by Alex Evans | Oct 8, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, UK
I’ve just been reading a new pamphlet on foreign policy by Michael Ancram – a Tory grandee who was Deputy Leader of the Party and Shadow Defence Secretary until 2005. In lots of ways, the paper – entitled ‘Farewell to Drift’, and available as a pdf here – is much as you’d expect.
There’s a section on hard power (“the days of using hard power for ‘nation building’ … are well and truly over”), and another on national security (forget aircraft carriers, spend the money on “a navy that can protect our islands from physical attack, infiltration, smuggling – or even piracy against our shipping”). Development, on the other hand, does not warrant a section; DFID gets a mention, but only in the sense that
The Foreign Office has been emasculated by the creation of DFID, which veers dangerously close to setting its own foreign policy at times … DFID’s budget overwhelms that of the FCO, further undermining the former.
But interestingly, although climate change isn’t mentioned, there is a separate section on Energy, Food and Water – which, from a starting point of the national interest, ends up at a sort of realisation of the need for collective action, especially on the latter two.
Of course, you can’t do much about energy, food and water without going via climate change. But given the toxic politics surrounding climate at the moment, Ancram’s angle of approach confirms a hunch I’ve had for a while – that resource scarcity may be a useful entry point to the debate that allows for easier engagement of actors sceptical of cliamte change.
by Alex Evans | Oct 8, 2010 | Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development
Former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios has a new Center for Global Development paper railing against the agency’s culture of bureaucracy – and, in particular, its obsession with measuring things. As Natsios observes, this approach “ignores a central principle of development theory – that those development programs that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational, and those programs that are the most transformational are the least measurable”.
But the real treat comes in a quotation Natsios has found from, of all development experts, the Duke of Wellington:
Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French Forces, my officers have been diligently complying with your requests, which have been sent by H.M Ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch rider to our headquarters.
We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit, and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.
Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstances since we are at war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.
This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government, so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains. I construe that it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one with my best ability, but I cannot do both.
1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London, or perchance
2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven out of Spain.
by Alex Evans | Oct 8, 2010 | Economics and development
Over at Brookings, Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz have been crunching the data in the IMF’s new World Economic Outlook, which came out yesterday (pdf of the WEO executive summary here).
One of the most interesting bits of their analysis is a comparison between the 2008 WEO’s forecasts of countries’ GDP in 2013, and what the new WEO forecasts for the same year – in other words, a measure of how much the financial crisis and global downturn has messed up countries’ prospects.
As the map below shows, Eastern Europe and Russia are the big losers, where “for many countries 2013 incomes will be 15 to 20 percent lower than had been previously expected”. Brazil, China and India emerge more or less unscathed. All in all, “154 economies are now anticipated to be poorer in 2013 than had been thought two years ago, while only 25 are expected to be richer”.
Africa’s mixed performance will give development analysts lots to chew on. In some of the negative cases, what went wrong is fairly clear: Madagascar’s deep shade of red is presumably due to the coup there in March 09, for instance.
But overall, Chandy and Gertz find that among the 71 economies that managed to post an increase in per capita income in 2009, despite the bitter winds howling around them, we find three quarters of the world’s low income countries “who, contrary to fears, fared relatively well through the crisis”.
by Richard Gowan | Oct 7, 2010 | Economics and development, Middle East and North Africa, Off topic
Abu Dhabi’s The National brings us this story straight outta Jordan:
Six young men are standing around a pair of CD decks on a Friday afternoon in mid-September, spinning tunes, shooting the breeze and gently trying to outdo one another with their DJ skills. It’s a scene that could unfold in countless urban environments the world over. What makes this particular tableau slightly unusual is that we are in a women’s centre run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Jebel el Hussein, a Palestinian refugee camp in the northwest of the Jordanian capital.
At the heart of this unlikely gathering is Martin Fernando Jakobsen, a 31-year-old DJ from Denmark and member of the Copenhagen-based collective The Black School. Along with a group of likeminded friends, including his long-time collaborator Simon Dokkedal, he has been taking hip-hop workshops to refugee camps on and off for the last two years. It is, he says, a path that he more or less stumbled onto.
“A while ago my wife got a job in Beirut with the United Nations Development Programme, so I moved out there with her,” he explains. “While I was there, I started thinking about a way to bring our group together again and to give something back to the community at the same time. One day I found myself talking with a lady from the Danish Centre for Culture and Development and outlined to her a plan for a pilot scheme of workshops in Lebanon’s Palestinian camps. The organisation already knew who we were, so agreed to fund it. That’s when the whole idea came to life.”
As great moments in rap history go, I’m not convinced that this matches Tupac and Biggie. Oddly, I also have a piece in today’s National reviewing The Crisis Caravan, Linda Polman’s assault on the aid industry. While I argue that Polman’s reportage echoes a lot of other recent war memoirs and her analysis is too narrow, she takes down feel-good aid projects brilliantly. I wonder what she’d have made of this one?
by Alex Evans | Oct 7, 2010 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7Cmn5AOOxg[/youtube]
