by Alex Evans | Jul 31, 2011 | Influence and networks, North America
Details from Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy:
The House Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee, led by Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), unveiled its fiscal 2012 appropriations bill today in advance of tomorrow’s markup. The bill would provide State and USAID with $39.6 billion in discretionary funding next year, which is 18 percent, or $8.6 billion, below the fiscal 2011 level. The fiscal 2011 level, which was reached as part of a deal to avoid a government shutdown in April, was already $8 billion less than originally requested by the Obama administration […]
The State and Foreign Operations appropriations bill usually enjoys wide bipartisan support, but this year will be an exception. House Democratic aides said that the bill was crafted in a way to satisfy GOP political priorities and without much consideration for comity or consensus across the aisle.
“The decision was apparently made that this would be a Republican bill,” one House Democratic aide said.
For employees at State and USAID, the cuts could be particularly biting. The bill cuts the $1.35 billion USAID operations budget to around $900 million and would eliminate what’s known as “localization pay” for diplomats abroad, which would immediately bring down their salaries.
by Jules Evans | Jul 29, 2011 | Economics and development, Global system, Influence and networks
Global Dashboard had its summer drinks party last night – thanks to Alex and David for hosting us, it was great fun. I particularly enjoyed talking to some of the civil servants who attended, as I’ve been thinking about bureaucracy and morality, and the question of whether it’s possible to have a ‘good society’ in a bureaucratic age. Can politics promote the good life, and if so, what is the role of the civil service in pursuit of that goal?
When the modern civil service was set up in the 19th century, via the reforms of Macaulay, Northcote and Trevelyan, it was modeled on the Chinese imperial civil service – this is why senior British civil servants are still called ‘mandarins’. The Chinese civil service was founded on Confucian philosophy, and part of that philosophy was the meritocratic idea that anyone could become a good person through the proper philosophical training: ‘By nature men are similar, by practice men are wide apart’, as Confucius put it.
So the Chinese civil service had an open exam entry system, which tested civil servants’ intelligence and aptitude in various subjects, including their knowledge of the Confucian philosophy. The imperial civil service played a central role in shaping the Confucian moral values of Chinese society. Civil servants were, in effect, the public intellectuals of Chinese society.
When it came to the British civil service, Thomas Babbington Macaulay, who set up the prototype of the modern civil service in the Raj, embraced the Chinese idea of the civil service as a meritocracy, but thought the civil service should embrace an empirical, scientific model of statecraft rather than also being guided by ancient ethical philosophy like Chinese mandarins. In an essay on Francis Bacon, he unfavourably compared the ancient Greek approach to the modern, English approach: “For Plato, the end of legislation is to make men virtuous”, he wrote, while for Bacon, the end of legislation is “the well-being of the people”, by which Macaulay means making “imperfect men comfortable”, supplying their “vulgar wants”, improving their material circumstances.
Macaulay was deeply scornful of the way ancient philosophy focused entirely on creating inner virtue rather than trying to improve the material circumstances of society. He believed philosophy had failed in its project of creating character or virtue, while the new philosophy of science had, in a few centuries, invented such wonders as the steam-engine. He wrote: “The wise man of the Stoics would no doubt be a grander object than a steam-engine. But there are steam engines. And the wise man of the Stoics is yet to be born.”
So Macaulay thought that the aim of the civil service, and of politics in general, should be improving the well-being of the people by making life more comfortable, through science and technology. Modern statescraft should deal in facts, not airy-fairy ‘values’. And later reformers, such as Northcote and Trevelyan, agreed that the civil service should be both meritocratic in the Chinese model, and should also strive to be impartial, non-political, technocratic. This vision of the civil service abides: when Whitehall came to codify its values (this only happened last year) it enshrined the values of integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality.
But is there a contradiction here? If a civil service is impartial and non-political, does that also mean its amoral? If it is purely technocratic, then is it value-less? If a government wanted to go to war on a trumped-up cause, for example, would it be the job of the civil service to find the most efficient way of administering its masters’ will?
If the civil service aims, as Macaulay says it should, at the ‘well-being of the people’, does that not imply some moral vision of the good, or can one have a purely scientific and non-moral definition of well-being and human flourishing? (more…)
by Richard Gowan | Jul 25, 2011 | Africa, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development, Europe and Central Asia, UK
It’s clearly the season to be thinking about whether our current levels of aid spending are politically sustainable. As Alex highlights in his excellent post below, new polling figures from Chatham House suggest that two-thirds of the British public think the UK shells out too much in aid (although I concur with Alex’s assumption that few people track the real level of spending). And as I note in a new commentary piece over on the ECFR site, this fits in with other signs of a looming attack on aid in Europe:
Some European governments, notably the UK, and the European Commission have done their best to uphold their aid pledges since the financial crisis struck. But last year the new coalition government in the Netherlands announced its intention to cut development spending by €400 million in 2011, with more reductions to follow. Opinion polls suggested that voters approved. Research for ECFR’s European Foreign Policy Scorecard found that France had cut its donations to UN humanitarian agencies by around 20% in 2009 and 2010. This week, the human impact of such economising was brought home as Oxfam and other NGOs revealed that European donors including France and Germany had pledged miniscule sums of aid to address the drought in East Africa.
These are, aid experts worry, the initial signs of a deeper shift in Europe’s commitments to helping the poor and vulnerable beyond its borders. Over the last decade, it has become a standard defence of the EU to note that whatever the bloc’s military and diplomatic weaknesses, it is at least the world’s biggest source of international aid. But it hardly requires a mystical ability to see the future to predict that as EU members grapple with debt and domestic priorities, foreign aid budgets will be under recurrent pressure.
Like it or not, I think that it is pretty inevitable that we will see a period of continued retrenchment by European donors in the years ahead (check out the full ECFR piece to find out why). The question is whether this will be smart retrenchment – with governments, NGOs and international organizations actually working out how to introduce sensible reductions, evaluate what works, etc. – or a poorly-coordinated set of budget cuts justified by vague appeals to “the need for austerity”.
There are lots of reasons to expect the latter. It’s hard to instigate serious discussions about retrenchment because (i) aid’s opponents have lots of easy populist arguments about how “aid never works”; and (ii) aid’s defenders naturally adopt maximalist positions when faced with these attacks. If you back down from the (now sadly hard-to-sustain) stance that the developed economies should continue to aim to spend 0.7% of GNI on development aid, it’s hard to know where the retreat will end…
by Alex Evans | Jul 25, 2011 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, UK
Chatham House and YouGov published their annual survey of British attitudes on UK international priorities last week, and it’s worth a look. The survey covers both 2,000 or so members of the public, and over 800 opinion formers. Some findings:
First, as expected, the public strongly thinks that the UK spends too much on aid to poor countries (57% say so). I kind of wish the survey had asked them what proportion of GNI Britain spends on aid – I bet the mean estimate would have been over 5% (as opposed to less than 0.7%). But there we are.
And climate fares little better than development. Asked what are the biggest future threats to “the British way of life”, only 18% said climate change – this on a question where respondents could pick three or four issues, not just one. 31% of people are “not currently convinced that climate change is a serious threat”.
But here’s the interesting part. On that same question about future threats, interruptions to energy supply scored 37% – placing it second after terrorism (53%). And “long-term scarcity of essential natural resources, such as water, food and land” scored 30%. Among opinion formers, international financial instability comes a lot higher (59%, as compared to 36% among the public); but energy interruptions and resource scarcity are both in the top five.
It’s the same story when it comes to what UK foreign policy should focus on. Among opinion formers, “ensuring the continued supply of vital resources, such as oil, gas, food and water” comes out top in a list of issues that should be “the main focus of UK foreign policy”, with 48% selecting it as one of up to 3 issues. (Terrorism came joint first; climate was fourth, at 26%. Climate fatigue is not just limited to the public.) The public, meanwhile, put the resource scarcity priority second on the list, after securing Britain’s borders.
So, newsflash: scarcity is now a more resonant frame with both the UK public and UK opinion formers than either climate or development. I’ve suspected for a while that this was the way things were headed, but would certainly not have guessed that the agenda would shift this fast.
To be sure, it’s extremely worrying to see climate and development scoring so poorly. But I think the survey’s findings also signal an important opportunity to build new constituencies for action on climate and development – by pointing out the extent to which action in these two areas can deliver on scarcity concerns. (This has the added benefit of actually being true – in contrast, say, to arguing in favour of aid to fragile states on the basis that it will help protect UK national security, which is a much less convincing argument, as Stewart Patrick notes in the current edition of Foreign Policy.)
By extension, there may also be more political space than we thought for talking about the ‘fair shares’ aspects of resource scarcity that I wrote about in the Oxfam / WWF paper that came out last week (details here). That’s what Chatham House’s Rob Bailey argues too, in a short comment piece in which he notes that,
Both the general public and opinion-formers consider aid largely irrelevant to Britain’s international reputation, and as playing only a small role in serving national interests. This suggests that one argument in defence of aid employed by the Secretary of State for International Development, that Britain is an ‘Aid Superpower,’ is unlikely to resonate with voters, despite the fact that the UK is viewed internationally as a leader.
Would an international development strategy focused on sustainable, equitable and secure access to resources win greater voter approval? Maybe: as we have seen, there is a strong convergence in opinion that resource insecurity is a major threat to the UK and should be a foreign policy priority. This need not be window dressing, as there is a growing body of expert opinion that identifies resource scarcity as the major development challenge for the 21st century.
