Monthly Archives: March 2012

Busan Aid Effectiveness, Power Impact Analysis and the Rights Based Approach

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The use of big words and capitals in capitals

I just used a title where most of the words seem to call for capitalization. It just shows how the development bingo is still in full swing, and we take ourselves so seriously. It is also typical of the kind of message coming from the centralised decision making processes. In development speak: from capital.

Busan has transformed from a city in Korea known from crossword puzzles to a development milestone. I lump this milestone to the latest trend: just like in the sixties we talk about power relations again, power in the sense it was analysed in the Marxist political thinking. Only now this analysis is called political science. The Rights Based Approach is where the empowerment thinking has been hiding while the OECD-led government ownership approach has been running the donor capitals.

Busan Power Impact Analysis

The main gist of Busan is the strengthened “country ownership”. This is good right? It depends of how you see the world. Do you think that countries are people too? Countries don’t have ownership, people in countries have. Who exactly in the development countries and in the donor agencies get more power?

When looking at the Busan outcome document with the instruments offered by the Dictators’ Handbook, we see a document that strengthens the power of the undersigning parties. The reinforcement of the central power, in practice, the president or the minister of finance of the recipient government, is the overarching theme of the outcome document. Now power relations are seldom win-win. More central power means automatically less power for the “others”. From the Handbook (another capitalization) we know that for the Dictator this power allocation is crucial and deliberate. We know also that every leader is a frustrated potential Dictator. This transfer of power to the central recipient’s government seems very risky from the donors’ side if development is the goal and not just international relations. Using the tools from the Handbook, and for the sake of simplicity, it seems like the right thing to conclude that we can use “country ownership” and “wishes of the president” interchangeably.

The Handbook explicitly warns for putting individuals in “gatekeeper” positions, where they can keep everybody else hostage to their designs. Busan promotes this practice and calls it country ownership, while in fact it strengthenes the powers that be, not “we the people”. In a democratic country, this is not a problem, as there are checks and balances. But where exactly the lack of democracy is the problem (as is underlined in the rest of the outcome text), this principle can be expected to block every democratization effort.

Now why would the donors do this? Different hypothesis can be construed and accepted or rejected using the Handbook’s tools:

  1. The objective of development assistance is not helping the poor but advancing the interests of the donor. Meaning of course in the first place good relations with the recipient country, trade advantages, and the odd joint public events and lip service to themes dear to the donor’s heart like gender and reproductive health. This reasoning is an example from the Handbook itself.
  2. Donors are just gullible, and really believe third world leaders are there only to help the poorest. As donor bureaucrats have their own politicians too, it seems not realistic that such ideas would get a lot of traction
  3. Donors think that the rest of the Busan document will manage to steer the leaders to better behaviour. This is a plausible explanation, and seems to be confirmed by the circus surrounding the Paris and Busan agenda.
  4. The Busan agenda, like the Paris agenda before, gives a few strong donors a central bagaining position  at the table, and authorizes small donors to be at the high table too to free ride on the tails of the bigo ones without more than a semblance of expertise. This seems a strong argument. The World Bank has a near monopoly of negotiations with the national governments on budget aid issues, with only DFID having some clout to match their capacity in some countries. Smaller donors can play with the big boys without really having much capacity for doing so. Everybody wins.

Arguments 1 and 4 seem convincing, while argument 2 is heavily used for the public sphere and argument 3 keeps the conscientious bureaucrats motivated at their job. Especially for them there is more to Busan than country ownership alone. However, from the Handbook, we know that every conditionality fails that is not enforced automatically. So it will not happen.

A set of additional principles (conditionalities by another name) will guide the actions and might balance the first principle: Focus on results, inclusive development practices, transparency and mutual accountability.

The results agenda has not been the panacea everybody hoped for.  While the MDGs have given a sense of direction, Paris nor Accra have been very useful to promote this agenda. Indeed, results are best measured on the lowest level, while Paris and Accra rather operate on the aggregate level. Measuring aggregate results is not easy. In most development agencies,  there is an important passive resistance against the “results craze”. Moreover there is a tendency of eliminating power elements from the equation. This could lead to a “sustainable poverty” approach: there are some basic MDG results, but not enough to lead to real empowerment of the poor or even of the middle class. Of course if evaluation is serious and integrated in the way things work, there will be a pressure for improvements. The track record is scary: donors in general hop from paradigm to paradigm, with scant attention to evaluations coming too late or leading to doing the wrong thing righter. More importantly, there is a also preference for political re-engineering instead of just correcting practices step by step, often in line with the electoral cycle at the World Bank or in the UK.

Inclusive partnerships are vague. They seem to fit the description of elections under Lenin in the Handbook: there is no real binding process, and it can be used to divide and rule an ragtag of stakeholders.  It authorizes the President, according to his wishes to set up the processes for participation that fits his purpose. Moreover, the “inclusive agenda” on its own is a more complicated concept than it seems. Does it mean that also the powerless, women, poor, minorities should be included? Or does it mean there should be a consensus approach where real challenges to the conventional wisdom (the wishes of the president) can be sidelined? Is there room for oppositional thinking, with genuine representation, or do we have unelected or self-elected groups vying for attention? The way the inclusive partnership approach works in real countries who have been receiving budget aid without having a multi-party democracy, like Rwanda and Uganda, can shed a light on this.

Transparency and accountability to each other is a fun principle. Transparency is nice and does not hurt anybody, but the added value of just publishing the data is limited. I would agree that it could be the basis for the work of different groups in the civil society to put pressure on the President.What works here of course is not the transparency in itself but the documented pressure.  Transparency could also be the basis for the President to know what everybody, including pesky civil rights groups are up to and are funded for. Mutual accountability is a strange concept. Money goes from the donor to the President. Accountability works the other way. As there is no power in the other equations (to the respective citizens, the intended beneficiaries, constituents and shareholders), we can ignore them. However, this principle introduces the “intended beneficiaries” which might be a weak basis for a rights based approach. The principle might also open the door for conditionality on the basis of some form of participation, but this will be very difficult to enforce, as there is no real definition of what accountability to the intended beneficiaries might mean. As we know, with Dictators, just like with children, it is important to be specific on what exactly is expected from them. And they rarely voluntarily part from power.

When moving thorough the rest of the document, all the right noises on democratic governance, anti-corruption, gender, evaluation,  and other issues are made. It also is rather detailed in its requests for data, monitoring and evaluations. At the same time, a strategic comprehensive and planned approach to development as a whole is promoted. In the reality of the field, these streams are rather exclusive: the iterative approach needed for a really inclusive and democratic process with good evaluations along the line, does not go well with comprehensive 5 year plans on a national level. The approach rather leads to what Aid on the Edge calls “ official views”. The different, and often mutually competitive goals and methods of work make the outcome document difficult to enforce and give a lot of room for politickering, except for the central part:

  1. Country ownership (meaning according to the wishes of the President)
  2. Through the promised transparency: full control on what happens by whom where.

Competing paradigms: Human rights based or country ownership based

The paradigm in UN-development activities is a human rights based approach, where rights are owned to individuals. This is why the MDG- approach becomes effective: you check whether any individual baby got its right to life, aggregate data, and check the result, count the children denied their right to schooling. The rights based approach respects country ownership, or rather country responsibility, but the development activities are aimed at the “one and indivisable” individual human rights. Each right has its own advocates fighting for this right, and its own budget for strengthening the advocacy. UNICEF for children’s rights, Oxfam for the right to food, UNHCHR for Human rights, ILO for labour rights, and so on. The wishes of the president are not above the rights of the individual.

The OECD approach is a government centered approach, with a centrally planned or coordinated working method, steered from Paris to Accra and further to Busan. In essence, it does not deal with “aid effectiveness”, although it uses the term, it only deals with streamlining procedures for government to government procedures. The wishes of the President are above the rights. It ignores the fact that, from the french revolution on, every advance in governance has happened by  wrestling power from the government, not by strengthening them. it is the accountability structure that strengthens institutions.

In this sense Busan is a “means oriented approach” although it uses the term “results based approach” throughout the text. The main question is: does Busan support the human rights based approach, which is essentially empowering, or does it work against it? Asking the question for every single intervention under Busan goes a long way to find the answer.

Finally, the Busan Outcome seems to be an effort by the major development players to force a global “official view” on the others that suits their interest. This view will compete with an innovative, evidence based approach to reaching the global “official goals”.

 

David Brooks and the Art of Linear Thinking

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In The New York Times, David Brookstackles the Fertility Implosion, the fact that , when women have access to reproductive rights and reproductive health services (like general health services but also anticonception) on average, they don’t like to spend their life as baby factories. This seems to lead in every country to a fall in the number of babies, which in the long run (when the last babies of the fertile years become pensioners, so in some 60, in the future probably rather 70 years) leads to a shrinking workforce.

His starting point is the falling fertility in the Arab countries.

Then he moves further to lament the cost of and aging population, the Grey Tsunami coming over us, with as notorious examples the Chinese, European and Indian.

As a final warning he talks about the declining fertility in the US.

I don’t want to write a long post on this, but as this reasoning combines top down planning of the most cherished choices of individuals with a lack of scientific knowledge, I would like to call immediately Godwin’s law and eugenetics. Talking about diminishing fertility rates while only showing it as an issue, not an opportunity is for me an important misrepresentation:

  1. Being the master of your own fertility is a basic human right. Writing, talking about fertility without referring to this right in a tone of “we are in danger” incites to social engineering without respect for this right.
  2. It is not the fertility of women going down, it is the average fertility rate: the number of children they choose on average to have. Biology stops being destiny. Is it ethical to start manipulating the wishes of people?
  3. The major cause and effect of this decline is the empowerment of women. Is there a misogynist agenda here? Instead of having 8 children from the age of 16, woman do sometimes chose to study, take a few years off for children, and with all respect, do with their life what they want including raising children. The women with a good degree will be way more productive than the unschooled from before the empowerment.
  4. Some 16 years after the fertility declines there is a window of opportunity for a booming growth: young people enter the workforce, and there is no need to scale up a lot of services like health and education anymore, just to keep up with population growth. It takes another 40 years or more before they reach retirement. The Asian Tigers fully enjoyed this window. The Arab countries might be there in only a few years. Please include this fact also in your reasoning.
  5. Retirement financing is indeed a problem of adaptation, but not a problem that cannot be tackled. It is rather a problem of planning and saving for a rainy day, than a substantive problem. Indeed, David, planning for it is a good idea.
  6. Linear thinking does not come close to predict the future. The population is not a mass of people all doing exactly the same. Women abused and raped by their husband would have a fighting chance of not bearing child after child in the new world, but the same reproductive health services help loving couples to get the children they want or single women to fulfil their wish to be a mother. Subcultures that are more child friendly, like loving parents, back to earth ecologists or orthodox faiths (not a scientific list), will out-breed the others. Without going into details: when looking into the population in detail, some groups will show a rising fertility, while others a declining fertility rate. Over time this leads to the numbers inching up again, problem solved. Why doesn’t Brooks refer to Sweden?
  7. Perhaps one of the major concerns is how society changes if children are really wanted. When looking at the countries who are further up the curve, like Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, this might not be bad at all. Societies like this seem to attach more importance to the quality of life. The parents want their children to grow up in a nice world. However, this might be due to other factors than only demographics.just think about it: people who don’t like children in a society die out in a society where you get children only when you wan them.

There must be more, but hey, I am angry.

Peak Oil, the problem or the solution?

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I was reading the three futures black swan posting by Paul, and wondered whether Peak Oil would really be such a disruption to the way we work. It seems indeed that Peak oil is now mainstream in the public debate, but the consequences of it are rarely thought through. The camps seem to be divided between believers, predicting catastrophe, and unbelievers. Even in the most oil-dependent country in the world, the discussion on energy policy seems mostly superficial. In this it reminds me of the Climate change debate. It seems that there is scant real planning for the future going on, just doomsayers and deniers.

The debate going on, it looks like even normal economic concepts, like demand and offer, are forgotten.

A marginal revolution

Wikipedia defines Peak oil as the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. I would like to use a different concept. The peak production as defined above depends on the price, and we could imagine prices to be higher, so much higher that a lot of now uneconomical fields go into production. So “ peak oil” is in fact only defined at a certain price. Of course, in the end production will eventually have to go down, but it will go down first because extraction is not cost effective at the price people are ready to pay for it, not because there is no oil left anymore. In the end, oil will never run out, only the price will rise so high nobody will buy it anymore.

For this blog, I will use the definition of peak oil as the price of oil where major alternatives become as viable as oil itself. Within this definition, peak oil is reached for different uses at different prices. Taxes and subsidies are equally part of the picture.

Most of these alternatives need investments and constant demand, making them a bad bet when prices are just fluctuating, leading to peaks and troughs in demand for the new resource (while for oil these investments are in place). It is not worth investing in the alternatives that risk to be uneconomical for most of the years to come. However, once the prices move to a long term high, the picture changes.

For home heating, peak oil is already reached: for a price of 100 US$ a barrel, it is apparently worthwhile to build a passive house in a temperate climate, as people are doing so in droves. So the energy bill of the house for heating becomes approximately zero. You only have to calculate the depreciation of the system. Even for older houses, insulation is cutting the bill with up to 3/4. The move from petrol-based heating (gasoline) to gas or even heath pumps (nuclear) is general, thanks to a little subsidy left or right. Indeed, this is taking into account the subsidies, but as heating oil in general is not taxed like other goods, this argument cuts both ways.

For decentralised electricity production the use of solar power in sunny countries with a low cost of roof space and a high cost of energy transport, might already be reached. Wind energy is not far behind. When prices are high, the use of bio-fuels seems to be economical in countries with a good year round vegetable production potential.

For centralised electricity production nuclear energy seems to be an alternative I am reluctant to support, and as much as a loath it, coal is still around.

For fueling cars the production of bio-diesel based on palm oil seems to be economical at high price points (perhaps 120 USD/barrel, we saw it already happen a few years ago), but in the long run the use of electricity as a plug-in option for hybrids or as a full electrical option seem relevant. The problem with electricity seems to be more the infrastructure and the upfromt investment cost than the economical use of energy (just like with the passive houses). Indeed, if highways would be standard providing a “third rail” like for subways, we would be wondering who authorized the use of dangerous inflammable technology like the internal combustion engine.

Overall, there are many alternatives for oil, and more to come, each of them economical from a different price point. The most promising for the moment is energy savings (house insulation, less consuming cars, less car use, etc.). However, as prices rise, innovation will explode.

In the long run, under constant incentives from prices and government propaganda, the silent hand of alternative choices shows up: what about changing a house with 4×4 in the countryside for an apartment in a livable city and all the money for holidays you can imagine? What about just using a plastic case instead of aluminum?

Lack of price elasticity is worse than high prices.

For the moment, the price of energy is linked to oil: the other energy sources, coal, nuclear energy, wind-energy, bio-fuel, solar energy, sell their energy on a market where the price is more or less set by oil.

It seems like oil production is on average rather stable, while prices are not.

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Total global oil production, in millions of barrels per day, annual 2002-2010 (data source: EIA)

With an economy at full swing, the demand for oil grows and so do prices, as production lags. If suddenly oil prices go up, there is a problem. More fuel economical machines are not installed on the spot: the demand for oil stays fixed until some buyers drop out of the market and essentially close shop: a crisis. Prices of products go up, demand for products goes down: crisis. Less demand for fuel.

Also when oil production is under thread (you know, the Middle East), prices will skyrocket, with a serious risk of a recession. As oil production is not very flexible, prices will go up suddenly and come down crashing.

The roller coaster ride in the price evolution are a systemic risk to the global economy. But also to the national economy and the household. I did not do any simulations, but it seems reasonable to put that the economy would be able to hum on more nicely at a predictably and steadily rising price.
This calls for a policy by the government to protect the economy by diminishing the risk posed by petrol price peaks.

Peak oil and global warming.

So what do we do?

We can chose to ignore global warming AND ignore the whole peak oil debate.

In the case of global warming, this will probably not help, as the scientific consensus on it is quite huge and, moreover, if you visit the Alps you can see the glacier’s decline. At a certain stage the warming will impose itself. it will be way to late to stop any of it, but in any case, there will be a need for investments in air-conditioning, roof insulation, storm and water works. Meanwhile, we could expect the oil prices not to come down at the 20 US$/barrel anytime soon, as the whole world seems to be getting out of poverty. With a fast growing demand, even with unlimited reserves, it will be difficult to pump fast enough. As most of the oil sits in dangerous countries, the current roller coaster of prices seems to be inevitable.

A policy trying to limit the impact of oil shocks would even in this case be good policy. Just drilling more would not change the prices a lot, but making the economy as a whole less dependent on oil, or energy if possible, would. What are these measures? The same as what you would do if you believe in global warming.

What kind of society?

If we know global warming is coming and oil prices are expected to go up, an active policy to go for oil and coal independence is urgent.

With the current technology, it might be possible to nurture decentralised systems or go for evermore centralisation. Solar panels on the roof or fusion energy.

Or we could hedge our bets. We don’t want to nuclear power providers get into a powerful position like the Arabs are, so the development of more diffuse power production is a necessity to balance the centralised powerhouses.

Indeed, big oil, big energy and big finance have a similar track record. They wield enormous power. They are able to resist reform, even if the systemic risk becomes too high. Democratic control is often failing.

Concluding, as any response to the increasingly unstable petrol prices will take time, I would agree with Paul that the first ten years of Peak oil will be rough.