Open The Echo Chamber

I just witnessed a fascinating twitter exchange that beautifully summarizes the divide I am trying to bridge in my work and career.  Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva, the head of research at Oxfam GB, after seeing a post on GDP tweeted by Tim Harford (note: not written by Harford), tweeted the following:

To which Harford tweeted back:

This odd standoff between two intelligent, interesting thinkers is easily explained.  Bluntly, Harford’s point is academic, and from that perspective mostly true.  Contemporary academic thinking on development has more or less moved beyond this question.  However, to say that it “never has been” an important question ignores the history of development, where there is little question that in the 50s and 60s there was significant conflation of GDP and well-being.

But at the same time, Harford’s response is deeply naive, at least in the context of development policy and implementation.  The academic literature has little to do with the policy and practice of development (sadly).  After two years working for a donor, I can assure Tim and anyone else reading this that Ricardo’s point remains deeply relevant. There are plenty of people who are implicitly or explicitly basing policy decisions and program designs on precisely the assumption that GDP growth improves well-being. To dismiss this point is to miss the entire point of why we spend our time thinking about these issues – we can have all the arguments we want amongst ourselves, and turn up our noses at arguments that are clearly passé in our world…but if we ignore the reality of these arguments in the policy and practice world, our thinking and arguing will be of little consequence.

I suppose it is worth noting, in full disclosure, that I found the post Harford tweeted to be a remarkably facile justification for continuing to focus on GDP growth. But it is Saturday morning, and I would rather play with my kids than beat that horse…

Man, has there ever been a less enticing blog post title?  But it pays to be direct – so there it is.  I have funding for a Ph.D. student, starting in January, to help me on my USAID-funded work on climate services for development.  So, without further ado, the ad:

Graduate Student Opportunity for January 2013

University of South Carolina, Department of Geography

Ed Carr is seeking a Ph.D. student to support ongoing work on climate services for development in sub-Saharan Africa and develop an independent research program in this broad area of inquiry.  The funding for this position is attached to USAID’s Climate Change Resilient Development (CCRD) program, and the candidate will have specific responsibilities supporting the the development of field methods and the analysis of preliminary data, as well as conducting extensive fieldwork in one or more Malian communities in May-July 2013 as part of the project “An Assessment of Mali Meteorological Service’s Agrometeorological Program.”

Qualifications:

• Candidates will have to be admitted to the geography graduate program at the University of South Carolina
• Candidates should be from a country in which USAID operates. Preference will be given to candidates from West Africa, then other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, as this is the current target region for the project.
• Candidates should have experience in one or more of the following: climate change adaptation, rural/community development, rural agriculture, climate science
  • The bulk of initial project work will focus on community-level information needs, and therefore preference will be given to those candidates with experience conducting qualitative research in rural settings.
• Candidates should hold a Masters degree in Geography, Anthropology, Planning or another closely related field
• Excellent written and spoken English.  French language ability is preferred.

The duration of funding is January-July 2013, with likely continuation through July 2014.  The candidate will receive tuition, a living stipend, and salary/research support for work to be conducted in May-July 2013.  Candidates who meet departmental expectations of progress and excellence will be eligible for additional semesters of support to complete their degrees.

Please note the very short lead time for this opportunity – viable candidates will likely have to have a visa in hand if they are to start in January 2013.  Candidates who cannot make this deadline, or who are not selected in this round, should stay tuned – I am hoping to open up a few more slots in the fall.

Prospective candidates are encouraged to contact Ed Carr at carr@sc.edu.  Applications are due on 1 November, 2012 via the instructions on the departmental web page: http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/geog/academics/admissions.html

There has mixed response to my posts on disaster awareness among college students (well, the Horn of Africa drought among my current students) – see posts here and here.  Some see something hopeful and interesting in the idea that the students want more complex explanations for the problems they see.  Others are significantly more negative, suggesting that people such as my students are just symptomatic of a larger societal, if not species-level, lack of empathy for distant others.  I fall on the optimistic side of things, perhaps because I am a geographer.  Let me explain…

Geography, as a discipline, spends a hell of a lot of time thinking about how places are created and maintained.  Places are not locations (folks get this mixed up all the time) – places are our experiences of particular locations – at least this is how I choose to think about it.  And when you think of it that way, it becomes impossible to see life in a particular place as independent from events in other places.  The experience of living in Columbia, South Carolina is shaped by the weather, the cost of living, the infrastructure, the schools (I am a parent), etc.  But each of these is in turn shaped by other factors that transcend Columbia.  The cost of living and state of the infrastructure are intimately tied to the history of the state of South Carolina within the United States (where the South has historically been the underdeveloped agrarian other of the industrialized Northeast), but are also tied to the global economy. South Carolina is now the last stopping point for large-scale manufacturing before it heads out of the US to find the most favorable conditions of production possible.  The overseas shift of the textile industry wrought devastation on the state’s economy…and relatively few in the state seem able to come to grips with the fact they were ground up in the jaws of a new global economy that has already spit them out.  Even the weather is being reshaped by global factors that drive climate change, as a new regime of reduced rainfall seems to be settling in.  At what point do you stop calling a prolonged rainfall deficit a drought and start calling it the new normal?  Turns out about three decades. We are about 20 years into a significant decline in precipitation, so we are getting there.  Thus, the policy decisions (regarding industrial policy and emissions policy) of actors in China and India drive shifts in the economy and environment of the State of South Carolina.  We are thoroughly tied up in larger global forces here.  To understand South Carolina today, we have to understand the larger world today – there is simply no way around this.

As soon as this lesson settles in (and it can take a while), it becomes obvious that these forces flow both ways – that is, as Columbia, SC is constituted by global forces, so too what we do here in Columbia contributes to global forces that play out in other places.  Thus, when we vote for federal lawmakers who keep absurd ethanol subsidies in place no matter what the price/maize production conditions, we create a driver of food price increases that can radiate around the world.  And while we in Columbia feel those increases, when the price of a loaf of bread goes up by a dollar, most of us are inconvenienced and annoyed.  For someone who was already living on less than $2/day, this same price increase blows up their capacity to feed themselves.

All of this then goes back to my earlier point about what the students wanted – complex explanations.  The kids already get it, folks – they already understand an interconnected world (to some extent), and they mistrust oversimplified explanations.  When you feed them simple explanations, you often have to root out the interconnections that connect us to events in other parts of the world – the very things that students would grab on to.  In short, by oversimplifying things, we are making it harder for people to feel connected to the places in which things like famine happen.

The lesson: find yourself a geographer, work with them to tell the damn story in all its complex glory, and get out of the way.  The kids are waiting…

Today, I reentered the classroom for the first time in two years.  That’s not completely accurate, actually – I lectured at the Foreign Service Institute several times while I was in DC, and I have a number of lectures, so I am not totally out of practice.  And after you’ve spent over 1000 hours (!!!) in front of a classroom, it really is like riding a bike…

Despite my classroom experience, I was seriously thrown by a moment in class today – I was discussing the different climates we see in East Africa, and mentioned the Horn of Africa famine in an offhand way…then realized there were too many blank stares.  So I asked the class directly how many of them were aware of the famine.  Not a single hand went up – 70 students, no hands.  Now, maybe someone put up a hand in that half-shrug, uncomfortable sort of way and I missed it.  And perhaps a few people had heard of the famine, but had not heard of it as something going on in the Horn of Africa.  But…at best, that is a few people.  Out of 70.

HOW THE HELL COULD THIS HAPPEN?  Somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in this famine – actually, that is a very low estimate, given that we were looking at 20,000-30,000 under-5 deaths in August 2011, and things stayed bad for quite a while after.  This is probably the single biggest human catastrophe since the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004 (that killed 230,000 people).

I don’t blame the students.  Honestly.  They are wired in – they get all kinds of media all day long.  The simple fact is that the story of this famine was never sold very well, or very widely.  I thought the PSA campaign around the famine was terrible – a bunch of B-list celebrities, at best, in really dull clips (more on that in a later post).  Media coverage was confused.  Most could not separate drought from famine (which led me to write my most-viewed post ever), attributing the causes completely to the weather.  Others played up the Somalia terrorism angle with al-Shabab, a heterogenous and not terribly effective fundamentalist group in Somalia that decided to turn itself into drone bait by aligning with al-Qaeda.  But the whole story was much more than could be compressed into 2 minutes on the nightly news.

That these students didn’t know about the famine is a lost opportunity – an opportunity to illustrate how complex the world is, how climate change compromises development efforts, how relief work is very hard, and very political, and how there are a hell of a lot of really heroic people doing amazing work that probably saved as many lives as were lost, if not many, many more.  These are the people who will become educated voters, who will shape America’s place in the world through who they elect and what sorts of priorities they express – and they have no idea that America has a tool like FEWS-NET, which now can predict when and where famine will break out months in advance in several African countries…this is an astonishing accomplishment, and the envy of the world.  And if the foreign aid cutters in Congress get their way, it could go away.

Maybe many more people paid attention to the famine on other campuses, in other states…but somehow, I have a feeling that my class was not all that much of an anomaly.  Simply put, we in the relief and development community suck at messaging.  Between the frantic and often disingenuous fundraising that imprint television viewers with the belief that the situation is hopeless, the confused media reporting as everyone looks for their unique angle, and the near-total failure of messaging from the donor institutions, it is no wonder my students were clueless – hell, they almost certainly knew about the famine, at least in passing, but the completely disjointed storytelling probably prevented any meaningful understanding of the causes of the events or how to address these causes and their impacts.

I have no idea how to fix this, but somebody has to fix this. It is too important to be lamented and then ignored in favor of “doing the work” of development and relief.  Messaging is the work of development and relief – telling the story of what we do, why it needs to be done, and how we could do less of it in the future if we just addressed some root causes now is fundamental to getting the societal buy-in we need to do our jobs right.  Somebody do this right.  I can only reach 70 people at a time…

OK folks, yesterday I pointed to my friend Keith Bratton’s kickstarter effort to fund a photodocumentary study of the impacts of climate change on life in Ghana’s Central Region.  Please go to the page and check it out – Keith is a great photographer, and will produce really stunning stuff (some of which you can have, for a very low pledge!).  He’s crawling toward what he needs for the project, so all donations are important.

But to up the ante, I want to point out another “reward” option that Keith is now putting up.  The case he wants to document is a fantastic example of the complex challenge that climate change presents to the achievement of development goals – it raises issues of cross-sectoral work, the connections between people and the natural world, and how climate change creates unexpected challenges that, if unaddressed, can compromise the things you are focusing on.  It is, in short, a perfect case from which we can learn about why we must integrate climate sensitivity into development work, and the ways in which such sensitivity makes us “think differently” about development.

To whet your appetite, an example from my own work in Ghana that I talk about in my public speaking on the book: in 2005, I suddenly noticed that there were flocks of toucans flying around the villages in which I had been working from some 8 years.  I had never seen toucans before, and their sudden presence puzzled me.  It took me a while to piece together what was going on – you see, the Gulf of Guinea large marine ecosystem has been collapsing due to an intersection of overfishing (itself driven by a combination of local overfishing to feed a growing population, and the presence of large international trawlers overfishing the territorial waters of Ghana and other countries, largely with impunity) and climate change (which has changed the upwellings of cold water in July-September and December such that there are fewer fish riding those upwellings into the local fisheries).  With less fish to eat, communities in the coastal hinterland had started hunting aggressively, wiping out most terrestrial animals in the process – along with them, rodents…who must have eaten toucan eggs.  Hence the explosion of toucans, who are likely wiping out some other species they like to eat, etc., etc..  The toucan is just a manifestation of a complex ecological change taking place along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea that is poorly understood, but presenting real challenges for people’s food security and incomes.  Achieving development goals in this region, then, requires understanding climate change and its impacts, as well as the complex and seemingly-distant outcomes of these impacts.

That is a remarkably simplified version of what I see happening in Ghana – and it can be told more eloquently, and with more grounding in the human experience of these changes, in the work Keith proposes.  So, beyond seeing him work toward publishing this important story, I have suggested to him that he offer, at the $1000 pledge level, to put together a training module for your organization, using his pictures and findings, to help train your people up on the importance of climate change to development, and on how to think about climate change in the context of development.  Further, because I believe in Keith’s project but lack the wherewithal to back it out of my own pocket, I have offered to work with Keith to build this module should anyone order it.  So, in return for supporting Keith’s work, you get his photos and experiences, as well as my expertise – 14 years in university classrooms, over two years of living in villages in sub-Saharan Africa, lots of refereed publications addressing the climate change/development connection, and work on the donor side examining the climate change/development connection – all wrapped up in a training module that you can plug in to your own training program.

For those of you outside the development implementation world, this might seem like an insanely high price – but everyone in that world knows that this is a steal.  Were I a training consultant, I would be charging an order of magnitude more for such a service, at least.  And my illustrations would not be as nice as what you will get from Keith.  Again, Keith will produce the module, and I will help him do it – but I will not be paid to do this.  I have no financial stake in this project at all.  This is my in-kind backing of what I think is a significant project.  So if your organization needs the training, here is a great opportunity.

I continue my musings on the recent emergence of development studies in the American academy . . .

The rise of development studies presents two interesting opportunities for development in general – a chance to start treating development as a discipline, and the chance to bring interdisciplinary (or, in the parlance of the donor and implementation world, integrated) thinking to the fore in development.

What do I mean by treating development as a discipline?  Various social scientists have demonstrated that development is not just a set of activities, it is a body of thought.  This is what I meant in Delivering Development when I said that

“contemporary development is not the product of a single organizational mission, a single theory, or a particular set of practices. It is the congealed outcome of more than six decades of often-uncoordinated administrative decisions, monitoring reports, economic theories, academic studies, and local responses. These ideas, such as the value of free trade and global markets for the global poor, are repeated so often and in so many venues that they seem to lack a single author or source. For the contemporary development practitioner, they seem to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The same assumption is repeated over and over in development documents until, for example, it is impossible to talk about development in the absence of markets. The results are practices and ideas that seem both universal and eternal.” (p. 7-8)

If people come into development from narrow, technical backgrounds, they are unlikely to know the history of ideas into which they have waded.  They may not know the history of interventions that have been tried in the past.  Understanding the ideas to which one is responding or building on with a particular program or project, and knowing the previous history of similar efforts, seems to me to be critical to achieving any development goals.  For such a knowledge base to become common in the field, development cannot just be an object of study for other academic disciplines – it has to be recognized as its own discipline to which new students must be introduced.

Academia has, for essentially my entire academic life since I entered undergrad, argued for greater interdisciplinary collaboration.  As best I can tell, very little of academia has actually shifted academic incentives such that interdisciplinary work might actually emerge and flourish.  The emergence of development studies presents an opportunity to create such incentives within an academic discipline*.  Any program of development studies that considers not only theory and thought, but also the history of development interventions, will necessarily engage the fact that development is an inherently interdisciplinary undertaking.  While economists have long held sway over the (informal) discipline of development, they are hardly the final answer for most questions that anyone engaged in development might face on a day-to-day basis (market failure around the environment, anyone?).  As the same time, the climate scientist is probably not going to have a lot of answers for how we might foster the emergence of local markets better able to address the predicted/modeled challenges of future climate change.  Technical expertise is critical to achieving development goals, but narrow disciplinary expertise is likely to reproduce stovepipes of information, funding and programming that make it difficult to address the suite of issues arising around most development challenges.  In the rise of development studies, we have the chance to break down these stovepipes under the rubric of a single discipline, thus creating a home for interdisciplinary work within a discipline (yes, that is contradictory), as it were.  At the same time, graduates of such programs would already think “integratively,” perhaps one of the biggest challenges I have seen for implementation.

Much of this opportunity could be realized even in the course of a Masters degree – which is critical to most programs, as they are Masters-terminal.  However, if development studies is to realize these potentials, it will require Ph.D.-level engagement by students and faculty to build literature, journals, and approaches requisite of an academic discipline.  This, however, must take shape in the context of an extended and varied engagement with donors and implementers that can only really be had if we move more people between academia and the donor/implementer world.  Creating the incentives for such movement is an entirely different question . . .

*Note: as a geographer, I have to point out that my discipline displays all of the characteristics of an interdisciplinary endeavor – most departments contain everything from qualitative social scientists to soil or atmospheric scientists to experts in the GISciences, and we are rewarded for collaborating with one another.  Of course, we are collaborating within geography, and publishing in journals accepted by geography, which makes things much easier.  But working across the various academic divides (quant/qual, human/environment, etc.) has already been modeled . . .

Disclaimer: This post is my personal work, and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of any of my current or past employers.

As I prepare to return to life as a full-time academic, I have become acutely aware of the explosion of development studies programs in the United States over the past 4-5 years.  A mere 10 years ago, if you wanted a development studies degree most of your options were in the UK, not the US…and to be honest, most of your best options were outside the US as well.  Otherwise, you picked a discipline like economics, anthropology or geography, and focused on development topics as a part of your disciplinary focus (this was my route).  This is no longer true – today there are development studies masters programs all over the US.  For the first time in the US, we are seeing the mass professionalization of “development studies” on a scale that reminiscent of various colonial administrations more than 100 years ago, something that should probably give everyone pause.

But what is development studies for, aside from generating tuition dollars for cash-strapped universities?  Is development studies a professional degree, an academic discipline, or something in between?  I am not sure I have a clear answer to this question, but I do know that I am concerned by some recent conversations that suggest that development studies programs should be about what the practitioners/implementers/donors want and need.  The logic here is one of professionalization: those seeking development studies degrees ostensibly want jobs, and therefore they should be trained to do the sorts of things that their future employers want them to do.  However, this is a narrow and shortsighted view of what development studies is and should be, even as a professional degree – and to some extent it represents a narrow and boring view of what academia might bring to the table.

Development is a constantly evolving field.  We learn more about how the world works each day, and identify new challenges all the time.  Further, in an ever-more interlinked economic world experiencing unprecedented environmental change, new challenges and opportunities emerge all the time.  If we mean to train people to be effective across their careers, we cannot be focused on what is important/trendy now, but what the persistent challenges are most likely to be over time…and where the emergent challenges are most likely to spring up.

More than that, though, it is a mistake to assume that demand-driven programs will actually train people in a manner that makes them true assets to their future employers.  Certainly there is great expertise and experience on the practitioner side of development, but that is no guarantee that what people think they need from a development studies graduate is, in fact, what they need from an employee. Take, for example, gender and development.  There is no question at all that gender is an absolutely critical part of the social processes that influence/are influenced by development interventions.  Without a solid understanding of such things as gender roles and power relations in the places where we do our work, we are likely to overlook important dynamics that will influence the outcomes of our projects and programs.  So, development studies programs should incorporate gender and development training into their programs.  That said, development studies programs should not simply reproduce in their students the same sorts of analytic approaches and capacities as seen in much current development practice – because much of that work is employing seriously outdated approaches to gender that actually obscure tremendously important social processes and relations.  For example, in my work in Ghana, I have demonstrated that the feminist empiricist approach that dominates most contemporary gender and development work over-homogenizes women, even at the village level, such that we can lose sight of the particular challenges faced by the poorest women (in Ghana, it was about the poorest 40% that were hard to see – article here).  So it is not our job to simply train people to existing standards – it is to train people in the most current thinking.

But even this is not enough – a good development studies program must also teach its newly trained professionals how to bring the latest and best thinking on development subjects to their employers in a manner that is implementable.  This requires a significant effort, and expertise that most academic institutions lack.  Simply put, you need people in the program with experience in both academia and in the world of implementation, and who speak the languages of both worlds.  Contrary to what most development studies academics think, academia has little clue how implementers and donors actually work and think.  This is why so little academic work has an impact in the donor/implementer world.  The best training on the latest thinking is useless if the trained cannot actually make use of what they know once they are employed.

The answer, then, is perhaps not a demand-driven degree, but instead an academic program that engages and cultivates relationships across the implementation world to remain responsive to need and demand, while at the same time helping to shape that demand through research, writing and a flow of well-trained students into development practice.  This will require a very different sort of staffing than most new programs have on hand – it will require identifying not only talented academics, but also those willing to leave the world of implementation to teach (or development studies is going to have to cultivate a lot more people like me with experience in both worlds).  Once the staffing problem is sorted out, there will be a cultural problem – how to build rapport between critical academics and thoroughly modernist practitioners such that the program has intellectual coherence (it doesn’t go very well when faculty contradict one another course to course) and might actually generate new and exciting research and teaching.  It will be interesting to watch the new programs, as they emerge, negotiate these issues . . .

Disclaimer: This post is my personal work, and does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of any of my current or past employers.

Earlier this week, Linda Raftree pointed me to this article, which references another article that calls blogging without tenure “an extreme sport” because of the risks involved.  It is a little hard for me to comment on this specifically, as I did not start blogging until after I had tenure – not because I was afraid of blogging, but because it never occurred to me to blog before then (basically, my agent and my publisher pushed me to blog to promote my book).  I did plenty of “public sphere” writing, such as op-eds in The State (Columbia, SC).  Hell, right before I went up for tenure I published one titled “Governor’s energy report has no clothes.”  I walked into my chair’s office the day it was published, and he shook his head and said “not exactly keeping your head down, are you?”  The op-ed had no impact on my tenure at all.  In most cases, neither will blogging.

I think most academics are far too timid when it comes to public expression.  They fear reprisals against their careers, but rarely seem to be able to articulate where such reprisals might come from or how they might actually create harm.  I am sure there are indeed cases of highly dysfunctional situations where individual’s careers might be harmed by the public expression of their views on a given subject within their expertise, but such situations are volatile for many reasons and blogging is unlikely to ever be the cause of career problems.  In fact, I am convinced that there is far more upside to blogging than there might ever be a downside.  On the upside:

1) As I recently noted, my blog and twitter accounts appear to have done a great deal to spread my work around, and to get that work used (at least by other writers).  Find me a department that will complain about your rapidly rising citation counts.

2) You will develop a whole new community of colleagues, and they will bring new ideas and perspectives that you simply cannot get talking to people in your department, or even in your discipline.  These ideas and perspectives can be challenging, but if you can harness them, they can carry your thinking to new and innovative places.

3) When you develop a public persona, you can build a degree of freedom from problematic situations in your home institution.  You can cultivate a community in which there might be several people interested in giving you a job.  Further, universities love publicly-visible faculty, because they are easy to point to when someone asks what the faculty contribute to the larger society (and yes, this does get asked often).

4) You practice speaking in multiple registers: we all write academic articles, and if you are on the tenure track I hope you’ve figured that process out.  But do you know how to engage the person on the street?  Taxpayers fund a lot of research, and explaining to them why they should be happy they are funding yours is a worthwhile skill.  You can’t do that through a journal article, or in the language of your discipline.

On the downside:

1) Bill Easterly said it best: the blog is a hungry mouth.  It can be hard to keep up with posting, especially when you have a bunch of other stuff going on during the semester.

2) You will be exposed to griefers – the internet is a harsh place.  People will say nasty things about you and your ideas.  If you are fragile, do not try this at home.

Anyway, these are just my quick thoughts on blogging and academia, and I am sure my thoughts are incomplete and others will have something to add.  Indeed, you should check out Marc Bellemare’s recent post on things he has learned as an untenured blogger.  Speaking for myself, though, I have not regretted blogging at all, and aside from sometimes being exhausted after finishing a post, I have yet to see a serious drawback from doing so – but the benefits have been remarkable.

Colleague Ben Neimark at ODU recently asked me a tough question: “What makes for good (helpful to get published, strengthened,  intellectually creativity, etc.) peer review?”  I figured this might be of wider interest to academic colleagues, as well as those who see the entire academic publishing world as somewhat opaque.  So . . .

I think the challenge in producing a good peer review is to balance its dual imperative .  There is the part of peer review that ensures quality and offers constructive criticism (and I have received some in the case of my current livelihoods work – see here, here and here -, and have had some reviewers offer great stuff in the past).  Then there is the disciplinary policing that goes on through peer review, where reviewers don’t examine the quality of the data or argument, but simply argue against it because it challenges convention (which the reviewer likely belongs to or established) – see my comments about reviewer 1 at the bottom of this post.  This second function makes innovation very challenging unless you are very, very hardheaded (which I am).

In a nutshell, though, I think good peer review is that which looks at a paper for its stated aims and evaluates

1. are those stated aims actually new and interesting and
2. did the paper achieve the stated aims.

If standard 1) is not met, a good peer reviewer should be able to suggest where the real contribution of the paper lies – i.e. by suggesting literatures into which the author should place the manuscript.  If standard 2) is not met, the reviewer should explain exactly how and why this happened, and what sorts of remedial steps might solve the problem(s).  That is my minimum take . . .

I’m happy to hear the opinions of others . . .

In our last installment of this series (in which I try to lend some transparency to the publication process), I had requested (in great detail) further clarification before I revised and resubmitted an article to Development and Change. Yesterday, I received a reply.

DECH-11-094 – Livelihoods as Governmentality: Reframing the Logic of Livelihoods for Development

Dear Edward,

Thank you for your detailed response to the referee reports that were sent to you in connection with your paper.

The editors discussed your e-mail during their editorial board meeting last week, and have asked me to contact you. They found your response to the referee comments generally reasonable, and a good foundation for revising your paper. Assuming that you are still interested in doing so, they invite you to go ahead with the revisions as proposed.

So, this is good news.  But then the editor went an extra step – in other words, she made some editorial suggestions:

I would like to mention a couple of additional points. We ask all authors who submit revised manuscripts to include a list of revisions made. The response that you have sent to us indicates that some of the comments will not be addressed in the revised paper: it is important that your list of revisions also includes a rationalization for what you have NOT done, as well as for the changes that you have made. However, you might also consider whether any of those ‘non-responses’ need to be covered in some way in the revised manuscript itself. For instance, in your point 2 d) (ii) you suggest adding a footnote regarding (the lack of) remittances; it might be helpful to consider something similar for the point above it, on religious activity. And more broadly, rather than dismissing the report of Reader 1 because s/he seems to be asking for a totally different paper, you might consider whether you could reformulate any elements of your paper to ensure that similar criticisms could not be levelled against it by other readers, in the event of it being published. Finally, with regard to the point about precipitation: there is clearly a difference of opinion here, although the referee mentions an IPCC report (as well as other statistics), and you tell us that you are on the IPCC and have access to rain gauge data. Since the issue at stake seems to revolve around widely available quantitative data, presumably it can be resolved through the use of recognized sources and citations?

There is nothing wrong with this at all – it is a clear signal from the editor of the preferred tack to take while editing this piece.  Contrast this with the initial editorial statement I received. Which would you rather operate from?

The editor also acknowledged my concerns regarding one of the reviewers:

For the record I would like to stress that correspondence about the revision process does not imply any kind of commitment to a revised version of the paper. As stated in Friedl’s original e-mail, revised manuscripts are subject to further review and refereeing. In practice, the editors are often selective when it comes to sending revised papers back to referees, but they reserve the right to approach any of the original referees, and/or one or more new referees, as they see fit.

That is as close as an editor is going to come to saying “yeah, we’re not going back to reviewer 1.”

Had I not pushed back and laid out my concerns, I would be operating with the initial very vague guidance.  Now I have a very clear, achievable path to getting this done.  There is no guarantee it will be accepted, of course, but now my odds are greatly improved.

In the interest of transparency, this was my response:

Thank you for getting back to me, and doing so in such a detailed manner.  I greatly appreciate your editorial involvement in the revision process.  I will, of course, submit a cover letter that details all the revisions made in detail, and explain what issues the revisions were intended to address – and I will, of course, explain why I have not chosen to address certain comments.  I take your point with regard to reviewer 1 – in fact, if I look back at my notes on his/her review, I do see one or two things that I could address from that review, and I will try to think about how I might phrase things in the introduction to address the sort of reading I recieved from this reviewer.  I have no problem with footnoting the religion issue, and I will, of course, document my claims about the climate and the rain gauges.  I believe the reviewer was looking at the data for the Sahel, which is rather different than in coastal areas.

[Note: There is no harm in conceding a point to an editor, especially when that point is valid! It also signals to the editor that you are taking their points seriously.]

I fully expected my resubmission to be reviewed, which of course carries with it the risk of rejection or further revisions – though hopefully I will revise the paper in a manner that avoids this outcome.  I of course recognize your editorial right to select whatever reviewers you see fit to assess this revision – I merely wanted to voice my concerns with reviewer 1 for the record.  I appreciate that you and your colleagues do try to be selective about who reviews revisions, and having raised my concerns I am more than happy to proceed through this process with the reviewers you see fit.

[Note: read the last two sentences as me more or less saying "I'm glad you agree that reviewer 1 sucked."]

Again, my thanks for taking the time to send along detailed comments.  I will get to work on the revision shortly, and hopefully turn it back to you before the end of the month.

Upward and onward, y’all.