by Alex Evans | Jan 9, 2008 | Economics and development
Lawrence Haddad, the thoughtful Director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, has published a list of eight events and trends to watch out for in 2008: here it is. All eight are interesting, but none more so than Haddad’s discussion of a largely unnoticed event last year: the World Bank’s quiet revision of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) estimates for developing countries.
The new calculations involved big downward revisions for China, India and Brazil GDP after PPP is factored in. In Africa, thirteen countries were revised upwards – and thirty three downwards. According to Haddad, the new estimates will “significantly increase the estimates of those living under a dollar a day in Africa, Asia and Latin America”. While the new figures don’t contradict the basic reality of strong economic growth in emerging economies, Haddad notes that they do…
1. accentuate inter-country estimates of inequality (the rich country GDP estimates were largely unchanged), thus changing the dynamic of discussions around climate and trade.
2. force us to question our assumptions about the elasticity of poverty reduction with respect to economic growth. Has it changed in the last 5 years? This is a key question to be answered given the new development cooperation focus on various forms of economic growth.
3. force us to think about the newly increased number of poor within China and India – are they really living in the midst of a sea with a rising tide that will lift them out of poverty or are they caught in an inequality trap that is every bit as unforgiving as the traps in which Paul Collier’s bottom billion are caught?
If one thing’s missing for me on Haddad’s list, it’s scarcity trends. Rising oil prices and rising food prices are already causing real problems for developing countries that rely on imports of fuel or food – c.f. the IEA’s pronouncement between Christmas and new year that oil prices alone have already offset increased aid and debt relief to African non-oil producers over the last three years.
A pronounced downturn in the US and other western economies may ease the pressure in the shorter term – but the long term trends still look tough for developing countries. As I argued in my presentation last year to the PM’s Strategy Unit on international implications of rising food prices, donors need to pay a lot more attention to scarcity – and resilience to scarcity shocks.
by Alex Evans | Jan 8, 2008 | Influence and networks
Amid the general surfeit of apocalyptic language being used about the solvency crunch, climate change, oil prices and various other dark sides of globalisation’s force, there’s one constituency from whom we haven’t heard. Where’s the anti-globalisation movement? Shouldn’t they all be out in the street with drums and whistles, cheerfully dancing the told-you-so in a conga line stretching down the street, smashing the odd McDonald’s window as they go?
Take, for instance, this helpful chronology of the anti-globalisation movement produced by two German researchers. They highlight 1982 as the first year in which a major protest was held simultaneously in the same city as a G7 summit – 20,000 peace activists demonstrated against Reagan’s presence (and the terrorist group Action Directe – remember them? – attacked the Paris rep of the World Bank and the IMF). From there, the noisy and colourful history unfolds just as we saw it, until 2001 and – there ends the history, with the death of a protestor at the Genoa G8 after he was shot by a police officer.
At the time, everyone was stunned. I remember attending a climate change summit just a week or two after the G8, where there was a general sense of disbelief and rage among the activist networks at the conference. The mood was that a corner had been turned; things wouldn’t be the same from here on; it might all be about to get much more dark.
Which, of course, it did, though not in the way that anyone was expecting: obviously, any attempt to figure out what happened to the anti-globalisation movement has to start at 9/11. So here, for what it’s worth, are five starters for ten off the top of my head about what happened thereafter. Corrections, arguments, howls of protest very welcome…
1. Economic globalisation was immediately dislodged from its top spot on the ‘hot list’ of global issues. Throughout the 1990s, a lot of people in industrialised countries felt a creeping sense of worry and insecurity about globalisation. But after 9/11, there was something much more vivid to worry about – with governments painted in a totally different light (front line against terrorism rather than purveyors of policies to help multinational corporations).
2. Protests at summits immediately became much more difficult. The regular schedule of G8, IMF and other summits provided the anti-globalisation movement with much of its lifeblood. But after 9/11, the exclusion zones around summits got much bigger, the protestors were far more at arm’s length, and there was less scope for generating high profile media coverage.
3. The movement became part of the Stop the War coalition – and then the war went ahead anyway. I remember going to one of the early London meetings of the Stop the War Coalition, and noticing (with both frustration and admiration) how deftly Globalise Resistance and the Socialist Worker Party had taken control of the co-ordination committee – and how excited they were at the potential to reach out to a far wider constituency. But the fact that the ensuing protests against the war were so massive, so diverse and broad-rooted, and so completely ineffectual, left many with a profound sense of hopelessness and apathy about what activism could achieve.
4. The movement’s lack of solutions started to count against it. In its earlier days, the global resistance movement’s relativist philosophy worked strongly in its favour. Anyone with a grudge against liberal economics, patriarchy, the scientific establishment or liberal democracy could join in; all that was needed was some kind of critique of Enlightenment universalism. But as time went on, the movement started to suffer from its lack of big ideas for solutions. When there was discussion at all of what should be started (as opposed to stopped – like dams, IMF conditionality, nuclear power, GMOs or whatever), the solutions were either fuzzy (global justice now!) or parochial. Serious proposals for global frameworks for sustainability and justice that might have seemed like no-brainers for the movement, like contraction and convergence, were never endorsed.
5. Protests became harder to organise because of repressive anti-terrorist legislation. As observed here before, even the former head of counter-terrorism at Scotland Yard has said he has “a horrible feeling that we are sinking into a police state”. As Chris Atkins’ film Taking Liberties chronicles (here’s the trailer), anti-terrorist legislation in the UK, as in other countries, has been used extensively by police to counter protest activity much more broadly than just at summit meetings.
So where does the movement stand now?
Some people, of course, might argue that 2005’s Make Poverty History coalition represented a continuation or evolution of the movement. I wouldn’t buy the argument. The anti-globalisation movement was fundamentally a bottom-up exercise – even if organisations like the Socialist Worker Party itched to organise it. MPH, on the other hand, was the opposite. It was organised by a tiny handful of large NGOs, who from the outset worked closely with government. That political strategy made a lot of sense – but it also made MPH something entirely different from the global resistance movement.
Others would argue that the movement has gone virtual, either into the blogosphere (c.f. excitement about the role of the ‘netroots’ in Howard Dean’s presidential campaign last time), or into virtual campaignign networks like Avaaz. Here too, I have my doubts. As I’ve written here before, I’m a huge fan of Avaaz – but again, it’s hard to make a case for it being a direct inheritor of the anti-globalisation movement. It’s too well-organised, too solutions focused to be classed as such.
A third group might argue that the global resistance movement is alive and well, perhaps pointing to last summer’s Heathrow climate camp as proof. This is probably the most credible answer – after all, some of the leading lights of the old movement, like the Wombles (remember them?), were there. But if that is the nearest we get to an answer, then the next question is – is that it? The anti-globalisation movement reduced to just a couple of thousand people at Heathrow?
But here’s the thing: we do need a global justice movement today.
I don’t mean a movement that reproduces all the worst traits of the old anti-globalisation movement, like its susceptibility to hijack by violent nutters, its chronic inability to agree on solutions, its “global bad! local good!” simplifications. But we do need to resurrect the movement’s insistence that nothing can be achieved without grassroots participation being built in from the outset; its daring willingness to imagine different futures; and its sense of fun and theatre in politics.
I have precisely zero confidence that a political system that consists of voting every four or five years and then leaving it to technocrats in between has the capacity to solve the challenges that will come at us over the next few years.
Conversely, it’s abundantly clear that vibrant political participation at local level will be one of the best forms of resilience a community can have in the face of the kind of unpredictable shocks likely to emerge in the same period.
What still needs to be figured out, though, is how activist citizens can aggregate their influence to affect global outcomes for actually solving issues like climate change. Equity and fairness – on a very grand scale – will be at the heart of all of these discussions. Who’s going to argue for it?
by Alex Evans | Jan 3, 2008 | Conflict and security
I’ve been reading the Harvard Business Review’s excellent book on resilience. One of the best articles in it is How Resilience Works by HBR senior editor Diane Coutu, who finds that that “three fundamental characteristics seem to set resilient people and companies apart from others. One or two of these qualities make it possible to bounce back from hardship, but true resilience requires all three.” And they are these:
The first characteristic is the capacity to accept and face down reality. In looking hard at reality, we prepare ourselves to act in ways that allow us to endure and survive hardships. We train ourselves how to survive before we ever have to do so.
Second, resilient people and organisations possess an ability to find meaning in some aspects of life. And values are just as important as meaning; value systems at resilient companies change very little over the long haul and are used as scaffolding in times of trouble.
The third building block of resilience is the ability to improvise. Within an arena of personal capabilities or company rules, the ability to solve problems without the usual or obvious tools is a great strength.
by Alex Evans | Dec 10, 2007 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence, UK
Earlier today I went along to the launch of Demos’s new report, National Security for the 21st Century, by Charlie Edwards. It’s an excellent pamphlet and anyone interested in how governments co-ordinate themselves to deal with complex risks should read it. Anyway, at the event, Liberal Democrat leadership contender Nick Clegg made a strong call for an end to the “politics of fear” (duly picked up the media), arguing that the public “will come to resent parties and governments who beat the drum of fear most loudly”. He said:
“In a climate of fear, decisions are taken as a short-term response rather than as part of long-term strategy. As more and more of these decisions are made, the overall approach becomes less – rather than more – coherent. And as government lurches from one decision to the next, it succeeds in neither protecting people nor empowering them”.
Well, amen to that. Instead, Clegg went on, we need a national security strategy “based in part on public engagement, involvement and action … putting power and confidence into people’s hands so they are equipped to tackle danger”. So, he said,
“If Britain is to be prepared for emergencies of all kinds, I believe we need to re-establish some form of Civil Defence organisation. And it must be community-based, community-led, and engage people. I want to explore how we can get people to learn skills to serve their community, and share the skills they have, so when emergencies happen – from flooding to a terrorist attack – it isn’t just a small, professional elite who step up, it’s everyone, with their own particular skills. I will set up a working group to look at how best to structure this sort of Community Resilience Force. And I want to use the principles of openness, engagement and individual action across the board, not just in terms of national security.”
Now, admittedly Clegg’s Community Resilience Force is thin on the detail. Well, fair enough; he’s in the closing straight of a leadership contest. But what’s appealing here is the idea of resilience as a bottom-up undertaking. Clegg seemed tacitly to admit that faced with a really serious system shock – a ‘Black Swan’ event – top-down co-ordination will quickly become overwhelmed: even a competent FEMA would have struggled to cope with Katrina, in other words. In such circumstances, a resilient citizenry will be the difference between breakdown-and-recovery versus outright collapse (c.f. The Upside of Down).
Or so I thought. But then came the questions. Having spent the weekend reading John Robb’s must-read book Brave New War, I stuck my hand up. Quoting Robb, I observed that insurgents in countries as disparate as Iraq and Nigeria were proving increasingly adept at identifying ‘systempunkt’ nodes: the critical hubs which, if attacked successfully, risk taking down the entire system through a cascading failure. There are plenty such points in our power, water, gas, food and financial systems – just look at today’s FT for a snapshot of how much trade into Britain relies on a couple of over-congested ports, Felixstowe and Southampton.
What would Clegg’s vision of participatory resilience look like in the context of that kind of shock, I wondered? Hmm, said Clegg. Well, community empowerment wouldn’t really be the point in that kind of context. That sort of context is more a matter for the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. Right, I nodded, ignorant of the content of said Act but resolved to look it up at the earliest opportunity.
So imagine my surprise when I discovered this afternoon that not only does the CCA 2004 not appear to be based on participatory resilience, it is in fact the epitome, the quintessence, the very archetype of a top-down approach.
Once you’re past the (sensible) parts on emergency planning, you find that the part Clegg was referring to is about overhauling Emergency Powers in UK law. What it says, in essence, is that that in an “emergency” (that’s any event, not necessarily in Britain, which “threatens serious damage” to human welfare or the environment, or “war or terrorism that threatens serious damage to the security of the UK”), then the relevant Secretary of State – that’s any Cabinet member, not just the PM- can do anything.
Oh, you think I exaggerate? Here’s section 22 (1):
Emergency regulations may make any provision which the person making the regulations is satisfied is appropriate for the purpose of preventing, controlling or mitigating an aspect or effect of the emergency in respect of which the regulations are made.
Now, I may not be a politician, but I must admit that I’m struggling slightly to see any particular correlation between (a) this interesting approach to governance and (b) community-based resilience or decentralised, participatory citizenship. If I understand Nick Clegg’s position correctly, then, the executive summary goes something like this:
“Centralised bureaucracies perform badly in conditions of stress, while decentralised citizen-led systems are more robust – except if the conditions of stress are sufficiently stressful, in which case the exact opposite applies.”
Um… glad we got that straight.
by Alex Evans | Dec 7, 2007 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
While we’re thinking about infectious disease: how I love the complexity theory boffins at the Santa Fe Institute. This month they’ve been thinking about the role played by fear in how infectious diseases spread, under the glorious title of “Coupled Contagion Dynamics of Fear and Disease“. Here’s the abstract:
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We model two interacting contagion processes: one of disease and one of fear of the disease. Individuals can “contract” fear through contact with individuals who are infected with the disease (the sick), infected with fear only (the scared), and infected with both fear and disease (the sick and scared). Scared individuals–whether sick or not–may remove themselves from circulation with some probability, which affects the contact of individuals and thus the disease epidemic proper. If we allow individuals to recover from fear and return to circulation, the coupled dynamics become quite rich, and include multiple waves of infection, such as occurred in the 1918 flu pandemic. We also study flight as a behavioral response. In a spatially extended setting, even relatively small levels of fear-inspired flight can have a dramatic impact on spatio-temporal epidemic dynamics.
In short: freaking out can be a highly constructive component of resilience strategies.
