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.
Tag: adaptation
From the aid/development divide to the climate change/development divide
I’ve been going on quite a bit about how we envision the relationship between aid and development – or perhaps more appropriately, how we do not really envision that transition, but assume that it simply happens – quite a bit lately. But pressing on my mind during my work life is the relationship between climate change and development – how do mitigation and adaptation efforts relate to development? The answer, of course, is that they relate to development in many different ways. For example, mitigation efforts include things like land use, which can impact existing agricultural practices, and constrain (or sometimes enable) the options available to the designers of agricultural development projects. Adaptation efforts emphasize the prevention of negative outcomes, a form of coping, but unless this relationship is explicitly considered they do not necessarily rhyme with development projects that seek to build on existing resources and capacity to improve people’s situations.
(I confess that I am deeply concerned that development is rapidly being subsumed under adaptation in some quarters, which is a real problem as they have two different missions. To refocus development projects on adaptation is to shift from an effort to improve someone’s situation to an effort to help them hang on to what little they might have. But this is a post for a different day.)
There is a danger, in this era of enhanced attention and funding toward climate change, of using climate change funds to continue doing the same development work as we were doing before, only under a new label (i.e. calling agricultural development “agricultural adaptation”, then using climate change funds to support that program even though nothing about it has really changed). It is an annoying habit of people in agencies, who are often cash- and personnel-strapped, to try to use new initiatives to support their existing projects. There is also a danger, in places where climate change has a greater emphasis than development, that development dollars aimed at particular challenges will be repurposed to the end of addressing climate change, thus negatively impacting the original development goal. A year ago, Bill Gates wrote warned against just such an outcome in his 2010 Annual Letter as co-chair of the Gates Foundation. On first read, it is a reasonable argument – and one that I largely agree with. We live in a world of finite donors, and new dollars to address climate change often have to come from some other pot of money funding another project or issue. These are difficult choices, and Gates has every right to argue that his pet interest, global health, should not lose funding in favor of climate change related efforts. However, his argument sets up a needless dichotomy between development/aid (in the form of public health funding) and efforts to address the impacts of climate change:
The final communiqué of the Copenhagen Summit, held last December, talks about mobilizing $10 billion per year in the next three years and $100 billion per year by 2020 for developing countries, which is over three quarters of all foreign aid now given by the richest countries.
I am concerned that some of this money will come from reducing other categories of foreign aid, especially health. If just 1 percent of the $100 billion goal came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases. In the long run, not spending on health is a bad deal for the environment because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment.
Well, sort of. I could make a pretty brutal counterargument – not spending on health, such as HIV/AIDS leads to a lot of deaths in the productive segment of the population pyramid, leaving a lot of fallow land to recover its nonagricultural ecological functions. This sort of land use change is actually visible in places like Swaziland, but very hard to quantify because the studies aren’t there yet – nobody wants to be seen as potentially supporting this sort of nightmarish conservation argument. I certainly don’t – but that is not my point. My point was that Gates’ argument is pretty thin.
In making a political point, Gates is being a bit selective about the relationship between climate change and health. What he is completely ignoring is the fact that mitigation efforts might limit the future range of disease vectors for any number of illnesses, thus saving tremendous numbers of lives. This is especially true for diseases, like malaria, where a vaccine has proven elusive. Further, he ignores the ways in which coherent, participatory adaptation programs might address health issues (by managing everything from nutrition to sanitation) in an effective manner. While I am not arguing that mitigation and adaptation efforts could completely address the impacts caused by the loss of $1 billion in vaccination funding, his argument for 700,000 extra deaths* rests upon the assumption that nothing in the climate change portfolio will address the causes of such deaths through other means. He’s creating an either/or that does not exist.
Again, Gates is making a political point here – which is his right. But that political point sets up a false dichotomy between aid/development and efforts to address climate change that even Bjorn Lomborg has abandoned at this point. We can argue in the interest of our agencies and organizations all we want, but the problems we are trying to address are deeply interlinked, and in the end creating these false dichotomies, and claiming that one issue is THE issue that must be addressed, shortchanges the very constituencies we claim to be working with and working for.
*I must admit I loathe this sort of quantification – it is always based on horribly fuzzy math that, at best, is grounded in loose correlations between an action and a health outcome. I raise this issue and take it apart at length in my book . . .
On Aid and Development
An interesting post at Blood and Milk yesterday led a commenter to note that we shouldn’t use the terms “international development” and “aid” interchangeably – that the “real big story about development is exactly that it is NOT all about aid, but about domestic elites establishing pro-growth rules.”
For me, this raises two issues – the first is about the relationship between aid and development, and the second about the character of development itself. Alanna Shaikh, who writes the Blood and Milk blog, added a new post today that addressed the first. In this post, Shaikh argues “You can, and do, get development without aid. I’m pretty sure you don’t get it without economic growth.” Well, sort of. I currently work in one of the world’s largest development/aid organizations. I am the climate change coordinator for the Bureau most directly responsible for our aid activities (as opposed to our development activities). This puts me in something of an odd position – I am a development/environment person tasked with thinking and program-building for the long-term in an aid organization that is often reactive in its programming and its mandate. Why, then, did I take this position? Because of the need to better connect aid to development (and vice versa). Right now, aid and development exist in very different worlds – even in the same building, there is little communication or coordination between these two missions. This galls people on both sides of the divide, from leadership down the line. The vision of an agency like mine is that aid should transition to development, ideally seamlessly (though at this point we would take any sort of transition). Adaptation to climate change is one area where such transitions can be created out of existing programs – our aid teams work on hydrometeorological disaster risk reduction (DRR), and our development side works on adaptation to climate change. These are very similar areas of work, differentiated largely by timeframe. One of my jobs over the next few years will be to better connect our hydromet DRR and adaptation programming to build one connection between aid and development – a thread that we might use to close other aid/development gulfs (such as in food aid and agricultural development).
Aid may not be the same thing as development, but it should not be seen completely separately from development – my Bureau sees its constituency as that component of the population that is largely left behind by economic growth programming. Nobody debates that a significant percentage of the population slips through the cracks of economic development programming – our job is to ensure that those who slip through the cracks do not remain there, but have an opportunity to recover and participate in society, politics and the economy. So, when I hear someone argue that there can be development without aid, I strongly disagree – at least at the national scale (communities are a different issue). At the national scale, you cannot have socially or environmentally sustainable development that abandons a significant portion of society to its fate. Aid is critical to development – or it should be, if only we could better coordinate aid and development efforts.
Second, I am deeply concerned by the continued connection of development to economic growth. The linkages between human well-being and economic growth are shaky at best (most correlations can be readily challenged and dismantled) – largely because development, globalization and growth do not really work the way people seem to think they do (my book is an exploration of this point). Further, economic growth cannot be eternal. 3% growth per year for everyone forever is simply beyond the physical capacity of the planet. I’m pretty sure that development is going to have to detach itself from economic growth (ironically, this would mostly entail simply acknowledging the reality of what’s been happening around the world for the last 60 years) if it is ever to accomplish its end goal – the improvement of the human condition in this world.
Finally, a thought on the two metastories of development that Shaikh raises at the end of her post. I agree that development is neither all success or all failure – it plays out differently in different places, and we have better understandings of why in some areas (health, for example) than in others (transportation development, for example). I would argue that this is a symptom of a larger problem – we really don’t understand what is happening in the Global South most of the time, and as a result we are often measuring and analyzing the wrong things when we do project scoping or evaluation work. Our assumptions about how the world works shape the way we frame our questions about the world, and the data we gather to answer those questions. The problem, simply put, is that we are often asking the wrong question. Sure, every once in a while our assumptions align with events on the ground, and a project works. But the rest of the time, our assumptions do not align with reality, and we run into difficulty understanding what is happening in particular places, and why particular projects fail. The end result? A seeming random set of project outcomes, where things work in one place but not another for reasons that seem hard to discern. There are more fundamental metanarratives of development out there than success or failure – they are narratives about how globalization works and how development works that shape our very ability to assess success or failure. And those narratives actually misinform many of our best efforts.
And I'm back . . .
OK, page proofs are done. Index is mostly done . . . well, it is out of my hands, anyway. Jacket copy approved. Happy blurbs from Mickey Glantz and Andrew Rice secured for the jacket. Nice author photo for the jacket taken (by Scott). Yep, pretty much done here . . . which means I can now get back to hassling the internet. Wheeeee!
To celebrate, I bring you a completely unfair piece of insanity. I know I come to this late, but this is so nuts I simply could not let it go. Well, that and this may have a direct impact on my work life in the very near future . . . that’s right, it’s the battle for leadership of the House Energy and Commerce Committee! And why, you ask, does a fairly esoteric battle for what seems to be a marginal committee (it’s not) rise to my attention? Because one of the candidates, John Shimkus, is arguing that while climate change is real, we don’t have to do anything about it because, and I quote:
“I do believe in the Bible as the final word of God,” Shimkus said. “And I do believe that God said the Earth would not be destroyed by a flood” (via Politico)
By flood, I presume he means sea-level rise. And by Earth, I can only presume he means his great state of Illinois, which is a hell of a long way from the nearest ocean (though Great Lakes rise could cause serious problems for Chicago). I suspect there are a bunch of people in low-lying parts of Bangladesh and Vietnam, as well as a number of island states like Tuvalu, who are pretty much looking down the barrel of the world being destroyed by flood who might take issue with this particular mashup of climate science and the Bible, regardless of their religious background.
Holy crap.
This is old Bjorn Lomborg read through Genesis (new Bjorn Lomborg has reconsidered the math, and now thinks we should do something, though it is mostly adaptation) . . . and Rep. Shimkus might have some influence over the use of federal aid dollars for climate change work.
Look, it is one thing to debate those parts of the science that are not settled (a relatively small amount), and further to debate what to do about the impacts of what is already happening, and what is very likely to happen . . . but it is entirely another to announce that we don’t have to worry about such impacts at all because, even though climate change is real, God will save us. History is littered with the bodies of people who waited for God to save them. God helps those who help themselves – not those who sit around waiting for miracles . . . but it seems Rep. Shimkus’ reading of the Bible didn’t quite make it to the New Testament.
An opportunity in the challenges . . .
Via Grist:
TIANJIN, China — China will on Monday host its first U.N. climate conference as it seeks to showcase its green credentials, but hopes are dim that the event will yield major breakthroughs that environmentalists crave.
Three thousand delegates will converge on the northern port city of Tianjin for the latest round of tortured United Nations negotiations aimed at securing a post-2012 treaty on tackling global warming.
But even the most optimistic forecasts for the six days of talks foresee only incremental progress amid the continuing fallout from last year’s failure in Copenhagen by world leaders to forge a comprehensive deal.
“Our expectations are not very high, in the sense that we have not witnessed a willingness from governments to really move the negotiations forward,” Greenpeace International Climate Policy Director Wendel Trio told AFP.
Check the Oh Crap box in the right sidebar. These guys are foot-dragging, and we’re already out of what most people think is the safe range for CO2 concentrations. What do I mean by safe? Well, it comes down to the odds of catastrophic change. The concern is that, as CO2 levels inch upward, we are approaching a situation where nonlinear changes start to happen – that is, where slow, steady changes in the climate “jump” to a new state very, very rapidly (in decades or less). We can cope with slow, steady changes in rainfall in most parts of the world. That is much of what adaptation planning is about these days – adjusting livelihoods and infrastructure for expected changes in the future to minimize the negative impacts.
What worries me, however, is what I don’t know. Global climate and ecology are extraordinarily complex, linked systems that are not completely understood. Changes in some parts of these systems may have no effect at all on the larger picture. Other changes might radiate through these systems, having massive, unintended and largely unpredictable consequences. As we inch the CO2 concentrations ever upward, and we inch global temperatures upward, we create conditions in which the likelihood of this sort of non-linear change increases. The big example of this you might have heard of is the potential shutdown of the Gulf Stream, a shift in ocean circulation triggered by larger changes in oceanic circulation linked to salinity and temperature. If this happens (and it could, though I think it remains unlikely), Europe (for example) would become much, much cooler, radically altering agricultural production and the accessibility of ports from France north much faster than we could keep up with the changes.
This is an extreme example, but there are many other such shifts we worry about . . . and many, many more that we’ve not yet thought of because of the complexity of the systems with which we are engaged. It is possible to plan for adaptation to such events, though – in fact, I would argue that the idea of the discontinuous change is an opportunity for more productive adaptation and development thought than that which is practiced today. All you can do in the face of discontinuous change is make communities and countries as resilient as possible – build as much capacity for change as you can, and then let people address these changes in locally-appropriate manners as they start to happen. In other words, discontinuous change gives us the opportunity to take our hands off the wheel – to stop lying to ourselves that we can plan for everything, or that we even have all of the knowledge we need to make such plans. Instead, it encourages us to think about a more flexible, resilient world in which people are empowered to address the challenges in their lives.
In every challenge, there is an opportunity . . .
Development is not the same thing as adaptation
One of the most interesting and distressing trends in recent development thought has been the convergence of adaptation to global change (I use global change as a catch-all which includes environmental and economic change) and development. Development agencies increasingly take on the idea of adaptation as a key component of their missions – which they should, if they intend to build projects with enduring value. However, it is one thing to incorporate the idea of adaptation into development programming. It is entirely another to collapse the two into the same mission.
Simply put, development and adaptation have two different goals. In general, development is about improving the conditions of life for the global poor in some form or other. Adaptation implicitly suggests an effort to maintain what exists without letting it get worse . . . which sounds great until you think about the conditions of life in places like rural sub-Saharan Africa, where things are often very bad right now. A colleague of mine at USAID, in the context of a conversation about disaster relief and development, said it best: the mandate of disaster relief is to put things back to the way they were before the disaster. In a place like Haiti, that isn’t much of a mandate.
All of this becomes pretty self-evident after a moment of thought. Why, then, do we see the collapse of these two efforts into a single program in the world of development practice? For example, what does it mean when food security projects and programs start to define themselves in terms of adaptation? It seems to me that the goal shifts for these programs – from improvement to the maintenance of existing situations. If a development agency was there in the first place, the existing situation is likely unacceptable. To me, this means that this subtle shift in mission is also unacceptable.
Why am I going on about this? I am about to take up a job as the Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for USAID’s Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance. In this job, I will have to negotiate this very convergence at the program level. How we work out this convergence over the next few years will have tremendous implications for development efforts for decades to come – and therefore huge implications for billions of people around the world. And I don’t pretend to have all the answers . . . but I will think out loud in this space as we go.