010-11. And other Oxfam affiliates have had a long history of supporting local humanitarian organisations. The expulsion of Oxfam GB and other INGOs from Darfur in 2009 is a well-worn story. Rather less so is Oxfam America’s continuing support for local organisations in Darfur, who are struggling with limited funds, political pressures and conflict.

Many have talked recently of a ‘new business model’ for humanitarian action that values Southern capacity more than ever before. At the end of 2011, the President of MERCY Malaysia – a major INGO based in Kuala Lumpur– argued that ‘a greater role for Southern, national and local NGOs’ is the only way to respond to increasing disasters, and the realisation that climate change adaptation, preparedness and risk reduction are as ‘humanitarian’ as immediate relief. He might have added that traditional Western humanitarian donors, gripped by economic crisis, are not likely to continue to increase their funding to match a rising tide of humanitarian need.

For all these reasons, the centre of humanitarian gravity is moving Southwards. That shift is well under way in many countries. In Bangladesh, the government provided 52 per cent of the response to 2009’s Cyclone Aila (with 37 per cent from INGOs and nine per cent from the UN). Oxfam entirely welcomes that shift, but recognises the challenges – ethical and practical – as it gradually becomes more of a ‘humanitarian broker’, supporting others more than doing aid itself. Its latest briefing paper – Crises in a new world order: challenging the humanitarian project – sets out both sides of that coin.

Building up capacity is a long-term challenge.  It doesn’t free humanitarian agencies of the imperative to act fast when disasters strike in the meantime. In December, tropical storm Sendong killed more than 1000 people in the Philippines. Prompted by a previous disaster – typhoon Ketsana – two years earlier, the Philippines government had been doing a lot to improve its capacity. And Oxfam, in parallel, had seen itself increasingly as a supporter of local NGOs, rather than a direct provider. But when a storm strikes in an area where the local government is totally unprepared, as it did in December in Mindanao, Oxfam found itself having to do more than it planned.

Equally, the traditional Western humanitarian’s tendency to assume that the local response will be slow and ineffective is usually wrong. National Red Cross and Red Crescent societies alone reached 45 million people in 2009. Evaluations of crises up to Haiti’s 2010 earthquake have regularly found that international donors and agencies have paid too little attention to local knowledge and action. As one of my colleagues in Oxfam America asked, “Why is the humanitarian community able to improve in some areas but not this?”

Even in difficult circumstances local civil society can deliver results. In Ga’an Libah in Somaliland, a local organization supported pastoralists whose livelihoods were collapsing in the face of drastic

environmental degradation. With support from Oxfam, they helped the pastoralists construct stone terraces to minimize water runoff, and helped bring about the revival of grazing management and reforestation. The livestock grew heavier and more numerous, and the pastoralists used the new income to send more children to school.

But working in effective states with significant capacity and a determination to help all their people

is one thing. Working in fragile states or those that are seen as illegitimate or corrupt will always be fraught with difficulty. All of this varies case by case, but in general terms, the different models of states and international responses can be summarized by this table, which Oxfam developed in 2011 to help guide its humanitarian programming.

None of this is easy. And as the new paper makes clear, Oxfam has not always found it easy either. But there is no turning back. The humanitarian world will never again be the Western-dominated thing it once was. INGOs will be as vital as ever. But their greatest responsibility will be to help build Southern capacity. And their greatest challenge will be to do that while responding to the new crises that don’t wait for that capacity to be built up.

Here’s Ed talking about the paper:

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The World Bank dips a $1bn-a-year toe in the water of Cash on Delivery aid, with its new Programme for Results (which rather begs the question what are the other programmes for……)

“[Gibson Dunn Crutcher] immediately went on the offensive, beginning a tireless campaign to unearth evidence to try to discredit the plaintiffs and exonerate their client.” American Lawyer magazine explains why it named Gibson its top litigation department of the year. The client in question is oil giant Texaco-Chevron; those pesky plaintiffs are 30,000 Amazonian residents who have been living among Texaco-Chevron’s waste for 40 years and are now trying to take Chevron to court. The US is just a different place. Oxfam’s Chris Jochnick updates on the Chevron case. Texaco-Chevron has 39 different law firms working on the case.

Progress on the Uganda land grab covered previously. At the request of the grabbed communities, the World Bank’s Office of the Compliance Adviser/Ombudsman(CAO) has announced it will launch an independent investigation.

Deborah Brautigam destroys the China-in-Africa bit of an Economist survey of ‘state capitalism’

‘On average, Africa has managed to raise an estimated $441 in taxes per person per year while receiving $41 per person annually in aid’ – that’s got to be good news.

Oh dear, I think I’m about to get into trouble again, but ’sxxx ex pat aid workers say’ is worth it. Just for the record, I have never met anyone who resembles either of these two…….

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A Welsh friend of mine once came back home after a long stint in Nicaragua. A mate picked him up at the airport and on the long drive back to Cardiff, Alun turned to him and asked ’so, how’s the harvest been this year?’ His friend looked at him as if he’d gone mad. Which brings us seamlessly to this guest post on seasonality from John Magrath……

Seasonality describes the fact that rural livelihoods in developing countries undergo regular, predictable, and often massive, changes according to the pattern of the seasons. In particular, the annual rains bring about – or bring to a peak – all sorts of effects – most of them adverse if you are poor. These include starvation, energy depletion, increases in sickness, migration, shortage of money and going into debt.

It was a regular theme in development studies from the late 1970s – when it was pioneered by the great Robert Chambers at the UK’s Institute of Development Studies – to the 1990s. Then it rather fell from favour. Now a new book, Seasonality, Rural Livelihoods and Development, the result of a conference at IDS in 2009, aims to revive the topic.

I declare an interest, as the book opens with a scene setter of a chapter written by myself and Steve Jennings about the growing influence of climate change. It draws on Oxfam research to describe how farmers in many countries perceive that their seasons are changing, throwing up new challenges.

Advocates for taking seasonality more seriously argue that, by showing how “normal” seasonal vulnerabilities underpin tip-overs into crisis when the weather is particularly bad, seasonality can be a powerful argument for proper planning to even out seasonal variations and enable people to have “a-seasonal” livelihoods.  Furthermore, seasonality affects every aspect of people’s lives, and understanding the complex and ratcheted (to use Robert Chambers’  favourite word) interactions enables one to intervene holistically, rather than sectorally.

But seasonality has always been neglected by governments and by aid workers because they don’t tend to live in rural communities – especially not during the rains. There are urban,  “tarmac” and  dry season travel biases in their understanding.

Then on top of those, in the 1990s interest faded away, largely because of the precipitate decline in public investment in agriculture generally.  With that went the abolition of many of those counter-seasonal measures that actually were in place (though not always effective), like grain reserves.

Many things have changed since the 70s: the growth of towns, communications that reduce isolation, the spread of social protection systems such as India’s employment guarantee schemes.  But the seasons have not gone away. Stephen Devereux, Rachel Sabates-Wheeler, Richard Longhurst and the other authors argue that understanding and building seasonality into policies is still relevant – in fact maybe more relevant than ever as climate change bites. And that still isn’t happening; they say that disaggregated data on seasonal poverty is still hard to find, and one of their recommendations is that poverty statistics should reflect seasonal variation, instead of reporting a single poverty headcount for a given year.

They also make the point that seasonality isn’t, fundamentally, about “blaming the weather”; rather, the weather exposes fundamental inequalities in resource distribution – that is, social injustice. But maybe the fact that seasonality is triggered by weather has made campaigners for social justice wary of embracing the subject and contributes to its neglect.

As I say, I declare an interest because I think that seasonality is one of those things that is staring us in the face so closely that we don’t see it properly; we take it for granted as “just another thing poor people have to put up with” when it could illuminate our understanding, analysis and practice. But am I right? Or do people working in development say a) we recognise seasonality but actually, we don’t see it as particularly important compared to other influences on poor people’s lives, or other ways into helping them tackle their problems? Or b), we think it is important but we think that it is already incorporated sufficiently into planning for long-term development, humanitarian response and, in particular, social protection initiatives?

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There’s nothing more disturbing than belatedly realizing that you’ve written two papers in close succession that contradict each other. Does it make you an open-minded liberal, or just a confused dimwit? Judge for yourself based on these two papers: one, an internal paper for Oxfam, tries to capture and update the argument of From Poverty to Power that development arises from the interaction of active citizens and effective states. The other, a chapter for the latest Commonwealth Secretariat annual  ‘Commonwealth Good Governance’ is much more cautious about the difficulties in achieving a ‘democratic developmental state’, born of precisely that combination. I suppose you could argue that they represent the clash between respectively optimism of the will and pessimism of the intellect. Or that I’m really out of my depth. Either way, it’s been niggling away at me for years. See what you think and if anyone can shed light on how to reconcile the will and the intellect, bring it on.

Excerpt from How Development Happens

‘Why focus on effective states? Because history shows that no country has prospered without a state than can actively manage the development process. The extraordinary transformations of countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, Botswana, or Mauritius have been led by states that ensure health and education for all, and which actively promote and manage the process of economic growth. After twenty years of erosion by deregulation, one-size-fits-all ‘structural adjustment programmes’, and international trade and aid agreements, many states are weak or absent. But there are no shortcuts; the road to development lies through the state, and neither aid nor NGOs can take its place.

Why active citizenship? Because people working together to determine the course of their own lives, fighting for rights and justice in their own societies, are critical in holding states, private companies, and others to account. As an integral part of ‘development as freedom’, active citizenship also has inherent merits: people living in poverty must have a voice in deciding their own destiny, rather than be treated as passive recipients of welfare or government action.

True development emerges from the interaction of effective states and active citizens. Economic growth is not enough if it comes at the expense of other freedoms. The system – governments, judiciaries, parliaments, and companies – cannot deliver development merely by treating people as ‘objects’ of government or other action. Rather, people must be recognised as ‘subjects’, conscious of and actively demanding their rights, before true development In its full sense can come about.’

Excerpt from ‘The democratic developmental state: Wishful thinking or direction of travel?

“We are left with an unpalatable conclusion. While effective states, in the Commonwealth as elsewhere, are historically a sine qua non for economic development, measured in terms of income per capita, active citizenship and democracy are equally essential to achieve development in the wider sense – an accumulation of freedoms ‘to do and to be’ (Sen, 1999).

But there are likely to be trade-offs between these two goals, even though its nature and extent is probably changing over time, in response to cultural shifts on attitudes to human rights, technological changes in access to information, decentralisation and the partial encroachment into national political spaces of international governance norms. High levels of growth are more likely to be achieved with the sacrifice of some freedoms, and vice versa.

Yet, at the very least, it seems plausible that the transition from an exclusive to an inclusive state can occur earlier in a country’s development trajectory than in the past. Aid can help or hinder this process (and most likely do both). Moreover, on this occasion, the author hopes his analysis proves unduly pessimistic, and that Mkandawire’s fiery optimism carries the day:

The experience elsewhere is that developmental states are social constructs consciously brought about by political actors and societies. As difficult as the political and economic task of establishing such states may be, it is within the reach of many countries struggling against the ravages of poverty and underdevelopment. The first few examples of developmental states were authoritarian. The new ones will have to be democratic,and it is encouraging that the two most cited examples of such ‘democratic developmental states’ are both African – Botswana and Mauritius (Mkandawire, 2001).”

Any thoughts?

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From a new paper by J. Hansen, M. Sato and R. Ruedy

“The “climate dice” describing the chance of an unusually warm or cool season, relative to the climatology of 1951-1980, have progressively become more “loaded” during the past 30 years, coincident with increased global warming.  The most dramatic and  important change of the climate dice is the appearance of a new category of extreme climate  outliers.  These extremes were practically absent in the period of climatology, covering much  less than 1% of Earth’s surface.  Now summertime extremely hot outliers, more than three  standard deviations (σ) warmer than climatology, typically cover about 10% of the land area.  Thus there is no need to equivocate about the summer heat waves in Texas in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, which exceeded 3σ – it is nearly certain that they would not have occurred in the absence of global warming.  If global warming is not slowed from its current pace, by midcentury 3σ events will be the new norm and 5σ events will be common.”

Plus some pretty hard-hitting writing in the body of the paper:

“One of the major candidates in the current Presidential primary in the United States has declared that human-made global warming is a hoax, and he has issued an official Proclamation: ” I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on those days for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.”

Science cannot disprove the possibility of divine intervention. However, there is a relevant saying that “Heaven helps those who help themselves.”"

[h/t Steve Jennings]

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So Barack can do a mean Al Green, but can other world leaders sing? [h/t Rob Bailey]

Where does the price of your iPad go? Only 2% to Chinese workers

Here’s a lesson in how to increase your blog traffic. Call a post You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum! Then sit back and watch the comments roll in – 583 at the last count (at least it puts the swimming pool in perspective). And it’s beautifully written too (by Field Ruwe, a US-based Zambian media practitioner and author) [h/t Malcolm Spence]

“Things are getting worse rather than better for people who took part in Egypt’s revolution last January, and the new government doesn’t seem to be a stabilising force.” IDS researcher Mariz Tadros offers a gloomy view of the revolution’s first anniversary.

And they’re off! Follow all the gossip on the race to be next World Bank president on this dedicated website.

This week’s nothing-to-do-with-development slot: imagine a feminist West Wing set in continental Europe, with plenty of agonizing over foreign aid and human rights. Welcome to Borgen, the latest amazing Danish drama on BBC4 – female prime minister (and she’s not a bit like Meryl Streep) juggles the dictates of power and principles. Brilliant.

You can rely on Harvard’s Lant Pritchett to be provocative and thoughtful, (and pugnacious – see this exchange in the comments when I mildly criticized Harvard a couple of years ago) so worth watching this interview on the ‘Cambridge Nights’ channel. University nights are clearly more, um, cerebral in the US……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wow. Hit a nerve there. I’m both gratified and slightly appalled by the level of interest generated by Wednesday’s post on the development-critical issue of whether Oxfam should keep the pool at its Nairobi guesthouse shut. For those people without the time or inclination to trawl through over 60 comments, here’s a summary.

First the voting – deeply unscientific, self selecting, but at least the software doesn’t let you vote more than once from the same machine. Of the 654 votes cast to date:

• ‘Open the pool, provided it operates at zero cost to Oxfam’ gets 59%

• ‘Open the pool right away’ gets 26%

• ‘What are you wasting space on the blog on such a trivial issue?’ gets 8%

• ‘Keep it shut’ gets 7%

Now for the comments: I read through everything up to number 60, and got the following approximate breakdown:

• Open the pool: 20

• Open the pool + lateral thinking (open it to the public, charge other NGOs, privatize it etc): 11

• Humorous (at least in intent): 9

• Completely random and hard to categorize: 9

• Keep it shut: 6

• Other stuff Oxfam does is much worse: 3

• Why not just go to a pool somewhere else? 2

The lateral suggestions are interesting and creative, but they are only worth considering if they fulfil one overriding criterion – Oxfam is in the middle of a major emergency, helping some 3 million people get through the drought in the Horn of Africa and Nairobi is the headquarters of that effort. So if anything distracts one iota of management attention from that effort, forget it, at least until the drought is over.

As for going elsewhere – in Nairobi  anywhere further than walking distance seems to require an hour in a taxi stuck in traffic.

And here are three of my favourite comments:

Calvin: ‘Use the pool but don’t enjoy it’

Ros: ‘How we all agonize that we are not Gandhi’

But by popular acclaim, the prize for best comment goes to Matt for this gem:

A) Form a swimming pool collective with a rotating chair, with use of the pool to be voted on every week. Pool to be funded by bake sale at the local international school.

B) Divide the pool surface area into 100 square use rights – sell rights to the staff and/or guests, who are only allowed to swim within their allotted area, unless allowed to by other freeholders. Let residents buy and sell these rights to each other and let the market reach an efficient outcome

C) Let NGO workers use the pool, but constantly make them feel guilty about it: surround the pool with posters of photos from recent/ongoing drought. Actually, this could be a win win situation – if you run into anyone who seriously objects to the idea of Oxfam using a pool, let *them* stand on the side and heckle the swimmers.

D) Randomly allocate 50% of your guests with passes to the pool. Use pre and post survey data on stress levels, health, etc to evaluate the actual impact of pool usage. If you’re concerned about financial viability, charge a high price and then randomly distribute vouchers of varying levels to the treated group to tease out the demand curve for pool usage.

So what happens next? Errrmm nothing, necessarily. I’m just a humble head of research and for some reason the big cheeses tend not to manage Oxfam via online referenda, but I think this exercise will eventually have an influence. Right now, those in charge undoubtedly have better things to do, but I know they read the blog (far more often than they ever read my emails….) and this exchange has definitely made a few waves. I’ll keep you posted.

And by the way, yes, this was an interesting exchange on a genuine dilemma facing an INGO, but if you want to read about a rather more pressing dilemma, try why everyone (including us) was late in responding to the drought and what we can do about it.

Right, now I’m off on holiday for a couple of weeks (and yes, there will be pools involved). I’ve set up a bunch of roboposts to keep wasting your time while I’m away and Richard King will manage the blog. Anything goes wrong, it’s his fault.

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I’m still reeling from the overwhelming response to yesterday’s post (voting still open, by the way) and will respond in due course, but in the meantime, let’s get back to all that development stuff, shall we? One of the most striking aspects of exploring the human impact of the global financial crisis and food price spike was the absence of realtime data: a shock happens, and we hear about certain variables – GDP, prices, even unemployment in some countries – in real time. But other aspects – especially the impact on the way people live their lives – take months or often years to emerge. We had a go at doing some realtime monitoring of, for example, the gender impact of the financial crisis, and (with IDS) the community impact of the price spike. What we haven’t done yet is harness the spread of mobiles and the internet in that task.

Step forward the UN. Here’s a fascinating ten minute presentation of five ground-breaking data crunching experiments from the UN’s Global Pulse project, trying new ways to  follow realtime events. The first uses mobile phones to survey wellbeing around the world as a first step to inform the design of more exhaustive surveys. Next up is using prices of online food (e.g. on developing country supermarket websites) as a low-cost, realtime way to follow food prices. Third is tracking shifts in global opinion by tracking news coverage via key words and phrases and watching how they evolve over time. Fourth shows how monitoring online conversations (eg blogs, twitter) can help follow unemployment trends – in the US the language of anger (and cancelling vacations)  precedes job losses, whereas in Ireland it is talk of anxiety. Finally, the enthusiastic tweeters of Indonesia talk about food a lot, and the frequency pretty much matches food prices. Much more to come, with a focus on Indonesia and Uganda.

Please send links to your own favourite examples of this kind of exercise. [h/t Richard King]

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Nairobi is a major NGO hub, currently the epicentre of the drought relief effort, and Oxfam’s regional office realized some years ago that we could save a pile of money if we ran our own guesthouse, rather than park the numerous visitors in over-priced hotels. It’s nothing fancy, definitely wouldn’t get many stars, but it’s much more relaxed than a hotel and a brilliant place to meet the kind of people I profiled recently. It’s really rather unique.

But there’s a problem. As a large converted house in a nice part of town, and like most such houses in Nairobi, it has a swimming pool. But the swimming pool is covered over and closed, even though it would be cheap to keep it open. Why? Reputational risk – back in the UK, where swimming pools are luxury items, Oxfam’s big cheeses saw a tabloid scandal in the making and closed it (see right, the blue of the pool is a protective tarpaulin, not water). It didn’t help when some bright spark decided to advertise for a swimming pool attendant on the Oxfam website……

On my recent stay at the guesthouse, I asked everyone I met there and whether African or mzungu, they all said  it makes sense to open the pool. Exhausted aid workers arrive hot and dusty from remote areas of East Africa for some R&R, but there’s no chance of a refreshing swim. I need my exercise so had to go running instead – the combination of altitude, hills and choking traffic fumes nearly killed me.

On the other hand there’s no denying that most of our supporters back in the UK, let alone the people we are working to help, are not likely to have access to a pool in their back yard, so why should aid workers get special treatment? (And I have to confess, when I interviewed the members of a sex workers’ collective in Rio de Janeiro a few years ago as they relaxed by their aid-funded organization’s pool, I was rather shocked myself.)

So what do you think? Should Oxfam open the pool and take any bad publicity on the chin, or should we stop whining? It would probably cost about $200-300 a month to keep the pool open – if we could find a way to do it without creating an accounting nightmare, we could probably raise that from contributions from guests, and even have money to spare to plough back into Oxfam programmes. Vote now (see right).

Vote choices: Open the pool; Open the pool but only on if it at least covers its own costs; Keep the pool closed; Don’t waste my time – use the blog for something more high-minded please (and you can choose more than one option).

Update: check out the comments – some hilarious suggestions and yes, I am a bit depressed that this is already the most popular poll ever on this blog………

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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Nominations for the ABBAs – Aid Bloggers’ Best Awards (how contorted an acronym is that?) are now open, asking for suggestions in about a dozen different categories – closing date is 27 Jan, so get stuck in. And while we are navel-gazing, here are last year’s ABBA winner Chris Blattman’s ten steps to better blogging – nothing revelatory, but useful

Todd Moss summarizes the good and bad bits for Africa of the US Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation

India miscellany: The Economist hails the efficiency of India’s ‘unique identity’ (UID) biometric scheme, which this month enrols its 200 millionth member, starting from zero a year ago. Interestingly, the selling point a more efficient (and less corrupt) welfare and benefits system, rather than security.

Whatever happened to India’s anti-corruption movement? Not going well, says Milan Vaishnav. http://blogs.cgdev.org/globaldevelopment/2012/01/fast-or-farce-whither-indias-anti-corruption-movement.php Priti Patnaik reckons social audits could be the answer http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/jan/13/india-social-audits-fight-corruption “Women fled at the sight of me; people used to call me mental and wondered if I had weird diseases,” he recalls. “I was even suspected of being possessed by a bad spirit. No one used to come near me during full moons because of that. I had to meet what friends I had in secret.” It’s hard being an entrepreneur sometimes, especially if you’re an Indian man trying to invent a way to make low cost sanitary towels. But Arunachalam Muruganantham got there in the end http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/22/sanitary-towels-india-cheap-manufacture Aakash – Indian Ipads at £35 ($50) a pop. Not that’s frugal technology. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/12/indian-computer-tablet-aakash-internet Nominations for the ABBAs – Aid Bloggers’ Best Awards (how contorted an acronym is that?) are now open, asking for suggestions in about a dozen different categories – closing date is 27 Jan, so get stuck in http://www.aviewfromthecave.com/2012/01/2011-aid-bloggers-best-awards.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AViewFromTheCave+%28A+View+From+The+Cave%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

What’s happening to India’s anti-corruption movement? Not going well, says Milan Vaishnav. Priti Patnaik reckons social audits could be the answer.

“Women fled at the sight of me; people used to call me mental and wondered if I had weird diseases,” he recalls. “I was even suspected of being possessed by a bad spirit. No one used to come near me during full moons because of that. I had to meet what friends I had in secret.” It’s hard being an entrepreneur sometimes, especially if you’re an Indian man trying to invent a way to make low cost sanitary towels. But Arunachalam Muruganantham got there in the end (and his wife and mother even came home). At the other end of the tech spectrum, there’s Aakash – Indian IPads at £35 ($50) a pop. Now that’s frugal technology.

And this has nothing to do with development (unless you see it as a horribly apposite metaphor for much of our work…..), but check out Rube Goldberg’s Creme That Egg? New York Times piece about the artist (plus more videos) here. [h/t John Magrath]

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When I was asking around about last week’s paper on the G20 and inequality, ace number cruncher Andy Sumner emailed to say that talking about inequality in terms of the Gini index is terribly old hat, and these days, everyone is trying out different indicators. So I went back to his July summary of the latest research on within-country inequality on Global Dashboard, and I have to say, it is brilliant. Some highlights http://www.globaldashboard.org/2011/07/01/what%E2%80%99s-really-happening-to-inequality/ ‘What’s happening to within-country inequality isn’t immediately clear. The new Solt database of the main measure of inequality (known as the Gini after an Italian Sociologist who developed it) was analysed by Ortiz and Cummins at UNICEF who concluded the evidence showed: Rising inequality in Asia, 1990-2008 but falling inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa over the same time period. And inequality in Latin America rose slightly 1990-2008 but fell between 2000-2008 and inequality was static in the Middle East and North Africa. Ortiz and Cummins list a long set of countries where inequality significantly fell between 2000-2008. For example, inequality fell by more than 3 points in Thailand, Malaysia; Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Chile; Lesotho, Malawi, Ethiopia, Burundi, Mali, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Nigeria, Gabon. However, a new paper by Chilean Economist Gabriel Jose Gabriel Palma does a detailed study of within country inequality between 1985 vs 2005 suggesting the Gini hides as much as it reveals. Instead we need to look at each 10% of the population and what they get. He finds that there is now a surprising similar picture in most countries, noting: 1. The great majority of regions and countries have a relatively similar distribution of income inequality because countries with low inequality at the outset (1985) have got more unequal and countries with high-inequality have got slightly more equal. 2. The middle classes generally get half of the economic pie wherever you look and the middle classes are incredibly successful about protecting their half. 3. Politics is increasingly a fight for the remaining half between the richest 10% and poorest 40% meaning the other half of the distribution is increasingly ‘up for grabs’ between the very rich and the very poor and who can win over the middle classes. This might begin to explain some of the recent declines in inequality in Latin America as suggested in a paper by Birdsall et al., who argue that ‘social democratic’ regimes (eg Brazil, Chile and Uruguay) are more likely to reduce inequality than ‘left populist’ (eg Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela) and both are more likely to reduce inequality that non-left regimes (eg Colombia, Costa Rica Mexico, Peru) and that this is largely due to more social spending and more progressive spending especially so in the social democratic regimes (eg spending on cash transfers targeted to the poorest and greater increases in spending on health and education and increases in spending on basic services – in particular in education, greater increases in spending on primary and secondary schooling rather than on public universities. These social democrats have strong support in the middle classes and this throws up the question posed by Birdsall et al: Might the growing middle classes in countries like Chile and Brazil help lock in leftist social democratic political regimes (whether because or despite its concentration in the top quintile of households)?  There is no evidence that a large middle class is necessary let alone sufficient to these regimes.  But a growing global middle class does seem likely to reinforce effective government that manages moderate redistribution while retaining investor confidence in the likelihood of continuing growth and price stability. Put another way: When is the middle class large enough to become politically salient in supporting or at least tolerating the kind of social and other distributive policies that are good for them but turn out to be good for the poor—for example universal public education? Food for thought – the middle classes as the new revolutionaries?’ Great stuff Andy. As for organizations like Oxfam, it seems to provide empirical support for our focus on ‘convening and brokering’ – the latest jargon for getting people from different social and economic backgrounds into a room, and helping them build alliances. Any other thoughts?

When I was asking around about last week’s Oxfam paper on the G20 and inequality, ace number cruncher Andy Sumner emailed to say that in his opinion, talking about inequality in terms of the Gini index (a single number for overall inequality) is terribly old hat, and these days, everyone is trying out different indicators to get at the fine detail of different kinds of inequality. So I went back to his July summary of the latest research on within-country inequality on Global Dashboard, and I have to say, it is brilliant. Some highlights:

‘What’s happening to within-country inequality isn’t immediately clear.

The new Solt database of the main measure of inequality (known as the Gini after an Italian Sociologist who developed it) was analysed by Ortiz and Cummins at UNICEF who concluded the evidence showed:

Rising inequality in Asia, 1990-2008 but falling inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa over the same time period.

And inequality in Latin America rose slightly 1990-2008 but fell between 2000-2008 and inequality was static in the Middle East and North Africa.

Ortiz and Cummins list a long set of countries where inequality significantly fell between 2000-2008. For example, inequality fell by more than 3 points in Thailand, Malaysia; Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Chile; Lesotho, Malawi, Ethiopia, Burundi, Mali, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Uganda, Nigeria, Gabon.

However, a new paper by Chilean Economist Gabriel Jose Gabriel Palma does a detailed study of within country inequality between 1985 vs 2005 suggesting the Gini hides as much as it reveals.

Instead we need to look at each 10% of the population and what they get.

He finds that there is now a surprising similar picture in most countries, noting:

1. The great majority of regions and countries have a relatively similar distribution of income inequality because countries with low inequality at the outset (1985) have got more unequal and countries with high-inequality have got slightly more equal.

2. The middle classes generally get half of the economic pie wherever you look and the middle classes are incredibly successful about protecting their half.

3. Politics is increasingly a fight for the remaining half between the richest 10% and poorest 40% meaning the other half of the distribution is increasingly ‘up for grabs’ between the very rich and the very poor and who can win over the middle classes.

This might begin to explain some of the recent declines in inequality in Latin America as suggested in a paper by Birdsall et al., who argue that ‘social democratic’ regimes (eg Brazil, Chile and Uruguay) are more likely to reduce inequality than ‘left populist’ (eg Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela) and both are more likely to reduce inequality that non-left regimes (eg Colombia, Costa Rica Mexico, Peru) and that this is largely due to more social spending and more progressive spending especially so in the social democratic regimes (eg spending on cash transfers targeted to the poorest and greater increases in spending on health and education and increases in spending on basic services – in particular in education, greater increases in spending on primary and secondary schooling rather than on public universities.

These social democrats have strong support in the middle classes and this throws up the question posed by Birdsall et al:

Might the growing middle classes in countries like Chile and Brazil help lock in leftist social democratic political regimes (whether because or despite its concentration in the top quintile of households)?  There is no evidence that a large middle class is necessary let alone sufficient to these regimes.  But a growing global middle class does seem likely to reinforce effective government that manages moderate redistribution while retaining investor confidence in the likelihood of continuing growth and price stability. Put another way: When is the middle class large enough to become politically salient in supporting or at least tolerating the kind of social and other distributive policies that are good for them but turn out to be good for the poor—for example universal public education?

Food for thought – the middle classes as the new revolutionaries?’

Great stuff. It set me thinking about one of the findings of our paper – that whereas inequality is falling in many low and lower middle income countries (see chart), it is rising in all but four of the G20 countries. Might that be because the middle class is more likely to ally with the elite in the G20 countries than elsewhere and why could that be? Perhaps because their economies are integrated, or more dominated by financial institutions? Just idle speculation of course  - feel free to add y0ur own.

As for organizations like Oxfam, it seems to provide empirical support for our focus on ‘convening and brokering’ – the latest jargon for getting people from different social and economic backgrounds into a room, and helping them build alliances. Any other thoughts?

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In the second of two guest posts on Oxfam’s new paper on the G20’s performance on inequality and sustainability, senior researcher Kate Raworth tackles the thorny issue of green growth

(can you make my pic about this size, not bigger) In 2010, the G20 committed to pursue equitable and sustainable  economic growth. That’s a big thing to stand for. Zooming in just on the sustainability part of that: have they been making their growth go green? Assessing the G20’s record on green growth means getting clear on the concept of decoupling. Sounds tedious, I know, but it matters (if you want to understand income inequality, you need to know about Gini coefficients – likewise, if you want to understand sustainable growth, you need to know the difference between relative and absolute decoupling). It’s set out in Fig 1 below. Here GDP is growing (from an indexed starting point of 100), against two different scenarios for resource use (let’s say it’s CO2 emissions for simplicity). When GDP and CO2 emissions both grow, but GDP grows faster, that’s relative decoupling. It’s an important start towards sustainability, but not enough because CO2 emissions are still rising: you could call it greener growth. Given that global CO2 emissions have already overshot sustainable limits, what’s needed is absolute decoupling, and that’s only achieved when GDP grows while CO2 emissions fall absolutely. That has to be the standard for green growth – and it’s what high-income countries must achieve if they are to cut their CO2 emissions significantly below 1990 levels, to help stop dangerous climate change. So how have the G20 been doing on decoupling? Here’s their GDP growth versus the CO2 emissions they produced to generate that growth, from 1991 to 2007 (Fig 2). Figure 2: The G20’s record on GDP and CO2 emissions growth, 1991-2007 What’s going on in here? The diagonal line shows one-for-one growth, with no decoupling. Indonesia is on that line, with both GDP and CO2 emissions increasing around 100% over the period. In Zone 2, below that line, are all the relative decouplers: countries whose GDP grew faster than their emissions did. Among emerging economies, the top performers for relative decoupling were Mexico, where GDP grew four times faster than CO2 emissions (in part due to the rise of ‘light industry’ under NAFTA, eclipsing the importance of the oil sector), and China, whose GDP grew two and a half times faster than its emissions.  Along with them, many other G20 countries have been achieving greener growth. Good start – but not nearly enough. The hunt for evidence of green (absolutely decoupled) growth has to focus in on the high-income G20 members, because they are the ones who should be making it happen. How have they done since 1992? Mostly, not very well. Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, and the US have all only relatively decoupled: their CO2 emissions are rising more slowly than GDP, but they are still rising. The really interesting action – and the hope on which green growth is pinned – is below the horizontal axis, in Zone 3, because that’s where GDP grows while CO2 emissions fall. Four countries made it down there. Russia is unfortunately a case of no growth rather than green growth over the period, so doesn’t count. But Germany, France and the UK all saw GDP rise while their CO2 emissions fell. That’s absolute decoupling in action. Green-growth evidence in the bag – case closed? Not at all: here come the caveats. First, what about emissions embedded in a country’s imports? Sure enough, if you take account of traded carbon, the UK rises back above the line significantly (the UK may be producing less carbon-heavy stuff, but is consuming more of it). So only France and Germany are left firmly below the line. Second, relative to the rest of the G20, France and Germany grew pretty slowly over those two decades. Countries with high GDP growth rates would have to be making phenomenal gains in technical efficiency and behaviour change to cut their carbon emissions even faster. Is absolute decoupling only possible for slow-growers?… Third, we’re talking carbon here, but sustainability obviously means much more than that: absolute decoupling in using other resources – like water, nitrogen and phosphorus – matters too, but is not under anything like the scrutiny that carbon is. Still, well done France and Germany. How did they do it? Well, France gets around 80% of its energy from nuclear power – a thorny issue – but has also promoted feed-in renewable tariffs, fast trains, and efficient buildings. Germany’s emissions cuts are born of both hope and despair:  thanks to impressive legislation and investment promoting renewable energy (growth from 1% to 11% of Germany’s energy use, 1990-2011), but also thanks to industrial shut-down in East Germany in the early 1990s after reunification. The vast majority of high-income countries in the G20 have so far provided no evidence that they can make economic growth environmentally sustainable. Of course, most have barely started to put in place the policies required to make it happen – but delay will only make it harder. So what does the G20 evidence show? That absolute decoupling is possible (we’ve seen it!), at least for some of the countries, for some resources, for some of the time. But that’s a far cry from believing that environmentally sustainable GDP growth is possible everywhere, all the time, indefinitely. Jury, please remain in court. We need more evidence – on both sides – before we can close the case on green growth. Anyone out there got the evidence to swing it?

In 2010, the G20 promised to pursue equitable and sustainable  economic  growth. That’s a big commitment. Zooming in just on the sustainability part: have they been making their growth go green?

Assessing the G20’s record on green growth means getting clear on the concept of decoupling. Sounds tedious, I know, but it matters (if you want to understand income inequality, you need to know about Gini coefficients – likewise, if you want to understand sustainable growth, you need to know the difference between relative and absolute decoupling). It’s set out in Fig 1 below.

Fig 1: Relative and absolute decoupling: GDP and resource use

Here GDP is growing (from an indexed starting point of 100), against two different scenarios for resource use (let’s say it’s CO2 emissions for simplicity).

When GDP and CO2 emissions both grow, but GDP grows faster, that’s relative decoupling. It’s an important start towards sustainability, but not enough because CO2 emissions are still rising: you could call it greener growth. But given that global CO2 emissions have already overshot sustainable limits, what’s actually needed is absolute decoupling, and that’s only achieved when GDP grows while CO2 emissions fall absolutely. That has to be the standard for green growth – and it’s what high-income countries must achieve if they are to cut their CO2 emissions significantly below 1990 levels, to help stop dangerous climate change.

So how have the G20 been doing on decoupling? Here’s their GDP growth versus the CO2 emissions they produced to generate that growth, from 1991 to 2007 (Fig 2).

Figure 2: The G20’s record on GDP and CO2 emissions growth, 1991-2007

What’s going on in here? The diagonal line shows one-for-one growth, with no decoupling. Indonesia is on that line, with both GDP and CO2 emissions increasing around 100% over the period. In Zone 2, below that line, are all the relative decouplers: countries whose GDP grew faster than their emissions did. Among emerging economies, the top performers for relative decoupling were Mexico, where GDP grew four times faster than CO2 emissions (in part due to the rise of ‘light industry’ under NAFTA, eclipsing the importance of the oil sector), and China, whose GDP grew two and a half times faster than its emissions.  Along with them, many other G20 countries have been achieving greener growth. Good start – but not nearly enough.

The hunt for evidence of green (absolutely decoupled) growth has to focus in on the high-income G20 members, because they are the ones who should be making it happen. How have they done since 1992? Mostly, not very well. Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, and the US have all only relatively decoupled: their CO2 emissions are rising more slowly than GDP, but they are still rising.

The really interesting action – and the hope on which green growth is pinned – is below thehorizontal axis, in Zone 3, because that’s where GDP grows while CO2 emissions fall. Four countries made it down there. Russia is unfortunately a case of no growth rather than green growth over the period, so doesn’t count. But Germany, France and the UK all saw GDP rise while their CO2 emissions fell.

That’s absolute decoupling in action. Green-growth evidence in the bag – case closed?

Not at all: here come the caveats.

First, what about emissions embedded in a country’s imports? Sure enough, if you take account of

traded carbon, the UK rises back above the line significantly (the UK may be producing less carbon-heavy stuff, but is consuming more of it). So only France and Germany are left firmly below the line.

Second, relative to the rest of the G20, France and Germany grew pretty slowly over those two decades. Countries with high GDP growth rates would have to be making phenomenal gains in technical efficiency and behaviour change to cut their carbon emissions even faster. Is absolute decoupling only possible for slow-growers?…

Third, we’re talking carbon here, but sustainability obviously means much more than that: absolute decoupling in using other resources – like water, nitrogen and phosphorus – matters too, but is not under anything like the scrutiny that carbon is.

Still, well done France and Germany. How did they do it? Well, France gets around 80% of its energy from nuclear power – a thorny issue – but has also promoted feed-in renewable tariffs, fast trains, and efficient buildings. Germany’s emissions cuts are born of both hope and despair:  thanks to impressive legislation and investment promoting renewable energy (growth from 1% to 11% of Germany’s energy use, 1990-2011), but also thanks to industrial shut-down in East Germany in the early 1990s after reunification.

The vast majority of high-income countries in the G20 have so far provided no evidence that they can make economic growth environmentally sustainable. Of course, most have barely started to put in place the policies required to make it happen – but delay will only make it harder.

So what does the G20 evidence show? That absolute decoupling is possible (we’ve seen it!), at least for some of the countries, for some resources, for some of the time. But that’s a far cry from believing that environmentally sustainable GDP growth is possible everywhere, all the time, indefinitely.

Jury, please remain in court. We need more evidence – on both sides – before we can close the case on green growth. Anyone out there got the evidence to swing it?

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Another day, another Oxfam report. This time it’s a ‘practice what you preach’ survey of the G20 countries’ performance on inequality and the environment. According to this guest post from co-author Caroline Pearce, they don’t come out of it very well…….

G20 governments cannot afford to ignore inequality. An Oxfam report published today, Left Behind by the G20, examines G20 countries’ records on inequality and sustainability, and on the former shows an overall picture of rising income inequality: in almost all G20 countries, inequality is dangerously on the rise, despite the G20’s much vaunted commitment to promoting shared growth and narrowing the development gap. Crucially, what the report does not find is any link between particular stages of development and levels of or changes in inequality, casting doubt on those who argue that inequality is an inevitable stage along the way to development. Rather, inequality is a matter of political choices, and now the onus is on the G20 to make the right ones.

According to new data from the new Standardized World Income Inequality Database, just four G20 countries (Korea, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina) have reduced income inequality in the last 20 years (see chart), and some with only modest levels of growth. Even these are not unambiguous success stories: in three, initial inequality was so high that decades’ more progress would still be necessary to bring them to levels seen in, for example, Pakistan, let alone in a country like Sweden. The exception is Korea, which grew to high-income status while reducing already comparatively low levels of income inequality. The others, along with the rest of the G20 club, face serious challenges in living up to G20 promises about ‘inclusive growth’.

As well as highlighting this troubling trend, the report spells out why G20 governments should care. Inequality – of many different kinds, not simply income inequality – is linked to weaker and less accountable public institutions, social unrest, crime, and lower well-being. The ongoing Occupy protests are just one illustration of popular discontent with growing inequality, and particularly with the way that inequalities of wealth and power reinforce each other. Our report acknowledges these concerns, and focuses on the links between income inequality, poverty reduction, and growth.

Firstly, high and growing levels of inequality severely limit the impact of growth on poverty reduction. This is a simple matter of logic: when the benefits of growth go disproportionately to the wealthy, then the resources left over to reduce poverty are inevitably reduced. World Bank analysis found that 1 percentage point of economic growth in a low inequality country could reduce poverty by 4 percentage points – or not at all, in a high inequality country.

Our report uses models developed by economists from the World Bank and the UN University to illustrate the potential impact of inequality on poverty in three G20 countries: Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. Using current IMF projections of economic and population growth, we show that continuing progress on inequality in Brazil would allow a million more people to exit from dollar-a-day poverty by 2020 than if inequality remains stagnant. Accelerating the fall in inequality in Mexico, taking 5 points off the gini by 2020, could reduce the number of people in absolute poverty by more than three quarters. Most worryingly, allowing inequality in South Africa to grow at the most recently observed rate could push well over a million extra people into extreme poverty, even as the economy grows. This is a powerful rebuttal of the assumption that a rising tide will lift all boats: on the contrary, without attention to inequality and distribution, the tide can rise but allow many millions of women, men and children to sink.

Moreover, a growing body of evidence demonstrates the pernicious impact of inequality on growth itself. Recent IMF research papers, for example, have illustrated the role of inequality in driving the 2008 financial crisis, and the fact that high levels of inequality shorten the average length of periods of economic growth. The overall message: without attention to inequality and distribution, the tide will slow or perhaps even stop rising.

The question of what should be done about this is harder, with different answers for different countries. Oxfam is undertaking a major research project to look at the impact of different policies on inequality and growth. But some obvious lessons stand out: progressive taxes and redistributive transfers make a huge difference; universal public services – particularly education and health – increase social mobility and reduce future inequality; a focus on gender inequality is not only necessary in its own right but crucial in reducing income and wealthy inequality; and redistribution of land can reduce poverty and prevent growing inequality.

Tomorrow, Kate Raworth discusses the G20’s record on sustainability

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Oxfam and Save the Children have a new paper out today that worries away at the baffling fact that lots of organizations knew disaster was looming in the Horn of Africa (and said so), but the system was largely unable to respond until people actually started dying. From the exec sum of A Dangerous Delay: The cost of late response to early warnings in the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa:

“The 2011 crisis in the Horn of Africa has been the most severe emergency of its kind this century. More than 13 million people are still affected, with hundreds of thousands placed at risk of starvation. One estimate suggests that 50,000–100,000 people have died. This crisis unfolded despite having been predicted. Although brought on by drought, it was human factors which turned the crisis into a deadly emergency.

Tragically, the 2011 crisis is not an isolated case. The response to drought is invariably too little too late, representing a systemic failure of the international system – both ‘humanitarian’ and ‘development’.

In the Horn of Africa, there were indications that a crisis was coming from as early as August 2010. In November 2010, these warnings were repeated and they became more strident in early 2011. Some actors did respond, but full scale-up only really happened after the rains had failed for a second successive time (see chart, below). By this time, in some places people were already dying. Many had lost their livelihoods, and many more – particularly women and children – were suffering extreme hardship. The scale of death and suffering, and the financial cost, could have been reduced if early warning systems had triggered an earlier, more substantial response. Why was the international system so slow in responding to accurate early warnings? One reason is that raising large sums for humanitarian response currently depends on getting significant media and public attention – which did not happen until the crisis point was reached.

Decision makers are often not comfortable with uncertainty and forecasts, requiring hard data before initiating a response. So, while many people ‘on the ground’ in the region – representatives of many agencies and institutions, and communities themselves – were aware of the impending crisis and trying to set alarm bells ringing in January and February 2011, they were not always able to get traction ‘further up the chain’ from those who needed to act to avert another crisis.”

The underlying problem is that the incentives (or lack of them) are preventing the system (both national governments and international aid agencies) from acting on the early warning system, which is working pretty well. Why is that?

• “fear of getting it wrong – with both financial and reputational risk at stake;
• fear of being too interventionist – undermining communities’ own capacities to cope;
• fatigue – ‘there are droughts every year’ – encouraging an attitude of resignation to the high levels of chronic malnutrition, and an inability to react to the crisis triggers.”

What could change that?

“The decision to respond is ultimately a political one. National governments often see an emergency declaration as a sign of weakness, especially if there is a drive for food self-sufficiency. This can make it difficult for humanitarian agencies to declare an emergency themselves. Early response is more likely when there are clear links with those directly affected by the food crisis – thus multi-party democracy and a free press are necessary, but not always sufficient for the politically marginalized. A strong, vibrant civil society voice is required to ensure that there is a political price for failure to respond. For the donors, their relationship with national governments is a key determinant of early response. Although humanitarian aid should be exempt from political conditionality, political differences can seriously delay the response, as in Somalia in 2011.”

In the end it all comes down to dealing with uncertainty (echoes of my recent reading….)

“Responding on the basis of forecasts instead of hard data requires a shift in dealing with uncertainty.42 Currently, uncertainty too often stifles action; one study in Kenya found that while forecasts allow for prepositioning of food stocks, national decision makers often do not rely on them for scaling up a response. Forecasts involve uncertainty: they are inevitably based on data which is not totally comprehensive and are tinged with judgement; the earlier the warning, the less accurate it is likely to be. Yet this uncertainty is not unquantifiable – standard risk management techniques allow us to convert this uncertainty into risk, which can then be managed and minimised. The figure shows a typical risk impact/probability chart, which plots the probability that a hazard will occur against its impact. Clearly, the most dangerous risks are those with high impact and high probability; these are the risks that should be prioritised for action, and require the closest attention.

Using this logic, it would have been clear from around January 2011 that the high probability of poor March–May rains in the Horn of Africa, magnified by the failure of the previous rains in late 2010, would constitute a critical risk that needed to be addressed immediately.

The principles of risk reduction and management are well accepted in other fields, such as insurance (where paying money upfront is regarded as a responsible approach to prevent high losses in the event of a crisis) and public vaccination campaigns (to prevent epidemics and reduce medical costs). These principles must be embedded in short-term emergency response, longer-term development work and government investment programmes.”

It’s on the front page of the Guardian, a top story on the BBC, and I’m on press duty – could be a busy day.

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Just spent a fascinating week in Nairobi, taking part in a review of our three-year- old urban programme there. Like many large development NGOs, Oxfam’s traditional remit is deeply rural – goats, irrigation, drought, that kind of thing – but the world has gone urban, and so in a few countries, we are dipping our organizational toes in the water. Some impressions on the challenges of urban work:

Perhaps most striking are the multiple centres of power and association compared to the rural world. Tier upon tier of government, dense networks of clubs, traditional and tribal structures and militia, social and community organizations, churches, ‘merry-go-round’ savings and loans groups, youth groups, sports clubs, cultural groups – the list is endless. Power is dispersed and often hard to map or even detect. How to chart a way through the forest of organizations and identify potential partners and targets for influence?

A lot of official aid goes to the ‘capacity building’ of officials and promotes legal reforms to improve the ‘enabling environment’ for business. The assumption is that the state wants to help, and just needs more support. But what if the disabling environment matters more? Street traders say that when you try to start a business, a previously absent state appears, and not in a good way: ‘suddenly, all the officials arrive, asking for bribes’. Every bylaw is an excuse for graft. ‘You need a lot of blessings to open a kiosk, our elders need to be smiled at’- Kenya is full of euphemisms for graft.

Once you set up your market stall, you face arrests, confiscations, fines and sexual harassment. The key seems to be organization, so Oxfam is funding an ‘access to justice’ programme that builds small trader associations, and works to improve relations between them and the local authorities and police. Experiments like ipaidabribe.com may also be worth trying, although no Kenyan activists I spoke to had heard of it.

There is a wider point here. When the authorities are seen as a threat ( ‘I can’t remember a time when they came and said ‘we want to help you’’) there is a temptation for donors, NGOs and community organizations to seek to build movements that bypass the state, emphasising self-regulation and ‘popular justice’. But that is probably short sighted – state-building will eventually have to take place, and there is a window of opportunity for that in Kenya right now. Following the appalling violence that took 1,500 lives after the 2007 elections, a new constitution was overwhelmingly approved in August 2010. According to one optimistic community organizer in the Mukuru slum this is a turning point ‘before it was all ‘once I’m elected, I’m the boss – I don’t have to listen to anyone’. Now that’s changing, knowledge of rights scares the people in power. The rule of law is getting better.’

But patronage is deeply rooted in Kenya, where every conversation rapidly morphs from challenges to policies to politics to personalities – who you know, who’s doing what to whom, who controls which fund. Gossip, scandal and politics are inseparable. More concretely, getting policies implemented, or changing them, is all about working connections and building alliances. Grassroots leaders rapidly enter that world if they want to deliver any progress for their supporters.

After 2007, few think overtly confrontational approaches such as street protests will bring anything but disaster, and any idea of building up an autonomous change movement outside this system seems very implausible, so how can the new constitution be used to create space for citizens (especially marginalized groups such as women and youth) to organize around collective issues? How far can they go before the system discerns a threat and cooption, corruption and repression ensue? These are legitimate worries, but for the moment, changing the system from within to build something approaching an effective state seems both more promising than a more outsider approach and less fraught with danger. So it seems likely that over the coming years, we will devote more of our limited resources to seizing the opportunities presented by the new constitution. If that fails, then I guess we’ll have to rethink.

Finally, people seem confident that the upcoming elections (scheduled for March 2012), won’t lead to a repeat of the post election violence (often referred to simply as PEV) that took place in 2007/8. They trust that a ‘never again’ sentiment and the optimism surrounding the new constitution will prevail. I hope they’re right. A kind of semi-spontaneous segregation has taken place in many slums, as people have chosen to move to areas where they feel more secure because their own tribe is in the majority. There has even been a revival in ethnic identity, as shown by the increased prominence of vernacular radio stations. People seem uncertain whether this makes conflict more or less likely – much will depend on whether the presidential candidates stoke up ethnic tensions to improve their prospects in the run up to the elections. The role of the media, which inflamed tensions last time around, is also important – maybe worth doing some advocacy, perhaps get them to sign up to a code of conduct in advance?

Several other country programmes in Oxfam are developing urban work. Based on this visit, the key to success seems to lie in developing an acute awareness of the multiple locations of power, political agility in seeing where and how to intervene, and a readiness to constantly re-examine our work in response to the constant political and social turbulence of the urban world. Exciting stuff.

A shorter version of this post also appears on the World Bank’s People, Spaces, Deliberation blog

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One of my New Year’s resolutions was to read more books and fewer papers – books often push authors deeper, forcing them to identify and develop their underlying assumptions and ideas, whereas papers (whether single or in edited volumes pretending to be books) are often a rehash of their existing thinking, garnished with a dollop of new data. First up was William Byers, The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty, (Princeton, 2011).

I think this book is important, but appropriately, given the title, I’m not certain. It’s pretty deep, conceptual and full of subtle argument, and trying to summarize it on a blog is always likely to reduce it to a bunch of platitudes. It’s also full of maths, because the author is a maths and stats prof at Concordia University in Montreal, so lots of red meat for any mathematicians out there, but I won’t dwell on that out of compassion for the numerically challenged….

For Byers, the overarching theme of the ‘new science’ – which seems to mean anything since Einstein –  is ‘the emergence of limits’ – limits to reason, deductive systems, certainty, objectivity, in short, limits to what we can know. This is in part because the nature of science has changed from ‘being to becoming’; from structure to process – e.g. evolution, complexity theory etc.

At the heart of this evolution is ambiguity – multiple equally valid ways of understanding a particular phenomenon, epitomised by wave-particle duality in subatomic physics. But ambiguity is painful because ‘our culture remains in a ‘classical’ state, yet the frontiers of science have moved on.’ Even in scientists ambiguity induces a ‘state of vertigo’ and many opt instead for the lure, however illusory, of scientific certainty.

In contrast, Byers thinks that creativity in science and elsewhere lies in trying to live with ambiguity. ‘The whole book is about that ungraspable dynamism that generates the scientific world.’ He cites no less an authority than Leonard Cohen: ‘There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.’

Although the book celebrates uncertainty, it acknowledges that ‘the islands of relative certainty science has carved out are of immense importance and the scientific method itself is one of humankind’s prime hopes for the future’. But it contrasts the science of certainty with the ‘science of wonder’ (great quotes from Einstein on the ‘cosmic religious feeling… that is the strongest and noblest reason for scientific research.’)

In Byers’ view ‘It is the science of certainty that is engaged in a battle to the death with the religion of certainty. The science of wonder is perfectly compatible with the religion of wonder, for ultimately they are the same thing.’

The book builds to an increasingly spiritual conclusion, captured in TS Eliot’s revelatory poem, Burnt Norton

‘At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’

The job of a thinker is to endure the tensions, frustrations and vertigo in order to gain the insights that come from trying to experience the ‘still point’.

The book’s only real disappointment is its rather weak conclusion, in which he fails to connect this thinking with the challenges faced by society in 21stC (despite the blurb’s claim that this is its intention – I suspect interfering editors looking for a more popular hook). He asserts (but doesn’t try to prove) that it is the retreat from ambiguity that is responsible for some (largely unspecified) modern malaise, including global warming and the ‘dream of technology as total control’ and embracing it that will solve the problem (s).

Anyway, I thought it was interesting, perhaps because I once studied physics, but what’s all this got to do with development? Well, science is seen as the aspirational goal of a lot of development thinking – solving problems, identifying cause and effect – along with all those subjects that call themselves ‘social sciences’. So understanding what is really going on in the activity known as ‘science’ may help us avoid mistakes built on a crude or simplistic picture of what scientists do. Byers (above) quotes Warren Buffett’s wonderful ‘All I can say is, beware of geeks bearing formulas’.

But since reading it , I’ve mainly been thinking about the book almost as a highbrow self-help text. As a development generalist, a lot of the time I’m linking – feeding in examples and insights from other bits of the development world, challenging what people are doing or thinking on a particular issue. Often, I’m not at all certain of where I’m going – the absolute opposite of a specialist endlessly laying down best practice on the same X or Y. The lesson I take from Byers is that being uncertain may be uncomfortable, but it can also be creative, so don’t immediately head for the nearest intellectual comfort zone – keep skating on the thin ice and something will turn up. Take comfort in the discomfort.

You can hear Byers talks about the book here.

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