After the MDGs: what kind of goals? Alex Evans

Following the British government’s announcement that David Cameron will be one of the co-chairs of the UN’s forthcoming High Level Panel on what should follow the Millennium Development Goals after they expire in 2015, we’ve been setting out some thoughts about the design principles of any new set of goals. Last week, David set out some of the criteria that will make for an effective set of goals. So what about the actual content of the goals?

Amid widespread enthusiasm for the new idea of Sustainable Development Goals (see this briefing), there’s a marked lack of clarity about what such goals would actually look like: what they’d cover, how they’d work, how they’d relate to the existing MDGs and so on. Some people want to see environmental considerations like planetary boundaries in the new framework. Others want to see enabling conditions for development, like growth or governance. Lots of people are talking about access to energy as an area where a new goal could be agreed. Lots of others would love to see a new goal on reducing inequality.

Before the SDGs debate goes much further, these kinds of debate need to become a lot more structured if we’re to avoid getting a ‘Christmas tree’ of goals (weighed down with everyone’s baubles, lacking focus or any sense of priorities). So what are the key questions we need answers to, and in what order should we be asking them? Here’s our take on the five core questions that will shape the post-2015 agenda:

1. Do we need new goals at all? Not enough people have stopped to ask whether new goals are really needed in the first place. But it’s essential that the approach to post-2015 be thought through from first principles: the case for new goals won’t be persuasive unless it sets out clearly why it is that quantified targets are likely to be an effective tool to accelerate development or increase sustainability, especially given that evidence for the impact of the existing MDGs isn’t conclusive.
2. Should goals be universal? The current MDGs are designed to apply to the world’s most vulnerable people – in other words, about a billion of them if you use $1.25 a day of income as the benchmark, or 2 billion at $2 a day. Should a new set of goals continue with this basic principle? Or should it take a radically different approach, and aim for goals that would be genuinely global in coverage - in other words applying to 7 billion rather than 1 billion people?
3. How broad should goals be? New goals after 2015 could be tightly defined (a small set of headline targets in a few specific sectors, say), fully comprehensive (covering all aspects of society, economy, and the environment), or somewhere in between (like the current MDGs, which cover a representative set of issues).
4. Do we need one, or more than one, framework? While an all-singing, all-dancing package of SDGs would logically subsume MDGs, it’s also possible to imagine slimmed down SDGs living alongside revised MDGs (‘twin tracks’), or a variety of hybrid models (a loose ‘family’ of goals, that could apply just to poor countries or be universal in nature).
5. Should the framework be binding? The MDGs were designed to be global targets – not to apply to individual countries. While many donors have increasingly tracked MDG progress at country level (and some countries have incorporated them into law or in some cases even the constitution), it’s also the case that the MDGs probably couldn’t have been agreed if they had imposed binding obligations on governments. So should future goals be applied at national as well as global level? And should they define rights or desired outcomes?

Depending on how you answer these questions, you end up at one of a range of different kinds of outcome:

Full SDGs – universal, comprehensive, covering all 7 billion of us and with nationally specific targets – have some momentum right now. But it’s hard to see major powers signing up: India’s against, China’s keeping quiet for now, and it’s hard to see the US agreeing to anything that looks like global direction of the US’s domestic agenda. Don’t hold your breath.

SDGs-lite – which is where we might end up if the full SDGs agenda gets progressively diluted (e.g. controversial goals get dropped; targets become aspirational or voluntary and fail to be matched with a hard-edged delivery plan). This option runs the risk of failing to satisfy anyone (governments, campaigners, the media) - while also losing the MDGs’ focus on the poorest.

MDGs Plus – This option would start from the core MDG principle of focusing on the poorest, but built outwards from there. The risk is that reopening the framework could lead to a ‘Christmas tree’ outcome. But strong leadership could also keep the agenda tight – perhaps complementing goals with a set of key capabilities open to peer review.

Hybrids – Another option would be to combine SDGs and MDGs in a hybrid – for example, the approach proposed by Oxfam’s Kate Raworth. This approach would allow an evolutionary approach under which the poverty elements of the goals would be agreed early on in the process – thus safeguarding the MDGs’ poverty focus before moving on to the politically more challenging ground of sustainability goals.

Car crash – Finally, of course, it could all go pear-shaped. This is a risk that deserves to be taken very seriously indeed; after all, it’s not as though the last few years are short of example of sustainability and climate summits going wrong in one way or another. Remember: the MDGs took ten years to emerge, during a period of history that was a lot more warm and fuzzy than today’s context – and the MDGs were politically much easier than goals on politically charged areas like sustainable consumption. A car crash scenario could lead to the loss of the MDGs’ poverty focus with no countervailing win in another area.

(This post is based on a forthcoming Brookings paper by David and I on the post-2015 challenge, which will be published in the next few days.)

Geography fail Alex Evans

000
WEIO21 PHEB 110945
TSUIOX

TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 002
PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS
ISSUED AT 0945Z 11 APR 2012

THIS BULLETIN IS FOR ALL AREAS OF THE INDIAN OCEAN.

... AN INDIAN-OCEAN-WIDE TSUNAMI WATCH IS IN EFFECT ...

A TSUNAMI WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT FOR

 INDONESIA / INDIA / AUSTRALIA / SRI LANKA / MYANMAR / THAILAND
 MALDIVES / UNITED KINGDOM / MALAYSIA / MAURITIUS / REUNION /
 SEYCHELLES / OMAN / PAKISTAN / SOMALIA / MADAGASCAR / IRAN /
 UAE / YEMEN / COMORES / MOZAMBIQUE / KENYA / TANZANIA /
 CROZET ISLANDS / BANGLADESH / KERGUELEN ISLANDS / SOUTH AFRICA
 SINGAPORE

From the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center yesterday.

David Cameron to chair new UN Panel on what happens after the MDGs Alex Evans

News in the Guardian today:

David Cameron has been asked by the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to chair a new UN committee tasked with establishing a new set of UN millennium development goals to follow the present goals, which expire in 2015.

Some initial reactions:

- It’s a major political coup for the UK, and especially of course for DFID, who’ve been working behind the scenes to secure this outcome for months.  (The UK may not have been supposed to announce the appointment just yet – there’s nothing on the appointment in the last briefing of the Secretary-General’s spokesman – but you can see why they couldn’t wait…)

- The immediate question now is who will be the other co-chair – or co-chairs. Two co-chairs is the norm for this kind of UN exercise, one from a developed and one from a developing country, but three co-chairs is not unheard of (e.g. the 2006 High-level Panel on System Coherence). If there were three, expect one to be from an emerging economy and one from a low income country.

- It’ll be safe to assume that the other co-chair[s] will be serving heads of government too. If I had to make a guess right now on people, I’d go for Dilma Rousseff from Brazil as the emerging economy candidate (especially as the Rio+20 summit in June is the launchpad for the Panel), and maybe Ellen Johnson Sirleaf from Liberia. Meles Zenawi would be another obvious choice, but he chaired a recent UN panel on climate finance so may be out of the running, plus the UN will want to have gender balance among the co-chairs.

- Another big question is who will head up the secretariat that supports the Panel. The recent trend has been for the secretariat head to come from within the UN: this was the case on both the Global Sustainability Panel last year (which I worked on), and the 2006 system coherence panel). But there’s also precedent from them to come from outside (Steve Stedman’s role on the 2004 panel on Threats, Challenges and Change being the obvious example).

- In terms of substance, the direction of the post-2015 agenda is currently heading towards the idea of Sustainable Development Goals. The Rio+20 summit will probably call for SDGs as a key summit outcome, but duck the issue of what those Goals should cover – passing the political heavy lifting straight to the Panel that David Cameron will be co-chairing.

- Expect the politics of this agenda to become very challenging and complex over the next 12-18 months. We did a backgrounder on SDGs a couple of months ago, which gives a quick overview; we’ll also be publishing a more up-to-date analysis paper through the Brookings Institution very shortly.

- On the domestic political aspects, Patrick Wintour’s analysis in the Guardian is undoubtedly right that this will firmly lock in the government’s commitment to spending 0.7% of national income on aid. At the same time, David Cameron’s chairmanship of the Panel will also allow him to argue to domestic audiences that he’s pushing internationally for a more hard-headed approach to aid – an argument that Conservative Home is already running with approvingly.

Update: if you’re wondering about how David Cameron sees the development agenda, take a look at this speech from last year.

The 10 countries most likely to default on their sovereign debt Alex Evans

New data out yesterday from Markit, the gurus of credit default swap data:

H/t Business Insider.

Great NGO moments, part 394 Alex Evans

A particularly special moment in NGO campaigns strategy yesterday, for connoisseurs of the genre: Jubilee Debt Campaign arguing that Britain should forgive £45 million in loans to Argentina’s former military junta, despite the fact that the loans were used to buy weapons (including two type 42 destroyers and two Lynx helicopters) that were subsequently used to, er, invade the Falklands.

Yes, yes, Jubilee is attempting to make a serious point here (i.e. that debt lent to dictators should be regarded as illegitimate and odious, especially when tied to British arms sales), the point is not limited to Argentina (e.g. they mount a similar argument about loans to Hosni Mubarak’s fallen regime in Egypt), and Britain emerges looking pretty stupid on the question of whom to sell arms to (so what else is new).

But even so: to be out there arguing for debt forgiveness for Argentina, for weapons used to invade the Falklands, on the 30th anniversary of said invasion, when Argentina’s current government is rattling sabres about the Falklands all over again – that, my friends, is what is called “brave” in episodes of Yes, Minister.

The results of this courageous stand:

- Business Secretary Vince Cable, realising that Christmas has come early, has enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to say that no, he will not be forgiving Argentina’s debt;

- The story has gone massively viral (it’s currently 3rd most read on the Telegraph website) as the nation digests how satisfying it is to be able to jerk Argentina’s chain back for a change, after months of trouble-stirring by Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner;

- And Jubilee, meanwhile, have ended up looking like utterly bonkers lefties, with debt relief (and, by extension, aid and 0.7) now associated in the public mind not with Africa, but with Argentina - not merely a middle rather than low income country, but the one middle income country actually to have invaded us within living memory.

It’s not immediately clear how Jubilee could possibly top a public relations coup of this magnitude, short of arguing for debt forgiveness for, like, Greece or something. Oh, wait…

Here we go again: cost of Africa’s oil imports > Africa’s aid (updated) Alex Evans

Back in 2010, when I wrote Globalisation and Scarcity (pdf), one of the stats cited in the report that seemed to kindle most interest was the International Energy Agency’s finding in late 2007 that in 13 non-oil producing African states, including South Africa, Ghana, Ethiopia and Senegal, increases in the cost of oil over the previous three years had come to more than the total amount of aid and debt relief that they had received over the same period.

And now? Here’s Fiona Harvey in the Guardian over the weekend:

Developing countries in Africa received less in overseas aid last year than they paid for oil imports, new figures show. Sub-Saharan Africa received about $15.6bn (£9.7bn) in overseas development aid last year, but this was outweighed by the $18bn cost of importing oil, according to the figures compiled by the International Energy Agency and seen by the Guardian.

Not really a surprise, given that oil prices were throughout 2010 significantly higher than they were over the three years to 2007 (see this graph) – but a major headache for net importing developing countries even so.

Here in Ethiopia, where I’m now living, you don’t have to look far to see the impacts of all this: inflation is running at around 36%, and the government’s vulnerable foreign exchange position menas that there are periodic moments when everyone in Addis Ababa is driving around looking for gas stations that still have diesel in stock.

Needless to say, these kinds of challenges come with major political dimensions too. Following the 2008 commodity spike, the government has shifted in to top gear on improving its export earnings, which features as a central objective in the [breathtakingly ambitious] 2010 Growth and Transformation Plan (one page summary here). Two of the key avenues identified for pursuing that goal are massive hydroelectric power projects designed to turn Ethiopia into a key exporter of electricity, and large commercial farm projects that are also geared towards exports.

Most donors and NGOs here seem to agree that these are good ideas in principle, but there are some very live debates, both social and environmental, about how they’re conducted in practice. It’s an interesting case in point of how scarcity issues are in practice all linked together: oil price inflation and import dependence act as the prompt for massive investment in renewables and an ‘African green revolution’, but also for charged political economy questions about access to land, water and other natural resources.

Update: Joe points out below that aid to Sub-Saharan Africa is considerably higher than the $15.6 billion cited by the IEA – and on stopping to think about it, the $15.6bn figure clearly is way too low. data.worldbank.org confirms that Joe is also right about what the figure should actually be, i.e. more like $45bn (the most recent World Bank figure for total ODA to SSA is $44.6bn, for 2009; Joe’s presumably using 2010 data from the DAC, but I can’t access their website to check).

All of this raise the question of where the IEA got its ODA figure from – and whether the whole premise of the article (and my blog post!) was wrong. I’ve tweeted Fiona Harvey at the Guardian to ask her if her source at IEA can shed any light: will post what she comes back with.

Friday reality check Alex Evans

Great quote from the Economist’s Democracy in America blog, back in December:

A hundred years from now, looking back, the only question that will appear important about the historical moment in which we now live is the question of whether or not we did anything to arrest climate change. Everything else—the financial crisis, the life or death of the euro, authoritarianism or democracy in China and Russia, the Great Stagnation or the innovation renaissance, democratisation and/or political Islam in the Arab world, Newt or Mitt or another four years of Barack—all this will fade into insignificance beside the question of whether we managed to do anything about human industrial civilisation changing the climate of Planet Earth.

What does the Security Council think about Ethiopia / Eritrea? Alex Evans

With Ethiopia having launched an attack on camps inside Eritrea last week, and apparently another over the weekend (though the Ethiopian government denies that), UN Dispatch is wondering how come the Security Council seems to be turning a blind eye. Their answer is that the Council has been silent – and is likely to remain so – for several reasons:

First, the Council has found itself spurned by Eritrea in the past. Following the 2000 peace agreement, a UN peacekeeping force called the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea (UNMEE) was set up to monitor the situation. After increasingly restrictive conditions from Eritrea, including the cutting of logistical routes, the UN Security Council begrudgingly sunset the mission in 2008. There is no love lost between the two, also, due to Security Council sanctions on Eritrea for supporting al-Shabab despite prevailing arms embargoes.

Second, the issue is unlikely to be pressed by any of the Permanent Members for swift action. In its role as the President, the UK has yet to call for any meetings on the matter, and has stated that its focus this month will be on the Middle East. Once the United States takes up the Presidency in April, it will likely focus the status of Sudan and South Sudan, which are personal projects of Ambassador Susan Rice. Further, the United States is a strong ally of Ethiopia for its role in countering the spread of terrorism in the Horn. That leaves France, which is spending its diplomatic clout on getting a stronger resolution on Syria out of Russia and China.

Of the non-permanent states, while the African Union has called for calm between Ethiopia and Eritrea, South Africa and Togo have yet to echo the call from the Security Council. Barring a strong push by the two sub-Sahara African non-permanent members, it’s unlikely a sense of urgency will permeate the situation.

While this week’s fighting has been about training camps, all this is of course taking place against the larger backdrop of a border conflict that’s been left unresolved since the end of war between the two countries back in 2000. For some background on the impasse, it’s worth looking back at this International Crisis Group report from 2008, which argued that the two countries were at “serious risk of a new war”, and that

Ethiopia and Eritrea have had no incentive to resolve the frozen border conflict. Indeed, both regimes have used it as an excuse to enhance their domestic power at the expense of democracy and economic growth, thus reducing the attractiveness to them of diplomatic compromise. They support the other’s domestic rebels, and each is convinced that the fall of the other’s regime is imminent and the only real solution to the border dispute.

At the same time, the key international actors have allowed this situation to remain frozen because of overriding concerns, such as Washington’s concentration on its counter-terrorism priorities. However, the significance of the bilateral dispute has been magnified by its impact on the region, especially the conflict in Somalia, where insurgents backed by Eritrea battle Ethiopian troops that support the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

ICG’s take on what an endgame could look like, if the international community were to engage more seriously:

The basic goals remain to get Ethiopia to accept the border, Eritrea to accept the need for dialogue and the international community to provide the carrots and sticks needed to press the parties, including financing for trans-border development. Overcoming so many contrary predilections, even in the Security Council and major capitals, but especially in Addis Ababa and Asmara, will be hard.

But there are some objective considerations that might attract both sides to the process recommended [in the report]. Eritrea wants to consolidate its independence, prefers physical border demarcation to virtual demarcation, seeks Ethiopian withdrawal from Badme in particular and desires better relations with the West. Building a reconfigured progress on the Ethiopia-Eritrea Boundary Commission’s conclusions about the border should give it enough to be open to a wide-ranging dialogue. Prospective access to Eritrean ports and essentially an end to internal armed insurgencies should be meaningful incentives for Ethiopia.

What it’s like to work in international development Alex Evans

By Ahmed El Mezeny at Save the Children in Egypt, via Facebook. Outstanding.

Biggest solar storm since 2005 underway Alex Evans

The Sun is up to all sorts of interesting things this week, with unusually high sunspot activity leading to a series of solar flares (or coronal mass ejections, CMEs, in the jargon). One was launched on Sunday night and arrived here only 34 hours later, a good deal faster than the usual average of 2-3 days. That led to some pretty stunning aurora borealis activity; the shot below was taken in Tromsø in Norway (h/t Bjørn Jørgensen, via the excellent SpaceWeather.com).

As it turns out, though, Sunday’s solar flare was just a warm-up. Another even larger one – scoring 9 on a strength scale that runs to 10 – set off towards us at about 4am GMT yesterday, which means it will be arriving in about 4 hours’ time (2pm GMT on 24 January).  The image below is from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory; see also this movie from SOHO, NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

Does this mean we’re in for a Carrington Event? Doesn’t look like it - 95% of the CME is going to miss us, so we’ll only catch the edge. Had it hit us square on, we’d be looking at very substantial disruption to internet, GPS and telecoms. But if you live in a northern latitude and you have a clear evening, then certainly worth keeping an eye on the sky – could be pretty spectacular.

The unsustainability of sustainable development Alex Evans

From XKCD, via Tim Harford.

Should we have Sustainable Development Goals as well as (or indeed instead of) MDGs? Alex Evans

Later today in New York, a 2 day meeting on the idea of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ will begin, bringing together numerous countries’ Permanent Representatives to the United Nations plus a whole host of environment and development experts from capitals. It’s going to be an interesting meeting.

The idea of ‘SDGs’, after all, has acquired a lot of political momentum in recent months. Partly that’s because they’re seen as a potential outcome from this summer’s Rio+20 sustainable development conference – at a point when very few concrete outcomes from Rio appear to be in prospect (see the ‘zero draft outcome document’ pdf that was published earlier this month). The SDGs agenda is also topical given that the Millennium Development Goals are due to hit their 2015 deadline pretty soon, raising the question of what should come after them. (See Claire’s excellent recent publications, like this and this, on that for a full briefing on where things stand on that front.)

But the funny thing is that there’s remarkably little clarity on what SDGs would cover, or how they’d work. Would they just run from now to 2015, alongside the existing MDGs, and cover a few ‘gaps’ that were missed out in the MDGs – like access to energy? Or would they in fact take over from the MDGs after 2015, thus becoming the new organising framework for global development policy? These are big questions – and at a time, of course, when multilateralism has really been struggling to make much running not just on Rio preparations, but also on climate, trade, and any number of other key issue areas.

Against this backdrop, David and I have just published a short CIC briefing paper (pdf) that discusses where we are on the SDGs agenda – and how it might usefully pan out from here. In a nutshell, our argument is that policymakers should think twice before regarding SDGs as an “easy win” from Rio. We argue that this is a very complex and potentially very contentious area of policy – and that policymakers should play a long game at this stage rather than going for quick wins that could all too easily backfire. Accordingly, we think that discussion of SDGs at Rio should go no further than discussion of broad principles and raising the level of ambition. A lot more shared awareness – not just between policymakers, but also with publics, private sector, media, civil society and so on – is needed before the discussion about specifics gets underway in earnest.

Gabrielle Giffords to step down Alex Evans

Sustainable Development Goals – a useful outcome from Rio+20? Alex Evans

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Piracy: the new aid Alex Evans

OK, OK, that’s not quite what Chatham House are saying in their new report Treasure Mapped: Using Satellite Imagery to Track the Developmental Effects of Somali Piracy. But check out some of what the report does say:

The data analysis indicates pirate incomes have widespread and significant positive impacts on the Somali economy. Although only a fraction of ransoms is exchanged into Somali shillings, the appreciation of the Somali shilling resulting from the injection of US dollars benefits people relying on imported food staples such as rice. There are clear trickle-down effects for casual labourers and pastoralists because of higher cattle prices.

Or this:

Piracy has created employment and considerable multiplier effects in the Puntland economy, even if a significant proportion of the proceeds is invested in foreign goods or channelled to foreign financiers. The distribution of ransoms follows traditional patterns in Somalia, involving considerable redistribution and investment in urban centres rather than coastal villages.

But here’s the real punchline:

The total cost of piracy off the Horn of Africa (including the counter-piracy measures) was estimated to be in the region of US$7–12 billion for 2010, while ransoms were said to be in the region of US$250 million. Even if Somali communities received all of the ransom money, replacing this source of income (for example with a combination of a foreign-funded security forces and development aid) would be considerably cheaper than continuing with the status quo.

A negotiated solution to the piracy problem should aim to exploit local disappointment among coastal communities regarding the economic benefits from piracy and offer them an alternative that brings them far greater benefits than hosting pirates does. A military crack-down on the other hand would deprive one of the world’s poorest nations of an important source of income and aggravate poverty.