@bill_easterly, 21-01-11 20:43

William Easterly (@bill_easterly) 21-01-11 20:43 Commentators give a lot of useful "feedback" to a certain Prof on Millennium Villages http://bit.ly/gUx2TR

 

@edwardrcarr, 21-01-11 21:03

Ed Carr (@edwardrcarr) 21-01-11 21:03 @bill_easterly A lot of this was predicted years ago . . . http://bit.ly/i1JtV5

 

@bill_easterly, 21-01-11 20:43

William Easterly (@bill_easterly) 21-01-11 20:43 Commentators give a lot of useful "feedback" to a certain Prof on Millennium Villages http://bit.ly/gUx2TR

 

naming, shaming, & measuring

naming, shaming, & measuring

Texas in Africa

Just before the holidays, the Enough Project released its first rankings of electronics companies based on their "progress they are making toward conflict-free supply chains and a conflict-free mining sector in Congo." You can look at the quick guide to their rankings here or read the full report here.

As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm cynical about the effects that any effort to engage in supply chain monitoring in the DRC will have on the conflict there. This is because the conflicts there are not only about or fueled by the mineral trade and also because local institutions are not strong enough to prevent smuggling, mislabeling, and the many, many, many other ways of getting around a monitoring and tracing regime. I'm of the view that this exercise is mostly a waste of time and effort, but if companies want to do it, then so be it. The "name-and-shame" approach that Enough is using here is standard advocacy practice. Whether consumers will pay any attention remains to be seen.

What I'm interested in here, however, is the report's authors' methodology in determining whether a company is making a good-faith effort at tracing and ending the use of Congolese conflict minerals in their products. The report outlines 18 indicators they used to make this judgment:

1. Tracing: Has the company traced its suppliers of tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold
(3TG)? (four questions)
2. Auditing: Does the company have audits conducted of its suppliers of the 3TG
minerals to determine mine of origin and chain of custody? (six questions)
3. Certification: Has the company taken concrete steps to develop an international
certification regime for the 3TG minerals? (three questions)
4. Stakeholder engagement: Has the company had regular engagement with the NGO
coalition, led by Enough, on the conflict minerals issue? (two questions)
5. Support for legislation: Has the company supported the legislation on conflict
minerals? (three questions)

As you can see from the rankings, Enough believes it has sufficient information for most companies to answer all of the above questions. I'm curious, though, as to how they've verified that companies have undertaken these actions. It's virtually impossible to fully trace suppliers, determine mine of origin, and to determine the chain of custody for the 3T's and, in particular, gold in the eastern DRC. On what basis is Enough gauging these activities? As Jason Stearns points out, it's pretty easy under the newly-released draft SEC framework (the development of which was required by the Dodd-Frank legislation) for a company to engage in due diligence, find nothing, and yet still be using minerals the sale of which is funding violence. As he notes in another post, the lack of an oversight mechanism plus the secretive nature of mineral sales in the Kivus will make it very, very difficult for companies' auditors to actually verify what they claim to be verifying.

Then there's the issue of engagement with Enough, which I find a somewhat bizarre indicator for measuring this particular outcome. The insinuation here is that a company that doesn't go along with Enough's method and advocacy program must not be doing anything about this issue. For example, one of the questions (worth one point) in the survey is, "Has the company held regular communication with the Enough NGO coalition regarding conflict minerals (at least bi-monthly)?" Which means that if your company hasn't sent an email or talked to Enough and the coalition once every two months, you must not care about conflict minerals.

Is that really the case, though? It may be unlikely, but isn't it possible that a corporation could be pursuing efforts to avoid the use of conflict minerals outside of Enough's framework? Especially if, like many observers, they believe that this effort is unlikely to lead to lasting peace in the DRC? Likewise, I find the "supporting conflict minerals legislation" criteria dubious. The legislation on this issue wasn't necessarily worth supporting for the reasons I've outlined above. Does a corporation have to support that legislation in order to be a good corporate citizen?

The conflict minerals issue gave Enough the chance to score a major legislative victory, and it gives corporations a chance to make themselves look like good corporate citizens. This is true regardless of whether the approach mandated by the legislation actually produces measurable positive outcomes for the Congolese. (HP in particular has been very interested in appearing to be a leader on conflict minerals.) However, much of the criteria by which this commitment is measured seems to me to be fairly dubious. A corporation can lose up to nine points on the scale simply for not working with Enough or getting involved with the legislation. To an academic like me, the use of "working with Enough" as an indicator seems to be measuring something that has very little to do with the outcome they're seeking to measure, namely, progress towards the use of fewer conflict minerals in consumer electronics.

I'd be interested to hear from other advocacy folks as to the justification for using such measures as a matter of commitment, as well as whether this is standard practice.

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Sustainability is Unsustainable

Sustainability is Unsustainable

The Business Ethics Blog

I was tempted to call this blog entry "Sustainability is Stupid," but I changed my mind because that's needlessly inflammatory. And really, the problem isn't that the concept itself is stupid, though certainly I've seen some stupid uses of the term. But the real problem is that it's too broad for some purposes, too narrow for others, and just can't bear the weight that many people want to put on it. The current focus on sustainability as summing up everything we want to know about doing the right thing in business is, for lack of a better word, unsustainable.

Anyway, I am tired of sustainability. And not just because, as Ad Age recently declared, it's one of the most jargon-y words of the year. Which it is. But the problems go beyond that.

Here are just a few of the problems with sustainability:

1) Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, not everything unsustainable is bad. Oil is unsustainable, technically speaking. It will eventually get scarce, and eventually run out, for all intents and purposes. But it's also a pretty nifty product. It works. It's cheap. And it's not going away soon. So producing it isn't evil, and using it isn't evil, even if (yes, yes) it would be better if we used less. Don't get me wrong: I'm no fan of oil. It would be great if cars could run on something more plentiful and less polluting, like sunshine or water or wind. But in the meantime, oil is an absolutely essential commodity. Unsustainable, but quite useful.

2) There are ways for things to be bad other than being unsustainable. Cigarettes are a stupid, bad product. They're addictive. They kill people. But are they sustainable? You bet. The tobacco industry has been going strong for a few hundred years now. If that's not sustainability, I don't know what is. To say that the tobacco industry isn't sustainable is like saying the dinosaur way of life wasn't sustainable because dinosaurs only ruled the earth for, like, a mere 150 million years. So, it's a highly sustainable industry, but a bad one.

3) There's no such thing as "sustainable" fish or "sustainable" forests or "sustainable" widgets, if by "sustainable" you mean as opposed to the other, "totally unsustainable" kind of fish or forests or widgets. It's not a binary concept, but it gets sold as one. A fishery (or a forest or whatever) is either more or less sustainable. So to label something "sustainable" is almost always greenwash. Feels nice, but meaningless.

4) We're still wayyyy unclear on what the word "sustainable" means. And I'm not talking about fine academic distinctions, here. I'm talking big picture. As in, what is the topic of discussion? For some people, for example, "sustainability" is clearly an environmental concept. As in, can we sustain producing X at the current rate without running out of X or out of the raw materials we need to make X? Or can we continue producing Y like this, given the obvious and unacceptable environmental damage it does? For others, though — well, for others, "sustainability" is about something much broader: something economic, environmental, and social. This fundamental distinction reduces dramatically the chances of having a meaningful conversation about this topic.

5) Many broad uses of the term "sustainable" are based on highly questionable empirical hypotheses. For example, some people seem to think that "sustainable" isn't just an environmental notion because, after all, how can your business be sustainable if you don't treat your workers well? And how can you sustain your place in the market if you don't produce a high-quality product? Etc., etc. But of course, there are lots of examples of companies treating employees and customers and communities badly, and doing so quite successfully, over time-scales that make any claim that such practices are "unsustainable" manifestly silly. (See #2 above re the tobacco industry for an example.)

6) We have very, very little what is actually sustainable, environmentally or otherwise. Sure, there are clear cases. But for plenty of cases, the correct response to a claim of sustainability is simply "How do you know?" We know a fair bit, I think, about what kinds of practices tend to be more, rather than less, environmentally sustainable. But given the complexities of ecosystems, and the complexities of production processes and business supply chains, tracing all the implications of a particular product or process in order to declare it "sustainable" is very, very challenging. I conjecture that there are far, far more claims of "sustainability" than there are instances where the speaker knows what he or she is talking about.

7) Sometimes, it's right to do the unsustainable thing. For example, would you kill the last breeding pair of an endangered species (say, bluefin tuna, before long) to feed a starving village, if that was your only way of doing so? I would. Sure, there's room for disagreement, but I think I could provide a pretty good argument that in such a case, the exigencies of the immediate situation would be more weighty, morally, than the long-term consequences. Now, hopefully such terrible choices are few. But the point is simply to illustrate that sustainability is not some sort of over-arching value, some kind of trump card that always wins the hand.

8 ) The biggest, baddest problem with sustainability is that, like "CSR" and "accountability" and other hip bits of jargon, it's a little wee box that people are trying to stuff full of every feel-good idea they ever hoped to apply to the world of business. So let's get this straight: there are lots and lots of ways in which business can act rightly, or wrongly. And not all of them can be expressed in terms of the single notion of "sustainability."

Now, look. Of course I don't have anything against sustainability per se. I like the idea of running fisheries in a way that is more, rather than less, sustainable. I like the idea of sustainable agriculture (i.e., agriculture that does less, rather than more, long-term damage to the environment and uses up fewer, rather than more, natural resources). But let's not pretend that sustainability is the only thing that matters, or that it's the only word we need in our vocabulary when we want to talk about doing the right thing in business.

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How do Southern NGOs Rate Northern NGOs?

How do Southern NGOs Rate Northern NGOs?

Development Horizons from Lawrence Haddad

How do the Southern partners of Northern NGOs rate them?


Keystone Accountability have just released a report which attempts to answer this question.

Keystone worked with the following 25 European and US NGOs: CARE UK, CARE USA, Christian Aid, Catholic Relief Services, Concern, Church World Service, Helvetas, International Rescue Committee, International Service, Lutheran World Relief, Minority Rights Group, Mennonite Central Committee, Methodist Relief and Development Fund, Mercy Corps US, Peace Direct, Save the Children US, Practical Action, UMCOR US, Progressio, Save the Children UK, Schorer, Self Help Africa, Skillshare International, Tearfund and Trocaire.

2733 partners were invited to respond and 1067 did, a 39% response rate (an impressive response rate, although I would have liked to have seen more exploration of the impact of this rate, and its distribution, on survey results).

The Southern NGOs said they valued/needed more of the following support:

* Non-Financial Support: Facilitation in the accessing of other sources of funds
* Monitoring and Reporting: The need for Northern NGOs to share lessons and experiences with them when working on the same issues
* Relationships: Develop joint strategies with us

It seems to me that all 3 of these top priorities would help Southern NGOs become true partners, not sub-contractors, to become more independent financially and intellectually and to help co-construct ideas and strategies. It is interesting that under improving relationships it is not things like "take time to listen", "be more respectful" and "be more fair"
that the Southern NGOs say they need, but pragmatic things like "develop joint strategies" and "promote our work".

The report does not rank Northern NGOs, but it does allow each NGO to compare its own score (which it receives in a confidential report) with the distribution of scores achieved by the other 24.

For example Progressio have chosen to release their report and it shows they are in the top quartile of NGOs when it comes to Relationships and Capacity Building Support but in the third quartile for Other Non-financial Support.

It seems to me that true leadership is helping to set up systems that may be inconvenient to your own organisation at times, but which help the wider community learn about what is working and the gap between rhetoric and reality.

So I salute the 25 NGOs for undertaking this exercise (and especially Progressio for making theirs public) and congratulate Keystone for having the vision and perseverance to do this work (disclosure: IDS has worked with Keystone on farmer feedback under the ALINe programme).

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Is eliminating malaria hopeless?

Is eliminating malaria hopeless?

Chris Blattman

The real way to get rid of malaria is to reverse the dynamics of rural-to-urban migration and build comfortable, stable rural communities first—something that is probably never going to happen in Africa—and then to attack the disease. The key way the disease is spread is by infecting people without resistance. Rural to urban migration, the kind that dominates in Africa today, promotes the spread of the disease.

…In this sense, Jeffrey Sachs and the Gates Foundation are working against themselves, by pushing development and fighting malaria at the same time.

That is James Pogue writing in Guernica. The tagline for the piece is "Ending malaria in Africa any time soon is nearly hopeless. And in trying, Jeffrey Sachs and Bill Gates may be doing more harm than good."

Skeptical though I am of massive, idealistic, cash-driven interventions, I have to hope that policymakers regard Pogue's article skeptically.

First, if there's one success Big Aid can claim in the 20th century, it's disease eradication. Western donors and African governments may be crap at generating jobs, but man did they wipe out some persistent sickness.

I've just come from Vietnam and Thailand where malaria has not disappeared, but ceased to be a major concern (unless you live astride the border with Burma or Laos). To the public health specialists out there: is this so? And is the goal really so much more elusive in Africa?

Ultimately, what other cure to malaria is there other than development? To run effective eradication campaigns, governments must be staffed with well-educated bureaucrats and backed by stable tax revenues. People must be able to afford treatments and preventions. And citizens and businesses must hold the government accountable for providing this public good. Few of these factors arrive without economic development, and most are going to be tied to population movements away from agriculture.

Governments and businesses across the continent are already taking action. Many capital cities have lower transmission rates in part because they drain swamps. Rural home spraying is increasingly common. Some mines and other private businesses have eradicated malaria in their environs.

I'm all for pursuing scientific advances, but for Africa to sit in poverty and wait for a cure to be discovered sounds like madness.

Pogue's parting paragraphs suggests even the cure may be overblown, and that malaria isn't much concern (indeed it's a source of pride):

For some Africans, resistance to malaria is literally in their blood; for many of the rest, they've earned their immunity, without drugs, and without asking for Western help. Guys like me, only there to profit off what's under the ground, ought to be able to handle a couple weeks of fever.

More than one friend or coworker in Africa has lost a child to malaria. I cannot imagine anything more emotionally painful or antithetical to "development". There's very little here to be proud of.

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Trust me, tell me, show me will become Guide Me....

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Commotie over Rosenthal

Commotie over Rosenthal

Vice Versa - vakblad over ontwikkelingssamenwerking

Er is veel commotie in de ontwikkelingssector naar aanleiding van de aanvaring tussen minister Rosenthal van Buitenlandse Zaken en ICCO. Rosenthal stelt dat ontwikkelingsorganisaties die activiteiten uitvoeren die 'strijdig zijn met de regeringsopvattingen', moeten vrezen voor hun subsidie.

De minister gaat de vinger aan de pols houden bij alle ontwikkelingsorganisaties. En dat is iets waarover brancheorganisatie Partos zich zorgen maakt. In een verklaring op haar website schrijft Partos dat het vindt dat Nederlandse ontwikkelingsorganisaties en het gehele maatschappelijke middenveld de ruimte moeten behouden om, waar dat past binnen hun doelstellingen, tegen het Nederlandse beleid in te gaan.

Met het standpunt van Rosenthal slaat de Nederlandse regering een fundamenteel nieuwe en bijzonder kwalijke weg in, vindt de brancheorganisatie. In de Nederlandse democratie is het de afgelopen 45 jaar juist een groot goed geweest dat maatschappelijke organisaties de ruimte hebben om hun eigen koers te varen. 'Deze democratische verworvenheid past niet in landen met beknottende regimes, waar ontwikkelingsorganisaties vaak hun werk uitvoeren. Maar wel bij ons eigen land, dat vrijheid van meningsuiting en vrijheid van vereniging hoog in het vaandel heeft', aldus Partos.

Afleggen van verantwoording

Partos vindt dit ook logisch. Binnen een gezonde democratie durft de overheid namelijk haar eigen oppositie te financieren. In de verhouding staat, markt en maatschappelijk middenveld, is juist het maatschappelijk middenveld de geleding die de overheid scherp houdt en dwingt tot het afleggen van verantwoording. 'Ontwikkelingsorganisaties zoals ICCO, vertegenwoordigen dan ook de stem van de burger richting de Nederlandse overheid en houden de Nederlandse regering scherp in haar beleid richting een duurzame en rechtvaardige wereld voor iedereen', aldus Partos.

Recente uitspraken van staatssecretaris Knapen bevestigen deze opvatting. Partos wijst op een  uitspraak van Knapen in de Kamer: 'Bovendien beschouw ik hen [ontwikkelingsorganisaties] ook als een waakhond. Zo moeten ze ook kunnen functioneren. Ze moeten ons wakker houden en ons op onze fouten wijzen.' Het valt Partos op dat 'gek genoeg' de minister van Buitenlandse Zaken zich op een heel ander standpunt lijkt te stellen.

Bukken

In zijn column in dagblad Trouw vraagt journalist Han Koch zich af of iemand Ben Knapen onlangs nog gezien heeft. Volgens Koch lijkt Knapen te bukken voor zijn baas en is hij opvallend afwezig in het dit debat. Ontwikkelingssamenwerking is de portefeuille van Knapen en niet van Rosenthal en daarom verbaast Koch zich erover dat hij Knapen niet hoort. 'De kwestie-ICCO is zijn kwestie; hij gaat over de hulp.' Het kan volgens Koch een strategie zijn om Rosenthal de kar te laten trekken en Knapen in de luwte te houden. In die strategie past dan ook dat de nieuwe regering de confrontatie met het middenveld zoekt. Dat is volgens Koch ook een weg om nieuw geld te vinden voor bijvoorbeeld de vredesmissie in Afghanistan. Wordt ongetwijfeld vervolgd.

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