by Richard Gowan | Feb 3, 2011 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks, North America, Off topic
The Ottawa Citizen counts the costs of Canada’s 2010 run for the Security Council:
The Harper government spent nearly $1 million ferrying diplomats around the world in an unsuccessful bid to shore up support for a Canadian seat on the United Nations Security Council, newly released documents show.
Foreign Affairs officials travelled from the Polynesian island of Tuvalu to the Solomon Islands and dozens of other destinations in an attempt to win backing for membership in the world’s most exclusive club.
And then there were a few trips up to the Bronx…
The documents show thousands of dollars were spent entertaining foreign diplomats and U.S. officials, including a visit to a New York Yankees game with Cuban, Thai, Bosnian, Sri Lankan and Cambodian representatives. Canada also picked up tickets to take officials from Oman, Brunei, the Philippines and Italy to see the Cirque du Soleil.
I’d love to be the official who sits down and decides that the Sri Lankan ambassador is clearly going to trade their vote for an evening’s baseball whereas the Omani is more into acrobatics… Anyway, I’m sure that Mets and Red Sox fans will be delighted with this extra evidence that the Yankees suck.
by Jules Evans | Feb 3, 2011 | Economics and development, Global system, Influence and networks
Here’s a brief video of an event I attended yesterday, held by the Franco-British Council, about new French and British government initiatives to measure well-being.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN9Jtea1Hfs[/youtube]
by Alex Evans | Feb 3, 2011 | Middle East and North Africa
As the protesters battle it out against the hired thugs in Tahir Square, it’s worth keeping half an eye on the rapid deterioration of the Egyptian economy, too. This from a Nomura report on the situation published yesterday:
Banks will remain closed for the remainder of the work week … Cash is becoming scarce, particularly as many workers have not been able to collect their salaries from the end of January, and concerns are growing about access to food supply in certain areas.
The extended bank closure has begun to raise concerns about deposit runs and extensive demand for foreign exchange, once they do eventually open. And the risk of imposition of capital controls, at least temporarily, has increased. Regular government financing operations have also been interrupted, with the cancellation of a regularly-scheduled treasury-bill yesterday.
by Claire Melamed | Jan 31, 2011 | Economics and development
There’s much anxiety in development-land these days. New, frightening beasts like ‘results’ and ‘value for money’ are stalking the defenceless and helpless herds of ‘empowerment’ and ‘rights’. With their new slashing, tearing, efficiency-driven ways, the fear is these interlopers will exterminate the shyer folk and irretrievably warp the development process.
Actually, scrap the analogy. Firstly, it’s possibly a bit overwrought, and secondly, it’s just not true. It is absolutely wrong and quite dangerous to equate a concern for results with the view that development is just about handing out food parcels.
If you think results don’t matter, then consider the alternative. Without measuring results, we would never know if aid money made any difference. We would have no way of reporting back to communities about what governments were doing. We would have no way of judging between different claims on scarce development budgets, other than the whims of aid administrators and the vagaries of development fashion. And we would never, ever, know if things were getting better or worse.
It seems extraordinary to me that anyone could object to having more information about whether a policy change or a development project has an impact. More information can only help the people who really should be driving development – poor people themselves – to make choices and take control of what is done in their name.
This is not to say that what is counted doesn’t matter. A concern for results shouldn’t mean that we just reach for the nearest indicator and call it development. Quite rightly, there are many voices out there pointing out that development is a complex social and political process, involving power, rights and justice – all concepts that are difficult to capture on a spreadsheet. And, yes, there is a danger that pursuit of ‘results’, narrowly defined, could steer development projects and policies towards what is best counted, not what is best.
Now that is the argument worth having. What should we count? Those who are concerned with empowerment, rights and other such slippery but absolutely essential ideas should be rushing to the statisticians, and calling out for better ways of measuring if what they are doing in the name of empowerment and rights is actually working. Yes, as the saying goes, ‘not everything that can be counted, counts’, but ‘not everything that counts can be counted’ just isn’t good enough. We just ask people to take it on trust that things are working because the professionals say so? I think not.
Don’t get mad, get counting. The results agenda is completely compatible with a view that people are the agents of development and that it is their experiences and relationships that define progress. There are ways of measuring how people feel about things – in the UK, for example, we have things like the British Social Attitudes survey which asks people what they think and then reports it, and measures changes in things like attitudes to inequality, feelings about old age or views about the effectiveness of education policy over time. And we know that there are many ways of involving poor people in defining indicators and collecting numbers.
It could be so exciting. Let’s ask poor people what they call results, and what they consider the best value for money? Surely, surely you want to know?
