OK, two posts for today, because I can’t help myself. Yeah, I am a social scientist. Which means that people either think I run control experiments on various populations (an idea that freaks me out)*, or they think that I have no method to my research at all – I just sort of run around, talk to a few people until I get bored or run out of money, and then come back and write it up.
Of course, both views are crap. Good social science is founded on rigorous fieldwork and data whose validity can be verified. How one collects that data, and verifies that validity, varies – it depends on what you are studying. For whatever reason, though, people have a hard time understanding this. Quick story: a former chair of my department, during a debate about field methods, actually once asked me if it was really possible to teach someone to do interviews and participant observation. My response: “I didn’t pop out of the womb able to do this, you know.” End of discussion, thankfully.
But now I have found someone who has written this up nicely – Wronging Rights (absolutely hilarious, and totally awful, all at the same time – just go read for a bit and then feel bad about yourself for laughing. Everyone does) has a great post on the subject that links to a series of even better posts at Texas in Africa that covers it (see the Wronging Rights post link to connect to the relevant Texas in Africa posts).
Social scientists, get to reading. Journalists, read this and understand why you are not social scientists. Especially you, Thomas Friedman. And the rest of you . . . never, ever ask me if you can teach someone to do social science . . .
*controlled experiment: what, am I supposed to pick two identical villages (no such thing), and then start to work with one village while studiously ignoring the other village no matter what happens to that community (i.e. drought, food insecurity, disease, what have you) because I need to preserve the integrity of my control group? There are other ways to establish the validity of one’s results . . .
Category: development
Thousands of ways to get this done
Well, the Cancun Conference of the Parties (called COP for short) is upon us, where everyone will sit down and accomplish pretty much nothing on a global climate change agreement. There is real concern circulating in the diplomatic world that this meeting could see the fracturing of the push for a global agreement such that it never happens – at least from this framework. This outcome is problematic in all sorts of ways, not least of which in the chaos it will unleash in the development world, where a huge amount of money was slated to be used for adaptation to climate change under what amounted to a glorified memorandum of understanding coming out of Copenhagen. If the whole process bites the dust, it isn’t very clear what happens to that money or the programs and projects under development to use it.
That said, if it all goes totally bad in Cancun it doesn’t mean that we are beyond creating meaningful paths toward a lower-emissions future that might be manageable. Indeed, one might argue that the death of the global framework might be the only way forward. States like California, and cities like New York, are now starting to implement policies and programs to cut their own emissions without a national mandate. They are creating locally-appropriate policies that maximize environmental benefit while minimizing the local “pain” of the new policies. This is all well and good for these cities, but what I find interesting is that there is some evidence – however loose- that this city-by-city, state-by-state approach might actually be more efficient at achieving our climate goals than a global agreement.
I was part of the Scenarios Working Group for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment – my group was tasked with running four future scenarios for ecosystem services (the goods and processes we get from ecosystems) under different future political, economic and social conditions. Once we got our baselines and assumptions for each scenario in place, a team of modelers ran the scenarios for various issues (temperature change, water availability, etc.) and then we attempted to link the model runs to meaningful statements about how ecosystems might fare under each scenario.
This is relevant here because, interestingly, we had a “global orchestration” scenario that, to some extent, looks like what the world was going for with Copenhagen and Cancun. We also had another scenario called “adapting mosaic”, which assumes decentralized control and adaptive management of environmental resources. Neither scenario was a clear winner – each had strengths and weaknesses. An “adapting mosaic” approach is great at managing new and emerging environmental challenges, whether from climate change or other issues. It might also serve as the very legitimate basis of a bottom-up approach to an eventual global accord on climate change. However, this approach risks ignoring global commons like fisheries, which often leads to the loss of that resource through overuse. There is a real risk that inequality will go unaddressed, at least across countries and at the global scale, but at the same time economic growth will not be as robust as under other scenarios. Global orchestration is good at maximizing income. While I dissented from this view*, the group argued that under global orchestration a Kuznets Greening Curve would kick in (as people get wealthier, they pay more attention to the environment – thus, economic growth and consumption can result in better environmental quality), and we would have strong global coordination on everything from trade to environmental issues. However, this approach is much more reactive, and focused on the global scale – thus it is not very good at dealing with local surprises. In my opinion, adapting mosaic looks better, over the long run, than global coordination (especially if you factor in my concerns about the Kuznets Curve assumption).
In short, in the efforts of California and New York we are seeing the emergence of a de facto adapting mosaic as the global orchestration efforts of Cancun and Copenhagen fall by the wayside. This actually might be a good thing.
In uncertainty, there is hope.
*the Kuznets curve rests on a key assumption – that with enough wealth, we can undo the damage we do while building wealth to the point that we start caring about the environment. Kuznets has no answer for extinction (a huge problem at the moment), as that is gone forever. Further, the Chinese are starting to provide an object lesson in how to blow up the Kuznets curve by damaging one’s environment so badly that the costs associated with fixing the problem become overwhelming – and those are the fixable problems. Basically, assuming a Kuznets Greening Curve allowed those framing these scenarios to put an overly-happy face on the global orchestration scenario for political reasons – they wanted to provide support for a global effort on climate change. A more honest reading of the data, in my opinion, would have made adapting mosaic look much better.
There's a really bad former colony joke in here . . .
Hey, the IMF is in Ireland! Super. Should be interesting to see how they treat a non-poor country . . . and what the hell would Irish structural adjustment look like, I wonder? Actually, I shouldn’t wonder . . . since we will likely find out shortly. Let’s all watch the loss of sovereignty. Ugh.
Perhaps we could fix this by simply forcing U2 to bring its business operations back to the country. Ooops, was that out loud?
Big shifts coming . . . or not
Well, this is interesting, to say the least. Someone decided to get cute and leak the draft of the new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review – yeah, the one marked NODIS (No Distribution). State runs a tight ship, so my guess is that someone on the Hill leaked this. Hard to say why, exactly. But it is very interesting reading, both from the perspective of someone in one of the agencies in question, but also from the perspective of development studies in general.
Well, now it is out there, so go here to have a look.
I will refrain from offering my comments – I think that probably steps over a line given my current official position – but have a look and see what you think. I do think that Josh Rogin’s story on this has a very interesting set of comments from Todd Shelton at InterAction. I will note, though, that we heard informal messages from the upper reaches of the Agency that this document is a draft, and by no means finalized . . . though one wonders what impact this leak will have on the editing process.
Page proofs . . .
are killing me. But, the book is here, and I am cleaning it up. I hate page proofs. Deeply. This is the sort of detail work I loathe – combing back through 90,000 words looking for misspellings and erroneous punctuation. It is taking days, because you can only focus that hard for so long. And at the same time, I am cleaning up the index.
Oh, and that is on top of the article that was due back in today – I worked with two of my Ph.D. students, Mary Thompson and Manali Baruah, to produce a paper that examines how REDD+ functions as a form of unacknowledged environmental governance (defining legitimate terms and actors within debates over how to implement terrestrial carbon sequestration projects in forest areas). We’ll see how it does in this round of peer review.
And then there is the talk I am supposed to be giving at UNC – Chapel Hill on Friday. I’ll be discussing how we think about livelihoods in development, how current framings might have carried us as far as they are going to, and what a new framing might look like. Yeah, it is coming together, but not as quickly as I’d hoped.
But, without further ado, the first few hundred words of Delivering Development:
Well, maybe . . .
UNDP has launched its 20th anniversary edition of the Human Development Report. In the report, they argue that development is working better than we realize – and use this to argue that aid is therefore working better than people think. However, there is an important caveat in the report which calls this general claim into question. As the BBC reports “There has been most progress in the areas of health and education, sectors which have received most focus in development assistance.”
This is a huge caveat. These are the sectors that are easiest to measure – at least through traditional indicators. Development programs have been designing programs around clear indicators and pumping money into achieving those indicators for some time – the same indicators used by the human development report. Of course literacy rates are up. Of course life expectancy is up. These are low-hanging fruit. But what does this really mean for the quality of life of people living in the Global South? Are they living better, happier lives? Or are they living longer, in greater misery than ever before? Are any of these gains sustainable, or are they predicated on continual flows of aid? There is no answer here – and it is an answer we need to obtain not through indicators, but by getting out there and talking to those we intend to help with development. Get on your boots, and get out of the SUV/Mission Office!
I do, however, like that this report is trying to make an evidence-based case for the persistence of market failures around public goods. We have seen, time and again, that when governments fail to provide security, access to healthcare, and education for their populations, the markets DO NOT step in to fill the gap. A lot of poor, vulnerable people get left behind. (Given recent trends and this week’s election results, it is entirely likely that South Carolina will empirically demonstrate this can happen even here in the US, at least in the area of education, over the next four years).
Manifestos can be fun . . .
especially when they sound half crazy, but I still largely agree with them: Kick it over manifesto
Mostly it’s an overwrought rant against neoclassical economics (though it could be applied much more widely to the discipline of economics), but I do love this:
You claim to work in a pure science of formula and law, but yours is a social science, with all the fragility and uncertainty that this entails. We accuse you of pretending to be what you are not.
Oh, so true, so true. I’m on the same page with them . . . here . . . and here . . . and here, etc.
Perhaps this manifesto answers the question I asked at the end of this post.
Shouldn't accounting rules apply to everyone?
Hoorah! The World Bank is officially recognizing that environmental impacts are an example of a colossal market failure, and moving aggressively to get the cost of these impacts built into country’s national accounts. To quote World Bank President Robert Zoellick:
“We know that human well-being depends on ecosystems and biodiversity,” said Mr Zoellick.
“We also know they’re degrading at an alarming rate.
“One of the causes is our failure to properly value ecosystems and all they do for us – and the solution therefore lies in taking full account of our ecosystem services when countries make policies.”
Well, super. We’ll see how this goes over when a bunch of countries see the accounts they use for planning head into the toilet – my guess is massive pushback from countries that can (China, India, pretty much the entire Global North), which means the only countries that will be forced to deal with this revaluation are those in the Global South too small to resist World Bank pressure. Enforcing this change in accounting unevenly will be remarkably unfair, if this is how it plays out. Think I’m a bit alarmist? Continue reading the article, right down at the end:
The draft agreement ministers are considering in the main negotiations here calls for “the values of biodiversity” to be integrated into countries’ development and poverty reduction strategies.
But delegates are still arguing over whether to call for integration into national accounts.
Only developing countries have to create poverty reduction strategies and development strategies. So if these values are used in these strategies, but not in national accounts more widely, we are going to be hitting the poorest countries pretty hard while doing nothing ourselves.
However, there is a larger problem here – the valuing of everything via markets. While this is an interesting effort, neither the science nor the economics are very well worked out, so the value of many ecosystem services (the goods and processes we get from ecosystems) is hard to calculate. So, will we end up only dealing with this in ecosystems where the economics and science is further along (forests, for example – and temperate forests, at that)? Or will we risk arbitrary valuations that lead to their own kinds of market failures? The first option runs into the uneven enforcement problem I raised above – not every country has well-understood forests, so only some countries would have to deal with this revaluation. The second is not an improvement on the current situation – indeed, it would give us the false impression we know what we are doing, when we do not.
Watch this space . . .
Explaining myself
So, today I was challenged by an old friend, and a very well-known senior scholar in my field, about working for USAID. He did so on two of the largest listservs in my field – admittedly, because I had just posted an offhand follow-up to some AID job postings to the list inviting people to apply. Ben is great guy, and one of the founders of what might be thought of as hazards research – he’s also got his own political positions (which are evident below). I like him a lot – he pushes me all the time, which I find very, very productive (and that is his intent). I think his challenge, and my reply, help articulate why more people ought to be straddling the academic and practice worlds in development.
First, Ben:
Dear Ed,
I am sure all of us involved in Africa specialty group as well as the CAPE discussion list would benefit by hearing more detail about why you feel that the land tenure team at USAID has “an outstanding reputation” and why you believe “USAID is dead serious about its goal of becoming an intellectual leader in development…”. Furthermore, if you are correct about the agency’s dead seriousness, what are the constraints and obstacles that have to be overcome?
From my point of view, until USAID is removed from its current position within the Department of State and made an independent agency like DFID in the UK or GTZ in Germany, everything done in the development field by anyone, alas, even you dear comrade, falls under the shadow of US geopolitical special interest. There is also a case one could make that, in particular, all research on issues of resource access, land tenure falling into this category, needs to be free of ALL national and international development assistance agencies because of their usual commitment to what UNDP calls “alignment with host country interests.” So, for example, to follow up on the World Bank’s recent report on land grabbing, it is doubtful if any development assistance partner (USAID, DFID, GTZ, UNDP, FAO, etc.) would criticize the corrupt practices in many countries leading to land grabbing.
Those seem to me to be macro and meso challenges to your optimism and jolly invitation to join you. Finally, at the micro scale, it would seem, a fortiori, that those of us who work in the mode of participatory action research, something as you well know from your excellent past work demands a great deal of trust, can ask our friends and informants in various parts of rural Africa to put aside generations of mistrust of the great powers that ravaged their continent with surrogate conflicts during the Cold War and which continue to prop up corrupt regimes with development assistance.
Your scholarly credentials and intelligence are so obvious to those who know you, I am sure you must have good reasons for your sojourn at USAID and for your widely disseminated invitation to others to join you there. Please share them with us.
All the best,
BEN
Dr. Ben Wisner
Aon Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, University College London, UK
Environmental Studies Program, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, USA
And my reply:
Hi Ben (and all):
One of the things I love most about Ben is his ability to pin me down – whether arguing about the modeling community or agreeing about the tragedy that was the Spanish anarchists in Catalunya during the Spanish Civil War. There’s no such thing as an offhand invitation! So I am happy to elaborate, at least as much as I can in a generally-circulated email – and please note, I am speaking for myself here. No official agency messages coming from my mouth . . .
First, I am at USAID out of a serious desire to bridge the absurd and growing gulf between the academic and practitioner communities in development – we all know that the practitioner community is not reading the academic lit (and indeed they are not, though the reasons for this are complex, and include the fact that the agencies do not have subscriptions to the journals because they have difficulty justifying the expense [yes, this is absurd]), but the academic community does not spend a heck of a lot of time reading the practitioner stuff either – except mostly to throw (intellectual) stones without actually understanding the institutional context of the various documents they are critiquing. Let’s be honest, the number of development geographers out there that have actually worked in a development agency (not just consulting, but actually in the organization) is tiny, which means that most of us (including me, at least until about 6 weeks ago) are critiquing something we understand very poorly, at best. The result: two parallel literatures, and very little productive interplay. So I am learning about how to translate between these communities to facilitate greater communication and cooperation. It seems there is tremendous mistrust on both sides of this divide, for good reason and for not so good reasons. I suppose I am trying to parse through those reasons as well.
That said, you certainly can call the “authenticity” of my experience into question. I occupy a unique space here at USAID. I am a fellow, which gives me freedom to move around beyond my obvious job description and to challenge things that I see as problematic. Further, I am on leave from South Carolina – I did not surrender my position or my tenure. So, I have a lot of security – I don’t worry about speaking up in a meeting (or responding to an email) in a manner that might have repercussions for my career – the worst that can happen to me is to be sacked before my fellowship is up and sent back to my tenured position. So I cannot say that I fully understand the pressures that some of my colleagues must feel on a day-to-day basis. Then again, I know my positionality and, trained as a poststructuralist, I’ve long thought that authenticity was sort of crap, anyway . . .
At another level, I fear that I (and perhaps many on this list share this feeling) was at risk of becoming the new extractive industry. Speaking for myself, I found that I was going to various places in the world, doing serious fieldwork, writing it up and trying to push the literature forward . . . only to watch that work gain no traction at all in the policy and practice world. The same mistakes just kept happening. So, all that my research really did was get me promotions and pay raises. Going to a place in the Global South, gathering a resource (in this case knowledge and information), and then redistributing that resource in the Global North to my financial benefit? Sounds like extraction/expropriation to me . . . I found that untenable, and I am actively looking for ways to make my research “do something”. Yes, this is fraught and intellectually dangerous territory. But I found the alternative unacceptable.
Second, your critique of USAID’s position vis a vis US foreign policy is to the point – we are absolutely constrained by State’s vision for the world, and this does limit us somewhat. That said, there is a lot of critical awareness of these limitations at USAID (much, much more than I’d expected), and significant efforts to push back and shift the views that are seen as problematic. For example, there is excellent work on environment-conflict connections coming out of my bureau that aggressively challenges the absurd “water wars” mentality that seems to drive some corners of our foreign policy, referencing really good academic work on the nuanced, difficult connections between environmental change/resources and conflict. Hell, they have Homer-Dixon thoroughly beaten.
At the same time, I don’t want to fall into the position of arguing from one end of a continuum (“thoroughly compromised”?), with academic research implicitly at the “free and untainted” other end. There are a hell of a lot of unacknowledged politics in academic research (though I know from our conversations you are quite aware) – for example, NSF sets priorities all the time which are shaped by Congressional funding and partnerships with various agencies in the executive branch (CNH sound familiar, there CAPE-ers?), and we all run off to apply for these funds as if they were apolitical – a terribly naive position. Put another way, one could argue that it is much easier to be critically aware of one’s position, role and influences when they are clearly articulated in a memo.
To answer fully, and with illustrations, your concerns for issues like land grabbing and “alignment with host country interests” is impossible in a public forum. First, I don’t speak for the Agency. Second, examples would invoke countries, and that is a bad idea when you can be seen (incorrectly, in my case) as speaking for US foreign policy. Third, there are really good people here in the Agency who are actively working to address the very things you are worried about in a lot of different ways . . . many quite subtle. It is not fair for me to place them in the spotlight without their consent. You will have to trust me on this – which is hardly evidence in and of itself, but you do know me well.
The desire to become an intellectual leader in development seems sincere. Sure, broad public statements may or may not have much meaning. However, I have been struck by the pride folks have in the mission of this organization – and the rage they feel over the ways in which the Agency was downsized and stripped of many of its best thinkers over its recent history. This is not merely a front office “feel good” thing – I see this as a feeling that permeates the agency, from the administrator down to the line offices and the field missions. To that end, they are staffing up – and they seem sincere about bringing highly qualified people in to develop cutting-edge programming. How this will play out if those highly qualified people start pushing back against existing programs and policy, I have no idea. But this agency is not a monolith, and a lot of people I interact with are very open to criticism and respond very quickly and positively to it – again, to an extent I have found surprising.
And it is from this that I issued the invitation – either to apply for these jobs, or to consider taking an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship, or for you more senior types (am I more senior? Nah) a Jefferson Science Fellowship, and serve a sabbatical or leave year at AID. They want good people. Most of the folks I work with want to be challenged constructively. And if those of us who have the training, experience and critical faculties don’t apply for these opportunities, we cede the field to a bunch of people with MAs in Political Science who for their research likely ran massive regressions on the relationship between conflict and natural resources without bothering to contextualize either the type of conflict or the natural resource in question (yes, I have actually seen this very project proposal – structured because they could not get a large enough N to regress if they parsed by natural resource. Mercifully, the researcher in question is not here at AID).
Finally, your point on addressing generations of mistrust is an excellent one, and one that I have no good answer for. USAID is particularly challenged in this regard because it implements so little of its own programming – basically, most of the agency’s programs are contracted out, and AID staff are generally limited to monitoring the contractors and their products. This creates a major problem for the agency – I think there is a real gap between what people in the agency know about what is really happening in the world, even at the level of the field missions, and actual events in the world. This was a central point of my book <<plug alert>> (Delivering Development – forthcoming from Palgrave MacMillan in February, available for preorder at all major booksellers now!) and it seems to be borne out by my experiences thus far. But given budgetary constraints, likely to be tightened starting roughly a week from today, USAID will never be allowed to staff up to levels necessary to implement its own programs, and therefore get that handle on what really happens in the world. I will be interacting with country missions quite a bit over the next several months, and I suspect I might pick up some insights along the way . . . or at least I hope so.
I’ve spent way too much time on this response, and anyone still reading at this point probably wants the last 10 minutes of their lives back. Ben, I am genuinely thankful for you and the challenges you pose – you make me a better thinker and person. And one with less sleep, dammit.
Best,
Ed
Are we really that bad?
So, the Center for Global Development, a non-partisan think tank focused on reducing poverty and making globalization work for the poor (a paraphrase of their mission statement, which can be found here), has issued a report that more or less says that USAID’s quality and effectiveness of aid is very low when compared to other agencies.
Well, I’m not all that freaked out by this assessment, principally because it fails to ask important questions relevant to understanding development needs and development outcomes. In fact, the entire report is rigged – not intentionally, mind you, but I suspect out of a basic ignorance of the difference between the agencies being evaluated, and an odd (mis)understanding of what development is.
For me, the most telling point in the report came right away, on pages 3 and 4:
Given these difficulties in relating aid to development impact on the ground, the scholarly literature on aid effectiveness has failed to convince or impress those who might otherwise spend more because aid works (as in Sachs 2005) or less because aid doesn’t work often enough (Easterly 2003).
Why did this set me off? Well, in my book I argue that the “poles” of Sachs and Easterly in the development literature are not poles at all – they operate from the same assumptions about how development and globalization work, and I just spent 90,000 words worth of a book laying out those assumptions and why they are often wrong. In short, this whole report is operating from within the development echo chamber from which this blog takes its name. But then they really set me off:
In donor countries especially, faced with daunting fiscal and debt problems, there is new and healthy emphasis on value for money and on maximizing the impact of their aid spending.
Folks, yesterday I posted about how the desire to get “value for our money” in development was putting all the wrong pressures on agencies . . . not because value is bad, but because it puts huge pressures on the development agencies to avoid risk (and associated costs), which in turn chokes off innovation in their programs and policies. And here we have a report, evaluating the quality of aid (their words) in terms of its cost-effectiveness. One of their four pillar analyses is the ability of agencies to maximize aid efficiency. This is nuts.
Again, its not that there should be no oversight of the funds or their uses, or that there should be no accountability for those uses. But to demand efficiency is to largely rule out high risk efforts which could have huge returns but carry a significant risk of failure. Put another way, if this metric was applied to the Chilean mine rescue, then it would score low for efficiency because they tried three methods at once and two failed. Of course, that overlooks the fact that they GOT THE MINERS OUT ALIVE. Same thing for development – give me an “inefficient” agency that can make transformative leaps forward in our understandings of how development works and how to improve the situation of the global poor over the “efficient” agency that never programs anything of risk, and never makes those big leaps.
Now, let’s look at the indicators – because they tell the same story. One of the indicators under efficiency is “Share of allocation to well-governed countries.” Think about the pressure that places on an agency that has to think about where to set up its programming. What about all of the poor, suffering people in poorly-governed countries? Is USAID not supposed to send massive relief to Haiti after an earthquake because its government is not all we might hope? This indicator either misses the whole point of development as a holistic, collaborative process of social transformation, or it is a thinly-veiled excuse to start triaging countries now.
They should know better – Andrew Natsios is one of their fellows, and he has explained how these sorts of evaluation pressures choke an agency to death. Amusingly, they cite this work in here . . . almost completely at random on page 31, for a point that has no real bearing on that section of the text. I wonder what he thinks of this report . . .
In the end, USAID comes out 126th of 130 agencies evaluated for “maximizing efficiency.” Thank heavens. It probably means that we still have some space to experiment and fail left. Note that of the top 20% of donors, the highest scores went to the World Bank and UN Agencies, arguably the groups that do the least direct programming on the ground – in other words, the “inefficiencies” of their work are captured elsewhere, when the policies and programs they set up for others to run begin to come apart. The same could be said of the Millennium Challenge Corporation here in the US, which also scored high. In other words, they are rewarding the agencies that don’t actually do all that much on the ground for their efficiency, while the agencies that actually have to deal with the uncertainties of real life get dinged for it.
And the Germans ended up ranking high, but hey, nothing goes together like Germans and efficiency. That one’s for you, Daniel Esser.
What a mess of a report . . . and what a mess this will cause in the press, in Congress, etc. For no good reason.