A new edition of the Development Drums podcast is now available online. Malini Mehra from the Center for Social Markets and Alex Evans from the Center on International Cooperation at NYU take a step back and look at the broad sweep of the big development challenges of the 21st century.
Malini Mehra and Alex Evans discuss the big development challenges of the 21st Century in Development Drums 25
Alex Evans and I recently took part in a discussion of the big development issues with a committee of Members of Parliament in the British House of Commons. Alex kicked off that meeting with a magisterial and somewhat pessimistic presentation which set out ten key issues for development, and we took his presentation as our agenda for this discussion on Development Drums.
Malina and Alex are interesting and knowledgeable on a dauntingly wide range of issues, and the podcast covers a lot of ground: the changing distribution of global poverty; demographic change; the financial crisis; oil prices; food prices; feeding the 9 billion; climate change; trade; the changing face of conflict; the global governance deficit; and the implications for UK development policy. Each of these issues really needs an entire episode of Development Drums to be discussed properly, but I thought it was interesting to bring them all together to draw out common issues and ideas.
The following thoughts struck me from the discussion:
First – the importance of resilience which cropped up again and again in the discussion. I think this is possibly the Next Big Thing in development thinking (as if we need more Big Things). The idea is that we should be helping to develop the institutions and assets that ensures that people are resilient to shocks, of which there seem to be likely to be more.
Second – treating shocks as opportunities as well as risks. As Alex points out in the podcast, there was a narrow window after the collapse of Lehman Brothers during which we could have remade the global financial system: but nobody had a plan ready to go. There are going to be more shocks: will the progressive development community be ready to seize the opportunities these represent?
Third – the almost complete failure of global governance. All the issues we discuss relate in some way to the failure to put in place effective global processes and institutions to solve collective action problems such as on trade, climate change, or food supply. As Malini says, we are living in an era not of the G-8 but of G-0. Alex provides an interesting analysis of the problems in the podcast: on the face of it, to my mind, the problems don’t sound insurmountable.
Fourth – the optimism and energy coming from emerging countries such as India and China. Malina both describes and embodies this. But it’s also clear that on many issues – notably trade and climate change – the interests of these increasingly powerful countries are now diverging from those of the less developed countries, and we need to think hard about ensure the interests of the poorest countries are not left behind a grand bargain between the old and new rich countries.
Fifth – development policy isn’t mainly about aid. In a discussion which surveys the big development challenges confronting us, aid hardly gets a mention. Yet most of the development agencies in the world spend most of their time thinking about aid.
How to listen to development drums
You can listen to Development Drums on your computer straight from the website (http://developmentdrums.org) or download any episode (from here) to your MP3 player or computer. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Development Drums on iTunes free of charge (search for “Development Drums” in the iTunes store).
As is the Development Drums custom, the podcast plays out with a slightly relevant song. See if you can guess before you get to the end what it’s going to be (there’s a clue hidden in the title of the podcast, Episode 25: Global Development Challenges).
Other development podcasts
I find podcasts a convenient way to keep up to date, especially when I’ve got long plane flights or trips by road; and lots of people listen to them when running on the treadmill in the gym or during their commute.
If you enjoy Development Drums, you may also enjoy the Center for Global Development’s Global Prosperity Wonkcasts, which are a bit shorter than Development Drums. As with Development Drums, you can listen online, subscribe to the feed or subscribe free on iTunes.
The Guardian has also recently started a monthly development podcast. The most recent editions are about “securitisation of aid” (that is, greater focus of aid on fragile states) and on so-called “Land Grabs“. Again, you can subscribe to the feed directly, or get it free on iTunes.
Here’s a complete list of development podcasts:
- Development Drums
- The Center for Global Development Prosperity Wonkcast
- The Guardian Focus Podcast
- Think Before You Give
- BBC Africa Today
- Peterson Perspectives
- PRI: Global Health and Development
- The World Bank Podcasts
- Philanthropy This Week
- PRI: The Changing World
Other economics podcasts
Tim Harford (author, and FT leader writer) has just compiled a list of the best economics podcasts.
Andy Sumner has published a new paper which argues that the global poverty problem has changed because the countries in which most of the world’s poor liver are no longer classified as low-income countries (LICs). In 1990, about 93 per cent of the world’s poor people lived in LICs. Today, there are still about 1.3 billion poor people, but about three-quarters of them live in what are now classified as middle-income countries.
This shift has profound implications for development policy. It highlights the importance of ensuring that growth reduces poverty. It raises questions for the allocation of traditional aid, and about the legitimacy and effectiveness of intervention by outsiders to influence the distribution of income within other countries.
In a new episode of Development Drums, I discuss these issues with Andy Sumner and Claire Melamed (Head of the Growth and Equity Programme at ODI). We discuss what the new data tell us, and what it means for aid and development policy.
You can listen to Development Drums on your computer at the website (http://developmentdrums.org) or download it (from here) to your MP3 player. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Development Drums on iTunes free of charge (search for “Development Drums” in the iTunes store).
Last week’s UN meetings in New York prompted a flurry of papers, speeches, documents, announcements and articles about development in general, and the Millennium Development Goals in particular. There seem to be three emerging development narratives which are not obviously completely compatible. I’ll summarize them here, and in a later post I’ll look at whether there they can be brought together into a coherent synthesis.
Narrative 1: Glass half full: we need a big heave
The dominant story from the summit was that development can be achieved if the world would only come together with a big heave. On this view, the glass is half full. We have made good progress towards the MDGs (supported by the new MDG report card by ODI; and their excellent new Development Progress Stories website); and with more money, we can do more. Jeff Sachs, whose Millennium Villages Project exemplifies the idea of a big, coordinated push, called in the FT for aid to be scaled up through pooled donor funding, “to scale up what has been proven to work”. (Oddly, he chose the Global Fund rather than the World Bank as his example of effective multilateral institution.)
The new report of the Commission for Africa advocates a further big heave
A new Commission for Africa report, Still Our Common Interest, agrees. The original 2005 report was probably the most authoritative (certainly the most weighty) argument for a big heave; and it concluded (among other things) that donors should treble their aid to Africa. The updated 2010 report reiterates that view, celebrates the progress that has been made, and calls for donors to increase their aid, including – very oddly – a proposal for a new Global Fund for Education.
Probably the biggest announcement this week, which sits squarely in the big heave narrative, was for a new UN Global Strategy for Women and Children’s Health. As I argued here the other day, the focus on women and children’s health is welcome, but this is no strategy: it is another list of spending commitments, which the UN press release says is worth $40 billion. The only interesting feature of it is that it lists commitments by private companies and NGOs as well as official donors. All very big heave; all very retro.
Narrative 2: More accountability leads to better institutions
While the UN institutions and the NGOs promote the big heave, donor governments, particularly the US and UK, are beginning to tell a different story which focuses on the need for more transparent and accountable institutions, both in developing countries and in the international development system. This was most evident in President Obama’s speech which announced a new US development strategy. President Obama explicitly distanced himself from the big heave:
“This is the reality we must face — that if the international community just keeps doing the same things the same way, we may make some modest progress here and there, but we will miss many development goals.”
Both the US and the UK government argue that the efforts of donors should be measured not by what is spent, but by what is achieved, both by aid and by other policies. Cynics might think this is preparing the ground for aid cuts in the face of tight government budgets, though this does not appear to be the motive of the UK government which has committed to increasing aid to 0.7% of GDP by 2013.
The emphasis in the new US policy on growth as the permanent path out of poverty is not as new as the President’s speech implies; but the renewed emphasis will be welcome to those who think that the importance of growth is sometimes forgotten. As Lant Pritchett writes:
The “development is about more than growth” backlash, which had important elements of truth, easily got carried away into “development isn’t at all about growth” and it is good to see economic growth back front and center of development objectives.
A more novel feature of the new US policy is the emphasis on investing in systems and institutions, for service delivery, public administration, and other government functions, and the importance of country ownership. This is new for the US. For many European donors it is this reasoning that brought them to give more of their aid through governments as budget support, so this new US approach will be seen as a welcome conversion.
What is striking about this narrative is the emphasis it puts on transparency and accountability as ways to make institutions work better. President Obama set out the argument in his General Assembly speech the following day:
The arc of human progress has been shaped by individuals with the freedom to assemble and by organizations outside of government that insisted upon democratic change and by free media that held the powerful accountable. … In all parts of the world, we see the promise of innovation to make government more open and accountable. Now, we must build on that progress. And when we gather back here next year, we should bring specific commitments to promote transparency; to fight corruption; to energize civic engagement; and to leverage new technologies so that we strengthen the foundation of freedom in our own countries, while living up to ideals that can light the world.
This emphasis on accountability seems to resonate closely with the approach of the UK Government. The UK International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, set out a similar argument in his first major speech, in which he emphasized outputs and outcomes rather than inputs, and launched the new UK Aid Transparency Guarantee. Paul Collier and Jamie Drummond, writing in the Guardian, make a similar point about the need for transparency and accountability in the use of natural resources.
The 32 page outcome document, Keeping the Promise, sets out the usual long list of activities which “with increased political commitment .. could be replicated and scaled up for accelerating progress”. But experienced communiqué watchers (like Lawrence Haddad) also detect a new theme: the need for more citizen-led monitoring of delivery. For example, the outcome document calls on donors to:
[Work] towards greater transparency and accountability in international development cooperation, in both donor and developing countries, focusing on adequate and predictable financial resources as well as their improved quality and targeting; …. To build on progress achieved in ensuring that ODA is used effectively, we stress the importance of democratic governance, improved transparency and accountability, and managing for results.
Until now, I think many people working in the development community have seen transparency as an add-on, at best a way of retaining public support for aid while they get on with figuring out how to use the aid money wisely (and at worst an annoying additional bureaucratic burden). Perhaps I am tempted to read too much into these speeches, because my day job is working towards more transparent and accountable institutions, but it was striking to see Raj Shah, Administrator of USAID, talking about the use of new media to build an online platform to help the government to reach its development goals. I think it is now clear that, for the US and UK at least, transparency and accountability will play a more central role in their development strategies, both as drivers of change in developing countries, and forces for improvements in the effectiveness of development agencies and institutions.
A sign that this narrative is beginning to take shape is that it is already under attack. In an interesting article in The New Republic, David Rieff is sceptical of the idea that donor nations can offer a path out of poverty:
The problem is not with the analysis but rather with the president’s implicit claim that we know how to offer peoples and nations such a path. … The stark fact is that only if one fetishizes the idea of civil society as a kind of universal ideological solvent, and believes that, in tandem with scientific innovation, the road to our collective salvation is now open to us, can such optimism be justified.
An interesting feature of this narrative is that it emphasizes the need for a wider range of instruments (known either as beyond aid or – ghastly term – policy coherence). For example, in his speech, President Obama said:
Development is helping nations to actually develop — moving from poverty to prosperity. And we need more than just aid to unleash that change. We need to harness all the tools at our disposal — from our diplomacy to our trade policies to our investment policies.
Andrew Mitchell’s speech in June said something similar:
21st century development is a complex tapestry of trade, investment and enterprise, climate change, economic growth, debt relief, financial services, intellectual property and advancing new technologies.
Bill Easterly argued in the pages of the FT that trade, not aid, is needed to promote development. I’ve argued elsewhere that we don’t know very much about whether and how aid promotes economic and development, but we do know that it enables people to live better lives while that transformation is taking place. So it may be that these beyond aid policies are the best hope for promoting development, while aid should focus primarily on improving lives in the meantime.
Narrative 3: The challenge is increasingly inequality, not absolute poverty
In my view, by far the most interesting and important paper to be published around the summit was The World’s Poor Aren’t Where We Think They Are, by Andy Sumner from IDS. Here’s the key conclusion:
In 1990, we estimate that 93 per cent of the world’s poor people lived in low income countries. In contrast, in 2007 we estimate that three-quarters of the world’s approximately 1.3bn poor people now live in middle-income countries (MICs) and only about a quarter of the world’s poor – about 370 million people live in the remaining 39 low-income countries, which are largely in sub-Saharan Africa.
The paper also shows that just 12 percent of the world’s poor live in fragile low-income countries. Take a look at this Guardian data visualisation tool.
Data visualisation by the Guardian
This change in the reality on the ground has profound implications for development policy, and my sense is that the discussion in New York is not yet grappling with these issues. Readers of Paul Collier’s book The Bottom Billion will recall his analysis that the world’s poorest people lived in about 50 very poor countries which he said were stuck in a series of poverty traps. Policy should be focused on helping those countries to escape that trap. But if three quarters of the world’s poor live in middle income countries, the challenge is to reduce inequality in these countries. The figures suggest that the biggest causes of poverty are not lack of development in the country as a whole, but political, economic and social marginalisation of particular groups in countries that are otherwise doing quite well.
It is not clear that additional resources from abroad are an important part of the answer to this. At The Guardian, Jonathan Glennie says:
The world needs to find new ways to help other countries respond to persistant poverty and increasing inequality. The era of aid as we know it is ending. Let’s hope that a new era of development cooperation takes its place.
For some people this suggests that we should reconceptualise development as the ability of all the world’s citizens to live decent lives, rather a problem of economic industrialisation of poor countries. This view has the advantage of focusing on people and communities, rather than countries. A recurring theme of the Chronic Poverty conference, which took place just before the MDG Summit, was the right of all citizens to a basic standard of living, and there is growing interest in the possible role of various kinds of social protection (social safety-nets, conditional and unconditional cash transfers, family grants and so on).
Similarly, a new report from Phil Vernon and Deborrah Barksh at International Alert asks us to get “beyond the MDGs”. They call for a
… a new narrative, based on a vision of a world in which people can resolve their differences without violence, while continuing to make equitable social and economic progress, and without lessening the opportunities for their neighbours or future generations to do the same. This vision would be both enabled and recognisable by five core factors: equal access to justice, political voice, security, economic opportunity and well-being. These would in their turn be underpinned by a self-reinforcing set of values and institutions.
On this view, poverty is a problem of political and economic marginalisation which can affect communities within industrialised, industrialising and low income countries. It calls for a different kind of policy agenda, which is as much to do with empowerment and political voice as the transfer of resources and investment in public services.
Conclusion
These seem to be three quite different views of development. There is a substantial gap between advocating a big heave of more aid to ignite a cycle of industrialisation in the poorest countries, a focus on more transparent and accountable institutions in developing countries and in the development system, and political change that protects the rights of society’s most marginalised groups in whatever country they happen to live.
But while there are tensions and trade-offs, these views are not intrinsically contradictory, and in a subsequent post I’ll look at how these three narratives can be stitched together into a coherent whole.
Ravi Kanbur has written an interesting paper (pdf) about how he feels as someone who makes a good living from analysing and writing about poverty. Here is an extract, but it is worth reading the whole, thoughtful piece:
What is striking about the class of poverty professionals (of whom I am one) is that the good living (granted, not at the billionaire or millionaire level, but pretty good nevertheless) is made through the very process of analyzing, writing, recommending on poverty. To me, at least, this is discomforting and disconcerting. I feel slightly ashamed within myself when I turn up to a poverty conference (perhaps even one where I am the keynote speaker), having flown business class, staying in an expensive hotel and (sometimes) being paid handsomely for attending. I recall many years ago, when I was in my twenties, telling the anthropologist Mary Douglas about how I was starting to do consulting for the World Bank on poverty issues, and how important it was to do this work. “And it’s not too bad for one’s own poverty either, is it?” came her worldly, knowing, reply. The seeds of discomfort sown by that comment have germinated and taken root, and now won’t let go.
Ravi suggests that everyone working in development should reconnect with poverty through a poverty immersion:
each poverty professional should engage in an “exposure” to poverty (also known as “immersions”) every 12 to 18 months. I do not mean by this rural sector missions for aid agency officials, nor the running of training workshops by NGO staff. What I mean is well captured by Eyben (2004); these are exercises that “are designed for visitors to stay for a period of several days, living with their hosts as participants, as well as observers, in their daily lives. They are distinct from project monitoring or highly structured ‘red carpet’ trips when officials make brief visits to a village or an urban slum….”
A friend of mine from DFID did this recently and came back saying how valuable it was. I am in favour of immersions, though I don’t think it gets close to addressing the problem that Ravi is grappling with.
This reminds me that in March 2008, the Conservative development spokesman (and, since yesterday, the UK Secretary of State for International Development) announced that all DFID staff would be required to undertake a week-long immersion living in a poorer community. Andrew Mitchell said:
These immersions will serve as a valuable ‘reality check’ from the usual round of meetings, paperwork and spreadsheets. It will help keep everyone at DfID focused on their core mission: serving and helping poor people to work their way, sustainably, out of poverty.
I hope that they will implement this proposal now that they are in Government, and I hope DFID’s new Ministers will consider doing an immersion themselves, perhaps during the summer recess.
(via Suvojit)
On the CGD blog, Nancy Birdsall proposes “Ten Actionable Ideas … for a 21st-Century Global Development Agenda”
What are examples – some realized and some on the table but untested – for practical action in the interests of global prosperity? Where do good ideas come from? How do they get translated into action?
Nancy’s ten:
- More AMCs for vaccines and green technology
- Protect some aid from security and political objectives
- Independent evaluation agency
- More representative G-20
- Visas for people from poor countries
- Duty free, quote free access to all markets
- Per capita distribution of net income from non-renewables
- Reform of selection of heads of international agencies
- World Bank to have a global public good window
- Petrol tax in the US
Ever fizzing with ideas, Nancy throws in a few others: endow think tanks in low-income countries; increase capital at development banks; Climate Investment Funds to bring private investment money; Cash On Delivery Aid; new insurance and risk management instruments at the multilateral development banks.
Well I agree with all those, of course (and not just because I’m a visiting Fellow at CGD!). She asks for other suggestions. Here are my ten:
- Global standards for transparency and traceability of all aid to increase accountability and effectiveness
- Climate justice – every person in the world to have equal, tradeable, carbon emission rights, capped overall at the level scientists tell us is safe
- Global information sharing among tax authorities to prevent tax evasion
- Unbundling of aid funding from aid delivery, complete untying and global standardised output and outcome indicators to enable cost comparisons
- A global minimum income guarantee backed by cash payments to the world’s poorest people
- Product traceability from sweatshop to supermarket using barcodes
- A complete ban on exports of small arms
- A standing, professional UN peacekeeping force to be deployed by a reformed Security Council
- Reform of intellectual property to permit free access in the lowest value markets
- Increasing the share of aid to LDCs from 38% of global aid today to 90% by 2012.
Update 25 February: On Twitter, Nancy Birdsall (@nancymbirdsall) says: “@OwenBarder has 3 more actionable ideas (and 7 dreamy ones)”. This is a good game: which of these does Nancy think are actionable and which are dreamy? My guess is she thinks (1), (3) and (9) are actionable and the rest dreamy. But what do you think?
I think they are all realistic – but then I’m with John Lennon: “You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us, and the wo-o-rld will live as one”.
Over the weekend we were trekking in the north of Ethiopia. The fields were full of wheat and barley, looking (to my inexpert eye) about 3 weeks from harvest (see the picture, right, taken on 29th November). The farmers all said they were looking forward to a good harvest this year.
Then last night, we woke up to torrential rain. I gather it was raining in Addis Ababa too. It doesn’t normally rain at this time of year in Ethiopia. If this continues for another day or two, the crop will be ruined.
The rain today is an unwelcome reminder of how precarious is the livelihoods of millions of people who are dependent on rain coming at the right time (and not at the wrong time). It can turn a good harvest into a bad one, or into no harvest at all. Affected families may be forced to sell their meagre assets, pushing not only them but their children into another generation of chronic poverty.
Our thoughts today are with the millions of farmers of Ethiopia and their families.
UPDATE: (2nd December) – It has been cloudy, but not raining, here in Addis. Fingers crossed.
Phil in Afghanistan writes about what it is like living in a country in which there are many very poor people:
On the way back to the car, the girl, with the unerring accuracy of the terminally poor, spots me again, and comes running. I give her 10 Afs. Wordlessly, she takes it and turns away.
I have just spent more than 20 times that amount on food she will likely never eat.
I thought about this as I drove home. She will never eat a fruit tart, nor lychees with cream.
… Poor people are real. I met one, gave her next to nothing and drove on. I drove on to my lychees and walnut bread.
It means nothing and it means everything. Poverty is the sum of a lot of big things, but it is also the sum of a lot of little decisions that I make every day. And because we all make such decisions, poverty has long ago become a permanent fixture on the unreachable horizon, a cause we strive to but never seriously expect to reach.
I think that girl has a right to better than that.
Phil’s right: the girl has a right to better than that. We can do better than that.
In the fight against global poverty, we live still in an era of Victoria charity – throwing a few spare pennies to the poor in the workhouse. We seem to assume, unthinkingly, that the poor (a) are in that condition partly as a consequence of their own fecklessness and (b) that there is nothing much we can do about it. Neither of these assumptions is remotely close to the truth.
Alex Evans at Global Dashboard
I’m currently immersed in writing the main pamphlet for my project on food prices with Chatham House (hence not much posting for the last few days) – but I have to take ten minutes out to sing the praises of the gorgeous piece of writing I’ve been immersed in for the past couple of hours.The paper in question is Escaping Poverty Traps: the Chronic Poverty report 2008-09, from the Chronic Poverty Research Centre. The title, admittedly, makes it sound like any other international development report of the sort that fill cardboard boxfiles in great reams of unread worthiness in people’s offices around the world. But don’t be fooled. This is an edgy, push-the-envelope, fundamentally political piece of work.
The new Chronic Poverty Research Centre website was launched today; and the second Chronic Poverty Report will be launched next week:
Four years ago, the Chronic Poverty Research Centre published the Chronic Poverty Report 2004-05. This was the first major international development report to focus on the estimated 320 to 445 million people who live trapped in chronic poverty – people who will remain poor for much or all of their lives and whose children are likely to inherit their poverty. These chronically poor experience multiple deprivations, including hunger, under-nutrition, illiteracy, lack of access to safe drinking water and basic health services, social discrimination, physical insecurity and political exclusion. Many will die prematurely of easily preventable deaths.
If the first report examined the dimensions of the problem of chronic poverty, the Chronic Poverty Report 2008-09 looks at possible solutions. Through our research we identify five main traps that underpin chronic poverty – insecurity, limited citizenship, spatial disadvantage, social discrimination and poor work opportunities – and outline key policy responses to these.
The point about chronic poverty is that, even if there is economic growth in developing countries, there are about 400 million people who will most likely remain poor unless specific measures are taken to address the causes of chronic poverty.
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