A year ago, I was worrying about the implications of the Euro crisis for UN operations:

Despite the financial crisis, the UN’s peacekeeping budget — running at between $7 billion and $8 billion a year — has not yet faced drastic cuts. The Obama Administration has made a point of paying its dues (now 27% of the total) on time, compensating for Bush-era arrears.

However, other big financial contributors — especially members of the European Union, who cover 40% of the costs combined — are looking for cuts as part of broader spending reductions.

In June [2010], Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador to the UN, told the Security Council that “in the context of budgetary austerity, the cost of peacekeeping was increasingly difficult to manage.”

You can find a longer version of this argument in a paper I wrote for ZIF, the German peacekeeping center, in August 2010.  Fourteen months later, my gloomy predictions are being vindicated.  Colum Lynch published a lengthy piece yesterday  on the FP website headlined “U.S. and Europe fight over cuts in peacekeeping”:

Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, fended off a push last month by European governments to press to consider cuts next year in U.N.-backed peacekeeping mission in Liberia, which costs upwards of $525 million a year, more than Liberia’s $459 million annual national budget. Rice has also resisted calls from other European governments, like Britain and France, to consider deeper cuts in U.N. peacekeeping missions in Haiti and in Sudan.

France and Britain are required to pay, respectively, 7.5 percent and 8.16 percent of all U.N. peacekeeping costs.

U.S. officials say that peacekeeping missions must be adequately funded to ensure their success, and that European governments, who each pay a far smaller share of the U.N. peacekeeping budget, are in some instances motivated by a desire to shift funding to their own “pet” missions, not the commitment to fiscal discipline that they claim.

“There is no country that has a greater interest in the economies, effectiveness, and efficiencies of U.N. peacekeeping missions [than the United States]. We pay 27 percent of the bill while the Europeans pay a smaller percentage,” Rice said in an interview with Turtle Bay. “For them to be holier than thou is a bit rich, to say the least.”

I’d like to say “I told you so”, though that’s not super-helpful…

It turns out that my last post on the Security Council and Syria was wrong.

Exceptionally wrong, in fact.

Rather than acquiesce to a resolution condemning the Syrian government for repressing its people, China and Russia used their vetoes.  And rather than support the EU-drafted resolution (as had seemed increasingly likely) Brazil, India and South Africa abstained.

This is a big set-back for the EU and the Americans, who were firmly behind the European initiative.  It’s a big win for Russia, which would have been embarrassed if China had even abstained.  And it’s a grim moment for Brasilia, Delhi and Pretoria, who have missed the chance to carve out a distinctive position in the Council on Syria, and opted to avoid a confrontation.  This was a moment the “IBSA” countries  could have seized to show why they deserved more respect at the UN.  They missed it.

More analysis tomorrow.  For now, congratulations to Gabon and Nigeria for voting for the resolution, refuting the claim that all developing countries are anti-interventionist.

When the current British government took office, it decreed a limit on the number of special advisers that each minister was allowed to appoint.  Recent figures show that David Cameron has sixteen “spads”, Nick Clegg has eleven, and most other ministers have just one or two.  Overall, there are still fewer than eighty advisers wandering around Whitehall today.  Some civil servants probably think that’s still many too many.

Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State, Nigeria, would beg to differ.  Today he announced the appointment of a modest 924 special aides…

Governor Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State, on Monday, approved the appointment of 94 Senior Special Assistants (SSAs), 20 Special Advisers (SAs) and 810 Special Assistants.

A statement signed by the Secretary to the State Government, Ahmed Dandija, also announced the appointment of 24 Directors-General in charge of various sectors of the state.

Yuguda also approved the appointment of 20 Deputy Chairmen and 82 members for the Local Councils in the state.

The statement added that all the appointments were with immediate effect.

One can only imagine that the administration of Bauchi State is about to make a great leap forward.  [H/T Teju Cole.]

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the UN Poverty Targets – are just a few years away from judgment day – 2015 – so it’s a pretty good time to ask how are they doing – especially as people start to think about a new generation of MDGs or MDGs 2.0. In fact how the world fares on the current MDGs may well determine if there is even a second set.

A new report out this week from Ben Leo and Ross Thuotte using the latest available data  (see interactive maps here and data excel here and paper here and country-by-country graphs here) outlines where countries are. The key findings this year are:

- Overall, low-income countries’ progress toward the highly ambitious MDGs improved modestly this year while middle-income countries’ performance declined slightly because of a deterioration in the Middle East and North Africa.

- Low-income countries improved this year, on average, on four core MDG target indicators: extreme poverty, hunger, HIV/AIDs, and water. Performance declined modestly for three core MDG indicators: education, gender equality, and child mortality.

- Among low-income countries, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Niger produced the most dramatic improvements this year. For middle-income countries, Mexico and Uruguay exhibited the most dramatic improvements. Honduras and Ecuador remain tied for the best performing countries. Others in the top 10 achievers include – not surprisingly - Brazil, China, and Vietnam and surprisingly (perhaps?) are - Cambodia, Egypt (erm… and Tunisia did well last year on the MDGs), El Salvador and Sri Lanka.

However, the authors note that:

- Widespread data revisions or retractions affected a number of countries’ MDG Progress Index scores, particularly in relation to the education indicator. This effect highlights the practical limitations of attempting to track annual MDG progress and the sensitivity of performance trends to often poor, non-static data sources.

Erm… oh dear – just a few years away from judgment day (2015) and the data is subject to ‘widespread revisions’ ? eg 31 of 67 countries with data revised their data for the education MDG.

And about a quarter of countries countries don’t have a baseline to judge if specific MDGs are met.

As debates on MDGs 2.0 begin what are the implications of the above? Maybe chose targets for data that exists at the outset (ie the baseline) so one can judge if the targets are met?

All of this is a bit worrying of course because data matters not only to wonky geeks – but how can one judge any kind of results without a full set of data? (and one that isn’t subject to substantial revisions year-to-year…).

Last Thursday, I published a grumpy post over on the blog of the Takshashila Institution, an excellent Indian think-tank. Why was I in a bad mood?

On Friday, India will use its month-long presidency of the United Nations Security Council to convene a discussion on the state of peacekeeping.  This is timely, as UN operations have been through a turbulent year, navigating crises in Côte d’Ivoire and Sudan.  There is talk of a new mission in Libya.  But this meeting is likely to be a bore.

And why did I think that the debate would be a snooze-fest?  Demonstrating a remarkable degree of foresight, I guessed that “Security Council diplomats will be thinking of how to beat the traffic from New York to Long Island’s beach resorts once the debate is finished.”  Er, no.  With Hurricane Irene almost literally on the horizon, everyone was probably wondering when they could go and stock up on bottled water and black truffles, or whatever ambassadors consume during hurricanes.

The debate was also overshadowed by the tragic attack on the UN offices in Nigeria.  Nonetheless, a quick read of the summary of the discussions suggests that they were every bit as tedious as I had predicted. Let’s get a quick taster:

Most speakers in the ensuing discussion stressed the continuing importance of United Nations peacekeeping and the need for increased engagement by the partners involved.  In that context, many welcomed more regularized consultations with troop- and police-contributing countries and urged continuous improvement in cooperation among all stakeholders.  Many also called for innovative thinking in closing resource gaps, particularly in supplying such enablers as helicopters, and in implementing the recommendations of previous peacekeeping reviews.

Enough already!  When multiple speakers are highlighting the  importance of “implementing the recommendations of previous peacekeeping reviews”, you know that “innovative thinking” is probably in short supply.  I’m afraid that I fault the Indian conveners for not shaking up the discussions:

A background paper prepared for the Security Council’s meeting contains a solid but all-too-familiar litany of diplomatic statements about how peace operations are resourced and managed.  It fails to grapple seriously with the hardest cases facing the UN or offer a serious framework for resolving them.

As I’ve argued before, peacekeeping is an issue on which New Delhi can show global leadership, but holding debates in New York in which everyone says more or less exactly what they’ve always said isn’t the way to achieve that.

While I am not a regular reader of Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly, I know people who are.  And they are not happy about this story from the Congo…

Congolese security forces have seized a jeep belonging to the United Nations peacekeeping operation and arrested a UN employee suspected of trying to smuggle over tonne of minerals out of the country, the government said on Monday.

The incident will embarrass the UN force, MONUSCO, which has helped prop up Democratic Republic of Congo’s weak armed forces but is also often accused of not doing enough to protect civilians and has been involved in sexual abuse scandals.

What happened?

Congolese Information Minister Lambert Mende said the incident took place on Sunday evening at the border crossing in the eastern city of Goma.

“Border police … and other security services … have seized a load consisting of 24 packages of cassiterite (tin ore) each weighing 50kg, on board a MONUSCO jeep,” he said.

A police investigation is under way and two people, including a Congolese U.N. staff member, have been arrested, Mende said.

As the lovely portrait of a lump of cassiterite at the top of this post suggests, trying to move a tonne of the stuff around by jeep might not to be the most subtle plan ever.   For good discussions of how to monitor, rather than exploit, the DRC’s extractive industries, look at the papers from CIC collected here.

This Wednesday (17 August) Foreign Policy published a piece by Ban Ki-moon’s Chief of Staff, Vijay Nambiar, rebutting an earlier article by former South African President Thabo Mbeki in FP about the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire. It’s worth a look.

Mbeki argued that the international community was “fundamentally wrong” to insist that Côte d’Ivoire hold elections for which it was not ready in 2010.  Nambiar says that Mbeki offers an “inaccurate account” of the crisis.

This is heated stuff.  But one can’t help noticing that Mbeki’s article appeared on, er, 29 April.   It’s good that the UN is standing up for its principles.  But did it really need the best part of four months to draft a rebuttal?

There is no shortage of post-riot commentary pieces about what to do with Britain’s under-educated and unemployed teens.  The prize for most dangerous proposal so far goes to Mr. Mark Street of Doha, Qatar, an expat Brit who writes to the Financial Times to express his “shame at these disgraceful scenes.”  A lot of us share that sentiment.  But I’m not quite so keen on Mr. Street’s proposed solution:

My suggestion would be to introduce legislation to create a compulsory two-year “national service” for young people leaving school with minimal qualifications. Not a military service, but one with military discipline, the objective of which is to help the less fortunate in places such as the Horn of Africa, building basic infrastructure or distributing food aid. That would give some purpose to their lives, and showing them how well off they are in relation to so many people in the world might teach some lessons that our education system has so profoundly failed in doing.

To which one can only say no, no and thrice no.  I suppose I just about grasp the “moral education” argument here.  But does anyone really think it would be feasible – let alone advisable – to ship thousands of narky British teenagers into a famine-stricken and violent part of the world like the Horn of Africa?  Who would protect the truculent little fellows from bandits and Islamist militias?  Would this army of hoodied road-builders have to be housed in a sort of gulag archipelago of work camps?  How resistant would they be to disease?  How many vats of high-factor sun cream would we need to ship through Mombasa to protect these pale-skinned sons of Britannia from the glaring African sun?  Has anyone noticed that the Empire is dead yet?

And so on and so forth.  While I am always sympathetic to conservative nostalgia, Mr. Street would probably be best advised to advocate more practicable old-school policy options, such as putting rioters in the stocks and pelting them with offal.

Here’s a rather odd bit of UN-bashing from last Friday:

The United Nations Security Council is looking into forming a new environmental peacekeeping force to deal with potential conflicts caused by so-called “global warming.”

Er, really?

The “green police,” as some are calling it, would wear green helmets, rather than the blue ones currently worn by U.N. forces. James Taylor is senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, a non-profit group that works to discover, develop and promote free-market solutions to public policy problems. He speculates on how seriously this should be taken.

“Anytime that somebody is talking about raising a standing army, giving it weapons, militarizing the world … in a way that hasn’t been the case before, I don’t find that a laughing matter at all,” he explains. “And given the extremism of the environmental activists here in the United States and around the globe, that gives me great cause for concern, considering that the enemy that they say is destroying the planet is Western civilization and, more specifically, free-market nations such as the United States.”

Where is all this coming from?  It’s true that the Security Council recently held a contentious debate on climate change, but I can say with 100% confidence that there was no talk of a standing army.  But the Heartlanders aren’t just dreaming this up.  Instead, their website points us to this story from the Guardian:

A special meeting of the United Nations security council is due to consider whether to expand its mission to keep the peace in an era of climate change.  Small island states, which could disappear beneath rising seas, are pushing the security council to intervene to combat the threat to their existence.

There has been talk, meanwhile, of a new environmental peacekeeping force – green helmets – which could step into conflicts caused by shrinking resources. [Emphasis added.]

Hm, so this is a lefty fantasy as well as a right-wing one.  What is the Guardian’s source for the claim?  Answer: an op-ed over at the Huffington Post by Germany’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Peter Wittig.  After offering a rather effective overview of the the security challenges deriving from climate change, Amb. Wittig notes that “there are governments that — in allusion to the ‘blue-helmet’ UN peacekeepers — are already calling for ‘green-helmets to close down coal-mines.’”

As far-fetched as the idea of “green-helmets” might sound, consider the tasks that the United Nations peacekeepers already perform today — e.g. emergency aid, development and recovery, state — and peacebuilding. Repainting blue helmets into green might be a strong signal — but would dealing with the consequences of climate change — say in precarious regions — be really very different from the tasks the blue helmets already perform today?

I’ve made a brief effort to track down the origin of the “green-helmets to close down coal-mines” quotation, but failed.  Perhaps a better-informed reader can enlighten me.  However, a close reading of Amb. Wittig’s op-ed reveals that he patently does not want to (i) forcibly shut any mines; (ii) create a green-helmeted environmental peace army; or (iii) destroy the free market or indeed the West.  In fact, he specifically writes that “it is too early to seriously think about Council action on climate change.”

The Guardian story took the Ambassador’s allusion and converted it into an easy and misleading headline.  The Heartland Institute simply swooped on the Guardian’s tale and spiced it up a little.  And so a new anti-UN myth has been born.

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…

A new threat to the United Nations is reported in Swaziland:

A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) worker was terribly shaken and emotionally moved when her boyfriend gifted her with snakes in a beautiful present wrapper.

The hair-raising incident took place at the UNDP offices in Mbabane sometime last week. The lover of the UNDP worker came to present his girlfriend with two snakes and a lizard. The gentleman went to the offices and left the present to her lover. The man is alleged to have quickly delivered the gift and departed soon.

Jubilantly and eagerly, the lady opened the gift bag only to find two dead snakes and a lizard. The lady was too shocked and threw the gift down and screamed. Other UNDP workers quickly responded to find out what was the matter. They were also astonished to find the ‘gift’ snakes.

Senior staff members are said to have intervened. The security took away the snakes. According to sources, a well-dressed decent man arrived at the offices looking for his girlfriend, who work in the company. The innocent-looking man was carryinga beautiful gift wrapper. The security allowed him to enter, our sources revealed.

Yikes. On the plus side, this sounds like an excellent basis for a low-budget sequel to that 2006 Samuel L. Jackson classic “Snakes on a Plane”, featuring the immortal line “Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!” Come on, just say it out loud: “I have had it with these motherfucking snakes in this motherfucking UNDP office!”  Movie gold.

News this morning from Reuters (here) that Ethiopia is buying 200 tanks from the Ukraine for US$100m (£62m).

This reminded me of a similar figure from a few months ago of US$96m (£59m)…

…which is the rise in UK bilateral aid to Ethiopia, 2010/11 (£241m/year) vs 2012/13 (£300m/year) reported in DFID’s bilateral aid review.

A surprise consequence of the UK’s 0.7% GDP aid commitment perhaps or a hazard of tying the UK’s narrative on development policy too much to aid volumes perhaps rather than more genuine development policies and national politics?

Charles Kenny’s Getting Better is one of the books of the moment (here’s a summary and reviews in NYT and the Financial Times and listen to it here).

It’s an upbeat account of progress. Things have got better around the world.

He notes that if one looks at almost any measure of quality of life except income there has been real and rapid progress. For example, infant mortality has halved since 1960 and countries in every region of the world have seen such improvements not only in health but in education, gender equality, civil and political rights too over the same period.

This is good news. I was struck by three things.

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More UK aid to India debate this week (see earlier posts here and here).

India has pledged $5bn in aid to help African countries meet the MDGs and got berated by the FT for being behind the (Chinese) curve.

Hold on… Didn’t UK aid agency, DFID just pledge £1bn ($1.5bn) to India for the same next 3 years in the run up to the 2015 MDG deadline? (because a third of the world’s poor live in India – largely in the poorer states).

So $1.5bn goes in as UK foreign aid to India and $5bn goes out as Indian foreign aid to Africa?

However, maybe that’s not as strange as it sounds. Transactions costs aside, why might India be better at doing aid in Africa?

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Some certainly are. This week there’s been a big UN meeting about the world’s poorest countries – the 4th UN conference on the Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

Surprisingly, one Least Developed Country (LDC) is now a high-income country (Equatorial Guinea) and 13 more are now middle-income countries (MICs). However, most of these new MICs are islands with very low populations and poverty remains very high in the LDCs.

The, currently 48 Least Developed Countries has been the group of UN recognized poorest countries (defined as low income; low human assets; economically vulnerable) for forty years and received preferential treatment in trade; development finance and technical assistance and a well-regarded annual report from UNCTAD.

Recent sophisticated estimates of poverty in the LDCs suggests poverty levels (US$1.25 poverty line) have doubled since 1980 from 184m people to about 360m people.

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