Category: policy

Optimism in numbers

Tom over at A View from the Cave has a really interesting observation at the end of his post on the Mortensen scandal the other day:

I have been conducting interviews with the Knowledge Management team with UNICEF and the one today go to discussing the access of information. I was struck when the gentleman I was interviewing said, “There are hundreds of offices and thousands of people in UNICEF. Any idea that I come with has likely been already done by 50 people and better than what I had imagined.” We need to access this information and share it with each other so that a story like this will not go the same route.

I know that this is not a new observation – hell, it is practically the mantra of the ICT for development crowd – but I want to point out something that gets lost in its common repetition: optimism.  The interviewee above was not disparaging the idea of access to information, but instead showing tremendous humility in the face of a vast, talented organization.  Tom’s point was to move from this humble observation to (quite rightly) point out that while great ideas may exist within the organization, until they are accessed or shared they are just potential energy.
This is the same thing I tried to leave readers with as one of the takeaways from Delivering Development.  As I argue:

We probably overlook significant problems every day, as our measurements fail to capture them, and we are likely mismeasuring many of those we can see. However, this is not failure; this is hope. If we acknowledge that these are, indeed, significant problems that must be addressed if we wish to build a sustainable future, then we can abandon the baggage of decades of failure. We can open ourselves up to innovation that might be unimaginable from within the echo chamber of contemporary globalization and development . . .

This uncertainty, for me, is hope. There are more than 6.5 billion people on this planet. Surely at least several of them have innovative and exciting ideas about how to address the challenges facing their lives, ideas that might be applicable in other places or be philosophically innovative. We will not know unless we ask, unless we actively go looking for these ideas and empower those who have them to express them to the world.

In short, Tom’s interviewee sees 50,000 people as a hopeful resource.  I see the nearly 7 billion people on this planet in the same way.  I am optimistic about the “potential energy” for addressing global challenges that exists out there in the world.  That said, it will be nothing but potential until we empower people to convert it into kinetic actions.  Delivering Development provides only the loosest schematic of one way of thinking about doing this (there is a much, much more detailed project/workplan behind that loose schematic) that was presented to raise a political challenge the the status quo focus on experts and “developed country” institutions in development – if we know that people living in the Global South have good ideas, and we can empower these people to share their ideas and solutions, why don’t we?
Sometimes optimism requires a lead blocker.  I’m happy to play that role . . . hopefully someone is following me through the line.

Posted on by Ed 0

The Echo Chamber is showing up everywhere!

Either drawing directly on Delivering Development, or working in parallel to it, people seem to be circling around the idea of development as an echo chamber from which we have great difficulty escaping to see the world as it is, not as we want it to be.
A View from The Cave approaches this issue through a discussion of skepticism in aid:

For some people, aid and development endeavors seem as simple as serving up a spoonful of sugar that is brimming with kindness, energy, compassion and good intentions. Simply add sugar to the prescribed medicine and we can save the world!
Unfortunately, we know that it is not so simple. Communicating this is even harder. Telling a women that her favorite clothing distribution organization could be preventing growth and contributing to the poverty cycle is not received well. Speaking with a gentleman about orphanages being filled with children who have been orphaned not due to the death of parents, but voluntarily after an orphanage has been established, will make you seem cold-hearted and uncaring.

This, of course, extends past outreach to the general public – the research and policy worlds are full of this sort of problem.  Marc Bellemare has a post up that addresses this through the idea of confirmation bias, which he eloquently defines as the phenomena in which “people tend to give much more importance than is warranted to whatever evidence confirms their beliefs, and they tend to discard whatever evidence contradicts their beliefs”.   He then extends this to the policy world:

Over the last decade, development economists have developed a number of methods aimed at establishing the validity of causal statements. But what good are those methods when policymakers have their own ideas about what works and what does not?

As an economist in a policy school, this is one of those things I don’t really like to think about. I nevertheless think social scientists in general — and economists in particular — should carefully think about how to engage with people who suffer from confirmation bias, as it is no longer sufficient to just put our findings out there for policy makers to use.

Too right! This is exactly my point from one of the panels I sat on at this year’s Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Seattle – our responsibility as researchers does not end with publication.  It starts with publication, as that evidence is treated as nothing more than another viewpoint in the policy world, and can/will be used and abused to all sorts of ends if left undefended.
Finally, H-5inc. has drawn directly on Delivering Development in a recent post, arguing that a passage in the book “rather nicely sums up what I think is really at the root of our struggles to make productive and appropriate use of data” (that is a very nice thing to say, honestly):

We expect the world to work in a certain manner. Therefore, we gather data to measure the expected workings of the world and analyze those data through frameworks founded on the very understandings of the world they are meant either to affirm or to challenge. In addition, by our choice of data, and our means of analysis, we end up affirming that the world does indeed work the way we thought it did.

Lots of voices circling around the same subject, lots of different ways to intervene and start to tear down the echo chamber that limits us so severely in our efforts to productively engage the world.  I choose to interpret this as evidence in support of my hopelessly realistic optimism about development and the world in general.

Posted on by Ed 0

Revisionist history

REVISED 6 April 2011, 11:35am

Esther Duflo responded in a comment below – you should read it.  She is completely reasonable, and lays out a clearer understanding of the discipline and her place in it than did the article I am critiquing here. I have edited the post below to reflect what I think is a more fair reading of what went wrong in the article

——————————————————————————————–

Esther Duflo is a fairly impressive person.  So why does she, and the Guardian, feel the need to inflate her resume?

Doing her PhD at MIT, she was one of the first doctoral students to apply economics to development, linking the two, at a time when there were few university faculties devoted to the subject.

“It was not considered a fancy area of study,” she says. “There was a generation of people who had started looking at development from other fields. They had their own theories and only a few were economists. What I contributed to doing was to start going into detail. But I did have some advisers and mentors.”

Er, no.  Development economics as a formal field had been around since the early 1980s (Note: Marc Bellemare and Duflo have both pointed out that the real roots of this discipline go back to the 1940s), and economists had been working on development issues since . . . colonialism, actually.  I imagine there are a lot of senior Ph.D. economists at the IMF, World Bank and various other organizations who will be amused to hear that they were beaten to their degrees by Duflo. She was not at all one of the first doctoral students to work on this, and there are/were plenty of faculties that look at development economics.
I suspect that this might have something to do with what Mark Blaug was talking about in his article “No History of Ideas, Please, We’re Economists.” In short, one of Blaug’s arguments is that disciplinary history has largely disappeared from doctoral programs in economics, with the predictable effect of dooming the discipline to repeat its errors.  I would extend Blaug’s point to many who work in the larger field of development – we have a lot of technical specialists out there with excellent training and experience, but relatively few of them understand development as a discipline with a history and a philosophy.  As a result, we see “new” projects proposed and programmed despite their odd resemblance to previous efforts that failed.
There is a hint of this in the article – after all, Duflo is correct in noting that she emerged as an academic at a time when other social science fields were on the ascendancy, but she the Guardian fails to ask why this was the trend at the time – especially after economics’ dominance of the field for so long. A little disciplinary history  here would have helped – these other fields rose to prominence in the aftermath of the collapse of development economics as a formal field in the late 1980s…
So, Guardian, anyone over there actually schooled in development? Or interested in fact-checking?

Posted on by Ed 5

Why do we insist on working at the national level again?

The BBC has posted an interesting map of Nigeria that captures the spatiality of politics, ethnicity, wealth, health, literacy and oil.  There are significant problems with this map.  The underlying data has fairly large error bars that are not acknowledged, and the presentation of the data is somewhat problematic; for example, the ethnic “areas” in the country are represented only by the majority group, hiding the heterogeneity of these areas, and other data is aggregated at the state level, blurring heterogenous voting patterns, incomes, literacy rates and health situations. I really wish that those who create this sort of thing would do a better job addressing some of these issues, and pointing out the issues they cannot address to help the reader better evaluate the data.
But even with all of these caveats, this map is a striking illustration of the problems with using national-level statistics to guide development policy and programs.  Look at the distributions of wealth, health and literacy in the country – error bars or no, this data clearly demonstrates that national measures of wealth cannot guide useful economic policy, national measures of literacy might obscure regional or ethnic patterns of educational neglect, and national vaccination statistics tell us nothing about the regional variations in disease ecology and healthcare delivery that shape health outcomes in this country.
This is not to say that states don’t matter – they matter a lot.  However, when we use national-scale data for just about anything, we are making very bad assumptions about the heterogeneity of the situation in that country . . . and we are probably missing key opportunities and challenges we should be addressing in our work.

Posted on by Ed 1

You teach, therefore you can't?

Naomi Schaefer Riley published a particularly stunning op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday asking “Should Professors be Political?” I am actually working on a response op-ed, because despite her framing of this piece as an effort to lay out the educational cost of academic political engagement, this op-ed is not really an argument about education as much as it is an effort to bottle up voices, viewpoints and evidence with which she disagrees in the “safe space” of the university classroom, where these ideas cannot do any harm by influencing society at large.
For example, Riley argues that University of Wisconsin professor William Cronin’s involvement with the Wilderness Society, an environmental organization working to (among other things) stop mining in the Otero Mesa of New Mexico, is an example of run-of-the-mill partisanship. Really?  Certainly the arguments of the Wilderness Society are political insofar as they suggest policy directions, but what, exactly, is partisan about a concern for environmental quality?  Hell, even the basically libertarian governor Appalachian Trail in SC was in favor of environmental protection.  And what of the fact that the Wilderness Society’s claims are rooted in empirical evidence gathered through just the sorts of research that Riley otherwise sees as appropriate for academics, and therefore not rooted in a political agenda as much as in evidence about events in the world, and how they impact human beings.
Even more odd are Riley’s objections to Wisconsin’s Nelson Institute.  How, in an era of budget cutting and calls for universities to demonstrate greater relevance to the taxpayers who support them, could one critique the Institute’s mission of acting as a “catalyst and model for interdisciplinary collaboration on environmental initiatives across departments, schools, and colleges, and including governmental, private, and non-profit entities”?  Environmental challenges are complex, and require the collaboration of academics and policymakers across a set of institutions and disciplines.  Good policy requires good data, and good data requires good research – so why not foster greater collaboration between policymakers and researchers, between politicians and academics?  What, exactly, is Riley really concerned with?
Simply put, her concerns have nothing to do with educational quality, and in the end are not really about  academic engagement with politics.  Instead, they reflect a fear of a wider, clearer voice for academics with whom she does not agree.  When she suggests that Cronin’s engagement with the Wilderness Society is run-of-the-mill political activism and partisanship, or complains that Ohio State’s African American and African studies department overtly sees its mission as contributing “ideas for the formulation and implementation of progressive public policies with positive consequences for the black community,” she is not-so-implicitly telling academics to get back into their ivory tower where their ideas will remain marginal to the public discourse.  In a reversal of the old adage, she is arguing, “you teach, therefore you can’t.”
This argument for the traditional model for academic engagement, where the researcher’s responsibility for their data and findings ends with the publication of results, willfully distorts how science and other forms of inquiry are used in the political debates that shape the world and our quality of life.  Research findings, no matter how rigorous or replicable, are not seen as truths in the political arena.  They are just viewpoints, to be considered alongside other viewpoints, as political debates about policy unfold.  If the findings of the academic enterprise are to be useful to society at large, academics have a responsibility to interpret their findings into policy, to make political arguments based upon their evidence.  If we are not doing so, why are we doing research at all?
In short, the fact that some professors are politically engaged is nothing to lament.  Indeed, far too few of my colleagues take up this challenge, with disastrous results for both policy and the academy.  On one hand, excellent research, and fascinating research findings, never finds its way into the public or policy discourse, resulting in intellectually and even factually impoverished policy that has negative consequences?  On the other, as academia becomes more and more divorced from the concerns and needs of those who support it with their tax dollars and tuition, it becomes harder to see what we need academics for, and easier to argue for ever-deeper cuts to higher education budgets.  We need more public intellectuals, not less, if we are to continue as a robust, functional democracy.

Posted on by Ed 1

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).

Posted on by Ed 1

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.

Posted on by Ed 3

Keep what ya got (by giving it all away)

No, the title is not meant to invoke the idea that I am going to sell all my worldly possessions and seek some sort of enlightenment – nor is it a suggestion that you should do so.  Nah, this post is more tricky than that . . . it’s about thinking through who we are, and who we want to be in the world.
This has been at the front of my mind for a lot of reasons of late.  At a personal level, the wife of a very close friend of mine is about to pass away from cancer – she’s 41, and will leave behind her husband and a 6-year-old son.  This sort of thing really tends to put life and its trials in perspective.  And so, with that framing, I’ve also been wrestling with what I am going to do career-wise.  The fellowship I am on required that I declare if I intended to renew by late last week.  This was not a difficult decision – however, I also had to decide if I wanted to continue in my current position, or take up a new one.  For many in my agency, this decision would have been easy – keep the slot I currently occupy.  I have a direct line to my Assistant Administrator (which at AID is very, very far up the food chain), who has a real interest in climate change and really listens to me when I advise her.  I sit in a program office, where I have the capacity to shape the direction of climate change programming for an entire Bureau with a multi-billion dollar budget.  In the bureaucratic world, I have landed in a remarkably influential position . . .
And I have decided to give it up.
Wait, what?
Here is the thing: I have about 14 years of experience working on issues of development, principally from the research end of things.  I’ve had the good fortune to become engaged in several global environmental assessments, which have broadened my perspectives and my expertise/experience.  I know where we have significant holes in our understanding of how the world works that are impeding our ability to address the challenges so many face in the world today, and will serve as roadblocks along any path toward a sustainable future on this planet.  I am working to fill those knowledge gaps with my research . . . but in my current slot, I don’t really use what I know – either what I know to be true from my research experience, or what I know we don’t know.  In seven months, I feel like I have really gone to the intellectual well once – in a briefing to my Assistant Administrator last week.  The rest of the time, a reasonably competent manager with a general awareness of climate change and humanitarian assistance could have done my job.  I cannot tell you the number of days I have left the office without a clue of what I accomplished, deeply frustrated and unsatisfied.
My agency is a contracting agency – we write scopes of work for other people to do our research and thinking.  So I am expected to scope papers and projects for other people, who are significantly less qualified than I am, to execute.  This . . . is . . . maddening.  It is also reality.
So, what does it all mean?  First, it means I am going back to academia at the end of this fellowship: if all of the thinking is done externally, and I feel like I am well qualified to do that thinking, I had better get outside of the agency so that I can actually do it.  And if I am going to leave the agency, I need to start building up my contacts with the people who get what I do and what I know so they will come to me in the future for these tasks.  I am currently in a humanitarian relief bureau, but I am not a relief person – I am a development person by training, research and inclination.  Yes, that is a false dichotomy, but in terms of policy and programming, it is a very real institutional divide here.  So I need to sit with the development people, with those who understand how my efforts to rethink livelihoods (first article in a series is in review), and to rethink the connection between land use change and livelihoods change (here and here), might become crucial contributions to their programs and policy.  So in year two, I am shifting to a new Bureau, and to a relatively minor slot in a line office, to work in detail on issues of adaptation to climate change.  Many people would see this as a demotion – as me giving away access and all its advantages.  I see it as the only way to keep what I have, and to have a much longer-term impact.
You cannot imagine my relief.
Ian Brown was right: Keep what ya got, by giving it all away.

Posted on by Ed 0

Why does higher ed need transforming, exactly? Data please . . .

Philip Auerswald has a guest insight on the Washington Post‘s website discussing the challenges to the current higher education model posed by both economic reality (rising tuitions + fewer loan dollars = major constraints) and the challengers to the traditional model (i.e. University of Phoenix).  Overall, his assessment of the current landscape was reasonable.  But there were two things that worried me about this piece.
First, there is no discussion of how we got here (except for a mention of the credit crunch).  Yes, higher ed costs are skyrocketing, if you evaluate tuition bills.  But I am unclear on the change in the cost of education when a) adjusted for inflation over time and b) when one factors into the equation the massive withdrawal of state support for public universities in recent years.  In other words, rising tuition bills reflect both inflation (to some extent) and the transfer of cost from taxes to tuition.  So has anyone out there done the math to figure out how much the cost of education has really risen over the past few decades, versus how much tuition has risen in this endgame of a strategy to shift education from a public good to a private responsibility?  Why am I asking?  Because I know from experience that somewhere at or above 85% of most public universities’ operating costs are generated by salaries and benefits.  But I also know that my inflation-adjusted salary (which is reasonably good) is not really any higher than that of my senior colleagues at similar stages of their careers in the 1970s.  So where the hell is the supposed rising cost of education coming from?  Had I time and inclination, I would crack open a bunch of university budgets from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and now and look at the patterns of expense, and the inflation-adjusted amounts of expense, to figure out if costs are really rising.
Second, I found the following conclusion chilling:

New entrants in the market for collegiate education will be weakly branded relative to those of powerful incumbents…say those with teams that have played in the Final Four. As a consequence, the successful ones will focus on competencies rather than credentials. They’ll have data and evaluation to support their claims of quality.

When higher ed becomes mainly about competencies, critical thinking and analysis die – this is not, of course, what Auerswald is suggesting should happen.  I’m simply pointing out that we have seen this show before – it’s called No Child Left Behind, and I have watched the changes this godforsaken law and its associated obsession with evaluation, data and competencies has wrought upon the average undergrad.  The average score on a map quiz (memorization exercise) in my large classes has skyrocketed over the past decade, as the rote memorization skills that have become so important pre-college translate into the universities.  However, more and more often my students cannot think critically, and cannot link disparate bits of information unless it is done explicitly for them.  For example, I often teach my students that in many parts of Africa, the soils are not ideal for agriculture and therefore are not as naturally productive as in other parts of the world.  I also teach them that the majority of Africans draw their livelihoods from some form of agricultural activity.  The vast majority (typically in the 80-90% range) will answer questions about those two points correctly on a test.  However, if I ask them how the soil quality of Africa might impact African livelihoods, the correct response rate plunges into the 60%.  They can regurgitate.  But they can’t work with information anymore.
This is what a focus on data, competencies and evaluation will turn universities into – because there is no good evaluative tool for capturing critical thinking, and because this sort of thinking has become greatly undervalued by a lot of society.  But we are slowly killing our democracy by gutting this fundamental underpinning of what it means to be a citizen – the right to express oneself doesn’t mean much if you have nothing interesting or important to say.  The right to hear others speak, and to read nearly whatever author you might want, doesn’t mean much if you cannot sit down and parse out the messages conveyed and decide how best to evaluate and use them.  If this is where we are headed, we are in serious trouble.
Let’s figure out where the real changes in cost are coming from, assess their magnitude, and publicize both bits of information as much as possible.  Let’s make sure legislatures are forced to accept the blame for rising tuitions when those tuitions are rising to make up for lost state revenues – at the University of South Carolina, the bookstore is now a more important source of revenue than the state (really), yet the legislature gets away with blaming the university and some form of phantom costs for rising tuitions.  The public needs to understand that a public good is being turned into a private responsibility, and the very functioning of our society is at stake.

Posted on by Ed 1

What else we don't know about adaptation

RealClimate had an interesting post the other day about adaptation – specifically, how we bring together models that operate at the global-to-regional scales with an understanding of current and future impacts of climate change, which we feel at the local scale. This post was written from a climate science perspective – and so focuses on modeling capabilities and needs as related to the biophysical world.  In doing so, I think that one key uncertainty in our use of downscaled models for adaptation planning is huge – the likely pathways of human response to changes in the climate over the next several decades.  In places like sub-Saharan Africa, how people respond to climate change will have impacts on land use decisions, and therefore land cover . . . and land cover is a key component of local climate.  In other words, as we downscale climate models, we need to start adding new types of data to them – social data on adaptation decision-making, so that we might project plausible future pathways and build them into these downscaled models.
For example, many modeling exercises currently suggest that a combination of temperature increases and changes in the amount and pattern of rainfall in parts of southern Africa will make it very difficult to raise maize there over the next few decades.  This is a major problem, as maize is a staple of the region.  So, what will people do?  Will they continue to grow maize that is less hardy and takes up less CO2 and water as it grows, will they switch to a crop that takes up more CO2 than maize ever did, or will they begin to abandon the land and migrate to cities, creating pockets of fallow land and/or opening a frontier for mechanized agriculture (both outcomes likely to have significant impacts on greenhouse gas emissions and water cycling, among other things)?  Simply put, we don’t really know.  But we need to know, and we need to know with reasonably high resolution.  That is, it is not enough to simply say “they will stop planting maize and plant X.”  We need to know when this transition will take place.  We need to know if it will happen suddenly or gradually.  We need to know if that transition will itself be sustainable going forward, or if other changes will be needed in the near future.  All of this information needs to be part of iterative model runs that capture land cover changes and biogeochemical cycling changes associated with these decisions to better understand future local pathways of climate change impacts and the associated likely adaptation pathways that these populations will occupy.
The good news* is that I am on this – along with my colleague Brent McCusker at West Virginia University (see pubs here and here).  Between the two of us, we’ve developed a pretty solid understanding of adaptation and livelihoods decision-making, and have spent a good bit of time theorizing the link between land use change and livelihoods change to enable the examination of the issues I have raised above.  We have a bit of money from NSF to run a pilot this summer (Brent will manage this while I am a government employee), and I plan to spend next year working on how to integrate this research program into the global climate change programming of my current employer.
Long and short: climate modelers, you need us social scientists, now more than ever.  We’re here to work with you . . .
*Calling this good news presumes that you see me as competent, or at least that you see Brent as competent enough to make up for my incompetence.

Posted on by Ed 0