OK, a last thought on the development initiatives and markets thread: let’s leave the predictive markets thing aside for the moment, and get to what I think is a more serious question for development initiatives – do we use all the information we might to evaluate the likely impact of our programs? I think a lot of folks misread the intent of my initial post – I was NOT suggesting we bet on mortality rates and other direct measures of project effectiveness. That is something I could see as an academic exercise, but is way too morbid for my tastes, even in that setting.
But everyone who lunged in that direction seemed to miss the point that any major development initiative will, if it succeeds, have radiating impacts through different markets. That is, a successful food security initiative will change harvest sizes of different crops, thereby influencing commodities markets. A successful public health intervention might increase the size of the workforce, or its efficiency. And so on. My simple thought was that any fund investor worth his/her salt should be examining these initiatives and their expected outcomes to decide 1) if the initiative worked, what markets might be affected, how and when and 2) do they think the initiative will actually work.
If there is no movement around these initiatives, it seems to me that these two factors might be important – at the first step in this decision-making, investors might decide that in the event of a successful intervention, the markets affected might not be accessible or profitable, or the timeframe of any movement in the market might be so long as to make immediate response unnecessary. Thus, we would see no market response to the announcement of an intervention. At that point, it doesn’t matter if the intervention will work or not – that assessment never comes into the picture.
However, in at least some cases, I have to think that there are initiatives out there (in a world of rising food prices, I am a bit fixated on food security at the moment) that would affect significant markets, and not only at a national scale (where markets might be illiquid or otherwise inaccessible). Take the case of cocoa and Cote d’Ivoire this past winter: the civil conflict in CIV cut off a significant amount of global supply, and futures markets got skittish over the further constriction of trade, driving cocoa prices upward. This is a niche crop, heavily produced by only a few countries, but the price movement could have meant big dollars for a fund that correctly anticipated this trend. Surely there are (or will be) food security initiatives that could similarly affect the overall supplies of and access to particular (perhaps niche) crops for entire regions, or even shift global availability/perception enough to shift commodities prices in much larger, more transparent markets in the short term. Don’t fixate on national markets for these initiatives – what about really big development movers that could affect global supplies of grain in an era where all the slack has been taken out of various global grain markets? You can’t tell me that everyone at these trading desks is simply ignoring the food security world . . . surely they are at least assessing through step 1) above. So if there is no market response to these initiatives, either the timeframe of movement is too distant to warrant interest, or the traders simply don’t think these initiatives will succeed enough to significantly influence the markets in which they trade. Perhaps the price of oil and its impact on transport is much, much more important than increasing harvest size when it comes to shaping food commodities prices . . . in which case, it would probably be good for those designing food security initiatives to know this at the outset and address it in project design (for example by thinking about transportation issues as integral to the initiative).
Of course, there is option 3): traders have no idea what sorts of initiatives are out there, and are operating in ignorance of these potential large drivers. This is entirely possible, but a bit hard to believe . . .
Tag: aid
Quick thought: clarifying the development initiatives and markets post
Lots of comments pouring in via twitter regarding my earlier post on development initiatives and markets. First, I found it interesting that readers went in two directions – they either took the post to be about prediction markets alone, or they caught the reference to hedge funds and realized that I was talking about “betting” in a much more general sense: that is, in the sense of hedge fund investment, which is really a set of (ideally) well-researched, carefully-hedged bets on the direction of particular stocks, commodities and sometimes whole segments of the market.
For now, let’s take up the issue of predictive markets. I love Bill Easterly’s response tweet, asking what development initiative I (or anyone else) would bet my own money on. I think prediction markets are interesting tools. They are hardly perfect, as like other markets they are subject to bubbles and manipulation, but there is some evidence to suggest that they do yield interesting information under the right conditions. It would be interesting to set up parallel prediction markets, and populate one with development professionals at agencies and NGOs, one with development academics, and one that blends the two, and then have them start to buy and sell the likelihood of success (as defined by the initiative, both in terms of outcomes and timeframe) for any number of development initiatives. While I doubt these parallel markets would move in lockstep, I wonder if they would come to radically different assessments of these initiatives. And we could examine how well they worked as predictive devices. I’m pretty sure most academics would have started shorting the Millennium Village Project at its inception (academic paper here) . . . so what things would the development blogosphere/twittersphere short today? What would you go long on (that is, what would you hold in the expectation it would meet expectations and rise in value)? Have at it in the comments . . .
I’ll address the wider meaning of “betting” that I was also aiming at later . . .
Quick Thought: Development initiatives and markets
Welcome to a new feature of Open the Echo Chamber, a quick post on something that interests me. Yes, I am capable of writing less than 1000 words in a post, but most of the time I take on subjects that need a lot of attention. Going forward, I am going to try to intersperse some “quick thoughts” on the blog for those who lack the 15 minutes and headspace to deal with my longer fare . . .
I’ve been doing a lot of reading about hedge funds lately, and it recently hit me: does anyone in the markets bet for or against development initiatives? It seems to me that you could – after all, a big initiative from either a multilateral or large bilateral donor will often come with quite a bit of money attached (at least initially), a lot of publicity, and some clearly stated goals that are almost always tied to economic growth or diversification. So, do investors look at these initiatives and bet for or against them? I’m not saying they bet directly on an initiative, but on its outcome: for example, do funds look at large food security initiatives in a particular country and bet on the prices of the crops involved in that initiative?
Here is why I care: if nobody is betting on them, it pretty much signals that these initiatives are largely irrelevant. Either they are not large enough to move any market in the short or long term, or they are not aimed at anything likely to induce a transformation of economy and society through some set of cascading impacts in the long term. If this is the case, it seems to me we ought to back out of those initiatives right away. This is not to say that we should not be addressing the needs of the most vulnerable people in the world, but to suggest that an absence of interest in these initiatives might mean that our efforts to address these needs are not likely to come to much.
On the other hand, if we see significant betting on the outcomes of initiatives, it seems to me we might start to look at the direction of this betting (short or long) to get a sense of how things are likely to play out, and start looking for problems/leveraging opportunities as soon as possible.
Just a quick thought . . .
Why should the aid/relief/development community care about global environmental change (Pt. 4)?
So, how do we fix the way we think about development to address the challenges of global environmental change? Well, there are myriad answers, but in this post I propose two – we have to find ways of evaluating the impact of our current projects such that those lessons are applicable to other projects that are implemented in different places and at various points in the future . . . and we have to better evaluate just where things will be in the future as we think about the desired outcomes of development interventions.
To achieve the first of these two is relatively easy, at least conceptually: we need to fully link up the RCT4D crowd with the qualitative research/social theory crowd. We need teams of people that can bring the randomista obsession with sampling frames and serious statistical tools – in other words, a deep appreciation for rigor in data collection – and connect it to the qualitative social theoretical emphasis on understanding causality by interrogating underlying social process – in other words, a deep appreciation for rigor in data interpretation. Such teams work to cover the weaknesses of their members, and could bring us new and very exciting insights into development interventions and social process.
Of course, everyone says we need mixed methodologies in development (and a lot of other fields of inquiry), but we rarely see projects that take this on in a serious way. In part, this is because very few people are trained in mixed methods – they are either very good at qualitative methods and interpretation, or very good at sampling and quantitative data analysis. Typically, when a team gets together with these different skills, one set of skills or the other predominates (in policy circles, quant wins every time). To see truly mixed methodologies, this cannot happen – as soon as one trumps the other, the value of the mixing declines precipitously.
For example, you need qualitative researchers to frame the initial RCT – an RCT framed around implicit, unacknowledged assumptions about society is unlikely to “work” – or to capture the various ways in which an intervention works. At the same time, the randomista skill of setting up a sampling frame and obtaining meaningful large-scale data sets requires attention to how one frames the question, and where the RCT is to be run . . . which impose important constraints on the otherwise unfettered framings of social process coming from the qualitative side, framings that might not really be testable in a manner that can be widely understood by the policy community. Then you need to loop back to the qualitative folks to interpret the results of the initial RCT – to move past whether or not something worked to the consideration of the various ways in which it did and did not work, and a careful consideration of WHY it worked. Finally, these interpretations can be framed and tested by the qualitative members of the team, starting an iterative interpretive process that blends qualitative and quantitative analysis and interpretation to rigorously deepen our understanding of how development works (or does not work).
The process I have just described will require teams of grownups with enough self-confidence to accept criticism and to revise their ideas and interpretations in the face of evidence of varying sorts. As soon as one side of this mixed method team starts denigrating the other, or the concerns of one side start trumping those of the other, the value of this mixing drops off – qualitative team members become fig leaves for “story time” analyses, or quantitative researchers become fig leaves for weak sampling strategies or overreaching interpretations of the data. This can be done, but it will require team leaders with special skill sets – with experience in both worlds, and respect for both types of research. There are not many of these around, but they are around.
Where are these people now? Well, interestingly the answer to this question leads me to the second answer for how development might better answer the challenges of global environmental change: development needs to better link itself with the global environmental change community. Despite titles that might suggest otherwise (UNEP’s Fourth Global Environment Outlook was titled Environment for Development), there is relatively little interplay between these communities right now. Sure, development folks say the right things about sustainability and climate change these days, but they are rarely engaging the community that has been addressing these and many other challenges for decades. At the same time, the global environmental change community has a weak connection to development, making their claims about the future human impacts of things like climate change often wildly inaccurate, as they assume current conditions will persist into the future (or they assume equally unrealistic improvements in future human conditions).
Development needs to hang out with the scenario builders of the global environmental change community to better understand the world we are trying to influence twenty years hence – the spot to which we are delivering the pass, to take up a metaphor from an earlier post on this topic. We need to get with the biophysical scientists who can tell us about the challenges and opportunities the expect to see two or more decades hence. And we need to find the various teams that are already integrating biophysical scientists and social scientists to address these challenges – the leaders already have to speak quant and qual, science and humanities, to succeed at their current jobs. The members of these teams have already started to learn to respect their colleagues’ skills, and to better explain what they know to colleagues who may not come at the world with the same framings, data or interpretations. They are not perfect, by any stretch (I voice some of my concerns in Delivering Development), but they are great models to go on.
Meanwhile, several of my colleagues and I are working on training a new generation of interdisciplinary scholars with this skill set. All of my current Ph.D. students have taken courses in qualitative methods, and have conducted qualitative fieldwork . . . but they also have taken courses on statistics and biogeographic modeling. They will not be statisticians or modelers, but now they know what those tools can and cannot do – and therefore how they can engage with them. The first of this crew are finishing their degrees soon . . . the future is now. And that gives me reason to be realistically optimistic about things . . .
Why should the aid/relief/development community care about global environmental change (Pt. 3)?
OK, ok, you say: I get it, global environmental change matters to development/aid/relief. But aside from thinking about project-specific intersections between the environment and development/aid/relief, what sort of overarching challenges does global environmental change pose to the development community? Simply put, I think that the inevitability of various forms of environmental change (a level of climate change cannot be stopped now, certain fisheries are probably beyond recovery, etc.) over the next 50 or so years forces the field of development to start thinking very differently about the design and evaluation of policies, programs, and projects . . . and this, in turn, calls into question the value of things like randomized control trials for development.
In aid/development we tend to be oriented to relatively short funding windows in which we are supposed to accomplish particular tasks (which we measure through output indicators, like the number of judges trained) that, ideally, change the world in some constructive manner (outcome indicators, like a better-functioning judicial system). Outputs are easier to deliver and measure than outcomes, and they tend to operate on much shorter timescales – which makes them perfect for end-of-project reporting even though they often bear little on the achievement of the desired outcomes that motivated the project in the first place (does training X judges actually result in a better functioning judicial system? What if the judges were not the problem?). While there is a serious push in the development community to move past outputs to outcomes (which I generally see as a very positive trend), I do not see a serious conversation about the different timescales on which these two sorts of indicators operate. Outputs are very short-term. Outcomes can take generations. Obviously this presents significant practical challenges to those who do development work, and must justify their expenditures on an annual basis.
This has tremendous implications, I think, for development practice in the here and now – especially in development research. For example, I think this pressure to move to outcomes but deliver them on the same timescale as outputs has contributed to the popularity of the randomized control trials for development (RCT4D) movement. RCT4D work gathers data in a very rigorous manner, and subjects it to interesting forms of quantitative analysis to determine the impact of a particular intervention on a particular population. As my colleague Marc Bellemare says, RCTs establish “whether something works, not how it works.”
The vast majority of RCT4D studies are conducted across a few months to years, directly after the project is implemented. Thus, the results seem to move past outputs to impacts without forcing everyone to wait a very long time to see how things played out. This, to me, is both a strength and a weakness of the approach . . . though I never hear anyone talking about it as a weakness. The RCT4D approach seems to suggest that the evaluation of project outcomes can be effectively done almost immediately, without need for long-term follow-up. This sense implicitly rests on the forms of interpretation and explanation that undergird the RCT4D approach – basically, what I see as an appallingly thin approach to the interpretation of otherwise interesting and rigorously gathered data. My sense of this interpretation is best captured by Andrew Gelman’s (quoting Fung) use of the term “story time”, which he defines as a “pivot from the quantitative finding to the speculative explanation.” It seems that many practitioners of RCT4D seem to think that story time is unavoidable . . . which to me reflects a deep ignorance of the concerns for rigor and validity that have existed in the qualitative research community for decades. Feel free to check the methods section of any of my empirically-based articles (i.e. here and here): they address who I interviewed, why I interviewed them, how I developed interview questions, and how I knew that my sample size had grown large enough to feel confident that it was representative of the various phenomena I was trying to understand. Toward the end of my most recent work in Ghana, I even ran focus groups where I offered my interpretations of what was going on back to various sets of community members, and worked with them to strengthen what I had right and correct what I had wrong. As a result, I have what I believe is a rigorous, highly nuanced understanding of the social causes of the livelihoods decisions and outcomes that I can measure in various ways, qualitative and quantitative, but I do not have a “story time” moment in there.
The point here is that “story time”, as a form of explanation, rests on uncritical assumptions about the motivations for human behavior that can make particular decisions or behaviors appear intelligible but leave the door open for significant misinterpretations of events on the ground. Further, the very framing of what “works” in the RCT4D approach is externally defined by the person doing the evaluation/designing the project, and is rarely revised in the face of field realities . . . principally because when a particular intervention does not achieve some externally-defined outcome, it is deemed “not to have worked.” That really tends to shut down continued exploration of alternative outcomes that “worked” in perhaps unpredictable ways for unexpected beneficiaries. In short, the RCT4D approach tends to reinforce the idea that development is really about delivering apolitical, technical interventions to people to address particular material needs.
The challenge global environmental change poses to the RCT4D randomista crowd is that of the “through ball” metaphor I raised in my previous post. Simply put, identifying “what works” without rigorously establishing why it worked is broadly useful if you make two pretty gigantic assumptions: First, you have to assume that the causal factors that led to something “working” are aspects of universal biophysical and social processes that are translatable across contexts. If this is not true, an RCT only gives you what works for a particular group of people in a particular place . . . which is not really that much more useful than just going and reading good qualitative ethnographies. If RCTs are nothing more than highly quantified case studies, they suffer from the same problem as ethnography – they are hard to aggregate into anything meaningful at a broader scale. And yes, there are really rigorous qualitative ethnographies out there . . .
Second, you have to assume that the current context of the trial is going to hold pretty much constant going forward. Except, of course, global environmental change more or less chucks that idea for the entire planet. In part, this is because global environmental change portends large, inevitable biophysical changes in the world. Just because something works for improving rain-fed agricultural outputs today does not mean that the same intervention will work when the enabling environmental conditions, such as rainfall and temperature, change over the next few decades. More importantly, though, these biophysical changes will play out in particular social contexts to create particular impacts on populations, who will in turn develop efforts to address those impacts. Simply put, when we introduce a new crop today and it is taken up and boosts yields, we know that it “worked” by the usual standards of agricultural development and extension. But the take-up of new crops is not a function of agricultural ecology – there are many things that will grow in many places, but various social factors ranging from the historical (what crops were introduced via colonialism) to gender (who grows what crops and why) are what lead to particular farm compositions. For example, while tree crops (oil palm, coconut, various citrus, acacia for charcoal) are common on farms around the villages in which I have worked in Ghana, almost none of these trees are found on women’s farms. The reasons for this are complex, and link land tenure, gender roles, and household power relations into livelihoods strategies that balance material needs with social imperatives (for extended discussions, see here and here, or read my book).
Unless we know why that crop was taken up, we cannot understand if the conditions of success now will exist in the future . . . we cannot tell if what we are doing will have a durable impact. Thus, under the most reliable current scenario for climate change in my Ghanaian research context, we might expect the gradual decline in annual precipitation, and the loss of the minor rainy season, to make tree crops (which tend to be quite resilient in the face of fluctuating precipitation) more and more attractive. However, tree crops challenge the local communal land tenure system by taking land out of clan-level recirculation, and allowing women to plant them would further challenge land tenure by granting them direct control over access to land (which they currently lack). Altering the land tenure system would, without question, set off a cascade of unpredictable social changes that would be seen in everything from gender roles to the composition of farms. There is no way to be sure that any development intervention that is appropriate to the current context will be even functional in that future context. Yet any intervention we put into place today should be helping to catalyze long-term changes . . .
Simply put: Global environmental change makes clear the limitations of our current thinking on aid/development (of which RCT4D is merely symptomatic). Just like RCTs, our general framing of development does not move us any closer to understanding the long-term impact of our interventions. Further, the results of RCTs are not generalizable past the local context (which most good randomistas already know), limiting their ability to help us transform how we do development. In a world of global environmental change, our current approaches to development just replicate our existing challenges: they don’t really tell us if what we are doing will be of any lasting benefit, or even teach us general lessons about how to deliver short-term benefits in a rigorous manner.
Next up: The Final Chapter – Fixing It
Relief vs. Fundraising
David Reiff has a great piece on ForeignPolicy.com called “Millions May Die . . . Or Not.” It is hard to read, in some ways, because nobody really wants to criticize folks whose hearts are in the right place. At the same time, couching pleas for aid in ever escalating “worst disaster ever” claims, is risking the long-term viability of charitable contributions:
By continually upping the rhetorical ante, relief agencies, whatever their intentions, are sowing the seeds of future cynicism, raising the bar of compassion to the point where any disaster in which the death toll cannot be counted in the hundreds of thousands, that cannot be described as the worst since World War II or as being of biblical proportions, is almost certainly condemned to seem not all that bad by comparison.
I see this as akin to blizzard predictions – what one of my friends long ago started calling the “Storm of the Century of the Week” problem. I cannot take an apocalyptic blizzard prediction seriously anymore, because they are all apocalyptic. One day this will bite me in the ass, I know . . . well, unless I stay in DC and/or South Carolina.
But there was one thing left unexamined in the article that I wonder about – Reiff notes, quite rightly, that:
All relief agencies know that, where disasters are concerned, not only the media but the public as a whole practices a species of serial monogamy, focusing on one crisis to the exclusion of all others until what is sometimes called “compassion fatigue” sets in. Then, attention shifts to the next emergency.
Reiff does not tell us the origins of this syndrome – and the article seems to suggest that it “just exists,” a cause of the ever-escalating claims about the scale and scope of a given disaster. I wonder, however, if he has overlooked something important here – that perhaps the escalating claims are the very thing that has created this “serial charity/aid monogamy” by overwhelming our capacity to address the wide range of needs that exist in the world.
In short, has the competition for relief dollars created a cycle in which claims about the magnitude of the crisis will continue to inflate, further focusing the attention of the public and media into shorter and shorter cycles until it completely evaporates? Are we looking at a midpoint to the creative destruction of the relief industry? And what have the policy implications of this narrowing been – is there space to back up and think more holistically, and with greater perspective, to do a better job of assessing need and capabilities of meeting it?
The British lead . . . and who will follow?
David Cameron gave a speech yesterday at the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation conference. It deserves to be read in full – I don’t agree with every word (and how I disagree with many of Cameron’s stances), but it is one of the clearest statements on why we must continue to deliver aid to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world.
On the down side, Cameron starts out a bit too market triumphalist for my tastes:
At home we don’t tackle poverty by state hand-outs; we help people get into work, to stand on their own two feet and to take control of their own destiny. The same should be true of development. No country has ever pulled itself out of poverty through aid alone, so this government will take a new approach. The same conditions create prosperity the world over. They include access to markets, property rights, private-sector investment and they make up what I see as the golden thread of successful development. Ultimately it’s the private sector that will be the engine for growth and that’s why this government’s efforts will increasingly focus on helping developing countries achieve that growth with the jobs and opportunities it will bring.
Well, this is a bit muddled. First, last I checked England (and Great Britain more generally) was home to a robust welfare state (well, until various Tory governments from Thatcher to Cameron took a hatchet to it) that provided the safety net that enhanced the quality of life of its citizens. On the other hand (and second), I agree that no country has ever been lifted out of poverty through aid alone – but then, that’s not what aid does. At best, aid catalyzes much larger processes of change – and sometimes those changes play out constructively (I discuss this at length in Delivering Development). Third, the only countries to have really changed their status in the last half century have done so by rejecting things like the open market and behaving in very politically repressive ways to get through a serious of difficult transitions that eventually made them competitive in global markets and able to productively take in foreign investment – so this claim about what works isn’t fully supported by the evidence. Andy Sumner’s work on the New Bottom Billion suggests that this might be changing as a new pile of countries “graduate” from low-income to middle-income status, but this is still unclear as many of the new “graduates” from low to middle income status have just crept above that line, often with no transformation of their economic fundamentals (leaving them vulnerable to slip-back) and still containing huge numbers of very poor people (creating the same problem, and calling into question the very concept of “graduation” to middle income status).
This is not to say that I don’t think markets have any value – I just fear those who place absolute faith in them, especially given that the environment is the site of perhaps the most serious market failure we’ve ever seen. However, as the speech progressed, I became somewhat more comfortable as, at least in the context of development, Cameron takes a somewhat more moderate tack:
We want people in Africa to climb the ladder of prosperity but of course when the bottom rungs of that ladder are broken by disease and preventable death on a massive scale, when countries can’t even get on the bottom rung of the growth ladder because one in seven of their children die before they reach their fifth birthday, we have to take urgent action. We have to save lives and then we can help people to live. So that’s where today’s announcement fits in. Because there cannot really be any effective development – economic or political – while there are still millions of people dying unnecessarily.
Absolutely correct – the “bottom of the pyramid”, as it were, often finds itself left behind when economic growth programs rev up . . . this is well-understood in both academia and the development institutions. Indeed, it is not controversial for my Bureau (DCHA – the folks who deal with disasters and conflict) to argue that its work is fundamental to creating a firm foundation for future development efforts because we address the needs of vulnerable populations who might otherwise be overlooked by Agency programming.
But what I most like is the kicking Cameron hands out to those who argue we don’t have the money for aid in these hard economic times. The kicking comes in two parts – first a moral argument:
When you make a promise to the poorest people in the world you should keep it. I remember where I was during the Gleneagles Summit and the Live 8 concert of 2005 and I remember thinking at the time how right it was that those world leaders should make such pledges so publicly. For me it’s a question of values; this is about saving lives. It was the right thing to promise; it was the right thing for Britain to do and it is the right thing for this government to honour that commitment.
So to those who point to other countries that are breaking their promises and say that makes it okay for us to do the same, I say no, it’s not okay. Our job is to hold those other countries to account, not to use them as an excuse to turn our back on people who are trusting us to help them. And to those who say fine but we should put off seeing through those promises to another day because right now we can’t afford to help, I say we can’t afford to wait. How many minutes do we wait? Three children die every minute from pneumonia alone; waiting is not the right thing to do and I don’t think that 0.7% of our gross national income is too high a price to pay for saving lives.
…
I actually think that most people in our country want Britain to stand for something in the world, to be something in the world. And when I think about what makes me proud of our country, yes, I think of our incredibly brave service men and women that I have the honour to meet and see so often; and yes, I think of our capabilities as an economic and diplomatic power; but I also think of our sense of duty to help others. That says something about this country and I think it’s something we can be proud of.
Where . . . the . . . hell . . . is . . . the . . . American . . . political . . . leadership . . . on . . . this? Dammit, the British just took the “City on a Hill” mantle from us. Most Americans want America to stand for something in the world, last I checked.
Oh, and Cameron addresses the unaddressable (for America, it seems) in his speech: that development, in reducing the need for future wars and humanitarian interventions, actually is cost-effective:
If we really care about Britain’s national interest, about jobs, about growth, about security, we shouldn’t break off our links with the countries that can hold some of the keys to that future. If we invest in Africa, if we open trade corridors, if we remove obstacles to growth, it’s not just Africa that will grow but us too. And if we invest in countries before they get broken we might not end up spending so much on dealing with the problems, whether that’s immigration or threats to our national security.
Take Afghanistan. If we’d put a fraction of our current military spending on Afghanistan into helping Afghanistan 15 or 20 years ago just think what we might have been able to avoid over the last decade. Or take Pakistan. Let another generation of Pakistanis enter adult life without any real opportunities and what are the risks in terms of mass migration, radicalisation, even terrorism? That’s why UK support over the next four years will get four million more children in Pakistan into school. This could be life changing for those children and it can be part of the antidote to the extremism that threatens us all. So it’s not just morally right to invest in aid, it’s actually in our own interests too.
God help us, Ron Paul seems to be the only candidate for anything willing to say that the wars we are in are costing a hell of a lot of money, and might not have been necessary. Of course, Ron Paul doesn’t like aid, either . . . actually, he doesn’t seem to like much of anything. Nobody is really taking his hobgoblin act all that seriously, which means he isn’t going to shift the debate here. Cameron, though, really glues his fiscal conservativism to a rational argument for aid – maybe we just should have worked on the aid side of things, at a fraction of the cost, and averted the whole mess in the first place. Lord help me, the Tories are sounding reasonable . . .
Now, Cameron’s ideas for transforming aid are vague, mostly about focusing on results and enhancing accountability. This is all well and good, but amazingly thorny. There’s been quite a bit of discussion about evaluation in the development community (great summary list here) and this blog (here, here and here) of late, and if nothing else, the reader might come to grips with the huge challenges that we must address before we can get to a realization of Cameron’s otherwise nonoffensive ideas.
I suppose it was asking too much to hope a leader talking about transforming development might mention that the global poor might actually have ideas of their own that we should start learning about before we go barging in . . .
Geographers had (sorta) found Bin Laden?
Inquiry is dead when the flagship journal Science starts ambulance-chasing . . . but hey, its Osama bin Laden week in all media, so I guess it should be of no surprise that they are running a story on three-ish year old efforts to get a sense of where bin Laden might be hiding. To their credit, the folks at UCLA are hardly crowing – it was a student project, and Thomas Gillespie, the faculty leader of the project openly noted “It’s not my thing to do this type of [terrorism] stuff,” and made it clear that he had no intention of shifting from his biogeographic interests:
“Right now, I’m working on the dry forests of Hawaii where 45% of the trees are on the endangered species list,” says Gillespie. “I’m far more interested in getting trees off the endangered species list.”
I’m waiting for the gentlemen over at floatingsheep.org to weigh in on this particular project – they are much more qualified to comment on the substance of the study. However, I applaud Gillespie for refusing to get caught up in the hype. Sadly, I’m sure some of my disciplinary colleagues will want to trumpet this as an example of how useful geography is, and why it should get more attention. Because, you know, we’ve just recently shaken off the colonial origins of our discipline, where we proved our usefulness by mapping local populations and resources to facilitate their control, and lord knows we wouldn’t want to put that sort of thing behind us. As one of my colleagues in grad school once pointed out (tongue-in-cheek) after listening to some of our colleagues complain about how some engineering and science departments had much larger budgets, “if we were willing to help kill people, we wouldn’t have this problem.”
And people wonder why I get itchy about the militarization of aid and development.
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.
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.