There was mild amusement yesterday when newly-minted President Hollande had to delay his arrival in Germany after lightning struck his government jet.  The jet in question (seen back on the tarmac above) looks quite modest from the outside.  Let’s hope that there was at least some Sarkozy-era bling on the inside.  After all, other world leaders have some pretty luxurious plane interiors.  Check out a fun series of photos here.  Dilma Rousseff of Brazil can enjoy an in-flight shower:

But the Brazilian shower looks positively suburban compared to the one on the Russian presidential jet, which Vladimir Putin is presumably glad to have back:

That said, the real surprise is that some countries are still able to maintain presidential jets at all. Cash-strapped Greece has one.  Italy has one for the president and a couple of extra for officials.  Spain has a whole air group devoted to bearing the King and senior politicians about… check out a helpful list here.  Sadly, the quality of the bathrooms involved in call cases is not clear, but in an age of austerity shouldn’t some of these planes be grounded?

Quote 1:

We do not make demands from governments … or parliament members, which some of us see as illegitimate, unaccountable or corrupt.

Quote 2:

We demand … free and universal access to health, education from primary school through higher education and housing for all human beings. We reject outright the privatisation of public services management.

From Occupy’s “manifesto”.

To:           Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, David Cameron

From:      Alex Evans and David Steven

Date:       10 May 2012

Congratulations on your appointment as co-chairs of the UN’s new High Level Panel of Eminent Persons to advise on the design of a framework to replace the Millennium Development Goals after 2015. The Panel has a major opportunity to build a vision for global development over the next generation, at a time when most governments are primarily focused on much shorter term fire-fighting and crisis management.

Your task, however, will not be easy. The Panel will start work after the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio +20) – an event that is likely to be a disappointment at best, and could yet prove an abject failure.

You will have to demonstrate that the Panel can avoid the many mistakes made in the run up to Rio. On the one hand, this means working patiently to rebuild consensus, at a point when the development agenda is showing signs of becoming dangerously polarised. On the other hand, you will also need to inject a sense of urgency into the process, if a new framework is to be in place in time for 2015.

In this memo, we set out eight steps that will help ensure the Panel asks the right questions in the right order, in a way that encourages your fellow leaders to move towards a clear and coherent strategy over the next couple of years.

1. Beware the curse of the sequel. Most targets are quickly forgotten, but the MDGs have become a ‘universal language’ for international development. They will not be improved without creative thinking, a hard-headed approach, careful political management – and recognition of how much the world has changed since they were agreed. Many have badly underestimated how much work needs to be done. Your first job will be to jolt them out of this complacency.
2. Focus on the poor first and foremost. Rio +20 will put Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on the international agenda – but the obstacles to such ambitious goals are substantial. Developing countries are right to worry that the poor would be the first casualties of a bitter, and possibly fruitless, fight to agree SDGs. You will need to reassure them by making it clear that you will make recommendations on poverty first – in an interim report – before moving on to consider broader goals.
3. We have halved poverty. Now let’s end it. Poverty rates are falling at unprecedented rates – a success that you should celebrate – with fewer than 900 million people likely to be living on less than $1.25 a day in 2015, comfortably exceeding the MDGs’ headline target. This provides the world with an historic opportunity to set goals for ‘getting to zero’ on absolute poverty – achievement of which would be a truly epochal shift.
4. ‘Getting to zero’ will radically change the development mission. Every success in the fight to end poverty makes the remaining task a little harder: the ‘last poor’ will be the hardest to reach. The Panel must challenge development organisations to explain how they will react as the ‘geography of poverty’ shifts to fragile states, or unstable regions of otherwise prosperous countries, where results will not come easily. It should also provide a platform to the g7+, a group which represents some of the world’s most fragile countries, to tell the international community what help they need to build societies able to deliver better lives to their citizens.
5. But emphasise the opportunities too. Many African countries are beginning to surf a demographic wave, as growing numbers of young people enter the workforce and dependency ratios fall. During the global economic crisis, many of them maintained high growth even as the rest of the world slowed down. Their future looks hopeful – as long as they are connected to global markets, and as long as national institutions are strong enough to generate jobs, and support inclusive and sustainable growth.
6. Rather than a grand design, aim for a loose family of SDGs. The Sustainable Energy for All initiative has shown the potential for sustainability goals to be developed by a disparate alliance of actors who have the will and the capacity to implement them. Instead of attempting to build a rigid SDG framework, you should explore the potential for building on this foundation, with different partnerships all bringing their own approach to achieving significant improvements in one or more aspects of sustainability.
7. Provide space for innovation. The world is changing rapidly, but the international system moves at glacial pace. Provocative questions are needed to open up space for new thinking and approaches. What will a post-2015 framework do for the half of the world’s people who will be under 30 in 2015, for instance? What can be done to help the world’s towns and cities provide decent lives for a billion additional residents between 2015 and 2030? How will poverty reduction evolve in a world where we have the name, address and mobile phone number of growing numbers of poor families? And what types of partnership can deliver impact in a world where governments often hold only few of the cards?
8. Get people arguing about concrete options as soon as possible. The international system is capable of debating vague generalities for the next two years, without ever bringing to the surface important areas of disagreement. Even if, as a Panel, you don’t find the definitive answer for what a post-2015 framework should look like, you will have made a huge contribution if you move quickly to define the choices the world faces, set out the benefits, costs, and risks of each option, and catalyse a genuine global debate.

The goal of ending absolute poverty is within reach for the first time. With skill and luck, you can prise open the space to begin building a new consensus on development that lasts for the long term. You will be at the forefront of helping the world seize these opportunities. We cannot imagine a more significant political legacy. We wish you luck in your endeavour.

First, it has devised a system of decentralization that has sharply reduced ethnic conflict. And second it has a major metropolis that increasingly is acting like one of a handful of city development states–large urban areas in developing countries that are driving progress forward in a way typically associated with well-managed central governments.

In Nigeria’s case, the central government has worked so badly for so long and is so poisoned by its access to and dependence on oil money that state and city led development may be the only way to achieve progress.

The country’s history and continued sad performance make the achievements of Lagos, one of the world’s largest and fastest growing cities, all the more remarkable. Although more associated with the miseries of overpopulation, poverty, and deplorable living conditions than with good governance, the city has over the past decade achieved remarkable improvement in a number of key areas.

Governors Bola Tinubu (1999-2007) and Babatunde Fashola (2007-) have transformed how the state government is run. Fashola in particular has come in for much praise. Since coming to power, he has reduced traffic jams, set up new bus routes, cleaned up streets, increased security, and raised taxes to invest in new expressways, commuter rail lines, and affordable housing. His administration is one of the few in the country which has a detailed and structured budget (made fully available to the public online). He was reelected in 2011 with 81 percent of the vote and is widely considered one of the few “performing” governors in the whole country.

The education reforms are especially noteworthy. The city government has enhanced the inclusiveness of the school system by reducing the financial burden faced by parents, extending services into rural areas, providing free textbooks, and arranging for transportation and meals for children with special needs. It invested heavily in infrastructure and equipment (especially laboratories) and built up capacity by improving technical and vocational schools, promoting sporting and science competitions, and requiring membership in a state-sponsored scout organization aimed at building leadership skills and providing children with teamwork experience.  These initiatives were all complemented by an emphasis on teacher training and awards to incentivize good teaching.

There are a number of structural factors that have contributed to this success.

First, the state earns most of its revenue (73 per cent of the total) from local sources, giving it an incentive to perform well. Unlike other government bodies, it does not depend on the central authorities for hand-outs. It does not have natural resources either. Instead, many departments–including lands, environmental protection, works and infrastructure, transportation, and even the judiciary–earn sufficient revenues to cover at least their personnel costs. The lands department even produces a profit. Each government department that offers services charges some fees to cover all or part of the cost of the service. This is a great example of how the dependence for taxation on local residents can spur governance improvements. (Fashola describes how he reformed taxes here.)

Second, Nigeria’s federal structure gives local leaders substantial powers, something relatively rare in the developing world, where central governments usually monopolize authority and resources. Fashola has had the freedom to work on improving education, infrastructure, transport, and so on whereas many of his counterparts in other countries don’t.

Third, multiple elections since the late 1990s have created a dynamic where candidates can compete on policy and not identity. Lagos is, like many developing world cities (especially business and political centers), more of a melting pot of various ethnic and religious groups than other parts of the country. Urbanization has reduced traditional allegiances while providing the opportunity for new ways of thinking to form. Being the commercial capital of the country, residents are less likely to tolerant leaders who cannot deliver the goods.

Lagos’ success exemplifies a broader trend. There are a number of cities across the developing world that are playing significant roles promoting development—sometimes even outclassing their central governments (as in Nigeria).

In Medellin, Colombia, Mayor Sergio Fajardo broke up clientelistic political networks, raised tax receipts, improved public services, introduced transparency fairs, established civic pacts and restored citizens’ sense of hope during his term in office in the mid 2000s, transforming the city administration. The poor have especially benefited from new transport links, publicly funded business support centers, and a locally managed program of cash grants. (See a case study describe his work here.)

Curitaba, in southern Brazil, has been a world leader in urban planning, public transport, and environmental protection. It received the Globe Sustainable City Award in 2010 and has consistently been rated the country’s best “Brazilian Big City” in which to live.

Some of China’s success can be attributed to strong provincial and urban governance. The country gives lower levels of government much more power and money than other developing countries, enabling local leaders to experiment, compete, and lead change from below. Shanghai and others have taken advantage.

These places suggest that urban areas may be better placed than central governments to promote development in many countries. Closer to populations, more likely to have local tax revenue, more easily held accountable, and less hampered by the difficulties in projecting authority across distance, large cities could be the basis for a new urban based development model. If a substantial portion of a state’s resources and responsibilities were funneled to major cities (who would assume control for their surrounding hinterlands), greatly empowered mayors—or district governors—could be tasked with a much larger range of activities than is the case today. Restructuring the state around where people lived would reduce some of the social conflicts and dysfunction produced by national politics, and create leaders who are more likely to focus on the pragmatic concerns of their constituents.

Armed with their billions, these NGOs have waded into the world, turning potential revolutionaries into salaried activists, funding artists, intellectuals and filmmakers, gently luring them away from radical confrontation, ushering them in the direction of multi-culturalism, gender, community development-the discourse couched in the language of identity politics and human rights…

Arundhati Roy, via Casper TK. Read the whole thing.

We’ve known for a while that David Cameron will be one of the co-chairs of the UN Secretary-General’s panel on what comes after the MDGs, when they expire in 2015.  Today the SG announced the other two co-chairs: President Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, and President Yudhoyono of Indonesia.  So that’s one each from a high, middle and low-income country, one woman – you can see the work that went into putting that together, and it’s a good job.  The UN secretariat will now start hitting the phones to assemble the rest of the panel, and they will be announced after the Rio+20 conference in June.

And in case you were wondering, the three are ‘delighted’ to have been asked, and are hoping for an ‘ambitious’ agenda….the full text of their statement is here.

It is useful to think of sustainability in the metaphor of an athletic game: It is possible to “lose”–that is, to become unsustainable, as happened to the Western Roman Empire. But the converse does not hold. Because we continually confront challenges, there is no point at which a society has “won”–become sustainable in perpetuity, or at least for a very long time. Success, rather, consists of staying in the game.

- Jospeh Tainter, author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, in a 2009 talk you can read here.

Where the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit had seen the EU and its partners badly outflanked by a low ambition consensus of the US and the BASIC countries (leading to a voluntary pledge-and-review approach rather than the binding targets-and-timetables approach that the EU wanted), it appeared at the 2011 Durban summit that a new dynamic might be emerging – based on a partnership between the EU and low income countries who were not only increasingly focusing on global mitigation scenarios, but also increasingly prepared to break ranks with the G77 and speak out about the need for emerging economies to do more to reduce their own emissions.

The surprising spectacle of the EU managing to gets its act together will have made many US and emerging economy policymakers sit up and take notice. But all of them will also have been wondering whether the EU and its partners would manage to build on this initial success and turn it in to an inflection point on the global climate agenda, with the new alliance not only maintaining political momentum, but also converting it into design principles for future climate policy.

Alas, the signs now emerging are not good if this Reuters piece today is to be believed:

The European Union recommitted to providing 7.2 billion euros ($9.4 billion) for the Green Climate Fund over 2010-12, according to draft conclusions seen by Reuters ahead of a meeting of EU finance ministers next week. But after that, how much cash will flow is unclear as the text, drafted against the backdrop of acute economic crisis in the euro zone, states the need to “scale up climate finance from 2013 to 2020″, but does not specify how.

The article goes on to detail that EU ministers are arguing over how much of the money should come from public and how much from private sources – needless to say, many ministers would find it a lot easier to exhort the private sector to do more than to do pony up the cash themselves.

Although the article doesn’t name names on which countries are causing the problems, it’s a fair bet that Poland figures prominently among them, especially given that Poland vetoed plans for the EU to adopt a 30% (rather than merely 20%) emissions reduction target by 2020. In the background, there’s the further problem that Italy and Spain – two countries who in the past tended to side with calls for more ambitious action – are likely to fall away as their economies implode.

Although the Green Climate Fund is far from being the biggest issue on the climate negotiating table, it matters a lot to many low income countries. If the EU looks like it can’t be trusted to stick with them on the issues they really mind about most, then it’s hard to see an EU-low income country alliance setting the pace on the larger global climate agenda over the next couple of years – and we can look forward to lots of crowing from emerging economies made gleeful by the opportunity to argue that this is what happens when G77 solidarity is allowed to fracture.