Earlier this week I argued on here for men to be brought into discussions and policy-making on gender and development. I did not expect to be arguing just two days later that women should not be neglected in such debates. But an article on the Guardian’s Poverty Matters blog this morning (h/t Claire Melamed for the link) has forced me temporarily to switch sides – my brothers will have to survive without me for a while.

The article is titled, ‘Will the ‘girl effect’ really help to combat poverty?’ The sub-heading reads: ‘Many development organisations see empowering girls – and enabling them to delay childbearing – as a powerful means to tackle poverty, but the evidence so far doesn’t bear this out.’

In this ADD world, where many people have time only for headlines, I wonder how many readers (or how many of the thousands who read a short link to the piece on Twitter) will see this and move on, sighing about another massive waste of money and time and wondering when the world will finally realise that aid doesn’t work.

Those who take the time to read the full article are less likely to go away with such thoughts. For it’s not really about empowering girls at all, but about one relatively minor aspect of empowering girls – delaying pregnancy. ‘Time will tell,’ the author, Ofra Koffman, writes with foreboding, ‘whether the “girl effect” will become one of those promising interventions that turn out to be more of a myth than a panacea.’ But her argument addresses only part of this question, and even this is based on flimsy evidence. For example, Ms Koffman uses the fact that adolescent fertility is not much higher in Rwanda than in the United States to show that the links between teenage pregnancy and economic development are weak. The obvious flaw in this case is that adolescent fertility in the US today tells us nothing about its effect on development because the US is a developed country. A comparison with youth fertility when the US was developing would have been more pertinent, but even then there may have been confounding factors two or three centuries ago that muddied the picture.

That disadvantaged women in the UK who delay pregnancy are no better off than their peers is a slightly stronger argument against policies to reduce adolescent fertility (although again the relevance of the UK to, say, Burkina Faso is debatable), but what the article entirely omits to mention is that such policies are very far from the central plank of efforts to empower women and girls. Sanitation, healthcare, microfinance and, most importantly, education have received at least as much attention and resources, but all these are absent from the Guardian piece.

Their omission is not surprising, for including them would fatally undermine the argument that women’s empowerment is a waste of time. Girls’ education, for example, has multiple positive impacts on their and their families’ lives, from health improvements for women and their children (see here, here and here for evidence from developing countries), to improvements in their own and their countries’ economic circumstances (see here and here). Girl Effect, the Nike-sponsored program that this article references, acknowledges that there are many ways to achieve its goal of strengthening women’s status. The writer implies that adolescent fertility is all such programs focus on, but the Girl Effect website highlights the importance of education, healthcare, and HIV prevention, and DFID (also referenced), the World Bank and other development agencies, as well as many of the developing-country governments that bear the ultimate responsibility for educating their people, are fully aware that the benefits of girls’ schooling go far beyond delayed pregnancy.

Now I may be overly harsh in criticising the author of this piece, who might not have written the title and the sub-head herself. But between them, she and the Guardian have done women and girls a disservice. Efforts to improve women’s lives have transformed developed societies – it would be a shame if such ill thought-through articles denied developing countries the same opportunity.

Last week I was asked to review a new book on gender and development. Since these things are usually turgid affairs, full of abstruse jargon (“registers of governmentality”, “idioms of sexualness” and “body reflexive practices” are just a few of the assaults on English perpetrated in this one) and nostalgia for the marxist utopias of yore, I was apprehensive. I envisaged long days of ploughing laboriously through paragraphs, trying heroically to decipher “essentially hetero-normative constructions”, “emergent rubrics”, and “positionalities”, and then having to pretend in my review that I’d both mastered this tangled tongue and maintained sufficient will to live to pass constructive comment on it.

But once you have hacked your way through the impenetrable forest of the introduction (which counts “decentring the traditionally unmarked male” and “normatively naturalizing potencies” among its most egregious language crimes), you emerge into a glade of sunny clarity. For Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities is no ordinary gender book – reading it will give you a new perspective on the social problems of the developing world.

The idea that gender equality is important to development is not new – efforts to educate women and girls are among foreign aid’s few relatively uncontested success stories, and microfinance programs, the development fad du jour, also mostly target women. Men, however, have largely been overlooked by practitioners and policy-makers; reading Men and Development, you begin to see what catastrophic effects this has had.

The problem lies in the expectations society has of men. In West Africa, for example, men are expected to set up a home, marry at least one wife, and accumulate and provide for children and other dependents. Those who fail to perform these duties forfeit the respect of their elders, women and their peers; they cannot become “real men”.

When the breadwinner role becomes impossible to fulfil – as it did for millions of men across Africa during the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s – men have other facets of masculinity on which to draw in order to recover their self-esteem. Some of these alternative masculinities are positive – think of the black South Africans who responded to economic emasculation by adopting the role of fighter against oppression and joining the liberation struggle.

But many traditional expressions of manliness are socially destructive. Physical violence is the most obvious of these. Economic insecurity, as one of the Men and Development authors Gary Barker notes in an earlier paper, can prompt men to turn to violence to reaffirm their power – many South African men have joined criminal gangs, for example, while domestic violence becomes more common as unemployment rises.

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So the other day I was asked what I thought the ‘big debates’ were in development.  A dream question.  But the more I thought about it, the more I found myself stumped – and slightly depressed.

I used to spend a lot of time arguing about big issues: trade liberalisation; industrialisation; national sovereignty.  Not that I’d necessarily want to go back to those days, but the nearest thing I could think of to anything that approaches that level of disagreement today is the spat between Jeff Sach’s gang and Michael Clemens’ gang about whether the Millennium villages project is working.  And it’s not even an argument about development policy or practice, but about research methods: essentially, if the project should have used the hugely fashionable randomised evaluation methodology, and identified a control group at the start to be able to see the impact that interventions are having compared to that control group. 

Important stuff, but surely not the be-all and end-all of the potential questions raised by this project.  Who, for example, is asking about the relative importance of improvements within rural areas and movement out of rural areas for development in the long term?  Who is asking about the limits of this kind of aid-based intervention in the absence of institutional and market changes at the national or global level?  (more…)

If people in the Middle East could democratically choose what country they lived in, would they choose the one they are in now?

Amidst all the talk of an Arab Spring, the fragility of the Arab state is often forgotten.

Whereas developed countries are almost always the product of an organic, internally driven process, in the Middle East’s case, the countries are mostly the product of a British-French agreement made in 1916 (Sykes-Picot) that paid little attention to local sociopolitical realities. As a result, few possess the historical roots, social cohesion, and legitimacy necessary to nurture the complex institutions that are a prerequisite for development and democracy. On the contrary, most suffer from both sectarian divisions and weak government—the causes of state fragility. (more…)

Homegrown nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play crucial roles providing social services to the poor, holding governments accountable, aggregating the political power of the disenfranchised, and helping to shape public policies. Their importance to development is well known.

But what explains the reason why some developing countries possess so few independent organizations while others have a multitude?

Take Pakistan for instance. Whereas in Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, NGOs have played such a prominent role that they have supplanted the state in some crucial areas, in Pakistan they are far less influential. Despite having 180 million people, the latter has relatively few important NGOs, think tanks, and independent monitoring organizations (IMOs), as pointed out by former ambassador to Pakistan William B. Milam in his book Bangladesh and Pakistan. Despite a generally positive government attitude (at least towards domestic organizations) and much growth in recent years, the number of important institutions pales in contrast to Bangladesh’s total. (more…)

In recent years, the word ‘globalisation’ has become synonymous with a whole range of international ills.  Financial globalisation has been particularly maligned.  Once hailed as the solution to poverty and underdevelopment, it is now blamed for the unfettered flow of ‘hot’ capital around the world, the build-up of credit and asset bubbles and the creation of unsustainable global imbalances that have led to dangerous levels of volatility in the global economy.  But are either of these views fair?  Do we expect too much from globalisation, or do we credit it too little?

Let’s start with the positives.  Over the last century, globalisation – the faster and cheaper flow of goods, services, capital, people and ideas around the world – has helped to lift millions out of poverty.  It has enabled developing countries abundant in resources and manpower to generate remarkable rates of growth, while in the developed world it has brought down the cost of consumer goods, stimulated innovation in many sectors and created new markets for goods and services.  Globalisation has provided unprecedented opportunities for people to live and work abroad, and helped to spread acceptance of universal values such as democracy, freedom and human rights.

Yet in spite of these achievements, globalisation has manifestly failed to deliver security and prosperity for all.  Inequality may have fallen between countries over the last thirty years, but it has risen within them as an ever smaller elite have captured most of the gains associated with technological progress.  Global competition has spurred huge productivity increases in many industries, but has also put serious pressure on jobs and wages.  These problems were evident before the global financial crisis, but have been magnified and exacerbated by it.  In 2003, a Eurobarometer survey found that 60 per cent of Brits were in favour of globalisation, compared to 27 per cent who were opposed.  By 2010, just 30 per cent of UK respondents to a YouGov poll thought that globalisation was good for the British economy, against 34 per cent who thought it was bad (with the rest being indifferent or unsure). (more…)

Mexico, like many places around the world, has numerous immensely imaginative one-liners to characterize corruption. Here is a sample:

• “El que no transa, no avanza” (“Whoever doesn’t trick or cheat, gets nowhere”)
• “No roba, pero se le pega el dinero” (“He doesn’t steal, but money sticks to him”
• “Fulano de tal es honesto, pero honesto, honesto, honesto, ¿quién sabe?” (“So-and-so is honest; but honest, honest, honest, who knows?”
• “Político pobre, pobre político” (“A politician in poverty is a poor politician”)
• “No les pido que me den, sólo que me pongan donde hay” (“I am not asking for money, just to be appointed where I can get some”)
• “Vivir fuera del presupuesto es vivir en el error” (“To live outside the federal budget is to live in error”)
• “Amistad que no se refleja en la nómina no es amistad” (“A friendship that is not reflected in the payroll is no friendship at all”)
• “Con dinero baila el perro, si está amaestrado” (“Properly paid and trained, a dog will dance”)
• “No les cambies las ideas, cambiales los ingresos” (Don’t bother to change their ideas, just change their incomes”)

Source: Manana Forever?: Mexico and the Mexicans

Good news: Ban Ki-moon will save Antarctica!

Ban Ki-moon has just set out his plans for his second five year term. He is not unambitious:

“Today I want to share with you an action agenda for the coming five years,” he told the Assembly as he returned to the rostrum to brief Member States on his vision for his second term.

“A plan to make the most of the opportunities before us. A plan to help create a safer, more secure, more sustainable, more equitable future. A plan to build the future we want,” he said.

The “action agenda” presented today describes specific measures regarding each of the five imperatives, including an unprecedented campaign to wipe out five of the world’s major killers – malaria, polio, paediatric HIV infections, maternal and neonatal tetanus, and measles.

Mr. Ban also announced that the UN will work with Member States to make Antarctica a World Nature Preserve and that he will appoint a new special representative for youth.

Hm… a year ago, I published an article in which I noted that “Ban has oscillated between bouts of fatalism about the UN’s decline and curious bursts of overheated rhetoric about its importance.”  We seem to be in one the latter periods:

“Waves of change are surging around us,” he told the Assembly. “If we navigate wisely, we can create a more secure and sustainable future for all. The United Nations is the ship to navigate these waters…

“We are the venue for partnerships and action. Now is our moment. Now is the time to create the future we want,” he stated.

Interestingly, Ban didn’t use the words “South Sudan” once in his main speech (he nodded to it in a post-speech press conference) despite the evidence that the country may be falling apart on the UN’s watch.  But then he didn’t mention Syria either.  Still, he didn’t overlook the UN’s crisis management operations completely:

Our operations build bridges — literally and among communities.

Clever, huh?

Listening to the debates on the UK’s Welfare Bill this morning, I was struck by the similarities between this debate and the endless arguments about whether the UK should give foreign aid. 

Ever since the Elizabethans institutionalised the idea of the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor into the system of poor relief, governments have had two main public reasons for giving people money (here or abroad): because they need it (see, for example, humanitarian aid or child benefit), or because it will do some wider good (like help them find a job, or promote economic growth), and two reasons for taking it away: becasue they don’t really need it (the ‘undeserving poor’ that right-wing pundits are so keen to uncover), or because taking it away is in their own best interests (so they can, in the jargon, ‘stand on their own two feet’).  Welfare reforms, aid budgets, all are subject to this remorseless political logic.

There are two things which are particularly frustrating about this rather sterile argument.  Firstly, it’s conducted entirely on the spending side, while in fact the fairness of a system depends both on how money is raised and how it is spent.  Debates on spending are often conducted as if choices were all about distribution within a group of very poor people. 

Iain Duncan Smith, speaking for the government on the BBC’s Today programme this morning, argued that the welfare bill will seem fairer to people in work who are earning low incomes and who don’t want to see their taxes used to provide the unemployed with higher incomes than they themselves enjoy.  But if public spending really has come down to dividing up tax revenues from and benefit payments to people who are at or below the average wage, then the answer is not welfare reform to change the distribution of the spend, but tax reform to change the distribution of the revenue. 

Of course poor working families should not be paying for poor non-working families, just as poor working families should not be paying for poor families in other countries.  The whole point of a redistributive tax system is that it’s the wealthy who pay for the poor.  If this is really the issue, then change the tax system rather than tinkering with spending.

My second bugbear is the myth of the perfect system.  People arguing on both sides of the debate about the welfare bill and discussions about aid often appear to assume that there is some possiblity of a perfect system out there, which will solve the short-term problems of poverty without any risk of long-term distortions to people’s behaviour. 

Well there isn’t.  Rather than looking for perfection, it might be better to think about both debates in terms of different types of mistakes various systems might make.  Is it better to err on the side of generosity, and perhaps risk giving aid or welfare to a few people who don’t really need it, or is it better to err on the side of meanness, and risk cutting off aid or welfare to people who really do need it? Which kind of mistake can we live with?

Governments in this corner of the world have been struggling with this idea, at home and abroad, for over 400 years, since the first Poor Law was passed in England in 1601. There are real practical questions about how to manage both aid and welfare, how to make the most of scarce resources, and how to build handouts into a system of longer term improvements in people’s lives.  But going down false, politically expedient avenues won’t help anybody.

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.

European ministers are meeting today to discuss an oil embargo on Iran.  The run-up to the meeting has been dogged by reports that some impoverished EU members – notably Italy and Greece – have questioned the initiative.  The Iranians may think that the EU won’t do them real damage, as I point out in a new column for E!Sharp:

There is a general impression that the EU would not hurt a fly.  Instead, it might launch a strategic partnership with the fly, hold annual meetings with the little creature, and possibly fund a Brussels-based think-tank to produce a report entitled “Achieving a Sustainable EU-Fly Relationship by 2025”.

That is the image that many EU officials want to project.  “The strength of the EU lies, paradoxically, in its inability to throw its weight around,” Catherine Ashton declared in February last year. “In short, the EU has soft power with a hard edge – more than the power to set a good example and promote our values. But less than the power to impose its will.”  Yet the EU was throwing its weight around just then.

The EU’s top target one year ago was Laurent Gbagbo, who was refusing to accept the UN’s decision that he had lost elections in Côte d’Ivoire in November 2010.  A brutal but wily operator, Gbagbo had unleashed thugs on his opponents, menaced UN peacekeepers and bamboozled African mediators.

But the UN had mandated sanctions against his regime and the EU took the lead in implementing them.  In a very un-European moment of nastiness, Ashton’s spokesperson told a reporter that the “priority is on the economic asphyxia of Gbagbo’s regime.”  When I read that menacing line, I wanted to cheer.

Things turned out pretty badly for Mr Gbagbo, who was undercut by the EU sanctions and is now at the ICC.  The Syrian regime is also struggling with Euro-sanctions:

The EU first imposed sanctions on individual Syrian officials as violence in the country escalated in May last year, but raised the stakes by deciding to stop importing Syrian oil in the autumn.  Although the Syrian regime has held on to power – and continued its vicious campaign against protestors – the EU’s sanctions have had an impact.  Companies like Shell have pulled out.  With its energy sector under siege, Damascus has struggled to supply its own population with fuel.  The Financial Times reports that the price of subsidized cooking gas for normal Syrians had now tripled.

Syria’s President Assad has accused the Europeans of persecuting innocent civilians.  Nobody should be proud that poor Syrians have been affected by the price hikes – even leaving ethical issues aside, it is arguable that some citizens feel greater solidarity with the regime in the face of EU pressure.   But Côte d’Ivoire and Syria both show that, at least when it comes to sanctions, the EU has more than “soft power with a hard edge”.  It has straightforward hard power – even if it is economic not military.

Iran is, of course, a rather tougher target.  But the EU may do it real damage.

Indonesia, sometimes known as the “fifth BRIC” (after Brazil Russia India China) because of its population size and growth potential, now has debt rated at investment grade for the first time since the Asian financial crisis:

While a credit-rating cut hangs over some nations, the Southeast Asian giant’s sovereign debt has been bumped back up to investment grade by Fitch Ratings, in December, and Moody’s Investors Service this week. Standard & Poor’s will surely follow suit.

Investors have already rewarded the country for solid fundamentals—foreign direct investment grew 20.2% last year to a record $19.3 billion, the government said Thursday, and, earlier this month, Indonesia sold 30-year bonds at a record-low yield of 5.375%. Meanwhile, gross domestic product growth is trotting along at a healthy 6%-plus, public debt is under control, and inflation is relatively benign at under 6%. Still, there are reasons to be cautious.

Corruption and weak infrastructure are perennial problems. Crumbling roads and inadequate ports especially stifle trade, costing as much as 1% of GDP, according to analysts. A recently enacted land acquisition bill should help. But there is much work to be done.

While India and China gain many more headlines, Indonesia may be both a more attractive bet for investors and a better case study for development professionals trying to find lessons applicable to less developed countries.

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.

As everyone starts to freak out about what it would mean for the UK – with its high gas import dependency on Qatar and low gas storage capacity – if Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz, Chatham House’s Paul Stevens has a useful corrective in this morning’s FT. There are two key reasons why Iran is unlikely to try to block the Straits, he argues:

The first reason to believe Iran might stop short of closing the strait is simply because such a move would fail. Cutting off Gulf oil supplies represents an existential threat to the west that it would have to use force to counter. The response, if transit were seriously threatened, would rapidly degenerate into a shooting war between Iran and the US supported by many of its allies. While oil prices might reach unprecedented new levels, the US Navy would quickly restore access.

The second reason is that a serious threat to close Hormuz is arguably the principal Iranian deterrent against a military attack by the US or Israel on its nuclear facilities. So to use it in response to an EU oil embargo would be using that proverbial sledgehammer to crack a pistachio nut.

And in any case, he goes on, “Iran does have other options to retaliate. It could intensify pressure on oil prices by contributing to the instability in Iraq that has followed the US troop withdrawal as the Shia ruling clique has begun a de facto war of attrition against the Sunnis.”

All this said, Stevens is also heavily sceptical about whether the EU’s embargo on Iran will actually work:

History is littered with failed oil embargoes, ranging from Cuba, Rhodesia and South Africa to the embargo against Iraq after 1990.It is also worth highlighting that an EU oil embargo would greatly strengthen the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad at a time when it is under considerable pressure, especially with the parliamentary elections looming in March. Unemployment remains high, as does inflation, which has been greatly aggravated by the removal of many price subsidies in the past twelve months. Also in the past few weeks, the value of the Iranian rial against the dollar has fallen dramatically.

The Center for Global Development has been organizing a Study Group on a U.S. Development Strategy in Pakistan. It published a report listing its recommendations last June.

Nancy Birdsall, CGD’s president, has also issued a series of open letters to the US government, such as the one posted recently.

CGD should be praised for undertaking such an initiative. Getting aid right in Pakistan matters a lot to US national interests, as well as to the idea that donors can contribute to state building. No fragile state is as important as Pakistan. Its governance problems have allowed terrorists to use its territory to plan attacks, and make its growing stockpile of nuclear weapons less secure. On the other hand, its strategic location and growing population (the country will be the 4th largest in a generation) ought to make it an important emerging market.

It is also rare that any think tank so closely examines aid policy in a specific country, though the importance of Pakistan means that two Washington organizations have done so in the last year (the Wilson Center issued a report in December).

But, CGD’s approach is flawed. Although the report makes sensible recommendations (on things like opening markets, promoting investment, engaging reformers, and improving USAID operations), it says almost nothing specific about Pakistan. There is no attempt to understand the drivers of its political economy, and the causes of its weak governance. There is no attempt to delve into the reasons why its leadership has consistently failed the country or why its state apparatus works so badly, especially for the country’s tens of millions of poor people. All its ideas more or less repeat verbatim what could be said about U.S. aid to almost any developing country. There is no context. (more…)