There’s a fantastic array of blog postings to mark the 100th International Women’s Day today, and twitter is abuzz with stories, links and random celebrations of people’s mothers (funny to think that Clara Zetkin, who is credited with coming up with the idea for an International Women’s Day, would not understand that sentence at all).  A selection: the Guardian has a great feature on women’s voices from around the world.  The strongest message coming from that is one of hope and things getting better.  Duncan Green has a wonk’s guide to IWD, with links to some interesting looking research on how women’s movements have been successful in making some of these changes for the better actually happen, in South Africa and the Middle East.  And this, slightly less optimistic piece from Canada’s Globe and Mail is about how far many of us have to go.

For those in search of numbers, there’s some here, also from the Guardian on the gender pay gap, and an analysis from Tim Harford on why it persists (though it only really applies to professional women).  More numbers from a survey of UK women, with the slightly depressing fact that only one in five consider themselves to be feminists. I’m with Rebecca West on that one :

I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

(though perhaps I do know what feminism is – at least, my daughter told me that it’s about wanting things to be fair, which will do for me)

And for those who like their politics with a bit of glamour, here’s James Bond in a frock

What’s so inspiring though is just how much there is.  It used to be that no one in the UK really registered International Women’s Day – I remember many conversations with NGO colleagues when I worked at Action Aid (who also have some great stuff on their website), bemoaning the fact that no one here cared very much about the day, while our colleagues around the world were gearing up for national holidays and events to mark the occasion. According to my flower importer friend, in Europe IWD is second only to Valentine’s Day in terms of demand for roses.

Long may it last.  And a very happy International Women’s Day to you all.

So says Hosni Mubarak (h/t Business Insider).

Chris Albon has an excellent post over at The Atlantic, which has this to say:

Warfare has changed much since Napoleon’s Grande Armée marched across Europe, but one of the Little Corporal’s maxims is just as true in Libya today as it was near Waterloo two centuries ago: armies march on their stomachs. The anti-Qaddafi rebels are no different. The push to Tripoli would require consistent access to — amongst other things — food supplies. While having adequate food alone would not be sufficient to take the capitol (they also need war materials, training, and transportation), it is an absolute necessity. And, right now, the rebels don’t have enough. But we do.

The United States has the capacity and infrastructure to supply rebel-controlled eastern Libya with substantial amounts of food aid. These shipments could be transported directly into the rebel center of Benghazi, a major seaport with more than adequate facilities. The food aid would not only alleviate the emerging humanitarian crisis in eastern Libya — an important effort in itself — it would help the rebel cause. The shipments would boost the morale of rebel fighters and, more important, provide the supplies necessary to feed the newly formed army during any push towards Tripoli.

I think Chris makes a good argument – but it’s also interesting to pause and reflect on the question of how to square his proposal with the concept of humanitarian space.

The obvious answer to that is that the international community ought to be sending humanitarian assistance to both sides of the front line without prejudice or preference because, well, it’s humanitarian. But as Chris’s argument flags up, the rebels would still be net beneficiaries – because they don’t currently have the food supply lines in place, whereas pro-government forces do.

I don’t think that undermines Chris’s argument - instead, I think it serves as a useful reminder that any decision to give humanitarian assistance, development aid or whatever always turns the donor into a political actor in that arena, because there are unavoidable issues of winners and losers at play.

But this does still leave the fact that as humanitarian space gets blurred, so humanitarian workers are exposed to greater risk (see e.g. this Guardian piece by James Denselow). Pro-Gaddafi forces could easily start attacking WFP workers if they’re seen to be working to the advantage of rebel forces.

So while I agree with Chris’s logic, and think the risks involved in setting it out in a forum like The Atlantic are minimal, I also think it would be risky indeed for humanitarianism and for the safety of aid workers if the US Administration publicly espoused the same logic. The State Department and USAID should follow Chris’s advice – but whatever happens, they mustn’t admit to doing so.

A year ago, I blogged about the launch of a big UN review of how the organization deploys civilian experts to post-conflict countries.  As I said then, this mattered:

“Another UN panel,” I hear you cry, “whoopy-ruddy-doo!” But this is a serious panel dealing with a serious problem: the shortage of decent justice experts and other civilian specialists to deploy to post-conflict countries. Many UN missions have only 60-70% of their planned civilian staff, leaving them overstretched and unable to deal with day-to-day political issues, human rights and so on.

Now the Civilian Capacities Review has reported, underlining the scale of the problem:

As communities emerge from conflict, they often face a critical shortage of capacities needed to secure a sustainable peace. Yet the United Nations struggles both to recruit and deploy the range of expertise required, and to transfer skills and knowledge to national actors.

The report will make uncomfortable reading for a lot of long-time UN staffers. It argues that the organization relies too much on a stock cast of “international civilian servants”: generalists who deploy from mission to mission and imagine that they can somehow apply the same state-building techniques to places as diverse as Haiti and the Congo:

As well as being slow, the recruitment system lacks the ability to fill highly specialized needs. It has been described as a “wholesale” mechanism — designed to sift through bulk applications for general purposes. Increasingly, however, the contextual nature of conflict produces specialized peacebuilding demands (for example, natural resource management in Liberia, combating drugs and organized crime in Guinea-Bissau or land management in Darfur). The system is unable to meet these demands.

Ouch. The whole report is similarly unsparing of the UN’s sensitivities, and comes with a bundle of concrete recommendations to shake things up.  These include creating a far more flexible staffing system for post-conflict missions by which (to simplify) the UN could pull together expert secondees from governments and NGOs to respond to specific problems, rather than just fall back on the usual suspects. It’s good to see a honest assessment of the UN’s problems in this area – as I’ve said before, the EU should do a similar self-analysis – and the recommendations are serious and sound.  That’s bad news for quite a few peacekeeping bureaucrats out there…

Nearly two years ago I had warned on this blog of the deep risks linked to China’s (then-widely-praised) fiscal stimulus and financial easing measures, which while displaying early signs of efficacy also reinforced the structural imbalances at the source of China’s economic vulnerabilities and environmental ills (see my earlier blog post here).  I pointed out that much of the RMB 1 trillion (GBP 100 billion) stimulus spend and an even larger amount in bank lending was being funneled into energy-intensive manufacturing and export-oriented sectors already plagued by overcapacity, even as global demand was dropping off (hence dimming prospects for Chinese exports).

In a follow up post later that year (see the post here) I again highlighted concerns about the sustainability of the stimulus and pointed to the environmentally detrimental consequences of the fiscal and credit ‘binge’, noting that the recovery was unlikely to be nearly as ‘green’ as many pundits at the time – including analysts at HSBC – had made it to be (NB: HSBC were so gung-ho as to speak of a ‘New Green Deal’ in China. See their report here), and notwithstanding China’s pledge to join other G20 leaders in using fiscal stimulus programs to build a “resilient, sustainable, and green recovery.” I lamented that the government had missed the opportunity of a massive counter-cyclical boost to steer the economy on to a more equitable and sustainable growth path powered by domestic demand.

Now finally, Premier Wen has come clean on the fragility of the recovery. During a recent online chat with netizens ahead of the meeting of China’s congress, Wen explained that the government would reduce its growth target down a percentage point to 7% (GDP growth was 10.3% last year) in order to check inflationary pressures and mitigate the environmental and socially adverse consequences of runaway growth fueled by the stimulus. In the interview, he counseled that:

“We must not any longer sacrifice the environment for the sake of rapid growth and reckless roll-outs, as that would result in unsustainable growth featuring industrial overcapacity and intensive resource consumption”

He further noted that China must become more self-sustainable by increasing domestic consumption and reducing its reliance on exports and investment. He cautioned that:

[continuing on the current path] will lead to production capacity gluts and deepening pressure on the environment and resources so that economic development will be unsustainable.

Mr. Wen’s online interview was held against the backdrop of widespread public dissatisfaction with soaring inflation and a call for Chinese “Jasmine rallies” – a reference to the Jasmine revolution in Tunisia which set of a domino of unrest through the Middle East.

I’ve spent too much of my week arguing that yes we should give aid and yes it can work.  The launch of DFID’s Aid Reviews  launched another round of argument, some of it valid, about the what, why and how of aid.   But my colleague Jonathan Glennie probably said it best here, in this letter which sadly we didn’t actually send:

Dear Mr Daily Mail,

Aren’t we bored yet of this bogus debate between the “aid lobby” and “aid sceptics”. There is simply no evidence to support a position that “aid never works” any more than there is to suggest that “aid always works”. There are, of course, enough anecdotes of aid being put to good use and aid being put to disastrous use to continue to fill column inches of lazy journalists for some years yet. But people who have actually bothered to spend time to look at this subject will realise that aid can work, depending on a range of factors. Aid has, sometimes, saved or improved millions of lives. On other occasions, it has propped up dictators and imposed devastating economic policies that have destroyed fledgling industries. Sometimes it has helped poor countries on their way to becoming richer (South Korea, Vietnam, Botswana) and sometimes it has led to concerning levels of aid dependence (Mali, Sierra Leone, Tanzania).
Rather than selecting anecdotes and pretending that they constitute evidence on which to base policy making, isn’t it time to engage in a more serious discussion of how to use aid most effectively. While not everything the present aid review suggests is sensible, it does, at least, engage professionally and thoughtfully with these questions. If only your columnists had the time to do the same.

International Crisis Group’s deputy president Nick Grono made an excellent speech recently on ‘challenges for conflict prevention and resolution over the next two decades’, the text of which is now up on ICG’s website. The whole thing is well worth a read, but especially interesting and topical is his list of seven key lessons on “what approaches [can] best support reform and improve the chances of a transition ultimately leading to a peaceful and democratic state”. Here’s a paraphrased summary:

1) Reform has to happen quickly before impetus runs out – which it will, quickly. “If reforms don’t happen almost immediately, the opportunity is soon lost. Not full democratic transition of course, but enough to establish momentum for continued transformation.”

2) Democratisation after protests can happen faster and more easily in places that don’t have entrenched traditional elites. “…frequently popular uprisings are co-opted or taken over by the members of the existing elite. Sometimes this is defensive, to ensure the elites’ survival, after the sacrifice of a few leaders … other times, as recently in Kyrgyzstan, the revolt was simply an extra-constitutional, intra-elite, reshuffle.”

3) Try to get the military out of politics as soon as possible. “All too frequently Western nations seem comfortable with this, as the militaries are known entities, create a semblance of order and normality, and their commanders have often been trained at Leavenworth or Sandhurst. But more often than not, the military just ends up undermining democratic development, as in Pakistan.”

4) Get elections right. Not too early, not too late, and understanding that “they’re not an endgame”. “Often it will be better to build elections from the ground up – starting with local elections before moving to parliamentary or presidential polls, as local democracy helps build capacity.”

5) Understand that outsiders are largely bystanders during the transition, at least in the early chaotic stages. “The US did not persuade Mubarak to leave, nor could the Saudis convince him to stay – the Egyptian army decided.”

6) Don’t try to pick winners. Often irresistible to international actors, but rarely successful (Grono cites Karzai, Kagame, Meles, Museveni); external actors should focus on institutions rather than on individuals.

7) Conflict prevention matters. “The long term, painstaking work of investing in institutions, building the rule of law and developing civil society may be the most effective way for outsider actors to influence these transitions, in the years before they occur. Those countries with more developed institutions and more entrenched rule of law will likely stand a better chance of a stable transition than those without – think Jordan, or even Egypt, as compared to Libya.”

The Obama Administration has a respectable story to tell on food security in lots of ways: its Feed the Future initiative, particularly, put it in a genuine leadership position among G8 governments (although there are now lots of question marks over whether Congress will allow the program to go forward).

But on one aspect of US food policy, there’s a deafening silence: the government’s support for corn-based ethanol. Here’s Robert Hormats, Under-Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs, on USAID’s blog:

World food prices have been increasing over the past six months, due to weather-related production losses and strong global demand. The growing demand is fueled by rapid expansion of middle-class households in emerging markets.

Er, hello? Let’s stop by at FAO’s Food Price Index (February data out today – you guessed it, another record high). What do they think is driving cereal prices upwards?

The increase in February mostly reflected further gains in international maize prices, driven by strong demand amid tightening supplies, while prices rose marginally in the case of wheat and fell slightly in the case of rice.

In other words, this is mainly about corn. And who’s the biggest corn exporter in the world? The United States.

And where is 40% of US corn production going this year? Ethanol, for use in US car engines.

And will USAID acknowledge that this has anything at all to do with spiking food prices? Don’t hold your breath.

There is a danger that we have become not just trapped in the ‘prison of GDP’, but trapped in the prison of statistics. We have become trapped in the idea that something can only be a serious goal if we can quantify it, measure it, and track our progress towards it on a neat Power Point graph. And we want to use this approach to find well-being. We want a technocratic solution to a spiritual question. (more…)