Development Horizons by Lawrence Haddad

Visible Hands and Invisible Reforms?

2012-02-11T11:05:00.005Z

A new book edited by Stephany Griffiths-Jones, Jose Antonio Ocampo and Joseph Stiglitz "Time for an Invisible Hand: Lessons from the 2008 World Financial Crisis" takes on the policy implications of what to do.

They cycle through a wide range of ideas including:

* Reforming financial regulation--the more liberalised the financial system, the greater the need for effective regulation. Effective regulation means making it counter-cyclical and comprehensive ("the domain of the regulator should be the same as that of the market that is regulated")

* Fix flawed incentives for bankers and fund managers--put all bonuses into an escrow account that can only be cashed out after a period equivalent to a "an average full cycle of economic activity"

* Asia may have learned the worng lessons from the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98--it improved domestic regulation and transparency and accumulated large reserves, but countries in the region did not put in place counter cyclical measures to cope with the vicissitudes of the global markets, within which they have subsequently become much more integrated.

* the Special Drawing Rights system that the IMF put in place in the 1960s and which the G20 has refuelled in recent years need to be come more development orientated--they are still allocated according to IMF shareholdings (and so go largely to the rich countries) and there are no rules governing trading which is entirely voluntary.

I'm not an expert in this area, but the pace of reform in this area (3.5 years on) seems very very slow (do we really have to wait 65 years for the super sovereign reserve currency idea from Keynes to gain traction?). One of the chapters co-authored by Stiglitz delves a little into the political economy of reform, and shows how some global greenback currency would impact on domestic policy freedoms, especially in the US.

A good book--for me it reinforces the need to look harder at the political economy of financial market reform. The technical issues are not insurmountable, but the political ones seem to be.

Speculating about Speculation

2012-02-07T07:31:00.007Z

Yesterday the Future Agricultures Consortium, which IDS co-chairs with ODI and which is supported by DFID, held a meeting on Food Price Volatility. The core questions revolved around the state of knowledge around: (a) is FPV going up or down? (b) if going up, is it a problem and for who? (c) what, if anything, should be done? and (d) what more do we need to know?

We were joined by colleagues from several organisations including the UK's Treasury, Oxfam, UNCTAD, IFPRI, WDM and SOAS.

The meeting helpfully unpacked a lot of the questions.

1. Food price spikes -- are we talking about food price levels or volatility? They tend to go hand in hand, but they have two different effects.

2. Which components of volatility do we care most about? Predictable or unpredictable components? The latter.

3. Is FPV going up or down? We had papers that said it had never been higher, and some that said it was lower than in the 1970s. Not much consensus there. I suspect the answer depends on the commodity and time period (e.g. for coffee, not much price volatility, for wheat, a lot). Also, the periodicity of the price volatility matters a great deal.

4. Does FPV matter? At the macro level if the effects are big enough it could lead to a tightening of interest rates. At the micro level consumers are affected--they may be able to offset by switching consumption into foods that have not seen such big price rises, but these are not without costs (whether nutritional or taste) and the adjustments tend to fall more on women (based on work from elsewhere). On the producer side, farmer decisions in one year tend to be highly affected by decisions the previous year (adaptive expectations) and so they can easily over or underinvest in inputs with disastrous consequences. For farmers, FPV muffles the underlying market signals and this is not good. Who does FPV benefit? No-one really with the exception of Commodity Exchanges whose revenues are based on volume.

5. What are the drivers of FPV? Two classes were identified: fundamental and amplifiers. On the fundamental side we have things like price inelastic demand (a result of economic growth--wealthier consumers are not price sensitive to the foods they like) and on the supply side we have climate uncertainties. But we also have policy choices that for example cast a blind eye to the concentration of exporting surplus in the hands of a few countries and which allow physical food stocks to dwindle. On the amplifier side we have hedgers and speculators. Hedging can be against natural phenomena or market phenomena as can speculation. There was no consensus as to whether hedgers or speculators played any role in amplification. Certainly the speculators in the market provide a direct connection to the need for more hedging and the potential for ramping up of fundamental volatility. But the group also noted the potential of these speculators to be scapegoats when prices are high.

6. What to do? Lots of options were discussed. There are cause specific solutions--if you think the FPV is being driven by market speculators then limit their positions. There were also general solutions (wherever the FPV comes from) such as reducing information asymmetries through greater transparency, building up stocks--physical or virtual, taxing the rate of volatility, developing risk management products, diversifying production to minimise the impact of local weather shocks. Others suggested region and commodity specific strategies (e.g. agreements in Asia about rice). We did not talk enough about the capacity to formulate, implement and enforce these policies nor the political economy of them.

7. What additional evidence do we need? Many of the discussants said that the choices above were empirical questions. I felt that everyone had their own favourite evidence base that backed up their assertions but that there was no consensus evidence base--so this would be a priority for me. Other areas of interest to me--experimental economic approaches to appetite for volatility (perhaps we are overestimating the negative impacts?), research on how depleted women become if they act as shock absorbers for the rest of their family in the face of shocks, the impacts of biofuel mandates on FPV, and the contribution to FPV of large scale land and water acquisition deals.

All in all, I felt that once you begin to unpack the issues, there is no easy quick fix (no surprise), there is a clear need for more evidence in this area and there is a need for a consensus set of evidence.

For more information see www.future-agricultures.org (where you will be able to find the power points) and contact my IDS colleagues Stephen Spratt and Jim Sumberg.

Disaster Relief 1.0 vs 2.0? Bringing new voices into the humanitarian space

2012-02-04T16:04:00.017Z

OK, so you need to get past the tired "2.0" framing in the report title, but "Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies" is quite interesting.

The report is "a snapshot of an ongoing discussion" and one of several initiatives under the $30m "Mobilising Development" collaboration between the UN Foundation, and the Vodafone Foundation. The report also involves OCHA (the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

Apparently the humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was different. For the first time, members of the community affected by the disaster issues pleas for help directly to those who could help. Also citizens around the world mobilised to plot and organise these pleas and help coordinate the humanitarian technical response.

So far so good. But the international humanitarian system is not equipped to handle these new voices and actors. The Report is a first attempt to help these worlds--old and new--come together to find ways of strengthening humanitarian initiatives. The seasoned humanitarian community relies on techniques that are tried and tested, that have been subject to scrutiny in the harshest of contexts and have come through and is understandably cautious when it comes to new technologies and armies of laptop volunteers.

The report does a good job of convincing people like me (i.e. not very well informed enthusiasts) that generating signals from people in distress via SMS technologies is only one part of the needed enabling technology. Also needed: (1) tools for viewing and processing high resolution aerial imagery, (2) geospatial wiki platforms (like OpenStreetMap) that allow many people to co-construct maps, (3) regular wikis for building up narratives of what is happening and needed, (4) collaborative platforms like Google Docs to allow people to share data and reports, and (5) bandwidth to allow Skype and other types of video conversation.

I feel that the report is a bit too pessimistic in how long it will take this technology to become useful and therefore used by people working in the humanitarian space. In a sector with many young people, they surely will be the champions of this new way of seeing, listening, analysing and acting. There is no substitute for experience, but experience is no defense against resisting innovation. This Report and the initiative seems like a good safe space to explore and learn. It is raising more questions than it is answering but, for now, that seems OK.

Footnote: my IDS colleagues Martin Greeley and Henry Lucas are doing a review of "Real Time Monitoring" with UNICEF and I'm sure it will prove to be a useful complement to the work summarised in this report.

The highly structured thinking of Michael Lipton

2012-02-02T12:03:00.010Z

Last night Michael Lipton gave a talk entitled "The State and the big push towards modern industry: 'new' economics, defunct economists, and farmers".

Michael is one of the world's leading thinkers on development.

The array of issues that he has contributed to in profound ways is staggering:

* on the pro-urban bias in development

* on decision making by smallholder farmers and its importance in development

* on poverty measurement and policies and on holes in the poverty consensus (such as social exclusion)

* on the emergence of institutions such as land reform

* on the disconnects between poverty and nutrition

* on mechanisms for governing competition for water amongst its multiple uses

* on population dividends

And the list goes on. These are all topics of much discussion today. But this is not surprising as Michael is one of those rare academics who is widely respected in the academic world, but also in the policy world.

It is for this cumulative body of work at the intersection of policy, practice and academia that he was recently awarded the Leontif Prize by Tufts University.

His Sussex Development Lecture built on and critiqued the interesting work of Justin Lin, Chief Economist at the World Bank. In a couple of papers from 2010 Lin argues that we need a New Structuralism to understand growth. Old Structuralism emphasised state activity to move economies from agriculture to industry and services, essentially ignoring comparative advantage (how one evolves and uses natural endowments of a country) while the New Structuralism sees the state more as a facilitator than an orchestrator when it comes to moving from agriculture to other types of production, but always guided by comparative advantage.

In the Lecture (and in a related paper) Michael concluded that Lin's work is a good start, but it is only a start. For example he notes that Lin's paper is very much couched around growth, not poverty reduction. Michael argues that the New Structuralist approaches make it imperative that the State is more active in guiding this comparative advantage-led growth towards poverty and inequality reduction. Michael also makes the argument that the New Structuralist perspective supports (and can be driven by) science-led smallholder-agriculture led growth.

As usual, Michael made me think hard about something that it would be much easier not to have to think about at all. He has been doing that for most of us for a long time and I am very thankful to him for that.

Development Acumen and Achilles Heels?

2012-01-28T08:18:00.007Z

This week, I met with CDC's excellent new CEO, Diana Noble. CDC is a development finance institution, set up by DFID, but not financed by UK taxpayers since 1995. CDC has been successfully recycling returns from investments into new investments. With the aim of having a bigger additive effect transformative change, they are focusing all new investments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.
In the course of our discussion, Diana told me about the Acumen Fund, investing in "social enterprises, emerging leaders, and breakthrough ideas".
The Fund has an interesting "10 things we have learned to be true":

Dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth
 Neither grants nor markets alone will solve the problems of poverty
 Poverty is a description of someone's economic situation, it does not describe who someone is
 We won't succeed in the long term without cultivating local leaders
 Great people, every time, no exceptions
 Great technology alone is not the answer
 If failing is not an option, you've ruled out success as well
 Governments rarely invent solutions, but they can scale what works
 There is no currency like trust, and there are no shortcuts to earning it
 Patient capital investing is built upon a system of values; it is not a series of steps

I like the fact that the Fund is reflective. I also like the focus on dignity, leadership, blends of grants and markets, patient investing, listening to customer feedback.
But the Achilles Heel of this sector is the lack of independent evaluation and verification of impact.
The claims of Acumen's success are loud: 55,000 jobs created and supported, and 86 million lives impacted. I could not find any evaluations on the website (the "knowledge centre" has photo essays, stories and update letters but no independent assessments of impact and sustainability).
It would be so much more reassuring if these numbers had been generated by independent and publicly available evaluations. This is one way of building trust.

The Egyptian Revolt one year on: How should it change the way we think about development?

2012-01-24T10:56:00.001Z

This week IDS releases a collection of papers authored by Egyptians who bridge the academic and activist worlds on "The Pulse of Egypt's Revolt".

The collection is edited by my colleague, Mariz Tadros. Mariz is a Research Fellow at IDS and previously an Assistant Professor at the American University in Cairo and a journalist for the Al-Ahram Weekly newspaper.

The collection of papers, including a nice overview from Mariz, asks two questions:

(1) why and how did the Egyptian uprisings begin? and
(2) what are the implications for development paradigms, concepts and practices?

Linking to and getting inspiration from the other 11 papers in the volume (including one of her own on "Backstage Governance") Tadros puts forward 5 ideas:

1. We need new ways to grasp the pulse on the street

The paper argues that "disciplinary silos" and "methodological precincts" make it hard to get a rounded picture (deductive political science, for a variety of reasons, assumes Egyptians will not rise). It says that what matters is the "dark matter of citizenship" and that this cannot be assessed by surveys. Finally it highlights sites of information that are not mainstream but which need to be engaged (Wikileaks, online reactions to stories, new Arab satellite TV channels, soap operas, films).

2. Calling the revolts a "Facebook revolution" is a gross simplification

There were many triggers and it was their confluence that was important: youth (Facebook, yes, but also old fashioned pamphlets and slogans) and the brutality they were subjected to; the people, who were connected to the brutality by Al-Jazeera and the like and came out in numbers that the security forces couldn't handle; and the military which did not side with Mubarak (and we don't know how hard they had to be pushed to switch loyalties). All of these factors came together.

3. The act of revolting should not be confused with its outcome

Tahrir Square in Jan-Feb 2011 was a particular time and space: it did not represent the whole of the nation (Facebook offered limited opportunities for forging a coalition outside of youth in Cairo), and the political truce called for by rivals with a common goal--get rid of Mubarak--was quickly called off.

4. The concept of "unruly politics" may offer a powerful way to understand people's mobilisation

Much of the public dissent leading up to the revolt was missed because it does not fit conventional "checklists" of what constitutes the right way of challenging the status quo (for example the Stay at Home campaign in 2008 or campaign that conveyed their anger with politicians of their hunger by banging on pots and pans). The unruly label is because citizens engaged in spaces outside of the conventions realms of state and civil society--in hidden and informal spaces that many civil society organisations failed to connect to.

5. There is a disconnect between development paradigms and the dynamics of unruly politics in authoritarian settings.

First, there is a disconnect between the publicised state of the economy (good) and conditions on the ground (no change). Second, the irrelevance of institutions mandated to improve governance and the background operation of the State Security Investigations in pulling the governance strings. Finally, the neutering of civil society through apolitical compartmentalisation and projectisation. These disconnects, together with the right political catalysts and moment, created the right environment for mass mobilisation.

Overall, the shifts the Bulletin calls for include:

(a) a "made in Egypt" economic growth policy, one that recognises the politics of different choices about how markets function, the political consequences of those choices, and how citizens should be protected from its extremes,

(b) civil society organisations to root themselves in civil society, not in donor society,

(c) looking before leaping onto the social media bandwagon--it undoubtedly has a role to play in creating new spaces for meaningful engagement, but not if it is not embedded in the context,

(d) aid to be viewed less through a geopolitical lens and more through a developmental one, and

(e) new ways of supplementing conventional methods of data collection as to the conditions, attitudes and perceptions of ordinary citizens, capable of doing extraordinary things.

Clearly Mariz argues that the donors have a very large opportunity to shape the way they interact with civil society and the Government and that these new relationships must be driven by home grown initiatives, development. Having worked in Egypt in the late 90s this all makes a lot of sense to me. I just hope the new government provides the space to let this happen.

Do Indices Change Anything?

2012-01-21T13:49:00.005Z

With so many indexes out there, whether they change behaviour in those collecting, reporting or reading them seems like an obvious question to ask. Thirty minutes on Google Scholar does not reveal anything.

I have indices on the brain this week. On Monday I was at the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs making a presentation on hunger, food security and agriculture. This is going to be a new priority for the new Minister for International Development. I presented the Hunger Reduction Commitment Index (HRCI) that an IDS team has constructed with support from Irish Aid. The HRCI shows Denmark at number 1 in the donor countries. This went down well, but raised the question: if Denmark is doing so well, why the new priority?

Then on Tues-Weds there was a meeting at FAO on measuring hunger outcomes, using various indices--my IDS colleagues Edoardo Masset and Stephen Devereux were in attendance. I hope some progress has been made in measuring hunger properly since the last such meeting in 2002 and that even more progress will be made in the next 10 years.

Then on Thursday we had the Global Think Tank Index from the University of Pennsylvania. The index places IDS at 8th in the world in terms of think tanks on international development (2nd in UK behind ODI) and 2nd in the UK in all topics for a University affiliated think tank (although we are independently governed). Of course I would like to be higher than 8th, but last year we weren't even on the list (because no one thought to nominate us, presumably thinking that someone else would --you cannot nominee yourself) so that is an improvement.

Finally on Thursday and Friday we hosted a DFID-IDS Learning Event on Nutrition Governance, showcasing 6 country case studies. Each case study looked at the incentives, barriers and tradeoffs behind the structures and frameworks that are supposed to help coordinate nutrition actions across sectors and across levels of government. We noted the vast difference in governance effectiveness behind the "good governance" scores of the WHO Landscape indicators which track whether such structures are in place.

In all of these examples, the index in question has proven to be a lightning rod for discussion. Sometimes this can be a distraction, but most times it serves as a kick off point for discussion and debate about the index, but also about the issue.

Nevertheless, it does seem that there is a need for rigorous evaluations of indices used--do they spur effective action? This is something that IDS will work with Irish Aid and DFID on in evaluating the HRCI and a related but distinct nutrition commitment index.

If you know of any studies we can draw inspiration from, please let me know. Thanks.

Dangerous Delays and Fallible Fire Alarms

2012-01-18T14:56:00.006Z

Save the Children and Oxfam released a joint report today entitled "A Dangerous Delay: The Cost of Late Response to Early Warnings in the 2011 Drought in the Horn of Africa". The report argues that early warning systems performed, but decision makers did not respond to them. In an interview Justin Forsyth the head of Save the Children UK likened the situation to an alarm bell that had a very delayed effect. A lot of people were harmed by the delayed response and the cost of dealing with hunger and malnutrition was much higher than if it had been addressed earlier.

So why the delay? Using Forsyth's analogy, either policymakers did not hear the alarm, did not trust it, or although hearing and believing the alarm, they simply could not respond to it quickly enough. The report makes some good recommendations about amplifying the alarm (via the media and building up capacity of those to communicate the significance of the alarm up the decision chain). It also makes good recommendations about helping people respond to it more quickly once they believe it (emergency response funds, insurance, greater joint programming between development and humanitarian groups).

The one area that the report is relatively silent on is whether the policymakers believe the signals. The report focuses on the case where the signals were right and outlines the cost of ignoring them, but policymakers might argue: what about the costs of acting when the signals were wrong?

As researchers, we should be analysing, ex post, the frequency with which the early warning signals get it right. If we can attach a probability to the predictive power of the signals, then when the next signal goes off policymakers can better assess the risks of responding to a non crisis against the risks of responding late to an emerging crisis. In other words, how often will the signal get it right?

It's not pretty, but I would not be surprised if this is the kind of calculation that is often made.

In appreciation of Philip Payne

2012-01-14T09:39:00.001Z

This week I heard the sad news that Professor Philip Payne passed away.

Based at the Nutrition Policy Unit (set up by ODA, now DFID, in 1977) at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, he was one of the key shapers of nutrition and nutrition policy in the 20th century, with plenty of implications for the 21st.

He did lots of big things. Three stand out for me.

1. He helped to debunk the idea that malnutrition was due to a protein gap. He and others pointed out that if there is a calorie deficit in the diet, then a focus on protein is merely an expensive and not nutritionally useful way of filling that gap.

2. He bridged the gap between the nutrition, economics and political worlds. He was one of the first to recognise that these drivers were fundamental to reducing undernutrition.

3. He focused on function, stress and adaptation. Using language that would be seen as in vogue today, he and people like Michael Lipton and Richard Longhurst introduced nuance into the various debates about when coping with stress incurred unacceptable costs and when it was a positive adaptive response.

Never far from controversy, renowned for speaking his mind, he would approve of the way the rest of the nutrition community is finally catching up with him.

Hungama: Stirring stuff for nutrition in India

2012-01-13T12:39:00.010Z

A remarkable new report has been published by the Naandi Foundation, called Hungama (a Hindi word for causing a "stir" or a "ruckus"). Undernutrition is often neglected and so we need to make more noise about it, especially when it is unresponsive to economic growth. This is what this report does. It surveys 112 districts in India.

"Of the 112 districts surveyed, 100 were selected from the bottom of a child development district index developed for UNICEF India in 2009, referred to as the 100 Focus Districts in this report. These 100 districts are located in 6 states. The best-performing district from each of these states was also selected for survey. To this set was added another set of 6 districts, 2 each from the best-performing states of the country. Having the largest sample size for a child nutrition survey since 2004, the HUNGaMA Survey captured nutrition status of 109,093 children under five years of age. Data collection took place between October 2010 and February 2011 in 3,360 villages across 9 states. Coordinated by the Naandi Foundation, the HUNGaMA survey presents underweight, stunting and wasting data at the district level (this was last done in 2004 by DLHS-2, which reported only underweight estimates). It is also the first ever effort to make the voice of over 74,000 mothers heard."

Quick read headlines for me:

in these districts (remember, this is not representative at the state or national level), underweight rates have declined from 53 % in 2002-4 (the LFHS 2 data) to 42% in 2011 (the Hungama data). This is a rate of about 1.4 percentage points per year, much faster than NFHS data suggest (the maroon dotted line below) and somewhat faster than the NNMB data suggest (the maroon solid line below). But has stunting declined? Unfortunately the LFHS-2 did not collect stunting data, even though Hungama did. But can we conclude that stunting (the preferred indicator of undernutrition) has also declined? Not really, because as the below data show, the NNMB recorded an increase in stunting (the solid blue line) at the same time it recorded a decline in under weight. Interestingly, the smallest decline in underweight is for the best districts in the best states (Figure 15): 35% to 32%. This is a bit surprising if only because the rates are still so high.
it is interesting that the stunting and underweight rates are better for the Best Districts in the Focus States than the Best Districts in the Best States (figure 1). This needs more exploration.
wasting rates are puzzling. These are higher for the Best Districts in the Focus States compared to the average of all Districts in Focus States. The overall wasting rates are 11-12% which is lower than the rates in the diagram above for NNMB (15%) and much lower than NFHS (19% -- a big proportionate decrease).
one of the big differentiating covariates of the different district groupings is whether mothers have heard of the term "malnutrition" in their local language: 8% in the 100 focal districts, 18% in the best districts from focal states and 80% in the best districts from best states. But this is not reflected in the differences in undernutrition rates in these groups (remember, the stunting and underweight rates are higher in the best districts from best states compared to the best districts from focal states)
lots of analyses are suggested by the data--I would like to examine how ICDS characteristics in 2004 and 2011 are correlated with changes in underweight rates
the 3 categories of states are a bit confusing, and simple comparisons of means might be misleading because one group consists of 100 districts and the other 2 groups consist of 6 districts each.
the data and the report have received serious attention from the media and the Government. I hope the research community is also active in sifting through the data
the effort by Naandi (and it really has been an incredible undertaking for an NGO) shows the enormous vacuum created by the lack of Government data. Despite the great work from Naandi, it remains essential to have a comparable set of snapshots from the GoI every 2-3 years.

I hope this remarkable report stirs all stakeholders into action to accelerate undernutrition reduction.

Expert Panels: What Are They Good For?

2012-01-10T07:07:00.001Z

I am currently on the UN Committee on World Food Security's High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE). It is an interesting experiment and a part of the reform of international governance of food and nutrition put in place a couple of years ago by the UN. It is interesting because (a) the HLPE acts as an independent think tank in the midst of the UN on food and nutrition, making public recommendations to the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and (b) it tries to draw together expertise and know how from the four corners of the globe.

The HLPE has selected and commissioned two teams to work on two hot issues of the day: "food price volatility" and "land tenure and international investments in agriculture". I have just received final copies of the two reports.

The first is on food price volatility. Two interesting points from this report: (1) it shows clearly the transmission lags between world food price changes and local food price changes. There were 3-6 month lags in transmission of increases from global to local, but very muted declines in local prices even after global prices declined substantially between May 08 and March 09. African prices were the slowest to increase, but once up, they stayed up, right into 2011 (Figure 9 in the report) and (2) there is a nice typology of policy solutions (Table 13) although I would have liked to have seen a greater linkage of these options to political and administrative capacities. For example,Table 12 of the report, which summarises policy interventions actually adopted in the wake of the 07/08 food price spike, shows that countries from Latin America and the Caribbean were much less likely to restrict or ban exports than Asian countries and yet African countries were much more likely to reduce or suspend taxes than Asian countries. Why? Technical, political or administrative capacity reasons?

The second is on large scale land acquisitions and is quite explicit in its discussion of power asymmetries between land users/occupiers, governments and large commercial interests. It aligns its recommendations more closely to different stakeholders than does the first report. Like the first report it calls on the CFS to play a stronger role in promoting data access, policy transparency and stakeholder accountability. This is an important role for the CFS. Data sharing does not always come easily to UN agencies in this arena and transparency and accountability are not always easy for organisations governed by 190 or so members.

As a member of the HLPE I have been encouraged by the openness of the HLPE process so far and the initial attention from the CFS to the first two reports. The HLPE members do not get paid, but the HLPE consumes resources. As more reports come in, an M&E function needs to be put in place to see if and how the reports influence the wider field -- and the CFS/UN in particular.

FAO DG's first news conference: 5 things we learned

2012-01-05T11:37:00.002Z

On Tuesday, 2 days into his 3 and a half year tenure, the new FAO DG, Graziano da Silva, held his first press conference. The 10 minute presentation was a restatement of the 5 pillars upon which the DG ran as a candidate: end hunger; move towards more sustainable systems of food production and consumption; achieve greater fairness in the global management of food; complete FAO's reform and decentralization; and expand South-South cooperation and other partnerships.

Much more interesting was the 45 minute Q and A session with the press. Both of these sections of the press conference are available as audiofiles at the link above.

What did we learn?

1. Political Will will have a high priority. When asked by an African newspaper what was the one thing that needed to happen to end hunger in Africa, the DG said build political will and then translate that into concrete action at the technical, financial and support levels. It is refreshing to hear the political coming before the technical and not as an afterthought. Concrete tools and measures need to be developed to assess, spur and build political will for hunger reduction and FAO should lead on this.

2. A whole of society approach is needed. It is not just FAO and not just governments that have the responsibility for ending hunger, a whole of society approach is required: civil society, the private sector. This is great, but someone needs to take responsibility and be accountable. Orchestras still need conductors. FAO should focus on accountability and transparency in the food system.

3. "Nobody Eats at the Global Level". FAO decentralisation and getting closer to the ground is going to be a feature of the new DG's tenure. Quite what this means for a normative organisation is not clear, but the recognition that solutions to hunger need to be found on a nation by nation, community by community basis is clear. There is no blueprint, adaptation to existing capacities and political processes is important. It is clear that the DG will draw heavily on his Brazilian experiences in this and other areas. The South-South sharing of experiences will be particulalry important here. It would be good for FAO to set up the world's best learning hub on what works in ending hunger.

4. The DG is serious about completing the FAO Reform process. In response to a question about FAO expenses and benefits da Silva was clear that he would be looking for savings throughout the organisation, cutting inefficiency and reducing bureaucracy, including in his own office. Good, but don't do this in a mechanistic way.

5. FAO will become more open. Putting the press Q and A out in an unedited audiofile was brave for a UN organisation and indeed for any big bureaucracy. I very much hope this openness lasts beyond the honeymoon period.

A good start for the new DG.

Leadership in Development: What do we know about it?

2012-01-04T07:30:00.000Z

There's an interesting review by Ted Miguel in Foreign Affairs of Steve Radelet's book, Emerging Africa. The review summarises Radelet's arguments:

1. Democratisation--of governments, access to information and accountability
2. Improved economic policy
3. Debt reduction
4. New technologies (esp the mobile phone)
5. A new generation of leaders

Radelet argues that democratisation is the number one contributing factor. My IDS colleagues in the Africa Power and Politics Programme, supported by DFID, would probably agree with this, although they would argue very strongly for good enough democracy that is suited to context rather than Western style orthodoxy.

In a very positive review, Miguel mildly chastises Radelet:

"But in identifying democratization as the leading cause of Africa's recent economic turnaround, especially in the countries he labels as emerging, Radelet simply pushes the question of causality back another step. Left unanswered is why some African countries, such as Ghana, developed successful democracies in the 1990s, whereas others, such as Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana's neighbor, tried and failed."

Miguel's answer? He argues that it might be education. He notes that Africa's human capital stock has risen dramatically in the past 30 years. In addition to Radelet's arguments about how this means the technical level of policymaking has improved, Miguel draws on his own research to illustrate how education empowers students rather than making them acquiesce to authority that is not pro-development. Better educated students are more politically informed and are better able to see through propaganda and are less willing to identify ethnically with a particular policy stance.

I find these arguments plausible, even though Miguel's research is only drawn from Kenya. But Miguel's argument does not really address the question of why Ghana is open but the Cote d'Ivoire is not.

Personally, I think the most under researched area is Radelet's fifth factor: leadership.

What do we know about how pro-development leadership emerges and can it be supported better? What factors have shaped the emergence of pro-development leaders whether the more celebrated ones Radelet identifies such as John Githongo in Kenya and Patrick Awuah in Ghana or the unsung heroes at other levels? What role does oppression play in radicalising them and what role does democratisation play in supplying them with enough oxygen to operate? What can the educational establishment and public policy do to support future leaders?

Leadership is an important and under researched issue for development in general, not only for Africa.

10 Predictions for 2012

2011-12-29T10:43:00.011Z

"Our assessment is that the Egyptian Government is stable" Hillary Clinton January 25, 2011.

Yep, it's that time of year, when the mind is free to wander, wishful thinking has its day, hostages to fortune are taken (see Sec. Clinton above), and some wild ideas are let loose.

As usual, I remain uncomfortable in predictions, especially about the future, nevertheless, here goes:

1. Development assistance will increasingly resemble an hourglass. For the rush of sand to the bottleneck of the hourglass read the run up to the MDGs and the dwindling club of ODA eligible countries. What kind of development world are we slipping into and what do we want that other half of the hourglass to look like? In the rush to 2015, we are not doing such a great job of thinking about the 2016+ world. We all need to do better at this future game.

2. The nutrition bubble will last for more than 1000 days. I have not witnessed anything like it--the interest in getting rid of undernutrition seems here to stay, for a while, at least. Many of the investments are 5-6 years and so this guarantees their longevity beyond 1000 days. The 1000 days is a brilliant marketing construct (the first 1000 days of life is a vital window of opportunity to intervene to address undernutrition--beyond this period Q2 1 nutrition violations are irreversible). Whether this transformation of nutrition within the development agenda can be locked in will depend on how we are able to transform thinking about nutrition, getting a better balance between health and development perspectives and making it as much a political issue as a technical one.

3. Hunger will not rise up the agenda unless there is another major food price spike. It used to be the nutrition stakeholders that looked like a rabble. Now the anti-hunger lobby looks disorganised and toothless. What will it take for hunger to move up the development agenda? Either a crisis (on top of the existing crisis of hunger) or the construction of a movement. Let's not wait for a new crisis.

4. Business accelerates its shaping of development, the development community continues to shrug. Walmart, the world's biggest corporation and China, the world's most populous country have been quietly building a partnership that is beginning to shape consumer behaviour towards green products and increasingly concentrate power in the global retail industry. Chinese consumers are worried about food safety, the Chinese government is worried about its reliance on fossil fuels, and Walmart wants to increase market share in China and become a world leader in green sourcing. It seems to be working, but we don't really know because the rest of us are not paying enough attention.

5. Say hello to SDGs, wave goodbye to MDGs? Rumours are that at the upcoming Rio+20 meetings a suite of Sustainable Development Goals will be unveiled. I can only hope that there will be some coherence with the thinking around the post-2015 goals. It is surprising when we look back at 1999 and realise how little environmental sustainability was folded into the MDGs. With all the political revolts of 2011 will we look back at 2012 from 2016 and wonder why there was so little discussion of political sustainability in any new set of Goals?

6. Politics will become more unruly. My colleagues in the Participation, Power and Social Change Team at IDS have been highlighting this trend for a while, but the Arab revolts and the Occupy movements (due to be focused on Washington DC in an election year) have brought protest to the fore. Even TIME magazine made "The Protester" its Person of the Year (back in 2006 it was "You" as in You Tube). It remains to be seen how much of this is enabled by Facebook (800 million users and counting) and other social media platforms, but we will see more of it in 2012.

7. Central Asia will rise on the development agenda. Long forgotten, despite being on Europe's doorstep, many of the Central Asian countries have poverty rates stubbornly set at 30%. They have booming GDP due to natural resource price rises, weak institutions, growing inequality, frozen conflicts and bad environmental records. With the West's declining commitment to Afghanistan, elections coming up in Russia and other countries in the region and will we see protest and unrest in the Caucases?

8. Don't expect much leadership from the US on international development in 2012. On to a different kinds of caucases, the Iowa ones. At least it does not look as if Ron Paul (let's get rid of foreign aid) will get enough traction in the Iowa Republican nominations to survive beyond the Hawkeye State, but 2012 will be about the election and about dealing with the fallout from the Supreme Court's decision on the challenge by 26 States to national healthcare. The FY 2012 budget saw about a 15% cut in the non war related development assistance, which while not great is much better than was feared in the summer. But the wild card might be if Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden swap places (as Robert Reich predicts). On an Obama-Clinton ticket things will get interesting for foreign assistance. Obama will probably be re-elected and he definitely will with Hillary on the ticket (her predictive ability not withstanding) to energise "the base".

9. We will finally get more balance in the impact debate. We will find the right mix of concern with internal and external validity and the right mixes of quantitative and qualitative methods. DFID will publish a review by Elliot Stern and coauthors that I believe will be a helpful contribution to the debate, a debate in which the pendulum is swinging back to a different (i.e. increased rigor is here to stay), but more balanced place. What we really need are blends of these methods driven by the issues, rather than method driven dogma.

10. The world will not end on December 21, 2012. This is the date at the end of the Mayan Long Calender. I did not know about this until someone mentioned it to me in a comment on this blog. But the world cannot end on December 21, 2012 because the UK's Research Excellence Framework deadline is October 2013. I just can't see the UK's higher education funding council, HEFCE, allowing it.

Interesting stuff on my desk at the end of the year

2011-12-19T15:09:00.008Z

I couldn't find a thread for these interesting pieces on my desk at the end of the year, so here goes:

1. "Living With the Gates Foundation" -- it ain't easy speaking truth to power

Living with the Gates Foundation is an article in Alliance magazine by Timothy Ogden (one in a series of articles) that notes the usual "lack of accountability" vulnerability of foundations, but also notes the particular difficulty of speaking truth to power at the Gates Foundation. This is generated by the size of the foundation (about 15 Rockefeller Foundations and bigger than Italy's aid programme) but also by its ability to focus (for example it packs a very heavy punch in the global health community). Ogden notes that very few people he contacted for his article were willing to have quotes assigned to them. Would that be the same for other donors?

2. Publish What You Fund's Pilot Aid Transparency Index: x ray vision + x-tabs

In an index-laden world, this is an essential measure. The World Bank's IDA arm is the most transparent of 58 entities ranked, with China the 4th worst. UK DFID is 5th from the top while USAID is in the bottom half. The African Development Bank came in 4th and UK's CDC in the bottom quarter. I would have liked to have seen more cross-tab analyses such as: transparency x funds delivery, transparency x aid quality, and transparency x administrative spend. But this is a solid first outing for an indicator which I hope becomes a staple guideline for those working in development.

3."Scholars who became practitioners"-necessary, sufficient & (sometimes) helpful?

This is a CGD paper by Nora Lustig. Nora is an IDS Board member and was on the IFPRI Board when I was on the staff. The paper is about how research took centre stage at the birth of Progresa/Opportunidades, the Mexican conditional cash transfer programme. The conclusion is that the 2 main architects of Progresa, Santiago Levy and Pepe Gomez de Leon, were scholars turned practitioners and this had much to do with the detachment of being able to see beyond the political status quo, being able to marshal evidence on design and on their insistence on having a rigorous impact evaluation (which has proven so important in the programme's political sustainability and its replication elsewhere). Lustig is careful to say that it is not clear when or whether scholars turned practitioners are necessary or sufficient for successful policymaking (I can think of plenty of instances when scholars would be pretty unhelpful). I suspect that Levy and Gomez de Leon were pretty shrewd political operators too.

4. Poverty in Middle Income countries: 72% whichever way you look at it

A new study from OPHI. the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative which comes up (remarkably) with the same middle-income country poverty percentage (72% of the world's poor) as Andy Sumner's New Bottom Billion study of last year. And the intensity of poverty in low and middle income countries appears similar. The question is, what to do about it, and even more difficultly, what is the role for international development agencies? While Lustig's paper above highlights the home grown nature of Progresa, IFPRI as an international organisation was clearly key in playing a validating role.

Why do people still deny climate change?

2011-12-16T11:15:00.006Z

Dear readers, apologies for the silence. I have to spend too much time writing proposals and don't have enough enough time to write papers and blogs.

In any case, in a post-Durban-Climate-Change-what-does-it-all-mean mode (and see my IDS colleague Matthew Lockwood's insightful analysis here) I was browsing salon.com and came across this post by Gene Lyons which led me to this fascinating paper by Clive Hamilton (actually a year old) entitled "Why we resist the truth about climate change".

It's a question I often ask myself, wondering what it will take to change people's minds.

Hamilton's paper argues that climate deniers are those whose cultural identity is most threatened by the implications of climate change (in the US this means white, male and conservative).

He states:

"Those on the left are as predisposed to sift evidence through ideological filters; but in the case of global warming it happens that the evidence overwhelmingly endorses the liberal beliefs that unrestrained capitalism is jeopardising future well-being, that comprehensive government intervention is needed, and that the environment movement was right all along. For neo-conservatives accepting these is intolerable, and it is easier emotionally and more convenient politically to reject climate science."

It is a paper full of troubling (but gorgeous) quotes:

"In these circumstances, facts quail before beliefs, and there is something poignant about scientists who continue to adhere to the idea that people repudiate climate science because they suffer from inadequacy of information. In fact, denial is due to a surplus of culture rather than a deficit of information."

and

"Deniers have adroitly used the instruments of democratic practice to erode the authority of professional expertise, including skilful exploitation of a free media, appeal to freedom of information laws, the mobilisation of a group of vociferous citizens, and the promotion of their own to public office. At least in the United States and Australia, democracy has defeated science."

and more

"Innocently pursuing their research, climate scientists were unwittingly destabilising the political and social order. They could not know that the new facts they were uncovering would threaten the existence of powerful industrialists, compel governments to choose between adhering to science and remaining in power, corrode comfortable expectations about the future, expose hidden resentment of technical and cultural elites and, internationally, shatter the post-colonial growth consensus between North and South. Their research has brought us to one of those rare historical fracture points when knowledge diverges from power, portending a long period of struggle before the two are once more aligned."

Hamilton then draws parallels with Einstein's publications on the General Theory of Relativity pointing out how his scientific views were conflated with his political views (internationalist and pacifist) and how strong forces were quickly lined up against his ideas (the One Hundred Authors Against Einstein has eerie parallels to today's petitions from climate "skeptics").

Final quote

"The success of climate denialism in its various guises reveals how shallow the roots of the Enlightenment sink. When superstition was swept away by science and reason, our penchant for self-deception merely lost its cover. In the most vital test of our capacity to protect the future through the deployment of rationality and well-informed foresight the “rational animal” is manifestly failing."

And if you doubt the success of climate denialism, check out the race for the Republican Presidential nomination where candidates are taking pot shots at frontrunner Newt Gingrich for having once spoken in favour of Cap and Trade.

Hamilton reminds us that it is not the fanaticism of the active deniers that is the real worry, but the susceptibility of the rest of us to wishful thinking. It something is uncomfortable or threatens the current order, best to think it will not happen or if it does it won't affect me much. It is the "desire to disbelieve" that is the threat and this "deepens as the scale of the threat grows, until a point is reached when the facts can be resisted no longer."

So when can the facts no longer be resisted? The paper is silent on this.

For me the paper reaffirms the reality that knowledge is inevitably wrapped up in power and politics--how it is constructed, when it is used, how it is used--and that behaviour is guided by identity. And incidentally it is not behaviour that researchers are immune to (not enough researchers actually change their mind about something on the basis of new evidence).

For those of us invested in knowledge driven change, it is a sobering reminder of the need to influence politically on the basis of research that is done as apolitically as humanly possible.

MVP again

2011-11-28T16:18:00.004Z

You would have thought I'd have had enough by now.

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition-- a big deal journal in the human nutrition world--has just published a paper by the MVP team on "Multisectoral intervention to accelerate reductions in childstunting: an observational study from 9 sub-Saharan African countries". The Conclusion in the Abstract "These findings provide encouraging evidence that a package of multisector interventions has the potential to produce reductions in childhood stunting".

It is such a shame that the impact evaluation design does not allow us to say anything more than that. After all one would be surprised if a multisector package did not have the potential to reduce childhood stunting.

The need to word things so carefully originates from the lack of comparator stunting data from similar communities over the same time period. If we had this we could compare the stunting reductions to see if they are faster in the MVP villages.

The comparison the authors make is:

MVP village declines in stunting over the 2005-6 to 2008-9 period vs stunting declines in those same 9 countries, but at (a) a national level and (b) over the period 1988-2008.

If the authors had data from the same time period and from similar (even better, matched) areas then we could plausibly attribute a certain percent of the declines to the MVP.

So, the paper is not able to say too much.

The data are encouraging in that there is a significant downward trend in stunting in 6 of the 9 sites, but we would expect such a big intervention to have an effect on stunting rates in any case.

The real questions remain: (a) how much of the effect is due to the MVP? and, more fundamentally, (b) what happens after the MVP finishes?

DFID x 0.02 = ?

2011-11-22T17:34:00.009Z

Just what can a foundation achieve with a budget between 1-2% of DFID's? Well, this is the spend size of relatively large foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation.

As one of the participants of the Bellagio Initiative Summit on Wellbeing, Philanthropy and Development pointed out, television programmes like the UK’s “The Secret Millionaire” remind us, small amounts of money can transform lives so annual giving of $100m-$200m can have substantial transformative power. The question is how to maximise that power.

The obvious thing for Foundations to do is to work with those with deep knowledge of the context in question to unearth, develop and test innovations (technological, organisational, social), and to link up early in the process with those who might scale the innovations (e.g. National Governments and development agencies).

It is clear from the 2 days I have been at this summit that these kinds of partnerships are the exception rather than the norm. Listening to voices and constituencies on the ground and linking up with partners who have the capacity to scale does not happen nearly often enough. Why? My hunches:

(a) there are few incentives for foundations to do this. It is much easier to develop a pilot that shows a temporary positive effect but has weak origins in the context and little legacy in terms of what it leaves behind, and

(b) power gets in the way. Public development agencies (at least the bilateral ones) are directly accountable to taxpayers in ways that Foundations are not. The former are custodians of everyone’s money, the latter are custodians of one family’s money.

Without the right checks and balances Foundations can get carried away with their own sense of power and this can make linking with communities and development agencies seem like unnecessary exertions.

But my sense is that the appetite for change is growing, perhaps pushed by the transparency and accountability agenda.

One response to accountability and transparency is “just make sure we do good things” by, say, improving standard M&E. Another response is “make sure we do the best we can”. While the first response is a minimum, the second surely has to be the goal of visionary philanthropists.

If done right, this way of working promises more sustainable and transformative action.

But it will require a greater acceptance of the need to invest more in relationship building, a greater willingness to work with others’ agendas, a greater preparedness to be seemingly sidetracked and a willingness to develop and use the tools to redefine and assess impact in these new contexts.

Working with others from different cultures is hard and risky. But the potential benefits are enormous—much greater than 1-2% of what DFID can achieve.

Foundations are well placed to calculate those risks--and then to bear them.

Philanthropists: Dare to be Different

2011-11-21T21:43:00.002Z

I’m currently in Bellagio for the Bellagio Initiative on the Future of Philanthropy and Development in the Pursuit of Human Wellbeing, organised by IDS, the Resource Alliance and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Foundations spend private money. They don’t have to chase money like us mere mortals. As such they can dare to be different from public sector funders of development. They can afford to spurn fads and be fashionably unfashionable.

They should, for example,

• Help redefine the objectives of development

Public development agencies are more focused on the tangible development outcomes—these are straightforward to explain to taxpayers. Philanthropists can focus on other dimensions of wellbeing: trust, solidarity, self confidence, and freedoms. Wellbeing is important because it a truer way of assessing what it is to live well, but also because the nonmaterial dimensions force us to be more grounded, because to affect the nonmaterial dimensions of living well requires a greater understanding of context.

• Do things that others cannot

What is it that philanthropists have a comparative advantage in?
o Work on unfashionable issues
o Take risks and accept failure as a part of the innovation process—redefine success, don’t get trapped in electoral cycles.
o Reproduce—support the creation of other foundations

• Organise for the long view

Many philanthropists take a lifetime to build up their success and money—why do they expect to be able to effect change in 3 years?

o Get a better balance between delivering services for people in urgent need and building resilient societies, societies with strong organisations and institutions that can deal with unanticipated shocks.
o Build leaders and leadership. We know how important leadership is at all levels—household, community, district, national—in all sectors.

And yet, there seems to be convergence between the taxpayer driven results for development and the philanthropies’ impact innovations work. What is driving this? The private sector backgrounds of the new philanthropists? The need to work with public sector development agencies? The human desire to look good?

I don’t know, but we need philanthropy to dare to be different. The last thing we need is a McDevelopment monoculture of goals, ideas, innovations and actions.

More tomorrow as I try to absorb the exciting ideas swirling around the hilltops.

Richard Jolly: From Structural Adjustment to Human Development

2011-11-18T11:07:00.008Z

Yesterday we kicked off a two day workshop "From Structural Adjustment to Human Development" in honour of Professor Sir Richard Jolly, an IDS Associate and former IDS Director.

I first met Richard in the mid 1990s when he was the Chair of the rather obscure UN/ACC-SCN, the UN's standing committee on nutrition. The SCN's aim is to bring together different parts of the UN working on nutrition to help the whole be greater than the sum of the parts.

Watching Richard chair this 2 day meeting, I learned 5 things about him: (1) his deep commitment to the UN (why else would he have put up with those squabbling UN agencies?), (2) the breadth of his intellect (he can talk agriculture, sanitation and infant feeding with the best of them), (3) the respect in which he was held (he had recently worked with Frances Stewart and Andrea Cornia on the ground-breaking Adjustment with a Human Face), (4) his relentless focus on putting people at the heart of development and (5) his optimism and total lack of cynicism (essential to get those sometimes warring factions to agree).

His contributions to development and to development research (for he is a man of action as well as of intellect)

* "Redistribution with Growth (which rejected the early 70s separation of optimal growth and redistribution) -- the Occupy movement would be inspired by this
* Adjustment with a Human face (which argued, amongst other things, that the poorest should be protected from austerity measures) -a guideline to any policymaker grappling with the global recession
* the regional Human Development Reports (Richard was instrumental in getting the HDRs going) and their ability to create a space to speak truth to power and cut through GDP/capita-only narratives--important in the context of the Arab Spring uprisings, I am told.

On a day to day level Richard is a delight to have at IDS--always generous with this time and never pulling the "when I was Director" routine (at least to my face!).

Richard remains active, working to spearhead a new coalition to get inequality issues higher up the development agenda. His energy and optimism are quite timeless.

Why India Needs a National Nutrition Strategy

2011-11-13T19:44:00.004Z

This article was just published in the British Medical Journal.

Over the past 15 years India’s economic growth rate has been unprecedented. The International Monetary Fund reports an average growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) of nearly 6% in the 1990s and of 8% in 2000-10. The economic growth has not, however, been associated with corresponding reductions in the rates of childhood undernutrition. The National Family Health Survey, which provides India’s most authoritative statistics on nutrition status, showed that 43% of children under 5 years old were underweight for age in 1998-9; by 2005-6 the percentage had only dropped to 40%. At that rate of progress India will not reach its millennium development goal target (to halve the proportion of underweight children by 2015) until 2043. By contrast, China has already met its goal and Brazil is expected to do so by 2015.

Undernutrition is responsible for 35% of deaths among children under 5 and 11% of the total global disease burden. It also reduces schooling attainment: an improvement in height for age z scores of 1 is a predictor of an extra half a year of schooling and substantially increases the likelihood of being poorer later in life since less schooling is a predictor of lower wages (46% in a longitudinal study from Guatemala) and lower lifetime incomes.

During 1981-2005 India’s poverty rate fell from 60% to 42%. This decline is similar to China’s more lauded poverty reduction (a fall from 40% to 29%) over the same period. Yet unlike China, India is not reducing undernutrition. Given the importance of childhood nutrition it is important to ask why high levels of undernutrition are so persistent in India.

(For more see the above link).

How much money is invested in nutrition?

2011-11-07T10:02:00.007Z

It is usually easier to find out how much money is being spent on something than how much money should be spent on it. Not so, nutrition.

Thanks to many cost-effectiveness studies we can isolate the 13 essential nutrition interventions and we know roughly how much it costs to make a big dent in undernutrition rates. For example, the Scaling Up Nutrition movement (SUN) estimates the annual amount to be $10 billion.

But how much is actually spent by donors and by multilateral agencies? It turns out this is a really difficult question to answer, at least for nutrition.

Last week my IDS colleague Stephen Spratt and I were at Action Against Hunger at their London offices. We are working with them on a project on innovative financing for nutrition.

Stephen is an expert in development finance and has ideas about how to finance nutrition scale ups, drawing on ideas from climate financing and a range of transactions taxes.

But to do this modelling of financing and taxes, we need to have accurate and specific nutrition resoruce data.

There are two types of intervention to assess current investment flows for: direct and indirect.

The direct interventions are things like breastfeeding promotion, complementary feeding promotion (for infants post weaning) and micronutrient supplementation. It should be easy to get resource flow data for this tangible category, right? Wrong. It turns out that the CRS data held at OECD DAC for donor countries has a category "basic nutrition programme", but when you trawl it project by project, only about a third of that spend is actually on one of the 13 essential nutrition interventions. Interestingly other CRS line items, not labelled with nutrition but with obvious connections to nutrition, contain more spending on the essential nutrition interventions than the "basic nutrition programme" line item.

For the indirect interventions such as agriculture, social protection, health, water, sanitation, women's empowerment it gets even more complicated. Do we use indirect intervention spending (a) only from CRS categories that have something to do with nutrition, (b) from all CRS categories, but only for indirect projects that have nutrition outcome aspirations or (c) from all CRS categories for all indirect projects, whether or not they have nutrition outcome aspirations? I favour the second and the third, because the second gives us the full amount that is being spent on nutrition-focused indirect interventions and the third gives us the potential resource flows that could be supercharged for nutrition.

On top of all this, the range of helpfulness from the 6 bilaterals and the 5 multilaterals approached by Action Against Hunger for clarifications was very wide, with some being right on top of resource flows, some not knowing, and some unhelpful.

The bigger point to be made here is how on earth are we going to be able to track SUN's progress if we cannot even get a fix on resources flows to nutrition? Moreover what are the obligations on agencies to share their resource flow information by issue? There is a clear job for Publish What You Fund and International Aid Transparency Initiative here.

For nutrition, the CRS clearly needs a revamp and on transparency part of the SUN initiative should be to get some sunlight onto nutrition resources flows. Otherwise the SUN will be operating in the dark.

Do blogs change anything?

2011-10-29T17:41:00.015+01:00

I was a blogger before the Internet. In 1990 while at IFPRI I set up and edited the IFPRI Research Bulletin as an internal summary of the research my colleagues were doing. The goal was to help us all find out about each other's work in an easy and quick way and to stimulate debate.

This is one of the key motivators for me to blog: when I see something interesting I want to reflect on it, share it and listen to what others think about it.

But are blogs anything more than mere vanity projects?

Back in August, David McKenzie and Berk Ozler released a paper "The Impact of Economics Blogs". They pose 4 questions of economics blogs:

1. Do they affect the dissemination of economics research? (Yes.)

They note that RePEc (Research Papers in Economics--a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 75 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics) working paper downloads increase by 20-30 fold after a paper has been mentioned on a popular blog. More formally they regress abstract views on papers mentioned in the top 50 blogs and allow for lags and reverse causality and find big impacts of blog mentions on views.

2. Do they affect the reputation of their creators? (Yes.)

Here they use a list of most admired economists (derived from a poll of US academics) and combine that with the top 500 economists in terms of RePEc downloads. The run a probit regression (1=on admired list, 0 not) and try to explain that with variables such as whether the economists regularly blog and where they rank in the RePEc download ratings. It turns out that those who blog regularly are more admired than their RePEc ratings would suggest (although people are surely admired for more than their writing--whether articles or blogs!).

3. Do they change attitudes of readers or lead to their increased knowledge? (Yes.)

Here the authors used the launch of their own blog (Development Impact) on April 2011 to randomise encouragement to read the blog among other researchers. They did a baseline and follow up. As they note their study design has good internal validity (i.e. it is good at assessing whether their blog has an impact) but that they can say less about other blogs (less strong external validity) although they argue that their blog is not atypical of other blogs (although it is a World Bank blog).

They find that those encouraged to read the blog (the treatment group) were more likely to be interested in working as a researcher at the World Bank, had a more positive perception of the World Bank's research quality, were more aware of the authors of the blog, relaxed their perceptions that World Bank staff face censorship over blogs and changed their opinions on the effectiveness of different interventions.

4. Do they influence policy? (Don't know, probably yes)

This is the part of the paper that has the weakest evidence base and is essentially a search for stories which cannot be verified. The bloggers interviewed cannot put their finger on specific policies changed as a result of their blogs, but then again that is not how policy works. A better strategy would be to see how widely policymakers read blogs. But the strong suspicion has to be if policymakers are influenced by research, and if the blogs are any good, the blogs should enhance the likelihood of research being influential).

So, blogging seems to matter. I liked this paper because:

* of the creative use of mixed methods

* it is careful and well done

* it shows that randomised experiments don't have to be intrusive or expensive

* asks an important question in this blogoshere world and shows us that we can actually do experimental research on how policy processes use information and evidence

* it generates research questions for others to pursue

I would have liked to have seen more on whether blogs lead to less diversity in who is talking to who (I suspect the bonding impact amongst the like minded is quite high and the bridging factor across silos less strong), who has the luxury of being able to blog (e.g. institutional support) and how blogs change power dynamics in terms of whose voice is amplified?

The authors end up by asking, if there are all these benefits, why aren't there more bloggers? They suggest that the supply is lower than it should be because the barriers to doing it are large (emotional, time, writing skill etc.).

Now for the paper on Tweets.....

ABC, Easy as 123?

2011-10-27T07:18:00.007+01:00

Yesterday Brazilian Minister Marco Farani, visited IDS, met with some of our staff and gave a seminar on Brazil's approach to development and its emerging approach to development cooperation. Minister Farani is the Director of the Brazilian Agency for Cooperation (ABC).

The talk, together with the Q and A, was very interesting. Mr Farani made several key points

* the terms "North" and "South" will soon become as anachronistic as the terms "East" and "West" became after the end of the Cold War

* Brazil's approach to development cooperation is, at the moment, project based, pragmatic and underpinned by solidarity, not ideology or commerce

* Brazil's lack of a "past" (e.g. colonial) means it comes to Africa with less baggage than most existing donors. It has opened up 17 new embassies in Africa under President Lula Da Silva and trade with Africa has quadrupled in the past 10 years. Moreover at least 50% of the population has an African heritage.

* Already Brazil is being asked to give advice about its tropical agriculture (its agricultural research system EMBRAPA is widely respected throughout the world) and on its approaches to social protection (ditto).

* The Minister thought Brazil's development cooperation programme would specialise in environment, agriculture and social protection, but not necessarily worrying about becoming a world leader in these areas--Mr Farani reminded us, after all, that Brazil is still a recipient of ODA from Germany and Japan.

* The need to manage expectations--Brazil's domestic success in development will not necessarily mean it has the answers for other countries

* Brazil will probably retain a slightly heterodox development cooperation path, going its own way, with no plans, at least in the short term, a DAC member.

The Minister was admirably positive and optimistic about the path ahead making it sound, if not exactly easy, then not very bumpy either.

It will be interesting to see how it plays out. What are the next steps beyond cooperation projects? How will leadership on environment manifest itself? How will popular opinion within Brazil constrain any potential new ODA programme? When will commercial pressures begin to crowd in on the development cooperation programme? In which areas will the approach be heterodox and in which way? Will there be new ways of approaching certain development issues that have not been tried elsewhere but nevertheless have strong potential?

There are many important questions and Minister Farani made it very clear that research and knowledge would be at the heart of any new development cooperation programme.

The IDS BRICS initiative will be working with the Government of Brazil and our research, NGO and business partners in Brazil as well as DFID on these and other questions, comparing perspectives, approaches and issues across the other BRICS countries, looking for commonalities and contrasts.

IDS Fellows Alex Shankland and Lizbeth Navas Aleman are the leads at IDS in case any of you are interested in finding out more.

Disaster Diplomacy

2011-10-25T23:37:00.008+01:00

I was in Oslo yesterday, presenting some of the findings from the Reimagining Development work we have been doing at IDS to the Norwegian Research Council/NORAD Annual NORGLOBAL meetings.

I met some very interesting researchers doing great things at the interface of development and environment. One of them, Ilan Kelman, gave me a copy of his forthcoming book, Disaster Diplomacy. I began flipping through it on the flight back and found myself getting engrossed.

The basic question the book seeks to answer is: do disaster-related activities support or inhibit diplomacy processes?

Do disasters that affect all adversaries alike provide a space where differences can be put aside temporarily in the name of saving lives? And will this "time out", and the trust building that joint disaster-related action might foster, serve as a spur to the future construction of diplomacy?

More specifically, (1) do disaster-related activities influence diplomatic activities? (2) are the influenced diplomatic activities ongoing or new? (3) are the parties trying to make the diplomacy fail or succeed? (4) how long does the connection between the disaster and diplomacy activities last and what determines their longevity? and (5) do the disaster diplomacy activities address long standing livelihood vulnerabilities?

Kelman poses these questions of 18 case studies, ranging from food crisis (e.g. Ethiopia-Eritrea 2000-2002), tsunamis (e.g. Aceh, Sri Lanka), hurricanes (e.g. Katrina), and earthquakes (e.g. 2001 and India-Pakistan).

His conclusions are bleak. Disaster Diplomacy—at least based on these case studies and with the focus on the level of the State level--tends to fail. He concludes by saying that disaster diplomacy at the level of individuals may be happening and this may pave the way for states to practice it effectively. This is just one of the spin offs that he and others will pursue further in their work.

I was interested in this work because it displays the hallmarks of good research:

* A bridging of different worlds (disaster and diplomacy)
* Being careful about having a general framework that is flexible enough to be applied credibly to highly varied case studies, but in a way that allows those case studies to be aggregated in a convincing narrative
* Being brave enough to report a negative result (disaster diplomacy does not happen—imagine how personally advantaged the author would have been had the other result occurred)
* Being a general enough idea to have application elsewhere. I am thinking about Disaster Development—do disasters provide an opportunity to influence subsequent development in ways that are enduring and support the livelihoods of the most vulnerable?

Disasters are likely to become more frequent as population increases, current resource use patterns are maintained and climate change generates increased unpredictability. So we need to know more about how to create silver linings out of disasters—whether those linings are diplomatic or development orientated. This book is a useful way of thinking about the challenges to doing that.

Five things I learned from commenting on the MVP

2011-10-22T15:14:00.007+01:00

Well, that was interesting.

After my rather mild comments about the MVP last week we had the reply from Jeff Sachs and Prabhjot Singh.

Then we had some other blogs too.

David McKenzie provided a rebuttal of the response from the Millennium Promise team to me (many thanks David, even though we do not know each other).

Berk Ozler notes the role that the UN and the funders have played in the MVP. Michael Clemens from CGD weighs in too.

So after all the hoo-hah (a brilliant English term for fuss), here are 5 things I learned in the course of the last week.

1. If you offer a critique of the MVP, get ready for a full-on "stern" response. There seems to be an "if you are not with us then you are against us" narrative at work.

2. Get ready for any content in your critique to be drowned out by the impact issue. My blog was primarily about how to use the upcoming impact assessment to get a fix on how sustainable the MVP experiment would be once the donor money had gone. None of the above blogs mentioned this point.

3. The powerful can also be seduced by the "I've seen it work" argument. No need for boring old impact assessments, it seems.

4. One could make a career (of sorts) out of debating the MVP. There is a micro-industry of MVP debate out there. Lots of good stuff, but it must get a bit all-consuming.

5. The DFID funded evaluation of the MVP is more needed than I had realised. Well done DFID. And I will be the first to congratulate the MVP team if rigorous impact assessments show a positive impact attributable to the MVP.

Signing off on this topic for a while...

On World Food Day who is most committed to reducing hunger?

2011-10-16T11:11:00.014+01:00

Today is World Food Day.

It is usually a time when lots of measures of hunger are updated and released. All of these measures use an out of date methodology for assessing hunger (based on food balance sheets which are estimates of food availability, not access or utilisation) but that is another story.

More importantly World Food Day is a time to reflect on--and redouble--efforts to reduce hunger around the world.

But how do we know who is taking hunger reduction seriously?

It is vital to separate hunger outcomes from hunger reduction efforts and effort has to be contextualised by the resources and capacity available to a country.

IDS, together with NGO partners, with support from Irish Aid, has developed a Hunger Reduction Commitment Index (HRCI) to try to measure who is making the biggest effort to reduce hunger. Using secondary data (9 variables covering anti hunger spending, policies and legislation) we ranked 22 developing countries and 21 donor countries.

This is the kind of thing the FAO should be doing, and I hope they eventually take it over, but for now we are committed to developing it further.

The index ranking is still a draft (it is being peer reviewed) but the initial results are striking:

1. The top countries are Malawi (best), Guatemala, Brazil, Senegal with Ghana and Ethiopia tied at 5th. The bottom are Guinea Bissau (worst) Zambia, China, Nepal, with Lesotho and Bangladesh tied at 16th. China is the big surprise, coming in at 19th. It is a surprise because it usually ranks at the top of indices about who is doing well on hunger, but once we take out its hunger reduction numbers, the explicit commitment to hunger reduction does not show up in policies, spending or legislation. Of course if you have that level of hunger reduction (fuelled by economic growth), explicit commitment probably does not matter so much. That is why it is important to cross-reference commitment with hunger levels and resources available.

2. Once you cross-reference the commitment levels with hunger, wealth, administrative capacity and voice and accountability scores, several off- diagonal situations are highlighted:high hunger and low commitment (notably Guinea Bissau, Zambia, Bangladesh, but also Nepal and Lesotho), low wealth and high commitment (e.g. Malawi, Ethiopia, and Tanzania), high administrative capacity and low commitment (e.g. Lesotho and China) and low public accountability and voice but high commitment (Ethiopia). This contextualisation makes the HRCI more than an index, but helps it play a diagnostic role, guiding action from different stakeholders (governments, civil society, donors) to where their efforts can make the biggest difference.

3. On the donor countries, Denmark does best (with Finland second, and Ireland and Belgium joint third) with Switzerland worst. The UK comes in at joint 5th with France and Norway. South Korea, the new kid on the donor block, comes in at 12th--higher than Japan (13) Canada (14), the US (18).

We also collected primary data on 10 indicators in 3 countries (Zambia, Bangladesh and the UK) from in country "expert" panels (of around 30 people in each location, selected for as wide a range and balance of perspectives as possible) to give those governments a steer as to where these expert groups think they are relatively strong and relatively weak. For example in the UK the panel felt the UK government was strong on using evidence to inform policy but weak on working in a whole of government way.

I am a fan of relative rankings. I believe they provide positive motivation for action. Our hope is that civil society will find this index to be a useful addition to their toolkit in terms of putting pressure on governments to do something about hunger rather than simply talk about it.

We are developing the next phase of this work and will continue refining the index, updating the secondary data scores, updating the primary data collection while expanding the number of countries, working with civil society partners in country to help them use the index to support mobilisation against hunger and to set up a baseline for evaluation of the index.

The full draft report can be found here.

Jeff Sachs: LVP of the MVP?

2011-10-14T13:51:00.002+01:00

I have a lot of time for Jeff Sachs: sharp intellect, unflagging energy, extraordinary communication ability and gallons of boldness.

But when it comes to things like the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), in many ways, he seems to be his team's Least Valuable Player (LVP). He is, in short, a lightning rod. I think Madeleine Bunting called him a marmite person--you love him or hate him (although I am nowhere near these extremes).

The 2 main critiques of the MVP seem to be (a) of course if you spend $60 per head per person for 5 years you will see dramatic development improvements--but what happens when the donor money runs out? and (b) actually we don't know if the impacts are there because the MVP has no baseline comparison group of villages (and there is absolutely no technical reason the MVP experiment could not have been randomised at the village level a la Progresa).

The second critique seems sound to me. It is hard to understand why baselines of case control villages were not undertaken. The second critique gets us impact folk excited, but I suspect it is the first critique that is more widely supported--who on earth will pay for this once the donors leave?

But it seems to me that this ownership and sustainability issue can be evaluated in the impact analysis, at least in a plausibility kind of way (i.e. we won't really know if it sustainable until the external money is taken away).

For example, one could measure whether the MPV funds:

(a) crowd in or crowd out private or state contributions to infrastructure development

(b) lead to more business activity

(d) lead to more domestically financed NGOs

(e) helps secure rights (property, user of civil), and

(f) build a stronger capacity to fight for state resources.

One could also do some knowledge, attitude and perceptions work with policymakers, community leaders and NGOs that is clever enough to get around self-interest and get answers to questions about about sustainability and ownership.

These kinds of questions are vital, it seems to me, for the next phase of the MVP evaluation equation--an equation that Jeff Sachs would do well to take himself out of for a while...

When Worlds Collide

2011-10-09T18:10:00.003+01:00

For the past year or so I have been working with folks who regularly publish in the leading health journals and with the editors of those journals. It has been an eye-opening experience.

Now I am used to working with those from a public health background--I have an undergrad degree with joint honours in Food Science and Food Economics--and one of my PhD supervisors, Prof. Reynaldo Martorell is a leading light in Public Health Nutrition. But nothing could prepare me for this parallel universe.

Some examples:

* having my writing described as "so ugly" by a health reviewer -- OK it's more prose than poetry, but come on..

* being a part of a systematic review that surveyed 14000 papers and came up with 3 that met the inclusion criteria--and that, apparently, is OK!

* having to define "development" as an "intervention"

* trying to write a very wide ranging paper in 3000-4000 words because readers of these journals will not tolerate more (why not?)

* having been told my paper is going before a "hanging panel" (gulp)

* being surprised to be on a list of authors for a paper just because I contributed a few ideas

* being listed at the end of the long list of authors on a paper because this is what the grand old men and women are put

I have to say I have learned an enormous amount too:

* about the strengths and weaknesses of systematic reviews and meta analyses

* about malaria (why don't more social scientists work on it?)

* that re-reviews of systematic review papers are rarely done (why not?)

* about how complex our development language is to those outside development (complexity fundamentalism versus the epidemiological fundamentalism of the health research community)

And, most importantly, about how health can add value to understanding development and vice versa. In fact this is the theme of the special series of papers we are hoping to publish simultaneously in a leading health journal and in a leading development journal (and the working title of the series is the title of this blog).

I will keep you updated on this interplanetary journey.

UK Attitudes to Aid: Minding the Gap Between Political Leaders and the Public

2011-10-06T17:36:00.014+01:00

This morning I was interviewed by a TV reporter on the results from the UK Public Opinion Monitor on public attitudes to aid. It will be interesting to see how they present my evidence. I have a sinking feeling I will be presented as an aid-sceptic. I hope my instincts are wrong on this occasion.

Quite unrelatedly (I think) Andrew Mitchell, the UK's Secretary of State for International Development, was interviewed by the Independent newspaper in Saturday’s edition. He cited some encouraging private polling which found that the number of people who agree that “even as we deal with our deficit, we should be proud of our aid commitments” has risen from 48 per cent three months ago to 51 per cent at present, while 38 per cent disagree.

It is good news that this most recent polling shows support is holding firm and perhaps it signals a positive response to DFID's efforts in 2011 to demonstrate the positive force that aid can be.

Results from the UK Public Opinion Monitor (UK POM), run by IDS, had shown a deterioration in public support for aid in 2010.

In June 2010, 63% of people in the panel thought aid should be cut in context of addressing deficit. By November 2010, this figure had risen to 71%.

When we investigated the longer term views, the results were more positive. In March 2011 we asked UK POM participants what they thought about aid spending in 5 –10 years time. The negative response fell significantly: 51% thought aid should be cut in the longer term.

And in June of 2011 when we asked UK POM participants whether they agreed with the statement that their lives would become "much more dependent on events elsewhere" in 5 years time and again in 50 years time, the 50 year agreement numbers increased dramatically.

So some of the perceptions about aid are clearly linked to the current economic conditions in the UK and in the longer term people feel more supportive of aid and understand we will be living in a more interdependent world (where aid will be important in building political and economic relationships).

But the news from the Governor of the Bank of England today "the most serious financial crisis at least since the 1930s if not ever" makes the longer term feel even further away.

So what will build support for aid now?

• first, recognise the strong base we already have--the UK public feels the need to help--UK POM results from early 2010 show that 6 out of 10 of the UK public feel we have a “moral obligation” to help poor people wherever they live

• second, more evidence about when aid works is also important--systematic reviews are beginning to marshal an important type of evidence, and the ones I have read show that there are plenty of interventions--many supported by aid--that are having a real positive impact on people's lives

• third, the UK Aid Watchdog (ICAI) is becoming more important as another avenue for citizens to ask questions about aid effectiveness and for aid's effectiveness to emerge

• fourth, contextualising helps -- when we asked UK POM participants whether they agreed that aid to India should be at £280 million per year, 66% disagreed, but when we pointed out that India contained more people living in poverty than sub Saharan Africa, the percent who disagreed dropped to 50.

• fifth, those of us who have seen the sustainable support that aid can give to those living in the most desperate conditions must tell those stories to their friends, families, neighbours, communities and MPs

• finally, and I think most important, we need to be more prepared to support those directly affected by aid in sharing their experiences of aid--these are the most authentic voices and testimonies to the strengths and weaknesses of aid

Leadership is about doing the right thing, not necessarily the popular thing. But when will the gap between the leadership of the main political parties and the public on the commitment to aid become unsustainable? Those who believe that aid can do great things must support the leaders of the 3 main parties as long as the evidence supports us. For now, it does.

Is Business the New development?

2011-10-04T19:37:00.002+01:00

IDS organised a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference called “Is business the new aid?” The title was deliberately focused on getting a sharp response from the panel members (chaired by Lanre Akinola, Editor of This is Africa, Financial Times with Barbara Stocking, CEO of Oxfam, Sue Clark, Director of Corporate Affairs, SAB Miller, Stephen O’Brien, the DFID Minister, and me).

Everyone on the panel agreed that the answer to the question was “no”. For me the answer was “no” and “no”. No because businesses creating jobs and tax revenues are much more powerful than aid in reducing poverty and no because unlike businesses, aid has a responsibility to work for the most vulnerable.

We want aid to create the conditions where progressive growth can flourish—helping with governance (legitimate political stability, inclusive property and user rights, transparent recourse and justice mechanisms), with infrastructure (to reduce transactions costs for everyone), and with pro-poor institutional innovations (e.g. supporting smallholder farmers to work together to enter and influence value chain rules). The business schools call this reducing “beta risk” to allow (small and medium) enterprises to continue taking their own “alpha” risks. By progressive growth I mean growth that generates decent jobs (Stephen O’Brien called this “jobful” growth), that reduces poverty and is environmentally responsible.

I was struck by how relaxed the audience at the fringe event was about the role of business in development (I was also reminded that all 3 DFID Ministers have substantial business experience). The experiences of the BRICS countries seem to have changed the development community’s attitudes to business.

But the problem remains: how to tell whether the "business and development" success stories on display at panels such as these are: (a) genuine successes (have they been as independently and rigorously assessed as aid interventions are?) and (b) not just window dressing?

There is no way of knowing this at the moment. We need much more independent research on this issue. Collectively DFID, 3ie and Aus Aid have recently funded about 200 systematic reviews on development interventions—each of these will focus on 20 or so studies, making for at least 4000 high quality studies of development interventions. My guess is that there are less than 40 such rigorous studies of the impacts on business on poverty. That is why IDS will focus on building up the evidence base in this area over the next 5 years.

After our event, there was a reception hosted by the Conservative Friends of International Development. It was packed. Andrew Mitchell has clearly been very effective in building support for development within his party—certainly with the elder statesmen and stateswomen and the younger members of the party who have experienced the Umubano work in Rwanda. The strong support from David Cameron is important too. But what about those in the middle? Their resolve will surely be tested in the next 2 years as it dawns on the UK public that the aid budget will increase by 40% by 2014-15. George Osborne’s speech to Conference yesterday “we’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business” is a sign that the UK is reining in its green leadership ambitions and provides a contrast to Andrew Mitchell’s frequently repeated phrase “we’re not going to balance the books on the backs of the poorest”.

Encouragingly, there are no signals that the government’s stance is softening on the importance of DFID’s efforts to support international development. (Indeed the close out of the Conference by David Cameron will be dedicated to mobilising support from the membership for famine relief for the most vulnerable in Somalia.) But perhaps an even more important test of the Government’s resolve on development will materialise if it emerges that its development efforts are holding back UK businesses. That is why it is so important for DFID to work across government to head off these potential tradeoffs and identify the things that BIS, DECC, DEFRA and the rest can do to support development without damaging UK business interests.

When does business have the biggest positive impact on development? That is the research question. Is development bad for UK businesses? That is the political one.

Forget the Tobin Tax, What About a Panic Tax?

2011-09-28T16:15:00.002+01:00

So the President Barroso of the EC has proposed a Financial Transactions (or Tobin) Tax. Bill Gates is leaning that way too.

If the arguments for and against such a tax are well known, the evidence is not.

Cue the IDS systematic review from McCulloch and Pallacio. This is the first serious review of the research literature on a Tobin Tax and tries to debunk some myths:

* Will a Tobin Tax Reduce Volatility? This was the original motive behind Tobin's proposal. But the empirical evidence suggests no decrease in volatility and in a few cases, even an increase.

* Is a Tobin Tax Workable? Although these questions are not easy, there is a large literature on these questions and the consensus is that a Tobin Tax could be successfully implemented

*How Much Money Would a Tobin Tax Collect? If a tax rate of 0.005 % was applied only to spot transactions it would raise $26 billion globally and $11 billion in the UK only

* Who Would be Affected by a Tobin Tax? Would this really soak the rich? Or would it simply be passed on to consumers? The evidence base is weakest here but the authors think a Tobin Tax would be more progressive than other forms of taxation.

The main reasons given for the UK being against the Tax are political (the French and the Germans are behind it!), economic (it will lead to the decimation of the UK financial sector because bankers will up sticks) and budgetary (what is the case for a ring-fenced tax -- although it is interesting that Barroso is not linking the Tax revenues to climate finance).

So the Tobin Tax might be a useful tool to bolster public finances, but it might not deliver much for climate or do much for price volatility.

The former is a massive challenge--how to raise funds for something that rates far down the public policy list in public opinion polls?

The latter--volatility--might be dampened by a Panic Tax, the Tobin Tax's first cousin.

The Panic Tax--also a Neil McCulloch idea although he calls it an Inductance tax--does not tax the level of financial transactions, but the speed at which they occur.

This gets at Tobin's original concern directly and deals with the dangers introduced by High Frequency Traders.

See here for the Panic tax paper.

How “home grown” are Home Grown School Feeding Programmes?

2011-09-28T15:49:00.000+01:00

I attended a small part of a 3 day conference on a Home Grown School Feeding (HGSF) programme being led by the Partnership for Child Development (PCD) at Imperial College—IDS is one of the partners on the evaluation programme involving Rachel Sabates Wheeler, Edoardo Masset and Richard Longhurst amongst others.

HGSF tries to set up school procurement of food for school meals in such a way that it stimulates the local food economy while improving school enrolment, attendance and achievement as well as food and nutrition security. Achieving just one of these outcomes (educational, nutritional, local economy) is a challenge. Nevertheless we do know that there are certain conditions under which all 3 objectives can be realised (see Adelman et. al. 2006 for a nice review).

The HGSF programme is working with governments and other national partners to build on regular school feeding programmes (where food is sourced nationally but not locally) to implement and test various HGSF approaches. From the 3 presentations I was able to catch, a few reflections:

• HGSF is such a neat idea, there is a danger that we can get a bit evangelical about it—we need to give the evidence every chance to speak
• Assessing impact is difficult, because there is no real way of aggregating across multiple outcomes–the PCD team is working on this
• The systematic reviews of School feeding Programmes (not the programmes that rely on locally sourced food) show how sensitive impact is to key design features such as calling the food a snack versus a meal (this has a big impact on food substitution away from the child in the home—families being more likely to treat something framed as a snack in an additive way). This means that there is a need to build in these variants into impact evaluations, which is expensive if done using surveys (as it increases sample sizes dramatically)
• This design sensitivity has implications for capacity development and for sustainability. Innovation and adaptation require capacities at the institutional, organisational and individual levels, so capacity development efforts are intrinsic to the scaling of HGSF
• The design sensitivity also implies that unless the HGSF programmes are “doubly” home grown (i.e. developed locally as well as using local food) they may well fall apart when the outsiders leave
• Ultimately this potential for scaling and sustainability via established institutions (i.e. schools) might be the trump cards that HGSF has when we benchmark its impacts against interventions like public works and cash transfers.

This PCD programme is led by Lesley Drake and Aulo Geli – website is here—I look forward to seeing how the programme overcomes some of these tough challenges.

Labour's Leadership on International Development--Is It Slipping?

2011-09-27T22:16:00.005+01:00

In the UK the Labour Party is the Opposition to the Coalition Government. Being in Opposition is difficult, but it does give political parties the opportunity (and responsibility) to rethink their approach to a whole range of issues. Is the Labour Party of Ed Miliband delivering on this responsibility in the area of international development?

From talking to many of the new MPs and some of the very experienced members of the House of Lords at the Party Conference in Liverpool this week, it is clear that the Labour Party still cares deeply about international development.

There is a lot of energy being dedicated to searching for new ideas and and a new narrative on international development--one that matches the realities of the 21st century (going beyond 2005 And All That) with the core values the Party holds dear.

What might such a narrative look like?

• Dissolve the “us and them” in development--share ideas on solutions to common national problems (e.g. how to reduce inequality, how to provide and effective and affordable social welfare system, how to empower citizens) and devise solutions together on global problems that are common to all (e.g. climate change, infectious disease, security).
• Focus on progressive growth—not growth for growth’s sake, but growth that creates opportunities and jobs for those at the bottom of the pyramid, reduces poverty and inequality and is resource sustainable. Find ways of supporting new blends of private and public sector action to support this.
• Focus on progressive climate financing—financing that asks the most from those who have benefitted the most over the decades from the untaxed emissions of carbon dioxide. The Financial Transactions Tax (are we at a tipping point on this?) will be one step in this direction, although most of its cost will likely be transferred to bank customers (not progressive, but at least proportionate). Keep the pledge to use no more than 10% of ODA for climate financing.
• Work better across government departments—as more countries graduate from LIC to MIC status, the call on ODA as we know it will decline, and because donor countries will be under pressure to reduce ODA, agencies like DFID will need to rely increasingly on the quality of their arguments, not their budgets, to steer other departments towards development outcomes
• Keep the promise on 0.7% of GNI to ODA--but revisit the issue of whether ODA should be more targeted to poor countries or to poor people

Some elements along these lines are emerging. But whatever the specifics are, two things seem really important:
(a) make sure core values (community, opportunity, solidarity, fairness) flow through the entire approach. Authenticity counts for a lot in shoring up public support for international development and for driving party members and
(b) fire up the Leadership about the agenda.

Harriet Harman is said to be allocating considerable energy to the development brief, and that is important, but it was the Blair-Brown energy that has made the UK a leader in development in the last decade. Ed Miliband has been party Leader for a year only and domestic issues have dominated his agenda, but if he is not seen to be more committed to international development by the time of the International Development Policy Review launch in Sept 2012, a big opportunity to shift the debate—and to reposition Labour-- will have been missed.

Time to Reimagine Development?

2011-09-22T15:22:00.003+01:00

In case you did not see this in The Guardian newspaper yesterday.

If the global crises of the past four years (food, fuel, financial) and the slow burn of climate change have called into question the way we live, then it's likely the impact of these crises on the field of international development will be fundamental. This assumption kick-started an initiative at the Institute of Development Studies in 2009 called Re-imagining Development (ReDev). The idea was not only to look at the impacts of the crises on the ground but also to assess how they affect the way we think about development.

Drawing on 20 case studies, we identified a number of assumptions about how development works that were challenged by the crises.

Economic growth can be a force for good, but it does not have to be

When many of us were taught economics, growth was sometimes seen as sufficient for development and always necessary. ReDev concluded that some kinds of growth are necessary, others irrelevant, and some harmful. Growth should be treated like technology: with the right governance, it can advance human wellbeing. The growth we want is economic development that is potent in reducing poverty, uses natural resources sustainably and emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases. Too much research on growth is focused on how we get it, rather than how we get the type we need. We get the growth we want by focusing on: creating the right initial conditions (such as low inequality); reducing entry barriers for new, small businesses; setting key prices at appropriate levels (as with carbon production); and adopting stronger transparency mechanisms to allow society to pressurise corporations.

Views on growth are surprisingly homogenous. This is probably because only one type of economics (neoclassical) is taught the world over. But monocultures, nature has taught us, are particularly vulnerable to events.

In an interconnected world, the nation state is increasingly relevant

Do global agreements on climate, trade and drugs drive national behaviour, or do national alliances supply oxygen and credibility to global agreements? Several case studies showed how national self interest will continue to undermine collective action that is in the long-term interest of all. From the G8 to the G20 to the G193, issue-specific coalitions of countries (there are 193 states recognised by the UN), and the membership of those coalitions, is probably best explained by national politics. We need to understand these national coalitions more than ever.

The complexity of reality cannot safely be ignored

Complexity is the policymaker's kryptonite. But it is increasingly difficult to simplify complexity in ways that do not do violence to reality. For example, complexity surfaced quickly for organisations tasked with monitoring the crises. They had to get speedy and meaningful data on a wide range of interlinked outcomes to track the impacts of the crises and to get quick ideas about how policy could mitigate them. They were caught between getting data out quickly and getting the data to be statistically representative. They found the complexity of doing both to be overwhelming. We have to get better at measuring the real-time consequences of complex crises.

Wellbeing and resilience are not panaceas, but neither are they fads

The crisis impact work indicated that while material goods were very important to the human condition, so too were the relationships and the psychological dimensions of human existence. Wellbeing brings these dimensions together in an explicit way. The emerging concern with resilience of systems is perhaps a good thing to come out of the bad news of the crises. Given the new global uncertainties (climate, the emerging powers, and resource scarcities deriving from current lifestyles) we think these concepts of wellbeing and resilience are here to stay. But if used lazily to provide politically correct gloss to issues of measurement of progress and interdependence, they will become devalued.

Civil society did not deal well enough with these mega-shocks

The ReDev report concludes that civil society did not sufficiently rise to the challenge or opportunity afforded by the crises. This was partly due to NGOs and civil society working in silos and partly due to the drop in income many of these organisations experienced. We felt civil society could have done a better job of enforcing the various accountabilities of governments and business. The Arab Spring may well temper this argument, but we were struck by the inability of civil society groups to mobilise collectively to push governments to act more quickly and protect the most vulnerable.

Though derived from different specialisations and institions, our observations are partial, driven by fragments of evidence from purposively selected sites and interpreted by people with particular values and perspectives, so we cannot overstate the representativeness of these conclusions. But clearly it was difficult for many of the thousands of people with whom we engaged to reimagine development.

New ideas often emerged in the personal realm, but struggled to find fertile ground professionally. Established concepts are hard to dislodge, having built up strong constituencies and vested interests within or across organisations. And the new interests - the emerging powers, the new donors, and the new philanthropists - are not necessarily going to plough different paths.

EADI-DSA Day 3: New (Old) Voices and Open Ears

2011-09-21T14:57:00.003+01:00

The plenary this morning consisted of two presentations, one from Eun Mee Kim Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies, Ewha Womans University in Seoul and Peter Knorringa from ISS in The Hague.

Professor Kim talked about South Korea as a bridge between developed and developing countries by way of its rapid development (it had a GDP/capita of $81 in 1961) and also as a bridge between DAC and non DAC ODA donors, especially those from Asia.

She argued that the Korean experience brought three things to the development table:

1. Country ownership was vital—the ability to negotiate strongly with donors about what aid should be used for and domestic policies to promote development (e.g. the government argued against donor advice on exchange rate policies)

2. The Korean example of development should not be a poster child for authoritarian regimes all over the world

3. Investment in human capital was key (although it had very low GDP/capita rates in 1961, it had a literacy rate of around 70%) to Korea’s development under authoritarianism and later under democracy

She closed by saying that South Korea is playing a key role on the G20 (it is now the 13th largest economy) in arguing that the focus of the G20 should not be solely on economic development but also on social development.

Professor Knorringa’s talk was about a different type of “new voice”, the private sector. He pointed to three trends in private sector governance that are likely having major implications for development:

1. The rush from companies to sign up to international standards on labour, environment, and safety. He pointed out that there are not necessarily good or bad for development. For example, they could lead to exclusion of the smallest producers and the poorest consumers but they could also facilitate medium size firms in the emerging countries to get into global markets.

2. The consolidation in the retail sector, with European and North American retailers partnering (and buying up) retailers in the BRICS and elsewhere. This is leading to the % of goods purchased from the organised retail sector increasing dramatically. This might lead standards to go out of the window or it might lead to a social global compliance platform where all retailers work towards convergence or, most likely he thought, it would lead to layers of standards, where the new middle classes might be willing to pay small premia for modest levels of environmental protection or labour standard improvements.

3. Companies getting more involved in the development process in order to secure a supply platform (e.g. working with smallholder cocoa producers in West Africa). Companies are increasingly behaving like NGOs, but not with the primary goal of enhancing development.

He argued that we in the development research community have a lot to offer these companies in creating bigger overlaps between commercial and developmental objectives, and that we have a lot to learn from them given that many have been working for longer than we have in the developing world and from a very different perspective.

Both presentations were clear and interesting. I agreed with Prof. Kim’s arguments about the essentialism of the state to want to promote development for its people, but I was less convinced with her argument that the only way to go in the 21st century is via democracy. That is almost like kicking away the ladder (as Ha Joon Chang, a Korean, would say of the rich countries). She was criticised from the floor for sounding too much like the World Bank, but I felt her response (she gave us an insight into the huge fights with the Bank over their narratives around the East Asian miracle and the role of the state) was very strong.

On Prof Knorringa’s talk, he did a good job of communicating why it is important for development researchers to engage with the private sector, but less on the when and how. Despite his arguments, some of the questions from the floor amounted to “we have nothing to teach the private sector about development and they never ask us anyway”. I find this sentiment depressing. Of course there are things each group can learn from each other—we both know the contexts, but from very different angles and this should make for the potential for some productive collaborations. And more and more companies are reaching out to our community. Of course we have to be very careful about greenwash and whitewash and all that, but we cannot just stick our heads in the sand and say it is too difficult. If we really believe commercial interests are to the detriment of development, we have an obligation to engage.

In both cases, I got a sense that the new voices sounded a lot like old voices, albeit with some new things to say. I also was reminded that new voices need open ears if they are to be heard.

EADI-DSA Conference - Day 2: Does International Development Assistance Care About Poverty?

2011-09-20T16:17:00.012+01:00

On Day 2 of the EADI-DSA Conference we had two excellent presentations from Ravi Kanbur and Sabina Alkire on "Rethinking Progress and How to Measure it".

Ravi kicked off by noting the stylised fact that poverty is now predominantly a middle income country (MIC) phenomenon, not a low income country (LIC) one (citing work by Andy Sumner of IDS). This is an artifact of the cutoff $1165 GDP per capita above which a LIC becomes a MIC. Indonesia changed status (from LIC to MIC) in 2008, India will in 2012/13 and China did in 1999.

Projecting forward, fewer and fewer countries would qualify for IDA and if IDA flows stayed at the same level some countries like Ethiopia would stand to gain.

He suggested there were 3 possible outcomes in IDA allocation: (a) no change in rules and increases in aid for the remaining LICS, (b) no change in rules, but a reduction in overall aid flows, and (c) change in the rules that keep current levels of IDA focused on poor people, whichever country they live in.

He thought (b) was the most likely outcome, but (c) was the right outcome.

He argued that the moral responsibility of the global community to poor people was analogous the Responsibility to Protect and he proposed the following operational rules for IDA qualification:

(a) keep the standard window at $1165 GDP/cap
(b) add a window that is 2 or 3 times of this threshold, but target it to poorest regions or key human development sectors, and
(c) have a third window to support the production of global public goods

He acknowledged that these proposals are unlikely to be adopted: the LICs will lose out, the MICs who will gain are too different to form effective alliances to argue for the rule change (and in any case, some of those within MICs are happy to graduate from IDA) and it is in donor interests to reduce overall aid flows and the current rules will help with this.

Sabina Alkire's presentation on the multidimensional poverty index (MPI)confirmed the conclusion that only 25-30% of the world's poverty is now in LICs--no matter how you measure poverty. She talked about how difficult it is to get crude measures of progress, like GDP/cap, "dethroned" (as Dudley Seers had put it) because of vested interests and noted how little money is spent on measuring poverty as opposed to expenditure on data measuring economic performance and employment. She presented data which show substantial deviations between $1.25 a day estimates of poverty incidence and multidimensional poverty incidence for some countries (in Ethiopia, multidimensional poverty is almost twice the income poverty rate).

Questions from the floor included: Aren't you assuming that IDA has a positive effect? Does this imply a vision of a global welfare state? How do we include multiple voices in multidimensional poverty measurement? Does IDA undermine Indian citizens' incentive to hold the Indian government to account and increase tax revenues? What about the politics of measurement?

Sabina acknowledged the politics issues and said she was not sure the MPI would survive as a cross-country index. She highlighted a number of possibilities: (a) it would be seen as a good idea that nevertheless peters out, (b) good multidimensional poverty measures would be collected and used to improve analysis and policy, (c) complex or inaccurate multipoverty measures would be collected, and the whole initiative would be discredited with a return to simplistic measures, or (d) conflicts would rage between different measurement schools with no consensus. She thought (d) was the most likely. Despite this she did cite several examples of where governments have adopted the measure as their own and have begun to use it.

Ravi responded by saying that lack of commitment of a government to do anything about poverty could also be a condition for receiving IDA--and in fact this might promote civil society to track the commitment of their governments to reduce poverty (this reminded me of the work from Dolf te Linto and colleagues from IDS on measuring the commitment to reducing hunger). He also said that unless IDA has a zero or negative effect on poverty, that his argument that IDA should focus on poor people rather than poor countries still holds.

A very good session, but I was struck by the resignation of the two presenters that the current measurement powers would prevail. Desmond McNeill pointed out that we need more work on the political economy of measurement--something I would wholeheartedly agree with.

EADI-DSA Conference, Day 1: Peak Everything

2011-09-20T15:40:00.003+01:00

Mario Giampietro opened up the EADI-DSA Conference giving the Dudley Seers Lecture by asking whether the development community wanted to take the blue pill or the red pill.

This is a reference to the film The Matrix where the main character is offered the choice between the bliss of illusion (blue) or the sometimes painful truth of reality (red). Prof Giampietro argued that the world is taking lots of blue pills and it needs more red. His argument goes something like this

1. The narrative of economists--that we need economies to grow forever--is unsustainable because we are not only at peak oil (we get it out of the ground slower than we consume it) but near peak everything (water, land, energy).

2. As long as the size of the economic pie is increasing, marketisation of services and globalisation in general reduce tensions in the system because the size of the pies is increasing.

3. But peak everything ("the real inconvenient truth") means that the size of the global economic pie is reaching limits and this means that debt cannot be repaid and that we begin operating in a zero sum way which undermines the tendency to cooperate.

4. Economics has contributed to this situation, because (a) it has prioritised growth to policymakers, (b) lacks the ability to deal with complexity in a reflexive way that puts our own behaviour into the centre of the picture (rather it tends to lead to technical fixes), and (c) cannot speak truth to power because this will undermine its position of power ("it is difficult to get someone to understand something if their salary depends on them not understanding it")

5. All of this means that we will have to use less energy, work more and marketise less (e.g. draw on cultural traditions instead of the market). We still have to grow in order to pay off the debts we owe, but we will have to do so using less energy (not only per unit of GDP, but in an absolute sense)

Diagnosis is always stronger than prescription in these kinds of presentations, but Prof Giampietro did say that we need to create a new reality (he just did not know how we would reach it, nor what it would look like) and ditch the fairytale that current consumption patterns can prevail.

I agree with the need for rich countries in particular to drastically change the way we consume resources, but for me there were 2 big questions (a) can we discard the "human ingenuity will fix this with technology with no need for a great change in behaviour" counterargument as Giampietro suggests? Simply because industrial production is not getting more energy efficient does not mean it could not under any circumstances, and (b) what will be the triggers for either a dramatic upsurge in new technology development or a drastic change in behaviour around energy use? What would concentrate our minds? What discomfort will represent a strong enough signal? And once concentrated, will we --like boiling frogs--realise we must do something once it is too late to change anything?

A stimulating seminar--for more on Prof Giampietro and his work see here.

DSA York: Time to Reimagine Development?

2011-09-16T09:15:00.006+01:00

This week IDS released a report (Time to Reimagine Development?) on how the global crises of the past 4 years have:

* affected people's lives on the ground
* challenged our core assumptions about development
* surfaced new ideas (or given life to old ones) about how sustainable development can be promoted

The report draws on about 20 case studies from the private sector, civil society, government, NGOs, faith based groups, students, and donors to try to address these questions.

The overview paper (which is free to download) suggests some core assumptions need to be challenged, including:

* complexity is always too complex to deal with
* the nation state is becoming less relevant
* wellbeing is too fluffy to operationalise
* resilience is a somewhat negative aspiration
* inequality is not something to fret too much over
* the present brand of economics is the best we have got
* civil society is well suited to responding to these crises

These are some of these issues will be discussed at the EADI-DSA Conference in York next week.

There are too many panels, working groups and study groups to tell you about (the schedule runs to 50 pages!), but the overall theme is around rethinking development in an age of scarcity and uncertainty: what are the new values, voices and alliances we need for increased resilience? Keynotes include Ravi Kanbur, Sabina Alkire, Mario Giampietro and Richard Jolly and there will be close to 1000 participants.

See you there.

Bad Social Science?

2011-09-11T19:36:00.004+01:00

I'm a fan of "Bad Science" by Ben Goldacre, published in the Guardian. Focusing mostly on common flaws in the scientific process, this week's article was on errors committed in the psychology research literature. He reports on a common statistical error. When, for example, the nerves of normal mice are treated with a drug, does the rate of nerve firing change? And what happens when you use mutant mice? If the response of the firing rate to the drug in the normal mice is statistically different from zero and the response of the firing rate to the drug in the mutant mice is not statistically different from zero, have you found a difference in response between the two groups? You have, but is it a statistically different response?

Apparently half of the 157 studies published in 5 prestigious neuroscience journals failed to perform this "difference in difference" test. This is made more amazing, because it is an easy test. For economists, the test is equivalent to seeing if an estimated slope coefficient in a regression equation varies by population subgroup. We usually do this test by interacting a dummy variable tagged to the subgroup (i.e. mutant mice) with the independent variable of interest (i.e. the drug) and seeing if the estimated slope coefficient on the interacted variable is significantly different from zero. If it is then the slope (i.e response) is statistically different for the two subgroups.

Economists do not typically make this mistake, in fact I wish they were more interested in sub-groups in the population, but they are usually happy with average affects across a diverse group of observations, with the usual excuse (sometimes valid) being small sample sizes.

But this made me wonder what similarly blunderous statistical mistakes we economists make?

I would be interested in your answers.

Will Busan and Rio+20 Change Anything?

2011-09-10T08:59:00.002+01:00

I was at the German Development Institute yesterday, presenting on “5 things to do by 2015 to accelerate hunger reduction”. Those of you who are regular readers will not be surprised by the content of my talk:

(1) build political commitment (don’t wait for it to magically materialise)—I shared some of the results from our Hunger Reduction Commitment Index work (showing Germany as 11th out of 22 donor countries)

G2) spend more public funding on agriculture (donors have only met 22% of their L’Aquila commitments and the deadline is 2012; and only 7 of 25 signatories of the CAADP target of 10% of government expenditure on agriculture have made that target with another 13 countries in the 5-10% range)

(3) focus money, energy, innovation on realising the “critical triangle” of more food production, hunger reduction and sustainability (with resilience—the ability of the food system to perform these 3 functions under shocks and stress—being in the middle of the triangle)

(4) dramatically improve cross-government coherence (e.g. does it matter if a country focuses its ODA well on hunger if it supports the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU?) (the UK scores poorly on this from our Hunger Reduction Commitment work)

(5) use 21st Century metrics: get estimates of hunger (not food production); be nimble about assessing hunger (using mobile technologies) and embed the critical triangle in the metrics (e.g. food production by hunger reduced by CO2 emitted).

The conference--well organised by Dirk Messner and his team at GDI around the theme “Rio+20: Planet Under Stress”-- was a good mix of greyhairs and those early in their careers. It touched on a number of interesting points:

• Will Rio+20 in April 2012 mark a paradigm shift as Rio did back in 1992 (did it?) or will it just be ensuring that we properly follow through on the 1992 agenda? The audience of 200 was pretty split on this.

• Is the focus of the rich countries on climate adaptation simply a form of displacement activity when they should be dealing with the much harder (politically for them) issue of mitigation where there will have to be real change in the intensity of resource use of voters

• Will Busan (the meeting in November 2011 to take stock of aid effectiveness) get to grips with the new pluralistic landscape in the ODA world (foundations, philanthropists, person to person giving, and new aid programmes in India and Russia)?

• Should the DAC aid effectiveness framework and commitments apply to new forms of aid (such as climate finance) and even more controversially to emerging forms of development resources such as tax revenues (apparently tax revenues in Africa amount to $440/person compared to $40/person for ODA)? Again, there was some division on these Busan questions.

I would like to see 3 “practical” but symbolically important things emerge post-Rio+20 and post-Busan:

• Ditching the old metrics on growth and consumption and replacing them with items (or at least denominators) that measure the intensity of resource use and carbon emissions

• Ditching the terms “developed” and “developing” countries and replacing them with new terms such as “sustainable developing countries” and “developing countries” to stress the work that the richer countries have to do. Germany might be in the former category and the USA and China in the latter (although strictly speaking no countries can be classified as sustainable developing countries if the collective action failure on emissions continues)

• Begin to think about replacing “aid programmes” and Ministries of Development with “Ministries of Global Development” which bring together international and global elements of business, climate, security and aid together under one roof, apply aid effectiveness indicators to all of it, and use these new ministries as building blocks for international agreements on global public goods.

Development research's Love-Hate relationship with policy and practice

2011-09-08T23:16:00.006+01:00

I was asked to make some introductory comments at the Development Study Association-Ireland (DSAI). DSAI is the newest part of the DSA, and this was its second conference with the theme of linking research, policy and practice.

I started off noting the Love-Hate relationship development research has with policy and practice.

Love: many of us took up development research through some personal motivation to make a difference; normative aspirations are firmly and openly embedded in development studies; many of our institutional homes reinforce this sense of mission; and finally, we are quite good at it by virtue of our multidisciplinarity and our comfort with evaluation and learning.

Hate: on the other hand we are sometimes not so enthusiastic: when there is a sense that the "use" orientation is taking us away from fundamental relationships and questioning assumptions and framings; when we feel we are no longer able to speak truth to power; when we get drawn into researching the amenable and not the meaningful and finally when we are told to do it (e.g. the value for money imperative).

Most of these risks can be managed, it seems to me, and in any case, we can't help it, it's in our DNA this linking of policy and practice.

How do we do it better? I used the Motives/Means/Opportunity model.

Motives: there are many ways of inculcating the motive to connect with policy and practice--supporting young PhD researchers to spend time in the field and recruiting Masters students who have some overseas work experience.

Means: models are useful (I like the problem stream, solution stream and political stream approach of Kingdon)

Opportunities: "build it and they will come" is a slogan for non-dissemination. We need to build relationships with key people we want to influence. Be clear about it and be focused on it.

It's easy for researchers immersed in the daily grind of writing proposals, supervising students, writing papers, teaching courses, doing administration and management of projects etc. to forget the privileged position we occupy. We should not underestimate how inspiring the best of our work can be to people outside the sector. I am constantly reminded of it. That's good, because it is easy to forget the potentially transformative potential our work can have when it is firing on all cylinders.

The DSAI had a couple of terrific panels bringing together researchers and organisations like Trociare (a large Irish NGO) and Irish Aid. We reflected on how difficult it was to make time to develop and invest in these relationships, but we also noted several instances when it had made a big difference.

DSAI seems to have found a valuable niche in bringing research, policy and practice together in Ireland. It has tremendous energy from its members and steering group and I wish it well.

Footnote: At the DSA-EADI conference in York Sept 19-22 --places still available, topic "Rethinking Development in an Age of Scarcity and Uncertainty", over 1000 people will attend--I will step down as DSA Chair after 3 years and a new Chair will be elected from the nominees. I will remain an advocate of the DSA--I believe it does a very good job of promoting development research, connecting researchers with other researchers and with policymakers and practitioners, supporting the next generation of researchers and providing a stimulating space to draw out new ideas.

You should join!

Floud, Fogel et. al. on "Technophysio Evolution"

2011-09-07T07:30:00.000+01:00

I recently reviewed "The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700" by Roderick Floud, Robert Fogel, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong for the journal Science.

The book offers an authoritative summary of the field of "technophysio evolution" (in short, how work and technology interact to express themselves over the generations via the size, composition and functioning of the human body). In doing so, they generate new insights into contemporary development processes. My main critique of the book is that the authors understate our ability to do something about the trends that affect our bodies.

Here is the my review

Book Review: The Changing Body. Health, Nutrition and Human Development in the Western World since 1700. Authors: R. Floud, R. Fogel, B. Harris and S.C. Hong. 2011.

This book uses the “plasticity, flexibility and responsiveness” of the human body to changes in nutrition, disease, work and warmth to generate long term insights on human development. The opening chapter is centred on a series of assertions which set up the book’s narrative: (1) the nutrition status of a generation determines its longevity and ability to work. Individuals with a better nutrition status (manifest as height for age and weight for height and the result of the net accumulation of energy and nutrient intake, infection, care and activity) have better brain development, stronger immune systems, and are less likely to succumb to certain chronic diseases later in life, (2) the work of that generation, when allied to technology (broadly defined) determines the generation’s output, (3) the output of a generation is partly determined by its inheritance from past generations (i.e. malnourished mothers are more likely to give birth to malnourished babies) and determines its standard of living through the enhanced ability to acquire material goods and the exertion of agency, (4) the standard of living of a generation determines the nutrition status of the next generation (through the ability of adolescent girls, pregnant women and parents to get access to food, health services and care for themselves and their children), (5) and so on.

This circle underpins the central theory of the book: “technophysio evolution”, a link between technological and physiological change. The authors explain that this kind of evolution differs from conventional forms in its emphasis on the control that humans have over their environment and its rapidity. The next two chapters review the evidence behind these assertions (using equations and lots of data), and the three chapters prior to the summary concluding chapter examine, in great detail (again with many data points provided), these “technophysio evolutions” in England and Wales, continental Europe and the US. Adult heights and life expectancy in these three regions have responded very rapidly to improvements in diet, disease prevention and sanitation over the past 300 years. Today, for example, adult males in the UK are, on average, 10 cm taller than their counterparts in the early 18th century and their life expectancies at birth have doubled.

My own work centres on the links between income, food consumption and nutrition, the links between nutrition and productivity and the distribution of food and other resources within households in a developing country context, so much of this territory is familiar. Nevertheless, the book makes several important contributions. First, because a number of the authors are historians the book introduces a “long view” into the relationships between different variables. Too often, those conducting research on developing country issues neglect these intergeneration effects (from grandparents to children through to their own grandchildren). Our need to understand long wave phenomena will only increase as we tackle issues such as aging, chronic disease, urbanisation and climate change. This book gives us some insights into how to do that and the value added of doing so. For example are we using short-run estimates of the responsiveness of calorie consumption to changes in income (vital in projecting food needs and potential hunger crises) when we should, as the book argues, be using time series estimates which give much lower estimates? If we did, our forecasts of the numbers of hungry people would be much lower with profound implications for public policy. Second, the book contrasts experiences from the rich and developing worlds. This does not happen nearly enough—these two worlds are quite distinct in terms of research and policy communities and yet the issues, methods and policy prescriptions are very similar and so the scope for cross-learning seems immense. For example, the evidence on how urbanisation in the 19th century in the US and UK led to declines in average male heights as disease and overcrowding overwhelmed any higher wages earned) should serve as a wake-up call to those in the development community who, in my opinion, are taking a rather casual view of the implications of urbanisation for wellbeing. Third, the book shapes the future research agenda by outlining a number of important questions, two of which stand out: (a) why does it take 2-3 generations for changes in environment to manifest as improved adult height? and (b) given that heights were not measured at the population level anywhere before the early 18th century, what will the laments of the 22nd century analysts be as to the variables we should be measuring today but have not even considered?

But the book also frustrates. It does not manage to make the most of the developed-developing country comparisons. There is not enough firepower in the writing team on the developing country literature (the evidence is over-reliant on a small number of top US academics) and so some of the opportunities to apply interesting findings from Europe and the US to the developing world (and vice versa) are missed. For example the insight about the extent to which heights can improve in one generation might explain the curious lack of response of nutrition status to sparkling economic growth in India (the book mistakenly brackets China and India’s progress in improving nutrition status). Nor does the book do enough to challenge current notions of economic growth. While effectively critiquing the partiality of income as a measure of welfare (and arguing that, as a measure, nutritional status is “analogous to measures of capability”), the book is sanguine about the capacity of current economic growth patterns to generate “bads” such as carbon emissions, obesity, and inequality. The long term perspective afforded by the intergenerational historical perspectives are also presumably the reason for the book to be very light on policy recommendations, but surely the long view places a greater obligation to think about core policy mechanisms, unencumbered by electoral cycles. At the individual level, there is a nagging worry that the authors have not sufficiently highlighted the ability of people to influence the impacts of long term trends on their bodies. The body is more than a diagnostic tool, it is the servant of our agency.

Nevertheless, this book is an authoritative summary of an evolving field of “technophysio evolution”. It places the size and shape of the human body at the centre of generational transitions. In doing so it generates new insights into contemporary development processes, even if it does understate the ability of humans to do something about the trends that affect their bodies.

Hunger Strikes for Malnutrition?

2011-09-03T10:39:00.005+01:00

I have just returned from a brief trip to Delhi. While there I met with the Planning Commission to talk about India’s nutrition situation, participated in the Britannia Nutrition Foundation’s third symposium and was on a panel (Malnutrition: Cracking the Code) of commentators organised by the NDTV channel.

Some reflections on the Planning Commission meeting:

While there is clearly a real concern within the Central Government about undernutrition and a desire to do something about it, my sense is that there is a lack of intensity and focus to the efforts and no real mechanism for mobilising all the available instruments (e.g. agriculture, sanitation, health systems, women’s empowerment, food programmes etc.) to deal with the issue. My presentation at the Planning Commission, chaired by the Deputy Chairman, precipitated a 70 minute dialogue among the 20 or so Commission members present. In a good natured discussion we touched on a number of issues:

• The interactions between the enabling environment for nutrition and the effectiveness of nutrition programmes like ICDS: if open defecation is practiced by over half of the population, if agricultural growth does not seem to drive nutrition improvements, if the health service is underfunded and if the women lack power then how can even the best nutrition programmes (or economic growth for that matter) get any traction in reducing undernutrition?

• The need for annual outcome data on undernutrition. The last assessment of nutrition status in India was in 2005-6. Can you imagine running an economic strategy in 2011 based on 2006 economic indicators? That is what is happening with nutrition. Apparently annual outcome data on nutrition will begin within a year or two.

• How the 12th 5 year plan (in development) will differ from the 11th when it comes to nutrition. Answers included: more funds for ICDS and more of a focus of that programme on the first 1000 days of life. Indeed, the whole 12th Plan will be health orientated.

• Was there something unique about India? Nutrition standards? Women’s status? Low diet diversity? On standards (are the healthy growth standards from other populations too high for Indians?) they may contribute to the high levels of undernutrition in South Asia relative to Sub Saharan Africa (Stephan Klasen has written about this) but standards would not be responsible for the slow rate of decline in undernutrition. On women’s status, yes, it is low in India, but it can be changed (look at the evidence from Duflo and others about the female quotas on Indian village council leadership showing that this form of empowerment increases nutrition relevant expenditures in the community). On diet, vegetarianism might be a challenge for raising the calorie density and micronutrient availability of diets, but there are many nutrition outcome bright spots within India that suggest these features of culture do not represent a binding constraint.

• Reassurances that a “nutrition lens” was being placed on other sectors (17 was the number mentioned) although I was less reassured about who within the Commission was going to make sure nutrition was firmly embedded within the 12th Plan.

• The need for the Government to commission the research it feels it needs. It does not at the moment. For instance the best study on ICDS impacts happens to be a PhD study by an Indian researcher at an American University—the Government got lucky, but it should be more demanding about the kinds of research it needs in order to do its business.

• While many members of the Commission clearly feel passionately about undernutrition, it does not seem to be anyone’s sole responsibility. I argued for more leadership from the Centre, mindful that a lot of power is devolved to the States, and for a strategic perspective on what to do about nutrition (there are so many opportunities, a strategic approach is needed) but I don’t think I was terribly persuasive.

Reflections on the Britannia Nutrition Foundation Symposium:

• The divide between public and private sectors in nutrition in India seems as large as ever. If the private sector is to be involved in shaping nutrition outcomes then the feeling from much (I think) of civil society is “they are only out for profit”. Well, guess what, they are already involved in shaping nutrition outcomes for profit. How can we begin talking to them to find and increase the overlaps between good profit outcomes and good nutrition outcomes? Part of the problem is, I suspect, an inability to know which companies are behaving responsibly and doing good things and which are not. At the moment we have to rely on what companies self report and even then in a rather piecemeal way. Accountability is weak. Marc van Ameringen the CEO of the Global Alliance for Nutrition (GAIN) reported on their work to assess the nutrition performance of food companies. I think this promises to be a great initiative (the candidate indicators are on the GAIN website www.gainhealth.org) because it will help us assess the reputation of a company in a more transparent way.

• There are dynamic States. Dr Veena Rao presented the Karnataka Nutrition “Mission”— a public commitment by the leadership of the State to place nutrition higher on the agenda and a commitment to spend more of the state’s money on nutrition in the hope that it will leverage additional funds from within and outside India. This whole initiative is quite inspirational—of course the implementation will be crucial if it is to live up to its aspirations.

• The lack of incentives for the Indian nutrition research community to reflect more holistically about the causes of the stagnation in nutrition status. Where are the demand driven research funds? Are the journals putting out calls for answers to these questions? Are the academic societies lobbying government via the media about nutrition? Are studies being done on how nutrition is shaped, framed, communicated and taught? Is there research on the beliefs and attitudes of key decision makers on nutrition, and on how the media report on nutrition and why? There are plenty of exceptions, and the level of nutrition science expertise is very high, but the lack of incentives to researchers to generate a wider system perspective is, I believe, a problem.

• The Britannia Nutrition Foundation is providing a service that other organisations should also be shouldering: annually convening Indian nutrition thinkers and leaders from a wide background to share innovations and findings, network, and strategise. Why is this not happening?

Reflections on the NDTV panel (airing on Sept 10):

• In addition to me the participants were Syeda Hameed, responsible for ICDS within the Planning Commission, Vinita Bali, the MD of Britannia and the Chair of the Foundation and a famous Indian screenwriter and activist. The moderator was a journalist from NDTV.

• Our moderator (excellent) told us that she had to study for a few days to get up to speed on undernutrition facts and consequences. She admitted to being shocked by what she read. This is a fascinating insight into the invisibility of the malnutrition issue.

• Other NDTV reporters in the audience noted that nutrition was not an electoral issue and that there were no “hooks” on which to put nutrition stories. We agreed that regular data on nutrition outcomes would be an important hook (and we all eagerly await the results of the Naandi Foundation’s first survey of the worst off districts—out later this year). I mentioned the work IDS has done in Peru, documenting how civil society groups in Peru (including CARE-Peru) forced electoral candidates to produce “malnutrition manifestos” – what they would do on undernutrition if they were elected. What a great commitment mechanism.

• Finally my trip came at the end of a two week hunger strike by the activist Anna Hazare in protest at the widespread corruption in Indian life (not so much paying for things citizens are not entitled to, but having to pay bribes for things citizens are entitled to, like a drivers licence, school entry, access to water etc). I made the point that it is ironic that civil society has been energized by a hunger strike, but that it cannot be energised by the hunger and malnutrition that pervades society.

I’m not suggesting hunger strikes to draw attention to malnutrition, but I wonder what the lessons of the Hazare movement will be for our collective efforts to generate energy around the need to reduce undernutrition in India?

What are the gaps in food governance and how to close them?

2011-08-26T17:41:00.008+01:00

Today I attended a 2 hour roundtable on food security policy and governance hosted by Unilever.

Participants were drawn from the NGO world (Oxfam, Save the Children, the Prince's Trust), the UK Government (FCO, DFID, DEFRA, Cabinet Office, BIS and the Treasury) the private sector (Unilever, Barclay's, IBLF, McKinsey and Yara) and researchers (NYU, Imperial College and IDS). The goal of the roundtable was to figure out how food security governance could do better to connect public and private sector stakeholders in policymaking. The roundtable was one in a series of meetings to feed into the upcoming G20, World Economic Forum and Rio+20 processes.

There is only so much that 25 people can accomplish in 2 hours on such a slippery concept as food governance. My own observations were helpfully organised by a "motive, means, opportunity" framework from IBLF. What are the motives, means and opportunities for public and private sector stakeholders to work together and which governance gaps need to be filled to support this?

Motives

* Leadership. Public sector leadership these past 3 years on the food price spike(s) has been pretty weak (one participant called in "G-zero" leadership--Doha, Copenhagen, low investment in agriculture, no restrictions on biofuels, weak on L'Aquila commitments etc.) and yet leadership is vital as a spur to action. Have we been looking in the wrong place for leadership? Perhaps it is there in Ghana, Vietnam and Brazil, or in the private sector? How do we nurture it?

* Lack of a roadmap. There seems to little consensus on what to do. This is inevitable given the different political, economic and social contexts in different countries, but consensus could surely be achieved on some principles. Lack of it was thought to be a drain on action.

* Lack of data. We don't have much data on where hunger is and how this changes in the short term. We don't collect food production data standardised by hunger reduced or by carbon emissions generated--in their absence how can we evolve governance to meet that aspiration? Do we know which countries and companies are really committed to reducing hunger as a result of their actions? Do we know enough about food waste and where to invest in post harvest technologies?

Means

* There was consensus that different stakeholders needed to establish relationships at the national levels and that any capacity and alignment of interests thereby developed would work well to support international agreements. The latter could not drive national action without understanding national level political interests.

* To facilitate public and private stakeholders working together, transparency and trust are paramount. How do different stakeholders know who has a good track record and who does not? This is particularly difficult in the private sector, and some kind of Agroindustry Transparency Initiative would really help.

* Institutional innovations can help cross-working. Despite the lack of appetite for new organisations, potential new virtual charters, conventions and other mechanisms to bring stakeholders together should not be taken off the table. Rio 1992 gave us a number of useful such mechanisms and we should be open to new ones.

* Boundary-crossers. People who can span both cultures (private and public) were seen as essential for cross-pollination. There are not too many of these folks (sometimes for good reasons relating to conflict of interest) but we need to look hard at how to increase the demand for and supply of people with these skills

* The concept of resilience (the ability to preserve the function of a system or organisation because it has a good capacity to adapt to shocks and uncertainty) has a lot of resonance in the public sector and a growing one in the private sector, but what does it imply for business as usual in the public and private spheres? Co-generating ideas about resilience could be one way of developing new blends of public and private.

Opportunities

One participant noted that crises should generate opportunity and novelty and in that spirit we listed some of the newer ideas we had heard of:

* "catastrophe bonds" to help countries/companies deal with shocks
* progressive food commodities investments
* hedging derivatives for helping organisations manage risk
* private sector initiatives to reduce the transactions costs of dealing with lots of small clients (e.g. a private sector version of WFP's purchase for progress model)
* higher stock to use ratios with stronger incentives for good management of stocks
* stress testing of food security organisations (as in stress testing of banks)
* better understanding of the features of value chains that promote hunger reduction
* less decoupling of humanitarian and development efforts might lead to less (not more) variability in each domain and to greater incentives for private-public partnerships

All in all, an interesting meeting and about as much as one could get from so many different people in such a short time--testimony, in part, to the excellent chairing of Alex Evans from NYU.

Does Local Governance Improve Local Economic Growth?

2011-08-26T09:11:00.008+01:00

One of the frequent rationales for efforts to strengthen governance is that this will lead to stronger economic growth (e.g. entrepreneurs are more certain about property rights, services, taxes and feel they are less likely to be exploited). Another debate is whether local governance or national governance matters most.

In a new paper, Neil McCulloch and Edmund Malesky use a unique data set from Indonesia to test these hypotheses. They link district level growth rates to firm perceptions of governance in those districts. Over 12,000 firms were surveyed in 243 of the country's 500 districts (representative of 15 of the country's 33 provinces). They mainly rely on some careful econometric analysis to explore the relationships between governance and growth.

The results are surprising:

* They do find a positive, statistically significant (and economically meaningful) relationship between district growth and local governance, but only after correcting for a whole host of data quality issues. This leads them to think that the relationship is not that strong and to explore other avenues of interpretation

* They find some evidence that structural features of districts (e.g. are they urban larger, more populous, conflict over natural resource endowments etc.) may be positively associated with growth but negatively with governance (e.g. corruption is easier). It is not clear to me from a quick read why their panel regressions cannot control for these relatively fixed features, but in any case they speculate that these are muddling up the relationship between growth and governance.

* Finally they speculate that governance at the local level may be less important than governance at the national level. The features that associate most strongly with growth are things like the presence of electricity and these have little to do with local governance, being determined nationally.

I would have liked to have seen more discussion on the influence of governance on different sources of growth (e.g. by sector, by labour intensity) and different qualities of growth (e.g. poverty reducing etc.), but perhaps this is for a later paper.

An interesting paper using an interesting data set which I am sure will generate many further important results.

Civil violence in the UK: three steps to understanding the ‘mindless criminal’

2011-08-11T11:38:00.006+01:00

This is a fascinating blog from Jaideep Gupte, one of my IDS colleagues, on the riots that in the UK these past few days. It provides an interesting perspective, drawing on empirical research from around the world on poverty and conflict under the MICROCON programme. I have reproduced the first few paragraphs from the MICRCON blog. The rest is to be found here:

"Last weekend, twitter and various internet blogs lit up: London was under attack. Television news repeatedly showed bewildering scenes of riotous mobs on the rampage, shops being looted and buildings on fire. As the violence spread from Tottenham to several neighbourhoods across the city, ‘copy-cat criminality’[1] and mob frenzy were blamed for the continued violence. However, as public order in other cities, including Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, also broke down, it became harder to pin the violence on mindless criminality alone.

The BBC hosted a lively exchange between Edwina Currie (former Conservative MP) and West Indian columnist Darcus Howe.[2] Currie de-linked the present spate of civil violence in London from the violent rioting in Brixton in 1981, arguing that while deep-rooted racism was almost a ‘respectable’ trait in the 1980s, this was not the case now. And that youth violence today, regardless of race, is fuelled by a disconnect with society in general. In a hypothetical scenario she painted, a youth would turn to violence just to have ‘the trainers that Mum won’t buy me’ and through a lack of respect for private property, that is, not recognising the distinction between ‘what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is yours and I don’t touch it’. In response, Howe pointed out that young Black men continue to be a disenfranchised cohort, who are stereotyped by the police through their stop-and-search powers. Howe also indirectly questioned why that mother would not (or could not) buy running shoes for her son, or what meaning the concept of private property had for someone who had none.

These views characterise an important debate in understanding civil violence: whether it is perpetrated by mindless criminality, or whether there is a more structured anatomy of a riot. So how are we to understand the London riots? Here is a 3-step approach to understanding the ‘mindless criminal’"

How can Researchers Maximise their Impact?

2011-08-09T17:08:00.005+01:00

Why am I recommending a 298 page “Handbook for Social Scientists on Maximising the Impacts of Your Research?” In fact I was going to do a blog about how silly it is to have such a long guide to building impact, but the Handbook, from the LSE Public Policy Group (consultation draft 3) is really good. Lots of evidence and data analysis is provided, stratified by discipline and level of seniority of researcher, all written up in clear (if not pithy) prose.

The handbook argues that research impact comprises academic impacts (within the research world) and external impacts (those outside higher education). It defines impact as an “occasion of influence” not as a change in outputs or activities as a result of that influence or a social outcome (would this definition be challenged by the UK Research Councils?). The Handbook states that “verified causal links from one author or piece of work to output changes or to social outcomes cannot realistically be made or measured in the current state of knowledge”.

Personally I think we can push it further than this given a concerted research agenda (see end of the blog) but then I have always been bullish about this issue.

The first part of the Handbook focuses on citations (the average article in the social sciences and humanities is cited less than once a year! p.24): what shapes them (in the first few years book citations are lower per year than articles, but also are more enduring), how to assess them (I had not heard of Harzing’s Publish or Perish software, but is supposed to be very good or social scientists), how to increase them (have a distinctive name, choose memorable titles that also summarise your argument, and co-author, preferably with people outside your organisation and country), how to assess citation performance (e.g. the h-index where you have an h score of 10 if you have 10 articles that have at least 10 citations each--the average for social science researchers is 3-4!).

The second part focuses on maximising external impact. The Handbook uses a simple research discovery, integration, application and renewal model as a necessary condition for generating impact. It then discusses how these 4 activities are spread across the 5 main demands on academics time (research, academic citizenship, academic management, teaching and dissemination and impacts work). Bridging scholarship, across disciplines and organisations is vital for this. Also vital are “impacts interface” organisations such as think-tanks, the media, professional associations and consultancies. "Impact gaps" lamented by some users can be traced to incentives, culture, demand and supply mismatches, weak communication and poor social capital. Ways of resolving these are highly context specific, with exchanges likely to be important in many contexts. The Handbook’s framework for identifying academics who achieve external impacts include 6 behaviours: they (a) are academically credible (that is a relief), (b) have good networking skills, (c) have good personal communication skills, (d) an external profile, (e) are experienced/safe pair of hands, and (f) have a track record of influence. At the organisational level the Handbook argues that: it is the tacit knowledge of research teams/institutes that has the highest impact, not the explicit knowledge they pump out; commissioned work can shorten time lags for impact; it is vital to systematically collect impact data in customer relation systems; stretching for impact does not necessarily lead to a loss of academic independence, but it could, so make sure this risk is prominent on risk registers; “information wants t be free”—maintain an online depository; researchers write blogs (cut out the middleman), but rely less on single-author blogs because readers want something new every day and single author blogs cannot do this (unless you are Duncan Green).

I found the first part of the Handbook more interesting than the second part (which seemed more obvious to me, perhaps because at IDS we worry about these things and don’t have to be as scientific about citation indices).

What really struck me however was how thin the evidence base is in terms of how research influence is defined, assessed and shaped. There is a really interesting research agenda out there on what affects the uptake of research (we are doing a project on how the framing of a research report affects what policymakers retain).

Finally, the Handbook, even as a reference tool, needs to apply the principles it espouses if it is to have an impact of its own. It needs to be shorter, with more real examples, and quotes from users, aggregators and producers of research. It needs to draw on that tacit know-how and less on more explicit (but abstract) knowledge.

Some Good Nutrition News out of India?

2011-07-21T07:05:00.002+01:00

A new paper by Eeshani Kandpal, forthcoming in the journal World Development reveals “unambiguous evidence that the ICDS (the Integrated Child Development Services programme) significantly reduces long term child malnutrition in India”.

ICDS is a child development programme with nearly a million centres throughout India. It is focused on welfare for children from birth to 6 years of age involving, feeding, health counselling, and education. Most studies have found ICDS to be ineffective in raising the levels of infant chronic undernutrition as measured by cumulative shortfalls of height for age from international standards (also known as stunting).

I feel that the paper slightly oversells its results, but maybe the temptation was strong, because the paper is very carefully done and methodologically sound and this is rare for ICDS, the largest nutrition-related programme in the world. In short, the paper is an important contribution.

The paper is noteworthy for a number of reasons:

• It uses the most recent nutrition data in India (2005-6)
• It properly uses propensity score matching to match up children in ICDS areas with those not in ICDS areas, but are identical in terms of observable factors that determine stunting rates and observable factors that determine participation in ICDS. The matching is vital, because ICDS is supposed to be targeted to areas in which stunting rates are highest. Without matching it is very possible that ICDS children would show higher stunting rates because of this targeting (and this is what the author actually finds)
• It compares matched and unmatched estimates of the effects of ICDS
• It breaks the results down by severely and moderately stunted children and by children under the age of 2 and under the age of 3, and by gender.

Findings:

• For all children, the matched estimates show that ICDS has a positive and significant impact of 6% on child stunting. The unmatched estimates show a negative and significant impact of ICDS of about 7%. Matching matters, big time.
• The positive impacts seem stronger for the moderately stunted than for the severely stunted
• The results are stronger (magnitude and significance) for boys
• These analyses are run for the 1992-93 data and for the 1998-99 data and the results are generally zero. So ICDS is now having an overall positive impact on stunting, whereas before it did not.
• The 2005-06 results show stronger effects for those less than 3 years of age compared to those only less that 2 years of age
• A separate analysis of where and how ICDS centres are placed finds that placement is likely to be pro-poor, although areas with more educated mothers are favoured and areas with gender population imbalances are not favoured
• Another analysis of ICDS expenditures at the 29 state level indicates that stunting levels do not drive allocations, but votes for the political alliance that won the 2004 national election have a positive impact on the ICDS funds received

The paper shows that ICDS has an overall positive impact on stunting rates using the 2005-06 data (unlike with previous rounds of data), but that this impact is not particularly well focused on the most stunted or on under 2s.

The author suggests that the ICDS investment yields a 3.75 fold net return. The questions that remain: (a) did anything happen in ICDS design to result in this recent impact? (b) is a certain level of wealth needed before national integrated programmes such as ICDS can have an effect (as opposed to more focused cash transfers?), and (c) how much can the net benefit/cost ratio of 3.75 be improved (community based nutrition promotion reach ratios of 12:1--see Horton, Alderman and Rivera 2008, Copenhagen Consensus) through a more nutrition focused allocation of ICDS funds to states, through better placement of ICDS centres and through a better focus on under 2s, on those with severe stunting and on girls?

At last, we have a good nutrition story out of India (although not quite as good as the author would have us believe).

Can the “commitment” to reduce hunger be measured? Should it?

2011-07-18T19:13:00.002+01:00

The Irish Hunger Task Force was quite clear in its recommendations that someone should be measuring the commitment to reducing hunger – for rich and poor countries alike. It’s no longer acceptable to talk rather airily about “political will”. Wishful thinking on this is unacceptable, we need to now measure political commitment. But how? Any why?

The “why” is easier than the “how”. It is important to assess political commitment for several reasons:

• To hold governments to account
• To help mobilise society against hunger
• To bridge the divide between rhetoric and reality on political will
• To help government’s prioritise their own efforts to reduce hunger
• To highlight the political nature of hunger

How? An IDS initiative in partnership with Save the Children UK, ActionAid, Trocaire and Irish Aid has produced its first set of results in advance of a first report due out in late August. These were presented at a workshop at Action Aid today.

The Hunger Reduction Commitment Index (HRCI) initiative has operationalised “commitment” as a mix of publicly stated intent and action. It constructs an index from 9 secondary data indicators, 3 from each of 3 categories: policy focus on hunger, legal framework to support hunger reduction and public expenditure on hunger related sectors. The index needs to undergo further sensitivity analyses (and needs to figure out how to incorporate primary data collection on commitment) so I don’t want to talk too much about the specifics. Some preliminary observations:

• The preliminary rankings are quite different from the admirable ActionAid Hunger Free index which conflates hunger outcomes and hunger commitments and the IFPRI/Concern Global Hunger Index (which only looks at outcomes)
• When you focus solely on commitments, some countries rank a lot worse than they do on the HungerFree scorecard (China drops from 2 to 12 out of 21 countries) and some do better (Ethiopia moves up from 10 to 4)
• Brazil does well on commitments and outcomes, so it stays high in the rankings on this new index at number 1
• Malawi, comes out as 1 in the HRCI (number 4 in HungerFree index), which adds a twist to the current strained relationships with the UK
• The new index of commitment is compared against outcomes, administrative capacity, voice and wealth. It is interesting to see that several countries who have high commitment scores have medium admin capacity scores (e.g. Malawi) and low voice scores (e.g. Ethiopia), while some have low commitment scores and high admin capacity (e.g. Mozambique)

Many questions were raised by participants at today’s workshop:

• How are the primary data going to be incorporated into the index? How can perception indicators be made comparable across countries?
• How will the index, and the process of constructing it, be empowering for communities who are food insecure? How can their voices be contrasted with the voices of in-country “experts”?
• How do we reconcile a set of indicators that work for a range of countries with a set that are more meaningful at the country level?
• How do we avoid confusing messaging on hunger given the other indicators out there?
• How do we make the index the beginning of a dialogue rather than a name and shame exercise?

These are all issues that will be addressed in the next country-led phase of the initiative (assuming we can find resources). The opportunities for linking the next phase of the initiative into nationally owned processes around MDGs and right to food movements and into international debates (e.g. FAO reform process, and various accountability initiatives) seem plentiful.

I will give an update when the full report is available in late August.

Is State Capacity a Political Choice? New Evidence from Bihar and Ethiopia

2011-07-17T19:10:00.002+01:00

Two recent papers from IDS colleagues suggest that the answer to this question is “yes”. The paper by Santhosh Mathew and Mick Moore (2011) examines the weak capacity of the State of Bihar in India over the 1990-2005 period, and a paper by soon to be IDS Fellow Stephen Peterson (2011) on Public Financial Management in Ethiopia over the 1996-2010 examines the drivers of successful financial reform. The authors argue, In both cases, that deliberate and calculated political choices drove weak capacity in Bihar and strong capacity in Ethiopia.

Bihar is one of the poorest States in India, but is currently on one of the strongest upward trajectories when it comes to governance. It is also a key target of DFID resources. Mathew is a senior administrator in the State (he took a time out to complete PhD at IDS) and gives us a strong inside analysis of how and why such political choices were made.

He puts forward two principal reasons for Bihar’s poor performance:

• The type of leadership exercised by Chief Minister Yadav combined with the nature of his political coalition: to energise his political coalition of middle and lower caste groups he continually confronted the upper caste groups who were in control of state machinery

• This meant that the latter were not well disposed to helping him deliver “development” and the distribution of material resources to his core constituency. Even more importantly he undermined state capacity so as to exclude these historically powerful groups from the machinery. This meant that Bihar failed to compete for central Government money (won by other states with greater administrative capacity to fill out the forms) and that it often under-spent its own budget

Yadav’s crime was not incompetence, but the choice of where and how to deploy his considerable talents.

Ethiopia, in contrast, chose to aim for international standards when reforming its financial systems (it is now the third best in Africa and is managing the largest aid flows). In 1996 reporting on financial performance was experiencing a 6-7 year backlog, the Ethiopian Civil Service College was not teaching accounting or budgeting, and bookkeeping was single entry. That has all changed.

Peterson argues that the change was supported in the following ways:

• Ethiopian policymakers did not aspire to “summits of international best practice” but “consolidation of the basics of a firm financial plateau”
• Decentralisation, central to the survival of the ruling Tigrayan ethnic group, required effective public financial management reform, so the ownership of the reform was strong
• Public financial management was rightly regarded by the Government as a core function of the state and therefore a matter of sovereignty—an issue that donors should not drive
• The strategy of the reform did not stop at “recognise, improve and change”, but continued on to “sustain”

Both of these papers demonstrate:

• The value of the insider-outside perspective (Mathew, a skilled administrator stepping outside to a UK research organisation, and Stephenson, an American researcher, stepping inside an Ethiopian system)
• The dangers of apolitical analyses of state capacity
• The long time periods for things to get noticeably bad (Bihar) and noticeably good (Ethiopia)—there are no quick fixes
• The importance of leadership and discipline (to pursue developmental or non developmental ends)

Both papers are short and well written—I recommend them both.

Violent Conflict and Incomplete Control

2011-07-01T14:25:00.009+01:00

Yesterday I spent the day at a conference hosted by IDS on the Micro Analysis of Violent Conflict, organised by an EC supported research consortium, MICROCON.

The Director of MICROCON, IDS Fellow Patricia Justino, kicked things off by pointing out that the starting point in 2006 was that (a) most work on violence and conflict is at the state level, (b) we knew very little about the impacts of conflict and violence on ordinary people and (c) very little about how people can and cannot "navigate" (a term introduced by Philip Verwimp, one of the co-Directors of MICROCON) their ways through it--ways, which if uncovered, will provide important clues and cues to policy formulation in this area.

Some reflections

1. MICROCON has made a very conscious effort to collect data, sharing it as widely as possible. As Chris Cramer, one of the participants, said, if truth is the first casualty of war then evidence is one of the key battlegrounds--in other words, data can help shed light on dynamic, chaotic and uncertain contexts. Tilman Bruck (DIW in Germany) and Gary Milante (World Bank and an author of the latest WDR) spoke about how we can be more systematic about collecting data in conflict areas, using panels and more standard definitions of key variables.

2. The people focus is simple, but powerful. It helps delve into the household (do conflict and violence affect intrahousehold power dynamics in predictable ways? Do regular empirical observations --e.g. greater resources in the hands of women empowers them--hold when conflict is the shock?). It also helps us understand how institutions (in terms of norms, rules of the game and organisations) can lead to and be born from violent conflict (e.g. the importance of restoring health and education services---even if not focused on the poorest--is a way of signalling that normality is returning and hope invested in a peaceful solution is less likely to be squandered).

3. Incomplete control. We heard about Stathis Kalyvas' incomplete control hypothesis of when political actors use violence. When they have complete control (hence the Clash picture) they don't need to use violence and when they have no control violence is counterproductive as they have no information to make the violence selective.

4. Conflict can turn things upside down. Like in some parallel universe, university degrees are good things in peacetime but in conflict they can be a signal to help target elites.

5. Policy priorities. We heard from the policy-oriented participants how difficult it is to prioritise and sequence interventions in conflict affected and post-conflict settings, because everything seems to need addressing. The conclusion seemed to be "it's almost more important to prioritise something than what is that is prioritised". In the nutrition area, I highlighted how the presence of violence and conflict (and their apparently unpredictable distribution of impacts) made it even more important to protect the first 1000 days of an infants life, regardless of whether they are malnourished or not.

This is an exciting area. While I suspect the "impact of conflict" evidence is well on its way to being filled, the gap that is now yawning is the "impact of conflict prevention and mitigation interventions". That would build on the work of MICROCON version 1 and would be a good focus for MICROCON version 2.

Evaluation Literacy: Reading the Systematic Review Tea Leaves

2011-06-26T20:21:00.006+01:00

Lots of systematic reviews are emerging from the various 3ie/DFID initiatives. As a researcher, I find them a fantastic resource. As a policymaker, I'm not so sure. It seems to me they require a huge amount of evaluation literacy.

Why? Well, it's not as if we have 20 studies on microfinance that have a similar design and similar outcome indicators and were all run in South Asia, or 20 agricultural interventions that tried to improve nutrition in the same way using the same indicator of nutrition. Getting the centre of gravity of the review is not easy, because the reviews are comparing African apples with Asian oranges and some of the fruits are bigger and more nourishing than others.

In any case, one of my colleagues at IDS, Emilie Wilson attended the big 3ie conference last week in Mexico and this is a brief report from her with links, on evaluation literacy.

Evaluation Literacy by Emilie Wilson, IDS

Donors want to see value for money. Researchers want to apply credible approaches to measuring the impact of development interventions. Politicians want to be re-elected on the back of successful social programmes. A match made in heaven?

Last week, I had the privilege of attending a 3ie conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on impact evaluation, entitled “Mind the Gap: from evidence to policy impact”. At IDS, I am lucky to be both working at the coal-face of policy influence using research communication and engaged with action research on how communication of research brings about change.

Wearing both those hats, I engaged in the conference wanting to learn more about the truism that “policy influence is a complex and nonlinear process”. And the beauty of attending these events is that faceless “policymakers” become Felipe Kast, Planning Minister for Chile, Gonzalo Hernandez-Licona, Executive Secretary for the National Council for Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL) in Mexico and Ruth Levine from the Hewlett Foundation. Real people with real problems (to resolve).

The conference pre-clinics, thematic and special sessions broadly divided into three areas:

1. how to do impact evaluations (methods)

2. what have impact evaluations already told us (case studies and findings on a wide range of issues including agriculture, health, and social protection)

3. how can we share with those in decision-making positions the news about what works and what doesn’t in development interventions

I focused on this last area, attending two excellent sessions on “Donor priorities for evaluations” and “Perspectives from policymakers”.

Presentations were clear and insightful (see especially “How to influence policy” and “Factors that Help or Hinder the Use of Evidence in Policymaking” by Iqbal Dhaliwal, global head of Policy for the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)), donors and policymakers were frank and humble, and the audience did not shy from asking challenging questions.

Some take-aways for me include:

· building the bridge between evidence and policy is a two-way process: researchers should ensure that evidence is substantial, timely and policy-relevant; policymakers need to be ‘evaluation literate’ and understand the value of using evidence in policy

· there is an important role to be played by ‘intermediaries’ – those who synthesise, repackage, ‘translate’ – making research and evidence relevant and usable beyond academia

We are often told that policymakers are constrained by time and money. Surely this assumption was challenged by the presence of so many at this conference, which required both time (including 30 hour journeys across the world) and money. Perhaps Esther Duflo, who spoke at the opening plenary, was right to talk of “fake urgency” and warn that rushing to gain time would eventually waste time. If we don’t learn lessons now, we’ll make the same mistakes again in the future.

Distracted from Distraction by Distraction

2011-06-21T16:28:00.005+01:00

Is the internet rewiring our brains towards power browsing and away from deep processing of information that "underpins inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination and reflection?" This is the argument made by Nicholas Carr in his book, "The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we read, think and remember".

As someone who routinely did his school homework in front of the TV and still likes to write with music blaring in the background, you would not think I would worry much about this. And after reading this book, I'm still not sure if I do.

The book's premise is:

1. reading deeply=thinking deeply

2. the internet is designed to "seize our attention, only to scatter it" and is "by design, an interruption system"

3. due to the neurophysiological plasticity of our brain, it is being shaped by the internet into making us good at being "hunter-gatherers in the electronic forest" rather than "cultivators of personal knowledge" and

4. this is undermining our ability to "make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, and fostering our own ideas".

The book is rather dense (I know, you're thinking I have lost my capacity for "deep processing"--if I ever had it) but it is authoritative, introducing the reader to a lot of behavioural psychology research about how we read web pages (in F-shapes, scanning the first couple of rows of text, dropping down and scanning half a row and then dropping down some more lines only to lose interest) and the impact of longer online stories on our attention spans (on average, for every 100 extra words published we only read 18 of them).

To me, it all seems about balance. I enjoy the hunter gatherer aspects of the net. Yes, I have to be aware of the costs of increased efficiency of searching (e.g. the tendency to be directed to what everyone else is directed to), but there are many areas in which I have no deep personal knowledge but for which I want to get a quick sense of what people I trust are thinking, and the net is invaluable for this. But perhaps I am comfortable with this because I do have areas in which I have deeper personal knowledge--hunger, malnutrition, agriculture, food policy, statistical methods etc. I spent many years pounding through texts and papers while learning my trade in order to do this.

For me, as a father, the most worrying aspect of the internet is the effect it is having on the knowledge aquisition habits of the school students of today. Will they have the opportunities to develop deep personal knowledge of a field? Or will they be consigned to being merely a cadre of superbrowsers?

For those of us in development, this book again brings me back to the need to experiment with and evaluate how research is framed, communicated and used; how we define research quality; whether knowledge that is co-constructed can avoid the trap of being fractured and how the internet can be used to diversify knowledge sources rather than promote bandwaggoning of the research idea du jour.

All in all an interesting read, but one that requires you to turn off your emails and RSS feeds (but not the one for this site).

Keeping up with the Jones’ (and the Banda’s): Results for Good Change

2011-06-17T15:38:00.002+01:00

Yesterday IDS and ODI hosted a meeting with the Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell on the Results for Change agenda, chaired by IDS Board Chair Richard Manning. In all there were 25 people present from a range of research and development partners.

The Results for Change agenda has two key features (a) intensifying the focus on generating development outcomes, and (b) putting more scrutiny on whether this is being done cost-effectively. The agenda is aimed at reassuring the UK electorate that their aid is well spent. But it is also about wanting to support “good change” to make the world a better place. By “good change” I mean change where it is most needed and for whom it is most needed, change that is transforming and enduring and, vitally, change that does no harm.

The meeting focused on how the results agenda could be shaped to support the delivery of this good change. The Secretary of State’s speech at the Royal College of Pathologists demonstrated that he and his team are well aware of the potential disconnects between results and good change. For example, a narrow interpretation of “results” could mean that we evaluate things that are easy to evaluate, diverting attention away from things that are potentially more transforming and enduring but more awkward to evaluate.

My takeaways from the meeting:

1. Innovation. There is a desperate need for innovation in this space. First, on issues. For example, what is the best way of evaluating conflict prevention efforts or the efforts of businesses to achieve development outcomes as well as profits? In other words how do we push and pull good evaluations into the more difficult spaces? Second, how do we get more stakeholder voice into the evaluation process? Will this incentivise learning, make failure harder to ignore and force more listening? Third, how do we communicate results to policymakers, to the UK public (referred to as “Mrs Jones” by several participants) and to citizens in places where DFID works (ditto, “Mrs Banda”). The gap between the technical findings and how they are communicated to these different stakeholders is clearly large.

2. Simplification. Owen Barder noted that the outcomes focus, while a much needed emphasis, was in danger of overburdening organisations using aid. The introduction of a new reporting structure without a paring down of the existing structures risks diverting creative energy away from the achievement of the outcomes. Can the input and output tracking systems be simplified? If not, then outcomes will be at risk.

3. Accountability. How can we track where the evaluations are landing? Despite best intentions, is too much of the evaluative effort going into the short term, service delivery activities and not enough into activities that try to improve systems and rebalance power? Ben Ramalingam shared a useful graph that mapped he results context by (1) the nature of the intervention (simple to complex) and (2) the political context (pro-poor to no pro-poor). If all the evaluations and results are accumulating in the simple intervention/pro-poor space then we are not focusing on the portfolio of potential actions in a sufficiently balanced way.

4. Evidence and decision making. Political opportunity trumps evidence, up to a point. From the practitioners in the room we had some good insights on (a) how evidence is used to make the best decisions within the political space that exists (e.g. if political space exists for vaccinations, use evidence to make sure the right vaccinations are delivered to those most in need in ways that promote greatest spillovers) and (b) on how evidence can shape the political space in the medium run (e.g. does the evidence justify the political space that HIV/AIDS commands?).

5. More Evidence. We agreed that the evidence base in development is weak in many areas (don’t forget, we are researchers)--at least for the more RCT type evidence. But we skirted the issue of what constitutes credible evidence, noting that in some cases RCTs will be the “gold standard”, but in many other cases there will be different methods and blends that will be labelled as gold standard. We heard that DFID has commissioned a review of methods which can offer levels of rigour in their context that are similar to the potential rigour RCTs offer in theirs.

6. Need for country led accountability. We did not spend enough time on this. Who are the results for? And who generates them? These are key factors that will shape which policies and actions are evaluated, the definitions about the quality and weight of evidence and, crucially, the incentives to learning from the findings.

It’s clear to me that the “results for change” agenda has great potential. Those of us in the research community must play our part if this potential is to be realised. We must be at the forefront of this agenda, working with aid agencies and Governments to make the results work for “good change”. In doing this, we may well have to change ourselves--to learn from evaluation methods outside of development, to try to evaluate the seemingly unevaluable and to invest more in understanding the political processes within which decisions are made and communicated.

To get a wider range of perspectives from this meeting, I encourage you to visit blog entries from Rosalind Eyben and Simon Maxwell, both of whom who were active participants.

Microfinance: Angel or Devil?

2011-06-15T07:58:00.009+01:00

Microfinance has been in the news a lot recently, so I invited my IDS colleague Anton Simanowitz, who has deep knowledge of the field both as a researcher and a practitioner, to do a guest blog reflecting on the debate.

In the same week I happened to come across a systematic review of 15 studies on the impacts of microfinance, led by Ruth Stewart at the Institute of Eduction in London published late last year. The review is hard hitting with conclusions such as "Some people are made poorer, and not richer, by microfinance, particularly micro-credit clients", "The emphasis on reaching the ‘poorest of the poor’may be flawed–particularly if it just makes them poorer", "There is some evidence that microfinance enables poor people to be better placed to deal with shocks,but this is not universal" and "We recommend avoidance of the promotion of microfinance as a means to achieve the Millennium Development Goals".

Anton's commentary echoes these points (e.g. microfinance is difficult to evaluate as a stand alone intervention -- the Stewart study found only 4 high quality evaluations in more than 20 years of microfinance operation!) but he also says the current swing of the pendulum away from microfinance represents an opportunity to make it truly pro-poor.

Angel or Devil? The truth about microfinance - Anton Simanowitz

Last week I presented to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Microfinance, as part of their launch of a new report “Helping or hurting: What role for microfinance in the fight against poverty?” The report recognises that in many cases microfinance has been over-hyped and failed to deliver on its potential, and makes a number of recommendations to make microfinance more effective.

I joined what is often termed the microfinance ‘movement’ in 1997, working for three years for a local organisation in South Africa to help deepen their poverty outreach and impact. Spending time talking to the women clients, I could not help but be impressed by the lack of paternalism compared to my experience with other development interventions. Microfinance provides a service for a fee. My salary was paid for by the women I was interviewing, and when after a meeting I failed to find a single volunteer to stay behind to talk to me, I learnt the practical meaning of the term ‘time is money’.

The focus of my work was critical. I quickly recognised the business imperative of an organisation dependent on reaching scale, drive down costs and ensure virtually 100 per cent repayment rates for its very survival. This creates a tension with the need to tailor services to the individual needs of clients, for staff to provide a supportive and attentive service. When it works well, the support and facilitation of a staff member is a key aspect of ensuring that the clients productively invest their loans, re-invest profit, and that problems are dealt with in a supportive way by group members. I’ve often heard these field agents referred to as ‘angels’. More recently I heard a story of clients who told a survey team that their loan officers were devils, “all they care about is getting their money back”.

These tensions between commercial and social objectives – inherent in any social business – get to the heart of the current crisis in microfinance.

In recent months we’ve reached a tipping point and the pendulum is swinging with amazing force and speed. Microfinance is turning from angel to devil. In India, a seasonal phenomenon of suicides amongst over-indebted farmer has been blamed on microfinance; in Bangladesh the political elite has seen the opportunity to oust the Nobel Peach Prize Laureate and Founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus. And academic studies that question the blind belief in the universal good of microfinance are being picked up by journalists eager to join the frenzy of anti-microfinance rhetoric.

Microfinance has been over hyped for many years, and I’ve been part of a small and mostly ignored group of practitioners and academics who have been saying for the past 10 years and more that microfinance is not just about access to financial services. Not all microfinance is the same and the benefits are not automatic. To achieve impact requires a thought through process that starts with an understanding of the complexity and multi dimensional nature of poverty.

There is no answer to the question “what is the impact of microfinance on poverty”, because this is the wrong question. Microfinance organisations vary hugely in terms of their methodology, their products/services, their productivity levels, management systems, and the context in which they work. The livelihoods of their clients are complex and vary, and its hard to pinpoint the direct impact of one intervention in a complex financial portfoloio.

It's this complexity that makes assessing the impact of microfinance so difficult. Over the years many there have been many impact assessments, and they have been consistent in their inconsistency. Microfinance benefits some of the people, some of the time, in some contexts. A new wave of randomised control trials (RCTs) is confirming the same thing.

I’ve recently completed researching and writing a paper - “Challenges to the field and solutions” - that will be presented in plenary to the great and the good of microfinance in November this year. I’ve been impressed by how much knowledge and experience there is in the microfinance community about the needs of clients and how to design services to make an impact, but this is not applied in practice. I have come to realise that I’m part of an industry that devotes 95% of its effort into how to reach more people as efficiently and profitably as possible. The institutional needs take priority over client needs.

The current crisis in microfinance is a huge opportunity. With the benefits no longer assumed, perhaps people will start to focus more on working out how to realise the potential of microfinance.

Andrew Mitchell on Results for Change

2011-06-09T09:35:00.009+01:00

I read the speech Andrew Mitchell made last night on "Results for Change" at the Royal College of Pathologists in London (sorry, I can't find a link for it).

It was in part taking stock of the past year at DFID and in part taking on the critique of the results agenda that "it will encourage us to indulge in a host of evils: to focus narrowly on the easy wins, to adopt 'one-size-fits-all' methodology, to take simplistic views of complex societies, and to mortgage long-term change for short-term gain".

The Secretary of State cycled through examples of how the results agenda would play out in the areas of health, education for girls, wealth creation and governance.

On health, the speech focused on the direct impacts of vaccinations throughout the lifecycle, but also on the indirect effects. From the nutrition literature we know positive effect that "immunisation days" can have on the wider demand for health services, health systems strengthening and the consequent impact on child nutrition status.

On education for girls, we heard about DFID's work with the Nike Foundation and communities in northern Ethiopia. Again we know that extra years in school, if the quality of education is good and the environment is safe, is a good thing for future wellbeing through direct (participation and employment options) and indirect routes (e.g. later age of marriage and first birth).

On wealth creation it was EasyPaisa in Pakistan, a mobile phone based set of financial services. We know that financial services for the poorest can improve their assets and their access to know how.

On governance it was working with the Government to set up inexpensive channels for people to access legal rights in Bangladesh, which can help the poorest get redress to asset grabs, and to seek justice for those suffering violence.

Reactions?

* A well-written speech. Intended to inform and reassure. A good balance of substance and oratory.

* Good examples were provided. The governance one seemed strong (the speech was not afraid to talk about rights or power). The health one did a good job of reminding us that magic bullets can have positive spillovers. The wealth creation builds on innovations from Kenya and elsewhere but felt the weakest in terms of demonstrated impacts. The education one seemed to represent the biggest jump--from 376 girls in a pilot to 2 million girls over the next 4 years.

* In eachcase the outcomes identified seemed credible and sensible. On immunisations it is usually good enough to measure participation, but there was also a focus on getting rural doctors into post, thus strengthening health systems. On education there was a focus on helping girls stay in school, but also on reduced rates of early marriage. On wealth creation in addition to participation there is an outcome measure (I think) around remitting income. On governance there is an outcome around reduced violence and abuse suffered by women within the home.

* The challenge of course will be to (a) actually measure the outcomes, (b) assess the impact, and (c) learn from the results and (d) adapt the intervention. In my commentary I use the word "can" a lot--these interventions can be positive, but they can just as easily have zero or even negative consequences (we will soon be able to begin compiling this breakdown as all the new systematic reviews come in). So (c) and (d) are just as important as (a) and (b).

* In addition, HOW (a)-(d) are done will matter in terms of whose results count. The incentives to do (a)-(d) are weak enough and to do them in a way that is accountable to beneficiaries as well as to funders is even harder.

* Finally, I was struck that the interventions and the outcomes highlighted did not seem that different from pre-Coalition DFID. I think the true test of the current DFID will be (1) can it get results done in ways that promote learning and adaptation as well as accountability (for partners and DFID itself)? (2) is it open to different types of evidence, as long as of a sufficient quality? (3) of course, can it achieve better outcomes for a given set of resources? and (4) can it communicate that, credibly, to different audiences?

Results for "good change" is a difficult business, but I think the signs in this speech are encouraging. Most importantly it shows that DFID is listening to its stakeholders.

Framed

2011-06-08T13:55:00.011+01:00

Does framing matter?

The IFS released a report today on the UK pensioners "Winter Fuel Allowance". The report found that UK pensioners spend 40% of this allowance on fuel, even though it is a completely unrestricted source of income. This compares to the 5% of expenditure on fuel from other income sources they have.

We know that spending patterns are affected by who earns income within a household (e.g. income earned by women has a larger effect on food security and nutrition at the margin). We also know that income that can only be spent on certain items has an extra-marginal effect on the consumption of that item, (e.g. food stamps, which have to be spent on food, actually do increase food expenditures, although not by the full amount of the voucher because of reductions in food expenditure from other income sources). But when income is not restricted to any expenditure category, as in Deaton and Case's work on pension income in South Africa, the finding has generally been, all other things equal, that "a Rand is a Rand".

So, to get a massive marginal increase in fuel expenditures just by framing a general income transfer as a fuel allowance is really surprising. Or is it? The adherents to Cass and Sunstein, the "nudgers", (now there's a label that needs updating) argue that when faced with an information overload, people increasingly rely on cues from friends, family, media, and the government to help them make decisions.

Can nudging work in research uptake? We all frame our arguments, written or oral, to have maximum effect (I'm trying to do it now). Perhaps the most surprising thing is that many of us spend a lot of time worrying about whether our research will be used but not much time in experimenting about how to do it and whether the experiment worked.

One example of an experiment on research uptake is an IDS/3IE collaboration around the policy impact of opinion pieces. Using a randomised trial we are investigating the stickiness of messages from a major new report under three circumstances: (a) without an accompanying opinion piece, (b) with an anonymous opinion piece, and (c) with a named opinion piece from someone well known in the field.

As this field develops and is populated with studies, it will be interesting to observe whether decisions based on cues really are more frequent in contexts of information overload, or whether it is simply part of the human condition.

The G20 and Food Security: Five things for them to consider

2011-06-05T14:01:00.009+01:00

The G20 at the end of June has a pre-meeting of agricultural ministers to discuss food security. With food prices going beyond the highs of 2008 the issue is high on the political agenda (with Oxfam's GROW campaign being an excellent example of how to move it higher up that agenda). So what should they be discussing at the pre-meeting?

1. Find ways of decoupling agricultural commodity price speculation from the prices consumers have to pay. Agricultural commodities are going to represent a bull market for the next 10 years, fuelled by income growth in Asia, Latin America and Africa, so this problem is not going away. So some time can be spent on getting a long term solution. There may be some parallels between the need to decouple high street banks from financial market speculation. Food prices are too directly linked to the welfare of the poorest for this coupling with speculative behaviour to be tolerated. I don't know how to do it. Perhaps there is a place for some kind of Panic Tax that my IDS colleague Neil McCulloch developed as part of our Reimagining Development project. The Panic Tax focuses not on the level of financial flows (a la Tobin tax), but the speed of flow that is taxed. In effect the tax serves to slow down the speed of transmission of market speculation. Taxes are not an easy thing to talk about in the current centre-right European context, but the broader point is: look outside of the food and agricultural sector for solutions.

2. Find ways to take advantage of the higher food prices. A few years ago FAO was giving farmers advice on how to deal with low food prices. Well, this is an opportunity for those who can meet the higher prices. How can we get supply to be more responsive without putting more pressure on the environment? This is an impossible question to solve generically because each country will have its own set of solutions. National policies and politics will be essential for boosting supply response. To be fair, most of the poorer countries are doing their bit by spending increasing percentages of their budgets on agriculture. It is the donor countries who are dragging their feet. What can you do G8 and G20? Spend more of your aid on agriculture and food security. National strategies are vital for the countries in question, but multiple breadbaskets lend resilience to the global food system.

3. Regulate land purchases. Land purchases are not inevitably a bad thing, but the ways things are going they seem dodgy (they seek out weak national governance and are nontransparent). So on global governance, get more serious about large scale international land purchases. A voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative-type mechanism is too weak a response. Make these purchases fall under a rules based regime policed by the WTO.

4. Support the "construction of outrage". Civil society, with some exceptions, is too quiet on the issue of hunger. We are not "on the verge of another food crisis", we are in the midst of an on-going food crisis. Somehow we have internalised 1 billion hungry as not being a crisis. Why isn't there more outrage? One reason is that we don't have regular updates on hunger. More real time hunger mapping would fuel civil society and the media to keep the issue higher on the agenda and would actually help governments to be more responsive.

5. Support an FAO Revolution. FAO should be the beacon of political light that is shone on hunger. FAO should be populated by people who can support processes to end hunger, but who can also articulate the outrage of hunger. I don't agree with everything Olivier de Schutter, the UN's Special Rapportuer on the right to food, says but his voice is present where it counts. FAO needs senior leaders who can generate as much energy and passion about the issue as Olivier can.

Robert Chambers: Revolutionising Development

2011-05-27T18:28:00.009+01:00

Today IDS hosted a Reflection Forwards on the work of Robert Chambers. About 100 development luminaries came together to reflect forwards on Robert's work. How are his ideas and ways of looking at the world being taken forward by a host of development practitioners, policymakers and researchers all over the world?

In areas such as community led total sanitation, livelihoods, vulnerability and seasonality Robert has stood things on their head: putting the last first, focusing on relationships, redefining empowerment, developing participatory methods and relentlessly focusing on power.

In my conversations with people as IDS director, I come across 3 types of people: (1) those who know IDS well and at some point in our conversation ask me "and how is Robert?", (2) those who know a little about IDS, but whose eyes light up when they realise Robert works there and (3) those who do not know anything about IDS, but know Robert!

I first read his work in the early 80s as a useful complement or even antidote to the economists Bernanke, Amemiya and Pencavel. I tried to apply his methods to locating food insecurity in India in the early 90s and I worked with him and Jere Behrman in a CGIAR project on agriculture and poverty.

I have only worked in the same place as him for 7 years. He is inspirational, visionary, full of energy and directs his ego into his work and not into his own position. In a room full of gurus at IDS today, he was the guru's guru (although he would deny it).

Please check out the excellent book Revolutionizing Development (use discount code IDS30) that has been edited by Ian Scoones and Andrea Cornwall, which consists of articles reflecting backwards and forwards on Robert's work.

For an open access archive of the hundreds of pieces of Robert's work, here is a link from IDS' British Library of Development Studies www.ids.ac.uk/go/robertchambers

Ravallion on Impact, Interactions and Selectivity

2011-05-26T08:23:00.008+01:00

I don't really like blogging about blogs, but Martin Ravallion's blogs are like mini articles, so it does not count. In his guest blog the Director of the World Bank's Development Research Group flags 2 things that we should be worried about in the current impact surge.

1. Interactions. We are packaging change into neat interventions which are then evaluated. Second round effects over time,macro effects at the economy level, unplanned interactions between interventions and unanticipated effects on behaviour are being missed.

2. Selectivity on what gets evaluated. Whether it is the low hanging fruit, or interventions that bow to different impact methods or interventions in areas where it is politically expedient to do evaluations, what is being evaluated is not necessarily what needs to be evaluated.

So he calls for some kind of mechanism to systematically scan what is and is not being evaluated and then prioritise what needs to be. And he calls for a more eclectic blend of methods to be brought to the table.

I agree with all of this, that is why I would like to see a mapping of what is being evaluated against what our community thinks should be evaluated (can 3ie organise this please?).

We also need to go beyond different economics tools in our blending, although blending across disciplines will require extraordinary openness, respect and flexibility because we are effectively drilling down into world views and very different ideas about how change happens. But I believe it can be done, and must.

DFID in Afghanistan: Hearts and Minds or Legitimacy and Jobs?

2011-05-22T14:56:00.012+01:00

Against the backdrop of the capture and death of Osama Bin Laden, a new report from the Feinstein Center at Tufts University, authored by Stuart Gordon, examines the relationship between Aid and Security in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

The report is based on hundreds of in country interviews with Afghans and with individuals in the international community: from the civilian government, the military the UN, NGOs and contractors, community members, journalists, analysts etc.

The report concludes:

* the drivers of conflict in Helmand are a potent mixture of tribal vendettas, competition between narco-criminal groups, and violent reactions to predatory local police and bureaucrats. This mixture has developed over the past 30 years and was spurred on by the post-Taliban "carve-up" of power.

* the UK government and other donors adopted quick impact projects (QIPs) to help provide security and deliver services. But different UK government departments saw the QIPs as the means to different ends. The Foreign Office saw them as a way of politically engaging, the Ministry of Defence wanted them to help meet tactical military objectives (winning hearts and minds or the consent winning approach, CWA), while DFID saw them as a bridge to sustainable development. The interviews that Gordon conducted concluded that QIPs were not sustainable from a development point of view, with no evidence being found that they helped win hearts and minds.

* international development assistance generated a lot of negative perceptions: that it fuelled corruption, bypassed community structures, and did not generate enough employment.

As far as I can tell, the last DFID Afghanistan Evaluation was by Jon Bennett of ITAD in May 2009, covering 2002-2008. That report concluded that the DFID project success rate was in line with that in other fragile states and that DFID delivered what it promised within a long term commitment. But is also said DFID state building efforts focused too much on technical capacity in Kabul and not enough on political legitimacy outside of it, and that the emphasis on inclusion, gender and rights had not been strong.

The DFID Humanitarian and Emergency Response Review (HERR) barely mentions Afghanistan and is not terribly helpful in evaluating whether the strategic stance in Afghanistan is still fit for purpose.

Given the changes in the country and within the wider region, the on-going fluctuations in food and fuel prices to which the country is very vulnerable, the expansion of DFID activity in fragile states in general, and the time elapsed since the last DFID evaluation, there seems to be a good case for the planned fast tracking of Afghanistan by the new aid watchdog, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact in its newly released 3 year workplan.

But the workplan suggests the "investigation" (as opposed to a "VFM" review or a "evaluation" review) will look at programme controls and assurance (i.e. it is focussed on corruption) of DFID's programme in Afghanistan, rather than whether it is actually having an impact on development and security. I think ICAI should look at that spec again.

A New Harvest of RCTs?

2011-05-15T17:39:00.004+01:00

I am reading The New Harvest by Calestous Juma on how innovation and entrepreneurship need to be rethought in African agriculture. I can recommend the book—lively, provocative and well-evidenced. One of his key points is that agricultural innovation and knowledge generation in Africa needs to be decentralised. He argues that the interactions of climate change and ecosystems are expressed in variable and unpredictable ways and this makes context specificity more vital than ever. It is not that research and technology developed in one area will not be relevant in another, but just that we must continually challenge whether it will be. I agree with this conclusion.

Over the weekend I also read a column by Ben Goldacre on his “fantasy” that UK public policy should be driven by the MIT Poverty Lab approach. I have not yet read the latest book from the Poverty Lab which he refers to, but it strikes me that the randomised controlled trial (RCT) approach is at risk of doing exactly the opposite of what Juma advocates.

RCTs run the risk of locking in a result, not only within a country but across countries and over time. This is partly because: (a) they are costly to run (although I agree with Goldacre when he says you have to compare the cost with the costs of adopting the wrong policy) and so replication will be seen as costly and not terribly sexy to researchers or funders, (b) they are iconic (e.g. Progresa in Mexico, Orange Flesh Sweet Potato in Mozambique) because they are expensive and donors and researchers want to maximise their investments by publicising results (if they are positive), (c) they are not great at exploring the distribution of effects (sample sizes get too small if there are too many treatment variants) and (d) they are not particularly interested in external validity (understanding the likelihood of an interventions shown to be successful in one area being successful in another) because this requires a different set of skills.

It is interesting that RCTs have not been applied to UK public policy (I am assuming Goldacre is correct in this assertion). One could argue that heterogeneity (e.g. relative differences in behaviours and contexts by region and class) in the UK is lower than in emerging economies and hence the above worries about RCT portability are less valid. I wonder if this low RCT uptake in the UK is because of an anticipated stronger push back on ethical concerns (e.g. the challenge of getting informed consent when randomisation of treatment and control happens at the community or cluster level), or because of the political problems of doing such a pilot in the context of UK’s muscular media, or because UK communities would not put up with being seen as laboratory subjects.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not blind to the virtues of RCTs, I just don’t want to be blinded by them.

The FAO candidates speak: what do you think?

2011-04-26T17:00:00.001+01:00

Last week José Graziano da Silva, one of the FAO DG candidates (and the third to directly respond to the original blog), kindly emailed me to let me know that FAO has now posted the 4 page statements that each of the 6 shortlisted canidates for Director General presented to FAO members last week.

See the Guardian's Poverty Matters Blog for my assessment of their statements.

Please read the statements and share your own assessments--the FAO Council needs all the input it can get.

The IMF leadership renewal process: hypocrisy trumps democracy

2011-04-21T09:57:00.008+01:00

It would have been so good if David Cameron, when commenting on Gordon Brown's suitability for the position of Managing Director of the IMF on the BBC, had said "whoever is best qualified to get the IMF job should have it, regardless of nationality".

Instead he said he thought Gordon Brown was not the most competent and that the leadership should probably rest with the emerging nations. He is entitled to these opinions of course, but should he really be airing them in public at this time?

The UK Prime Minister is not alone in this stance--this political approach (e.g. which "country" gets it, a political interpretation of past performance etc.) is the norm. Despite all the talk about transparency, accountability, evidence and results based management, smoke filled rooms still hold sway when it comes to appointing people to these jobs.

Of course these posts are highly political, but all top posts--public and private--are. And in this job, more than most, the consequences of incompetence are wide ranging and signifcant: finance is a confidence game and livelihoods are at stake.

So, please Mr Cameron, next time you are interviewed on the BBC say "each IMF member should be allowed to nominate one candidate for the leadership position--not necessarily from their own country. A short list should be drawn up in relation to publicly posted job and person descriptions. The short listed candidates should have the opportunity to say what they intend to do and why they are the best candidate--backed up by evidence. That presentation should be available on YouTube for all to see. Citizens of the world should then be able to pressure their member governments for their preferred candidates."

The decisions of the MD of the IMF affect all of us--just ask those who have lost their jobs in the last 2 years.

We should all have a say in who the next IMF MD should be, and that should be based on evidence, not influence.

Switch: How to change things when change is hard

2011-04-20T18:31:00.003+01:00

Recently, Ruth Levine at USAID told me to read Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, and I usually do what Ruth says. I’m glad I read it. It lays out a simple model of change.

The book argues that most people think change (at the individual, organisational and societal levels) happens in this order: ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE.

This model works well where “parameters are known, assumptions are minimal and the future is not fuzzy”. This model may serve well if you want to shave off 5 minutes from your daily commute, but not if you want to understand changes where parameters are not known and the future is fuzzy. In development this is the kind of change we deal with 99.9% of the time. In this world, they argue that change mode is: SEE-FEEL-CHANGE. Evidence makes you feel something, and it hits you at the emotional level.

How to influence this model of change? Think of a rider, an elephant and a path.

The rider is our rational side. The elephant is our emotional side. The rider has the reins and seems to be in control, but is in fact perched precariously on top of the elephant and when the two disagrees, the elephant will win. The rider has strengths (long term thinking, going beyond the emotion) but also weaknesses (overanalysing and over-thinking). The elephant too has strengths (energy when roused, passion, drive) and weaknesses (lazy, looking for the quick payoff over the long term gains). The path is the situation, a situation that can be shaped to make change more or less likely, no matter what the rider and the elephant think.

The keys are to direct the rider, motivate the elephant and shape the path.

Directing the rider is about “finding the bright spots”, the flashes of successes that show others that things can success (e.g. the nutrition clinic that succeeds where others using the same basic model, fail—what epidemiologists call positive deviance), about having actionable goals (e.g. “buy 1% milk” vs “eat a healthy diet”), and describe a compelling change (e.g. a breast cancer clinic where all the specialists are under one roof).

Motivating the elephant is about finding the feeling (e.g. piling all the 424 different kinds of work gloves bought by a large manufacturing company in front of its managers to convince them to rationalise purchasing); shrinking the change (i.e. generating small wins that generate momentum because they bestow hope); and grow your people (e.g. the high school teacher who changed expectations of her students by switching from a grading system of A-D, F to A-C and NY, where NY =not yet).

Shaping the path is about tweaking the environment (e.g. shrinking your plates if you want to eat less or locking students out of a class if they are late); building habits (e.g. of brevity by having stand up meetings); and rallying the herd (e.g. creating free spaces where reformers can ready themselves for collective action without being observed by the dominant group). The Fundamental Attribution Error—our deep-seated tendency to ignore the situational forces that shape other people’s behaviour—is what we are trying to overcome here: the notion that people behave the way they do only because of the way they are rather than the situation they are in.

Of the people instigating the changes highlighted in the book, few are CEOS. They were not powerful or in charge of budgets and policies, but were people who saw that things could be better and persevered and succeeded.

I liked the authors’ previous book “Made to Stick” about communicating messages and knowledge, and this one is nearly as good. For those of you who are a bit allergic to American optimism (I'm not one of them) the tone may annoy you a little, and for those of you who study how change happens, the book (a quick 300 pages) may be too superficial, but as someone who regularly struggles with these issues, I found it thought provoking. You can find out more at www.switchthebook.com/resources

The New Old Politics of US Aid

2011-04-13T15:41:00.005+01:00

I just returned from a quick trip to the US where the debate about the shape of the FY 2010-11 budget is in full swing, despite being 6 months into the financial year.

Fuelled by 50 or so Tea Party members of the House of Representatives, which the Republicans now control, the budget will be cut by $38.5 billion, the biggest ever annual cut. It looks like the USAID budget (about $24 billion) might take a 30% cut. Now the QDDR, the recent review of US development and diplomacy, is not only about money, but the budget cuts will likely make aid reform more difficult, not less.

Given that US citizens make over $40 billion in private contributions to US aid organizations, why is the US government, and particularly Congress, so resistant to aid spending? Much of the resistance is down to long running challenges.

First, bad messaging is certainly one contributor: US aid spending is only about 0.25% of gross national income—well down the DAC league tables, and aid spending is less than 1% of the budget despite a sizable chunk of the US citizenry (and some congressional members) thinking the number is around 20%.

Second, the military superpower stance of the US is also a problem for aid, because non-humanitarian aid gets drawn into the security frame. So for aid to be justified to a large segment of the right it has to contribute to the security mission. If one can make the case that aid prevents conflict and maintains (pro-development) stability, this might not be so restrictive, but then again if a country is pro-development, it will likely be less prone to such conflict.

Third, some parts of the aid spend have a harder time connecting on a human level. Global health is easier to sell to the US public than is hunger reduction—perhaps because of the relatively high prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s.

But most importantly, USAID is increasingly caught up in an ideological backlash against the deficit generation of the Bush years. The belief that small government is good government obviously holds sway at the moment in the House of Representatives.

When the cuts come, it would be nice to think they will be driven by evidence of what works and what does not. But the new evaluation policy of USAID (which the World Bank is using as a basis for its own emergent policy) has only been in place for a few months, and there are precious few extant evaluations of USAID investments to guide decisions.

And where is the President Obama in all this? Absent, according to some key development thinkers in the US. The President needs to be on the front foot in this debate, making the case for foreign aid. The fact that he is not reflects an emerging style of letting Congress battle things out before a Presidential swoop, but, ironically, it is also one indication of the small size of the aid budget--a budget line item that is only going to get less and less important in the run up to next year’s election.

The aid in Spain falls mainly within development’s frame

2011-04-11T21:52:00.005+01:00

OK, so it’s a bit of a laboured blog heading, but behind it is an interesting paper by an IDS Visiting Fellow Manuel del al Iglesia-Caruncho, “The Politics and Policy of Aid in Spain”.

The paper analyses the evolution of aid in Spain over the past 6-7 years. After much inertia, the 2004-08 period saw a real upturn in Spain’s aid programme, with the author playing a key role as the Director of the Cabinet of the Secretary of State for International Cooperation.

During that period, Spanish aid doubled. As a percent of Gross National Income, aid was at similar levels to the UK. The increase was driven by the Spanish electorate’s backlash against the Iraq war and the Americanisation of Spain’s approach to aid. The Socialist party, in opposition, strove to exploit this gap, especially with young people, with Zapatero playing a key role. In addition to the sharp increase in aid flows, the percent to social infrastructure and health increased substantially. Also, the percent of ODA flowing through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—the intellectual centre of gravity of the aid effort—increased from 20% to 50% from 2004-2008.

The evolution is particularly interesting at this time, for at least two reasons. First, Spain is teetering–Spain, Greece and Iceland were the only Eurozone economies to shrink last year--and while the IMF says it does not think Spain is another Portugal, the pressure to cut aid is immense. Which path will Spain take? Reduce the number of countries it focuses on (still a very large number)? Will it focus less on social infrastructure and more on trade and commerce? Will it spend less through multilaterals and more on bilateral trade promotion? Will it spread ODA among more ministries as pre-2004 to help out other government departments suffering cuts? These choices will all affect aid effectiveness.

Second, there are parallels with USAID and its recently completed Quadrennial Development and Diplomacy Review (QDDR). The headline here is that the QDDR is being promoted as a blueprint for elevating and joining up “American civilian power” –across government and civil society. Some commentators are skeptical of the ability of the US government to pull together this disparate set of organizations into one, and accuse the QDDR of making function follow form, rather than the other way around. (A breaking headline is that the State Department is facing the prospect of a 30% cut in funding as a result of the budget deal struck in Washington last week. Negotiations are on-going but the prospects look bleak.)

So the US is trying to join up its disparate organizations to better deliver development and diplomacy, while Spain has achieved this in the last 6 years by increasing the percent of ODA captured by the core development institution within government—something the US does not seem set to do.

Needless to say, we don’t know much about what the most effective institutional set up is for delivering aid. Perhaps there is no one model, but the lack of research and evidence in this area is striking.

Social Protection 2.0?

2011-04-11T17:22:00.007+01:00

Social protection (SP), as we know it, has been around for about 10 years now.

Led by programmes like Opportunidades in Mexico, Bolsa Familia in Brazil and the Productive Safety Net Programme in Ethiopia, the first-wave programmes have established themselves as effective, and, in some cases, cost-effective in reducing the probability of being poor.

But right now, it seems we are in the midst of a collective breather. Everyone is taking stock. The European Report on Development has just released its report on social protection and inclusion, the World Bank has launched its new consultation on its strategic approach to social protection (building resilience and opportunity) and DFID has just published a comprehensive evidence paper on cash transfers.

So, what should the next 10 years of social protection bring? There is a real temptation to hang lots of things on the social protection Christmas tree--whether adaptation to climate change (adaptive social protection), economic growth (promotion and graduation), or social transformation (transformative social protection).

It is curious that, so far, the ”social” in social protection has been given so little attention. The original use of the term might come from Opportunidades, which focused strongly on longer-term non-income aspects of wellbeing such as nutrition, health, education and women’s power. But “society” (“big” or otherwise) is not really present in social protection debates. Should social protection be geared towards changing the rules of the game, which, if changed, would mean that SP is less needed in the first place? Can it be designed and implemented to reduce inequality? To reduce exclusion? To promote justice? To support democracy? This is the topic of a 3 day international conference hosted by IDS this week on Social Protection for Social Justice.

Most of the big money in social protection is going into cash-transfer type programmes, but much of this “social” agenda lies elsewhere: minimum wages, unionization, employment laws and lifecycle social welfare programmes. But most of the centre-right political capital (and the cash) is going to cash transfer programmes, so what can they do? It’s important to note that cash transfers, especially conditional ones, are effective at giving infants a good head start in terms of cognitive development--but this is just one dimension of equality of opportunity.

Can rights, justice, democracy, inclusion and equality be promoted with cash transfers to households? It will not be easy. Cash-based public works schemes may be good at building structures in one year, but institutions are constructed from rules and norms, not cement, stones and wood and often take decades. Could straight cash transfers to households could be delivered more inclusively? Maybe, but the currently-used community wealth ranking methods seem a good way to develop awareness and debate about what “need” is in any given context, whether or not the allocation process is distorted by local elites.

So instead of linking all cash transfers to households, why not apply some conditionalities at the community, district, or municipality levels? For example, cash would be transferred only if there was a commitment at this level to things like participatory budgeting, securing land rights, the use of social audits, community scorecards and performance thresholds for justice systems. The cash would be split between households (to generate demand) and the community level (to generate interest at that level). The risk of distortion (e.g. communities fiddling the books to get the cash) would have to be addressed, as would the quality of services. In addition, this would not be especially amenable to current evaluation methods.

But if cash transfers and social protection are going to leave an enduring legacy, they need to achieve these kinds of social and political development outcomes. Aspiring to achieve them would be a good first step in transforming Social Protection 1.0 to version 2.0.