A while back, I had a blog post on a report for ActionAid, written by Alex Evans, on critical uncertainties for development between the present and 2020. One of the big uncertainties Alex identified were environmental shocks, though in that version of the report he limited these shocks to climate-driven environmental shocks. In my post, I suggested to Alex that he widen his scope, for environmental shocks might also include ecosystem collapse, such as in major global fisheries – such environmental shocks are not really related to climate change, but are still of great importance. The collapse of the Gulf of Guinea large marine ecosystem (largely due to commercial overfishing from places other than Africa) has devastated local fish hauls, lowering the availability of protein in the diets of coastal areas and driving enormous pressure on terrestrial fauna as these populations seek to make up for the lost protein. Alex was quite generous with my comments, and agreed with this observation wholeheartedly.
And then today, I stumbled on this – a simple visualization of Atlantic Fisheries in 1900 and 2000, by fish haul. The image is striking (click to expand):
Now, I have no access to the datasets used to construct this visualization, and therefore I can make no comments on its accuracy (the blog post on the Guardian site is not very illuminating). However, this map could be off by quite a bit in terms of how good hauls were in 1900, and how bad they are now, and the picture would still be very, very chilling. As I keep telling my students, all those new, “exotic” fish showing up in restaurants are not delicacies – they are just all that is left in these fisheries.
This is obviously a development problem, as it compromises livelihoods and food supplies. Yet I don’t see anyone addressing it directly, even aid organizations engaged with countries on the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, where this impact is most pronounced. And how long until even the rich really start to feel the pinch?
Go here to see more visualizations – including one of the reach of the Spanish fishing fleet that makes clear where the pressure on the Gulf of Guinea is coming from.
Category: Livelihoods
And now everyone is implicated . . .
Updated 7 June 2011: I can find no evidence that any of my TIAA-CREF funds are holding Glencore. So far, so good . . .
aaannnnddd
No Glencore in my Vanguard 2025 Fund (kid’s college fund). Sadly, though, there is Gazprom. And probably a hell of a lot of other problematic stuff . . . nobody is clean, I tell you.
As a geographer, I spend a lot of time thinking about interconnections – how events and processes in one place influence events and processes in other places. I use these interconnections as a teaching tool in my courses, to help students understand how, for example, our levels of consumption here in the US preclude similar levels of consumption for the rest of the world (not enough resource out there to make that happen). I am always careful to make sure that the students understand that I am as bound up in these linkages as they are – I certainly do not live off the grid, walking/riding a bike everywhere and eating only food I grow (or that is grown locally). But it still hurts every time a find a new way in which I am bound to, and therefore a cause of, some of the processes I find most frustrating in the world. So, this excellent post on FairPensions was a bit tough. Simply put, Glencore, a well-known problem company that trades heavily in the food commodities markets (and appears to be making those markets, as it were, to its own advantage) has been fast-tracked into the FTSE 100, and therefore is now likely part of a lot of the mutual funds and pension plans to which we all make contributions. I’m going to have to check on this, and pray that TIAA-CREF has some sense, but . . . dammit.
For an earlier discussions of food insecurity and the commodities markets, see here, here and here.
On explanation in development research
I was at a talk today where folks from Michigan State were presenting research and policy recommendations to guide the Feed the Future initiative. I greatly appreciate this sort of presentation – it is good to get real research in the building, and to see USAID staff that have so little time turn out in large numbers to engage. Once again, folks, its not that people in the agencies aren’t interested or don’t care, its a question of time and access.
In the course of one of the presentations, however, I saw a moment of “explanation” for observed behavior that nicely captures a larger issue that has been eating at me as the randomized control trials for development (RCT4D) movement gains speed . . . there isn’t a lot of explanation there. There is really interesting data, rigorously collected, but explanation is another thing entirely.
In the course of the presentation, the presenter put up a slide that showed a wide dispersion of prices around the average price received by farmers for their maize crops around a single market area (near where I happen to do work in Malawi). Nothing too shocking there, as this happens in Malawi, and indeed in many places. However, from a policy and programming perspective, it’s important to know that the average price is NOT the same thing as what a given household is taking home. But then the presenter explained this dispersion by noting (in passing) that some farmers were more price-savvy than others.
1) there is no evidence at all to support this claim, either in his data or in the data I have from an independent research project nearby
2) this offhand explanation has serious policy ramifications.
This explanation is a gross oversimplification of what is actually going on here – in Mulanje (near the Luchenza market area analyzed in the presentation), price information is very well communicated in villages. Thus, while some farmers might indeed be more savvy than others, the prices they are able to get are communicated throughout the village, thus distributing that information. So the dispersion of prices is the product of other factors. Certainly desperation selling is probably part of the issue (another offhand explanation offered later in the presentation). However, what we really need, if we want a rigorous understanding of the causes of this dispersion and how to address it, is a serious effort to grasp the social component of agriculture in this area – how gender roles, for example, shape household power dynamics, farm roles, and the prices people will sell at (this is a social consideration that exceeds explanation via markets), or how social networks connect particular farmers to particular purchasers in a manner that facilitates or inhibits price maximization at market. These considerations are both causal of the phenomena that the presenter described, and the points of leverage on which policy might act to actually change outcomes. If farmers aren’t “price savvy”, this suggests the need for a very different sort of intervention than what would be needed to address gendered patterns of agricultural strategy tied to long-standing gender roles and expectations.
This is a microcosm of what I am seeing in the RCT4D world right now – really rigorous data collection, followed by really thin interpretations of the data. It is not enough to just point out interesting patterns, and then start throwing explanations out there – we must turn from rigorous quantitative identification of significant patterns of behavior to the qualitative exploration of the causes of those patterns and their endurance over time. I’ve been wrestling with these issues in Ghana for more than a decade now, an effort that has most recently led me to a complete reconceptualization of livelihoods (shifting from understanding livelihoods as a means of addressing material conditions to a means of governing behaviors through particular ways of addressing material conditions – the article is in review at Development and Change). However, the empirical tests of this approach (with admittedly tiny-n size samples in Ghana, and very preliminary looks at the Malawi data) suggest that I have a better explanatory resolution for explained behaviors than possible through existing livelihoods approaches (which would end up dismissing a lot of choices as illogical or the products of incomplete information) – and therefore I have a better foundation for policy recommendations than available without this careful consideration of the social.
See, for example, this article I wrote on how we approach gender in development (also a good overview of the current state of gender and development, if I do say so myself). I empirically demonstrate that a serious consideration of how gender is constructed in particular places has large material outcomes on whose experiences we can understand, and therefore the sorts of interventions we might program to address particular challenges. We need more rigorous wrestling with “the social” if we are going to learn anything meaningful from our data. Period.
In summary, explanation is hard. Harder, in many ways, than rigorous data collection. Until we start spending at least as much effort on the explanation side as we do on the collection side, we will not really change much of anything in development.
On field experience and playing poor
There is a great post up at Good on “Pretending to be Poor” experiments, where participants try to live on tiny sums of money (i.e. $1.50/day) to better understand the plight of the global poor. Cord Jefferson refers to this sort of thing as “playing poor”, at least in part because participants don’t really live on $1.50 a day . . . after all, they are probably not abandoning their secure homes, and probably not working the sort of dangerous, difficult job that pays such a tiny amount. Consuming $1.50/day is one thing. Living on it is entirely another. (h/t to Michael Kirkpatrick at Independent Global Citizen for pointing out the post).
This, for me, brings up another issue – the “authenticity” of the experiences many of us have had while doing fieldwork (or working in field programs), an issue that has been amplified by what seems to be the recent discovery of fieldwork by the RCT trials for development crowd (I still can’t get over the idea that they think living among the poor is a revolutionary idea). The whole point of participant observation is to better understand what people do and why they do it by experiencing, to some extent, their context – I find it inordinately difficult to understand how people even begin to meaningfully parse social data without this sort of grounding. In a concrete way, having malaria while in a village does help one come to grips with the challenges this might pose to making a living via agriculture in a rather visceral way. So too, living in a village during a drought that decimated a portion of the harvest, by putting me in a position where I had to go a couple of (intermittent) days without food, and with inadequate food for quite a few more, helped me to come to grips with both the capacity and the limitations of the livelihoods strategies in the villages I write about in Delivering Development, and at least a limited understanding of the feelings of frustration and inadequacy that can arise when things go wrong in rural Africa, even as livelihoods strategies work to prevent the worst outcomes.
But the key part of that last sentence was “at least a limited understanding.” Being there is not the same thing as sharing the experience of poverty, development, or disaster. When I had malaria, I knew what clinics to go to, and I knew that I could afford the best care available in Cape Coast (and that care was very good) – I was not a happy guy on the morning I woke up with my first case, but I also knew where to go, and that the doctor there would treat me comprehensively and I would be fine. So too with the drought – the villages I was living in were, at most, about 5 miles (8km) from a service station with a food mart attached. Even as I went without food for a day, and went a bit hungry for many more, I knew in the back of my mind that if things turned dire, I could walk that distance and purchase all of the food I needed. In other words, I was not really experiencing life in these villages because I couldn’t, unless I was willing to throw away my credit card, empty my bank account, and renounce all of my upper-class and government colleagues and friends. Only then would I have been thrown back on only what I could earn in a day in the villages and the (mostly appalling) care available in the rural clinic north of Eguafo. I was always critically aware of this fact, both in the moment and when writing and speaking about it since. Without that critical awareness, and a willingness to downplay our own (or other’s) desire to frame our work as a heroic narrative, there is a real risk in creating our own versions of “playing poor” as we conduct fieldwork.
I'm a talking head . . .
Geoff Dabelko, Sean Peoples, Schuyler Null and the rest of the good folks at the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars were kind enough to interview me about some of the themes in Delivering Development. They’ve posted the video on te ECSP’s blog, The New Security Beat (you really should be checking them out regularly). So, if you want to see/hear me (as opposed to read me), you can go over to their blog, or just click below.
How to blow up behavioral econ/RCT via qualitative research?
Just a quick thought, given the interest in my last two posts. I have (obviously) been driven a bit crazy by the RCT/behavioral economics folks who suddenly seem to be coming around to either qualitative methods to explain their results . . . which are generally results that qualitative researchers have known about for a long time. In other words, it seems to me that there is a real danger here that a sort of waving at qualitative methods (i.e. the “bad journalism” approach, where you just do a bunch of interviews without considering who to interview, how to interview them, why interviews vs. focus groups vs. whatever, etc.) might become yet another way to prolong the hegemony of economics over development thinking.
I’m worried about this because while I think economic approaches and theory have purchase on explanation to varying degrees depending on the subject at hand and the scale of analysis, in the end any effort to explain the emergence of and means of addressing a development issue or challenge at a scale that might have meaningful impact that relies on the economic alone will not result in a particularly complete explanation for observed events, nor will it help us understand likely outcome pathways in future similar situations. Put another way, only sometimes can economics get us to a “good enough” solution that enables really productive development work.
What if I told you that I had really good, concrete empirical data from a really tiny dataset (two villages in Ghana, but the entire population of those two villages, so no sampling issues) that clearly demonstrated that any effort to explain livelihoods decision-making in these villages cannot be productively explained by economic approaches – whether crude (i.e. assumptions about maximizing behavior) or complex (game theoretic approaches)? Instead, the data makes it remarkably clear that the economic, while a component of decision-making, is just one component of a project of household governance – it is a clearly external (etic, for you anthro types out there) heuristic that improperly parses the social processes that lead to livelihoods decisions. In short, I can show where the explanatory power of “the economic” stops, and where meaningful explanation requires a re-embedding of the economic in larger social processes that cannot be reduced to the economic (and, at the same time, which demonstrates that the economic cannot be reduced to any of these other processes).
Basically, I’m starting to walk you through my retheorization of livelihoods as what Foucault called governmentality . . . but I could also work this up as a means of discrediting the RCT and behavioral economics turn toward the qualitative by arguing that these efforts are tails wagging the dog . . .
Thoughts?
Qualitative research was (already) here . . .
You know, qualitative social scientists of various stripes have long complained of their marginalization in development. Examples abound of anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists complaining about the influence of the quantitatively-driven economists (and to a lesser extent, some political scientists) over development theory and policy. While I am not much for whining, these complaints are often on the mark – quantitative data (of the sort employed by economists, and currently all the rage in political science) tends to carry the day over qualitative data, and the nuanced lessons of ethnographic research are dismissed as unimplementable, ideosyncratic/place-specific, without general value, etc. This is not to say that I have an issue with quantitative data – I believe we should employ the right tool for the job at hand. Sadly, most people only have either qualitative or quantitative skills, making the selection of appropriate tools pretty difficult . . .
But what is interesting, of late, is what appears to be a turn toward the lessons of the qualitative social sciences in development . . . only without actually referencing or reading those qualitative literatures. Indeed, the former quantitative masters of the development universe are now starting to figure out and explore . . . the very things that the qualitative community has known for decades. What is really frustrating and galling is that these “new” studies are being lauded as groundbreaking and getting great play in the development world, despite the fact they are reinventing the qualitative wheel, and without much of the nuance of the current qualitative literature and its several decades of nuance.
What brings me to today’s post is the new piece on hunger in Foreign Policy by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. On one hand, this is great news – good to see development rising to the fore in an outlet like Foreign Policy. I also largely agree with their conclusions – that the poverty trap/governance debate in development is oversimplified, that food security outcomes are not explicable through a single theory, etc. On the other hand, from the perspective of a qualitative researcher looking at development, there is nothing new in this article. Indeed, the implicit premise of the article is galling: When they argue that to address poverty, “In practical terms, that meant we’d have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives,” the implication is that nobody has been doing this. But what of the tens of thousands of anthropologists, geographers and sociologists (as well as representatives of other cool, hybridized fields like new cultural historians and ethnoarchaeologists). Hell, what of the Peace Corps?
Whether intentional or not, this article wipes the qualitative research slate clean, allowing the authors to present their work in a methodological and intellectual vacuum. This is the first of my problems with this article – not so much with its findings, but with its appearance of method. While I am sure that there is more to their research than presented in the article, the way their piece is structured, the case studies look like evidence/data for a new framing of food security. They are not – they are illustrations of the larger conceptual points that Banerjee and Duflo are making. I am sure that Banerjee and Duflo know this, but the reader does not – instead, most readers will think this represents some sort of qualitative research, or a mixed method approach that takes “hard numbers” and mixes it in with the loose suppositions that Banerjee and Duflo offer by way of explanation for the “surprising” outcomes they present. But loose supposition is not qualitative research – at best, it is journalism. Bad journalism. My work, and the work of many, many colleagues, is based on rigorous methods of observation and analysis that produce validatable data on social phenomena. The work that led to Delivering Development and many of my refereed publications took nearly two years of on-the-ground observation and interviewing, including follow-ups, focus groups and even the use of archaeology and remotely-sensed data on land use to cross-check and validate both my data and my analyses.
The result of all that work was a deep humility in the face of the challenges that those living in places like Coastal Ghana or Southern Malawi manage on a day-to-day basis . . . and deep humility when addressing the idea of explanation. This is an experience I share with countless colleagues who have spent a lot of time on the ground in communities, ministries and aid organizations, a coming to grips with the fact that massively generalizable solutions simply don’t exist in the way we want them to, and that singular interventions will never address the challenges facing those living in the Global South.
So, I find it frustrating when Banerjee and Duflo present this observation as in any way unique:
What we’ve found is that the story of hunger, and of poverty more broadly, is far more complex than any one statistic or grand theory; it is a world where those without enough to eat may save up to buy a TV instead, where more money doesn’t necessarily translate into more food, and where making rice cheaper can sometimes even lead people to buy less rice.
For anyone working in food security – that is, anyone who has been reading the literature coming out of anthropology, geography, sociology, and even some areas of ag econ, this is not a revelation – this is standard knowledge. A few years ago I spent a lot of time and ink on an article in Food Policy that tried to loosely frame a schematic of local decision-making that leads to food security outcomes – an effort to systematize an approach to the highly complex sets of processes and decisions that produce hunger in particular places because there is really no way to get a single, generalized statistic or finding that will explain hunger outcomes everywhere.
In other words: We know. So what do you have to tell us?
The answer, unfortunately, is not very much . . . because in the end they don’t really dive into the social processes that lead to the sorts of decisions that they see as interesting or counterintuitive. This is where the heat is in development research – there are a few of us working down at this level, trying to come up with new framings of social process that move us past a reliance solely on the blunt tool of economistic rationality (which can help explain some behaviors and decisions) toward a more nuanced framing of how those rationalities are constructed by, and mobilize, much larger social processes like gender identification. The theories in which we are dealing are very complex, but they do work (at least I think my work with governmentality is working – but the reviewers at Development and Change might not agree).
And maybe, just maybe, there is an opening to get this sort of work out into the mainstream, to get it applied – we’re going to try to do this at work, pulling together resources and interests across two Bureaus and three offices to see if a reframing of livelihoods around Foucault’s idea of governmentality can, in fact, get us better resolution on livelihoods and food security outcomes than current livelihoods models (which mostly assume that decisionmaking is driven by an effort to maximize material returns on investment and effort). Perhaps I rest too much faith on the idea of evidence, but if we can implement this idea and demonstrate that it works better, perhaps we will have a lever with which to push oversimplified economistic assumptions out of the way, while still doing justice to the complexity of social process and explanation in development.
Future challenges, future solutions
On Global Dashboard Alex Evans discusses a report he wrote for ActionAid on critical uncertainties for development between the present and 2020. Given Alex got to distill a bunch of futures studies, scenarios and outlooks into this report, I have to say this: I want his job.
The list he produces is quite interesting. In distilled form, they are:
1. What is the global balance of power in 2020?
2. Will job creation keep pace with demographic change to 2020?
3. Is there serious global monetary reform by 2020?
4. Who will benefit from the projected ‘avalanche of technology’ by 2020?
5. Will the world face up to the equity questions that come with a world of limits by 2020?
6. Is global trade in decline by 2020?
7. How has the nature of political influence changed by 2020?
8. What will the major global shocks be between now and 2020?
All are fair questions. And, in general, I like his 10 recommendations for addressing these challenges:
1. Be ready (because shocks will be the key drivers of change)
2. Talk about resilience (because the poor are in the firing line)
3. Put your members in charge (because they can bypass you)
4. Talk about fair shares (because limits change everything)
5. Specialise in coalitions (and not just of civil society organisations)
6. Take on the emerging economies (including from within)
7. Brings news from elsewhere (because innovation will come from the edges)
8. Expect failure (and look for the silver lining)
9. Work for poor people, not poor countries (as most of the former are outside the latter)
10. Be a storyteller (because stories create worldviews)
I particularly like #10 here, as it was exactly this idea that motivated me to write Delivering Development. And #7 is more or less the political challenge I lay out in the last 1/4 of the book. #9 is a clear reference to Andy Sumner’s work on the New Bottom Billion, which everyone should be looking at right now. In short, Alex and I are on the same page here.
I have two bits of constructive criticism to offer that I think would strengthen this report – and would be easy edits. First, I think Alex has made a bit of a mistake in limiting his concern for environmental shocks to climate shocks. These sorts of shocks are, of course, critical (hell, welcome to my current job), but there are other shocks out there that are perhaps not best captured as climate shocks on such a short timescale. For example, ecological collapse from overuse/misuse of ecosystem resources (see the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment) may have nothing at all to do with climate change – overfishing is currently crushing most major global fisheries, and the connection between this behavior and climate change is somewhat distant, at best. We’ve been driving several ecosystems off cliffs for some time now, and one wonders when resilience will fail and a state change will set in. It is near-impossible to know what the new state of a stressed ecosystem will be after a state change, so this is really a radical uncertainty we need to be thinking about.
Second, I am concerned that Stevens’ claim about the collapse of globalization bringing about “savage” negative impacts on the developing world. Such a claim strikes me as overgeneralized and therefore missing the complexity of the challenge such a collapse might bring – and it is a bit ironic, given his admonition to “talk about resilience” above. I think that some people (urban dwellers in particular) would likely be very hard hit – indeed, the term savage might actually apply to those who are heavily integrated into global markets simply by the fact they are living in large cities whose economies are driven by global linkages. And certainly those in marginal rural environments who are already subject to crop failure and other challenges will likely suffer greatly from the loss of market opportunities and perhaps humanitarian assistance (look at contemporary inland Somalia for an illustration of what I am talking about here). However, others (the bulk of rural farmers with significant subsistence components to their agricultural activities, or the option to convert activities to subsistence) have the option to pull back from market engagement and still make a stable living. Opportunity will certainly dry up for these people, at least for a while, as this is usually a strategy for managing temporary economic fluctuations. This is certainly a negative impact, for if development does nothing else, it must provide opportunities for people. However, this sort of negative impact doesn’t rise to “savage” – which to me implies famine, infant mortality, etc. I think we make all-to-easy connections between the failure of globalization/development (I’m not sure they are all that different, really, a point I discuss in Delivering Development). Indeed, a sustained loss of global connection might, in the long run, create a space for local innovations and market development that could lead to a more robust future.
So to “be ready” requires, I think, a bit of a broadening of our environmental concerns, and a major effort to engage the complexity of engagement with the global economy among the rural poor in the world. Both are quite doable – and are really minor edits to a very nice report (which I still wish I wrote).
Why is this still surprising?
Alertnet has a post on climate change and the poor that opened with one of my least favorite narrative techniques – surprise about local capacity and knowledge for adaptation.
I was struck by the local community’s scientific knowledge about climate change. I’d often heard that such communities know a tremendous amount about changing weather patterns – and can easily tell a good year from a bad one in terms of droughts or floods – but that they don’t know much about ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ or ‘climate change’.
Not so in Manikganj District. The community performed a drama for us and it was clear that they knew exactly what these relatively western scientific terms mean both in theory and in practice.
I was also struck by how the community – supported by the local nongovernmental organisation, GSK – has developed a range of strategies and activities to cope with longer floods, higher floodwater levels and the erosion that each year washes away more and more of their crop and homestead land into the nearby Padma River. There was no drama here. And I was deeply affected by the industrious positive way the people of Manikganj District meet these challenges and carry on with daily life.
I confess to a bit of fatigue at the continued voicing of surprise at finding out that those in the Global South who are dealing with the impacts of climate change actually have ideas, and often successful strategies, for managing those impacts. Implicitly, every time we do this we back our readers up to a place of comfort (“those poor/dark people don’t know much”) and then get to act surprised when it turns out they do actually have knowledge and capabilities. I’d like to think that the first half of my book flips this script, arguing consistently that the people I have been working with are staggeringly capable, and therefore it is the breakdown of livelihoods and adaptation that is interesting, not its existence.
To be fair, though, I blame myself and my colleagues working on adaptation and livelihoods for the persistence of this narrative technique. Once we get past that all-to-common intro, the post gets into concrete discussions of how people are adapting – good, useful grounded description. But what I long for, and what I am working on (articles in review and in prep, folks) is moving beyond the descriptive case toward a more systematic understanding of adaptation and livelihoods decision-making that enables some level of generalization and systematization. Indeed, by failing to approach livelihoods and adaptation decision-making in this manner, we enable the very frustrating lead-in technique I described above – every case becomes unique, and every effort to manage the impacts of climate change is therefore an isolated surprise. If, in fact, it is not at all surprising that people have at least some knowledge and capacity for addressing climate change (and this is really not surprising at all, dammit), we need to get past simple description to capturing processes that might be leveraged into better early warning, better programming, and better understandings of what people are experiencing on the ground.