Alex and I argued for this policy in our Chatham House paper. DFID, we wrote, should be turned into the world leader in tackling the problems of fragile states.

But there was a quid pro quo.  Fragile states need lots and lots of high-level expertise – not oodles of dosh. But DFID is probably going to be forced to make job cuts as a result of the spending review. So it’s going to have more money, tougher challenges to deal with, but fewer people. Something has to give.

The solution, we argued, was for the government to “make it clear that where a poor country’s main need is financial, the UK will not necessarily maintain a country office – but will instead reduce transaction costs by partnering with other effective donors, or simply channeling funds through multilateral institutions such as the World Bank.”

So far, the coalition has seemed fairly cool on the multilateral system – but if it wants to do a good job in fragile states, this has to change. Clearly, the FCO and MOD are hoping they will directly spend a big chunk of the UK’s development money, but DFID still needs to think hard about how best to deploy is scarcest resource – the expertise of its dwindling staff…

GLOBAL CHALLENGES FOR DEVELOPMENT

PRESENTATION TO UK INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT SELECT COMMITTEE, 12 October 2010

 1.       The bottom billion

Paul Collier argued that the world’s billion poorest people are concentrated in 60 countries which are stuck in poverty traps, like conflict, the resource curse, being landlocked with bad neighbours and so on. That tallied with research from the early 90s that found 93% of the world’s poor people in low income countries.

But more recently, Andy Sumner of the Institute of Development Studies has published research arguing that three quarters of the world’s 1.3 billion poor people – those on less than $1.25 a day – live in middle income countries. Only about a quarter of the poor, about 370m people, live in the 39 low income countries that remain, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa.

2.       The next billion

The world is entering the final phase of a period of explosive population growth that peaked in the mid-60s. Between now and 2025, a billion more people will arrive, taking the global total to 8 billion. They will be Asian or African. 68% of them will live in emerging or developing countries, 28% in least developed countries. And just about all of them will live in cities.

And as the world heads towards peak population, many poorer countries will come to a turning point. Half the population of the very poorest countries will be under 20, and half the people in developing and emerging economies will be under 30.

These are favourable demographic conditions, with lots of young adults entering the workforce and having to support fewer children. These countries could collect a big demographic dividend, with their incomes tripling in the next 2 decades. But they could also slide into demographic disaster – if poorly skilled young people face lives of unemployment and frustrated aspirations.

3.       The financial crisis

Lots of people supposed that the financial crisis and ensuing downturn hit poor countries hardest – not unreasonably, given that poor people and fragile states tend to have least capacity to adapt to most kinds of shocks.

But in fact, data in the IMF’s new World Economic Outlook last week tell a different story. Researchers at the Brookings Institution compared what the 2008 Outlook had to say about individual countries’ growth prospects in 2013, with what this year’s report projected for 2013 – in other words, how much their prospects have been hurt by the financial crisis.

Russia and Eastern Europe were the biggest losers, with lots of countries seeing their 2013 incomes 15 to 20% lower than they would have been. Brazil, China and India all emerge pretty much unscathed. But here’s the surprise: among the 71 countries that managed to post an increase in per capita incomes in 2009, we find three quarters of the world’s low income countries – who, contrary to fears, actually fared reasonably well during the crisis.

4.       The next oil price spike

If the financial crisis proved less painful than we thought for some poor countries, that’s certainly not true of the oil price spike that peaked in 2008. An International Energy Agency study in late 2007 found that 13 non-oil producing African countries, including South Africa, Ghana, Ethiopia and  Senegal, had over the previous 3 years paid out more for oil imports than they’d received in aid and debt relief.

While oil prices have eased since their July 08 peak of $147, the stage is set for another oil crunch as the global economy recovers – potentially as soon as 2013. Investment in new oil production was already too low before the financial crisis, and then fell by another 19% during the credit crunch. Not long after that, we can expect the global peak of oil production to loom into view. This will all have huge implications for trade, for globalisation and for development.

5.       Feeding the nine billion

The oil price spike was intimately connected with the food price spike. Though there were plenty of other causes of the food spike – low stock levels, bad weather, panic measures by governments and so on – high oil prices had a huge effect by making fertilisers, on-farm energy use and transportation more expensive at the same time as making biofuels much more attractive.

In the background are other aspects of the new ‘age of scarcity’. The amount of arable land per person has fallen from 0.39 hectares per capita in 1960 to 0.21 hectares today – even as productivity growth has fallen from 2% a year at the height of the Green Revolution to 1% today. Groundwater depletion is already a massive problem. On top of all this, we have climate change to take into account.

And over the longer term, demand for food is projected to rise by 50% by 2030 – which will need massive investment, not only to make agriculture more productive, but also more sustainable (it accounts for 70% of water use, and up to 30% of greenhouse gas emissions), more resilient (above all to deal with climate change) and more equitable (given that three quarters of the world’s poor live in rural areas).

6.       Climate change

Global average temperatures are 0.6° Celsius higher than they were before the industrial revolution, and we’re already committed to another 0.7° C on top of that, whatever we do to reduce emissions. And the weak outcome of last year’s Copenhagen summit leaves the world on course for at least 3° C of warming.

The challenge of adapting to this level of climate change is absolutely not a stand-alone area of activity. On the contrary, it will intensify the challenges on all areas of development – from agriculture to cities, and from health to the risk of violent conflict. At the same time, the price tag for achieving the MDGs will be substantially higher than it would have been without climate change – as a result of which adaptation finance needs to be additional.

But don’t lose track of the potential for climate finance to be a major new source of development finance, too. Global aid was worth $120 billion in 2008; emissions trading was worth $64 billion in the same year, even though it’s in its infancy. Yet developing countries are missing out on this valuable new market – because they have no emission targets, and hence own no tradable permits. If developing countries did have targets, on the other hand, and they were set on an equitable basis (such as equal per capita entitlements), then over time we could expect it to become a far bigger force for poverty reduction than aid.

7.       The trade agenda

Until recently, most arguments in trade were about subsidies or about market access – the kind of disputes you expect in a buyer’s market, and which the WTO was set up to mediate.

But with the food price spike, we saw the opposite: disputes over security of supply, of the sort you get in a seller’s market. Over 30 countries had food export restrictions in place, leading to panic among import-dependent countries and very great danger for the world’s poorest consumers – at which point we realised, as someone in Ban Ki-moon’s office put it to me, that we didn’t have a system for managing this.

This is just one way in which the trade agenda is moving incredibly fast – even as the Doha round remains stuck as a ‘multilateral zombie’. Another is the way in which protectionism has become about currency valuations, not tariffs or quotas. A third is the risk of unilateral ‘carbon tariffs’ of the sort that France wants to apply to exports from poor countries.  And note that in all three cases, the WTO is in the same place: left on the sidelines.

8.       Changing face of conflict

Over the last decade, the kinds of conflicts we’ve had most experience of have been civil wars, in places like Sudan, the DRC, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and so on. This has led to more UN peacekeepers being deployed than ever before – at the last count, 80,000 soldiers, 12,000 police and thousands of civilian staff. The system is showing worrying signs of overstretch, including MONUC’s inability to prevent mass rapes like the ones happening in the eastern DRC.

But the face of conflict is also changing – with 2 trends especially worth highlighting. One is the growth of subnational, relatively low-intensity forms of violence in rural areas – like the Naxalite insurgency in India. We can expect to see more of this kind  of violence in future, as disputes over land and water (and the livelihoods that they enable) become more common.

At the same time, I think we’ll also come to hear more about failed cities as well as failed states. Mexico remains a prosperous country – a member of the G20 and of the OECD – but in cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez, 27,000 people have been killed in armed conflict since 2006.

9.       The global governance deficit

As the interconnectedness of the global economy has grown, so more of the risks faced by poor people and poor countries come from outside rather than inside their borders. While international donors can do a certain amount to help the poor to become more resilient, this is no substitute for preventive action on these trans-boundary risks.

But we should be worried about the capacity of multilateral action to do this. I mentioned that the WTO looks increasingly unable to manage risks to open trade. Last year’s Copenhagen summit saw a painfully weak outcome on climate change. The G20 hasn’t managed to defuse growing currency wars.

In the background in all of these cases, we see similar underlying issues. A lack of leadership, coupled with limited political space for really far-reaching action. In many cases, genuine uncertainty about what solutions look like or where we’re trying to get to. An unwillingness to talk turkey about the changing global balance of power.

This matters for development. And with G20 members facing acute political pressures to concentrate on issues and interests that are close to home, it will take real pressure from bodies like the IDC to stay focused on poor people.

10.   So what does this mean for how the UK does development? 

Four concluding thoughts on what all of these global trends mean for DFD and how the UK does development:

• We need to focus on poor people, not poor countries
• DFID needs more staff more than it needs more cash
• We need to focus far more on building resilience and reducing vulnerability
• We have to focus at least as much on what happens internationally, as what happens in poor countries

In 1990, we estimated that 93 per cent of the world’s poor people lived in low income countries (LICs). In contrast, in 2007-08 we estimate that three quarters of the world’s approximately 1.3 bn poor people now live in middle income countries (MICs) and only about a quarter of the world’s poor – about 370m people – live in the remaining 39 low income countries, which are largely in sub-Saharan Africa.

Andy’s findings are a very big deal, because they directly affect the question of where the UK should concentrate its development resources – and strongly call into question a core pillar of DFID’s current approach.

When I arrived at DFID as a novice Special Adviser in 2003, the department was hugely enthusiastic about a target of spending 90% of the UK’s aid in low income countries (the so-called ’90-10 target’).

This was in turn based on research by two economists, David Dollar and Paul Collier, which argued that to get most bang for your buck with your aid, you should concentrate it on good-performing (as opposed to fragile) low income countries (see this 1999 World Bank paper of theirs for more). This argument got a warm reception among senior DFID officials and the main development NGOs - in particular because so many of them adhered to a development paradigm that emphasised spending money as the key means of delivering poverty reduction.

One corollary of the Dollar-Collier argument was that fragile or conflict-affected low income countries were seen as offering less good rates of return on aid. While DFID more or less bought that argument in 2003, it largely reversed its position after that as it internalised what conflict does to prospects for poverty reduction and development, particularly from DFID’s 3rd White Paper in 2006 onwards. (And, as Richard noted in a recent post, new International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell looks set to continue that process.)

But the other corollary of the Dollar-Collier thesis was that middle income countries were also seen as less effective places to target UK aid – an issue that came to a head in 2003, when DFID came under huge pressure from Number 10 to increase massively its spending in Iraq, a middle income country.

Hilary Benn had been in post as Secretary of State for literally a few hours when he faced the decision of which programmes would have to be cut – and, by extension, whether DFID would maintain the 90-10 target. The NGOs we consulted were categorical: if DFID dropped the target, they would regard it as an act of war.

So with Number 10 demanding cash for Iraq on one hand and NGOs demanding the 90-10 target on the other, there was only one way to satisfy both: a veritable bonfire of middle income country programmes other than Iraq. Many programmes had their budgets slashed to the bone; many more had their offices closed altogether (see this Guardian coverage from the time).

Of course, all this was seven years ago, back in those strange days immediately after the invasion of Iraq. But bear in mind that 2003 proved to be the starting gun on a process that has continued since then, and which will soon reach its logical conclusion – when DFID closes its China programme. Andy’s research poses the question: is this actually what we should be doing?

Of course, the obvious counter-argument is that that it’s ridiculous for the UK to be sending aid to, say, China when China has its own aid programme in Africa. And if – like Dollar and Collier in 1999 (or, one might argue, like Bono or Jeff Sachs today) – you think development is primarily about spraying money at poor countries, then that’s entirely logical.

But the point is that there’s more to development that just disbursing aid money.  As I argued in a post last year (see also this one),

If we really want a full-spectrum approach to development, we need to place a bit less emphasis on aid and a lot more on political economy work in countries – the slow, steady process of using influence at the margins to work with progressive drivers of change towards pro-poor political outcomes in country.

That’s what DFID’s middle income country programmes were all about – and why it was such a tragedy to see them closed down. That’s why DFID needs to retain a sizeable staff presence in China, even if its budget there shrinks. And that’s why DFID’s people are as important as the size of its budget – and why it was so disastrous for DFID to lose one in six staff in “efficiency savings” under Labour, and why it will be nothing short of catastrophic if the same again happens under the current government.

Development policy needs to be about poor people, not just poor countries. Once we reframe our objectives in that light, we’ll find ourselves embarking on reconsideration of some fairly fundamental principles about how and where we do development.

 The new government took office with over a hundred such commitments on the books, the submission notes – before recommending keeping just 19 of them (including, thankfully, the £1 billion for food and agriculture and the £1.5 billion for fast start climate finance). Here’s the list of which commitments the submission proposes dropping.

Cue predictable howls of outrage from, well, everyone you’d expect (see this post on Left Foot Forward, and this Observer piece from over the weekend), plus an accusation from Caroline Crampton in the Statesman that “a silent withdrawal from the ringfencing policy seems to be underway”.

Well, hmmm… I’m not so sure. I have questions of my own about where Andrew Mitchell is taking DFID – I really hope the ultra-low profile he’s been keeping on big global policy issues like climate change is a reflection of a tactical decision to lie low until after the Spending Review, rather than a ‘new normal’; I’m seriously worried about what’ll happen to DFID’s headcount if its admin (rather than programme) budget is deemed eligible for the 25-40% cuts other departments are facing, given that DFID’s lost 1 in 6 staff since 2005 as it is; and of course I disagree with some of the items included on the proposed cancellation list (Gareth Thomas is right, for example, that cancelling funding to CERF would be a seriously bad idea, and would undermine the UK’s track record of leadership in pushing for a more coherent and effective UN humanitarian assistance system).

But overall, the howls look a bit overdone to me. For one thing, reviewing how DFID spends its budget is not the same as undoing the ringfencing over the size of that budget (as Caroline Crampton must realise). There’s no sign of the coalition backing away from its commitment on 0.7, and I honestly can’t see them doing it after all the political capital they’ve committed on the issue (for sure, there are questions about what else may be counted as aid, but that’s not what this  submission is about).

More fundamentally, it’s legitimate to question some of these funding commitments. How exactly are we honouring the principle that developing countries get to decide how to spend the aid the UK gives them, if ministers keep announcing one sectoral fund after another? And what about the fact that a good few of the items on the proposed list of cancellations were the result not of careful policymaking, but of Gordon Brown phoning up DFID and demanding an announceable (usually less than 24 hours before a speech)?

Me, I think the jury’s still out on Andrew Mitchell. The themes he’s developed so far – transparency, outputs and outcomes, accountability – are all OK as far as they go, if a bit boring. I don’t see the outlines of his ‘grand strategy’ on development yet, but hopefully we’ll hear more about that in the autumn. In the meantime, reviewing where DFID’s money goes and which of the ancien regime‘s commitments he’ll retain seems not unreasonable to me.

Andrew Mitchell becomes the first Conservative Secretary of State at the UK’s Department for International Development. DFID was formed in 1997, as one of the first acts of the Blair government.

So far, Mitchell sounds quite a bit like DFID’s first head,  Clare Short, promising to focus on poverty eradication:

We must make 2010 the year when we get the Millennium Development Goals back on-track and make real progress towards what we all want to see: a world free from poverty. I look forward to getting to work to help make that happen.

Update: Owen Barder comments:

The Conservatives have made no secret of their desire to ensure that Britain’s world-class development work is more closely integrated with the UK’s other international work led by the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence. The aim is to have a more joined up foreign policy, which may result in DFID being more engaged in post-conflict stabilisation and reconstruction in future.

I’m personally in favour of a more joined up foreign policy, but this integration of development policy with other UK objectives must not be a one-way street: it must also be that other government policies are designed to support the UK’s objectives for development and poverty reduction. The commitment in Andrew Mitchell’s statement to “harness the full range of British government policies” is therefore especially welcome.

As someone who cares passionately about the need for greater transparency of aid, I also welcome Andrew Mitchell’s emphasis on this. This bodes well for continued and strengthened UK support for the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). A group of 18 donors so far, who together give half of global aid, are working through IATI towards a common international standard for publication of detailed and timely information about aid: this offers the possibility of a step change in the accessibility of global aid information, which will help to make more accountable and effective.

Reaction and analysis from the Guardian.

Interesting then to see this 2008 review (huge pdf download) from Nigeria’s National Planning Commission, which sets out to analyse ‘the volume and quality of Official Development Assistance to Nigeria between 1999 and 2007.’

During this time, $6bn of aid has been spent in Nigeria, almost all of it spent by donors themselves, rather than being rooted through the government’s budget. The Planning Commission’s first job, therefore, was to try and work out who had spent what.

So it sent a template to donors asking for information on what they’d spent and where:

Of all the agencies, USAID was the only agency able to provide almost all the requested information with a little delay. EU was also able to meet most of our requirement, only after about three months delay…

CIDA’s [Canada] claimed disbursement did not tally with what they had actually spent…[It] refused to supply more information when asked [to]…

DFID is another donor that could not account for all its activities. When asked to provide information on the sectors and states DFID is operating in, it simply wrote saying ‘we do not require our programme managers to collect expenditure on a state-by-state basis.’…

JICA [Japan]…did not cooperate at all despite our many efforts to get JICA to collaborate with us.

The UN system was also only ‘partially cooperative’. UNICEF did not provide a breakdown of its health spending, for example (nor did DFID or CIDA). “We do not know exactly what [this] money was spent on,” the report notes. The Chinese government was also asked for data – but the review does not tell us what its response was (read into that what you will).

Donors should be much more transparent accountable for their activities, the Planning Commission concludes, while the Nigerian government “needs to offer clearer and more effective leadership to her development partners both in terms of how and where to operate.”

It lauds the example of Kano and Ondo states. They are robust in their response to ‘intruder donors’ who operate outside a framework established by the state government. That allows leaders to set, and be accountable for, their own development priorities.

Update: Of course, Nigeria’s own statistics are often woefully inadequate, whether at national or at state level. Recently, for example, Kano state has just been counting its schools:

An additional 88 senior secondary schools and 174 private  schools had been ‘discovered’, while in some areas schools had disappeared: the Kano municipality had 10 less junior secondary schools than first thought.

Update II: Worth pointing out, too, that the World Bank, DFID, USAID and African Development Bank recently agreed a joint strategy for Nigeria – bringing 80% of Nigeria’s development assistance under a single strategic umbrella. Somewhat oddly though, it cannot easily be found on any of the donors’ websites. There’s a copy here though.

I wonder if the donors will now move towards a single online platform to show what they’re spending, where, and what results it’s achieving… and, also, how effectively their joint approach is proving (the Bank and DFID have had a joint strategy for some years now) at reducing overhead for Nigerian government and non-government partners.

Fully half of new UK bilateral aid will focus on conflict-affected and fragile states; there will be an intensive focus on job creation in five at-risk countries (Yemen, Nepal, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Afghanistan); security is for the first time defined as an essential service, like health or education; there’s lots of additional focus on SSAJ (safety, security and access to justice); and there’s plenty more besides.

Now, sharp-eyed conflict watchers among you will already be wondering: does all this mean that the cuts to UK conflict prevention spending announced by David Miliband in March this year are effectively reversed?

(The problem, readers will recall, was that while peacekeeping missions were mushrooming – MONUC, UNMIS and the AU mission in Somalia in particular – the pound was collapsing against the dollar and the euro, the currencies in which peacekeeping bills are denominated. This was driving a coach and horses through the planned cross-governmental conflict prevention budget of £556 billion – comprised of £109m for the Conflict Prevention Pool, £73m for the Stabilisation Aid Fund and £374m for peacekeeping missions. The peacekeeping bit would now have to rise £456 million. So even after DFID and MOD had lobbed in an extra £71 million, it was clear that tough cuts would have to be made – a point made with anguish in a letter to the FT in March from foreign policy luminaries including Lords Ashdown, Hannay, Howe, Jay, Kerr, Robertson and Wallace. Now read on..)

Well, now that DFID’s Secretary of State Douglas Alexander is promising that the UK will spend £1 billion a year in post-conflict countries, it’s clear that much of the money that was cut in March will effectively be available again – though you’ll have a fight on your hands to get DFID to admit this to be the case, since it’s shy of creating any impression that it’s there to bail out other departments when the full, epic sweep of spending cuts becomes clear after the election.

But we’re nonetheless in a new situation, rather than back to the status quo ante, in at least three important ways.

First, there will be significant changes to the list of countries in which conflict prevention funds will be spent.  Because DFID’s cash must go to poor countries, less of the money will go to Europe, and more to Africa and Asia.  Cutting funding to the never-ending peace support operation in Cyprus might not seem like a big deal - but on the other hand, you might ask whether this is really such a good moment to be reducing spending on preventing conflict in the Balkans.

Second, it’s important not to lose sight of the point that funding isn’t the only thing that’s needed in order to do conflict prevention work: there’s also the small matter of skills and staffing levels. DFID’s seen savage cuts in its headcount over the last few years, as indeed has FCO – the legacy of the “Efficiency Review” that Gordon Brown presided over at the last election.  Working in fragile states and post-conflict contexts, though, is as much about influence as it’s about spending (as International Alert put it pithily, it’s about ’how’, not ’how much’) – which means that DFID and FCO need more people if they’re to avoid closing country offices and embassies (as they’re both now having to do).

Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, there’s a big question mark over what the new financial balance of power will mean for the future of joint work on conflict prevention across the government. The new DFID White Paper certainly says the right things about joint work with the FCO – for instance:

To put this new approach into practice,the UK will increasingly put politics at the heart of its action. We need to understand who holds power in society, so we can forge new alliances for peace and prosperity. This requires close co-operation between FCO and DFID.

Absolutely right. But the elephant in the room question here is: as the FCO’s budget gets stripped to the bone, will it be able to play that role?

This is not meant as a criticism pf DFID, which deserves nothing but praise for saying that conflict prevention is crucial for development and that its funding decisions will reflect that.  Instead, it puts the question at the doors of Number 10 and the Treasury – who after all set departments’ funding envelopes. If DFID is now saying that conflict is crucial for development, and that a joint, cross-HMG approach is crucial for conflict prevention, then it follows that FCO must be funded for the job.  Right now, it isn’t – and things look set to get much, much worse as cuts start to bite.

Gordon Brown’s speech on climate change a week ago was significant because it took a genuinely strategic perspective across different areas of governmental work, and arrived at a truly integrated sense of how to join up the dots between development aid and financing for climate mitigation and adaptation – making the UK one of the first governments in the world to tackle the issue head-on.

Now, he needs to do the same on conflict and fragile states. But it’s unclear whether he and the Treasury are yet committed to leading the change we need. While the credit crunch showed that we’re willing to devote practically limitless funds to firefighting crises that have already begun, we don’t yet seem willing to invest seriously in systems that could prevent crises from erupting in the first place.

If the past few years of food, energy, credit and other crunches teach us anything, it’s that the world is heading into a period of sustained turbulence – a time of ‘shooting the rapids‘, as David and I have termed it – in which the challenge is to find ways of managing globalisation’s “shadow sides”. (As Robert Cooper puts it, “we may not be interested in chaos, but chaos is interested in us”.)

For the UK to contribute fully to this task, it certainly needs a well-resourced aid budget – and all power to Brown and Darling for maintaining the UK’s commitment to 0.7. But it needs more than that. It needs integration of all our foreign policy levers – development, defence and diplomacy – and for each of these areas to be properly resourced. To think that funding only one of them properly (i.e. development, but not defence or diplomacy) is enough is fundamentally to misunderstand the extent to which global challenges – poverty, climate, state failure and the rest – are all interconnected.

Obama gets it. Douglas Alexander showed yesterday that he does too. Do Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling?

As its title would suggest, the report focuses on the impact of the financial crisis on international development efforts. It opens on a grim note with the news that DFID estimates that by the end of next year 90 million more people will be living in extreme poverty as a result of the crisis. Moreover, the WHO believes that up to 400,000 additional children could die as a result. The International Development Committee adds that progress towards the MDGs may have been set back by up to three years.

A major point made in testimony given to the Committee was that initial expectations that the developing world would be insulated from the impact of the crisis have proven false. Whilst the contagion effect of the crisis has only directly harmed western economies, the indirect knock-on effects have applied pressure to transnational business flows worldwide. The World Bank reports that of the 107 counties it categorises as ‘developing’, 40% are ‘highly exposed’ to the downturn.

Unsurprisingly-though quite rightly-the International Development Committee’s response to all this is to insist on the importance of maintaining ongoing aid commitments, as agreed at the G20 summit in July.

Aside from that, the issue of tax havens is highlighted and it would seem that the British government is increasingly committed to making progress in this respect. Gordon Brown in particular has been forthright on this issue, but his government seems somewhat hamstrung at present and we shall have to await developments.

In the wake of the London Summit, institutional reform is back on the agenda. The need to overhaul the IMF and World Bank, particularly in regard to apportionment of votes within those organisations needs to be a priority for the post-crisis politics of global governance. Indeed, reform has been presented as a condition for the boost to IMF funding that the G20 agreed upon earlier this year. Broader questions of operational versatility are also important. In these respects, the Committee’s report is strong on good ideas and analysis, but light on suggestions for how Britain can help bring about the desired changes. For that perhaps we need to wait for the DFID White Paper due later in the summer.

On a seemingly superficial note, the Committee proposes that DFID’s name be changed and puts forward ‘British Aid’ and ‘DFID UK’ as possibilities. The intention, it seems is to increase the ‘visibility’ of UK international development spending. Of course, DFID does a lot more than aid, so I think we can immediately dismiss the first suggestion. As a reserved Brit, the idea of being so brash as to use ‘UK’ on international development work is too reminiscent of the US tendency to splash the Stars and Stripes on aid parcels. It seems… immodest, somehow. But it might be a good idea all the same – US aid is part of its soft power and in the same way, the work of the Department for International Development has the potential to be a significant contributor to British attempts to win ‘hearts and minds’, particularly in countries like Afghanistan. After all, the Committee’s report points out that DFID is the largest donor to the World Bank’s International Development Association. Maybe blowing our national trumpet more boldly isn’t such a bad idea. Though one wonders if there isn’t a snappier name out there somewhere – suggestions welcome, of course.