I was at a talk today where folks from Michigan State were presenting research and policy recommendations to guide the Feed the Future initiative. I greatly appreciate this sort of presentation – it is good to get real research in the building, and to see USAID staff that have so little time turn out in large numbers to engage. Once again, folks, its not that people in the agencies aren’t interested or don’t care, its a question of time and access.
In the course of one of the presentations, however, I saw a moment of “explanation” for observed behavior that nicely captures a larger issue that has been eating at me as the randomized control trials for development (RCT4D) movement gains speed . . . there isn’t a lot of explanation there. There is really interesting data, rigorously collected, but explanation is another thing entirely.
In the course of the presentation, the presenter put up a slide that showed a wide dispersion of prices around the average price received by farmers for their maize crops around a single market area (near where I happen to do work in Malawi). Nothing too shocking there, as this happens in Malawi, and indeed in many places. However, from a policy and programming perspective, it’s important to know that the average price is NOT the same thing as what a given household is taking home. But then the presenter explained this dispersion by noting (in passing) that some farmers were more price-savvy than others.
1) there is no evidence at all to support this claim, either in his data or in the data I have from an independent research project nearby
2) this offhand explanation has serious policy ramifications.
This explanation is a gross oversimplification of what is actually going on here – in Mulanje (near the Luchenza market area analyzed in the presentation), price information is very well communicated in villages. Thus, while some farmers might indeed be more savvy than others, the prices they are able to get are communicated throughout the village, thus distributing that information. So the dispersion of prices is the product of other factors. Certainly desperation selling is probably part of the issue (another offhand explanation offered later in the presentation). However, what we really need, if we want a rigorous understanding of the causes of this dispersion and how to address it, is a serious effort to grasp the social component of agriculture in this area – how gender roles, for example, shape household power dynamics, farm roles, and the prices people will sell at (this is a social consideration that exceeds explanation via markets), or how social networks connect particular farmers to particular purchasers in a manner that facilitates or inhibits price maximization at market. These considerations are both causal of the phenomena that the presenter described, and the points of leverage on which policy might act to actually change outcomes. If farmers aren’t “price savvy”, this suggests the need for a very different sort of intervention than what would be needed to address gendered patterns of agricultural strategy tied to long-standing gender roles and expectations.
This is a microcosm of what I am seeing in the RCT4D world right now – really rigorous data collection, followed by really thin interpretations of the data. It is not enough to just point out interesting patterns, and then start throwing explanations out there – we must turn from rigorous quantitative identification of significant patterns of behavior to the qualitative exploration of the causes of those patterns and their endurance over time. I’ve been wrestling with these issues in Ghana for more than a decade now, an effort that has most recently led me to a complete reconceptualization of livelihoods (shifting from understanding livelihoods as a means of addressing material conditions to a means of governing behaviors through particular ways of addressing material conditions – the article is in review at Development and Change). However, the empirical tests of this approach (with admittedly tiny-n size samples in Ghana, and very preliminary looks at the Malawi data) suggest that I have a better explanatory resolution for explained behaviors than possible through existing livelihoods approaches (which would end up dismissing a lot of choices as illogical or the products of incomplete information) – and therefore I have a better foundation for policy recommendations than available without this careful consideration of the social.
See, for example, this article I wrote on how we approach gender in development (also a good overview of the current state of gender and development, if I do say so myself). I empirically demonstrate that a serious consideration of how gender is constructed in particular places has large material outcomes on whose experiences we can understand, and therefore the sorts of interventions we might program to address particular challenges. We need more rigorous wrestling with “the social” if we are going to learn anything meaningful from our data. Period.
In summary, explanation is hard. Harder, in many ways, than rigorous data collection. Until we start spending at least as much effort on the explanation side as we do on the collection side, we will not really change much of anything in development.
Tag: Malawi
Let's play identify the falling metal . . .
**Update** NASA tentatively identifies the metal as from an Indian launch
Sorry for the slow posts – it is a very busy week. And the coffee maker broke this morning. And my wife got lost on the way to the mall to buy a new one. Tomorrow morning is going to be less than fun.
Anyway, to keep my work-and-caffeine related whining in perspective, I bring you METAL FROM THE SKY. Mary Thompson, one of my Ph.D. students (you may remember her from hits such as this) is currently in Malawi, working around the Mt. Mulanje Forest Reserve to assess the use of the reserve by surrounding communities and the impact of a growing fortress conservation mentality on local livelihoods. It’s a great project, and we have built into it some serious efforts to assess forest impact via transect walk sampling and some fun work with satellite imagery.
So Mary just posted to her Facebook page (<<in grumpy old man voice>> in my day, we didn’t have Facebook . . . we had nonfunctioning landlines that we could reach once every two weeks . . .) an amusing story and picture.
So, last night at about 11pm there was this loud rumbling noise coming from somewhere. I kept thinking that if this was thunder it is the longest lasting thunder I’ve ever heard. And it was clear out. So eventually it stopped and didn’t happen again and I went to sleep. So this morning the people who work here said they think it was probably a small earthquake on the mountain or somewhere. Rare but not totally uncommon. I thought that was pretty cool and didn’t give it too much thought aside from giving my research assistants a lesson on how earthquakes work.
Then, we were leaving Monjomo village and passed a man that we knew from Likhubula on his bike and stopped him to ask the quickest way back on our bikes. He told us, and then said that he had just been to Chambe (a few miles up the road from where I live) where last night something metal had fallen from the sky and made the big noise everyone had heard and there was a rumor that another piece had been found at another village some distance away. So, of course we had to go check it out. we got there and there were hundreds of people hanging out for the excitement. This is very rural Sub-Saharan Africa, excitement here can be a little hard to come by. The police were there and had roped off a section of someone’s maize field (that had been flattened by all the people). In the center was a piece of metal a little longer than my arm that clearly belonged to some sort of machinery at some point. Since I’m a visitor (aka since I’m white and had a camera) they let me go under the rope barrier to take pictures. VIP UFO treatment for sure.
The chief of the neighboring village where I had been working for the past three months said she heard the loud noise and then her house was rattling and she thought it was a landslide from rocks on the mountain but she went outside and everything was lit up like electric lights (which they definitely don’t have) and she got scared and went back in the house.
I’ve never seen a plane over this area (doesn’t mean they don’t pass over from time to time), so who knows…
So, here is a picture of what fell from the sky:
OK gang, WTF is that? I can see a hinge at top left, and what looks like shearing on the part of the object nearest to us in the picture. The metal looks alloy, but what the hell do I know? Ideas? Anyone?
**Update 9 February**
Mary just sent me a message:
So, I emailed NASA’s Orbital Debris Program’s chief scientist and he said that the description and time fit well with an Indian rocket body that had been launched on the 2nd of Feb and reentered near this area on Feb 7th. I may change careers to UFO investigator.
Not to say I told you so . . .
but I told you so. Remember this post? Well, the New York Times has finally caught up to the story, and its not good news. The UN is finally starting to make official their concerns for global food prices. Now, you can argue that it is in the UN’s interest to raise this issue and make it a big deal, as the organization’s funding relies on donor countries who often are reticent to contribute except in times of crisis. However, the main person downplaying this potential crisis in the NYT story is Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) economist Abdolreza Abbassian:
“If you look at the numbers globally, the Americans, the Europeans and the Australians can make up the supply,” Mr. Abbassian said of the wheat harvest, playing down the chances of repeating the 2008 crisis. “There is no reason for this hype, but once the psychological thing sets in it is hard to change that perception, especially if Russia keeps sending bad news.”
There are a few important things to note here. First, while Abbassian downplays the idea of real shortages driving market prices, he is acknowledging that the uncertainty in the market is likely to drive price instability – the end result being unpredictable, and likely rising, food prices. Second, Abbassian must not be looking at the data that is trickling in from around the world. For example, I have firsthand information from Southern Malawi about the failure of the maize crop there – not as bad as a few years ago, but bad enough that it might compromise Malawi’s status as a maize exporter. Without wheat, people will start to press other grains, which are now themselves starting to get tight.
This is problematic globally, but I am very, very concerned for the situation in Southern Africa. Mozambique is already starting to see significant civil unrest related, at least in part, to rising food prices. Basically, this seems to have been the match that finally set off significant civil discontent with a problematic government. The last time Mozambique fell apart, refugees flooded places like southern Malawi, stressing land availability and people’s livelihoods – sort of exporting the problems to surrounding countries. The convergence of climatic variability and a highly interlinked global food market could be setting this region up for a really serious disaster in the immediate future . . . and we will feel the disaster here at the supermarket. Not good. Not good at all.