Adrian Fenton, writing on the website of IIED (whose work I generally like), seems to be pushing the idea that community-based adaptation (that is, adaptation that builds upon/strengthens strategies employed at the local scale) and microfinance go hand-in-hand. I am not so sure this is a good idea – I feel like IIED has missed a fundamental point here – for most of the developing world, livelihoods are about avoiding and managing risks and challenges – and then capitalizing on any surplus that might come about after managing those risks. As many have noted, this largely risk-averse approach to making a living hugely constrains opportunity because you cannot employ all of your resources in an effort to engage in markets/work off the farm/what have you – you have to effectively waste a bunch of them guarding against events that often don’t happen. One way in which this happens, which I lay out in my book and have discussed on this blog, is when people set up their livelihoods in a manner that allows them to temporarily deglobalize when markets turn against them. This effectively requires holding back resources from market sale in case you have to rely on them directly. For example, farmers who keep the deglobalization option open in their livelihoods hold back a portion of their labor from market engagement as they dedicate time to planting and raising food crops that might be used for subsistence purposes if the markets turn.
Given this fundamental characteristic of so many livelihoods that we see in the Global South, it seems to me that coupling adaptation (current community- and household-level livelihoods are, in effect, adaptation efforts that go on continuously) with microfinance applies the wrong medicine to the problem – people don’t need more capital, they need a way to free up the various resources they already have from the necessary conservativism of their current livelihoods strategies. Adding loans, even small loans, to the current livelihoods mix simply increases risk without necessarily providing benefits that offset that risk.
Instead, it seems to me we ought to be shifting our focus toward microinsurance and away from microfinance – microinsurance provides the safety net that enables risk-taking at the household and community level, and therefore empowers people to use their existing resources in the manner they best see fit. In short, it allows us to meet some of the financial requirements for adaptation without having to create new financial vehicles, and new forms of risk in already-stressed livelihoods. This is a much more direct means of addressing the challenges to local livelihoods posed by climate change impacts and raising the capital needed to address future risks, rather than offering seed capital, hoping the business/effort works out with enough profit to pay back the loan and provide a large surplus that might then be employed to address climate change.
This strikes me as the adaptation and development version of Occam’s razor – when evaluating plans for future adaptation efforts, select the one that requires the fewest new institutions and steps to raise the capital/resources necessary to meet future challenges.
Category: policy
Connecting aid and development – good news
The other day I posted on the need to reorient how we think about relief work, especially disaster risk reduction (DRR), if we are to connect relief to development, and DRR to adaptation. Well, for those who share my concerns, I have good news. I’m on the US Government review panel for the IPCC’s Special Report on Extreme Weather Events (SREX), which means I just got four second order drafts of chapters for the report. They are brutally long and detailed . . . and they are fantastic. They are an amazing effort to link disaster risk reduction (DRR) and the way that relief folks think about the world to adaptation and the way development people think. I can’t excerpt the report yet (not for circulation, and besides, not yet out of the review process), but I think it is safe to say I can shelve the report I thought I was going to have to co-author with a colleague at work about the DRR-to-adaptation link. We’ll just condense this into a few pages and make it something the agency and missions can wrap their heads around.
Seriously, those in academia will be able to teach from this report – and to be honest, it should be required reading for anyone employed by one of the large agencies that does both development and relief – and that includes all of those who work for “implementing partners.” How often can you say that about an assessment report?
I’ll post when the document goes public – I have no idea what the timeline is, except that we are managing the comments on the second order draft, which typically means we are getting down to the end of the process.
Thinking in parallel on unfettered globalization
I’ve not posted a lot on globalization, per se, on this blog of late . . . but I was really taken by Steven Pearlstein’s review of Dani Rodrik’s The Globalization Paradox in last Sunday’s Washington Post. I have not read Rodrik’s book, but if Pearlstein’s review is accurate, I think I find myself in his camp on the subject. There were a few passages in this review that I really liked, if for no other reason than they sound a lot like what I wrote in my book. But I particularly liked this bit of Pearlstein on Rodrik:
Globalization, by its very nature, is disruptive—it rearranges where and how work is done and where and how profits are made. Things that are disruptive, of course, are destabilizing and create large pools of winners and losers.
Now, from chapter 1 of Delivering Development:
The integration of local economies, politics, and society into global networks is not the unmitigated boon to human well- being presented by many authors. Those living along the shores of globalization deal with significant challenges in their lives, such as degrading environments, social inequality that limits opportunity for significant portions of society, and inadequate medical care. The integration of these places into a global economy does not necessarily solve these problems. In the best cases such integration provides new sources of income that might be used to address some of these challenges. In nearly all cases, however, such integration also brings new challenges and uncertainties that come at a cost to people’s incomes and well- being.
This is some interesting thinking in parallel – anyone got Rodrik’s email? I need to get a copy of the book, and the hours needed to read it.
Measuring poverty to address climate change
Otaviano Canuto, the World Bank’s Vice President for Poverty Reduction, had an interesting post on HuffPo yesterday in which he argues that we cannot understand the true cost of climate change until we can better measure poverty – “as long as we are unable to measure the poverty impact of climate change, we run the risk of either overestimating or underestimating the resources that will be needed to face it.” I agree – we do not have a particularly good handle on the economic costs of climate change right now, just loose estimates that I fear are premised on misunderstandings of life in the Global South (I have an extended discussion of this problem in the second half of my book).
However, I find the phrasing of this concern a bit tortured – we need to better understand the impact of climate change on poverty so we can figure out how much it will cost us to solve the problem . . . but which problem? Climate change or poverty? Actually, I think this tortured syntax leads us to a more productive place than a focus on either problem – just as I am pretty sure we can’t address poverty for most living in the Global South unless we do something about climate change (which I think is what Canuto was after), I don’t think you can address climate change without addressing poverty. As I argue in my book:
Along globalization’s shoreline the effects of climate change are felt much more immediately and more directly than in advanced economies. More and more, as both climate change and economic change impact their capacity to raise the food and money they need to get through each day, residents of this shoreline find themselves forced into trade-offs they would rather not make.
For example, most of the farmers in Dominase and Ponkrum agree that deforestation lowers the agricultural productivity of their farms, due to both the loss of local precipitation that accompanies deforestation and the loss of shade that enables the growth of sensitive crops, such as cocoa. At the same time, the sound of chainsaws can still be heard around these villages every once in a while, as a head of lineage allows someone from town to cut down one of the few remaining trees in the area for a one-time payment of a few hundred dollars. These heads of family know that in allowing the cutting of trees they are mortgaging the future fertility of this land, but they see little other choice when crops do not come in as expected or jobs are hard to find.
From a global perspective, this example may not seem that dire. After all, when one tree falls, the impact on the global carbon cycle is minuscule. However, if similar stresses and decisions result in the cutting of thousands of trees each day, the impact can be significant. All along the shoreline, people are forced into this sort of trade-off every day, and in their decision- making the long-term conservation of needed natural resources usually falls by the wayside.
Simply put, we have no means of measuring or even estimating the aggregate effect of many, many small livelihoods choices and the land use impacts of those choices, yet in aggregate these will have impacts on regional and global biophysical processes. When we fail to address poverty, and force the global poor into untenable decisions about resource use and conservation, we create conditions that will give us more climate change. If we don’t do a better job of measuring poverty and the relationship of the livelihoods and land use decision-making of the poor (something I have addressed here), we are going to be caught by surprise by some of the biophysical changes that persistent poverty might trigger.
From Humanitarian Assistance to Development (or not)
I spend a lot of time thinking about the divide between humanitarian assistance (HA) and development – and contrary to what some would tell you, there is a significant divide there. I am, by training, a development person – at least, that is how I tend to think. I’ve no experience in the HA world – I have not done academic work on disasters and emergencies, nor do I have field experience addressing either. Yet I find myself serving a fellowship in the HA Bureau of the world’s largest development agency, trying to find ways to better connect our HA efforts and our development efforts – like everyone else in this world, we have all kinds of problems fitting these two worlds together: delayed handoffs, no handoff at all, programs that have no bearing on one another, making planned handoffs impossible, etc.
Working specifically in the area of climate change, the gulf between HA and development work has become really striking. I’ve been trying to find ways to bridge the HA/development divide via adaptation – thinking about how things like disaster risk reduction and our best practices for relief and recovery might be aligned with adaptation programming to create at least one threat that pulls us coherently from emergency intervention to long-term transformation. What I have come to realize, in this process, is that the issue of climate change highlights the different cultures of HA and development, at least in this organization.
Simply put, it is not clear to me that the HA side of things has asked or answered the most basic of all questions: what problem are we trying to solve by addressing GCC issues? Right now the only thing that seems to resonate with the HA side of the house is the idea that we work on climate change to reduce the need for future humanitarian intervention. While important, that is not a development goal – that is the outcome of achieving other development goals that might lead to more resilient societies with lower sensitivity to and greater adaptive capacity for addressing climate change impacts. To pull HA and development together around the climate change issue requires thinking about HA programming as furthering development goals – and this, quite simply, is not how most HA folks with which I interact see themselves or their work. Instead, these folks seem to view the task of humanitarian intervention and crisis management as a goal unto itself. If you think I am off-base, take the explanation I got from a (ranking) member of an HA office when he was asked about his office’s limited office’s participation in the planning phase of country development strategies: “That’s DA (development assistance) money. We program HA (humanitarian assistance) money.” Really. That was the response. Welcome to my world. Oh, and the world of a hell of a lot of people in this field, given how many implementing partners we fund.
So you can see the challenge here in linking things via adaptation. Let’s look at disaster risk reduction (DRR), programming typically handled by HA organizations and specialists. To link hydrometeorological DRR efforts (think floods and droughts) to adaptation planning requires seeing DRR as more than an end unto itself – DRR would have to fit into larger programs that contribute to development goals which have the overall effect of lowering vulnerability and therefore the need for future humanitarian intervention. This is not how the HA community I interact with approaches DRR. Instead, DRR is programmed in the context of specific HA assessments, and with HA-specific goals that may or may not align in any meaningful way with the much broader, longer-term project that is adaptation.
The gulf between HA and development is, therefore, probably only close-able if those on the HA side of the house are willing to reorient themselves toward larger development goals . . . and at least where I sit, that is not going to happen for both cultural reasons and reasons of mandate. This is a serious problem – we need to close this gap, or we will prolong the programming of HA in places where a decent, coherent program of HA-development planning might get us out of a spiral of disasters. I see HA as a foundation of development – something that could be built on to create robust change – but this will only be true when the HA side of the house decides it wants to be that foundation.
Satellite Sentinels: We can do better than this (but it won't be as sexy)
The Satellite Sentinel Project released a report the other day that detailed what appears to be violence in the villages of Maker Abior and Todach in the Abeyei region of Sudan. The imagery in the report is fairly standard DigitalGlobe 60cm stuff – and nothing fancy has been done to it to enhance analysis – it’s not clear if the imagery is even georectified, though given its largely illustrative use it probably doesn’t matter. In the images are clearly burned buildings, and what certainly appear to be fortified areas where the Sudan Armed Forces are moving in equipment, fortifying defenses and improving storage facilities. They claim to have imagery related to a parallel buildup of forces on the South Sudan side of the border.
But what do these images really tell us that good, on-the-ground intelligence does not? Nothing. In fact, I would argue that these images might be leading to unwarranted conclusions . . . or the Satellite Sentinel Project needs to do a much better job of explaining how the imagery enhances their conclusions. For example:
- How are the structures on the South Sudan side of the border representative of military buildup? Do they share a construction or layout with other known military encampments? Or is this conclusion completely supplied by on-the-ground intelligence? If the answer is the latter, what exactly to these images add to the analysis?
- How are the burned structures in Maker Abior and Todach linked to the military buildup in the subsequent pictures? There is no imagery of an attack in progress – and there will likely never be this sort of smoking gun evidence from this project. Data is gathered irregularly, and often at fairly wide intervals – so what you will end up with are a lot of before and after photos that can only be explained by on the ground intelligence. In this case, it seems the on-the-ground intelligence has provided (at best) a weak link between this buildup and whatever happened in Maker Abior and Todach . . . but in presenting the imagery in this sort of a sequence, it appears that the evidence for the connection is much stronger than the data allows.
These are major issues that the project should be thinking through carefully. Inadvertent misrepresentation of events on the ground will greatly damage not only this project’s legitimacy, but indeed any efforts to use remotely sensed data to identify/verify events on the ground in this region.
Please note: I am NOT suggesting that there is no violence in the region, or that what is happening isn’t hugely problematic. However, I want our interpretations and responses to be based upon clear evidence, not loose circumstantial data strung together into potentially flimsy arguments about what has happened, and what might happen next.
So, what can we do about the problems in this region with this sort of data? Well, for one thing the project might think about how to use its considerable remotely-sensed imagery resources to fill some significant gaps in data and interpretation about the political economy of natural resources in this region. Abeyei has a long history of conflict between different groups using natural resources for their livelihoods – especially conflicts that occur when pastoral/semipastoral groups move their cattle through agricultural areas, damaging fields (this is a thin distinction – really, most everyone in this region makes a living through a mixture of pastoralism and agriculture. The question is which group’s crops are impacted by the other’s cattle.). This may be one of the most significant challenges facing this region – how to address this ongoing challenge, especially once there is a border dividing the transhumance routes these different groups have used to move their cattle to new watering and feeding areas. Given the potential impact of a border on these routes, and therefore access to needed natural resources, we’ve already seen the Dinka to the south and the Messiriya to the north laying out territorial and resources claims far in excess of any previously recognized situation. It is nearly impossible to adjudicate these claims because, as my colleague David Decker at the University of South Carolina – Sumter has argued, there is very little literature on the political ecology of this region. The bulk of our understanding of natural resources, livelihoods and political economy that we do have are derived from colonial accounts more than a half century old. With good intelligence, some serious on-the-ground research and the mobilization of people like David, and the integration of satellite imagery of the region that we can use to analyze (no more pretty pictures, just serious analysis) things like land cover, soil moisture, biomass, etc. we might at least create a stopgap for this knowledge gap that can then enable a settlement in this area that meets the widest range of livelihoods needs possible, lowering the potential for future conflict.
Vacating our terms: What is a MIC anyway?
I had the good fortune to be invited to a presentation by Andy Sumner at the Center for Global Development on Thursday – a senior staff lunch presentation, actually. So CGD was very kind in having me along. I really enjoyed the atmosphere – it was nice to be back around a room full of very smart people who spend a lot of time thinking about the issue of development, and who clearly enjoy pushing each other and the ideas in the room. Andy had a small novel’s worth of comments to consider by the end, but it was a really constructive pile of ideas.
Andy has come to a bit of fame recently for pointing out that what Collier called The Bottom Billion, really poor people more or less trapped in a few dozen very poor countries, no longer really works to describe the world (his paper is here). If that bottom billion existed in the late 1990s when Collier was writing, today it seems that there is a new bottom billion, living in middle income countries (MICs) – indeed, the majority of the very poor globally are found in MICs. The discussion around the presentation focused on everything from issues of data and method that led to this conclusion to wider policy concerns about whether or not this shift signals the end of grant-based aid because it will be politically infeasible to give (as opposed to lend) money to middle income countries (some of which have large cash reserves) for poverty alleviation – that aid to the very poor will have to shift to market-based lending.
I walked away from the presentation and discussion struck by something else: the term Middle Income Country is pointless. If Angola is a middle income country, and Ghana is about to be reclassified as such because of its new oil revenues, we might as well just chuck the typology. While GINI data (a measure of income inequality within a country) is tough to come by right now, it seems to me that a lot of the countries that have recently made the jump to middle income, yet still house a tremendous number of the “bottom billion” (i.e. India, China, Nigeria, and Indonesia), are clearly making that jump by enhancing inequality within their borders. This means that the basis for this shift in classification is not widespread through the country or its population – which opens up another question that is analytically crucial to understanding the likely future for aid to the poorest of the poor: on what basis did these countries make the jump to middle income status, what is the current structure of the economy, and to what is that jump, and the current economy, vulnerable. The impetus for aid grants disappears only if we assume that the gains made by these countries are widespread through the population and robust enough to withstand pressures and shocks that might push them back to low income status. I have my serious doubts that many places making the jump and becoming MICs can say either with confidence – climate change and a tightly interlinked global economy will challenge many of these economies in significant ways that will compromise their abilities to address the needs of the poorest within their borders. However, without addressing the needs of this portion of the population these countries will put their social, economic and environmental futures at risk. Now, perhaps more than ever, we need to be focused on fostering safety and certainty for the world’s most vulnerable, to ensure that a country making the jump to MIC status has achieved something meaningful and durable.
Liveblogging Dead Aid: Enough is enough
My efforts to liveblog my reading of Dead Aid have run aground on the reality of my life – I have a full-time job and a couple of things from my academic life that require my attention. That, and I admit to such frustration with the book that I start to question the purpose of my efforts – I saw this exercise as an effort to provide a detailed, reasonable critique of the book as I was reading it, and to offer redress as best as I could. However, as I have gone deeper and deeper into the book, I have come to realize that a serious effort to address and correct the numerous issues in this book was likely to consume another short book’s worth of space. I have another book or two worth of writing in me, but not on this topic. So, I will finish with this post, which covers the remaining chapters of the book in a more abbreviated fashion . . .
Chapter 6
p.80: Yes, emerging markets seem to offer higher returns on investment – and they are often countercyclical to economies of developed countries. But this does not automatically make them useful hedge tools. Moyo seems to ignore the fact that most emerging economies have a limited capacity to address shocks, which means that a minor event for a diversified economy can lead to horrendous outcomes in a smaller, less diversified economy. For example, concerns over how the Europeans were going to define chocolate, which might have changed global demand for cocoa, wracked Ghana’s economy in 1999-2000 because cocoa was such a huge part of that economy. This makes bond offerings inherently risky, even for well-governed developing countries like Ghana – even a well-governed country can’t do much about global market fluctuations in their primary commodity. So these markets are quite a bit dicier as hedge instruments than Moyo seems to want to admit. There’s a reason money isn’t pouring into these places . . .
p.81: Moyo’s discussion of credit ratings for countries is amusing . . . in that she has chosen not to discuss how much of a disaster the rating agencies turned out to be in the US market for real estate products. Credit rating agencies are not arbiters of truth.
p.82: Good, she notes that these economies are indeed quite fragile and subject to unique stresses. However, she does not offer any real way to address these challenges – the idea that we are “over” the sorts of panics that lead to contagion (when problems in one place lead investors to question their holdings in other places), and therefore any big shock to an economy won’t trigger wider problems within that economy or surrounding economies, is empirically problematic.
p.87: Moyo addresses the issue of default, but it’s a whitewash that makes it sound like bond markets won’t really mind. Even if this were true, she fails to grasp that many causes of default will not be addressed by reform issues in markets – as long as developing countries are natural-resource dependent and not particularly diversified, they will be at risk from default . . . and defaults will keep them from diversifying away from natural resource dependence. This is one of the many reasons why aid is important!
Chapter 7
This chapter strikes me as completely divorced from reality. Her treatment of concerns over the surge in Chinese interest in Africa casts them solely as short sighted concerns with China’s lack of conditionality on its loans – that is, people who object to Chinese engagement in Africa do so because China does not demand certain kinds of political or market changes along with its loans (some term these reforms, but the history of structural adjustment makes that term somewhat farcical). She dismisses the idea that many Africans are mistrustful of the Chinese, casting these concerns as a continuation of longstanding paternalistic attitudes toward Africa. She shores up this very thin argument by citing poll data to argue that the residents of many countries view the Chinese in a positive light. First, I would love to know the source of these data – she does not point to a source in the text. The reason I am interested is because I work in two countries where the view of the Chinese is not at all positive – Ghana and Malawi. I’m curious why the mistrust and concern I see in those countries is not manifest elsewhere. Second, assuming these poll numbers are valid, just because people have a positive view of China (or, at least a relatively more positive view of China than the US) does not mean that they are benefiting from Chinese involvement in their economy. This still has to be demonstrated. Moyo makes no effort to address this issue in her argument.
Finally, how can she talk about Chinese involvement and not address the issue of agriculture? This is where the real land-grabbing is going on. It is absolutely clear that the Chinese are investing in countries with arable land, and helping to build infrastructure to access that land. They are setting Africa up as China’s farm of the future – and that is not going to diversify African economies. It will simply perpetuate the challenges that Africa is already trying to address, and that Moyo seems to believe Chinese investment will solve.
Chapter 8
I must say that this was one of the better chapters in the book – well, the first half. Pages 114-119 are a good, concise review of trade barriers that hinder African development. Then Moyo lapses into pro-Chinese argumentation that suffers from the same problems I saw in Chapter 7 – a sort of “the-Chinese-will-save-us” attitude. Interestingly, while she recognizes the serious challenges that Africa’s limited infrastructure poses for industrial development and economic diversification, she completely ignores the role that aid might play in building out such infrastructure. Instead, she seems to think that African countries should take out much higher interest loans in the private markets (because this would improve the country’s reputation on global markets, which would enable future loans . . . but does nothing to really explain why anyone should take a higher-interest loan and turn down aid in the first place), or trust external investors to work with them to build the infrastructure they need . . . which is something of a return to colonialism – after all, mother countries did build infrastructure in their colonies – just the infrastructure needed to ensure the continued export of valuable resources. Incidentally, anyone paying attention to Chinese investment in Africa can see exactly this sort of behavior taking hold . . . but Moyo is either willfully blind to it, or does not know her history very well. This is another example of a recurrent problem with this book: in the end, it is a political argument that selectively mobilizes its data to support those politics while ignoring anything that might contradict the argument. The real challenges of African development are much more complex than she presents, and the likely solutions are going to require more than just capital investments.
Chapter 9
The first part of the chapter focuses on microfinance. It lays out the basic concept, and goes through the usual Grameen example. It also lays out an interesting Zambian adaptation of the idea. However, she dismisses a growing body of work that criticizes microfinance in a really shallow paragraph on 129-130, arguing that excessive interest rates will be reduced by competition (but doesn’t discuss where competition will come from, or if there is even room for competition in many microfinance-sheds – margins are pretty tiny in microfinance, even at high interest rates) and that borrowers forced into Ponzi situations (using one loan to pay off another, instead of productively investing it) will eventually go away as better information about their repayment rates becomes available (without discussing where that information will come from, or what to do about the honest farmer caught by an environmental or economic shock). It is distressing that she completely ignores the very large literature on microfinance’s failures in sub-Saharan Africa.
The discussion of remittances is interesting, but ends with a really weak recognition that they are really aid in another form – and they are justified because they reach the poor don’t increase corruption (but again, no substantiation of this).
Yes, Africa needs more savings – but this is a long-term problem in development that many have wrestled with. Acting as if this is revelatory, and failing to address the efforts to enable and spur savings that have and have not worked, does little to further the discussion. In this discussion, and that on the Grameen Bank, I find myself wondering (as I have many times in this book) whether the problem is that she really doesn’t know about these critical literatures, or she is strategically ignoring them to make her work seem more new and important. Either answer speaks to deep intellectual irresponsibility.
Chapter 10
p.140: I find it interesting that Moyo thinks private loans would not be stolen, because any corruption would lock down future loans. This may be true (though I have my doubts), but if it is a large enough loan, and enables a single act of massive theft, a corrupt leader might make a calculated decision to steal a lot out of that loan even if it leaves their country in the lurch. Private markets might not encourage repeated theft, but if they cannot prevent the first act of theft (which guarantees an unrepayable loan) and then, after that theft, cut off all outside sources of revenue for the country, the net impact on that country’s economy is more or less the same – unrepayable debt and no new sources of income to build productive projects to generate revenue and pay that debt. I just don’t buy the “private markets solve governance issues” argument at all.
p.147: Here it becomes clear that labeling Moyo the “anti-Sachs” is a joke. All along, she’s suffered from the single greatest failing of Sachs – staggering intellectual hubris. On this page, she says something that echoes the words of Sachs: “Development is not a mystery; each of the elements of the Dead Aid proposal has been tried and tested and yielded success – and governments and policymakers know it.” This is the same argument, more or less, that Sachs made in The End of Poverty and subsequent work: we know how to do development, we just choose not to. This is an awful ad hominem attack on a lot of good, smart people trying to further development around the world. The fact is that there are not tried and tested methods of bringing development about – if there were, WE WOULD USE THEM! But neither Sachs nor Moyo really understand development as a discipline – its history and theories – and so they are free to make staggeringly arrogant statements. Of course, the failure of the MVP is giving Sachs his comeuppance . . . who knows what will bring Moyo around.
p.149: Wait, did she just suggest that the average African wants to overthrow aid regimes, but are held back by the force of the state? Are you joking? Anyone who has spent time studying recent African history (or the old discipline of peasant studies) knows that starving the population is never sufficient to generate revolt, so the persistence of deep poverty is not evidence for the coercive force of the state.
p.151: Good lord, she’s othering her own continent – really, she’s referring to the “four horses of Africa’s apocalypse – corruption, disease, poverty and war.” I feel like I am reading a travel narrative from the late 19th Century, or most anything written by Robert Kaplan. Why not just start quoting Heart of Darkness and get it over with?
And, in summary, her plan seems to be: turn off aid over a five year period, and the problems will work themselves out. It’s really that easy!
Oh wait, it’s not.
+++++++++
Well, that’s that. Having spilled many thousands of words on this book, and having tried to read it with an eye toward constructively reworking it, I find very little recoverable here. It is, in the end, a short, semi-coherent work of staggering intellectual hubris that sees little need to take seriously the history of development efforts, the talents of those working in development, the wide range of evidence for and against her proposals, or indeed any of the complexity of the real world. This, in sum, is what happens when an investment banker decides to tell development and aid experts how to do their jobs.
I now have much greater sympathy for those in the markets who get angry and frustrated with development/aid worker misreadings of speculation in food markets to argue that all speculation is bad and should be banned – here we have development and aid specialists presuming to lecture the markets on their behavior. If nothing else, we should take a lesson from this book and make sure that when we do engage with market actors, we are informed enough to make intelligent arguments that contribute to the conversation. Dead Aid, in the end, is not a contribution to conversations about development for those of us who actually do the work – it is a non-sequitur that does not deserve the attention it has received, or any further attention.
On Egypt and the administration
While this is somewhat off the subject of development and global change (well, I suppose revolution in a country as pivotal as Egypt could count as the latter), I feel a need to chime in with an opinion on the role of the Obama administration and recent events in Egypt. It’s been noted all over the place that the administration has seemed behind the curve and ineffectual throughout the entire Egyptian revolution. This, of course, is based on public statements that seriously hedged the American position and clearly responded/reacted to events on the ground as they developed – the result, was a series of statements that shifted rather dramatically from weak support for Mubarak to stronger and stronger support for his removal.
I’d like to offer a few thoughts here – and they are just thoughts. I have no special sources or insights here, except as someone who works in the international realm and within the government and therefore has some familiarity with how things really get done. I am not, however, suggesting that the following is in any way to be seen as me reporting on things that I know to have happened behind the scenes – simply put, my security clearance doesn’t go that high, even if I wanted to know.
Simply put, I don’t think the administration was as out of the loop and reactive as people think. I’ve found it surprising that most who have noted the very close ties between the US and Egyptian militaries have largely limited discussion to noting that the Egyptians are armed largely with American weapons. Oddly, nobody has really been talking about the information black hole that developed around the Pentagon over the past three weeks – they stopped talking, almost entirely. That is unusual. Further, it is clear that the Egyptian military wavered at least once during this revolution, and looked like it might throw in with the Mubarak regime, at least until the next election. Yet they did not tip over – and surely part of this is because the military is drawn from a broad segment of Egyptian society, and was therefore very, very unlikely to fire on its own citizenry. But does anyone think that the Pentagon wasn’t working full time behind the scenes through every communications channel it had to the Egyptian military? In the end, the United States arms and offers training to the Egyptians, which gives us enormous formal and informal clout with their military. Does anyone really think that, after the first few days of the revolution, the Pentagon wasn’t delivering the message that Mubarak had to go? Did we have any other lever of change after the first few days? The answer to all of the above, for me, is no. We had no diplomatic lever to effect any change in Egypt after the first few days, once Mubarak turned defiant and started using the “foreign meddling” theme as a means of self-defense. This is not Secretary Clinton’s fault – I’ve been deeply impressed with her work relative to more or less everyone who has occupied her seat over the past 10-15 years. She just had no levers or influence once the diplomatic tide turned. But our military always had pull . . . and I am certain that the administration knew this and used this, calibrating its public statements to stay off the toes of the informal, unacknowledged communications that were going on between the Pentagon and Egypt’s military leadership. This is pragmatism at its finest – it doesn’t matter how it gets done, or who gets the credit, but I strongly believe that the Obama administration played this one about as well as it could, and was probably a lot more effective than most folks realize.
Someone will write a history of this 20 years from now, when the FOI requests are easier to fulfill, and we will have a much better sense of what really happened. I suspect the account will be kinder to the administration than much contemporary writing . . .
Necessary adjustments – but quant and qual still meet
The other day, I posted about the convergence between my own qualitative findings on the food security outcomes of food price instability and those of Marc Bellemare, Chris Barrett and David Just: that, at least in various parts of Africa, such instability was most likely to impact the middle and upper income cohorts more than the lower income cohorts of a given population. However, I jumped too quickly in assuming that their dataset included rural and urban households – as Marc pointed out on his blog, they used a panel of rural household surveys. So my initial argument about convergence does not hold up, as they did not consider the urban context in their work.
This is not to say that I am backing away from my assessment of the vulnerabilities of urban populations to this sort of challenge – I stand by it, having seen it, if only anecdotally, in towns and cities in Ghana over the past 13 years. Urban populations are generally much more dependent on markets for their food supply than those living in rural areas (though this is not always true), and therefore price instability does create significant livelihoods uncertainty that is very difficult to manage, especially for the urban poor. I therefore stand by my argument that we need to be keeping a close eye on the relative impact of price volatility on urban and rural populations, as the impacts of such volatility is likely to have very different impacts on these groups.
But recognizing that Bellemare et al’s work only addresses rural outcomes is not a problem for my argument about what I am loosely calling temporary deglobalization as a strategy for managing price instability (and price increases) – indeed, I think it strengthens the argument because it means that their dataset is now commensurate with mine, which was also rural. As I argued in an extended comment on Marc’s blog:
The rural farmers most hit by price instability are those most integrated with global markets – the ones least able to deglobalize, as it were, when things get uncertain . . . Meanwhile, the bottom 60% is not as engaged with markets in which price volatility matters, and therefore can back away from them in terms of how they use their crops. In my work in Ghana, I found very few true cash crops (in the area I was working). Instead, some crops were treated like “cash crops” in years where price conditions and farm outputs of staple crops were favorable, and as staple crops when either prices were not favorable (including periods of volatility) or outputs of other staples used for subsistence were not adequate to meet household food needs. (Note: in many cases, the treatment of a crop as “cash” or “staple/subsistence” was highly gendered as well). The real difference between the rich and poor (relative terms in the Ghana sample) is the overall livelihoods strategy – one strategy (seen among the wealthier) is much, much more engaged in production for local markets, while the other (seen among the poorer) hedged market production with significant subsistence production (again, highly gendered). In years of volatility (or really in the face of most shocks), the market-oriented livelihoods were simply less resilient than the more diversified livelihoods strategies of the poorer households.
Or, as Marc himself noted in his response to my post on his blog:
[The wealthier] households tend to be hurt by price volatility because they are producers and therefore net sellers of most of (if not all) the seven commodities retained for analysis (i.e., coffee, maize, beans, wheat, teff, barley, sorghum).
So this means that the “temporary deglobalization” argument is not merely a rural-versus-urban argument, but one that can separate households in the same rural community. This, I think, strengthens one of the arguments I was making in my original post:
- Demanding that rural producers orient themselves toward greater and greater integration with global markets in the absence of robust fallback measures (such as established, transparent microinsurance and microsavings initiatives) will likely extend the impact of future price instability further into the poorest populations.