by David Steven | May 10, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia
Yesterday I was at a roundtable on Europe and climate change, hosted by Jim Murphy, the UK’s minister for Europe, with his French counterpart, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, as the main speaker.
France is about to take over the EU presidency and will play a critical role on the road to Copenhagen. Two questions stand out:
- Can the EU show that it is making credible moves towards its unilateral commitment to a 20% emissions cut by 2020?
- How hard will the French push the idea that laggards on climate change should be punished through the global trade regime?
The first question is the most important. In Bali, the Europeans had some success in leading the negotiations from in front. I summed up their strategy as follows in my Bali wrap up:
(i) Take a unilateral commitment first. (ii) Next bring on board others prepared to move ahead of the pack. (iii) Only then bring the US – the problem player – into the thick of the action, and do so at a time [after the presidential elections] when the country will be desperate to re-engage with the wider world; (iv) And finally, persuade developed countries to do their bit, using a blend of three arguments. First, that rich countries have committed to action first. Second, that incentives are on the table, to help the switch from dirty to clean tech. And finally that not to act is unfair on countries that are poorer and more vulnerable (expect India to hear a lot from low-lying Bangladesh, for example).
But that strategy only works if Europe’s partners believe that the EU intends to keep the commitments it has freely made. At the moment, that is far from clear. The roundtable was opened by the FT’s George Parker, who argued that the UK missed half of its own green targets, public interest in the environment was on the wane, and that the EU was failing to align its budget to its green aspirations. (more…)
by David Steven | Apr 30, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Global system
I am at the Diplomatic Academy of London for a conference on ‘transformational public diplomacy’ (programme- pdf).
As the title suggests, the launch pad for the conference is US one – the agenda Condoleezza Rice first set out in a speech at Georgetown University in 2006:
I would define the objective of transformational diplomacy this way: to work with our many partners around the world, to build and sustain democratic, well-governed states that will respond to the needs of their people and conduct themselves responsibly in the international system.
Let me be clear, transformational diplomacy is rooted in partnership; not in paternalism. In doing things with people, not for them; we seek to use America’s diplomatic power to help foreign citizens better their own lives and to build their own nations and to transform their own futures.
In her speech, Rice set out priorities for preparing ‘old diplomatic institutions to serve new diplomatic purposes.’ First, a new ‘posture’ – getting staff out of Europe and the US and onto the diplomatic front line. Second, a regional rather than a bilateral approach. Third, ‘localization’ – less focus on capitals, more on major population centres. Fourth, more ‘jointness’ between soldiers and civilians. And finally, a reskilling of diplomats to meet new challenges.
Rice returned to this agenda in a second Georgetown speech in 2008. The nub of this speech was the scant resources the US devotes to diplomacy (despite some recent increases):
How can it be, for example, that the Pentagon has nearly twice as many lawyers as America has Foreign Service Officers? How can it be that the United Kingdom, with one-fifth of our population, has a diplomatic service nearly as large as America’s? Clearly, modernizing our diplomacy and fully resourcing it will be the challenge of a generation, not just one administration.
In questions at Georgetown, Rice was asked about the United States’s international reputation and gave a bullish response. “America is viewed and revered throughout the world as a country that is a fierce defender of human rights, a fierce defender of liberties, a great multiethnic democracy,” she claimed, while also hailing US leadership in the development field (“the largest international development effort since the Marshall Plan”).
Presenting this agenda to the conference, though, Barrie Walkley, from the United States embassy in London, noted that transformational diplomacy was “a purely American initiative”. Rice “leaves it to other countries to respond to this situation and say what they’re going to do.”
This assumption of US leadership reminded me of the words of Jim Connaughton, the US climate negotiator, at the Bali climate conference: “The US will lead and continue to lead [on climate] but leadership requires others to fall in line and follow.”
But if the problems of an interdependent world are essentially multilateral, interoperability between like-minded actors is surely at a premium. It’s probably not enough for the US to wait for its allies to fall in line…
by Richard Gowan | Apr 9, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development
I normally leave scarcity issues to the other, better-informed contributors to this blog, but this week’s food riots in Haiti have brought UN peacekeepers face-to-face with the effects of rising prices, so I can’t keep my head that deep in the sand. UN officials can talk about little except food prices at the moment. John Holmes, the UN humanitarian chief and increasingly cited as one of the Secretariat’s stars, set out the problem today:
Combined with the negative impact of climate change and soaring fuel prices, a “perfect storm” is brewing for much of the world’s population, said Holmes. “The security implications (of the food crisis) should also not be underestimated as food riots are already being reported across the globe.”
His comments came after two days of rioting in Egypt, where the prices for many staples has doubled in the past year. And violent food protests were continuing for a second day in the capital of Haiti. “Current food price trends are likely to increase sharply both the incidence and depth of food insecurity,” Holmes said, noting a 40-per-cent average rise in prices worldwide since the middle of last year.
What to do? Well, not unreasonably, the UN is continuing to push for more food aid to the worst off:
John Powell, the deputy executive director of The United Nation’s World Food Program, emphasized the need for developed countries to help governments in the developing world. Developing countries experiencing unrest over high food prices need help in developing “social safety net programs,” he said.
“Riots today mean you need a solution tomorrow,” Powell said. Governments with no “policy space” and under pressure from organized discontent in urban centres “is not likely to be the best decision” in trying to solve the problem, he said.
So, governments facing serious rioting make bad decisions. Hm. Sometimes, the real problem is that bad governments face riots. That isn’t about “policy space”, but about the fact that autocratic or incapable regimes tend to reinforce or manipulate food shortages to their own advantage. The popular response: rioting.
Throwing food at the problem might be a “solution tomorrow”, if there was food to be thrown. But it seems there isn’t – and the essential response to food riots is creating more accountable (dare one say “democratic”?) governments that are politically motivated to respond to inequalities (rather than simply offer a “safety net”, although that may have to do for now). My colleagues who think about such things will find this blindingly obvious, but there’s a risk that the current crisis will obscure the underlying political dimensions of the inequalities involved…
PS: whatever the precise linkage between scarcity and urban violence, nobody should attempt to intervenc before reading Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. It should be the book of the moment, and even makes UN statistic compelling. If you don’t have time to read that, there’s an article-length version of the case online.
by Mark Weston | Mar 28, 2008 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
A few weeks back the Guardian noted the transformation of Guinea-Bissau, a tiny, jungly and desperately poor country on the tip of West Africa, into the world’s first “narco-state.” Presumably this phrase means that its economy relies on drugs, though it has never been clearly defined and Guatemala and Afghanistan have also laid claim to the title in the recent past. No matter, what is not in doubt is that Guinea-Bissau, which had hitherto relied for survival on a meagre harvest of cashew nuts and fish (at least those fish that are not plundered by European Union trawlers), has found its diamonds/oil/gold/coltan substitute: cocaine.
The traditional route for exporting the drug from Colombia to Europe – Britons and Spaniards are the world’s biggest cokeheads – is via the Caribbean, but the American crackdown (no pun intended) has made that option both risky and expensive. Guinea-Bissau, which is the nearest point of Africa to South America, has no prisons and a police force that owns no handcuffs or vehicles, presents an alluring alternative. A few years ago, therefore, Colombian drug cartels began flying consignments of the drug to airstrips (left over from a recent civil war) in the remote jungles of the Bijagos islands. From there, having paid off local police, they move it north across the Sahara to Europe. (more…)
by Alex Evans | Mar 11, 2008 | Cooperation and coherence, Influence and networks
Who set out this admirable vision of decentralised policy coherence?
Without democracy, you have no understanding of what is happening down below; the situation will be unclear; you will be unable to collect sufficient opinion from all sides; there can be no communication between top and bottom; top-level organs of leadership will depend on one-sided and incorrect material to decide issues, thus you will find it difficult to avoid being subjective; it will be impossible to achieve unity of understanding and unity of action.
(more…)
