Tag: Delivering Development

Why is this still surprising?

Alertnet has a post on climate change and the poor that opened with one of my least favorite narrative techniques – surprise about local capacity and knowledge for adaptation.

I was struck by the local community’s scientific knowledge about climate change. I’d often heard that such communities know a tremendous amount about changing weather patterns – and can easily tell a good year from a bad one in terms of droughts or floods – but that they don’t know much about ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ or ‘climate change’.

Not so in Manikganj District. The community performed a drama for us and it was clear that they knew exactly what these relatively western scientific terms mean both in theory and in practice.

I was also struck by how the community – supported by the local nongovernmental organisation, GSK – has developed a range of strategies and activities to cope with longer floods, higher floodwater levels and the erosion that each year washes away more and more of their crop and homestead land into the nearby Padma River. There was no drama here. And I was deeply affected by the industrious positive way the people of Manikganj District meet these challenges and carry on with daily life.

I confess to a bit of fatigue at the continued voicing of surprise at finding out that those in the Global South who are dealing with the impacts of climate change actually have ideas, and often successful strategies, for managing those impacts.  Implicitly, every time we do this we back our readers up to a place of comfort (“those poor/dark people don’t know much”) and then get to act surprised when it turns out they do actually have knowledge and capabilities.  I’d like to think that the first half of my book flips this script, arguing consistently that the people I have been working with are staggeringly capable, and therefore it is the breakdown of livelihoods and adaptation that is interesting, not its existence.
To be fair, though, I blame myself and my colleagues working on adaptation and livelihoods for the persistence of this narrative technique.  Once we get past that all-to-common intro, the post gets into concrete discussions of how people are adapting – good, useful grounded description.  But what I long for, and what I am working on (articles in review and in prep, folks) is moving beyond the descriptive case toward a more systematic understanding of adaptation and livelihoods decision-making that enables some level of generalization and systematization. Indeed, by failing to approach livelihoods and adaptation decision-making in this manner, we enable the very frustrating lead-in technique I described above – every case becomes unique, and every effort to manage the impacts of climate change is therefore an isolated surprise.  If, in fact, it is not at all surprising that people have at least some knowledge and capacity for addressing climate change (and this is really not surprising at all, dammit), we need to get past simple description to capturing processes that might be leveraged into better early warning, better programming, and better understandings of what people are experiencing on the ground.

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I know that often big corporations and capitalism are the problem . . .

but damn, there are days I am glad I went with a commercial publisher – and one of the big ones, at that.  Yesterday, I came home to a small envelope from Palgrave Macmillan in my mailbox.  I had no idea what it was, since I was not expecting anything from them.  I opened it up, and inside was this:

 

 

(Incidentally, I have a promo code that instructors can use for a free inspection copy – if you are an instructor of a course that might adopt this text, send me an email and let me know the course you teach, and I can pass the code along.  They will force you to register and they tend to verify courses, though, so don’t bother bluffing . . .)

Obviously, this is the publicity flyer they are circulating to get my book some visibility in academia.  It’s pretty nice – I like it.  But what really struck me was the post-it attached – unsigned, with only one sentence: “1000 copies mailed out March 2011 to courses in Economic Development”.  Uh . . .
Holy crap.
If 1% of the instructors who receive this mailing adopt, I will sell more copies of my book in the first year than most academic titles ever sell.  There is no way I could have done this anywhere near as effectively by myself. And it is a nice reinforcement of the message I’ve been receiving from my publisher and agent that my editor is heavily invested in this book, and is planning a concerted push to get it out there.
Now, friends and colleagues in the blogosphere/twitterverse, I am awaiting your reviews.  No, really . . . I actually want the feedback.  Yes, I would love to see a bunch of glowing reviews show up telling everyone that my book is the be-all, end-all, but I know that it is not – I want to see what people think, where the book works and where it doesn’t.  That is the only way I can shape my message effectively, and shape the next book (yes, one is already lurking) to engage the development/aid community productively.

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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.

Posted on by Ed 0

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.
 

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When you've won the Peace Corps, you've won the war

Absolute best personal tweet I saw today, from @goldenmeancap:

@edwardrcarr Reading Delivering Dev. Memories flooding back of 1 team member’s @PeaceCorps service in Swedru, GH C/R. He can’t put it down!

No matter which Swedru he means (there are two in Ghana’s Central Region, Agona Swedru – pretty big – and Swedru – pretty small), I actually think I know the place he’s referring to.  Not well, of course, but I have passed through Agona Swedru one time, and passed by Swedru I don’t know how many times . . . pretty cool.
But a larger point – when you can get a Peace Corps volunteer to start having (largely positive) flashbacks to their fieldwork, you know you’ve done something right . . . at least in the first half of the book, which takes the reader down to the village and into the lives of the residents. This tweet review made my day.

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Liveblogging Dead Aid (Chapter 4)

After a few days off (a sort of sherbet for the mind, as it were), I’m back with Chapter 4 . . .
p.48: The chapter starts with a strong diatribe about the ubiquity of corruption in Africa.  First, it depends on where you are . . . and when you are.  Ghana in 1997 was run with small bribes.  Ghana now is navigable without much, if any, bribery – and a new generation of public servants is more efficient and transparent than ever.  Which leads to my next point . . . in the last chapter, Moyo warned against arguing that African culture somehow prevented development from taking root, and demanded we move past surficial explanations.  Here, however, she never interrogates why corruption happens – inadequate salaries of public servants, huge financial demands on the employed by extended families that lack access to social safety nets, etc.  By leaving this discussion out, Moyo is implying that Africans are inherently corrupt – and she is not moving past the surficial to interrogate causes.  Aid does not cause corruption to happen – aid is what is stolen when corruption exists.
p.50: Moyo is making staggeringly sweeping statements about how aid leads to corruption, arguing against the view that increased civil servant salaries reduces corruption.  She offers no evidence, just armchair psychology.  But there is evidence . . . that increased salaries help.  I’ve seen it myself, in Ghana.  It is not a magic bullet, but her dismissal of this corruption reduction tactic is unconscionable.  She’s just tossing away arguments that don’t fit her narrative.
p.51: Er, this isn’t Moyo’s fault (except that she is using it as evidence), but a study statistically examined the correlation between an ordinal scale of perceptions of corruption and economic growth?  Are you joking?  Do you know how many variables you’d have to control for to even begin to make that sort of analysis meaningful?
p.52: Wow, this is all sorts of loose correlation . . . OK, let’s say that 25% of all World Bank lending ever has been misused (as she claims).  First, is misused the same as stolen?  No – sometimes it was rerouted to other projects that were over budget, and might have had some productive outcome.  You have to capture that before you claim how much aid has actually been lost.  Second, this statistic does not really support the claim “vast sums of aid not only foster corruption – they breed it.”
In fact, let’s do some quick math here.  The World Bank had been making loans for 63 years at the time Moyo was writing.  Let’s say that an average of 110 countries a year received those loans (a low estimate, for sure), we have 6930 country/year data points.  Divide the $525 billion in total loans made by the Bank across this time, and we find out the average loan per data point (country/year) is  . . . $75 million.  Sorry, but this is not vast, by any stretch.
But let’s get concrete.  Ghana’s 2009 GDP was $29 billion.  That same year it pulled in $7.8 billion dollars in revenues.  Its net aid receipts were $1.2 billion.  Yeah, that’s a lot of money, but still only 15% of Ghana’s total revenues.  In the scheme of things, aid is not the big slush fund Moyo is trying to make it seem.
p.53: Holy crap, if you are going to point out we lend to corrupt governments, you might want to talk about why . . . and bring a real discussion of geopolitics to the table.  We lent to Mobutu because we feared the communists – everyone knows that.  So the problem wasn’t aid, it was the geopolitics driving bribes in the form of aid.
p.54: The section is title “Why give aid if it leads to corruption?”  Well, mostly because the links are pretty unclear, and because you’ve done nothing in this chapter to link them meaningfully.
To her credit, though, she is quite right about the agencies and how they value the size of the portfolio of lending, not the outcomes.  The World Bank has long been accused of this, and there is enormous pressure in every agency to get the budget spent on something . . . lest the budget be reduced next year.  However, USAID just took a huge step toward addressing this with Shah’s call for independent, transparent and publicly-available impact assessments of all projects.  Really crap projects will soon be visible to the public, and those responsible for them will be held to much greater account if this comes to pass.
p.55: Moyo has no idea what she is talking about on the Malawi food corruption issue.  As a result, she misapplies it to her larger argument that we lend regardless of corruption.  The issues of corruption in Malawi in 2002 had nothing to do with the food insecurity of the country that year – that was driven by the removal of a seed/fertilizer subsidy program at the insistence of the US and World Bank (who saw it as a market distortion).
p.57-58: And we are further into territory for which she seems to have no real understanding . . . the problem of government accountability is not really driven by aid.  The argument that aid reduces the need for taxes – and so the middle class and the population more generally could care less what the government is doing is astonishingly Western-biased (and neoliberal as hell).  The lack of responsiveness preceded aid, and persists because the state tends to lack the capacity to do anything for much of its population.  If anything, you could argue that aid has failed to improve state capacity such that the citizenry might feel bought in . . . but aid is not eroding civil society.
p.59: Mother of God, aid is what people are after when they try to take over a country?  Really?  Hell, even her example argues against this – Sankoh wanted the DIAMOND MINES, not aid.  She undermined her own argument – who the hell edited this book?
p.61-63: Well, yes, aid can be inflationary, causing problems for exports.  This is a problem that should be addressed.
p.64: Yes, inadequate absorptive capacity (the ability of a country to take up income of any sort and use it productively) can be a huge challenge in aid, and lead to waste and fraud.  But how often is it a huge challenge?  Note what I observed above – average annual World Bank lending, per country per year, is only $75 million.  That’s not a huge amount of money.  Absorptive capacity examples are much clearer in contexts where oil comes online quickly . . . which is why I am a bit concerned for Ghana at the moment.
p.66: OK, I’m getting worn out here by the overgeneralized, unsupported statements: “Aid engenders laziness on the part of African policymakers.”  Really?  All of them?
But what is the source of frustration here?  Keep reading, and you find this:

Because aid flows are viewed (rightly so) as permanent income, policymakers have no incentive to look for other, better ways of financing their country’s longer-term development.  As detailed later in this book, these options, like foreign direct investment and accessing the debt markets, offer more diversified and greater prospects for sustainable development.

This sounds a hell of a lot like an investment banker pitching a fund . . . oh, wait . . . she’s an investment banker.  Assuming Moyo believes that this really is the best way to go, it strikes me as remarkable how unreflexive she is about her own background and biases.
p.68: Oh, hubris: it seems that nobody has ever thought of an alternative to aid.  Really?  There is a lot of stuff in the later postdevelopment literature, all kinds of efforts to reimagine capitalism . . . now, we can argue about whether or not these are viable alternatives, but at least explore them before we run to the capital markets!
This is deeply frustrating – I like a controversial argument, but I also like a well-framed and supported argument.  We have the first part, but the second is completely absent thus far.

Posted on by Ed 1

Good lord, still trending up?

We’ve broken the 50k barrier!  And this is trending data . . . I bounced up and down between 50k and 70k today, so climbing into the 40k range is reflective of even more new sales . . .
Could this be sustainable?

Thanks to everyone!

Posted on by Ed 0

Liveblogging Dead Aid (Chapter 3)

And the beat goes on . . . ladies and gentlemen, Chapter 3.
p.29: Well, so much for starting brightly.  She has grossly oversimplified Diamond (which is hard to to, y’all) to argue that a country’s wealth and success depend on geography and topography.  Er, no, that would be a form of environmental determinism.  Diamond was writing an anti-racist history of the world, explaining how the conditions that would eventually result in the ability of some groups to colonize others, etc., was enabled by environmental and geographic situations – but Diamond does not simply erase colonialism from the equation, he is trying to set the stage for how it came about.  You could argue that he has a somewhat environmentally determinist take on the causes of colonialism, maybe . . .
Oh, and for Diamond’s purposes, Africa was not resource-rich . . . it lacked easily domesticable crops and animals when compared to other world regions.  The whole discussion of squandering natural riches on page 30 is a total non-sequitor in the context of Diamond.
Note: I really don’t love Diamond’s book . . . and I am defending it here.  Ugh.
p.30: OK, the geographer in me just screamed.  I can’t blame Moyo for this – it is all about Collier, who along with Sachs and a few others in the field of economics is slowly resurrecting environmental determinism (or at least geographical determinism) with their damn correlations between coastline, endowment of natural resources, and economic growth.  The connections between these three issues are so complex that any analysis that simply divides countries into three categories (resource poor/coastline, resource poor/no coast, resource rich) is going to over-aggregate different relationships and causes into gross oversimplifications and false correlations.  Further, the damn N for these analyses is going to be less than 20 for one or more categories (less than 60 countries in Africa, folks).  I mean, you can run non-parametric stats on this sort of thing, but for the love of God, why?  Just do the qualitative work, dammit.
p.31: Moyo seems to have completely and utterly missed the reason why colonialism had such a brutal impact on African development.  Sure, artificial countries were not great.  And the inherited governmental structures after colonialism often caused problems.  But this sort of thing only really mattered after independence.  By then, these places had been completely restructured into sources of primary materials for the industries of the Global North – infrastructure, agricultural innovation, etc., all of it was aimed at enriching someone else and ensuring the colonized never developed any economic power of their own.  This led to the perpetuation of colonial relationships by other means after independence (neocolonialism), and I have little doubt this is way more important than the borders or governmental structures when we try to understand the growth trajectories of Africa since independence.  Either she is stunningly ignorant of her own country’s history, or this is a very disingenuous reading of African history.
p.32: Wonderful, Paul Collier postulates that the more ethnically divided the country, the more likely the prospect of civil war.  In other news, people with guns are more likely to shoot one another.  How much more likely?  Is this a cause unto itself, or a variable mobilized to political ends that can be better explained by another variable (I’m looking at you, Rwanda)?
p.34: If you are going to use Botswana as an example of a place where growth and development were facilitated by good institutions (which it was), you still have to contextualize the huge growth numbers by noting the GIANT DIAMOND MINES in the country.  I’m just sayin’.
p.35: Nondiagnostic diagnoses make me crazy.  “Africa’s failure to generate any meaningful or sustainable long run growth must, ostensibly, be a confluence of factors: geographical, historical, cultural, tribal and institutional.”  Again, no kidding.  This is meaningless.  Of course, it also discounts her previous example of Botswana having meaningful economic growth. Or Ghana. Or South Africa.  In other words, her whole statement is an overgeneralized negative that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny (or, in fact, her own argument from a page ago).   Next part of the diagnosis: “No factor should condemn Africa to a permanent failure to grow.” I don’t know of anyone making that claim.  If we were, we wouldn’t really bother with development, would we?  We’d just give up and walk away . . .  And the final part: “for the most part, African countries have one thing in common – they all depend on aid.”  Er, and colonialism (except maybe Ethiopia, and then mostly on a technicality.  And don’t tell me about Liberia – for God’s sake, we carved the place out to resettle freed slaves).  And colonialism has a lot to do with what CAUSED the situations we now address with aid.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how she is ignoring this.
p.40: Yes, I am skimming a bit here.  That first bit really killed me.  But here I can give her some credit for hammering the “democracy gives us development” crowd – at least that portion of the crowd who thinks the relationship is simple.  It is not, of course, and some of the new thinking on this examines how, for example, governments can make difficult decisions that balance needed reforms/changes and their electoral interests.  But sadly, much of the mainstream writing on the subject tends toward the simplistic.
p.42-43: OK, I am now uncomfortable with what seems to be a bit too much lauding of dictatorships.  Yeah, they produce great growth numbers, but growth is a means to an end . . . improving the human condition.  Dictatorships tend to create large tradeoffs in quality of life that seem, on balance, to have negative impacts on their populations.  Not a lot of Chileans think back on Pinochet as the good old days, you know?
p.44: Moyo is quite right – the timing of aid, and inappropriate aid, can do much more harm than good.  For example, having food aid arrive nine months after a famine (not all that uncommon), just as the new harvest comes in, crushes local food prices (oversupply of free food drives prices of locally-grown crops) and re-impoverishes the local farmers.  But this is not an inherent problem of aid – this is about timing, something people are well aware of, and trying to address.  Further, Moyo’s complaint about celebrities bringing mosquito nets to the continent, and thereby putting local producers out of buisiness – while valid – steps outside her definition of aid (government-to-government transfers) that she laid out earlier in the book.  Apparently her terms of reference are not stable.  Super.
p.46: Moyo does not know what I feel in my heart of hearts, despite her claims – I do think aid can work.  Her evidence against it has to do with aid’s impact on various economic indicators.  But this is just means to an end, and does not capture many of the benefits of aid in a clear manner (reduced illness means a better quality of life, and might be partially captured in a growing GDP via the extra days the individual can work . . . but maybe not very clearly).  This isn’t to say that aid is perfect.  Hell, I wrote a book arguing that we don’t really know what it is we are trying to fix in much of the world, so I have my issues with aid and development.  I just want an honest reading of their impacts and drawbacks.

Posted on by Ed 1