Details from Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy:

The House Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee, led by Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX), unveiled its fiscal 2012 appropriations bill today in advance of tomorrow’s markup. The bill would provide State and USAID with $39.6 billion in discretionary funding next year, which is 18 percent, or $8.6 billion, below the fiscal 2011 level. The fiscal 2011 level, which was reached as part of a deal to avoid a government shutdown in April, was already $8 billion less than originally requested by the Obama administration [...]

The State and Foreign Operations appropriations bill usually enjoys wide bipartisan support, but this year will be an exception. House Democratic aides said that the bill was crafted in a way to satisfy GOP political priorities and without much consideration for comity or consensus across the aisle.

“The decision was apparently made that this would be a Republican bill,” one House Democratic aide said.

For employees at State and USAID, the cuts could be particularly biting. The bill cuts the $1.35 billion USAID operations budget to around $900 million and would eliminate what’s known as “localization pay” for diplomats abroad, which would immediately bring down their salaries.

Global Dashboard had its summer drinks party last night – thanks to Alex and David for hosting us, it was great fun. I particularly enjoyed talking to some of the civil servants who attended, as I’ve been thinking about bureaucracy and morality, and the question of whether it’s possible to have a ‘good society’ in a bureaucratic age. Can politics promote the good life, and if so, what is the role of the civil service in pursuit of that goal?

When the modern civil service was set up in the 19th century, via the reforms of Macaulay, Northcote and Trevelyan, it was modeled on the Chinese imperial civil service – this is why senior British civil servants are still called ‘mandarins’. The Chinese civil service was founded on Confucian philosophy, and part of that philosophy was the meritocratic idea that anyone could become a good person through the proper philosophical training: ‘By nature men are similar, by practice men are wide apart’, as Confucius put it.

So the Chinese civil service had an open exam entry system, which tested civil servants’ intelligence and aptitude in various subjects, including their knowledge of the Confucian philosophy. The imperial civil service played a central role in shaping the Confucian moral values of Chinese society. Civil servants were, in effect, the public intellectuals of Chinese society.

When it came to the British civil service, Thomas Babbington Macaulay, who set up the prototype of the modern civil service in the Raj, embraced the Chinese idea of the civil service as a meritocracy, but thought the civil service should embrace an empirical, scientific model of statecraft rather than also being guided by ancient ethical philosophy like Chinese mandarins. In an essay on Francis Bacon, he unfavourably compared the ancient Greek approach to the modern, English approach: “For Plato, the end of legislation is to make men virtuous”, he wrote, while for Bacon,  the end of legislation is “the well-being of the people”, by which Macaulay means making “imperfect men comfortable”, supplying their “vulgar wants”, improving their material circumstances.

If the civil service aims, as Macaulay says it should, at the ‘well-being of the people’, does that not imply some moral vision of the good, or can one have a purely scientific and non-moral definition of well-being and human flourishing? (more…)

It’s clearly the season to be thinking about whether our current levels of aid spending are politically sustainable.  As Alex highlights in his excellent post below, new polling figures from Chatham House suggest that two-thirds of the British public think the UK shells out too much in  aid (although I concur with Alex’s assumption that few people track the real level of spending).  And as I note in a new commentary piece over on the ECFR site, this fits in with other signs of a looming attack on aid in Europe:

Some European governments, notably the UK, and the European Commission have done their best to uphold their aid pledges since the financial crisis struck. But last year the new coalition government in the Netherlands announced its intention to cut development spending by €400 million in 2011, with more reductions to follow. Opinion polls suggested that voters approved. Research for ECFR’s European Foreign Policy Scorecard found that France had cut its donations to UN humanitarian agencies by around 20% in 2009 and 2010. This week, the human impact of such economising was brought home as Oxfam and other NGOs revealed that European donors including France and Germany had pledged miniscule sums of aid to address the drought in East Africa.

These are, aid experts worry, the initial signs of a deeper shift in Europe’s commitments to helping the poor and vulnerable beyond its borders. Over the last decade, it has become a standard defence of the EU to note that whatever the bloc’s military and diplomatic weaknesses, it is at least the world’s biggest source of international aid. But it hardly requires a mystical ability to see the future to predict that as EU members grapple with debt and domestic priorities, foreign aid budgets will be under recurrent pressure.

Like it or not, I think that it is pretty inevitable that we will see a period of continued retrenchment by European donors in the years ahead (check out the full ECFR piece to find out why). The question is whether this will be smart retrenchment – with governments, NGOs and international organizations actually working out how to introduce sensible reductions, evaluate what works, etc. – or a poorly-coordinated set of budget cuts justified by vague appeals to “the need for austerity”.

There are lots of reasons to expect the latter.  It’s hard to instigate serious discussions about retrenchment because (i) aid’s opponents have lots of easy populist arguments about how “aid never works”; and (ii) aid’s defenders naturally adopt maximalist positions when faced with these attacks.  If you back down from the (now sadly hard-to-sustain) stance that the developed economies should continue to aim to spend 0.7% of GNI on development aid, it’s hard to know where the retreat will end…

Chatham House and YouGov published their annual survey of British attitudes on UK international priorities last week, and it’s worth a look. The survey covers both 2,000 or so members of the public, and over 800 opinion formers. Some findings:

First, as expected, the public strongly thinks that the UK spends too much on aid to poor countries (57% say so). I kind of wish the survey had asked them what proportion of GNI Britain spends on aid – I bet the mean estimate would have been over 5% (as opposed to less than 0.7%). But there we are.

And climate fares little better than development. Asked what are the biggest future threats to “the British way of life”, only 18% said climate change – this on a question where respondents could pick three or four issues, not just one. 31% of people are “not currently convinced that climate change is a serious threat”.

But here’s the interesting part. On that same question about future threats, interruptions to energy supply scored 37% - placing it second after terrorism (53%). And “long-term scarcity of essential natural resources, such as water, food and land” scored 30%. Among opinion formers, international financial instability comes a lot higher (59%, as compared to 36% among the public); but energy interruptions and resource scarcity are both in the top five.

It’s the same story when it comes to what UK foreign policy should focus on. Among opinion formers, “ensuring the continued supply of  vital resources, such as oil, gas, food and water” comes out top in a list of issues that should be “the main focus of UK foreign policy”, with 48% selecting it as one of up to 3 issues. (Terrorism came joint first; climate was fourth, at 26%. Climate fatigue is not just limited to the public.) The public, meanwhile, put the resource scarcity priority second on the list, after securing Britain’s borders.

So, newsflash: scarcity is now a more resonant frame with both the UK public and UK opinion formers than either climate or development. I’ve suspected for a while that this was the way things were headed, but would certainly not have guessed that the agenda would shift this fast.

To be sure, it’s extremely worrying to see climate and development scoring so poorly. But I think the survey’s findings also signal an important opportunity to build new constituencies for action on climate and development – by pointing out the extent to which action in these two areas can deliver on scarcity concerns. (This has the added benefit of actually being true – in contrast, say, to arguing in favour of aid to fragile states on the basis that it will help protect UK national security, which is a much less convincing argument, as Stewart Patrick notes in the current edition of Foreign Policy.)

By extension, there may also be more political space than we thought for talking about the ‘fair shares’ aspects of resource scarcity that I wrote about in the Oxfam / WWF paper that came out last week (details here). That’s what  Chatham House’s Rob Bailey argues too, in a short comment piece in which he notes that,

Both the general public and opinion-formers consider aid largely irrelevant to Britain’s international reputation, and as playing only a small role in serving national interests. This suggests that one argument in defence of aid employed by the Secretary of State for International Development, that Britain is an ‘Aid Superpower,’ is unlikely to resonate with voters, despite the fact that the UK is viewed internationally as a leader.

Would an international development strategy focused on sustainable, equitable and secure access to resources win greater voter approval? Maybe: as we have seen, there is a strong convergence in opinion that resource insecurity is a major threat to the UK and should be a foreign policy priority. This need not be window dressing, as there is a growing body of expert opinion that identifies resource scarcity as the major development challenge for the 21st century.

“I always hire people who absolutely want my job. Not just in a ‘that would be nice to have her job’ way but in an absolute ‘I can do better than her’ attitude.”

Rebekah Brooks, while still CEO of News International

There’s a good piece (here) in the Economist on a whole new kind of country – the MIFFs (middle-income, failed or fragile states) picking up on a Global Dashboard blog last week (here).

Who are the MIFFs?

Home to 17% of the world’s poor and 40% of the world’s conflict they include a whole range of countries (see below) who are fragile and no longer so poor.

US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, speaking in a Security Council session on climate change that took place yesterday:

In this Council we have discussed many emerging security issues and addressed them, from the links between development and security to HIV-AIDS. Yet this week, we have been unable to reach consensus on even a simple Presidential Statement that climate change has the potential to impact peace and security in the face of the manifest evidence that it does.

We have dozens of countries in this body and in this very room whose very existence is threatened. They’ve asked this Council to demonstrate our understanding that their security is profoundly threatened. Instead, because of the refusal of a few to accept our responsibility, this Council is saying, by its silence, in effect, “Tough luck.” This is more than disappointing. It’s pathetic. It’s shortsighted, and frankly it’s a dereliction of duty.

The Security Council session was an agenda of the German government, which holds the Council presidency this month. The Germans’ hope was that they would manage to get a faily robust ’Presidential Statement’ (a bit like a Resolution, but not binding) out of the session, but thanks to Chinese and Russian opposition, only a very watered down version proved possible. See David Bosco’s take on the debate on ForeignPolicy.com here; the text of the Presidential Statement is here.

Media attention is focusing this morning on the question of why Andy Coulson didn’t go through “Developed Vetting” security clearance – an in-depth background check process that involves detailed interviews not just with the applicant, but with their friends and family as well, and that might in Coulson’s case have been expected to look at the whole issue of what he knew about phone hacking.

A Number 10 spokesman is quoted by the Guardian this morning as saying,

“He had ‘security check’ level of security clearance which most officials in No 10 and most special advisers would be subject to,” a spokesman said. “The only people who will be subject to developed vetting are those who are working in security matters regularly and would need to have that sort of information. The only special advisers that would have developed vetting would be in the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence and maybe the Home Office.”

Which struck me as an odd statement – because I went through Developed Vetting as soon as I arrived at the Department for International Development when I became a special adviser there in 2003. The spokesman continues:

“Andy Coulson’s role was different to Alastair Campbell’s and Jonathan Powell. Alastair Campbell could instruct civil servants. This is why [Coulson] wasn’t necessarily cleared. Given [the nature of] Andy Coulson’s role as more strategic he wouldn’t have neccesarily have been subject to developed vetting.”

And I certainly didn’t have the capacity to instruct civil servants, so that’s clearly not it either (and in any case, why would you need DV clearance to manage civil servants? It makes no sense!)

Part of the point here is that having Developed Vetting clearance – and hence permission to see Secret and Top Secret material – is not just about intelligence material from GCHQ and the Secret Intelligence Service. It’s also, more broadly, about sensitive foreign policy discussions at PM level.

When I worked in government, material issuing from 10 Downing Street – minutes of the Prime Minister’s video-conferences with the President of the US, for example – would frequently be classified as Secret. (Which would be why, as Jonathan Powell notes in the Guardian piece, all press officers were DV cleared during his time at No 10.)

So if Andy Coulson didn’t have DV clearance, then – at least on the basis of how things worked when I was at DFID – presumably he couldn’t be part of such conversations.

In other words, the No 10 communications director must have had to leave the room when David Cameron and Barack Obama were discussing Afghanistan, for example – which does seem extremely anomalous (and I wonder whether that’s actually how it worked…).

Why resource scarcity will be a game changer for global justice agendas, and what aid donors, NGOs and other development opinion formers need to do about it. WWF / Oxfam report by Alex Evans. (July 2011 – see also this speech given at the launch event)

Download Report

Yesterday WWF and Oxfam co-hosted a workshop in London on scarcity, fair shares and development – I did the introductory presentation, and wrote a paper ahead of the event which is published online today. In one sentence, my argument at the workshop was that,

As the 21st century global economy hits natural resource limits and planetary boundaries, fundamental questions about fair shares will start to arise – and these questions will increasingly come to be seen as the new front line for international development.

As I stressed in the presentation,this is not to say that I believe we’re headed for a neo-Malthusian nightmare:

On the contrary, I think we can be confident that markets will adapt and that technological innovations will emerge – as they always do. But that process of transition will take time. It will need to overcome inertia, market failures, externalised costs and perverse subsidies. And until it’s complete, poor people and poor countries risk losing access to resources that they depend on for their basic needs. And so any discussion of limits is also, inevitably, a discussion about fair shares.

And this will be a different kind of ‘fairness’ agenda to the one that those of us who think of ourselves as progressives are used to. I think we’ve only just begun to internalise just what a game changer the emergence of environmental and natural resource limits will be for global agendas about justice and equality:

Left and right have long disagreed about more or less everything, except the existence of an expanding ‘cake’ to share out. As long as the cake is expanding, then you can argue – as the political philosopher John Rawls famously did in his Theory of Justice back in 1971 – that inequality is OK if the worst off people are better off, in absolute terms, than they’d be under an equal distribution. But if the cake is finite, then by definition more for the better off means less for the worse off. It’s a much starker proposition.

Looking forward to Rupert Murdoch’s Select Committee appearance tomorrow? This quote from his biographer Michael Wolff, speaking today to ITV (and transcribed on the Guardian) should help whet your appetite:

He will handle it very poorly. This is something that Rupert doesn’t know how to do, has never done, has resisted doing and frankly can’t do. Rupert is – on top of everything else – an incredibly shy man and he is also a very inarticulate man and he is also a man who, I don’t think he is going to know what to do with the fact that he will be confronted here. It is very likely he will get angry. He will say things that people should not say in public. I know they are drilling him and rehearsing him over and over and over and over again and they are saying to him ‘do not say anything, just answer the questions in as few words as possible’. Whether he absorbs that lesson or not…actually I can’t imagine that he will or that he has.

Update (after the session): So much for that prediction. The NY Times seems to have the most grounded summary of yesterday’s proceedings, thanks to better contacts at News Corp’s US headquarters and perhaps a bit more distance from the issue than the UK press:

After days of intense anxiety over their appearance before a parliamentary committee on Tuesday, there seemed to be consensus inside the company and out that the Murdochs and the News Corporation had finally caught a break [...]

“This was the best day these guys have had in a really long time,” said David Bank, media analyst for RBC Capital Markets. “No shoe dropped, no smoking gun was found, it all sort of sounded kind of contained.” [...]

Inside the company, executives seemed relieved at how relatively smoothly the process went. “No one is despondent, no one thinks this went poorly,” said one person briefed on Tuesday’s events who asked not to be identified revealing private conversations. “I wouldn’t bet against those two.”

OK, that’s it. We are officially no longer a serious country:

The prime minister, who found out that Stephenson was resigning just over an hour into his overnight flight from Heathrow to Johannesburg, made a series of phone calls to the home secretary, Theresa May, and government officials from his Virgin plane.

These had to be made on the Virgin credit card phones available in all seats after the No 10 secure satellite phones failed.

Lest you thought that surging food prices were only an issue for low income countries and people living on less than a dollar a day, this week’s Economist article on food stamps in the US was pretty arresting:

Participation has soared since the recession began (see chart). By April it had reached almost 45m, or one in seven Americans. The cost, naturally, has soared too, from $35 billion in 2008 to $65 billion last year. And the Department of Agriculture, which administers the scheme, reckons only two-thirds of those who are eligible have signed up.

As the graph shows, while the number of beneficiaries has risen sharply, costs have increased even faster – no surprise, given what’s been happening to food prices. And guess what: the Republicans want to slash the program.

In their budget outline for next year they proposed cutting the amount of money to be spent on food stamps by roughly a fifth from 2015. Moreover, instead of being a federal entitlement, available to all Americans who meet the eligibility criteria irrespective of the cost, the programme would become a “block grant” to the states, which would receive a fixed amount to spend each year, irrespective of demand. The House has also voted to cut a separate health-and-nutrition scheme for poor pregnant women, infants and children, known as WIC, by 11%.

The Economist notes that “it is … hard to argue that food-stamp recipients are undeserving”:

About half of them are children, and another 8% are elderly. Only 14% of food-stamp households have incomes above the poverty line; 41% have incomes of half that level or less, and 18% have no income at all. The average participating family has only $101 in savings or valuables.

And even assuming that the (Democrat-controlled) Senate blocks cuts to food stamps, the larger context is of painful reductions to welfare provision even as the US economy remains anaemic:

Unemployment benefits last for a maximum of 99 weeks at the moment, and that is due to fall to six months from next year. No one knows exactly how many people have exhausted their allotment, as the government does not attempt to count them. But almost half of the 14m unemployed have been out of a job for six months or more, and so would no longer qualify for benefits under the rules that will apply from January 1st.