by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development
At a seminar held yesterday as part of IPPR’s Commission on National Security, we got onto a discussion of how far aid donors still need to go in sorting out their approach on conflict prevention. The problem isn’t with the specialist departments that deal with conflict within donor agencies – which are often excellent (e.g. the CHASE department in DFID) – but rather with long-term systemic issue areas that just aren’t mainstreamed properly throughout donors’ work. For me, four spring to mind.
First, governance. I’ve written about this at length before on GD, and I still think the same now. When European donors think governance, they think about techie work in the executive branch: public financial management, anti-corruption commissions, that sort of thing. What they overlook is the politics: elections, what happens in the smoke-filled rooms of the ruling party, the process of bargaining between states and citizens. And it’s here that conflict risk – or risk reduction – is often to be found.
Second, resilience. Many donors have great work underway on specific areas of resilience – like peacebuilding, adaptation to climate change or disaster risk reduction. But donors often fail to identify the syngergies between these different kinds of resilience work – as International Alert did in their report on climate adaptation and peacebuilding last year. How about a more joined-up approach across the board that focuses really hard on identifying the sources of resilience in different developing countries, and then working to build them up? After all, about the only thing that’s clear about the next couple of decades is that they’ll be increasingly turbulent. You wouldn’t know it from looking at donors’ country programmes.
Third, scarcity. Disputes over land in Kenya; water as a threat multiplier in Darfur; riots over food and energy prices in more than 30 countries this year alone; the looming shadow of climate change. Scarcity issues are set to become one of the principal obstacles to achieving the MDGs, and a major source of increased conflict risk. Helping partner countries to manage competing claims to scarce resources – at all levels from local to global – should be a core competence in donors’ policy and programme work alike. Is it? Nope.
Fourth, counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare. Whether you’re looking at the Taliban in Afghanistan, MEND in Nigeria, drug lords in Mexico or organised crime in the Balkans, there are plenty of participants in the ‘global bazaar of violence’ who are interested in hollowing out weak states – not the same as causing them to collapse, as Daniel and I were discussing earlier this week – so as to give them the space and legitimacy to operate as they want. Alas, it’s the military coming up with the really innovative approaches on this – not aid donors.
As should already be clear, these aren’t so much new agendas for aid donors, as cross-cutting ones: involving joining up the dots between current areas of work, being willing to take more risks, and realising that being an effective donor in the 21st century is as much about influence and the quality of your people as it’s about cash.
They also involve forging a lot of new, more coherent relationships: with new donors (like the Gates Foundation); with new country players (like China); and – perhaps most of all – with other parts of government (c.f. DFID and the the Foreign Office).
But here’s a key point: it’s crucial that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I always hesitate when I hear people in the UK calling for DFID to be merged back into the Foreign Office, or for the International Development Act to be revised or scrapped. True, there are [numerous] times when DFID needs to interpret its poverty reduction mission with a bit more verve and imagination. But remember why it was necessary in the first place to make DFID independent and to create the Act to protect it.
We do need a more substantive conversation about joining up the dots on aid and foreign policy – both in Britain and internationally – in order to get better at conflict prevention. But before we can start it, there need to be some upfront guarantees of no sliding back to aid being a tool for pursuing narrow, short-term national interests.
by Alex Evans | Jun 12, 2008 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Things keep going from bad to worse in Naples, where the piles of uncollected rubbish are still heaped up. Last week, the head of a waste disposal firm turned ‘super-witness’ – who was due to testify about links between corrupt politicians and the Camorra, Naples’ mafia – was gunned down in the street. According to John Hooper in the Guardian:
The Carabinieri, the military police, said yesterday the killing was impossible to reconstruct because no one would admit to having seen it. However, after a search for bullets and casings, they concluded that at least 18 shots were fired from two 9mm-calibre automatics. Orsi was hit twice in the chest and once in the head, suggesting that, in classic mafia style, he was given a “coup de grace” by one of the killers as he lay dying.
Why the Camorra’s interest in trash? Because they’re big players in the sector, Hooper explains – not least in illegally dumping toxic waste which they truck down from the north of Italy. That’s also why the people in and around Naples are opposed to the government’s plan to build incinerators to get rid of the rubbish backlog; they figure that the Camorra would take them over within about ten minutes, and use them to burn the toxic stuff too.
Meanwhile, Mexico‘s also sliding. Last month, the country’s acting chief of police was gunned down. According to the Economist:
One of his bodyguards, who was also wounded, managed to wrestle the police chief’s assailant to the ground and arrest him. Mr Millán was conscious for long enough to ask his killer who was behind the hit, but died before he could get a reply. The answer to his question, provided later by investigators, helps cast some light on why it is so hard to end drug-related violence in Mexico. They say that his assassin was sent by José Antonio Montes Garfias, another federal police officer.
The week leading up to May 13 saw 113 murders in Mexico, including 17 in just one day – and estimates of total deaths due to organised crime range from 1,100 to 2,500 people this year. 2,700 federal troops have now been deployed. As the Economist concludes, “the war on drugs has never seemed less like a metaphor”. And here’s the real catch: “success in disrupting drug cartels only leads to more violence as gang members fight to fill power vacuums and continue to supply the ever-lucrative drug market”. (See also John Robb’s recent write-up.)
In Naples and Ciudad Juarez alike, organised crime’s basic stance towards the state is the same as you’d find with Hezbollah in Lebanon, MEND in Nigeria or the Taliban in Afghanistan. The aim is not to cause the collapse of ‘official’ governance. Rather, it’s to keep the state ‘hollowed out’: so short of capacity and legitimacy that insurgents or organised crime can step into the gap, and then not only operate freely, but also start building up legitimacy powerbases of their own (c.f. another example of the Camorra in action).
by David Steven | May 20, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, North America
I’ve been at the Brookings Institution in Washington today for its conference on the transatlantic relationship.
In the chair, Daniel Benjamin, who runs Brookings’ Center on the United States and Europe, and who wrote The Age of Sacred Terror and The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Simon.
In The Next Attack, Benjamin and Simon argued that:
It is unlikely that even in his feverish reveries, Usama bin Laden could have imagined that America would stumble so badly and wound itself so grievously. By occupying Iraq, the United States has played into the hands of its opponents, affirming the story they have been telling to the Muslim world and adding to their aura as true warriors in defence of Islam…
There is, as has so often been said, a war of ideas going on, a battle for hearts and minds. Unfortunately, America has wound up on the wrong side.
Of course, this was pretty predictable. Every effective terror movement in history has been fuelled by the adverse reaction of its host society. The Bush administration has simply proved particularly obtuse and self-destructive- a fact for which Al Qaeda is appropriately grateful. In 2004, bin Laden mischievously quoted an unnamed British diplomat speaking at Chatham House (!) to support his assertion that ‘it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’ own goal’.
Benjamin and Simon’s policy prescription for the US can be summed simply as: stop scoring own goals. They call for a ‘deep and dramatic’ engagement with the Islamic world and point to Turkey’s relationship with the EU as a model. It has moved from military repression to relative liberalism, they suggest, albeit a liberalism that has an Islamic hue.
‘These changes, as well as the speed with which they have taken hold, are nothing short of remarkable,’ they write. ‘That they have happened at all is due to one thing: the prospect of membership in the European Union. The transformative potential this prospect has held has been clear to American policy makers for years, and, wisely, they have supported Turkey’s bid consistently and vocally.’
Of course, US support for Turkish accession to the EU is somewhat problematic. George Bush pushed this line in 2004 despite attempts from the French and others to warn him off. ‘Including Turkey in the E.U. would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the clash of civilizations as a passing myth in history,’ he said.
It’s hard for Europeans to be lectured on this issue by a man who believes that the US is in the midst of a Christian revival prompted by the ‘confrontation between good and evil’ (his words) that America finds itself in. Or from a guy who said this in 2001:
Oh, I know there’s some voices who want to wall us off from Mexico. They want to build a wall. I say to them, they want to condemn our neighbours to the south in poverty, and I refuse to accept that type of isolationist and protectionist attitude.
And then signed a bill to build a 700 mile fence along the Mexican border in 2006 – part of a desperate attempt to shore up his approval rating with the shrinking portion of Americans who represent his base.
But I digress. (more…)
by Alex Evans | May 20, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
For all the media comment criticising biofuels lately, you might have thought that the tide had clearly turned against the increasing trend of using crops for fuel. But you’d be wrong. In fact, as Javier Blas repoted in the FT last week, the proportion of American corn going to biofuels is going up: from 22 per cent of the crop last year to a third this time around.
The reason why is simple: oil price. With oil now at $126 – that’s up $10 just since the start of the month – and lots of analysts pondering $200 by year end, biofuels look like part of a route that leads towards energy independence. And even though corn-based ethanol is about the most idiotic substitute for oil imaginable (on a climate change as well as an energy independence basis), the truth is that in its messed-up way, it kind of works.
The proof: look at the front of today’s FT, where the headline is “US begins to break foreign oil ‘addiction’“. Foreign oil made up 57.9 per cent of imports in the first quarter of this year – as opposed to 58.2 last year. A small drop, you might think, but the Department of Energy is already forecasting a fall to 50 per cent by 2015. And here’s the grim bit:
Although the reduction in oil demand growth is partly because of slower economic growth and a projected 1m-barrel-a-day rise in output from the US’s Gulf of Mexico oil fields by 2012, experts also believe that legislation will accelerate the trend. The Energy Information Administration expects the energy act to help boost biofuel production from 8bn gallons this year to at least 32bn by 2030…
And that’s not all: even as the US starts the long hike towards weaning itself, the oil price is expected to keep on going up, as demand in China continues its ascent skywards. In the background, the International Energy Agency is warning that “the world can not easily afford to retreat from bio-fuels in spite of their possible role in driving up food prices”:
Biofuels already make up about 50 per cent of the extra fuel coming to the market from sources from outside of the Opec oil cartel this year. This explains why fears of a retreat this week helped drive oil prices to record levels. William Ramsey, deputy executive director of the IEA, said: “If we didn’t have those barrels, I am not sure where we would be getting those half a million barrels.”
Bottom line: we must not kid ourselves that we can deal with the food security issue separately from the energy security issue. They’re fundamentally intertwined in over a dozen ways – and the fact that hardly any multilateral institutions cover both energy and food is something that should worry us a lot…
by Mark Weston | May 16, 2008 | Off topic
A post I wrote last week described a “push” approach to AIDS prevention – circumcise men, tell people to use condoms, encourage them not to sleep around too much etc. The World Bank is trying a different tack, using a “pull” method instead: pay people not to get infected and let them work out for themselves how to stay safe. The Bank will pay 3,000 Tanzanians $45 – good money in Tanzania – if they regularly test negative for sexually transmitted infections (though not HIV, which is more expensive to test for but for which diseases like gonorrhoea are a good proxy). “Reverse prostitution,” they call it, rather alarmingly.
Conditional cash transfers are the new new thing in the development world. The success of Mexico’s Oportunidades scheme, which gives cash to poor families if they participate in health programmes, has sparked a wave of imitations in both developing and developed countries – even New York has got in on the act. A randomised controlled study of Oportunidades found that it reduced illness among children in the programme by 23% compared to a control group. The children’s height increased by 1-4%, and the health of adults also improved. Similar programmes to reduce drug dependency in the US by giving cash to cocaine and methamphetamine abusers in return for clean urine samples have cut stimulant use.
The World Bank scheme relies on a crucial insight, which LSE AIDS guru Tony Barnett and I discuss in a paper to be published in ‘AIDS‘ this summer. In order to take decisions now that will benefit them in the future, people need to value that future. In other words, they need hope:
People with hope for the future are less likely to engage in activities that put them at risk of illness or death in the present…Without future goals, there is little reason to avoid actions that may cause harm in the future but do not do so in the present. People may therefore forfeit future gains in favour of present benefits.
Studies of hope have found strong effects on quality of life. Hopeful children do better in skills tests; adults who have goals have better mental health; and those without hope of career advancement have higher rates of mortality. And it’s not just about money; drug users in the US programmes reported that having something to aim for and receiving rewards for achievement spurred them to quit.
In much of Africa, where HIV is rife, people lack hope and therefore take risks. They exchange safety for pleasure by having unprotected sex with multiple sexual partners. They know they might one day die as a result of this, but the concerns of the present are too pressing, the future too remote. Cash can make a difference – a study in South Africa found that poor women women who received small loans in return for participating in HIV and gender programmes reported increased hope and reduced violence at the hands of their partners.
You might think that not dying of AIDS would be reward enough for practising safe sex. In an environment where people have little to hope for, however, and thus no reason to make plans, you’d be wrong.
