In January, David Cameron nailed his colours to the mast with a speech in Davos that set out the three Ts agenda for the UK’s chairing of the June G8 meeting: taxes, trade and transparency. Since then, there has been much discussion of how serious the agenda is and what the G8 can actually deliver.

Will Cameron persuade the G-8 to take on tax evasion? 

There have also been some raised eyebrows among the cognoscenti about a fourth T: turf.  Some worry that a Cameron-led G8 effort might step on the toes of the G20 and its existing working groups, perhaps stimulating production of “not invented here” antibodies that would make it hard for the initiative to gain global traction.

We’ve been thinking about this issue, what G8 members should see properly as their collective responsibility, and what could be considered a success. Because the majority of the world’s cross-border financial services are provided by G8 members –even without including their satellite jurisdictions – progress on transparency at the G20 will be much more likely if the G8 members first get their own houses in order. Early action by the G8 should be welcomed by all concerned.

Still, we see two risks. The first is that G8 countries might introduce increased transparency within their home jurisdictions but be unwilling to apply the same higher standards to offshore secrecy jurisdictions (‘tax havens’) that are more or less directly under their influence (think Jersey or Cyprus, perhaps, or Cayman or Monaco). This would not only undermine the effectiveness of the initiative but cause outsiders – especially the non-G8 members of the G20 – to regard the entire effort with skepticism.

The second risk is that G8 countries might introduce arrangements but be unwilling to open these up to developing countries.  This would make it difficult for G8 members to claim that they were acting in a wider interest than their own narrow (and primarily fiscal) concerns. Apart from the lack of development progress entailed, it would likely make it much harder for the G8 to mobilise any subsequent progress from other secrecy jurisdictions such as Singapore to which illicit flows might gravitate.

Here’s a couple of pages outlining our thinking so far. To sharpen our thinking, we have written these as a draft  “Fermanagh Declaration” (in reference to the county of Northern Ireland where the G8 leaders will convene on 17-18 June). We would be delighted to receive comments, either below or directly by email (to europe@cgdev.org).

The world is at an auspicious moment. For the first time ever, we have a real opportunity to end extreme poverty within a generation. But achieving this goal won’t be easy.

Jim Kim, President of the World Bank, 17 April 2013

Here are some previous such declarations

This amazing story of human progress shows what’s possible.
We can be the generation that eradicates absolute poverty in our world.

David Cameron, Speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, 24 January 2013

For the first time in history, global economic prosperity, brought on by continuing scientific and technological progress and the self-reinforcing accumulation of wealth, has placed the world within reach of eliminating extreme poverty altogether.

Jeff Sachs, Can Extreme Poverty Be Eliminated?, Scientific American September 2005

You are right. We do have an historic opportunity this year to Make Poverty History.

Tony Blair, 16 April 2005, Campaign Diary

But in this new century, millions of people in the world’s poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved, and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free.

… Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.

Nelson Mandela, Trafalgar Square, February 2005

It’s an amazing thing to think that ours is the first generation in history that really can end extreme poverty, the kind that means a child dies for lack of food in its belly. This should be seen as the most incredible, historic opportunity but instead it’s become a millstone around our necks. We let our own pathetic excuses about how it’s ‘difficult’ justify our own inaction. Let’s be honest. We have the science, the technology, and the wealth. What we don’t have is the will, and that’s not a reason that history will accept.

Bono in an interview to the World Association of Newspapers for World Press Freedom Day on May 3, 2004.

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty

Thabo Mbeki, President South Africa opening World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, August 2002

in the new global economy we are, all of us, the richest countries and the poorest countries – inextricably bound to one another by common interests, shared needs and linked destinies; that what happens to the poorest citizen in the poorest country can directly affect the richest citizen in the richest country; and that not only do we have inescapable obligations beyond our front doors and garden gates, responsibilities beyond the city wall and duties beyond our national boundaries, but that this generation has it in our power - if it so chooses - to abolish all forms of human poverty.

Gordon Brown, speech to the Federal Reserve Bank, New York, 16 November 2001

The challenge is a huge one. But the prize is very great. We are the first generation in the whole of human history that has the chance to eradicate basic illiteracy from the human condition. And we can do this within fifteen years. Let’s resolve today – together – that we will do what needs to be done to make this happen.

Clare Short, UK Secretary of State for International Development, Speech to World Education Forum, Dakar, April 27, 2000

Hunger is man’s oldest enemy. There is now the scientific knowledge and the institutional arrangement that makes it possible to overcome hunger, not only within the United States but throughout the world. This can be done within the lifetime of people now living, if there is the political will to do so.

The Heritage Foundation, 1984

Mankind has never before had such ample technical and financial resources for coping with hunger and poverty. The immense task can be tackled once the necessary collective will is mobilized. What is necessary can be done, and must be done.

The Brandt Commission, North: South A Programme for Survival 1980

No child will go to bed hungry within ten years.

Henry Kissinger, First World Food Summit, Rome, 1974 

Because it is right, because it is wise, and because, for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty,

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Special Message to Congress, March 16, 1964

The world has been greatly changed, especially during the last century, by the discoveries of scientists. Our increased knowledge now provides the possibility of eliminating poverty and starvation, of decreasing significantly the suffering caused by disease, of using the resources of the world effectively for the benefit of humanity.

Linus Pauling – Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1963

Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world–or to make it the last.

President John F. Kennedy, Address Before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations, September 20, 1963

I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago. The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. … To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required–not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

President John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961.

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. …For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people.

Harry S Truman, Inaugural Address Given at Capitol Building, Washington, DC, Thursday, January 20, 1949

For the first time in history the counsels of mankind are to be drawn together and concerted for the purpose of defending the rights and improving the conditions of working people - men, women, and children – all over the world. Such a thing as that was never dreamed of before, and what you are asked to discuss in discussing the League of Nations is the matter of seeing that this thing is not interfered with.

Woodrow Wilson, League of Nations (8th September, 1919)

Richard Manning was a highly respected chair of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) – the development committee of the OECD, the rich countries’ think-tank. So we should pay attention when he says in the FT that the OECD is

encouraging OECD finance ministries to get away with murder as they seek to massage reported aid upwards at minimum cost.

(Here is the letter without the paywall.)

The definition of aid requires that loans are ‘concessional in character’ – in other words, that they are not simply commercial loans. There are two problems with this. The first, which Manning identifies in his letter, is that the rules that the OECD applies for measuring whether this test is met are not fit for purpose. Many loans fall with the current test even though they involve no concession. The second problem is that if a loan is regarded as concessional then the whole of the loan, and not just the concessional part (or ‘grant element’) is counted as aid. So if a government gives a $10 subsidy to a $100 loan to a developing country, then the whole $100 counts as aid.

There is a parallel problem with the way debt relief is counted. If you are not servicing your debts, then your financial position is not improved if I write that debt off my books.  The aid value of debt relief should be the value of the debt service payments which are no longer made as a result, not the whole outstanding book value of the loan.

There is a broader case for thinking again about how ODA is defined. This would be an opportunity to address long-standing anomolies, such as the treatment of debt relief, student subsidies, dumping of surplus food, and the choice of countries which are eligible. My own view is that the current definition creates an unhelpful disincentive to invest in global public goods, such as peacekeeping costs or global health surveillance. (Jean-Michel Severino and Olivier Ray discussed this a few years ago in a CGD Working Paper.)  But the reason why Manning is outraged about the treatment of loans is that the way the rules are applied is inconsistent with the existing definition of ODA to which OECD countries have signed up. They are not obeying their own rules.

Manning finishes with a striking thought:

If the OECD cannot do a professional job on this, the UN should take over the reporting for international aid flows.

Coming from a former chair of the DAC, that is a comment which should not be lightly dismissed.

Here is a reply from Twitter from Erik Solheim:

@fp2p @oecd No change to definitions. Scrutiny is good, check all ODA at bit.ly/10VrMuR. Focus on results in mobilising resources

— Erik Solheim (@SolheimDAC) April 11, 2013

A consortium of donors, NGOs, supermarkets and agro-businesses are working on plans to use surplus food, currently wasted in industrialised countries, to the developing world to tackle hunger.

According to some estimates, 1.2 billion tonnes of all food produced is never eaten – because of losses in harvesting, storage, transportation and poor labelling.  This is between 30-50% of all food produced: yet at the same time, about 900 million people will go to bed tonight hungry.

In a new public-private partnership, donor agencies and supermarkets are planning to work together to develop ways to ship this surplus to Africa. Food that is approaching its use-by date will be bought by donor governments at cost and repurposed to tackle hunger in countries that need it most. Officials are working with the merchant navy to develop a European equivalent of the US Cargo Preference Act so that the food is carried in nationally-registered vessels.

The UK Government Big Society unit is developing plans to put specially-marked donation centres on street corners, so that families with surplus food can donate it directly. UKAid will then be used to transport the food to countries with the highest rates of hunger.

Under the current definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA), the market value of the food which is purchased by government and the cost of shipping it will count towards the international definition of aid. This means that the scheme will contribute to the UK Government’s target of 0.7%, which Britain is meeting for the first time in 2013. The Treasury is thought to be enthusiastic about the scheme because it helps the UK to meet the target without additional public spending.  The scheme is regarded in government as a way to leverage Britain’s growing aid budget to support British farmers and firms while providing additional food for the world’s poor.

Ministers see the new scheme as a win-win. According to one Development Minister:

“I remember my mother telling me to eat all my dinner because people were starving in Africa. It always seemed to me we should ship them the food instead. Well thanks an innovative new partnership, we will be able to do that. This shows we can do well while doing good. We will create jobs for British farmers, food companies and for our hard-pressed merchant navy, while showing the world that we are serious about fighting hunger.  Furthermore, this is an opportunity to spread the word globally about the quality of British cuisine.”

NGOs, who are focusing on reducing hunger in 2013, have given a cautious welcome to the scheme:

“Hunger is the world’s most shocking problem and our toughest challenge. One in eight people on this planet lives with the pain of hunger. And yet our planet provides enough food for everyone. It’s unfair, it’s unjust, and – it’s totally preventable. We can reduce hunger without putting any additional pressure on the planet’s resources IF we ship unwanted food to people in poor countries.”

Even so, at the Center for Global Development we have significant reservations about the idea. The reason people are hungry is because they are poor, not because there is not enough food.  Though this became widely accepted in the 1980s, in recent years some campaigners and governments seem to find it easier to portray hunger as a problem of food production rather than poverty.

The programme will be piloted in Africa. The first Africa Pilot for Repurposing International Leftovers (APRIL 1) is expected to commence this month.

 The risk is that development becomes a secondary goal in a department with bigger fish to fry. The opportunity is that by putting development at the heart of a more powerful department with a broader remit for foreign and trade policy, Canada will now be able to promote development-friendly policies across the wide range of issues which most affect poor countries. It is not CIDA but Canada as a nation that needs to do more.

And I’m quoted in the Toronto Star:

“It makes no sense, giving aid to the same countries you hit with high tariffs,” says Owen Barder, a London-based official with the Centre for Global Development, a think tank that focuses on international aid issues.

It’s a disconnect, Barder said, that could be addressed and resolved with foreign aid officials positioned closer to the centre of power in Ottawa.

Archived copies: 

Bob Geldof has given an extended interview on Development Drums about his work over three decades; you can judge for yourself if this criticism of celebrity activists is fair. (But beware: the language is colourfully and characteristically explicit in places.)  You can listen to the 35 minute version here, or listen to the entire extended interview.  Alternatively you can read the transcript.

Geldof’s interview confirmed my impression that he is passionate, well-informed, and thoroughly decent. What’s more, I think he has done as much as anyone I know to make the world a better place.

I was living in Ethiopia in the early 1980s as the famine there unfolded; and I remember how Michael Buerk’s report on the BBC on 23 October 1984 brought it to the world’s attention. But that would have been just another news report without Bob Geldof  who (with Midge Ure) brought together a group of pop stars, called Band Aid, to record a charity single, Do They Know It’s Christmas? (It still makes me cry when I hear it.) The following year Geldof organised the Live Aid concerts in London and Philadelphia. I believe these concerts and the surrounding publicity played a decisive role in mobilizing public opinion behind efforts not only to address the famine, but to find ways to make sure that nothing like this could ever happen again.

Bob Geldof did more than raise money for a good cause.  In retrospect it seems extraordinary that a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher would send planes from the Royal Air Force to Ethiopia, then under a marxist military government, to deliver emergency food aid to remote parts of the country. I don’t believe this would have happened without the pressure of public opinion that Bob Geldof mobilised and to which he gave voice.

It seems to me that there is a direct thread connecting these events in the 1980s to the national consensus in Britain in support of a generous and effective development policy. It was this consensus on the need to do a better job of tackling global poverty which led to the establishment of the Department of International Development (DFID) in 1997 – which Tony Blair would later say was the greatest achievement of his government; it led to the cross party consensus on the need to protect the aid budget; and it culminated in the announcement in yesterday’s budget that Britain will this year meet the international target of spending 0.7% of GNI on foreign aid.  Geldof has remained engaged throughout, playing a key role in the Gleneagles summit in 2005, and in helping to shape Conservative Party policy on development in 2005.

I am not saying that Geldof was single-handedly responsible for Britain’s national support for development. There are many organisations and individuals who have contributed to this movement over the years, and they all deserve credit. But as you will hear in the podcast, Geldof deliberately played a particular role, agitating, mobilizing and disrupting in ways which helped capture the public imagination.

Geldof has more than his fair share of enemies. He is accused of misrepresenting Africa as a basket case, a continent of begging bowls. There have been insinuations – for which retractions and apologies were subsequently extracted – that the money raised by Band Aid was somehow used to support the civil war in Ethiopia. He has been accused of being a publicity-seeking celebrity, exploiting the misfortune of others.  I put all this to Geldof in the course of the interview, and he replies robustly. I find him convicincing and credible.

Geldof’s latest venture is a private equity firm, 8 miles, which makes investments exclusively in Africa. In the podcast he talks optimistically about the opportunities for investment in Africa, and the scale of the changes he is seeing. But he does not accept the suggestion that his campaigning, and the aid which he helped to raise, harmed Africa’s prospects for private investment and growth: on the contrary, he argues that they were, and remain, essential complements as Africa gets to its feet.

Whether you admire Bob Geldof or distrust him, if you are interested in what Band Aid and Live Aid achieved, and how celebrities have helped to build and sustain public interest in development, I hope you’ll listen to his interview on Development Drums. (Edited version | Full interview)

The budget presented today by Britain’s ruling coalition confirmed that the UK will meet the 0.7% target on foreign assistance in 2013.

This means that Britain will join Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg and Denmark as the first G-8 member of the small club of countries which meet the UN target – first agreed in 1970 – of spending 0.7% of Gross National Income (GNI) on Official Development Assistance (ODA). (The Netherlands, which has been above 0.7% every year since 1975, looks likely to leave the club in 2013).

Meeting the target entails a substantial increase in the DFID budget. According to the budget documents (page 69 of the Red Book), the DFID spending limit will rise from £7.8 bn in 2012-13 to £10.7 bn in 2013-14.  As far as I know, there is no peacetime precedent for a 37% increase from one year to the next in the budget of a UK government department with no change in its responsibilities.

The Government has also confirmed  - I believe for the first time – that the protection for the ODA budget will be continued into 2015-16. (See page 3 of the Red Book).

For readers not familiar with the UK’s budget system: these budget proposals are formally subject to approval by Parliament in July in the Main Supply Estimates; but Parliament normally approves the provision sought by the Government.

In absolute terms, the UK will overtake Germany to become the world’s second largest aid donor, with a budget of about $17 billion; a long way behind the United States which spends about $31 billion a year. (US foreign assistance, while large in absolute terms, is just 0.2% of national income.)

This increase in aid, in the context of a difficult fiscal position, is the result of a remarkable cross-party political consensus in Britain about the importance of development cooperation. This commitment has grown significantly since the establishment of DFID in 1997. (If you are interested, my 2005 Working Paper describes the reform of UK foreign assistance which helped establish this cross party agreement, in the context of British aid since colonial times.)

In From Poverty to Power Duncan aims to come up with an NGO narrative on development. His message is that active citizens and effective states are the main drivers of development.  Duncan is increasingly focused on how change happens and From Poverty to Power is full of examples of this, from pond rights in India to the international campaign to ban landmines.

Like Rakesh Rajani in the previous episode of Development Drums, Duncan emphasizes that change happens from within. Aid and the international system can help, or hinder, but are essentially secondary.

In the last episode of this trilogy about states, citizens and development, Daron Acemoğlu and Jim Robinson will talk about their book, Why Nations Fail. They are somewhat more pessimistic than Duncan about the possibility of influencing the speed and direction of development.  (But before that, Development Drums will bring you an interview with Bob Geldof which has led me to find out how to use the ‘explicit language’ tag in iTunes.)

My own view is that Duncan’s story about effective states is more compelling than the role he describes for active citizens. I see how active citizens can sometimes shape development for the better; but they can also sometimes stand in the way of progress. In either case, I suspect we may be in danger of overstating the role of active civil society. In the end my view is closer to the position reached by Acemoğlu & Robinson, though I don’t entirely agree with them either.

But don’t take my word for it: listen to Duncan Green on Development Drums on the website, or download it from there to your phone or MP3 player.  You can also subscribe to Development Drums free of charge in iTunes.

The advert says:

Adopting a polar bear is the best way to ensure ongoing support for this iconic species

I am pretty sure that is not true. If Coke thinks about this long and hard, I think they will find that making a concerted effort to tackle climate change is the best way to ensure the continued well-being of polar bears, rather than a bear sponsorship scheme.

But perhaps this ‘iconic’ company is not ready to tell people that?

In the latest edition of Development Drums, Rakesh Rajani and Martin Tisné discuss accountability, open government and development. The episode explores the idea of openness – meaning more than just transparency but also the mechanisms by which citizens can hold their governments to account.  Rakesh talks about his own work as the leader of Twaweza, which seeks to promote citizen agency in East Africa, and Martin about his work at the Omidyar Network supporting initiatives to promote accountability and transparency. They also talk about the work and future direction of the Open Government Partnership, which they both helped to establish.

This theme of the relationship between citizens and states is continues in the next episode of Development Drums, in which Duncan Green talks about his book, From Poverty to Power. (This episode will be online next weekend.)

It is a theme of both discussions that change happens mainly from within, and that it comes about from shifts in relationships of power and accountability. Rakesh and Martin discuss the role of information and transparency in supporting citizen agency, while Duncan looks more broadly at the role of active citizens. In both cases, I was struck by how important these relationships between citizen and the state seem to be, and yet how little we seem to know about what, if anything, can be done to accelerate change.  The role of outsiders is particularly uncertain, and there are considerable risks that well-intentioned efforts might be not only unsuccessful but harmful.

An idea which emerged strongly from both discussions is that industrialised countries may make their most effective contributions not through financial support but through their role in sharing knowledge, ideas, innovations and in helping to establish and reinforce norms and standards. This suggests that there may be potential in the Open Government Partnership, a voluntary coalition of 55 governments launched in 2011.

Development Drums does not aim to compete with mainstream media coverage of development issues. Instead of breezy overviews and summaries, Development Drums tries to take advantage of the podcast format  to discuss issues in depth and at length.  I know that this will not appeal to a lot of people, but I hope there is a niche audience which is willing to invest time in really getting to grips with a subject. The fact that some episodes have been downloaded 70,000 times suggests either that there is an audience scattered around the world wanting to listen to an in-depth discussion of questions in development, or that a lot of people do not know how to unsubscribe from podcasts in iTunes. I am conscious that these long discussions can be rather slow moving – especially as I seem to be turning into an even more verbose version of Jim Naughtie – and I’d welcome feedback about whether you find these discussion too long and whether there are ways to make Development Drums more compelling and useful.

This amazing story of human progress shows what’s possible.
We can be the generation that eradicates absolute poverty in our world.

David Cameron, Speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos, 24 January 2013

For the first time in history, global economic prosperity, brought on by continuing scientific and technological progress and the self-reinforcing accumulation of wealth, has placed the world within reach of eliminating extreme poverty altogether.

Jeff Sachs, Can Extreme Poverty Be Eliminated?, Scientific American September 2005

You are right. We do have an historic opportunity this year to Make Poverty History.

Tony Blair, 16 April 2005, Campaign Diary

But in this new century, millions of people in the world’s poorest countries remain imprisoned, enslaved, and in chains. They are trapped in the prison of poverty. It is time to set them free.

… Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.

Nelson Mandela, Trafalgar Square, February 2005

It’s an amazing thing to think that ours is the first generation in history that really can end extreme poverty, the kind that means a child dies for lack of food in its belly. This should be seen as the most incredible, historic opportunity but instead it’s become a millstone around our necks. We let our own pathetic excuses about how it’s ‘difficult’ justify our own inaction. Let’s be honest. We have the science, the technology, and the wealth. What we don’t have is the will, and that’s not a reason that history will accept.

Bono in an interview to the World Association of Newspapers for World Press Freedom Day on May 3, 2004.

For the first time in human history, society has the capacity, the knowledge and the resources to eradicate poverty

Thabo Mbeki, President South Africa opening World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg, August 2002

in the new global economy we are, all of us, the richest countries and the poorest countries – inextricably bound to one another by common interests, shared needs and linked destinies; that what happens to the poorest citizen in the poorest country can directly affect the richest citizen in the richest country; and that not only do we have inescapable obligations beyond our front doors and garden gates, responsibilities beyond the city wall and duties beyond our national boundaries, but that this generation has it in our power - if it so chooses - to abolish all forms of human poverty.

Gordon Brown, speech to the Federal Reserve Bank, New York, 16 November 2001

The challenge is a huge one. But the prize is very great. We are the first generation in the whole of human history that has the chance to eradicate basic illiteracy from the human condition. And we can do this within fifteen years. Let’s resolve today – together – that we will do what needs to be done to make this happen.

Clare Short, UK Secretary of State for International Development, Speech to World Education Forum, Dakar, April 27, 2000

Hunger is man’s oldest enemy. There is now the scientific knowledge and the institutional arrangement that makes it possible to overcome hunger, not only within the United States but throughout the world. This can be done within the lifetime of people now living, if there is the political will to do so.

The Heritage Foundation, 1984

Mankind has never before had such ample technical and financial resources for coping with hunger and poverty. The immense task can be tackled once the necessary collective will is mobilized. What is necessary can be done, and must be done.

The Brandt Commission, North: South A Programme for Survival 1980

No child will go to bed hungry within ten years.

Henry Kissinger, First World Food Summit, Rome, 1974 

Because it is right, because it is wise, and because, for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty,

Lyndon B. Johnson’s Special Message to Congress, March 16, 1964

The world has been greatly changed, especially during the last century, by the discoveries of scientists. Our increased knowledge now provides the possibility of eliminating poverty and starvation, of decreasing significantly the suffering caused by disease, of using the resources of the world effectively for the benefit of humanity.

Linus Pauling – Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1963

Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world–or to make it the last.

President John F. Kennedy, Address Before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations, September 20, 1963

I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago. The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. … To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required–not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

President John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961.

More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. …For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people.

Harry S Truman, Inaugural Address Given at Capitol Building, Washington, DC, Thursday, January 20, 1949

For the first time in history the counsels of mankind are to be drawn together and concerted for the purpose of defending the rights and improving the conditions of working people - men, women, and children – all over the world. Such a thing as that was never dreamed of before, and what you are asked to discuss in discussing the League of Nations is the matter of seeing that this thing is not interfered with.

Woodrow Wilson, League of Nations (8th September, 1919)

Rubber stamp that intrigued the press

Given this is what we do, it is awkward that we do not have a simple way of describing this broader range of issues on which we work.

There are two phrases which are often used in the rarefied discussion and communiqués of international conferences: ‘policy coherence for development‘ and ‘the do no harm principle‘. I think both ideas are flawed, for reasons I explain below. We at CGD in Europe have been using the term ‘beyond aid‘. But that is not ideal either.

I would like to use the phrase ‘good global citizenship’, though my American friends tell me that this may conjure up unwelcome connotations of black helicopters flying out of Turtle Bay.

(You might well think this is a self-indulgent rant about semantic niceties, and it is definitely a #firstworldproblem. Nonetheless, language matters for all sorts of reasons: it can reinforce misleading presumptions and prejudices, and unconsciously shape priorities.)

‘The do no harm principle’

I flinch every time I hear someone talk about ‘the do no harm principle’. It is presumably intended to echo a phrase from the Hippocratic Oath:

I will use treatments for the benefit of the ill in accordance with my ability and my judgment, but from what is to their harm and injustice I will keep them.

There is much to like in the Hippocratic Oath, but it makes no sense, in medicine or in development, to insist that we should ‘do no harm‘. The only way to achieve that objective would be to do nothing at all.

Almost all of the most important steps on the road to development produce losers as well as (many more) winners. The cotton spinners of Blackburn were harmed by the invention of the spinning jenny. Corrupt officials are harmed by efforts to improve public financial management. Lorry drivers are harmed when the railway is built. Should we stand against policies and actions which promote development because it is inevitable that someone, somewhere will lose from those changes? We can ‘do no harm‘ only if we oppose all development.

Furthermore, the ‘do no harm principle‘ is unavoidably a ‘take no risks principle’. A medicine may save millions of lives, but there are always some possible side effects such as allergies or the risk of contaminated supplies. If we provide a medicine to millions of people, the chances are that at least one person will be harmed by it. The only way to ‘do no harm‘ is to give it to nobody. Strictly speaking the ‘do no harm principle’ requires that nobody anywhere should be vaccinated, denying benefits to millions of people. We won’t get far in development if we take no risks.

In practice, the phrase ‘do no harm‘ is often used as a shorthand for the sensible idea that we should pay attention to the broader effects of our choices, and be alive to the likelihood of unintended consequences. This should be uncontroversial. We should pursue policies which do (much) more good than harm, which take account of the broader consequences, which take proportionate steps to limit the harm and risks, and which are careful and responsible about looking after those who are likely to lose from change. But to encapsulate the need for more care about broader consequences as a ‘do no harm principle‘ seems to me to reinforce unhelpfully conservative presumptions, both in the broad policy narrative and in the way individual projects and programmes are appraised.

Finally, ‘the do no harm principle‘ embraces a supposed ethical distinction between action and inaction which I find repugnant, and which most of the moral philosophers that I admire reject. I believe we should be just as concerned about not allowing harm as we are of not doing harm. We should be judged not only by what we do, but what we fail to do.

‘Policy coherence for development’

If there is a phrase I like less than ‘do no harm‘, it is ‘policy coherence for development‘ or – worse – ‘PCD‘.  I dislike this term in part because it is ugly jargon that means nothing to anyone outside the echo chamber of development bureaucracy. But I dislike it also because it focuses attention on the wrong question.

My interest in broader policies is not whether they are ‘coherent‘ but whether they are helpful or harmful to the world’s poor. A country could have a set of policies on aid, trade, intellectual property rights, tax and financial flows which coherently benefit its own companies or which coherently ignore environmental sustainability, and which are nonetheless perfectly awful for international development.

It is often implicit in discussions of ‘policy coherence‘ that it is especially desirable that a country’s other policies (eg on trade) should be consistent with the objectives its aid programme.  But this is the aid tail wagging the policy dog: industrialised countries should have good policies on climate change or immigration because these policies would benefit poor people (as well as benefiting the people of the industrialised countries), not because such  policies would buttress the aid programme. You have to have a peculiar obsession with aid to think that coherence with the aid programme is a good reason for doing the right thing.

This isn’t an entirely academic objection: I was recently at a meeting on Policy Coherence for Development at which one of the delegates, a mid-ranking official from her country’s foreign ministry, argued strongly that the focus of a work programme on policy coherence should be how different policies interacted with each other, rather than examining those policies primarily from the perspective of how they impact on developing countries. (Her point – with which it is difficult to argue – was that this is what the term actually means.)

Policy coherence would presumably be a consequence of a country having development-friendly policies in every different area. But policy coherence is not an objective in its own right, nor is it a powerful motivation for normal people. It takes a peculiar narcissism bordering on obsessive-compulsive disorder of policy wonks to elevate coherence between policies as a higher virtue than the individual impact of those policies on poor people.

‘Aid and beyond’

Because the ‘do no harm principle‘ is effectively a ‘do no development principle‘, and ‘policy coherence’ is an OCD obsession with consistency rather than impact, in CGD in Europe we have been looking for a different way of describing our work. We have settled on  ’beyond aid‘ to describe our initiative which looks at the way that the policies of European countries affect development. Though I prefer this by some distance to ‘do no harm‘ or ‘policy coherence for development‘, it suffers from two slightly contradictory yet significant drawbacks.

First, by defining these policies as things which are ‘beyond aid’, we seem to imply that aid is still first among equals in the way we approach development. Why don’t we call it ‘beyond trade’ or ‘beyond migration’? By calling it ‘beyond aid’ we might reinforce the idea that aid is the first or main instrument for tackling development, and everything else is an optional extra.

Second, the phrase ‘beyond aid’ is sometimes misinterpreted as implying that we should put aid behind us – in other words, that aid is no longer needed or useful. There are people who believe that, sometimes with considerable passion, but you do not have to be one of them to believe that these other policies are important. We do not want to use a term which implies that people should be forced to choose between aid and improvements in other policies, when they can reasonably support both.

Officials at the OECD recently asked us to call an event in which they were participating ‘aid and beyond‘ instead of ‘beyond aid‘ because they wanted us to emphasize that these policies are important as well as, and not instead of, aid.  While ‘aid and beyond‘ helps to avoid the the implication that we should forget about aid, it suggests even more strongly that aid should have pride of place in our thinking. I see why this implication might be attractive to the home of the trade union of aid agencies Development Assistance Committee, but describing the development policy agenda in this way risks distorting our priorities by appearing to put aid at its centre.

Good global citizenship

So if we cannot talk about ‘the do no harm principle’, ‘policy coherence for development‘ or ‘aid and beyond‘, what shorthand can we use for the wide range of policies which affect poor people around the world?

I like the phrase ‘good global citizenship’.  I’ve adapted this phrase from David Roodman who has been doing some analysis with a working title of a Global Citizenship Index. It resonates with the idea that we are concerned with how countries, governments, companies, institutions and people behave as global citizens – helping shape the norms and rules, and living within them, for our collective benefit and to protect the weakest and most marginalised members of society. I think this idea captures well the set of policies and behaviours by which rich countries, emerging powers and international institutions affect developing countries and poor people. It has the merit of being accurate and easily understood.

I gather from some American friends that this may sound less appealing to American ears: perhaps it sounds too much as if it is the first step down the road to global government, which ends with black helicopters flying out of  the UN offices on Turtle Bay to pacify the land of the free. I would be interested to know if this phrase really is too neuralgic for an American audience. (Please tell us in the comments.)

I believe that no development institution should be created unless at least one is closed down at the same time; and I feel the same way about jargon. So if we are going to start talking about ‘good global citizenship’, then at the same time we should strike ‘the do no harm principle’, ‘policy coherence for development’ and ‘aid and beyond‘ from the development lexicon.

Improvements on ‘good global citizenship’ or defences of the existing phrases welcome in the comments.

UPDATE: Norman Geras disagrees. I think he makes a very good point. I have more consequentialist instincts than him, but I accept there are some harms that can’t just be put in the balance. Accepting his argument, my formulation which he quotes isn’t quite right. But my main point stands: the phrase ‘do no harm’ makes no sense. The phrase ‘good global citizenship’ still seems attractive. 

The death of Aaron Swartz has made me think about how important it is for development that we continue to fight his fights, and continue to build what he began.

We know that sharing ideas, technology and data are essential to enable poor countries to close the gap with rich counties. Yet we have made it progressively harder for companies in poor countries to adopt new technologies, through protection of intellectual property, copyright and trademarks. We allow pharmaceutical companies to keep secret the data from clinical trials, for fear that it might be useful to other companies developing new medicines.  Western philanthropists fund a big exercise (the Global Burden of Disease project) to establish the main causes of death and disease around the world, but allow the western academics to withhold the data they have collected (often from governments and public bodies) so that they have a head-start on writing journal articles which they need for their academic prestige.  We continue to put most academic research behind paywall in subscription journal articles, beyond the reach of academics and civil society organisations in developing countries.  Accountability of developing countries to their own citizens is undermined by our secrecy about what we give in aid, or our companies pay in tax and royalties. Information about money we spend in developing countries – what has been spent, where, and for what – is still not easily available.

Some of this is changing. The UK Department for International Development Open Access policy is a huge step forward: it requires that research funded by DFID must be made available free online, and any data must be published within one year of collection. The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) – which was consciously modelled on Aaron Swartz’s work on RSS – is gradually being adopted to enable information about aid to be widely accessible, and here too DFID is leading the way.

Here are some suggestions for what more we can do:

1. Researchers and academics working in development should put pressure to open up academic publishing by refusing to do peer reviews except for open access journals; and commit to publishing all their data and code online (at the Center for Global Development we have a good policy like this).
2. All research funders require that all publicly funded research is open access with open data and open code.
3. Donors should adopt a policy of ‘public money – public code‘ – requiring all software that they finance to be open source. Aid agencies should not be paying for proprietary public sector IT systems (such as public financial management or education management systems).
4. All donors, NGOs, foundations and suppliers of services funded by aid should fully implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative.
5. Governments should not pursue the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

The first strand of CGD’s Europe Beyond Aid initiative will focus on the policies of European countries on technology, research and development and intellectual property, and we are looking forward to working with a wider range of experts to develop these and other policy ideas.  If you have specific suggestions to add to this list, I hope you will put them in the comments.

Aaron Swartz fought to make the world a better place: and he achieved more in a few years than most of us will achieve in much longer lives.  The world is changing, in the direction in which he was leading us, but we still have a long, hard fight against those who who want go control information and use it to exercise power.

First, Nouriel Roubini has suggested that  to the extent that private ownership of guns is allowed, gun owners should be required to take out insurance for third-party liability.  This would recognize that a person’s decision to hold a gun has implications for others in society. Economists Philip Cook and Jens Ludwig have estimated that  the social cost of one more gun-owning household is somewhere between $100 and $1800 per year. It would be for insurance companies to set an appropriate premium for each gun-owner, reflecting their assessment of the risks; but if the true social cost of owning a gun is of the order of $1000 a year, and gun owners actually had to bear that cost, that might lead many fewer people to buy guns. This elegant application of the ‘polluter pays’ principle would reduce gun ownership without breaching the Second Amendment, and if insurance companies do their job well it would target the highest risk gun owners.

Second, economists Ethan Bueno de Mesquita and Jens Ludwig have suggested a brilliant approach to reduce the political power of the National Rifle Association. They propose the establishment of a new fund with a single purpose. For every dollar the NRA spends in helping a political candidate, the fund would spend $2 to help the opponent (whether in a primary race or general election). The fund would raise money from public subscriptions – it would need to be of the order of $50m in an election year to double-match the NRA. Such a fund could change the calculus for a candidate who today feels the need to seek the support of the NRA, in order to obtain cash contributions or in-kind support – they may feel in future that courting this kind of support will do them more harm than good.  This idea might have other applications for breaking the grip of powerful lobbyists, such as oil companies or the big copyright holders.

What’s the problem?

Here are some things which I hear people say about their email, all of which resonate with me:

• “My inbox is my nag list. Everything in there is something I need to do something about. I get stressed every time I open Outlook to see hundreds of emails in my inbox, all nagging me.”
• “I am constantly checking my inbox for new emails.  So I never spend any quality time focusing on the work I should be doing.”
• “I’m worried that I am going to forget about an important deadline, so I keep scanning through all the emails in my inbox so I can decide what I need to do next.”
• “There are emails in my inbox which I have read at least half a dozen times but I have not had time to answer.”
• “I spend all my day feeding the email beast.  I don’t feel in control of my working day. Everything is urgent, so I never do anything that is important.”
• “I tend to answer everything at the last minute, by which time I have left it too late to think seriously or consult anyone; so it often ends up not being as thought-through as I would like.”
• “If I am away from the office, I find it stressful to think about all the unread emails piling up in my inbox which I am going to have to answer ”
• “There are emails in my inbox which I cannot do anything about, because I am waiting for somebody else before I can take the next step. I have to keep them there so I don’t forget to deal with them.”

If those worries sound familiar to you, this approach to dealing with emails may help.

The triage approach is a simplified version of suggestions from several books on how to manage projects and how to manage your time.  In particular, I have taken inspiration from ‘Getting Things Done’ by Dave Allen and from ‘Master Your Now’ by Michael Linenberger. I have tried those approaches, but I found myself unable to make the kind of commitment to new ways of working that they require. (Both approaches revolve around using to-do lists rather than email.) I have no doubt that people who go the whole hog and embrace one of these approaches get significant benefits from doing so; and there is special software, including plugins for Outlook, which they can use.  I am more comfortable with my simpler version which fits my own way of working, and it uses only Outlook’s built-in functions.  (Here are my instructions for setting up Outlook.)

The inaccurately named triage system

Several times each day, I triage my email inbox. This involves going through everything in my inbox and choosing one of four ‘Ds’:

• Deal with it
  If I can deal with an email in less than four or five minutes, I do so right away. For example, some emails only need a quick, one-line reply. It is better to do this right away than to have to deal with email again later.
• Defer it
  There are some tasks which will take longer than five minutes, or which cannot be dealt with immediately because they require additional information or some action by someone else.  These I tag with the date on which I want to deal with them – either today or on some future date. (I explain how to do so in the set up guide).  That gets the email out of my inbox and ensures that I’ll be reminded of it again when I need to come back to it.
• Delegate it
  If I am going to delegate a task, I try to do so immediately when I am triaging emails. That way I can give as much time as possible to whoever I am asking to do the job. I usually then defer the original incoming email to the time that a response is due. When that email reappears in my inbox, it reminds me to check that it has been dealt with.
• Delete or file
  If an email does not require any action, but I want to keep it to refer to later, I either delete it or (more usually) file it.

Once you have fully triaged your inbox, you will have a zero inbox. Everything will either be dealt with, deleted, delegated or deferred.  You can then turn to your ‘Today’ inbox to deal with the things you need to do during the day.

Some people specifically set aside an hour each morning or each evening to do email triage. I tend to look at my inbox every two or three hours to triage it. It usually takes about 15 minutes.  (I find this is also a good time to check my Twitter feed and Facebook!)

Live for today

If you triage your inbox three or four times a day, your inbox should be close to zero most of the time. I have switched off Outlook’s pop-up notification and sound alert for incoming emails, so that new emails do not disturb me while I am working on something else. (Instructions for how to do this are included in the set-up guide).

Instead of living in the inbox, I work mainly in my ‘Today’ folder which contains the emails which I have flagged for action today. I have set Outlook to open automatically into that folder.  That folder contains emails which have arrived previously and which I have flagged for action today; others have arrived today and I have marked them as needing to be dealt with today.

The art of procrastination

If there is something which I want to deal with later, but don’t yet know when, I kick the can down the road by queuing it up for a future Monday, often the first Monday of some future month.

So each Monday, especially if it is the first Monday of the month, my Today folder is a bit more full than usual with emails for me to review.  Some of them I kick down the road again to a future week or month; some of them I decide I am never going to tackle (or the moment has passed) so they get filed; some of them I can now deal with right away; and some of them I resolve to deal with this week and I put a particular date during the week to look at them.

Context folders

As well as organising work by date, I also organise emails by ‘context’.  I have three key context folders: @travel, @meetings and @Washington

Into each of these I put emails which I am going to need in a particular situation (such as when travelling).  Some people have a context folder for meetings with their boss, or with staff who report to them directly, so that they have a ready-made agenda for their next meeting.

Within the @meetings context folder, I create a subfolder for each future meeting, and I drop into that subfolder any email that I am going to need for the meeting.  Then when the meeting has happened, I move the sub-folder for that meeting from the @meetings context to my filed emails folder.

If you still want to use the defer function described above, you should first put a copy of the email into the relevant context folder (by dragging it there while holding down the Control key) and then defer the original email in the usual way.

Why this approach works for me

There are several characteristics of this system which seem to be important.

• A trusted ‘to do’ list.
  There are few things more uncomfortable than the feeling that you may have forgotten to do something. It is very stressful trying to keep everything in your head at once, and it makes it difficult to concentrate on the thing you are working on at the moment.  We need to park those tasks somewhere and be confident that they will come back to us in good time to handle them.  By putting a particular date on each email, I can get the email out of my ‘inbox’ and off my desk, secure in the knowledge that it will reappear on my screen on the day I need to do something about it.
• Zero inbox
  For many of us, it is important to keep an eye on our inbox, and to deal with urgent emails as they arrive.  But if our inbox is also our to-do list (and, in some cases, a filing cabinet), this means that every time we turn to our inbox, we are also confronted with an unsorted list of all the things we need to do.  With the triage system, the inbox contains only recently arrived, unread emails. There is something very satisfying about having a generally empty inbox.
• Avoid reading emails again and again
  Emails used to sit in my inbox for weeks – I wanted to do something about them, but I was not yet ready or they were not yet urgent enough.  I would read them again and again – sometimes several times a day – to check what was important or approaching a deadline.  With the triage system, I read each email when it comes in. Many of them I deal with there an then; the others are put aside until the day that I have designated to handle it. I still read many emails too many times, but it is much less often than it used to be.
• Create space for today
  Because I live mostly in my ‘Today’ box, not my inbox, I have more time to concentrate on the work that I should be doing. I do not anxiously monitor incoming emails, because I know I will look at those later in the day.

I have tried lots of different systems, some more elaborate than others, and this particular approach has worked well for me.  It will take about 15 minutes to set it up using this guide (but a bit longer to do your first triage!).

If you use Gmail rather than Outlook, there is unfortunately no equivalent function to put dates on email messages.  You could try Sanebox, or if you use an iPhone the new Mailbox email programme looks quite interesting.

If you have suggestions for improving this system, please put them in the comments below.

Europeans more than pull their weight in aid to developing countries. Last year Europeans provided more than €60 billion ($80bn) in aid, more than two and a half times as much as the United States. European members account for just 40% of the national income of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) but give more than 60% of the aid.

Furthermore, Europeans have reason to be proud of the quality of aid they give. They tend to focus on poverty eradication and sustainable development, and have largely shaken off the vested commercial interests in tied aid.

But development cooperation means more than effective aid. The partnership agreed a year ago in Busan (endorsed by more than 150 countries) called for its signatories to move “from effective aid to cooperation for effective development”.

So if European countries are serious about development – and not just giving aid – then we must also consider how European policies on trade, investment, migration, environment, technology and security all affect the developing world.

Improvements in any of these policies could have much more impact on poverty and prosperity in poor countries than any increase in the quantity or quality of aid we are likely to make.  Taken together, they are far more important than aid for creating the conditions for development. Yet they get relatively little attention in development circles.

For the last ten years the Center for Global Development (CGD) has been keeping score of how well rich countries are living up to their promises to pursue more development-friendly policies in the Commitment to Development Index.  Now that CGD has a Europe programme, we have decided to use the CDI to look more closely at how well European countries are doing and to identify the main policy priorities.On Tuesday, CGD hosted an event in coordination with the DAC High Level Meeting in London, to launch our new Europe Beyond Aidinitiative. The Secretary General of the OECD, Ángel Gurría, gave a keynote speech about the importance of beyond aid issues for development. Panelists Christian Friis Bach, the Danish Minister for Development Cooperation, and Erik Solheim, the Chair-elect of the DAC, both argued that aid should be seen as just one instrument within a broader framework for cooperation.  (Denmark is top of the Commitment to Development Index this year.)

There are now 21 European countries included in the index (19 members of the EU, plus Norway and Switzerland). Some of those countries do extremely well: the top seven countries in the Commitment to Development Index are (in order): Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, Austria, Netherlands and Finland.

But might the saintliness of the Scandinavians and like-minded nations be concealing a much less impressive story across the rest of the continent?

To get a handle on this, we have this year added a facility to calculate the Commitment to Development Index as if Europe were a single country. This works by combining data for all the European countries in the index and weighting the results as usual in the index for the size of their economy and their population. You can try it for yourself if you go to the main CDI webpage and click “Europe as one”.

Given that Europe is far more generous than the rest of the world in the quantity and quality of aid it gives, you might expect it to top the world league in the Commitment to Development Index.  But when you do the calculation, it turns out that Europe’s performance overall is not great. Nor is it awful: when you look across Europe’s policy footprint on developing countries, as a whole Europe is about par for the course.  Both Canada and New Zealand do better. Other parts of the world do worse: interestingly, the countries which are further behind seem to be improving, and may soon close the gap on Europe.

This is not an exercise in finger-pointing: the aim is to celebrate success and to understand where and how we can improve. To do that, we have to start by understanding where we are.

In a new Working Paper published yesterday, we set out the facts about Europe’s performance in the seven dimensions of the Commitment to Development Index.  It explores the highlights (and lowlights) of European policies as they affect development.

The big picture is fairly straightforward. Europe has generous and effective aid programmes, and makes a distinct contribution to global environmental challenges. But Europe’s policies on trade (especially agriculture), security and sharing technology have much less positive impact on development.

To generalize a little: Europe’s approach to development could be characterized as energetically tackling the symptoms of poor economic opportunities for developing countries by providing substantial and effective aid, while doing relatively little to tackle the underlying structural causes of poverty.

But dig beneath the surface, and things are (inevitably) more complicated.

There is considerable variation between countries in Europe (suggesting that many of the reasons for differences are not decided at EU level) and each country performs well in some areas and badly in others.  For example, Germany has among the best policies in the world for encouraging investment in the developing world, but is near the bottom of the pack on security because of its relatively small contribution to international peacekeeping operations and high levels of arms sales to poor and undemocratic governments.

The good news is that these variations suggest that rapid progress is possible. Even if European countries – collectively and individually – do no more than identify and implement the best practice among them, the margin for improvement is huge. For example, though they have much in common, Denmark and Sweden are respectively ranked the best and worst in the world in the index on security policies. For Sweden to move from the bottom of the global league to join Denmark at the top, it would need to participate in major security treaties (for example, Sweden has not ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions), and contribute to the protection of global sea lanes and to internationally-sanctioned peacekeeping operations.

Though every country has its own political idiosyncrasies, the extent to which some countries fall behind best practice of their neighbours suggests that considerable improvement is well within the realms of political possibility.

To get a better handle on the opportunities for improvement, CGD in Europe is today launching our Europe Beyond Aid programme. We are working with leading experts across Europe and around the world to look carefully at Europe’s performance in each of the seven components of the Commitment to Development Index (namely, aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security and technology). Each study will examine the performance of Europe together and as individual nations. It will assess the extent to which the room for improvement is primarily a question for the EU collectively, through the European Union, and the extent to which individual member states need to raise their game. The goal is to identify a policy agenda for European policy-makers in each of the seven policy areas.

Our first Working Paper – looking at Europe’s performance overall and written with David Roodman and Julia Clark – has now been published. Over time we will be publishing new working papers diving into the detail of each policy area (first up: technology transfer). We want to engage the experts and policy-makers across Europe in each of those, to arrive at a sound consensus about the steps Europe can take to improve its policy footprint in the developing world, and start to make good on the promise of Busan.

Christmas came early yesterday for campaigners for more effective and accountable aid, with an announcement from DFID which has raised the bar for aid transparency.

At an event in London last night, hosted by BOND and Publish What You Fund, the British Secretary of State, Justine Greening delivered a keynote speech which included (by my count) six key steps forward on aid transparency and accountability. She said that DFID will:

1. require organisations receiving and managing funds from DFID to release open data on how this money is spent in a common, standard, reusable format, including unique identifiers to make it possible to follow the money; including (crucially) requiring this of sub-contractors and sub-agencies, right through the aid chain;
2. geocode spending data to show where aid is spent at the local level
3. make its aid data compatible with partner country budget classifications, so that governments and citizens can see where aid is being spent and increase accountability
4. improve its data by publishing feedback from those directly affected by aid;
5. start a new Aid Transparency Challenge Fund to stimulate work by developers to create tools promoting the use of open aid information, supporting the traceability of aid, and improving results reporting, including a requirement that all tools developed through the Fund are ‘open source’ so that others can use and further develop them;
6. establish an International Development Sector Transparency Board with representatives from DFID, civil society, aid contractors, open data experts, partner countries, privacy experts and other government department representatives.

In April last year,  I listed ten steps for meaningful aid transparency based on three years of working on aid transparency. I think Justine Greening’s announcement has met nine out of ten of those suggestions. (It would be churlish to mention here the suggestion not yet implemented. I will follow that up later!)

As I said to The Economist just last week, the ability to follow the money will be a game-changer for foreign assistance. Once we have in place the system to follow UK aid, it is hard to see why other donor’s will not follow suit.

DFID will be using IATI, the internationally-agreed standard and mechanism for sharing aid information. All the information that DFID produces, and the information they will require from  implementing organisations and sub contractors, will be in an accessible, comparable, standardised format, making it much easier for everyone to find and use it.  As other donors move towards more transparent and traceable aid, using this international standard will make it possible to follow all aid money from any source to seeing exactly how it is being used.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Michael addresses concerns about the impact on countries from which people leave (the so-called brain drain) and the impact on countries to which people come (such as possible effects on jobs, public services and social cohesion).  He also emphasizes that we should focus primarily on the effects on migrants themselves.  In the final part of the interview, Michael gives an example of how his work has led to small but important changes in US immigration policy in ways that have huge benefits for development.

You can subscribe to Development Drums free in iTunes, you can listen to it from the website or you can add the feed to your favourite podcast software.

Ms Greening’s strategy is the requirement that any organisation receiving DfID funds publish clear information about where the money is going. This far-reaching transparency initiative is potentially a “game-changer”, says Owen Barder, a senior fellow and director for Europe at the Center for Global Development, a Washington, DC-based think tank.

Here is the full thing.

Britain’s foreign aid

Follow the money

Nov 28th 2012, 21:58 by S.L.

BRITAIN’S Department for International Development (DfID) is widely regarded as a trend-setter in the aid business. Under Andrew Mitchell, the agency tightened spending, cut the number of countries receiving aid and ceased funding United Nations agencies for housing and economic development that it determined were not delivering. Now its new head, Justine Greening, wants to make the country’s aid-giving more transparent. This should make it more effective. But Ms Greening’s efforts may also end up embarrassing both the department and the recipients of its aid.

In a manifesto published in the Guardian, Ms Greening outlined her plans for the agency. For starters, she notes that in 2013 the government will for the first time meet its pledge to spend 0.7% of the country’s gross national income on development. But the most significant part of Ms Greening’s strategy is the requirement that any organisation receiving DfID funds publish clear information about where the money is going. This far-reaching transparency initiative is potentially a “game-changer”, says Owen Barder, a senior fellow and director for Europe at the Center for Global Development, a Washington, DC-based think tank.

The transparency requirement, which will be phased in over an unspecified time period, appears to mean that NGOs, private contractors and possibly even governments that receive DfID funds would have to publicly disclose how they spend the money. The current DfID disclosures only show the money flowing outwards, but don’t shed light on where the funds end up. Currently, said Mr Barder, it is nearly impossible for anybody to figure out what aid money is actually being spent on.

The new initiative could really make governments and aid agencies accountable, said Mr Barder. “The idea that you can follow the money is a game changer.” By contrast, he notes, foreign-aid spending from America is divided between more than two dozen agencies and is virtually impossible to track. “Nobody across the system currently knows how much is going anywhere. At the moment it is a complete mess”, he said. “Whether you are an aid enthusiast or an aid skeptic, transparency is effective.”

Development policy: time to look beyond simply managing aid

Powerful nations need to do more to reform the governance of the global institutions they dominate, says Owen Barder

‘The past fifty years have seen unprecedented progress on almost every dimension of human well-being.’ Photograph: Aijaz Rahi/AP

Europe at the fin de siècle – the end of the 19th Century – is thought of today as an opulent, decadent and cynical end to la belle époque. This mood of fin de siècle is echoed in today’s development policies and aid agencies, similarly following a golden era for aid. Like the European elites of a century ago, the development policy community seems to be paralysed in the face of widely-anticipated (and largely desirable) change.

The structure, incentives and priorities of today’s aid agencies reflect their history in a disappearing era when development policy meant rich countries giving aid to poor countries for the alleviation of extreme poverty.

Today’s development challenges look quite different, in at least five ways. First, most of the world’s poor live in middle-income countries, such as China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria. Second, private investment, remittances and private giving are now far bigger than official aid. Third, there has been healthy growth in many developing countries, bringing increases in prosperity for many, but also great challenges of inequality, environmental degradation and dislocation. Fourth, we are moving from a world dominated by a few rich countries to broader spread of emerging global powers. Fifth and finally, we face a growing array of challenges requiring global solutions, including climate change, macroeconomic imbalances, inadequate financial regulation, tax avoidance, insecurity and corruption.

The past fifty years have seen unprecedented progress on almost every dimension of human well-being, including improvements in security, reductions in conflict, and the spread of access to water, food, shelter, health and education. These improvements have not been confined to fast growing countries like South Korea and China; there have also been remarkable improvements in countries which have seen relatively little economic growth in income, such as Mali and Burma. Many of these improvements have been supported and catalysed by foreign aid. As the world becomes more wealthy, we can afford to spend a rising share of our income on overseas aid; and it has been demonstrably successful.

But people from developing countries are clear that development policy today must mean more than giving aid. With growing economic success, they want to benefit more from the resources and services which they supply to the world. They do not want aid as compensation for global trade rules which are stacked against them: they want the rules changed. They do not want merely to be compensated for the damage done to the environment by industrialised countries; they want the destruction of our shared planet to stop.

Developing countries have made great progress on seven of the eightmillennium development goals. But there has been almost none on the eighth, for which the old rich world bears primary responsibility: “Develop a global partnership for development”. For example, the powerful nations have done little to improve the governance of global institutions which they dominate; nor have they developed, as they promised, open, rule-based, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial systems.

The Center for Global Development produces an annual index of commitment to development, which scores OECD countries on their policies on trade, the environment, migration, investment, technology transfer, security and aid. You can quibble with the details, but however you look at the trend over 10 years it is difficult to escape the conclusion that there has been very little overall progress in the policies of rich countries which affect prospects in poor countries.

Aid agencies and campaigners make a powerful case for increases in aid, and for improving its quality. But many have neglected the other issues which developing countries are increasingly demanding must be addressed and which are likely to be at least as important. This paralysis in the face of a changing agenda should come as no surprise. All aid agencies have to spend their budget wisely and avoid waste (or worse). But working to improve the policies on fisheries, patents or tax is always discretionary, however important it might be. Nobody in the government department responsible for these policies will complain if the development ministry leaves them alone. The people who stand to lose are in developing countries: and they have no voice and no vote when these priorities are set.

In the 21st century development policy is shifting to promoting a fair and effective global economic system, supported by investment in public goods, overseen by effective and legitimate institutions. Aid can help to protect and support who are disadvantaged by change. But aid agencies, NGOs and policy-makers will increasingly have to look beyond the management of aid, for which their organisations are organised, to a much broader agenda and new and unfamiliar ways of working.

Owen Barder is senior fellow and director for Europe at the Centre for Global Development. He tweets as @owenbarder

See blog post by Rita Perakis and watch the video:

This is another example of the immense waste caused by US rules requiring a substantial proportion of food aid to be bought from US suppliers and to be shipped on US-registered boats.

In another US food aid project to Cambodia in the same year involving local procurement, the freight costs are only 19% of the total.

A few questions spring to mind:

a. How many people in the developing world go hungry each evening because of the way we waste our food aid budgets?

b. Is there really no limit on how much money is spent lining the pockets of our own companies before the OECD refuses to count the spending as aid?

c. How dare we lecture developing countries about wasteful procurement, corruption and inefficient public expenditure?

This post first appeared on the Global Health Policy blog.

There has been bad news published in the New England Journal of Medicine about the effectiveness of what had seemed to be the best prospect for a malaria vaccine, known by the unsexy name of ‘RTS,S’.

The study of the phase III trials finds that in babies (aged 6-12 weeks) the vaccine only reduces malaria by less than a third.  This is disappointing because this is less than half the effectiveness that  had been suggested by the phase II clinical trials.

Another study published last year suggested the vaccine may be more effective in older children, aged 5-17 months. But a vaccine is unlikely to be cost effective in poor countries unless it can be included in the package of immunizations routinely given to babies.

This is almost unbearably bad news. Anyone who has lived in sub-Saharan Africa will be aware of the human and economic cost of malaria. It affects 200 million people a year, and kills ¾ million of those, mainly children.

The RTS,S vaccine was created in 1987 by Glaxo and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. But it had languished untested through lack of funding until the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation teamed up with GSK.  Between them they have reportedly spent about $500 million on this project.

Developing any vaccine is difficult; developing a vaccine against a parasite even more so.  The RTS,S vaccine has shown that it may, in principle, be possible to develop a vaccine against malaria, even if this particular candidate vaccine is not eventually successful. There are dozens of other candidate vaccines in earlier stages of development. Oxford University’s malaria vaccines programme has carried out about 30 small clinical trials. Specialist vacccine companies like Mymetics and Senaria are testing different approaches to this problem. But they haven’t had the same level of financial backing.

If you had to bet on a single possible vaccine then RTS,S was not a bad choice, given the information then available. But the experience demonstrates the danger of funders ‘picking winners’ among the possible approaches.

Under the Advance Market Commitment approach proposed by the Center for Global Development, donors would not have to choose research programs to fund. Instead they would create a contract to pay for a successful vaccine, if and when it is developed. This approach creates strong commercial incentives for vaccine companies to invest more themselves in developing and testing possible vaccines; and it ensures that the vaccine is made widely available when it is developed. The companies themselves decide which candidates to back (and decide when to cut their losses on those candidates).  And donors are only on the hook to buy a vaccine if one is successfully developed.

We know from the experience of a pneumococcal vaccine that an Advance Market Commitment is practically possible, and that it does indeed create incentives for vaccine companies to bring new products to market for developing countries.

Given the bad news about the malaria vaccine, the time has come for donors to make a historic Advance Market Commitment for a malaria vaccine, to unleash the creative and competitive energy of the private sector to solve this scientific and medical challenge.

The answer turned out to be that the registry contained a ‘reboot’ flag. The instructions to fix it are here.

We all know the clichés: India has a space programme; it has 61 billionaires and a burgeoning middle class. India became a middle income country four years ago, and though there are still 400 million people living in poverty that number is falling fast.  The era of Empire is over: it is for India, not us, to sort out its internal distribution of income and wealth.

What’s more, the citizens of both countries resent the aid relationship. Many Brits don’t see why they should pay taxes for aid to a country that is increasingly an economic rival, not an economic basket case; and Indians resent the patronising way aid is accompanied by finger wagging and expectations of contracts which do not befit a genuine partnership. What India both needs and want is the opportunity to trade, not more aid.

And yet: one third of the world’s poorest people (living on less than $1.25 a day) live in India. About 250 million Indians – a quarter of the country – will go to bed hungry tonight. About half the children in India are malnourished: a child in India is twice as likely as a child in sub-Saharan Africa to be underweight. The result can be stunting of mental and physical growth and development. Effects can be life-long, passed between generations, and can affect how well children do at school and their capacity to earn later in life. Lack of nutrition affects the economic potential not just of individuals but of the whole nation.

Furthermore, this is not, as is sometimes implied, merely a problem of inequality which could be sorted out if only the Indian authorities took it more seriously. India’s income per person is one third of that of China, and a sixth of that of Brazil. The poorest eight states in India contain more poor people (pdf) than the 26 poorest states in sub-Saharan Africa. If you spread India’s entire national income equally it would work out at about $10 per person per day. That is well above than the (preposterously low) international measure of poverty of $1.25 a day; but it only about a third of the (also far too low) US poverty line. (These numbers are at purchasing power parity, so don’t console yourself that $10 goes a long way in India.) That means that even if there were a way to redistribute income on a massive scale (which there isn’t: see Martin Ravallion’s calculations of the marginal tax rates that would be involved) the whole nation would still be appallingly poor and would still need our help.

Furthermore this problem will not go away any time soon even with healthy economic growth.  The OECD projects that over the next 50 years India’s income per head will grow approximately seven-fold but that in 2060 average living standards in India will still be roughly a quarter of the level of the United States.

It is entirely fair to say that aid won’t make much difference to any of this. It won’t accelerate economic growth very much, nor will it greatly affect the distribution of income. For a start, aid is far too small: India receives aid worth about 0.2% of its national income. But even where aid has been much larger, the effect on growth is very difficult to discern.

But that is not the right standard by which to measure aid. According to DFID, the aid provided by British taxpayers is currently paying for 835,000 children to go to primary school, and a further 700,000 students to go to junior secondary school. Between now and 2015, our existing aid programme (before it comes to an end) will provide nutrition programmes to 3½ million children and pregnant women, and pay for medical help in childbirth for 333,000 births. About 2.8 million people will get sustainable access to improved sanitation.

If India continues on its path of economic growth, and solves its problems of inequality, eventually those children will not need our aid. We can end our aid programmes now in the expectation that this will happen.  But let’s be clear: by ending aid prematurely we are playing chicken with children’s lives. Don’t pretend that we don’t know that the most likely consequence of this is that millions more people will suffer from malnutrition, hundreds of thousands of children will not be in school, and millions of people will not have access to toilets.

None of this contradicts the view that it is preferable for India to trade and grow its way out of poverty than to go on receiving aid. As India’s External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid said the other day, “aid is the past, trade is the future.”  At the Center for Global Development, we work mainly on thinking about what the industrialised countries can do to help create the conditions in which developing countries no longer need our aid.

The British Secretary of State, Justine Greening, said recently:

“.. we must try to tackle the root causes of poverty – not just the symptoms. This means putting in place the building blocks of prosperity – what the Prime Minister has referred to as the ‘Golden Thread’ of development.”

And the British Prime Minister said:

“But we in the developed world must also put our own house in order…”

Both these remarks are absolutely right: but where is the action?

I’ve read the DFID press release carefully, and while I see the section on “aid is the past”, I did not find anything about the UK living up to its responsibilities to ensure that “trade is the future”.

What is DFID offering? A ‘focus on sharing skills and expertise in priority areas’.  Technical cooperation always sounds nice: but while there are dozens of independent evaluations of technical assistance which find that it has not worked, there are practically none which find that it has. If India wants technical expertise, it can buy it in the marketplace.

‘Trade not aid’ is lazy thinking. There is no reason why we should not do both. We should do more to enable developing countries to grow and trade their way out of poverty. And we should provide aid to help the people of those countries in the meantime.

Al Jazeera had a discussion about this on 9 November, with Chetan Sharma, Alex Scrivener and me. You can watch it here:

if you are trying to work through the plethora of EU and UN-type agencies, you waste one heck of a lot of a money on the way in bureaucracy, and less gets to the front line

The Committee was a bit taken aback when I put forward the opposite case. I said:

when you look at value for money, there are theoretical reasons for thinking that multilaterals would be more effective and, in practice, such data as we have tend to support that idea.

The Committee gave me a good opportunity to explain this, though I am not sure I persuaded them. Here is why I think the big multilateral aid organisations through which the vast majority of multilateral aid is spent – such as the World Bank, European Union, regional development banks, and larger global funds such as GAVI – are generally more efficient than bilateral aid.

Why would multilateralism be more cost-effective?

1. Relative immunity from capture – bilateral donors are prone to being captured by commercial interests (eg the beltway bandits), lobbying by vocal NGOs, or short-term political pressures from legislators on a hobby-horse. Multilateral donors have more diverse stakeholders, so they are are less susceptible to capture by individual campaigns.

2. Untied aid – a particular example of capture is that bilateral donors generally tie their aid to their own suppliers, either explicitly or implicitly. This greatly reduces the value for money of aid.

3. Returns to scale – larger organisations can spread overhead over more projects. This is especially important for overseas offices, the duplication of which is very expensive. Bulk procurement can bring down prices (for example, of medicines).

4.  Specialisation – It makes no sense to have lots of bilateral donors each trying to build up expertise in each subject.

5. Diversity and breadth of membership – multilateral organisations include a broader range of members, including some countries which have themselves recently successfully industrialised their economy – and so can draw on and synthesize a wider range of experiences. This diversity gives developing country partners access to a greater range of ideas.

6. Improved aid allocation by ineffective donors – If a relatively effective donor (say, the UK or Ireland) increases their contribution to the multilateral system, that creates pressure on other, less effective bilateral donors (say, Italy or South Korea) to do the same in order to maintain their relative ‘fair’ burden. So if DFID shifts money from its (relatively effective) bilateral programme to a multilateral programme (also effective, but perhaps not markedly more so than DFID) this can other push other countries to spend less through their woefully ineffective and wasteful bilateral programmes and greatly increase overall aid effectiveness.

7. Reduced spillover effects – When we think about the effectiveness of bilateral aid, we often forget about the cumulative effects on developing countries and governments of coping with hundreds of different donors.  Knack (2006) refers to a forestry project in Vietnam jointly funded by 5 donors: it took 18 months and the involvement of 150 government workers to buy five project vehicles, because of the different procurement requirements of the different donors. That is why Simon Maxwell often says “don’t harmonise, multilateralize”.

We might all individually prefer to drive from our home to the office, but the roads would be impossibly congested if we all did that, so we are all better off if we pool our resources into an effective public transport system. It is similar for aid: we are all better off if we invest in a collective mechanism and resist the temptation to cause congestion by running our own individual aid projects.

The distinct roles of multilateral aid

Not only is multilateral aid likely to be more cost-effective than bilateral aid, there is much that it can do that bilateral aid cannot. It can:

1. Set and help spread norms and standards – for which individual donors lack legitimacy and credibility

2. Invest in global public goods – in a way that bilateral donors are usually unwilling to do.

3. Act in politically sensitive situations – for which sovereign countries lack neutrality and credibility.

Conversely, making more use of multilateral aid would free free up staff in foreign ministries and development agencies to focus on non-aid policies, such as trade, corruption, illicit financial flows, migration, environment, all of which have huge impacts on developing countries but which get crowded out by the priority given to managing aid budgets.

And in practice?

That’s all very well in theory, but what about the real world?

Shamefully we have very little data with which to compare the cost effectiveness of bilateral and multilateral aid.

But in the CGD Quality of Aid index, a multilateral agency tops three of the four dimensions; a multilateral agency (the World Bank) tops the index as as a whole; and all the multilateral agencies (apart from the UN agencies) come in the top half.

Almost all the aid establishment has a reason to claim that bilateral aid is better.  Politicians prefer bilateral aid because it increases the prestige and reputation of the donor country. NGOs and consulting firms reckon they have a better chance of getting a slice of aid spent through their flag-carrier aid agency. The aid bureaucrats in many governments prefer to control spending themselves than to provide core funding to multilateral agencies. The one group of people who might think otherwise – the multilaterals themselves – are constrained from saying so by their shareholders. But the fact that almost everyone has an incentive to say that bilateral aid is better doesn’t make it true.

If you like this, you may also like Development Drums (also on iTunes).

Here are the powerpoint slides.

To achieve the three objectives of reducing poverty and inequality, helping to manage our global commons and co-operating to accelerate global growth, the World Bank has four major instruments. But they all need to be improved if we are to face the challenges of the 21st century.

In the meantime, World Bank President Jim Kim has set out his agenda in a speech at the Annual Meetings in Tokyo:

we must stake out a new strategic identity for ourselves. We must grow from being a “knowledge” bank to being a “solutions” bank.  To support our clients in applying evidence-based, non-ideological solutions to development challenges.

Europe’s World also carries a commentary on José Antonio Ocampo’s article by Stephanie Majerowicz and me.  Here it is in full.

Commentary on José Antonio Ocampo’s article: It’s up to Europe to show real leadership over long-term World Bank reform

Autumn 2012
by Owen Barder / Stephanie Majerowicz

For all its flaws, the World Bank is perhaps the most effective aid agency in the world. Yet less than 8% of the world’s aid is channelled through it; the rest flows through a myriad of fragmented and much less effective bilateral aid agencies and multilateral organisations. Global aid is a valuable and scarce resource, and if more of it were it siphoned through the World Bank it could achieve a great deal more.This is why José Antonio Ocampo’s warning is so important. The world is changing fast, and the World Bank must either adapt or face irrelevancy. Ocampo writes with the understatement that befits a statesman, but it is important to not gloss over both the urgency and extent of the changes the World Bank must make to retain its leadership in international development. And Europe has a major role to play in bringing about these changes.

Last year, the Center for Global Development convened a working group on the future of the International Development Agency (IDA), the bank’s concessional loan facility. This examined how expected growth in the developing word – already an encouraging sign of success – will affect the World Bank’s core business of lending money at low rates to the world’s poorest countries. By 2025, most countries still eligible for IDA loans will be either fragile or post-conflict states, and they will have a combined population only a third the size of the countries eligible today. The Working Group’s report concluded that if the World Bank’s main product continues to be low-interest loans to poor sovereign governments, then the market for its activities will rapidly shrink.

If the World Bank is to claim the 21st century, it cannot do so with an outdated business model designed for the 20th century. As a starting point, it must find ways to address poverty in the middle income countries that are home to more than four-fifths of the people who live on less than $2 a day. As the World Bank at present struggles to implement projects in the very places that will continue to need concessional finance, it must therefore become more effective in fragile and post-conflict states. It is imperative that the bank provide finance and leadership for global public goods like climate change, fisheries, cross border health and financial stability.

To address these challenges, the bank will have to rethink and redesign its products. The marginal improvements that José Antonio Ocampo puts forward will not be enough. Loans to national governments of poor countries cannot be used for financing action to mitigate global challenges like climate change or to tackle pockets of poverty within middle-income countries. If the bank is to be effective in post-conflict and fragile countries, it will need innovative approaches that include more effective feedback loops.

To carve a contemporary role for itself, the World Bank will have to reform its governance to reflect changing membership and mandate. We cannot expect reform to come entirely from within; it must be driven by the shareholders. Traditional donors, including European governments, will have to learn to share power and responsibility with emerging powers who bear more and more of the financial burden, and with developing countries who must be our partners in tackling global problems. Europe has nine seats on the World Bank board to just the one seat held by the U.S, and we should harness that power to progress on long-term reforms of the World Bank’s instruments, governance and mandate.

The bank is one of the development community’s greatest assets, with a noble dream of creating ‘a world free of poverty’. It is important for European shareholders to work with the leadership of the World Bank and old and new stakeholders to ensure that it becomes a truly global institution.

Owen Barder is Director for Europe at the Center for Global Development where Stephanie Majerowicz is a research assistant.

I did try a couple of ready-made responsive themes for WordPress, to save myself the trouble of doing it manually, but I didn’t like any of them. So in the end I built it myself.  In case anyone is interested, I installed a local webserver on my laptop (using AMPPS) and then used Duplicator to copy my website locally. That way I was able to build and test the new layout without affecting the live website (and I could do it offline, such as on a long plane flight to Australia).

Yeah, I know. I’ll get my coat.

Diane Coyle was recently described as one of the UK’s most eminent public intellectuals.  She is Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, a member of the Migration Advisory Committee, she runs Enlightenment Economics, an economics consulting firm specializing in technology and globalization, and she has written a number of books on economics, including The Soulful Science, Sex, Drugs and Economics, and The Weightless World.

In The Economics of Enough, which is now out in paperback, she argues that all these crises have at their heart a failure to take proper account of the future in the way we run our economy, and a departure from the basic values which should guide our economy and society.  In this edition of Development Drums, Diane sets out why she thinks these crises are serious and long-lasting, and the obstacles we face in dealing with them.

The podcast finishes with a discussion of her Manifesto of Enough – her key proposals to get started on the challenges.

You can listen to Development Drums on the website, or download it to your computer or MP3 player, or subscribe free on iTunes.

In 2011, the British Department for International Development undertook a thorough review of how it allocated money to 43 multilateral organisations ranging from the World Bank to the Commonwealth Secretariat. The Multilateral Aid Review was intended to improve both the value for money of Britains multilateral aid, and the transparency and accountability of aid spending. This week, Britain’s National Audit Office (NAO) – the independent public auditor similar to America’s GAO – has published a glowing report on the process, with three important lessons.

First, the NAO finds that the exercise has significantly improved value for money for Britain’s multilateral aid. Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO, said:

By conducting a review of the money it spends through multilateral agencies, the Department [for International Development] has taken a big step towards improving the value for money it gets from these funds.

That is a pretty comprehensive endorsement of a brave and controversial decision by Andrew Mitchell, then Secretary of State for International Development, to open up the multilateral aid budget to transparent analysis and public scrutiny.

Second, the multilateral aid review was limited by the difficulty of collating reliable, comparable data on costs as organisations do not report on these consistently (see paras 2.8-2.16). This is a problem which could easily be solved if donors began requiring multilateral organisations to provide information in an open, consistent and comparable format defined by the International Aid Transparency Initiative.

Third, this process would have much more power, and be much less of a burden on multilateral organisations, if donors collaborated to encourage measurable performance improvements.  The NAO praises DFID for ‘instigating a wider debate on join approaches to assessing multilateral effectiveness (paragraphs 2.23 and 4.7 to 4.9) but there is clearly much more to be done.

Many of us are fond of complaining that the mechanisms for global collective action are inadequate or ineffective; and we often try to imagine new organisations without taking seriously enough the opportunities for improvement of existing institutions.  Significant improvements could be made if the rich and powerful countries which have leverage and control over these organisations by virtue of the money they give were to exercise the power they have in a more joined-up, rigorous and accountable way. This National Audit Office report into Britain’s Multilateral Aid Review suggests some valuable lessons not only for DFID but for everyone interested in improving the effectiveness of multilateral aid.

(Disclosure: I was a member of the ‘small expert panel’ established by the NAO to provide advice on this audit, as described in Appendix Two).

In the 2012 Kapuscinski lecture Owen argued that economic and political systems can best be thought of as complex adaptive systems, and that development should be understood as an emergent property of those systems. As explained in detail in Ben’s forthcoming book, these interactive systems are made up of adaptive actors, whose actions are a self-organised search for fitness on a shifting landscape. Systems like this undergo change in dynamic, non-linear ways; characterised by explosive surprises and tipping points as well as periods of relative stability.

If development arises from the interactions of a dynamic and unpredictable system, you might draw the conclusion that it makes no sense to try to assess or measure the results of particular development interventions. That would be the wrong conclusion to reach. While the complexity of development implies a different way of thinking about evaluation, accountability and results, it also means that the ‘results agenda’ is more important than ever.

Embrace experimentation

There is a growing movement in development which rejects the common view that there is a simple, replicable prescription for development.  Dani Rodrik talks of ‘one economics, many recipes’. David Booth talks of the move from best practice to best fit.  Mirilee Grindle talks of ‘good enough governance’. Bill Easterly has talked of moving ‘from planners to searchers’. Owen Barder has called for us to design not a better world, but better feedback loops.  Sue Unsworth talks of an upside down view of governance.  Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock aim to synthesize all this into their proposal for Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation.

These ideas are indispensable in the search for solutions in complex adaptive systems. In his 2011 book Adapt, Tim Harford showed that adaptation is the way to deal with problems in unpredictable, complex systems.  Adaptation works by making small changes, observing the results, and then adjusting.  This is the exact opposite of the planning approach, widely used in development, which involves designing complicated programmes and then tracking milestones as they are implemented.

We know a lot about how adaptation works, especially from evolution theory. There are three essential characteristics of any successful mechanism for adaptation:

1. Variation – any process of adaptation and evolution must include sources of innovation and diversity, and the system must be able to fail safely
2. An appropriate fitness function which distinguishes good changes from bad on some implicit path to desirable outcomes
3. Effective selection which causes good changes to succeed and reproduce, but which suppresses bad changes.

These principles are reflected in the six principles for working in complex systems which Ben set out in a Santa Fe Institute working paper with the former head of USAID Afghanistan, Bill Frej. They also run through the ideas in the must-read recent paper by Andrews, Pritchett and Woolcock  which sets out four steps for ‘iterative adaptation’ in the case of state-building and governance reforms:

1. focus on solving locally nominated and defined problems in performance (as opposed to transplanting pre-conceived and packaged best-practice solutions);
2. create an ‘authorizing environment’ for decision-making that encourages ‘positive deviance‘ and experimentation, as opposed to designing projects and programs and then requiring agents to implement them;
3. embed this experimentation in tight feedback loops that facilitate rapid experiential learning (as opposed to enduring long lag times in learning from evaluation);
4. engage broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate, relevant and supportable.

So there is now some convergence around these ideas, all of which focus on the importance of experimentation, feedback and adaptation as ways of coping with uncertainty and complexity.

The role of results in adaptation

Andrew Natsios, a former Administrator of USAID, fired a celebrated shot over the bows of what he calls the ‘counter-bureaucracy’ (the compliance side of the US aid system).  He says:

Let me summarize the problems with the compliance system now in place:

• Excessive focus on compliance requirements to the exclusion of other work,  such as program implementation, with enormous opportunity costs
• Perverse incentives against program innovation, risk taking, and funding for new partners and approaches to development
• The Obsessive Measurement Disorder  for judging programs  that limits funding for the most transformational development sectors
• The focus on the short term over the long term
• The subtle but insidious redefinition of development to de-emphasize good development practice, policy reform, institution building, and sustainability.

The reason for most of these process and measurement requirements is the suspicion by  Washington policy makers and the counter-bureaucracy that foreign aid does not work, wastes  taxpayer money, or is mismanaged and misdirected by field missions. These suspicions have  been the impetus behind the ongoing focus among development theorists on results.

These arguments – made with particular authority by Natsios – resonate strongly with the views of the growing movement for more experimentation, adaptation and learning.  But does that mean – as is often implied – that it is inappropriate or impossible to pay attention to results?

If anything, the opposite is true. All three steps in the adaptive process – variation, a fitness function and effective selection – depend on an appropriate framework for monitoring and reacting to results.  Natsios himself calls for ‘a new measurement system’. But – as Ben argued  last year – we must ensure that the results agenda is applied in a way which is relevant to the complex, ambiguous world in which we live.

Results 2.0: thinking through a complexity-aware approach 

A meaningful results agenda needs to take account of the diversity of development programmes, and the need for a more experimental approach in the face of complex problems. A good place to start is to borrow some approaches from academia, civil society and business strategy. This work suggests that a complexity-aware approach to results needs to get a better handle on need to be based on:

(a)   the nature of the problem we are working on,

(b)   the interventions we are implementing

(c)    the context in which these interventions are being delivered.

This gives us three dimensions – ranging from simple problems and interventions in stable contexts through to complex interventions in diverse and dynamic contexts.

Between a rock and a hard place

Down in the bottom left-hand corner are simple problems and stable settings.  This is where ‘Plan and Control’ makes most sense. Tradition results-based management approach, the more conventional unit-cost based value for money analyses and randomised control trials work especially well. (Classicists among you will recognise the hard rock of Scylla.)

At the top right we have complex problems, complex interventions in diverse and dynamic settings. (A lot of donor work in fragile states and post conflict societies are in this corner).  Here the goal is ‘Managing Turbulence’. In this space, everything is so unpredictable and fluid that planning, action and assessment are effectively fused together. To deliver results in this zone, we need to learn from the work of professional crisis managers, the military and others working in highly chaotic contexts. (This is the whirlpool of Charybdis.)

In between is what we have called the zone of ‘Adaptive Management’. Here we may find ourselves managing a variety of combinations of our three axes.  In our view, the vast majority of development interventions sit in this middle ground.

In this messy, non-linear world the challenge is to tread a careful path avoiding narrowly reductionist approaches to results without surrendering to excessive pessimism about our ability to learn and adapt.  In practice this means a more adaptive, experimental approach, trying out multiple parallel experiments, monitoring emergent progress, rates of success and adapting to context. Real-time learning is essential to check the relative effectiveness of different approaches, scaling up those that work and scaling down those that don’t.  It is a learning process which is essential for donors and – more importantly – for the governments and institutions of the developing world.

Adaptive management must engage the three drivers of evolution:

1. Variation – which means participants must be given space to experiment and engage in ‘positive deviance’.  The key is to liberate people implementing programmes from the conventional requirements to follow a preconceived plan, while retaining accountability of donors to their domestic constituencies. Development agencies and their partners can be given room for manoeuvre and experimentation if they are held to account not for their activities and spending according to a plan, but for the results they achieve or fail to achieve.
2.  An appropriate fitness function – which means that socially-useful changes are distinguished from ineffective or harmful changes.  This in turn requires society to agree – either in advance or at least in retrospect – what constitute useful changes, and to assess whether those changes are coming about.  For five decades the development industry has been inconsistent about what constitutes success, has failed to measure overall progress, and has eschewed opportunities to learn more about effects of different interventions through various kinds of rigorous impact evaluation.
3. Selection – which means that changes that bring about improvements according to the fitness function are reproduced and further adapted, while bad changes, policies or institutions are either reformed or brought to an end.  This requires a greater focus on evidence-based policy making, and that decisions about programmes and interventions must be more strongly linked the results they produce. The development industry has traditionally been insufficiently effective at taking success to scale, and insufficiently ruthless about failure.

Getting REAL with Results-Enabled Adaptive Leadership

Tracking results (and linking money to results) are often considered most appropriate for the simple stable situations in the bottom left hand corner of the cube. This is where it is easiest to attribute impact to the intervention.  It is in this corner that we find ‘piece rate’ systems: the manufacturer knows full well what the production function looks like for sewing machines and machinists and uses the piece rate system to motivate greater effort from staff.

But in the complex world of development, we do not know the ‘production function’ and we cannot readily attribute progress to any particular intervention.   Furthermore, we often do not know where we are in the cube.  We sometimes have reliable evidence about the value of a particular technology (say, a nutritional supplement or a bednet) which suggests we are down in the bottom left hand corner of predictable and attributable results. But when we introduce the messy reality of needing to inform people about the product, overcome resistance to change, of managing production and distribution and creating incentives for effective delivery, we rapidly find ourselves in a much more complex world.

So most of what we do to promote development is not in the bottom left hand corner: our interventions operate in the world of adaptive management and complexity.  The main value of a results focus in development not squeezing greater efficiency out of current service providers: rather it is in enabling people to innovate, experiment, test, and adapt.  The challenge here is to ensure that we have a focus on results which supports, rather than inhibits, effective feedback loops which promote experimentation and adaptation. This requires a new and more innovative toolkit of methods, and most importantly an institutional and relational framework which uses that information to drive improvement. We call this results-enabled adaptive leadership (because it has a nice acronym: REAL).

What might results-enabled adaptive leadership look like in practice? The Center for Global Development is currently exploring two specific ideas which we believe fit well with an adaptive, iterative and experimental approach to development :  Cash on Delivery Aid and Development Impact Bonds.

If you believe that development is a characteristic of a complex adaptive system then both of these ideas are attractive because:

• They explicitly focus on independently verified, transparently reported outcomes and impact – that is, appropriate measures of what society is trying to achieve – rather than inputs and outputs which are thought to be correlated with progress (but may not be, especially in a complex system).
• They avoid the need for an ex ante top-down plan, log-frame, budget or activities prescribed by donors.  Because payment is linked only to results when they are achieved, developing countries are free to experiment, learn and adapt.
• There is no attempt to follow money through the system to show which particular inputs and activities have been financed; it is important for governments to learn about whether certain activities are working, but it is futile for donors to speculate about the extent to which those changes would happen without them.
• They automatically build in a mechanism for selection by shifting funding to successful approaches and bringing failed approaches safely to a close (something which development cooperation which has traditionally found it difficult to do).

In a recent talk at USAID, Nancy Birdsall issued the following rallying cry: “It’s time to stop worrying about getting what we’re paying for, and start paying for what we get”.  This principle also underpins another initiative with which CGD is associated, TrAiD+, which calls for the creation of a “market of global results” in which investors could choose what type of projects to fund, based on results achieved. Given the growing role of business and philanthropy in development, this approach may well prove to be attractive to many funders.

These are examples of how a focus on results could help, rather than hinder, the process of adaptation and experimentation in development.  That does not mean that these are the only or even the best approaches (though CGD’s Arvind Subramanian teases his colleagues for offering cash on delivery as a solution to every problem).

Conclusion

The growing movement towards experimentation and iteration is driven by a combination of theory and experience.  Though these argument have rarely been explicitly framed as a response to complexity, as a whole they are entirely consistent with the view that development is an emergent property of a complex system.  We in the development community have much to learn from other fields in which thinking about complexity is further advanced.

Many development interventions operate in the space between certainty and chaos: the complexity zone which in which we believe that adaptive approaches are not only effective but essential.  This is often presented as a decisive argument against results-based approaches to development.  We argue that, on the contrary, a focus on results is an indispensable feature of successful adaptive management.  The challenge is to do this in a way which avoids simplistic reductionism and promotes an approach which focuses on outcomes rather than process, monitors progress, and which scales up success.

We are conscious that this falls well short of a detailed blueprint for how this might work in practice.  As they say in the world of tech: that is a feature not a bug. As Alnoor Ebrahim of Harvard University, one of the leading authorities on development accountability, puts it: “there are no panaceas to results measurement in complex social contexts.” A nuanced approach to results must be based on a thorough assessment of the problems, interventions and contexts. Our point is that there is no contradiction between an iterative, experimental approach and a central place for results in decision-making:  on the contrary, a rigorous and energetic focus on results is at the heart of effective adaptation.

Consistent with our view that success is the product of adaptation and evolution – of ideas as well as institutions and networks – we look forward to comments, improvements and corrections to these ideas so that we can get past simplistic extremes on either side and build a shared understanding of how to make this work.

This is the last in a series of three blog posts based on Owen Barder’s presentation on complexity and development. The first blog post asked ‘What is Development?’. The second blog post looked at the UK government’s ‘golden thread’ approach to development through the lens of complexity.

Ben Ramalingam’s book, Aid on the Edge of Chaos, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2013.