by Alex Evans | Feb 9, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
While we’re on the subject of the IPCC, this Spectator piece by Matt Ridley, which flags up the role of bloggers in all this, is worth a look (h/t Clive Crook again):
When Climategate broke, the mainstream media… mostly ran dismissive pieces reflecting the official position of the Consensus. For example, they dutifully repeated the line that the University of East Anglia’s global temperature record was vindicated by two other ‘entirely independent’ records (from Nasa and NOAA), which was bunk: all three records draw from the same network of weather stations. Editors then found — by reading and counting the responses on their blog pages — that there was huge and educated interest in Climategate among their readers. One by one they took notice and unleashed their sniffing newshounds at last: the Daily Express went first, then the Mail and the Sunday Times, last week the Times and this week even the Guardian.
For those few mainstream journalists who had always been sceptical — like Christopher Booker — it must be a strange experience, like being relieved after living behind enemy lines. Who knows, one day even BBC News may ask tough questions. But it was the bloggers who did the hard work.
by Alex Evans | Feb 9, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
That’s what Clive Crook thinks we may be looking at, as he explains in a post on FT.com:
A turning point has been reached when in the space of a few days the chief scientist at the UK environment ministry complains about the IPCC’s ever-lengthening list of blunders; the head of Greenpeace UK calls for the IPCC’s head to step down; and, following a series of commendably forthright Guardian pieces on the scandal, The Observer, no less, attacks the Climategate cover-up.
He continues:
…the main damage to the credibility of climate science was done not by the Climategate emails, nor by the principals’ efforts to justify themselves. The main damage was done by the many climate scientists who affected to see nothing troublesome in what was disclosed, and the far larger number who decided it was best to say nothing. That was the really shocking thing. If climate scientists had united in criticising the methods and practices revealed by Climategate, the scandal might very well have fizzled. In saying they saw nothing wrong, they impugned their own work and that of all their colleagues, and brought the whole enterprise under suspicion.
(more…)
by Mark Weston | Feb 8, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
This morning, presumably because of a burst pipe, a trickle of water was bubbling up through a hole in the surface of a busy Freetown street. Next to the hole, a man in rags was on his hands and knees, lapping at the water like a dog.
by Mark Weston | Feb 8, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
Mobile phones are spreading through Sierra Leone like a cholera epidemic. Everyone either has one or aspires to one. Phone theft is common (my own lasted a week). People will sacrifice meals or school fees to buy credits (everyone is on pay-as-you-go, and stalls selling top-up scratch cards are ubiquitous, as are recharging shops, since few have electricity at home).
There is keen competition among the major mobile networks – Zain, Africell and Comium adverts adorn billboards, bars and houses, whose owners charge a monthly rent for you to daub your logo over their walls. They sponsor pop concerts, sports events and even Freetown’s venerable cotton tree, under which the first freed slaves congregated to plan their new lives.
As in Europe, the operators do not shirk from sharp practice. Calls to someone else on your network are cheap, but if you call a Zain phone from an Africell sim your costs soar. To combat this, Sierra Leoneans buy a sim card for each network and give out three numbers to contacts – a sim costs a dollar, and phones are sold unlocked. Some have handsets that can carry two cards at once, and you press a button to choose which to use for a particular call. Others have three phones with a different sim in each. The less affluent have to open up their phone to change the card each time they call another network (this of course means that you often have to dial three different numbers before you can get through to someone).
The mobile exerts a dictatorial hold on social intercourse. Nothing is more important than an incoming call. Businesspeople interrupt meetings to take calls from friends, family and colleagues; the judge in a court case we observed last week kept halting proceedings whenever his phone rang; a beer with a Sierra Leonean friend is a series of stops and starts as he or she fields calls or replies to texts. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Feb 5, 2010 | Influence and networks
I tried asking that to roomful of Foreign Office diplomats yesterday, at a Chatham House seminar (part of the Institute’s program on Redefining the UK’s International Ambitions and Choices ahead of the election – David and I are writing one of two concluding reports, on ‘organising for influence’; the other, by Paul Cornish, will be on UK security and defence policy).
It’s not an altogether flippant question. Various countries (especially from the former Soviet Union) have decided not to bother with embassies in the UK, electing simply to hire Bell Pottinger instead. Other countres go for a both / and approach: China, for instance, has an extensive global network of posts, but also a large account with APCO Worldwide.
Granted, there are some areas in which it makes sense to keep things in house. Managing bilateral relationships with other government’s isn’t something you can easily outsource. And knowing how to operate in multilateral processes is something you only really learn inside a government – sure, you can hire a lobbyist to help you with (say) WTO negotiations, but chances are that what makes them a good operator in that arena is time spent working for a government.
But campaigning work on global issues – trying to create the conditions internationally for an ambitious climate deal, for instance – mightn’t that be the sort of thing at which a communications consultancy might actually be better than the Foreign Office? (more…)
