by Seth Kaplan | Jul 9, 2012 | Africa, Economics and development, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia
A key challenge faced by those engaged in international human rights policy and practice is adopting an effective framework for protecting and promoting human rights around the world in a way that preserves and articulates their universal nature, while at the same time respecting local values and practices.
One way to approach this challenge is to examine values, norms, customs and practices in non-Western cultures which can act as ‘receptors’ for human rights principles and practice. A new Dutch collaborative research project adopts just such an approach (and is thus called the ‘Receptor Approach’). It brings together experts from around the world and from a variety of disciplines – law, anthropology, sociology, political science, international relations and philosophy among others. (more…)
by Alex Glennie | Jun 25, 2012 | Economics and development
The comprehensive Data report released today by the One campaign reveals that the flow of aid from Europe to developing countries fell by €700 million in 2011, the first such drop in almost a decade. The crisis in the Eurozone and the squeeze created by austerity measures are taking the blame for this, with Greece and Spain having – understandably – made the largest cuts in their development budgets.
So far, much of the commentary has concentrated on what this means for the EU in terms of its pledge to contribute 0.7% of national income towards achievement of the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. Although the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands are on track to meet this target, many other European countries will have to stump up billions more in order to do so. This is a tall order at a time when cuts in public spending are being made across the board.
However, new research from IPPR and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), also published today, suggests that this debate is missing the point somewhat. Instead of focusing on ‘getting to 0.7%’, more attention needs to be paid to addressing declining levels of popular support for aid.
In February and March of this year, IPPR and ODI held a series of deliberative workshops around the UK: in London, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Evesham. These sessions gave us a chance to have in-depth conversations with diverse groups of UK voters, both to hear their views on various aspects of the aid and development debate and to better understand the values and attitudes that underpin them. The messages we took from these were mixed.
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by Seth Kaplan | May 31, 2012 | Economics and development
Adrian Leftwich gives a great description of what it means to work politically in the development field in a recent publication Politics, Leadership, and Coalitions in Development for the Developmental Leadership Program:
There is understandable caution and reserve about the idea of ‘working politically’, or for donors trying to address ‘the political dimensions of development’ – and for good reason. The phrase itself is easily misinterpreted as insensitive interference, as an invasion of sovereignty and a disregard for principles of ownership and endogenously driven developmental processes. It may sound like ‘regime change’. Given those many cases of bullying or intervention by conditionality of the international community in developing countries, there is good reason for such caution, as the very idea of working politically might seem to suggest a flagrant violation of the principles of Accra and Paris. (more…)
by Mark Weston | Feb 8, 2012 | Africa, Economics and development, Influence and networks
Last week I was asked to review a new book on gender and development. Since these things are usually turgid affairs, full of abstruse jargon (“registers of governmentality”, “idioms of sexualness” and “body reflexive practices” are just a few of the assaults on English perpetrated in this one) and nostalgia for the marxist utopias of yore, I was apprehensive. I envisaged long days of ploughing laboriously through paragraphs, trying heroically to decipher “essentially hetero-normative constructions”, “emergent rubrics”, and “positionalities”, and then having to pretend in my review that I’d both mastered this tangled tongue and maintained sufficient will to live to pass constructive comment on it.
But once you have hacked your way through the impenetrable forest of the introduction (which counts “decentring the traditionally unmarked male” and “normatively naturalizing potencies” among its most egregious language crimes), you emerge into a glade of sunny clarity. For Men and Development: Politicizing Masculinities is no ordinary gender book – reading it will give you a new perspective on the social problems of the developing world.
The idea that gender equality is important to development is not new – efforts to educate women and girls are among foreign aid’s few relatively uncontested success stories, and microfinance programs, the development fad du jour, also mostly target women. Men, however, have largely been overlooked by practitioners and policy-makers; reading Men and Development, you begin to see what catastrophic effects this has had.
The problem lies in the expectations society has of men. In West Africa, for example, men are expected to set up a home, marry at least one wife, and accumulate and provide for children and other dependents. Those who fail to perform these duties forfeit the respect of their elders, women and their peers; they cannot become “real men”.
When the breadwinner role becomes impossible to fulfil – as it did for millions of men across Africa during the economic crises of the 1980s and 1990s – men have other facets of masculinity on which to draw in order to recover their self-esteem. Some of these alternative masculinities are positive – think of the black South Africans who responded to economic emasculation by adopting the role of fighter against oppression and joining the liberation struggle.
But many traditional expressions of manliness are socially destructive. Physical violence is the most obvious of these. Economic insecurity, as one of the Men and Development authors Gary Barker notes in an earlier paper, can prompt men to turn to violence to reaffirm their power – many South African men have joined criminal gangs, for example, while domestic violence becomes more common as unemployment rises.
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by Alex Evans | Jun 29, 2010 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, Global Dashboard, Influence and networks
With the Conservatives back in charge of foreign policy, there is as you might expect a lot of talk about ‘The National Interest’ resuming its proper place at the heart of foreign policy. As this trend has gathered pace, so people with a more, shall we say, cosmopolitan worldview have started countering that foreign policy should be about something bigger than that.
But what, exactly?
In a post responding to David and my Chatham House report on UK foreign policy, Oxfam’s Duncan Green expressed a worry that our argument appealed too much to the new mood of the national interest. What we’d missed, he argued, was the sense of moral purpose that can energise support for development.
We should appeal to hearts as well as heads. Otherwise we risk giving up one of our strongest cards – moral suasion. The reason why the new government has gone out on a limb in pledging to increase aid despite the fiscal meltdown is surely not just about crude self-interest, but at least partly springs from a desire to do the right thing. To, dare I say it, change the world.
ODI’s Simon Maxwell made a similar point in an email to me, arguing that
Your ‘case for foreign policy’ is at first sight defensive and UK-centric i.e. only about defending UK interests. Where is your moral commitment to the MDGs or global stewardship of the world’s people and resources?
Fair questions – not least since much of my own take on development and foreign policy is based on what I consider moral. When people ask me ‘why we’re funding hospitals in Malawi when we’re closing them down at home’, part of me is stunned that the question should even need to be asked – given that in Malawi 5.5% of mothers die in childbirth, as compared to 0.01% here.
But at the same time, the lobbyist in me is hesitant about using morally based arguments. I always have the hunch that anyone who finds them persuasive is already, well, persuaded – and hence that they’re of limited use in enlarging the progressive foreign policy tent. Politically, the idea of an ‘ethical foreign policy’ is still seen as having been an albatross around Robin Cook’s neck at the Foreign Office. And above all, I worry that proponents of the national interest find it easy to paint moral advocates as starry-eyed, particularly given the wider backlash against aid.
But what intrigued me about Duncan and Simon’s responses is that neither of them mentioned an idea that we used to hear a lot about in discussions like these – interdependence.
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