Rethinking governance handbook

University of Victoria’s Centre for Global Studies, no date, ‘Rethinking governance’ handbook. An inventory of ideas to enhance participation, transparency and accountability, Victoria, Canada.
This is a manual aiming at enhancing the legitimacy of international organisations, by presenting an inventory of best practices and innovative approaches to increase accountability, participation and transparency. It was compiled to [...]

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. [...]

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 World Bank and Climate Change: Sustainability or Exploitation?

Commentary on article from Upside Down World
This article discusses suspicions of the market-based Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) for reduced emissions to combat climate change and how developing countries communities are affected.
Development workers for the last decade have been worried about how World Bank and UNEP sponsored mechanisms to sequestering carbon in developing countries forests [...]