Canadians used to think of themselves as global citizens, par excellence. Recently, though, this image has taken a battering.

Canada is now so obstructive in climate negotiations that even the Chinese government has had enough of its ‘conniving’ ways. In the midst of global economic turmoil, Canada’s main priority for the recent G7 summit was to force feed finance ministers seal meat.

And, at the Winter Olympics, it is so desperate to Own the Podium that it has  long planned to keep practise sessions for other countries to an absolute minimum in order to ensure its athletes get maximum home advantage. ”Skeleton racer Mellisa Hollingsworth will be flying down the fastest track in the world at Whistler with the benefit of 200-plus more practice runs than her rivals,” boasted one of its papers last week.

Canada was told that this policy could be disastrous, especially for the luge and for skeleton (a kind of tobogganing) where the Canadians have built a faster track than any in the world, making practise essential.  ”The speeds are going to be high up in the 100s,” warned the British performance manager. ” Therefore accidents are going happen and do happen in sports such as these. We’ve seen broken legs or even worse before for example.”

Sure enough the worst did happen, with Georgian luger, Nodar Kumaritashvili killed just hours before the opening ceremony. Charmingly, the Canadians have quickly wrapped up an investigation that blames the dead guy for the accident.

On Thursday, a BBC survey showed that Canada’s international image is beginning to take a battering:

Several countries saw sharp falls in positive ratings of Canada—in the USA the proportion rating Canadian influence as positive fell from 82 per cent to 67 per cent, in the UK from 74 per cent to 62 per cent, in Australia from 77 per cent to 72 per cent, and in China from 75 per cent to 54 per cent.  Overall, comparing views in 15 of the countries that were surveyed last year, the proportion rating Canadian influence in the world as mainly positive has fallen on average from 57 per cent to 53 per cent.

Even Canadians, the survey shows, believe the country has a less positive global influence than before. One wonders: do they care?

- With the UK election campaign under way in all but name, the FT’s Martin Wolf explains why he doesn’t fear a hung parliament – arguing that it might be just what’s needed to achieve fiscal restraint. “So poorly has single-party despotism governed the UK”, he suggests, “that I would welcome a coalition or, at worst, a minority government.” The Institute for Government, meanwhile answers all your hung parliament-related questions here, placing things in international and historical perspective.

- The Cable highlights the Obama administration’s key people on Iran. Richard Haass, meanwhile, suggests that the West’s strategy must do more to help the Iranian people – with the US and EU acting to “energise and lend rhetorical support to the opposition, helping it to communicate with the outside world”.

- Elsewhere, Der Spiegel profiles the five main risks to the Euro – namely Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Italy – assessing their economic woes. Charlemagne, meanwhile, interviews Cathy Ashton. And The Economist also has news that Dominique Strauss-Khan, current IMF head, is considering running against Nicolas Sarkozy in France’s 2012 presidential elections.

- Finally, this week saw a group of British Academy experts writing to the Queen about the failure to foresee the credit crunch – a follow-up to a question from the monarch at the LSE last summer. Their suggestion: the need for a better-coordinated government horizon scanning capacity – something that could take the form of a monthly economics briefing to the Queen, which would serve – as Professor Peter Hennessy has commented – to “sharpen minds” of officials. Read the full letter here (pdf).

“Meandering” is an excellent new-ish blog on peacekeeping and its discontents by Ed Rees, who works for the Peace Dividend Trust.  Ed recently asked readers with UN experience to contribute anonymously to a “working list of what host communities ‘pick up’ from peacekeepers” (with the important qualification that “STDs don’t count”).  Here’s a sample of the answers he’s got so far:

• A taste for double standards
• Disrespect for rule of law & due process
• Poor morals
• Poor discipline
• A poor work ethic
• A ID card fetish
• A propensity towards meaningless platitudes – ie “this is the year of development”
• A lack of accountability
• A Big Car fetish
• Having a driver to ferry one to important meetings in one’s Big Car
• Obsession with titles and status
• Posters announcing important initaitives that are adorned with many logos
• Long lunches
• Organograms
• The inability to fire people, rather selecting a move them up option
• Making “decisions by committee”, resulting in no decision
• An understanding that money derives not from labor but from being at the right place at the right time
• Keen understanding of the micro-gradations in classiness cocktail party venues
• Precise knowledge of per diem rates for international organizations

This one will run and run…

Blogs hosted by large institutions can often be a bit hit-and-miss, but the World Bank’s blog on conflict and development is an exception to the rule. The blog is a tie-in with the 2011 World Development Report, which will be on state fragility and violent conflict; most of the WDR core team – including Bruce Jones (David and my co-author on Confronting the Long Crisis of Globalization, who’s on secondment to the team as its senior adviser on multilateral issues) - are posting on the site.

As part of the research process, the project team are engaged on a grand tour of the globe’s troube spots, blogging as they go. Yesterday Nigel Roberts, one of the report’s directors, was in Gaza City, wondering “what the %*$& happened here”; last month he was in Helmand, pondering Gerald Templer’s lessons on counter-insugency; in November he was in Nepal, reflecting that “peoples’ expectations of what ethnic federalism can deliver seem out of all proportion to what any devolved Nepalese state can do”. Meanwhile, the report’s other director, Sarah Cliffe, was in Haiti shortly before the earthquake, looking at drugs and gang-related violence. At the same time, the team have commissioned a flotilla of research inputs – no less than 37 background papers and case studies designed to review the data, explore thematic issues, and draw lessons from a battery of geographical case studies. (The full list of background studies is here.)

This WDR comes amid changing times on the conflict front. As the project’s overview paper notes, the incidence and severity of state-to-state and civil war have declined significantly in recent years – but it’s not all good news. Not only are there ongoing problems such as long-running conflicts that have resisted resolution, post-conflict countries at risk of relapse, and regimes who’ve been isolated without conclusion; a range of new issues also seems to be coming into play… 

Some countries once seen as stable have experienced recent violence. Sub-national conflict in otherwise stable middle-income countries is a significant phenomenon, and organized crime and drug trafficking now make use of cross-border networks which threaten poorer regions, middle-income countries and high-income nations. The WDR will examine new datasets to assess the implications of these trends, as well as potential triggers of future conflict, such as rising youth unemployment; water, land and fuel shortages; nuclear proliferation; religious militancy; and climate change.

I’ve just finished writing the team’s background study on what climate change and resource scarcity mean for the risk of violent conflict (more on that at a later date). It’s been great to work with such an interdisciplinary team – and sobering to reflect on the risk drivers that lie ahead.

There are disturbing reports floating around today that the Chinese government has “ordered its reserve managers to divest itself of riskier securities and hold only Treasuries and US agency debt with an implicit or explicit government guarantee.”

The FT, and the city analysts it has spoken to, are speculating that the move may be in retaliation for US arms sales to Taiwan and Obama’s decision to meet the Dalai Lama.

In other cheery news, Iran is promising the ‘demise’ of the liberal capitalist system. But that’s supposed to be tomorrow.

And so to a veritable treasure chest for scarcity nerds everywhere: the Atlas of International Freshwater Agreements, brought to you by Oregon State University’s Program in Water Conflict Management and Transformation.

Here’s what you need to know. First, there are currently 263 rivers that either cross, or demarcate, international boundaries. Europe has most of them (69), followed by Africa (59), Asia (57), North America (40) and South America (38).  Here they are on a handy map (larger version at the link above):

Second, you should know that these international river basins account, according to OSU, for nearly one-half of the earth’s land surface; generate roughly 60% of global freshwater flow; and are home to approximately 40% of the world’s population. A taste of the vulnerabilities that come with this:

A total of 145 countries contribute territory to international basins. 33 nations, including such sizeable countries as Bolivia, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, and Zambia, have more than 95% of their territory within the hydrologic boundaries of one or more international basins. Perhaps even more significant is the number of countries that share certain individual basins … The Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine, and Zambezi are each shared by more than 9 countries while the Amazon, Aral Sea, Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna, Jordan, Kura-Araks, La Plata, Lake Chad, Mekong, Neman, Tarim, Tigris-Euphrates-Shatt al Arab, Vistula, and Volga basins each contain territory of at least 5 sovereign nations.

Third, the good news. You might think that the quote above suggests that we’re in for a century of water wars. But it’s worth remembering this: “in the largest quantitative study of water conflict and cooperation, researchers at Oregon State University found that cooperative interactions between riparian states over the past fifty years have outnumbered conflictive interactions by more than two-to-one”.  Shared water has to date much more often been a stimulus for cooperation than for competition – a point our buddy Geoff Dabelko also makes consistently. This isn’t a new story, either: “the history of international water treaties dates as far back as 2500 bc, when the two Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma crafted an agreement ending a water dispute along the Tigris River”.

But… ah yes, there’s a but. And it is this:

158 of the world’s 263 international basins lack any type of cooperative management framework. Furthermore, of the 106 basins with water institutions, approximately two-thirds have three or more riparian states, yet less than 20 percent of the accompanying agreements are multilateral. Moreover, despite the recent progress noted above, treaties with substantive references to water quality management, monitoring and evaluation, conflict resolution, public participation, and flexible allocation methods, remain in the minority. As a result, most existing international water agreements continue to lack the tools necessary to promote long-term, holistic water management

On top of this, there’s the small matter of climate change to consider – and especially, Cleo Paskal’s observation that “water-sharing agreements, especially those based on a set amount of water, rather than percentage of actual flow, will become problematic as water levels alter dramatically” (Cleo has a new book out, btw). So, lots done – but lots to do.

Shock news that Hector Sants, chief executive of the FSA, has resigned. Though, I am sure the two events are not causally related – let me again plug my paper, published last week by the Long Finance Foundation, on risk in the UK mortgage market, which was was highly critical of the FSA’s response to the housing bubble.

It’s tough keeping up sometimes. I thought that the peak oil conspiracy theory ran like this:

The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying. The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.

But that, my friends, is so last week. Apparently, the cool kids now believe that:

Peak oil is a fraud concocted by the oil industries to increase prices amid concerns about future supplies. The oil industry is aware of vast reserves of untapped oil, but does not utilise them in order to maintain the illusion of scarcity, they claim.

The safest thing is probably to believe that both conspiracy theories are true.

While we’re on the subject of the IPCC, this Spectator piece by Matt Ridley, which flags up the role of bloggers in all this, is worth a look (h/t Clive Crook again):

When Climategate broke, the mainstream media… mostly ran dismissive pieces reflecting the official position of the Consensus. For example, they dutifully repeated the line that the University of East Anglia’s global temperature record was vindicated by two other ‘entirely independent’ records (from Nasa and NOAA), which was bunk: all three records draw from the same network of weather stations. Editors then found — by reading and counting the responses on their blog pages — that there was huge and educated interest in Climategate among their readers. One by one they took notice and unleashed their sniffing newshounds at last: the Daily Express went first, then the Mail and the Sunday Times, last week the Times and this week even the Guardian.

For those few mainstream journalists who had always been sceptical — like Christopher Booker — it must be a strange experience, like being relieved after living behind enemy lines. Who knows, one day even BBC News may ask tough questions. But it was the bloggers who did the hard work.

That’s what Clive Crook thinks we may be looking at, as he explains in a post on FT.com:

A turning point has been reached when in the space of a few days the chief scientist at the UK environment ministry complains about the IPCC’s ever-lengthening list of blunders; the head of Greenpeace UK calls for the IPCC’s head to step down; and, following a series of commendably forthright Guardian pieces on the scandal, The Observer, no less, attacks the Climategate cover-up.

He continues:

…the main damage to the credibility of climate science was done not by the Climategate emails, nor by the principals’ efforts to justify themselves. The main damage was done by the many climate scientists who affected to see nothing troublesome in what was disclosed, and the far larger number who decided it was best to say nothing. That was the really shocking thing. If climate scientists had united in criticising the methods and practices revealed by Climategate, the scandal might very well have fizzled. In saying they saw nothing wrong, they impugned their own work and that of all their colleagues, and brought the whole enterprise under suspicion.

(more…)

This morning, presumably because of a burst pipe, a trickle of water was bubbling up through a hole in the surface of a busy Freetown street. Next to the hole, a man in rags was on his hands and knees, lapping at the water like a dog.

Mobile phones are spreading through Sierra Leone like a cholera epidemic. Everyone either has one or aspires to one. Phone theft is common (my own lasted a week). People will sacrifice meals or school fees to buy credits (everyone is on pay-as-you-go, and stalls selling top-up scratch cards are ubiquitous, as are recharging shops, since few have electricity at home).

There is keen competition among the major mobile networks – Zain, Africell and Comium adverts adorn billboards, bars and houses, whose owners charge a monthly rent for you to daub your logo over their walls. They sponsor pop concerts, sports events and even Freetown’s venerable cotton tree, under which the first freed slaves congregated to plan their new lives.

As in Europe, the operators do not shirk from sharp practice. Calls to someone else on your network are cheap, but if you call a Zain phone from an Africell sim your costs soar. To combat this, Sierra Leoneans buy a sim card for each network and give out three numbers to contacts – a sim costs a dollar, and phones are sold unlocked. Some have handsets that can carry two cards at once, and you press a button to choose which to use for a particular call. Others have three phones with a different sim in each. The less affluent have to open up their phone to change the card each time they call another network (this of course means that you often have to dial three different numbers before you can get through to someone).

The mobile exerts a dictatorial hold on social intercourse. Nothing is more important than an incoming call. Businesspeople interrupt meetings to take calls from friends, family and colleagues; the judge in a court case we observed last week kept halting proceedings whenever his phone rang; a beer with a Sierra Leonean friend is a series of stops and starts as he or she fields calls or replies to texts. (more…)

I tried asking that to roomful of Foreign Office diplomats yesterday, at a Chatham House seminar (part of the Institute’s program on Redefining the UK’s International Ambitions and Choices ahead of the election - David and I are writing one of two concluding reports, on ‘organising for influence’; the other, by Paul Cornish, will be on UK security and defence policy).

It’s not an altogether flippant question. Various countries (especially from the former Soviet Union) have decided not to bother with embassies in the UK, electing simply to hire Bell Pottinger instead. Other countres go for a both / and approach: China, for instance, has an extensive global network of posts, but also a large account with APCO Worldwide.

Granted, there are some areas in which it makes sense to keep things in house. Managing bilateral relationships with other government’s isn’t something you can easily outsource. And knowing how to operate in multilateral processes is something you only really learn inside a government – sure, you can hire a lobbyist to help you with (say) WTO negotiations, but chances are that what makes them a good operator in that arena is time spent working for a government.

But campaigning work on global issues – trying to create the conditions internationally for an ambitious climate deal, for instance – mightn’t that be the sort of thing at which a communications consultancy might actually be better than the Foreign Office? (more…)