by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2008 | Conflict and security
It’s not often that you expect clothes shopping in Covent Garden to turn into a lesson on defence procurement. But as I emerged from Reiss feeling pleased with my new acquisitions, what should I see above my head but the Royal Air Force flaunting theirs?
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqEBR9shy6A]
This being the year of the RAF’s 90th birthday, they really pulled the stops out for the annual Trooping the Colour flypast, which included a Lancaster bomber, an E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft, a Hercules, a C-17, no less than 17 Tornado F3s – and 9 brand spanking new fresh-out-of-the-box Eurofighter Typhoons.
But it seemed like something was missing. I scratched my head. Where were the Harriers?
Duh – silly me. They’re in Afghanistan, obviously, because – unlike the new Typhoons – they’re actually useful in the kinds of war that Britain fights these days. Still, never let practicality get in the way of fun new playthings where defence procurement is concerned, eh readers? As Ann Winterton observed in the House of Commons last year,
I am often reminded of the phrase “boys and toys” when I hear about the huge expenditure on procurement in the UK’s defence budget, not least because I have always believed that it is not what we spend but how we spend it that is more important.
For example, the RAF’s budget is haemorrhaging because of the Eurofighter—that fantastically expensive creation of European integration—and if we enter into tranche 3, which will provide for ground attack, the aircraft will be too fast to be of any use as close air support in counter-insurgency work.
A point neatly proved earlier today, methinks. Happy birthday, RAF.
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia
Looks like Sarkozy’s the latest European leader to start getting behind convergence of national emission entitlements to equal per capita levels as the central principle in how to share out a global emissions budget. Here’s an excerpt from the communique from his talks with Angela Merkel:
France and Germany consider paramount the goal to achieve a global agreement in the framework of the United Nations for the post 2012 period, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility. The international climate regime should be based on legitimate principles of equity, such as long-term convergence of emission levels per capita in the various countries.
Full Elysee statement here; for the backstory, start here.
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development
At a seminar held yesterday as part of IPPR’s Commission on National Security, we got onto a discussion of how far aid donors still need to go in sorting out their approach on conflict prevention. The problem isn’t with the specialist departments that deal with conflict within donor agencies – which are often excellent (e.g. the CHASE department in DFID) – but rather with long-term systemic issue areas that just aren’t mainstreamed properly throughout donors’ work. For me, four spring to mind.
First, governance. I’ve written about this at length before on GD, and I still think the same now. When European donors think governance, they think about techie work in the executive branch: public financial management, anti-corruption commissions, that sort of thing. What they overlook is the politics: elections, what happens in the smoke-filled rooms of the ruling party, the process of bargaining between states and citizens. And it’s here that conflict risk – or risk reduction – is often to be found.
Second, resilience. Many donors have great work underway on specific areas of resilience – like peacebuilding, adaptation to climate change or disaster risk reduction. But donors often fail to identify the syngergies between these different kinds of resilience work – as International Alert did in their report on climate adaptation and peacebuilding last year. How about a more joined-up approach across the board that focuses really hard on identifying the sources of resilience in different developing countries, and then working to build them up? After all, about the only thing that’s clear about the next couple of decades is that they’ll be increasingly turbulent. You wouldn’t know it from looking at donors’ country programmes.
Third, scarcity. Disputes over land in Kenya; water as a threat multiplier in Darfur; riots over food and energy prices in more than 30 countries this year alone; the looming shadow of climate change. Scarcity issues are set to become one of the principal obstacles to achieving the MDGs, and a major source of increased conflict risk. Helping partner countries to manage competing claims to scarce resources – at all levels from local to global – should be a core competence in donors’ policy and programme work alike. Is it? Nope.
Fourth, counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare. Whether you’re looking at the Taliban in Afghanistan, MEND in Nigeria, drug lords in Mexico or organised crime in the Balkans, there are plenty of participants in the ‘global bazaar of violence’ who are interested in hollowing out weak states – not the same as causing them to collapse, as Daniel and I were discussing earlier this week – so as to give them the space and legitimacy to operate as they want. Alas, it’s the military coming up with the really innovative approaches on this – not aid donors.
As should already be clear, these aren’t so much new agendas for aid donors, as cross-cutting ones: involving joining up the dots between current areas of work, being willing to take more risks, and realising that being an effective donor in the 21st century is as much about influence and the quality of your people as it’s about cash.
They also involve forging a lot of new, more coherent relationships: with new donors (like the Gates Foundation); with new country players (like China); and – perhaps most of all – with other parts of government (c.f. DFID and the the Foreign Office).
But here’s a key point: it’s crucial that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I always hesitate when I hear people in the UK calling for DFID to be merged back into the Foreign Office, or for the International Development Act to be revised or scrapped. True, there are [numerous] times when DFID needs to interpret its poverty reduction mission with a bit more verve and imagination. But remember why it was necessary in the first place to make DFID independent and to create the Act to protect it.
We do need a more substantive conversation about joining up the dots on aid and foreign policy – both in Britain and internationally – in order to get better at conflict prevention. But before we can start it, there need to be some upfront guarantees of no sliding back to aid being a tool for pursuing narrow, short-term national interests.
