by Alex Evans | Jul 23, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Lots of hopeful coverage last week about the find, made by Boston University researchers, of a massive underground lake in Darfur. The Independent was pretty typical:
In the dry wasteland of Sudan’s war-racked Darfur region, the imprint of an ancient 8,000sq-mile underground lake has been discovered by geologists from Boston University. If confirmed, a lake as big as the area of Wales could replenish the region for a century. It is also raising hopes that one cause of the devastating civil war could be alleviated if drinking water is pumped to the surface.
The Egyptian geologist Farouk El-Baz, who led the research, hopes up to 1,000 deep wells would bring some relief to an area where conflict between nomadic herders and farmers has been exacerbated by climate change and dwindling water supplies.
But a thoughtful article in the New York Times yesterday argues that the find may, if confirmed, be as much a curse as a blessing. Alex de Waal is quoted as saying,
Like all resources water can be used for good or ill … If the government acts true to form and tries to create some sort of oasis in the desert and control who settles there, that would simply be an extension of the crisis, not a solution.
Exactly right. In resource-scarce contexts, environmental goods are assets: so the key questions are ones like: who owns them? Who gets to use them? Who gets to lend them? And who gets to trade them? Unfortunately, most donor agencies these days are pretty bad at integrating these kinds of question into their development programming. But as resource scarcity takes centre stage in an increasing number of developing countries, watch this space…
by Alex Evans | Jul 23, 2007 | Economics and development, Influence and networks
Some blunt words from the US’s new envoy on HIV and AIDS, Anthony Fauci, who says:
“For every one person that you put in [antiretroviral] therapy, six new people get infected. So we’re losing that game, the numbers game.”
How refreshing to see a leading global issue ambassador being blunt about the central numbers, rather than spinning the usual rubbish about ‘steps in the right direction’, ‘packages of measures’ and what have you. Would that we saw more of this on climate change, where the linguistic swamp is probably worse than any other issue. Time for a quick hit of George Orwell for a rainy Monday morning, from Politics and the English Language:
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age, there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics”. All issues are political issues.”
by Alex Evans | Jul 23, 2007 | Conflict and security, Middle East and North Africa
The UN Security Council decided on Friday to terminate the mandate of UNMOVIC – the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, itself the successor to the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) established in 1991 to oversee post-war dismantlement of Iraq’s CBRN arsenal. Condi Rice and Margaret Beckett had written wrote a joint letter to the Security Council – the latter less than a week before her departure – saying:
“Together with the government of Iraq and other Member States, the United States and the United Kingdom … have been working since March 2003 with the objective of locating and securing, removing, disabling, rendering harmless, eliminating or destroying weapons of mass destruction … developed under the regime of Saddam Hussein … We wish to inform the Security Council that all appropriate steps have been taken to secure, remove, disable, render harmless, eliminate or destroy … all known elements of Iraq’s known weapons of mass destruction.”
There’s a certain amount of predictable sniggering at the news in many quarters. Well, sure they’ve been ‘secured, removed, disabled, rendered harmless, eliminated or destroyed’: there were none, right?
But in case you were thinking that UNMOVIC’s demise looked like an exercise in closing the stable door four years after the horse had bolted, Richard Weitz at World Politics Review argues that in fact, closing UNMOVIC down was a serious mistake.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Jul 20, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system, Influence and networks, UK
David Miliband’s first speech as Foreign Secretary, given at Chatham House earlier today, is worth watching (transcript on the FCO website here). He’s proposing to simmer the UK’s ten current international priorities down to perhaps three, mooting radicalisation, climate change and the EU as his “starters for ten”.
Especially welcome was the emphasis on Foreign Office reform, policy coherence and the need for a new theory of influence for 21st century diplomacy (which, regular readers will know, David Steven and I both have a tendency to bang on about). In his conclusion, he noted that:
The Foreign Office is a unique global asset. But diplomacy has to be allied to other assets across government, in particular, aid, trade, investment and military intervention. How can we improve coordination across the FCO and other departments on particular countries and challenges?
[…and there’s the question of] how can we engage beyond Whitehall, with faith groups, NGOs, business and universities. The old diplomacy was defined by a world of limited information. It was a veritable secret garden of negotiations. And secret negotiation still matters.
But we live in a world where the views of a Pashtun farmer, and the conflict he faces between illegal opium production and legal farming, holds the fate of a critical country in the balance. So the new diplomacy is public as well as private, mass as well as elite, real-time as well as deliberative. And that needs to be reflected in the way we do our business.
But the real stroke of genius here was to ask Avaaz to co-host: an awesomely smart piece of positioning. Rather than waiting for Avaaz to dump a global petition on him during some crisis still to come, Miliband has actively set out to court their global network of supporters – and succeeded. Having been invited to co-host and canvass questions for Miliband from their global roster of members and supporters, Avaaz are now positively purring about David – titling their coverage of his speech, “David Miliband – a new diplomacy?”
by Alex Evans | Jul 13, 2007 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
Earlier this week I went to an event attended by various senior policymakers discussing global risks and the inadequacy of the international system to deal with them. The discussion went along predictable lines for the most part, but there was a glorious moment when a senior World Bank executive said:
Clearly, it’s national sovereignty that’s the problem. And I think we’re getting to the point at which we have to have the main global decisions taken by the experts, not by politicians. I mean, if you’re on a plane and it’s crashing, who do you want in the cockpit: the pilot, or a committee of the passengers?
Ladies and gentlement: the World Bank. They’re here to help.
