Here is a tempting invite from the UN Department of Public Information…

The Secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues

is pleased to invite you to

“The Mayan Cosmovision: Is 2012 the end of the world?”

Wednesday, 24 October

1:30 pm

Room S-2726, 27th floor, Secretariat Building, UN Headquarters

After offering their blessings for the new offices of the Secretariat of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the Mayan Elders of the K’iche’ Mayoral of Santo Tomas de Chichicastenango, Guatemala (Maya-Quiche Empire), will share their message with the UN community.

According to the Maya, all aspects of life are governed by the movement of the heavens. Thousands of years ago, Mayan astronomers foresaw in 2012 a unique alignment of the cosmos which occurs only once every 64,000 years. The Maya identified this new cycle as a monumental transition and an opportunity to realign priorities based on the principles of love, gratitude, care and respect for both humanity and our environment.

Please bring your own lunch!

Hillary Clinton, out on the town in Colombia this weekend:

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…

The Economist favors Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to take over at the World Bank.  In takes just four paragraphs (one of them mildly brutal, one of them extremely so) to ram home the argument:

The World Bank is the world’s premier development institution. Its boss needs experience in government, in economics and in finance (it is a bank, after all). He or she should have a broad record in development, too. Ms Okonjo-Iweala has all these attributes, and Colombia’s José Antonio Ocampo has a couple. By contrast Jim Yong Kim, the American public-health professor whom Barack Obama wants to impose on the bank, has at most one.

Ms Okonjo-Iweala is in her second stint as Nigeria’s finance minister. She has not broken Nigeria’s culture of corruption—an Augean task—but she has sobered up its public finances and injected a measure of transparency. She led the Paris Club negotiations to reschedule her country’s debt and earned rave reviews as managing director of the World Bank in 2007-11. Hers is the CV of a formidable public economist.

Mr Ocampo was also finance minister, though his time in office, 1996-98, saw the budget deficit balloon. He ran the mildly statist UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. His is the CV of the international bureaucrat.

Mr Kim, the head of a university in New England, has done a lot of good things in his life, but the closest he has come to running a global body was as head of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation—not a post requiring tough choices between, say, infrastructure, health and education. He pioneered trials of aid programmes before they became fashionable and set up an outfit called Partners in Health which does fine work in Haiti and Peru. But this is a charity, not a development bank. Had Mr Obama not nominated him, he would be on no one’s shortlist to lead the World Bank. (Indeed he is a far worse example of Western arrogance than Christine Lagarde, whom the Europeans shoehorned into the IMF job last year: the French finance minister plainly had the CV for the job.)

Ouch.

Corruption is generally vilified as an unmitigated evil. It disenfranchises the poor, weakens public services, reduces investment, and holds back whole societies. And yet, in some instances, corruption can actually be very useful, lubricating business in a way that promotes growth, creates jobs, helps smooth the introduction of needed reforms, and reduces poverty.

What explains this paradox? (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

Syria is slipping further into chaos.  It’s sad to think that the Security Council has been debating the situation there for almost half a year to no effect.  Or, to be more accurate, the only effect has been to make lots of diplomats very unhappy, as I explain in the new edition of Pragati:

It’s hard to find a happy diplomat at the United Nations Security Council these days. Western officials grumble about the difficulty of negotiating with India, Brazil and South Africa (the IBSA countries) over the Syrian crisis, to say nothing of China and Russia. The non-Western powers, they suspect, are all plotting to frustrate the U.S. and Europe.

Piffle, reply the supposed plotters. The bleak mood in the Council is a result of the West’s distortion of the UN mandate to protect civilians in Libya. If NATO hadn’t used that as a basis for regime change, there might be real cooperation over Syria. Even the unhappiest European officials accept that other powers’ anger over Libya is genuine.

Does anyone gain anything from the stalemate? Russia arguably does. Earlier in the year it failed to halt Western interventions in not only Libya but also Côte d’Ivoire. As Russia’s main claim to leverage at the UN is its willingness to act as a spoiler, these set-backs made it look a shadow of itself. On Syria, its blocking power returned as it resisted – and in October vetoed – EU and US efforts to pass a resolution sanctioning Syria.

For China, the benefits have been less clear, as it prefers to look pragmatic on the Security Council. Nonetheless it felt obliged to side with Russia over Syria. But the real losers have been the IBSA countries, which have often looked trapped between the West and the Russo-Chinese axis as they have tried to respond to events in the Middle East.

But at least IBSA has emerged as a semi-credible diplomatic force in UN affairs, right?  I’m not so sure:

The fact that IBSA voted as a bloc can be interpreted as a success – it is generally recognised that the trio of powers have been significant swing voters in the Security Council this year. But this may only be a temporary phenomenon. Brazil is approaching the end of its two-year term on the Council, and South Africa continues to have a greater stake in acting as the leader of the African bloc than in aligning with India. IBSA’s brief moment of importance in the Council could soon be forgotten, and India’s leverage duly reduced.

Whatever else the Occupy protests (over 900 at the last count), have done, they have propelled the issue of inequality on to the front pages and into the political mainstream.  The idea of the ‘99%’ is brilliantly simple, pulling together every group and every person who has a nagging sense that they are losing out in the global economic race while others pull ahead out of sight.  

The case the protestors are putting basically an ethical one.  A world where the majority of the benefits of growth go to the few while the costs of failure, whether in the form of bank bailouts, of redundancies, or of cuts to public services are borne by the many is not, it seems, one that an increasing number of people want to live in any more. 

 If that fails to convince, there are other more prosaic reasons to care about inequality too. Inequality, at least at high levels, does matter to growth, to poverty, and to stability.  Here are five good reasons, drawing from recent economic research, for politicians to care about – and act on – inequality.

 One, inequality contributed to the financial crisis.  Debate rages about how much.  But it does seem clear that when real wages for the middle and working classes aren’t rising, as they weren’t in America for much of the 1980s and 1990s, and when aspirations are rising rapidly, partly because of the impact of the lifestyles of the super-rich whose incomes are heading North at a rapid rate, and when credit is cheap (thanks to the mega-profits being made in China due partly to low wages and growing inequality there), then an unsustainable credit bubble is only the click of a Wall Street button away. 

Two, (some) inequality is bad for economic growth.  This is one that economists have been arguing about for years.  But it’s clear that some inequalities – in access to education, to credit, to land in agricultural societies – are bad for growth, since they mean that the skills, energy and ideas of a large part of the population are being underused.  As growth becomes more about human capital and less about land and machines, this will only become truer. Inequality can also make growth less sustainable (in an economic sense), and make episodes of growth shorter than in more equal societies. (more…)

It now looks like the Security Council will vote on a (still too weak) resolution demanding the end of the Syrian crackdown today or tomorrow.  Russia is still bad-mouthing the proposal, drafted by the Council’s European members, but other powers are lining up to back it.  Brazil – previously numbered among opponents of a resolution along with China, India and South Africa – looks like it’s on board:

In a joint statement issued the same day European nations were to seek a vote on a UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria’s crackdown on protests, EU leaders and visiting Brazilian President Dilma Roussef said the two sides “expressed grave concern” at the current situation in Syria.

“They agreed on the need to continue urging the Syrian authorities to put an end to the violence and to initiate a peaceful transition to democracy.”

The well-informed David Bosco predicts that India and South Africa will also vote for the resolution, although the Indians were fighting a rearguard action against it last week.  He thinks that China and, in the end, Russia will abstain.  Meanwhile, Turkey is giving the resolution full support from outside the Council:

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan voiced support for the proposed UN resolution and said he would soon announce sanctions on the neighbouring country.

“The draft resolution before the council today is in the nature of sending a warning. We hope there will a positive outcome of this vote and that there will then be further discussions about whatever further steps need to be taken,” Erdogan told a news conference during a visit to South Africa.

The political picture could change again before the vote, and it can’t be repeated too often that the EU’s resolution has been watered down a lot , with a threat of sanctions reduced to near-invisibility.  But I think that this episode underlines the point Franziska Brantner and I made in our recent update on human rights and the UN for ECFR: many non-Western powers, especially rising powers like Brazil, want to distance themselves from Russia’s obstructionism in UN debates.  Even China is ready to step away from the Russians, as it did over Côte d’Ivoire.   As we noted in our paper, and I repeated here last week, this opens up the EU’s options for coalition-building in New York.  It looks like the EU is finally finding ways to use those options…

There’s a new paper out from the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, on the ever declining number of poor countries.

Moss and Leo estimate that more than half of the 68 countries currently eligible for concessional World Bank lending (under the IDA -the International Development Association) will ‘graduate’ by 2025.

Most (80%) of the remaining countries eligible for concessional World Bank lending will be sub-Saharan African countries (25 of 31). The only non-African countries will be Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Haiti, and Timor-Leste. Countries currently defined as fragile will account for sixty percent (18 of 31 countries) of the countries.

In a recent post one of the authors, Todd Moss suggests that aid agencies as currently orientated are not ready for the world of non-aid tools and global public goods that flow from the decline in poor countries, new donors and weak public support for large increases in aid budgets (UK aside maybe).

I couldn’t agree more – and as they note the implications for the aid system are enormous.

(more…)

The UN this week announced a June MDG review meeting in Tokyo. This is the conference that Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan at the MDGs Summit proposed that Japan convene in 2011 (see page 4, paragraph 1 of his speech).

One thing it may or may not discuss (depending on who you speak to) is what might replace the MDGs in 2015 which is likely to be one of the big global development policy debate of the next few years.

At the MDG summit last September the outcome document requested the President of the UN general assembly to organise a ‘special event’ in 2013 ‘to follow up on efforts made’. However, it is not yet clear exactly what this will mean. The outcome document also mandated the UN Secretary General to initiate a consultation process of what would come after 2015, and to recommend in his annual reports ‘further steps to advance the United Nations development agenda beyond 2015’.

It is possible though that there will be neither an agreement on any post-2015 framework nor an extension of the current MDGs.

Not surprisingly, the subject of what a new global framework might look like in detail is really starting to bubble up in debates.

The NGOs via GCAP are already discussing MDGs 2.0 and there was a workshop at the World Social Forum recently and blog convened by the UK NGOs. UNDP’s Helen Clark has it on her radar in a recent interview as does UNDP assistant SG, Olav Kjorven at UNDP in comments on a Guardian blog.

There’s also a global group convened by the International Red Cross and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a recent Lancet Commission report and one by International Alert and papers by MDG architects such as the former chair of the OECD DAC, Richard Manning and former UN official, Jan Vandemoortele (and a set of papers from a Brussels Forum on the ‘MDGs and Beyond’) as well as work at the Center for Global Development (for example, here in Global Policy, and here), a symposium at Harvard and – launching soon – CAFOD’s work on Voices of the South on the MDGs and post-MDGs.

(more…)

Step forward today’s candidate for least likely development hero of the week. It’s the cable car.  Traffic in some of the  big cities of the developing world is unimaginably awful, with two or three hour commutes to work absolutely normal.  And the poorest, living in new, informal settlements on the edges of cities often have the longest journeys.  But building mass transport systems like metros or trams is expensive, and takes years.  Luckily a quicker solution is at hand.  Last week it was reported that Brazil’s government are planning to build cable cars to connect the sprawling favelas to the centre of Rio. They are following in the footsteps of Colombia, where the cable car in the city of Medellin is estimated to have cut commuting times for those living in far flung urban settlements from over two hours to as little as 40 minutes. Cable cars are, apparently, easier to build than other mass-transport systems. They can float over inhospitable, steep, rocky or muddy terrain.   And cutting commuting times from hours to minutes changes lives. 

Cable cars – for life, not just for skiing?

That’s the gist of a new paper in Science, reported in the Guardian yesterday:

Billions of trees died in the record drought that struck the Amazon in 2010, raising fears that the vast forest is on the verge of a tipping point, where it will stop absorbing greenhouse gas emissions and instead increase them.

The dense forests of the Amazon soak up more than one-quarter of the world’s atmospheric carbon, making it a critically important buffer against global warming. But if the Amazon switches from a carbon sink to a carbon source that prompts further droughts and mass tree deaths, such a feedback loop could cause runaway climate change, with disastrous consequences.

“Put starkly, current emissions pathways risk playing Russian roulette with the world’s largest forest,” said tropical forest expert Simon Lewis, at the University of Leeds, and who led the research published today in the journal Science. Lewis was careful to note that significant scientific uncertainties remain and that the 2010 and 2005 drought – thought then to be of once-a-century severity – might yet be explained by natural climate variation.

“We can’t just wait and see because there is no going back,” he said. “We won’t know we have passed the point where the Amazon turns from a sink to a source until afterwards, when it will be too late.”

If we are in positive feedback territory on climate change, then all bets really are off.

Google “Fidel Castro”, and you can find an amazing trove of pictures of him with some of the most famous world leaders of the last half-century like Pope John Paul II, Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev – not to mention the very dapper Saddam Hussein above.  But, as I note in a review piece for The National, there’s one leader Castro has never got to do a photo-op with, although I bet he really wanted to…

Of all the nuggets of diplomatic gossip made public by WikiLeaks last year, one of the oddest concerned Fidel Castro’s “doomed love” for Barack Obama. In 2009, US officials in Havana reported that Cuba’s former leader – now in his mid-eighties and forced into retirement by ill-health – appeared obsessed with the new president’s potential to transform American politics and foreign policy. As the year wore on, obsession gave way to dyspeptic gloom, as Castro concluded that Obama was not a true radical after all.

How did the US diplomats know all this? Did they have back-channel communications with Castro or a mole on the inside? The answer is more prosaic. Their analysis was based on Castro’s regular opinion pieces for the official newspaper Granma, which are available online in English. Now Ocean Press has published a selection of these pieces, dating from May 2008 to June 2010, in a slim but prodigiously boring volume.

How boring exactly?

In a reflection published on the eve of the US elections in November 2008, for example, Castro felt it necessary to inform readers that “the Democratic candidate Obama is partly black” and that “the dark skin and features of that race are obvious in him”. Now, my memories of the 2008 campaign are growing a little hazy, but I am reasonably sure that perceptive commentators and even sections of the general public had spotted this earlier than November.

Similarly, Castro welcomes the choice of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state by noting that she was “Barack Obama’s rival and the wife of President Clinton”. Who knew?

Read the rest of the piece, including insights into Castro’s fear of robots, here.

UPDATE: this news just in from Havana proves that Castro’s Obama crush is so over…

HAVANA TIMES, Jan. 28 — Former Cuban President Fidel Castro questioned the State of the Union speech by U.S. President Barack Obama last Jan. 25. In one of his usual Reflections, Castro strongly criticized what the U.S. president said regarding the U.S. economy, renewable energy and international cooperation, among other issues. “It is difficult that God can bless so many lies,” the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution said.

Yes, according to the annual survey of US ‘independent watchdog’ Freedom House and carried by Foreign Policy and Voice of America.

Every year the Washington-based organisation, whose findings feed into World Bank governance indicators assesses political rights and civil liberties around the world, and grades countries in accordance with their levels of political freedom.

Freedom House (FH) is not without considerable controversy – visible recently in the Washington Post’s blog.

The data is produced by a set of ‘experts’ (50 analysts and 18 ‘senior-level academic advisors’). However, Freedom House scores are largely used due to a lack of alternatives. The organisation’s ‘Freedom in the World’ surveys like this years have been criticised for using arbitrary classifications, and critics argue their approach is too narrow. For example there is no way to consider the interdependence of human rights (for example, that you need certain education levels for genuine participation in politics). Moreover, is it even possible to reach an objective, comparable measure of something as complex as ‘political freedom’? and produce the ‘map of freedom’.

(more…)