The Center for Global Development becomes the latest to figure out that the Millennium Villages are not producing meaningful information about their accomplishments . . . because they are not working. I’m not a huge fan of finding new metrics to test this argument – the simple fact is this: when a project stops releasing its data, you can pretty much be assured the data is not telling the story they want. But then, this was all completely predictable.
Folks, Jeff Sachs won’t learn anything until you stop paying attention to him and he is forced to consider why nobody is listening anymore. Do it for him, if not for the global poor.
Category: development
An end and a beginning for sustainable development
The WWF has just released its 2010 Living Planet Report (download a copy here). The big headline, being run by all the news organizations, is that we “need to find another Earth”. The headline is attention-grabbing, but misses the real issue here. In several posts on this blog I’ve referenced the fact that we need about three Earths worth of resources to allow everyone to live at the standard of consumption of the average person in the US. Implicit in this measurement has been the fact that we here in the US (and in Europe, Australia, Japan, parts of China, parts of India, etc.) can go on consuming as we do just so long as the other 4-odd billion people don’t consume much at all. This is the part of sustainable development nobody likes to talk about – there are two ways to achieve it: either cutbacks on the consumption of those who consume the most until consumption at a fairly high level is available for all (how most people tend to think of it) or just keep a hell of a lot of people really, really poor so that a small minority can just go on consuming (de facto, this is the choice that we’ve made up to this point – that’s right, if you are reading this blog, you live the way you do because 4 billion people cannot).
Well, this report now throws a bit of a wrench into the ugly, unacknowledged path we have chosen – turns out that our current levels of consumption will not be sustainable past the next 20 years no matter how many people we impoverish. Our global population and consumption figures are simply too high. That’s right, by 2020 we’d better have figured out how to get twice as much resource out of this planet as we do now. I don’t see that happening.
I don’t think this means the revolution is coming anytime soon – I think the steadily rising inequality we see here in the US will eventually be mirrored by similar patterns across the advanced economies, as a smaller and smaller group of people cling to their privileges. Further, the whole two Earths in 20 years argument is a bit overstated, as they work in carbon sinks and other regulating services from ecosystems that are not completely understood and therefore sometimes more resilient than expected, and are often fungible with other resources and biophysical processes. But if the WWF is right (it is too early to say for sure), we are shifting into an era where our choices for how to achieve sustainable development narrow to one: reducing consumption. Then we will have new choices – who reduces, and how?
Saving Chilean miners, saving development
Well, they pulled all 33 miners out of the hole. This is an absolutely staggering feat – first, finding the miners nearly a half mile underground in the first place, and then drilling a precision shaft all the way down to them that was straight enough to accommodate a rescue capsule – which then worked flawlessly 33 times. It never got old watching the miners come out of the ground. And certainly the Chileans have a lot to be proud of these days.
AP Photo/Jose Manuel de la Maza, Chilean presidential press office
But this whole experience has caused me to think again about development and our persistent inability to get things done in a consistent manner for the world’s poorest people. This rescue was, in many ways, everything that modern development is not. The Chileans never asked about the cost – in fact, nobody knows what this cost, besides a hell of a lot. The government didn’t parse options and try to pick the most cost-effective rescue – they ran three plans at once, to see which would work best. It was expensive, but saved time and probably saved some lives. In short, the Chilean government didn’t even try to assess the value of a human life here – by any economic measure, they’ve probably spent a lot more saving these men than the miners will ever earn or spend in the Chilean economy, so the rescue was an economic loser all along – the government decided that saving these men was necessary at any cost, that the value of their lives was not calculable.
When I see that attitude, with this amazing result, I am appalled by the piles of monitoring and evaluation red tape that development organizations must wade through to justify their activities – was that the lowest bid? The most cost-effective intervention? All of that accounting misses the point – there is no such thing as a good intervention that leaves people behind in the name of efficiency or cost-effectiveness. Human lives cannot, and should not, be valued that way.
Second, this rescue was innovative and risk-taking. They ran three plans at once. Nobody had ever done any of them at this sort of depth. There were huge risks of failure. And they plowed forward anyway – two of them did not work out, but the third (actually, plan B) saved 33 lives. There are so many of us in development who carry around the desire to try innovative things, to risk failure, learn and try again . . . but the culture of development with its budgeting and monitoring chokes off these sorts of efforts for interventions that produce easily measured results. When we take risks and fail, the accountants take the money away. So we go for easy, safe results, even when those results have little meaning for the people at the receiving end of the intervention. What does it mean to say that this year we trained 25 judges in country X? Have we really improved the judicial system, or the standard of living for those subject to it? That number does nothing to help us understand if what we are doing matters at all . . . but we keep working on this sort of project because it is a measurable outcome that is of relatively low risk.
Contrary to what Jeffrey Sachs (see my impolitic rant here) keeps preaching, we DO NOT know what works in development. If we did, there would be a hell of a lot less suffering in the world today. We do know, however, what produces measurable results that look good, and we keep pounding away at that sort of work because we can rejustify our budgets each year. Development is pathetically risk-averse, from the top down, and those that would take risks cannot find the funding or support to do so.
Chile just pulled 33 men out of a hole in the ground a half-mile deep. They did it with help from mining and drilling experts from more than a dozen countries and with advice from NASA specialists on living in isolated conditions (if there were any doubt of the value of a human spaceflight program, here is yet another spinoff value that we have gained. NASA’s unique expertise in this area surely contributed to the safe recovery of many of these men). This was an international partnership to try to do the impossible, making it up as they went along. And they did it.
Surely we can reimagine development in the same way, and with the same spirit. But with much more urgency. There are a lot more than 33 people down this hole.
We're not all that powerful, really . . . and Jeff Sachs, please shut up. Please.
I somehow missed this NY Times article on our impending failure to reach the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Hey, it was my first week at work. In any case, a few thoughts on a topic that should be getting more discussion.
As I’ve told my classes time and again, the MDGs are the sort of thing that everyone can embrace. The NYTimes gets it right:
For all the bitter debates pitting nations against one another, there is conspicuously little disagreement over the United Nations goal of eliminating dire poverty. Virtually none of the countries that signed onto the endeavor in 2000 faults the idea of eradicating hunger, educating children, improving maternal health or combating disease. It would be like opposing mother’s milk.
Ah, but saying you want to eliminate suffering, and actually doing it, are two different things. And at the end of the day, we have two big problems. First, we live in a finite world where some of us consume so much that it creates real challenges for the rest to get to comfort, if not affluence. Put another way, if we want everyone to live at an average American standard, we need to come up with between 2-3 Earths worth of resources (see posts here and here). So, there is no way to achieve the MDGs without making hard choices . . . which leads to my second point: the rich countries do not feel an impetus to make these hard choices. At least for now, poverty/hunger/suffering are things that happen to large numbers of people somewhere else (we conveniently forget our own poverty belts, like Appalachia and the inner cities) for the average policymaker – we’ll just build really high walls to keep all “those people” out. Big kudos to Esther Duflo for pointing this out:
“If we miss the goals, who is going to punish us?” asked Esther Duflo, a development expert at M.I.T. “Nobody is going to come from Mars and say, ‘You didn’t reach the goals, so we will invade’ — there is no onus.”
But while this open assertion of the problem was necessary, I think Duflo is wrong about the fact nobody is going to punish us . . . well, perhaps not literally wrong. However, you can only limit the opportunities of the global poor for so long before we start seeing things like ecological collapse in agricultural systems, or the destruction of the rainforests, as the poor are forced into choices they would rather not make. No wall is high enough to guard against a changing climate or a disrupted global economy. We’re playing Russian Roulette, only adding shells to the chamber each time we miss easy goals like the MDGs, or fail to act on the changing climate. No, the aliens may not come to get us . . . there’s no need. They can just wait until we get ourselves.
Oh, and the Times felt the need to quote Jeff Sachs. Again. And he was wrong. Again. Jeff Sachs, for God’s sake shut your piehole. Really. You are a supremely arrogant man who has wasted his considerable intelligence by not listening to anyone, not reading any economic or development history, and not really learning any of the economic geography you profess to be furthering. Your brilliant idea for development, the Millennium Village Project, is a failure – I called that one four years ago – and yet you will not shut up. Will reality ever intrude for you? For the press? You are the D-list reality star of development . . . every time we try to look away, you perform the intellectual equivalent of taking off your top and running around, only we’ve seen this show before and nobody cares or wants to see it again. Put on your shirt and go read something by someone other than yourself, then come talk to us.
Shuffling the deck chairs?
I recently had an e-mail exchange with Rick Piltz over at Climate Science Watch (I link to them regularly, and if you are not familiar with the site, you should check it out – it is an activist site that does very good work) about the whole Cucinelli circus. At the end of that exchange, Rick mentioned that with the upcoming IPCC plenary the question of Patchauri’s leadership was once again on the table. This got me thinking . . . and I shorthanded an answer to him that I think I can expand on here.
For those not neck-deep in the world of climate change, Rajendra Pachauri is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is the authoritative scientific body working on the issue of climate change – it is empowered to review the existing literature and evidence (it does not do its own research) and present what amounts to a summary of our best understanding of what is happening to the global climate and why it is happening. (full disclosure: I have been appointed to the IPCC for this round as a review editor – basically, I will manage the peer-review process for one of the chapters).
The IPCC has come under fire quite a bit – in my opinion, mostly because the scientific story of climate change is getting clearer and clearer, and it is not a happy story. However, there have also been screwups – for example, some of you may have heard how a completely unrealistic assessment of glacier melt in the Himalayas somehow got through review into the last IPCC report (this melt is important, as it tells us how much flooding to expect downstream (i.e. northern India and Bangladesh, among other areas) in the near term, and how much the river flows of the region will decrease once the glaciers have largely melted (potentially creating significant food crises in the same areas). I wasn’t completely freaked out by this error – it is large document that is hard to manage, but the review process is very comprehensive. It’s just not realistic to expect a review, compiled by hundreds of scientists and reviewed by hundreds more as well as representatives from the participating governments (including the US), to come together flawlessly in a reasonable timeframe. However, when this popped up, the handling of it was botched – it was more or less the classic error: instead of identifying, acknowledging and fixing the error, at first the IPCC was seen to be stonewalling and trying to defend an undefendable statement. At one point, Pachauri issued a remarkably tone-deaf statement in which he effectively called India’s Environment Minister “arrogant” and dismissed the Indian Government’s report which seemed to contract the IPCC findings. Even if the IPCC report had been correct in its claims, this could have been handled better. However, the IPCC claims were wrong, and the Indian report was closer to the truth . . . which makes this a disaster. The whole event badly damaged the legitimacy of the IPCC in some people’s eyes, and was fodder for those who would deny the role of human beings in climate change. It was a PR disaster, really – the overall science of the report is, in my opinion (and it is an informed opinion) quite solid. If nothing else, note that as the models of climate get more sophisticated, their results are mapping ever closer to observed reality . . . and the models are predicated on widely accepted understandings of the causes of climate change brought forth through exercises like the IPCC assessments. Still, it was bad.
Add this to the fiasco from this summer (in which I’m afraid I was a visible participant), where the IPCC secretariat, in Pachauri’s name, issued guidance to members of the IPCC on how to interact with the press. The letter was astonishingly poorly worded to sound like those of us on the IPCC were not to speak to the press at all, when what was meant was that we were not to represent the entire IPCC report by ourselves to the press (in other words, we can speak to the press and say “in my opinion . . .” and be fine, but we cannot say “The IPCC says/believes/thinks . . .” because we do not speak for everyone on the IPCC). The meaning of the message was completely innocuous, but the initial wording was very unclear, and set off something of a firestorm.
So, does tone-deafness qualify as a reason to throw the chairman under the bus? Well, if you think that the chairman’s job is to be a media spokesperson, maybe it is. But if the chair is to run the larger IPCC process, I don’t think replacing Pachauri changes anything – it’s just finding a scapegoat to make it look like the panel has been reformed or something – which I strongly object to, as I don’t think the IPCC needs reform. The process is sound, the author selection is sound, the data is sound (yes, I know some people have issues with the data, but the vast majority of the scientific community does not – so I am going with them until such time as I see new evidence – though I remain open to new evidence, as our understanding of the climate as a complex system is incomplete, at best). So replacing Pachauri might actually be read as an admission of guilt or problems with previous IPCC reports that I do not think exist – there is no systematic rot here.
Besides, this round of the IPCC has already started – the authors are selected, and the first plenary will meet soon. So changing the chair now will do nothing but create administrative confusion. And the importance of replacing Pachauri rests on the assumption that the chair has a lot of power – and the post does not, in the grand scheme of things. In the end, the IPCC is an intergovernmental process, which means that the diplomatic process in large, key countries like the US greatly constrain and shape what the IPCC can do – probably more than the chair can. You’ll notice an absence of calls for replacement from the diplomatic community, which tells you what they think. More to the point, Pachauri still has his job – if any major country had an issue, he would be out. For an illustration, take a look at what the Bush administration did to Bob Watson, the previous chair of the IPCC. The Administration withdrew support for him (and there is documentary evidence to suggest that they did so because ExxonMobil really wanted him gone) and that was that.
So, in the end I vote to keep Pachauri in place. I think he is sincere in his efforts to get outreach right, both in terms of his own statements and in terms of the dissemination of the IPCC reports. He knows the process. And the governments are, for now, backing him, so all of the demands for removal are going nowhere right now. That said, I fear he may be one more public gaffe away from someone in the diplomatic world getting fed up and demanding a replacement . . . and that would not be good for the IPCC process during this assessment report.
Required reading . . .
I’ve worked in the field of development studies for more than a decade now, mostly from the academic side. In academia, we are very good at looking at the nuances of language and practice to try and detect why people do the things that they do. As a result, in development studies we spend a lot of time thinking about discourses of development – the ways that we think about, speak about and act in the world – and how those shape the ways in which we “do development”. Mostly, academics do this to explain why it is that development agencies and practitioners keep doing the same things over and over, hoping for a different result (which, you might remember, is how Einstein defined insanity). There are some wonderful studies based in this approach that everyone should be reading, including Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine, Scott’s Seeing Like A State, and Mitchell’s Rule of Experts (links in the sidebar to the right). All help us to better understand why development doesn’t seem to work as well as we hope. I suppose my forthcoming book (link also to the right) falls into this category as well, though I do not wade explicitly into social theory there (if you know the theory, you will see it in there – if you don’t, no worries, the argument is still perfectly intelligible).
What we academic types are not so good at is understanding the reality of life and work in a development organization. Many of us have never worked in one, or did so a long time ago as a relatively low-ranking person. However, when you rise in rank in an agency, you start to see the various organizational and political impediments to good work . . . and these impediments are at least as important for explaining development’s many failures as the (often-flawed) discursive framings of the world these agencies employ to understand the world.
With that in mind, I now strongly recommend you read The Clash of the Counter-bureaucracy and Development by former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios. Now, I don’t agree with a lot of the things that Natsios says about development in general – indeed, I think some of his logic with regard to economic growth as the core of development is very flawed – but I cannot argue at all with his gloves-off reading of how accountability measures, like monitoring and evaluation, are slowly choking USAID to death. And it is gloves off – the man names names. I was not AID under his leadership, but my colleagues all agree that he was a great administrator to work for, even if they did not agree with him all the time. The man knows development . . . which is more than I can say about some previous administrators here.
By the way, even if you don’t work in development, you should read this – it is a wider lesson about how the best intentions related to accountability can go all wrong. Those of you working for larger organizations will likely recognize parts of this storyline from where you sit. And it is a pretty entertaining read, if for no other reason then to watch Natsios just lay it out there on a few people. Must be nice to be retired . . .
Hang on, here we go!
Via Resilience Science:
International wheat prices are up 60-80% since July. And according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), this price increase is not a standard market function – despite some crop failures, “Global cereal supply and demand still appears sufficiently in balance” to have much more stable prices. So what, pray tell, is driving the increase? Well, the FAO blames “national policy responses and speculative behaviour.”
Garry at Resilience Science does a great job of covering the obvious rebuttal: “Oh, the FAO is another organization out to demonize markets – this argument isn’t based on evidence.” Um, not so fast . . . in a discussion paper for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) – and by the way, the US is a major funder for IFPRI – Bryce Cooke and Miguel Robles appear to have demonstrated quantitatively that various proxies for speculation and activity on futures markets best explain the dramatic price rises for food in 2008. To quote:
“Overall, we conclude from our time series analysis that when taking the four commodities analyzed here there is evidence that financial activity in futures markets and/or speculation in these markets can help explain the behavior of these prices in recent years. Other explanations are only partially supported for the particular case of one agricultural commodity or not supported at all. We do not claim, however, that these other explanations should be disregarded; all that we can say is that in using the variables considered in this study and the particular time series models herein, we do not find such evidence.”
Well, looks like Frederick Kaufman (see this earlier post) was at least partially right . . . in this case, the futures markets are causing more problems than they are solving. Put another way, these studies demonstrate empirically that the manipulation of these markets is killing people – literally. This is not market failure, people. This is human moral failure. But we wouldn’t want to regulate those markets, now would we?
Sigh.
I'd be worried, but they're pretty much always wrong . . .
Well, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says we are headed into an extended economic slump. AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
Wait, don’t go all Glenn Beck, buying gold and arming yourself. The IMF has a staggering history of getting country-specific analyses completely wrong. From structural adjustment to currency stabilization, the IMF has packed quite a bit of failure into its (just over) sixty years of existence. They are better at the regional to global level, which is where their real purview is anyway.
The IMF was set up in the dying days of World War II to ensure global economic stability, which gave it a mandate at the global and regional levels. However, it really lacks a mandate at the national level (though it can influence the credit ratings of individual countries), and it shows in their often-faulty analysis . . . simply put, they don’t do fieldwork. They have absolutely no idea what is really happening in the countries they analyze and on which they pass judgement. So I tend to ignore their statements about individual countries.
I find it funny that the Telegraph’s article quotes Joseph Stiglitz on the likelihood of an economic “death spiral” in Europe. After all, Stiglitz has referred to the IMF as a bunch of third-rate economists from first-rate economics departments . . . in other words, the ones who couldn’t get jobs in finance. And look what the “good ones” got us into . . .
Which leads to another thought – how bad do the economists have to screw things up before people finally start doubting them as fonts of truth?
Well, it all depends on what you mean by "have" a government
So, according to NPR Iraq has now set the record for the longest time after a parliamentary election without a government. For those unfamiliar, Iraq operates under a democratic system that awards seats in parliament by percentage of the vote, and they’ve got several political parties. The end result? Nobody has a majority, and at this point nobody seems to be able to cobble together a coalition of enough parties to get a majority and form a government. Man, you really have to dislike the other guy when you more or less give up power rather than partner with them.
But this is not the sweeping case that the title of the article, “Iraq Breaks World Record for Length of Time Without a Government,” suggests. By any reasonable standard, the contemporary record has to go to Somalia, which has been operating without anything resembling a real national government since . . . 1991. Yep, I graduated from high school right about the same time Somalia lost its government. Current college freshmen and sophomores have never lived in a world where Somalia had a national government. So why no mention of Somalia? I mean, even if you count the transitional government (put in place in 2004), they went 13 years without a government. Well, they are disqualified because they are not a parliamentary democracy (turns out Iraq’s record is pretty narrow, after all). It’s too bad Somalia is out of this competition, though , because it is an amazing case of state failure in the modern world. The transitional government appears to control, at best, a few city blocks in Mogadishu. Seriously – that’s not a hyperbolic statement. They literally control a few blocks. Sometimes. Er, that does not count as a national government, people.
Somalia is lines on a map and a bustling informal economy that seems to float a stable national currency – despite lacking a central bank or, as I mentioned above, A GOVERNMENT. (Economists hate that. A lot.) That’s about it. Somalia is the hole in the map, the one place in the world where there is really no effective control of the territory of the country by anything resembling a state. Sure, most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and many in Asia, contain territory over which they have very little, if any, control – but those tend to be little spaces within countries. Somalia is basically a giant sovereignty hole, with a tiny pocket of control.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this these days, as I think the connection between the state and local communities is probably the central governance question for development agencies in places like sub-Saharan Africa. Simply put, in much of SSA, the only legitimate governance (that is, governance that people feel bought into, and believe in) is pretty local, and vested in land tenure (those with control over access to land tend to be in charge, since so many people need land to farm and make a living). Development agencies, on the other hand, tend to work with national governments and generally avoid dealing with “traditional” or “informal” modes of governance, such as those seen at the local level. The result is a disconnect between a lot of development planning and programming and the reality of life on the ground in many countries – we do our planning and programming through a state that is simply unable to represent the needs of its people effectively, and even if it could it has no means of actually carrying out development planning in a meaningful way. Yet some folks persist in worrying about how to write legislation that would lead to effective adaptation planning . . . which completely misses the point. You can write all the laws you want, but if nobody can enforce them and the citizenry don’t see any reason to pay attention to them or any other governmental activity, all you are doing is killing time and trees.
In these situations, we’re looking for governance in the wrong places. Hell, the people in Somalia are quite vulnerable – to drought, violence, disease, etc. But they are not all dead, which means they have organized into structures that provide food, shelter, clothing and other goods in an informal way – there is governance here, but not from the state. I’m not going to valorize much of that governance, as it is rooted almost completely in violence and physical force without respect for the needs of the wider population, but the point is that this governance has found its own form of legitimacy that works, for better or for worse, much better than the pointless national government that the rest of the world seems to want to prop up so they can go on with the charade of working with another national government.
C'mon, Wired . . . really?
Dammit, Wired, I do like you . . . but why must you guys always assume that new stuff (ok, sometimes pretty cool stuff) will fix all our problems? There are situations where a new device or good might be important and useful . . . but to argue that a viable development path might be constructed on improving access to cheap consumer goods worldwide fails to acknowledge the reality of the world today. Even worse, they are not the first to fall into this fallacy – see the Product (RED) trainwreck (or as I like to call it, the buy-your-way-out-of-your-guilt plan), which came at this from the side of providing aid from rich countries.
Why am I so pissy about these sorts of feel-good ideas? Because perhaps the central challenge that faces us in addressing the intersection of development and environment is the problem that there is simply not enough stuff in the world to allow everyone to consume at the same level as Americans – not even close. We’d need between 2 and 3 more Earths. Or, if some Cal Santa Cruz astronomers are correct and they’ve actually found another potentially habitable planet, maybe only 1-2 more Earths. Hey, it’s progress . . . oh wait, its 20 light years away and we have no way of getting there. Right, 2-3 more Earths, then.
Under these circumstances, arguing for more consumption makes absolutely no sense at all – instead, it pushes us ever closer toward a zero-sum world, where the only way to improve one’s own material situation is to take away from someone else’s. I’d argue that this describes the current situation anyway, as we here can only live at our standard because so many do not – but that is a rant for another day.
This is not to say that the global poor should stay that way. Interestingly, Wired‘s examples of products they like are largely development interventions (irrigation, water filters, rural lighting, etc.) by a different name. I have no objection to these interventions – they are rather small in terms of consumption footprint, but have tremendous positive effects. However, the larger message of the piece seems to be that making cheap stuff for these markets is, in the end, good for them. No. This rests on the idea that the only products people want are as practical as irrigation – a very bad assumption. Most of the folks I work with in rural Ghana would love a TV, though I can personally attest that Ghanaian television will not improve their quality of life. Or anyone else’s for that matter. Making cheap TVs that people can afford is not going to help us out of the global hole in which we are located – it will just take up more resources faster.
Making development interventions cheap is good. Further, introducing them through markets, instead of through proscribed programming that is not sensitive to local context, is often good (sometimes markets fail, though). But assuming that we can generalize from these examples to a wider statement about markets and human well-being doesn’t fly. We’re not going to buy and sell our way to a more just, sustainable world.
Now, if someone was to get on revolutionizing the generation of electricity such that it is so cheap as to be effectively free, and we could talk about how to really revolutionize development, as this might address the resource shortage problem. When, for example, recycling becomes super-cheap (a huge percentage of the cost is energy), and we can reuse what we already have instead of constantly digging up more, this equation might change . . .