Owen abroad

Archive for April, 2007

One of Tony Blair’s blind spots – as I think he would be among the first to admit – is that he has tended to underestimate the importance and value of effective and lasting institutions. As he contemplates his legacy he seems now to be coming round to understanding this.

Looking back at the successes of previous governments, we remember mainly the institutions they built as their lasting legacies. Lloyd George gave us national insurance; Clem Attlee gave us the National Health Service. We don’t remember Andrew Bonar Law much, because he built nothing. Harold Wilson famously cited the creation of the Open University as his greatest achievement.

This Government’s most notable institutional changes have been devolution, the independence of the Bank of England and the partial reform of the House of Lords: planned in opposition and implemented soon after the 1997 election. In Government, the PM has taken the view that the priority is to put in place the right people to take the right decisions. I think this is a manifestation of New Labour’s philosophy that they would go with “what works”. They would govern with pragmatism, not ideology; and that meant appointing the right people and getting on with it rather than constructing effective and long-lasting institutions that might limit their discretion.

In that context, the Prime Minister’s speech on 27 January in Davos made interesting reading, because it is all about the need for more effective international institutions:

This is my major reflection on 10 years of trying to meet these challenges, 10 years in which, as a deliberate policy, Britain has been at the forefront, for better or worse, of each of these major global issues. Interdependence is an accepted fact. It is giving rise to a great yearning for a sense of global purpose, underpinned by global values, to overcome challenges, global in nature.

But we are woefully short of the instruments to make multilateral action effective. We acknowledge the interdependent reality. We can sketch the purpose and describe the values. What we lack is capacity, capability, the concerted means to act. We need a multilateralism that is muscular. Instead, too often, it is disjointed, imbued with the right ideas but the wrong or inadequate methods of achieving them.

None of this should make us underestimate what has been done. But there is too often a yawning gap between our description of an issue’s importance and the matching capability to determine it. … Global purpose, underpinned by global values requires global instruments of effective multilateral action.

This emphasis on the need for more effective multilateral institutions is both right and important. As the world become more interdependent, there are more and more choices that we need to make collectively. These include the provision of global public goods, collective security, and mechanisms to ensure that the benefits of globalisation are fairly shared so that progress can be sustained. As I think the Prime Minister is now saying, if we do not have legitimate and effective institutions to take these decisions, we will find that we have no way to meet these needs and aspirations, nor to resolve the world’s tensions.

Britain has quite a specific long-term interest in this too. We are witnessing the rise of new world powers such as China, India and Brazil. I personally welcome this, though there is a lot of angst around about what it means for us. One thing it almost certainly means is that in 20 years time, Britain will no longer be a major world power with the same amount strategic influence at the most important forums such as the G8 and the Security Council. If and when that happens, we will depend on the existence of effective multilateral institutions to protect our interests, and those of other middle-ranking powers. It seems to me that we should be using the power that we have today, while we still have it, to put in place those institutions and build them up so that they are effective and legitimate in the future. That is a legacy for which future generations in Britain may well thank us.

You must read this article by Naomi Wolf in the Guardian

From Hitler to Pinochet and beyond, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms. And, argues Naomi Wolf, George Bush and his administration seem to be taking them all

Tyler Cowen on Jeff Sachs’s Millennium Village project

In my view Sach’s [sic] work is admirable and will do much to improve the lives of a small percentage of Africans. But I do not think it is scalable. First, I believe the candidate villages are cherry-picked for possible improvement. Armed conflict remains a huge problem on the continent. Second, one key non-scalable ingredient is Sachs himself. His reputation is worth a great deal to him, and these projects will receive scrutiny and study; he has strong incentives to make sure everything goes as well and as honestly as possible. That incentive vanishes once we implement such ideas on a bigger scale and through other institutions. File this one under “Wonderful but oversold.”

In a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Barack Obama has promised to double aid by 2012 if he is elected President:

For the last twenty years, U.S. foreign aid funding has done little more than keep pace with inflation. Doubling our foreign assistance spending by 2012 will help meet the challenge laid out by Tony Blair at the 2005 G-8 conference at Gleneagles, and it will help push the rest of the developed world to invest in security and opportunity. As we have seen recently with large increases in funding for our AIDS programs, we have the capacity to make sure this funding makes a real difference.

No commitment to reform the institutions of US Foreign Assistance, however (unlike John Edwards).

G and I both ran the London Marathon yesterday, on a beautiful warm day.  G had a good run – starting at a sensible pace, running even splits, and finishing in 3:28:01.  I ran like an idiot – going off way too fast at the start, and (inevitably) hobbling home after my wheels came off at about 18 miles, for a total time of 3:04:09.

I learned some lessons again that I should have learned before:

• You can’t run a marathon well without training for it.   G and I both relied on our background fitness. But really we needed a tailored combination of long runs, speedwork, aerobic fitness, and strength.  Getting the right mixture is much more important than running in the park every day.
• If you go off too fast at the start, you will pay for it later.  It is much better to go off slowly and then speed up.  It is claimed that every 10 seconds a mile you run too fast in the first half will cost you a minute a mile in the second half.  And it is much more fun to be overtaking people in the last ten miles than to be overtaken.
• You can’t run as fast when it is hot.
• You’ll go through some rough patches in any marathon.  Don’t quit: they will pass.  I had a stitch twice, and several segments when I had to walk, and I still ran fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon.

Not according to Blake Lambert and Wendy Glauser who write about Canadian NGOs:

Part of the reason NGOs have difficulty meeting their overall goals is that they often end up measuring day-to-day results rather than long-term progress. As Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist and political economist who’s currently on fellowship at Stanford University, puts it, they measure “inputs rather than outputs.” If an NGO is planning to free up women’s time from domestic labour, for example, instead of measuring how much time they are spending cooking and cleaning, they might typically count how many women attended their last job-training session. “An NGO will say it’s trained 50 farmers in agricultural techniques,” Mwenda says, “but it won’t say whether that has led to an increase in production.”

I don’t think this is a problem confined to NGOs. The problem that many NGOs share with us in government is that there is no feedback loop from those whom we are supposed to be helping. Our accountability is to our donors (or taxpayers) who do not have first hand knowledge of whether we are delivering what we should.

More at Blake Lambert’s blog.

The Government has consistently refused to set up a statutory inquiry into the way that many thousands of haemophiliacs were put at risk by the supply of contaminated blood products. (The new inquiry by Lord Archer of Sandwell is an independent inquiry, not a government inquiry, and has no powers to subpoena witnesses or evidence.)

But it announced yesterday that there will be an official inquiry into the alleged removal of human tissues from the bodies of former Sellafield employees.

I just don’t understand this obsession with the treatment of dead bodies. Dead bodies don’t have rights. I really don’t care if human organs are taken out of dead bodies. What’s more, if these body parts can be used to identify causes of and cures for disease, then I think we should encourage scientists to use them.

How can we possibly think it is more important to investigate what happened to dead bodies than to find out whether somebody has negligently infected living people?

The head of evaluation at the World Bank writing in the Guardian blog about the effectiveness of aid:

For donors, this means going beyond the push for free-standing projects and the tracking of individual project successes, to supporting better coordination and linkages. For developing countries, it means being in the driver’s seat in recognizing and capitalizing on the most important synergies that additional financing from multiple donors can bring.

I don’t normally read the stream of vitriol that Paul Staines (calling himself Guido Fawkes) spews forth. It seems to me an imitation in the form of a blog of everything that is fetid about the mainstream press – all gossip and personality, with no substance or detail. I’m happy to leave him and his band of followers to entertain each other with their puerile fun.

So I did not notice this honourable mention in which Staines accuses me of being a sock puppet. My Mum – who must surely have better things to do than read Guido Fawkes? – emailed me about it. I mention it only to point out that Staines clearly does not know what the term ‘sock puppet’ means. (Sock puppets pretend to be somebody they are not; the comment he refers to on David Milliband’s blog is in my own name, so I can’t be a sock puppet, can I?)

By all means accuse me of sycophancy, if you like.

If you want to see more of Mr Staines so that you can reach your own views about his character and judgement, take a look at this recent discussion on Newsnight. (Thanks Justin.)

The Economist highlights the importance of improving the way aid is given:

Because the aid they receive is such a capricious, volatile commodity, governments dare not make full use of it. They could hire legions of extra teachers, clinicians and civil servants, but only if they are prepared to fire them when the aid spigot is closed. They could put AIDS-sufferers on anti-retroviral therapies, but only if they are willing to discontinue treatment once the money stops.

The article explains why the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is such an important step towards reducing the costs of aid to beneficiaries and donors alike, and so greatly improving the effectiveness with which aid is used.

It is a rare pleasure to read this well-informed comment about the need for donors to align their aid with the systems they are trying to support, to make aid more predictable, less likely to undermined domestic accountability and to duplicate each other less.

According to Murray Waas:

Employees of the World Bank have been “expressing concern, dismay, and outrage” regarding favoritism shown by the bank and the Bush administration towards the one-time girlfriend of World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, according to an internal memo circulated within the bank by the World Bank Group Association, which represents the rights of the bank’s 13,000 employees.

So asks Simon Maxwell at ODI. His conclusion is that DFID is pretty good.

In our own work on aid architecture, we asked developing country aid practitioners from 27 countries to rank donors and comment on their strengths and weaknesses. DFID outranked other bilateral and multilateral donors. DFID scored especially highly on efficiency, flexibility, speed of disbursement and alignment with country priorities.

The conclusion to draw from this: ‘don’t panic!’.

Thanks Simon. It is good to have support from such a reputable and independent source.

Just one quibble. Simon says:

Some of these contributions have a whiff about them of competition between DFID and the Foreign Office, which is unfortunate.

That would indeed be unfortunate. I don’t know if there is any Whitehall briefing going on; but if it is, then it all seems to be going one way. There is nothing in the papers to suggest DFID briefing negatively about the FCO. And a good thing too. We are above that kind of thing.