The other day I posted on the need to reorient how we think about relief work, especially disaster risk reduction (DRR), if we are to connect relief to development, and DRR to adaptation. Well, for those who share my concerns, I have good news. I’m on the US Government review panel for the IPCC’s Special Report on Extreme Weather Events (SREX), which means I just got four second order drafts of chapters for the report. They are brutally long and detailed . . . and they are fantastic. They are an amazing effort to link disaster risk reduction (DRR) and the way that relief folks think about the world to adaptation and the way development people think. I can’t excerpt the report yet (not for circulation, and besides, not yet out of the review process), but I think it is safe to say I can shelve the report I thought I was going to have to co-author with a colleague at work about the DRR-to-adaptation link. We’ll just condense this into a few pages and make it something the agency and missions can wrap their heads around.
Seriously, those in academia will be able to teach from this report – and to be honest, it should be required reading for anyone employed by one of the large agencies that does both development and relief – and that includes all of those who work for “implementing partners.” How often can you say that about an assessment report?
I’ll post when the document goes public – I have no idea what the timeline is, except that we are managing the comments on the second order draft, which typically means we are getting down to the end of the process.
Category: Adaptation
Measuring poverty to address climate change
Otaviano Canuto, the World Bank’s Vice President for Poverty Reduction, had an interesting post on HuffPo yesterday in which he argues that we cannot understand the true cost of climate change until we can better measure poverty – “as long as we are unable to measure the poverty impact of climate change, we run the risk of either overestimating or underestimating the resources that will be needed to face it.” I agree – we do not have a particularly good handle on the economic costs of climate change right now, just loose estimates that I fear are premised on misunderstandings of life in the Global South (I have an extended discussion of this problem in the second half of my book).
However, I find the phrasing of this concern a bit tortured – we need to better understand the impact of climate change on poverty so we can figure out how much it will cost us to solve the problem . . . but which problem? Climate change or poverty? Actually, I think this tortured syntax leads us to a more productive place than a focus on either problem – just as I am pretty sure we can’t address poverty for most living in the Global South unless we do something about climate change (which I think is what Canuto was after), I don’t think you can address climate change without addressing poverty. As I argue in my book:
Along globalization’s shoreline the effects of climate change are felt much more immediately and more directly than in advanced economies. More and more, as both climate change and economic change impact their capacity to raise the food and money they need to get through each day, residents of this shoreline find themselves forced into trade-offs they would rather not make.
For example, most of the farmers in Dominase and Ponkrum agree that deforestation lowers the agricultural productivity of their farms, due to both the loss of local precipitation that accompanies deforestation and the loss of shade that enables the growth of sensitive crops, such as cocoa. At the same time, the sound of chainsaws can still be heard around these villages every once in a while, as a head of lineage allows someone from town to cut down one of the few remaining trees in the area for a one-time payment of a few hundred dollars. These heads of family know that in allowing the cutting of trees they are mortgaging the future fertility of this land, but they see little other choice when crops do not come in as expected or jobs are hard to find.
From a global perspective, this example may not seem that dire. After all, when one tree falls, the impact on the global carbon cycle is minuscule. However, if similar stresses and decisions result in the cutting of thousands of trees each day, the impact can be significant. All along the shoreline, people are forced into this sort of trade-off every day, and in their decision- making the long-term conservation of needed natural resources usually falls by the wayside.
Simply put, we have no means of measuring or even estimating the aggregate effect of many, many small livelihoods choices and the land use impacts of those choices, yet in aggregate these will have impacts on regional and global biophysical processes. When we fail to address poverty, and force the global poor into untenable decisions about resource use and conservation, we create conditions that will give us more climate change. If we don’t do a better job of measuring poverty and the relationship of the livelihoods and land use decision-making of the poor (something I have addressed here), we are going to be caught by surprise by some of the biophysical changes that persistent poverty might trigger.
From Humanitarian Assistance to Development (or not)
I spend a lot of time thinking about the divide between humanitarian assistance (HA) and development – and contrary to what some would tell you, there is a significant divide there. I am, by training, a development person – at least, that is how I tend to think. I’ve no experience in the HA world – I have not done academic work on disasters and emergencies, nor do I have field experience addressing either. Yet I find myself serving a fellowship in the HA Bureau of the world’s largest development agency, trying to find ways to better connect our HA efforts and our development efforts – like everyone else in this world, we have all kinds of problems fitting these two worlds together: delayed handoffs, no handoff at all, programs that have no bearing on one another, making planned handoffs impossible, etc.
Working specifically in the area of climate change, the gulf between HA and development work has become really striking. I’ve been trying to find ways to bridge the HA/development divide via adaptation – thinking about how things like disaster risk reduction and our best practices for relief and recovery might be aligned with adaptation programming to create at least one threat that pulls us coherently from emergency intervention to long-term transformation. What I have come to realize, in this process, is that the issue of climate change highlights the different cultures of HA and development, at least in this organization.
Simply put, it is not clear to me that the HA side of things has asked or answered the most basic of all questions: what problem are we trying to solve by addressing GCC issues? Right now the only thing that seems to resonate with the HA side of the house is the idea that we work on climate change to reduce the need for future humanitarian intervention. While important, that is not a development goal – that is the outcome of achieving other development goals that might lead to more resilient societies with lower sensitivity to and greater adaptive capacity for addressing climate change impacts. To pull HA and development together around the climate change issue requires thinking about HA programming as furthering development goals – and this, quite simply, is not how most HA folks with which I interact see themselves or their work. Instead, these folks seem to view the task of humanitarian intervention and crisis management as a goal unto itself. If you think I am off-base, take the explanation I got from a (ranking) member of an HA office when he was asked about his office’s limited office’s participation in the planning phase of country development strategies: “That’s DA (development assistance) money. We program HA (humanitarian assistance) money.” Really. That was the response. Welcome to my world. Oh, and the world of a hell of a lot of people in this field, given how many implementing partners we fund.
So you can see the challenge here in linking things via adaptation. Let’s look at disaster risk reduction (DRR), programming typically handled by HA organizations and specialists. To link hydrometeorological DRR efforts (think floods and droughts) to adaptation planning requires seeing DRR as more than an end unto itself – DRR would have to fit into larger programs that contribute to development goals which have the overall effect of lowering vulnerability and therefore the need for future humanitarian intervention. This is not how the HA community I interact with approaches DRR. Instead, DRR is programmed in the context of specific HA assessments, and with HA-specific goals that may or may not align in any meaningful way with the much broader, longer-term project that is adaptation.
The gulf between HA and development is, therefore, probably only close-able if those on the HA side of the house are willing to reorient themselves toward larger development goals . . . and at least where I sit, that is not going to happen for both cultural reasons and reasons of mandate. This is a serious problem – we need to close this gap, or we will prolong the programming of HA in places where a decent, coherent program of HA-development planning might get us out of a spiral of disasters. I see HA as a foundation of development – something that could be built on to create robust change – but this will only be true when the HA side of the house decides it wants to be that foundation.
On Math, Climate Change and Food Security
Idiot Tracker has a post on food security that uses food security as a means of focusing the reader on the challenges that climate change are likely to present in the near future. In short, the argument goes that climate change will negatively impact our future agricultural productivity, making it difficult to increase that productivity as our population grows. If we do hit nine billion people by mid-century (barring cataclysm this seems to be the minimum number we will hit), the author calculates that we will need to come up with 14.5 trillion calories per day, and notes that climate change is likely to present significant barriers to meeting this need.
I agree . . . in a general way. We are losing huge amounts of arable land each year to soil degradation, and we are running out of productive places in which to extend new farms that do not create really problematic ecological tradeoffs (like massive deforestation that speeds climate change). Climate change is likely to force the transformation of entire agricultural regimes in otherwise sustainable areas – for example, by changing temperatures and precipitation such that most strains of maize will have difficulty germinating in Southern Africa in a few decades. This is all a very big deal. But this post is also very, very thin on support for its argument.
As the post does not present any hard data, including how the 14.5 trillion calorie per day figure was derived, I cannot be sure if the author did any real math on our current production or the likely loss of caloric production that might occur under any number of likely climate scenarios (a problem unto itself, at global circulation models are much better for temperature than they are for rainfall, and there are few regional circulation models that can correct this problem – see the fascinating recent work of FEWS-NET on modeled versus empirically-measured patterns of precipitation in East Africa). All of these might create significant error bars around likely future caloric production. Further, I cannot tell if the author has considered whether or not crops will migrate as their ecological zones shift – surely farmers that previously could not raise a certain crop will start to take it up as the local environment allows and as other producing areas fall out of favor. We know that some ecosystems will at least start to migrate if corridors for such movement are available – and agricultural systems are just another form of (heavily managed) ecosystem. As cropping areas shift, what will the net caloric impact be? It is not enough to say that we will lose a lot of calories when maize stops germinating in southern Africa. We will need to get a net figure by calculating in all of the new areas in which maize will germinate.
Of course, such math only works at the global scale, and issues of hunger have very little to do with global production – hunger is local, shaped more by the intersection of markets, the environment, politics and society. So noting that maize will germinate in new areas does nothing for the people in southern Africa who will be without maize. However, we have to obtain another net figure: the lost calories from maize versus the new calories from new crops that people can grow, but chose not to before. This may still total a net decrease in calories (indeed, it probably will), but this is not the same as simply subtracting maize from the equation.
Finally, what of plants that are edible, but that we currently choose not to eat? The clearest analogy, to me, is the evolution of seafood here in the US. I like to explain to my students that these new, exotic fish that are showing up at restaurants are the species that no self-respecting chef would touch two decades ago. But when you wipe out the cod, you start getting creative. And don’t get me started about tilapia. It’s the rat of fish. Seriously, it likes murky, stagnant water. It will grow anywhere. There is nothing I find funnier than hearing a server say “we have a very nice tilapia today.” Yeah, I’d love to pay $20 for the swimming pigeon, thanks! That said, people do eat tilapia and all sorts of other hilarious species because they are hungry and willing to pay. So what new species of plant and animal will we be willing to eat a decade from now? Three decades from now? This is hard to predict, but I’ll bet quite a lot that we will find new species to exploit and offset even more of this caloric loss.
Despite all of this, I do think we face significant food challenges in the next three to four decades. These will be felt very unevenly around the world, but they will be felt in significant ways. To figure out what these impacts will look like, and who will experience them, requires that we carefully think through not only the exposure of crops to climate change impacts, but also the sensitivity and adaptive capacity of the agroecological system to those impacts. It is only when we understand how such systems are likely to respond that we can begin to really plan for the challenges ahead.
From the aid/development divide to the climate change/development divide
I’ve been going on quite a bit about how we envision the relationship between aid and development – or perhaps more appropriately, how we do not really envision that transition, but assume that it simply happens – quite a bit lately. But pressing on my mind during my work life is the relationship between climate change and development – how do mitigation and adaptation efforts relate to development? The answer, of course, is that they relate to development in many different ways. For example, mitigation efforts include things like land use, which can impact existing agricultural practices, and constrain (or sometimes enable) the options available to the designers of agricultural development projects. Adaptation efforts emphasize the prevention of negative outcomes, a form of coping, but unless this relationship is explicitly considered they do not necessarily rhyme with development projects that seek to build on existing resources and capacity to improve people’s situations.
(I confess that I am deeply concerned that development is rapidly being subsumed under adaptation in some quarters, which is a real problem as they have two different missions. To refocus development projects on adaptation is to shift from an effort to improve someone’s situation to an effort to help them hang on to what little they might have. But this is a post for a different day.)
There is a danger, in this era of enhanced attention and funding toward climate change, of using climate change funds to continue doing the same development work as we were doing before, only under a new label (i.e. calling agricultural development “agricultural adaptation”, then using climate change funds to support that program even though nothing about it has really changed). It is an annoying habit of people in agencies, who are often cash- and personnel-strapped, to try to use new initiatives to support their existing projects. There is also a danger, in places where climate change has a greater emphasis than development, that development dollars aimed at particular challenges will be repurposed to the end of addressing climate change, thus negatively impacting the original development goal. A year ago, Bill Gates wrote warned against just such an outcome in his 2010 Annual Letter as co-chair of the Gates Foundation. On first read, it is a reasonable argument – and one that I largely agree with. We live in a world of finite donors, and new dollars to address climate change often have to come from some other pot of money funding another project or issue. These are difficult choices, and Gates has every right to argue that his pet interest, global health, should not lose funding in favor of climate change related efforts. However, his argument sets up a needless dichotomy between development/aid (in the form of public health funding) and efforts to address the impacts of climate change:
The final communiqué of the Copenhagen Summit, held last December, talks about mobilizing $10 billion per year in the next three years and $100 billion per year by 2020 for developing countries, which is over three quarters of all foreign aid now given by the richest countries.
I am concerned that some of this money will come from reducing other categories of foreign aid, especially health. If just 1 percent of the $100 billion goal came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases. In the long run, not spending on health is a bad deal for the environment because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment.
Well, sort of. I could make a pretty brutal counterargument – not spending on health, such as HIV/AIDS leads to a lot of deaths in the productive segment of the population pyramid, leaving a lot of fallow land to recover its nonagricultural ecological functions. This sort of land use change is actually visible in places like Swaziland, but very hard to quantify because the studies aren’t there yet – nobody wants to be seen as potentially supporting this sort of nightmarish conservation argument. I certainly don’t – but that is not my point. My point was that Gates’ argument is pretty thin.
In making a political point, Gates is being a bit selective about the relationship between climate change and health. What he is completely ignoring is the fact that mitigation efforts might limit the future range of disease vectors for any number of illnesses, thus saving tremendous numbers of lives. This is especially true for diseases, like malaria, where a vaccine has proven elusive. Further, he ignores the ways in which coherent, participatory adaptation programs might address health issues (by managing everything from nutrition to sanitation) in an effective manner. While I am not arguing that mitigation and adaptation efforts could completely address the impacts caused by the loss of $1 billion in vaccination funding, his argument for 700,000 extra deaths* rests upon the assumption that nothing in the climate change portfolio will address the causes of such deaths through other means. He’s creating an either/or that does not exist.
Again, Gates is making a political point here – which is his right. But that political point sets up a false dichotomy between aid/development and efforts to address climate change that even Bjorn Lomborg has abandoned at this point. We can argue in the interest of our agencies and organizations all we want, but the problems we are trying to address are deeply interlinked, and in the end creating these false dichotomies, and claiming that one issue is THE issue that must be addressed, shortchanges the very constituencies we claim to be working with and working for.
*I must admit I loathe this sort of quantification – it is always based on horribly fuzzy math that, at best, is grounded in loose correlations between an action and a health outcome. I raise this issue and take it apart at length in my book . . .
On Aid and Development
An interesting post at Blood and Milk yesterday led a commenter to note that we shouldn’t use the terms “international development” and “aid” interchangeably – that the “real big story about development is exactly that it is NOT all about aid, but about domestic elites establishing pro-growth rules.”
For me, this raises two issues – the first is about the relationship between aid and development, and the second about the character of development itself. Alanna Shaikh, who writes the Blood and Milk blog, added a new post today that addressed the first. In this post, Shaikh argues “You can, and do, get development without aid. I’m pretty sure you don’t get it without economic growth.” Well, sort of. I currently work in one of the world’s largest development/aid organizations. I am the climate change coordinator for the Bureau most directly responsible for our aid activities (as opposed to our development activities). This puts me in something of an odd position – I am a development/environment person tasked with thinking and program-building for the long-term in an aid organization that is often reactive in its programming and its mandate. Why, then, did I take this position? Because of the need to better connect aid to development (and vice versa). Right now, aid and development exist in very different worlds – even in the same building, there is little communication or coordination between these two missions. This galls people on both sides of the divide, from leadership down the line. The vision of an agency like mine is that aid should transition to development, ideally seamlessly (though at this point we would take any sort of transition). Adaptation to climate change is one area where such transitions can be created out of existing programs – our aid teams work on hydrometeorological disaster risk reduction (DRR), and our development side works on adaptation to climate change. These are very similar areas of work, differentiated largely by timeframe. One of my jobs over the next few years will be to better connect our hydromet DRR and adaptation programming to build one connection between aid and development – a thread that we might use to close other aid/development gulfs (such as in food aid and agricultural development).
Aid may not be the same thing as development, but it should not be seen completely separately from development – my Bureau sees its constituency as that component of the population that is largely left behind by economic growth programming. Nobody debates that a significant percentage of the population slips through the cracks of economic development programming – our job is to ensure that those who slip through the cracks do not remain there, but have an opportunity to recover and participate in society, politics and the economy. So, when I hear someone argue that there can be development without aid, I strongly disagree – at least at the national scale (communities are a different issue). At the national scale, you cannot have socially or environmentally sustainable development that abandons a significant portion of society to its fate. Aid is critical to development – or it should be, if only we could better coordinate aid and development efforts.
Second, I am deeply concerned by the continued connection of development to economic growth. The linkages between human well-being and economic growth are shaky at best (most correlations can be readily challenged and dismantled) – largely because development, globalization and growth do not really work the way people seem to think they do (my book is an exploration of this point). Further, economic growth cannot be eternal. 3% growth per year for everyone forever is simply beyond the physical capacity of the planet. I’m pretty sure that development is going to have to detach itself from economic growth (ironically, this would mostly entail simply acknowledging the reality of what’s been happening around the world for the last 60 years) if it is ever to accomplish its end goal – the improvement of the human condition in this world.
Finally, a thought on the two metastories of development that Shaikh raises at the end of her post. I agree that development is neither all success or all failure – it plays out differently in different places, and we have better understandings of why in some areas (health, for example) than in others (transportation development, for example). I would argue that this is a symptom of a larger problem – we really don’t understand what is happening in the Global South most of the time, and as a result we are often measuring and analyzing the wrong things when we do project scoping or evaluation work. Our assumptions about how the world works shape the way we frame our questions about the world, and the data we gather to answer those questions. The problem, simply put, is that we are often asking the wrong question. Sure, every once in a while our assumptions align with events on the ground, and a project works. But the rest of the time, our assumptions do not align with reality, and we run into difficulty understanding what is happening in particular places, and why particular projects fail. The end result? A seeming random set of project outcomes, where things work in one place but not another for reasons that seem hard to discern. There are more fundamental metanarratives of development out there than success or failure – they are narratives about how globalization works and how development works that shape our very ability to assess success or failure. And those narratives actually misinform many of our best efforts.
Continuing on a theme . . .
. . . a colleague in Senator Menendez’s office passed along one of their recently-introduced bills “To establish a program under which the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency shall provide grants to eligible State consortia to establish and carry out municipal sustainability certification programs” (S.3970). In effect, the bill directs the EPA to fund the development of state-level sustainability certification programs that include local governments, a state, at least one public university and other organizations, such as NGOs or private sector entities.
So who cares? The point here is that Senator Menendez’s bill recognizes that challenges such as water supply, energy demand and pollution are “regionally distinct”, and therefore addressing these challenges requires engagement with local and state governments (as opposed to a blanket solution at the national or global level) is a productive way forward. In other words, this is a legislative effort to promote the Adapting Mosaic scenario I discussed in a recent posts . . . and a welcome demonstration of senatorial competence.
Now, let’s see if it ever emerges from the Committee on Environment and Public Works, which is likely to be chaired in the new session by (gulp) Senator Inhofe. He of the climate bailout garbage. Yeah, this is going nowhere. Dammit.
Update (7 December)
Ah, crap, Hugh quite rightly points out that the Senate still belongs to the Dems, so at least Inhofe won’t be able to kill this right out of the gate. Man, I am being sucked into the “Republicans own everything” mentality around here . . . when in fact they own one house in Congress.
Is holding out the best move for the Global South?
One of the many barriers to a global climate deal is the standoff between the Global North (aka the wealthy countries) and the Global South (aka everyone else) over emissions cuts. Basically, most of the Global South wants to avoid any caps on their emissions, or to have very limited caps, so they can develop as quickly as possible. The Global North wants emissions caps across the board, rich or poor – ostensibly because most future emissions growth is projected to take place in the Global South. This is a bit disingenuous, for while the majority of emissions growth will come from the Global South, these emissions will still be a tiny fraction of those emitted by the Global North . . . so in many ways, cuts in the Global North are more important to CO2 concentrations than cuts in the Global South. Further, as several countries have pointed out, when countries like the US demand that everyone cut their emissions equally, we more or less ignore our own history of pollution. This was the point of the funds committed to these developing countries in Copenhagen – to recognize that we will need to create new development pathways for these countries if we close off the old ones – so, once again Senators Barasso, Inhofe, Vitter and Voinovich, these funds are not a “climate bailout“.
However, there is a question that the Global South ought to be asking right now – is any global climate deal better than no deal, and a set of bilateral negotiations on climate going forward? A global deal creates a uniform set of rules for everyone – no more room for negotiation or pressure. Bilateral negotiations, on the other hand, can get much more heavy-handed. For example, the United States (or any other OECD country) could, if it chose, make very stringent demands (much stiffer than proposed in the current negotiations) of countries, and compel compliance by threatening some or all of a given country’s foreign aid. This world would expose small, poor countries to pressure that larger developing countries (i.e. India, China, and Brazil) or countries that have natural resources we want/need (hello oil-rich Nigeria) might avoid. This would create an even more inequitable outcome, where some developing countries are able to occupy dirty, lower cost development pathways while others are consigned to high-cost pathways with no guarantees of funding to offset these costs.
So, which is more dangerous – a less than ideal or fair global deal, or the risk of bilateral negotiations with rich countries that can use their foreign aid as a stick to compel compliance? It seems to me the latter is a huge gamble that rests on the assessment of whether or not the rich countries will, indeed, force compliance in a relatively uniform manner via bilateral negotiations. If they do, it seems to me that the Global South is screwed, and will wish that they had signed a global deal. However, the Global North is hardly monolithic – the Scandinavians tend to put far fewer conditions on aid than other countries, the US and Great Britain have disagreed on fundamental philosophical issues like the value of markets and strategic food reserves, etc. So a uniform policy coming out of the Global North seems unlikely. As a result, each country in the Global South has to ask themselves if they will have enough sources of aid to avoid pressure on emissions caps in a world of bilateral negotiations.
You have to admire the rat bastards . . .
Man, do some of the Republicans have a slick noise machine – Bloomberg is reporting on a group of senators who are referring to the funds the United States committed as aid to get developing countries moving toward cleaner, more sustainable development as an international climate bailout. What a soundbite. What complete idiocy. Senators, let’s have a chat.
First, let’s consider the idea this is a bailout – what, exactly, are we bailing out? Developing countries were, by and large, consigned to their positions by the last four to five centuries of global history. Hell, a large portion of these countries had their borders drawn by other people over the last four to five centuries. Have you seen Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta)? Nobody chooses to be landlocked and primary commodity dependent, you know. So, while the bank bailout here in the US generated outrage because we were saving people from their own irresponsible behavior, to label fast start funding as a climate bailout is to blame the victims – basically, to insinuate that developing countries put themselves in that position somehow. Now, I am not denying that there have been irresponsible leaders and corruption in many developing countries that have contributed to the plight of their citizens, but most of these countries have only been under their own governments for fifty years or less – which means they arrived really, really late to the screw-things-up party. Hell, the party had ended and the house had been trashed before they got there – these guys are the governance equivalent of the idiot who shows up drunk on the doorstep, pounding on the door at three AM after everyone has gone home. No, this is not a bailout in the sense of the bank bailout.
Second, what this bunch overlooks is that this is an investment in OUR OWN FUTURE. If we do not 1) get some sort of meaningful improvement in people’s quality of live in the developing world and 2) find some means to do so that does not involve massive carbon emissions, we are looking down the barrel of a global environmental cataclysm in my lifetime. I go over this at length in my book – I would be happy to send a copy along to you and/or your staffs if you were at all interested (you’re not, I know, I know). Plain and simple, there will be nowhere to run to when it all goes bad. Yes, we in the US, Europe and the rest of the OECD have far more resources with which to cope with such challenges, but our way of life will change dramatically – and not for the better. Let me put this another way: Senators, your failure to grasp the basics of climate science, or the fundamental fact that we are all interconnected on a relatively small rock orbiting a fairly insignificant star in a mostly unimportant galaxy, leads you to believe that we can just carve off a big chunk of the (very poor) world and take care of ourselves. We cannot. You are on the wrong side of history here, and the evidence is already mounting.
Of course, what do you all care?
Sen. John Barraso (R-Wyoming): 58 years old
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma): 76 years old
Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana): 49 years old
Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio): 74 years old and retiring at the end of this term
Senator Vitter, you are the only one with a shot of being around long enough to see things go really bad.
Too right . . .
Kentaro Toyama has a great piece in the Boston Review on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in development – really, though, it is a larger commentary on how we think about using technology in development generally. Simply put, Toyama warns against treating ICT as itself a solution for poverty – instead, he argues, it is but one tool, a means to an end:
If I were to summarize everything I learned through research in ICT4D, it would be this: technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute. If you have a foundation of competent, well-intentioned people, then the appropriate technology can amplify their capacity and lead to amazing achievements. But, in circumstances with negative human intent, as in the case of corrupt government bureaucrats, or minimal capacity, as in the case of people who have been denied a basic education, no amount of technology will turn things around.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Alex Dehgan the other day – talking about how efforts to address particular development challenges, whether via technology or other approaches, should be focused on a systematic approach to the problem that will yield different, but locally-appropriate, outcomes in different places, instead of the search for a singular solution that could be applied anywhere and everywhere (history is littered with the wreckage of these efforts – most recently, see the Millennium Village Project). This is what I have been after in my work on livelihoods and adaptation for the past 7 years or so – a way of approaching these issues in a rigorous manner that allows for the serious consideration of local context. How we translate that into programming and policy remains to be seen . . .