Climate change and development

The issue of climate change and development is starting to come together quite sharply. Two recent reports by Oxfam and CARE bring out the problem in its starkest reality. The reports look at the effects of climate change on human migration, and the difficulty of equitably achieving a sufficient cut in greenhouse gas emissions.

Nationality Rights for All

As long as the nation state has been around there have been stateless people. According to the latest report of Refugees International, these number around 12 million worldwide: roughly the same numbers as those categorised as refugees, but without any of the rights or recognition of refugees.

Gender and accountability is important – but don’t mention the war

UNIFEM have put out two reports in the last few weeks. The first is ‘Voicing the needs of Women and Men in Gaza’, the gender needs survey for the Gaza strip, and the second is ‘Who Answers to Women?: Gender and Accountability’. These two reports highlight the problems that a UN agency has in dealing with contentious issues which involve member governments: that is, they cannot be criticised even obliquely.

Africa up for grabs?

There has been a lot of interest in African land deals in the past few weeks. Amy Glass raised the case of Madagascar on this blog, and Gwynne Dyer in a syndicated article calls it a ‘neo-colonialist land grab’ noting the ‘new’ colonists now include a new set of powers including China India, South Korea and the Arab Gulf States. The scale of foreign companies entering the Africa land market is huge, and while all of these deals may not go through, the implications of the some that do go ahead have enormous implications for peasant agriculture on the continent.

Indian Travellers Tale 2: From ‘rags’ to respect

In the streets of any large city in India you will see small groups of women (and sometimes children) around garbage skips, going through them and collecting scraps of paper, tin, plastic, and cloth. These are the ‘rag pickers’, and in India’s pervasive caste system they sit fairly close to the bottom rung. They are a sub-group of Dalits (once known as sudra or untouchables) and are generally marginalised in society, kept to the most menial and unpleasant tasks.

But a remarkable thing has happened with the ragpickers of the city of Pune in Western India: the ragpickers are now a central part of the city’s new waste management system, and had a critical hand in its design. But let us go back to the beginning. Twenty years ago, a couple of people from the SNDT Women’s University in Pune started an ILO-supported project to provide adult literacy to the city’s ragpickers. Very early on, the ragpickers made it clear to them that it was not literacy they wanted but respect and the opportunity to have a safe work environment free from harassment from the police and city government officials. Thus Kagad Kach Patra Kashtakari Panchayat (KKPKP) was formed: the Pune Ragpickers’ Union.

Traveller’s Tale: Indian NGO development revisited

I remember many years back in the early 1980s, I came across an older journal article by a pair of brothers with the arresting name of Paddock. They wrote in the mid-1960s, saying that India was beyond redemption, and that the world should undertake triage and only provide emergency assistance. Similar things are often said about Africa in today’s discourse, including Dambisa Moyo’s argument (discussed on this blog) to cut aid all together. It is nearly ten years since I was last in Bangalore (in Karnataka state) in India. Now the question is: what is the relevance of aid agencies and NGOs in the context of a booming economy, at least in southern India, and Karnataka in particular? Ten years ago, the concrete and glass IT offices were on the edge of Bangalore, standing rather incongruously in farmland and paddy fields, and people commuted out from the city to them. Now these IT offices are all surrounded by luxury apartments and gated highrise suburbs for the IT elite.

Now where does this leave the ‘real’ India – the rural communities which still make up most of the population and most of the poverty? They have not been left out all together: the construction work on roads and the like is evident everywhere. The question is does this reach the most marginalised?

New World Bank book “re-hash of standard World Bank dogma”

I first heard of the “new and epic” World Bank book entitled ‘Moving Out of Poverty: Success from the Bottom-Up’ on Duncan Green’s (of Oxfam GB) blog, From Poverty to Power, where his enthusiasm (“I’ve got the book on order, but this is so good, I wanted to tell people about it right away”) sent us scurrying to the World Bank’s PovertyNet publications for a read of the 50-page overview, only to be bitterly disaapointed. Green suggests that “there are rich pickings in here for anyone interested in the reality of poverty and development, big challenges to our assumptions, and blessed relief from all the frustrating generalities about ‘the poor’, ‘developing countries’ and so on”. For me the ‘pickings’ were very lean indeed in this re-hash of standard World Bank dogma, at the expense of social justice and the human rights of the marginalised.

The book reports on a multinational study of the factors that enable people to move out of poverty, and follows the Voices of the Poor study the Bank undertook in 2002. This current study was undertaken across 15 countries and involved 9,000 household interviews, 1,500 focus groups, as well as other survey instruments. But rather than using existing poverty statistics, the Study took a community or village approach, and asked communities to identify who was poor, their characteristics, and how they moved into or out of poverty.

But a major issue with the conclusions contained in the overview is that there is no mention of gender, ethnicity, or other characteristics of minorities which lead to exclusion and marginalisation. By ignoring the evidence that inequality is widening as economies grow, and furthermore that the depth of poverty is worsening (an indicator of increased marginalisation), the Bank with its new report is glossing over the fundamental factors of poverty. [...]

Men, Masculinity and Development in the Pacific

A new briefing note from Richard Eves and the State Society and Governance program at the ANU addresses Men, Masculinity, and Development in the Pacific. This is an important and accessible piece on the issue of looking at gender beyond the lens of the woman, and also away from the concept of mainstreaming gender so that it loses all meaning. The paper is an accessible summary of the key issues that need to be addressed in programming and complements Eves’ earlier work for Caritas, Exploring the Role off Men and Masculinities in PNG.

While it is important to have gender programming aimed at men and these programs should be looking at different ‘masculinities’ (if this is the best term), which are less related to power and aggression, and more related to what is common between men and women, the question still remains: what is the relationship with gender programs that address the specific needs of women? Eves is a little critical of gender programs aimed at women suggesting they imply an oppositionist approach, and that the empowerment is in relation to men. There is an element of that in many women’s empowerment programs, but most are about increasing women’s agency in number of domains of which the domestic domain is but one. The argument being that improving agency in broader domains may improve the domestic one. Of course the jury is out on this with as many empowerment stories increasing domestic violence as reducing it.

Commentary on Dambisa Moyo’s book ‘Dead Aid’

Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid has received a lot of publicity over the last month and joins a long list of popular books attacking aid programs, and those organisations and groups that deliver it. This book is by an economist who has spent most of her working life with Goldmann Sachs the investment advisory service, and before that the World Bank. I emphasise that point as most of the commentary highlights her Zambian heritage, and it is used to give her more credibility than the many middle age white males who comment on aid to Africa – and I readily admit falling into that category. Of course there are also many black voices who comment on the aid policies to Africa but take a different line, and we can think of Nobel laureates Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, or former UN Supremo Kofi Annan, all of whom have lived and worked in Africa; or the Kenyan lawyer Binaifer Nowrojee who is a member of the Coalition for Women’s Human Rights in Conflict Situations, and writes extensively on gender and conflict in Africa contexts.

The line Ms Moyo takes is a familiar one, and that is the debt crisis in Africa is of Africa’s own doing and that ‘aid’ makes things worse. What is interesting is that the book comes out at the time the world is facing by far the worst global recession since the 1930s, and the solutions Ms Moyo is suggesting for Africa, are now generally been agreed as been part of the cause of the current crisis: that is, access to unfettered global exchange markets, and poor credit regulations – particularly in the US. One can argue that Goldman Sachs is probably more to do the problem than the solution.

That aside, this book’s rather passionate defence of the neoliberal approaches to development is rather selective in its view of aid and development. While it readily accepts the role of the re-building of Europe after the war and cites the Marshall Plan as a very positive example, Ms Moyo seems to be less supportive of the aid successes in the developing world of the last sixty years, and the role it had in many countries, some of which are in Africa. She also suggests that the Asian successes are to do with ‘free market policies’ and ‘outward orientation’. While we can agree with an outward orientation, one is hard pressed to find any Asian country, successful or otherwise, that practices free market policies. Much of the success is to do with a high level of government (and dare I say it ‘aid’) investment in strategic areas, and in planning. None of this is mentioned in Ms Moyo’s book. [...]

The role of the affected state in humanitarian action: A case study on Indonesia

Whilst covering a lot of old ground on the role of the affected state and others in humanitarian action, this report by Barnaby Willitts-King is very timely as it raises issues including of the role of local authorities, local ownership, and appropriate behaviours of international agencies, both official and NGO.