Author Archives: Geert Vansintjan

Admitting Failure: Join the Posse (Only for real Men)

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I am all in favour of evolution in development practice and thinking, where normally, it is more important to cull downright dismal failures than to select only the best, as evolution needs variability to work its magic.

Admitting mistakes or difficulties is also part of every professional relationship between partners. Part of the reputation of ICRC is generated by its tendency to speak rather bluntly about its own capacities in private, while the toeing of the party line by the staff of other organisations (say UNICEF) lessens the confidence in the organisation. However, when looking at the public image, it might be the other way round. It might seem that, when you need direct funding from the broader public, admitting failure is not the best practice.

I have some serious questions on the trend to focus on admitting failure. I will focus on elements:

  1. Who can admit failure?
  2. What does this failure say about the respect organisations have for beneficiaries?
  3. The posse rides again, where do we ride it to?

Who can admit failure?
When I look at who is leading the charge in “admitting failure”, it seems to me that big failures can be admitted by organisations who interact mostly with a more sophisticated donor public: governments (World bank) or better informed people (who supports engineers without borders?). For these organisations it seems to me to be fully in line with the analysis of Marc: it is just something to run with the posse, without a real cost. It is signaling credibility. However, if they need a separate thematic line to treat with failure, what have their (transparent) evaluation and monitoring departments been doing until now? An aspect that cannot be addressed with the failure approach is the recognition that systems are inherently complex.

When other organisations publish failures, it is closer to a “lessons learned” story: we know this works, we applied it there, we overlooked this element, it did not work). What is being talked about by these organisation is not failure, but evaluation and short feedback loops, in order to be able to correct early in the project. Small NGOs don’t have official evaluation strategies, they just learn their lessons the hard way, and take them on board.

Admitting failure looks very much like extremely badly conceived monitoring and evaluation when described this way. Indeed I fear this failure posse might interfere with the other posse towards professional and transparent evaluation and results measurement. The World Bank should know better.

Please some respect
The stories about failure often describe projects that were implemented and afterwards it seemed not to work, because of a simple aspect not taken on board. The Merry-go-round water pump is the case in point. I notice that the evidence base of this project was weak, and implementation at a large scale happened before a decent assessment was made.

This echoes the discussion on the Millenium Villages in the Guardian where do-gooders rush into implementation of everything they think will help the villagers, claiming it would be immoral to let them wait until an evidence base is established. I sympathise with them, but a minimum of monitoring must be possible between a pilot or startup phase and full-blown execution. Of course, the victims of all this activism are poor, and poor are by definition powerless. The organisation can just move on, looking for fresh victims. There are enough of them : “the poor will always be with you”. With enough failure, we can assure they stay that way.

The posse rides again: where to ?
Failure looks to me like the spin off from a good tendency. The tendency to professionalism, to stop looking at the world as it should be, but as it is. The need for evaluations and feedback loops. The need for research and evidence base. The need to document what works and what not. Part of this professional approach is that failure is just another piece of transparent information from every actor.

However, like we saw the “program approach” coming instead of making good projects, it might be that the Posse on Failure attracts more riders than the one of professional information and risk management.

CSR and Public – Private partnership: before, we used to call this propaganda, corruption or tender procedures.

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This my contribution to the first Aid Blog Forum on Corporate Social Responsibility.

When I look at the different contributions on CSR, the negativity of the academia and practitioners oozes from my screen. For good reason. Who pays the piper calls the tune. And the tune  set by a private partner is seldom purely “needs based”. There will be need for visibility and publicity (CSR is mostly about signallingand branding, Marc Bellemare). The moneyshark will come with his own ideas of what is important and what not (please add at least a micro credit chapter). And you will have to say yes.

What annoys me most is the blurring of the lines. How fast does CSR become single sourcing? How much of what we call CSR can be classified as propaganda, how much are the lines of good procurement procedures blurred by it?

Corporations have an identity, with different concentric circles. In the outer segment, we see branding and marketing. These signal the view of the corporation as they want us to see them. At the core, there is the real identity: cutting corners or maintaining quality even if business is slow. Some companies treat their employees well, some don’t. I could well imagine that CSR fits in the core of a company. When a soccer club sponsors UNICEF, I might believe it is. When a clothing giant campaigns on HIV/AIDS, it looks like marketing to me. It degrades the Cause and puts everything at the service of the bottom line.

Just like developing countries are victim to fickle donors looking for visibility,  CSR campaigns that are aimed to be marketing will sell the soul of their partners, and run off with the next posse.

humanitarian action should act like an insurance including preventive care. It should not depend on the media when aid comes, it should be send when you hit rock bottom. Of course, this kind of assistance acts before children are dying. Very seldom star-based initiatives support flexible funding to UN-bureaucracies. However, this is what we probably need. Prevention is more efficient. Needs based allocation is better than media based allocation. We have standards for servicing the affected populations we can be held accountable to.

Institutional philanthropists and some CSR companies do support such an approach. Most private donors however, don’t. In humanitarian assistance, most CSR seems to follow the flow, and create political incentives against Good humanitarian Donorship. Bono criticized countries for not giving “as much as IKEA” to the Horn of Africa. As far as I know, Ikea does not contribute to the Central Emergency Response Fund.

Somewhere, we must draw the line.

Humanitarian needs and the way we fund the Horn of Africa

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Some important annual milestones for needs based humanitarian donor budgeting just passed: the publication of the 2011 Global Humanitarian Assistance Report and the Mid Year review of the OCHA Consolidated Appeals.

The GHA report analyses the available data on humanitarian funding. It informs you on the reality of funding, in contrast with the fluidity of donor declarations and promises. Donors with a high media visibility might turn out to have low commitments . As an operator in the field, it tells you who funds what where. Compared to other sectors, funding seems to move in a direction where, according to the GHD consensus, more efficient humanitarian assistance is possible. The mid year review gives a snapshot of the needs and funding shortfalls in the different crises, as it is reported through the UN-system.
One of the aims of both documents is to get a better allocation of resources, to have more predictability and better match the donor budgets with the needs.

Indeed, the unspoken consensus on humanitarian assistance is that humanitarian assistance is a moral imperative, a human right, stronger than the “human rights”. When the shit really hits the fan, we will come and help you out. You can count on it. Everywhere. Anywhere. You will get at least what is promised in the Sphere standards. We will not let you sink lower. Your life and dignity will be protected.

Therefore, humanitarian assistance should be organised more like an insurance than like a charity. What is the current mechanics of humanitarian funding, and how is the political economy now, and what should change to become more like an insurance?

The mechanics: The budget cycle
The donor budget cycle starts for most government donors in march of the year before. The first draft of annual (or rolling multi annual) budget is prepared before the mid-year review is received. The only data on needs available are those from the year before. The budget is approved around November in countries with a working government, meaning before Common Appeal is even shared. The input for the budget cycle comes from the common appeal for the year before the budget. Even the review comes too late. The budget cycle is conducive for stable, long term investment in an insurance like scheme, with stable funding.

The mechanics: sudden disasters: the additional funds delusion
When a sudden overwhelming disaster strikes funding of the humanitarian budget is redirected to this new need. Most donors provide with a reserve of 20 % of their budget for sudden onset disasters.
Calls will be placed to liberate “additional funds”. These funds will come in the first place of course from the budgets within the same programme: the allocations for flexible funding or for complex crisis response that was not yet paid in the same year.These other crises will be “forgotten”: all attention goes to the media hog.
If the situation is politically overwhelming, the head of the humanitarian department will have a good hand to fight for additional budgets from other programmes. These will normally be development budgets. Unspent development funds will be transferred to humanitarian assistance. It is extremely rare budgets from outside the development sphere (e.g. unemployment benefits) get transferred to the humanitarian budget for a crisis.

Political economy for budgeting based on sudden disaster spending
This approach leads to an incentive structure for the level of the humanitarian budget that runs against the consensus on humanitarian assistance as a right:
The visibility of complex crisis and predictable funding is limited
The politically experienced needs are mostly in sudden onset disasters.
When it comes to “important crises” the voted humanitarian budget is irrelevant. You could as well accept the need for flexibility, and scrape the money together when disaster strikes. It will make you look good.

The political economy of spending in sudden onset disasters pushes against the principles of Good Humanitarian Donorship and pushes the long term budget provisions down.
Why would you have a high humanitarian budget if you can have a cabinet meeting with media coverage and add from other budgets when there is a political need? In this reasoning, the humanitarian needs are secondary.
It is indeed remarkable that countries with a “presidential” approach to humanitarian spending have lower annual budgets, but also have troops on standby when CNN is filming.

It is normal that the public and even most politicians think humanitarian assistance happens meanly in natural disasters, while in reality 80 % of the funds is spent in complex crises, mostly in civil war zones.

However, something more is at work. I like to call it the incredible moral fibre of the humanitarian donor and agency administration. In some countries, the flexible funding of needs based allocation mechanisms is and stays well funded. Moreover, disaster preparedness and prevention get a good funding, inspite of the political economy.

An alternative approach? Funding instruments
The humanitarian operations by the main actors have moved fast towards an accountable system trying to deliver services according to standards.

Donors should fund instruments that build up reserves and allocate towards the most important needs today in the shifting humanitarian crises. These instruments should be accountable and look for efficiently delivered effectiveness.

There is already an interlocking system with enough redundancy that does just this:
The CERF, DREF and ICRC core funding act as a global system of insurance for humanitarian needs. They can act in sudden disasters and fund forgotten long-term crises.
Most humanitarian agencies have a flexible fund for allocation according to needs. The UNICEF thematic fund for humanitarian assistance, IRA at WFP, SFERA at the FAO, etc.
ECHO acts like one giant needs based fund, with good management practices, oversight and quality control.
There are country level pooled funds and Emergency Response funds.

Apart from funding “needs based”instruments a donor will have to keep some hands on presence in crises that are perceived as important: human solidarity must be done and must be seen to be done. This should not obscure that working through insurance-like mechanisms is far superior when talking about efficiency and effectiveness.

However, there is little political gain in funding these instruments: when the list comes out of donor support for disaster relief, the budget will be spent, and there are no more funds available for bringing your country in the spotlight. Responsible donors and agencies manage however to keep up this kind of funding.

One fund or interlocking systems ?
Politically, the creation of one big fund seems interesting. . It would simplify the message and management for the donors. One check every year. However, in order to have an innovative, learning system, with enough redundancy to pick up the slag when one actor fails, a further development based on interlocking and sometimes competing mechanisms seems indicated.

Insurances need assurances: blank checks or value for money?
However, there is one issue with these instruments: most of them start from the hypothesis that all actors in humanitarian assistance deliver quality and value for money. Comparative evaluations and competitive bidding on value for money are rare. Most attention goes to effectiveness, not to efficiency within a certain quality standard for effectiveness. The instruments for creating instruments for assurance on value for money exist however: there are standards for service delivery and accountability, that could be used for diving prices down and quality delivery up.

These assurances will be the cornerstone towards an insurance-like system

Including preparedness and prevention
Like every insurance, there should be in-build incentives for preparedness and prevention spending, as one of the most efficient humanitarian approaches.

Pushing Good Humanitarian Donorship
The gatekeepers for information should brainwash the politicians and the general public by highlighting the positive contribution of flexible accountable and needs based instruments. The current practices by the main humanitarian actors are more geared towards monetising sudden onset crises, hoping it sticks into the general budget. This should be an active approach, worth a significant portion of the budget.

Some possibilities are obvious:
Ocha should, for every crisis, mention first the contributors to CERF; the same could be requested from ICRC for core and IFRC for DREF. There should be an effort also by teh EU to highlight the importance of flexible funding above ad hoc funding.
Pressure should be as little as possible on “additional funding” the pressure should be to increase the budget for needs based funds. Even pressure for flexible funding to agencies does not have the necessary flexibility to respond exactly to the needs.
The overall budget should be used in rankings. This is why GHA is so important. Rankings per crisis are important, but should be presented always with overall rankings.
To move to an insurance thinking, contributions could be presented preferably as a part of the GNP or per capita, instead of on an absolute basis.

What matters for increasing the humanitarian budget?
An increase in the humanitarian donor budget will not be directly caused by an increase in humanitarian needs. It will depend in the first place on the importance a donor country gives to humanitarian assistance in general. It will be based on the conviction that Humanitarian assistance is a right. It will depend on conviction of the politicians and the general public that assistance should be given more, and that the money is well spend.

This means that the moral case for assistance must be promoted until it becomes a consensus, first in each country, second globally.

It also means that vetting humanitarian partners is necessary. An insurance type of coverage is only possible with decent standards. Standards for service delivery, accountability and evaluation make it possible to compare the operations of the different actors, Multilaterals and INGOs. It does not mean that data or evaluations will convince anybody, it means that those advocating the moral case can do so from the high ground, knowing the tax payers’ money will be well spent.

The biggest enemy for this approach could be the NGO, or multilateral that can make a killing with ad hoc funding.

Markets in everything: 2021: the secondary market for development products.

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Francis Watanabe is project portfolio manager for the government. He acquires development interventions on the secondary market, to add to his portfolio on early child development. Innovators, like the Gates Foundation or Oxfam, or even local governments, start up their interventions, and after the first rated evaluation sell them off to the highest bidder on the secondary market. Interventions from a reliable provider, with a good results projection and long life span are in high demand. Buyers normally will pay for all the investments and overhead, and are prepared to pay the innovator for the further project management. The management fee for high yielding projects can be set quite high. Private sector innovators with a good success rate can earn a good living, and in some sectors, like micro-finance, most innovators are from the private sector. In early child development however, most innovators are former NGOs or foundations.

Watanabe is expected to reach a very good results/cost ratio for his portfolio, better than the average from the donor group, so he cannot just rely on market data. He also has to research on the latest scientific findings and try to identify upcoming new techniques or new innovators. He can also improve his ratings by identifying local champions in difficult environments. Real bargains can be concluded when other countries decide to switch to other priorities, and they offload their old portfolio.

Thanks to the secondary market approach, most donors have managed to improve the development results of their work with a factor two or even three, all on a stable budget.

It seems like this market approach just had to happen when the different building blocks for the system were available:

  • In order to have a functional market, knowledge asymmetry should be solved as much as possible. The transparency drive in development funding provided the information needed. The International Aid Transparency Initiative lead to the availability of data on every intervention by every actor in a comparable way. IATI started just did this.
  • The results based approach lead to a system where interventions should deliver on the promised results.
  • Standards in results reporting and impact evaluations led to the rating of projects for a specific development outcome. Independent rating agencies emerged from evaluation and audit consultancies.

The acceptance of the Sphere standard as the absolute poverty line set a baseline and brought it all together.

The real breakthrough came with the sphere standards, setting concrete lines for absolute poverty. Donors wanted to spend the bulk of their money on palpable morality & evidence based interventions for the poor, instead of for vague institutional goals or long term elusive economical growth.

Inevitably once the results based approach was accepted, coördination and partnership moved from the agenda. Indeed, as ownership and the “do no harm principle”were part of the basic set of principles, debating coördination and partnership was not necessary any more. Any intervention bypassing ownership issues would get a bad rating for sustainability. Partnerships and coördination became more organic: it had to serve the development goals. Pragmatically the operators moved from partnership to competition and back again, according to the needs of the beneficiaries.

However, still a hefty 30 % of the interventions happen outside of the system. This is normal, as most of the interventions that don’t cover basic services are more difficult to assess on their results potential and their value would be too difficult to estimate. Indeed: important work still happens in the rule of law, security, democracy, governance and economic development. However, a secondary market for this type of projects still seems a few decades away.

The Black Rabbit and Permaculture

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I have been very quiet on my blog lately, as I was totally absorbed by my garden. It is the first time in many years I am living in a home with a real garden where I can grow my produce and I enjoy every minute of it. As I vaguely remember being an agricultural engineer, with some solid experience with small-scale farming systems in Latin America and Africa, I was excited to get on with it. although I must admit that there has been a lot of sowing and growing, but not yet a bountiful harvest.Apparently, the thinking in agriculture from those traditional smallholders has seeped into me. Central is the quest for maximize the use of available resources (land, harvest residue, water) instead of just keeping them organised. .As leeks will be far apart for most of their growing season, why not growing radish, cress or even carrots in between them? Can I diminish the evaporation from the beans by growing a row of corn around them? Mulching with lawn clippings or with wood chippings? What about damage of blackbirds, snails, slugs, Cabbage whites?
Why should I grow dwarf beans when I can have beanstalks? I am also trying just to accept my loss when plague strikes, and apply some tricks to save water. The limits of my environment show starkly, and I should get some pesticides or fertilizer if I want to get really impressive results. But why should I.  I enjoy the constant experimentation, without a trace of RCT.Just now I learned that there seems to be a movement applying these central-African approaches: permaculture.

However, this kind of thinking doesn’t go down well in my more traditionally minded environment. My chaotic patches of multiple-layered inter-cropping systems are just not done. Uniform plots wit mono-cultures and straight lines are the rule.

On top of this new obsession with gardening, I started to sport again, as my tendonitis finally abated. No marathons for me any more, but I am building up to do some “sprint triathlons”. OK, that is only one eighth. This morning I was biking on a lonely bike-path along the canal, when I was surprised to see the rabbits lost all their fear for cyclists. It was there I saw the Black Rabbit. Just one black rabbit among its grey brothers and sisters. It might be the one who got away. Perhaps the group has lost the “wild”factor through interbreeding with tame animals. I wonder what will happen when the hunting season arrives. Although, I guess humans don’t hunt from bicycles.

The Sphere Project: Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response and the Poverty Line.

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The Sphere standards and humanitarian efficiency.

The latest edition of the Sphere Handbook was presented on the 23rd of June, and the more I read it and think about it, the more relevant I find this standard.

“The Sphere Handbook is a voluntary code and self-regulatory tool for quality and accountability[…] The Handbook does not offer practical guidance on how to provide certain services […] it explains what needs to be in place in order to ensure a life with dignity for the affected population.”

The standard is based on the experiences in the field of some of the main actors in Humanitarian assistance, and prefers localization above rigid compliance. It sets practical service levels on everything from protection, coördination, water, sanitation and hygiene, food security and nutrition to shelter and health services, but it leaves it open to the actors to decide how to reach these service levels, leaving room for innovation and improvisation. The “do no harm”principle refers explicitly to the strengthening of local institutions.

Although it is a voluntary code, a generally accepted standard is a god-send for evaluators. Suddenly interventions of different organisation can be compared against the same standard. While in the past evaluations were rarely comparing the efficiency and effectivity of different actors, this becomes feasible. Although the Sphere standards are voluntary, they will become the yardstick against which to measure outcomes.

It is difficult to underestimate the potential effect of having a common standard for evaluating outcomes in driving the quality and efficiency of humanitarian interventions. NGOs will be able to prove how much better their cost/benefit ratio is when compared to multilateral agencies. iNGOs will be able to prove the need for international staff to reach the required quality. Where efficiency and quality gains are possible, the policy for outsourcing and in-sourcing will be scrutinized.

The Sphere standard will be a “living” standard, but it should be rigid enough to drive the accountability an innovation processes.

Looking at the past months, I am surprised to find only limited enthusiasm with the results-based crowd for the Sphere standards.

The Sphere standards and the development paradigm

The sphere standards belong squarely in the humanitarian paradigm. Humanitarian assistance is a moral imperative. The aid is aimed at saving lives, alleviate suffering and preserve human dignity. The support should be given in a neutral and impartial way.

Mentioning the Sphere standards in relation to the development paradigm is not considered appropriate. Indeed: development is seldom framed as only a moral imperative. It rests on the crossroads of different values. The definition of development aid is vague and mixes values (gender equality, human rights,…) with economical development (poverty reduction, infrastructure,…) and governance. Often, in the presentation of development cooperation, poverty alleviation is linked to economic results and even to direct interests for the population in the North, such as getting rich by having more markets or the need to limit immigration. By definition, the actual development interventions are not the result of a single moral imperative, but the result of a political compromise between the needs of the population, the needs of the different local institutions and political powers, and the needs of the international actors.

Within the development paradigm, as there is always an interplay of factors, it is difficult to focus the intervention every actor on its comparative advantage. Institution building is particularly difficult, and national governments are supposed to deliver sophisticated services before they even can deliver the basic functions of the state, like security and the rule of law. Foreign donors try their hand at poverty alleviation, institution building, governance and economic growth, sometimes with little to show for.

In some failed states, this means that the only basic services available are those provided by the humanitarian actors, while development assistance focuses on elusive institution building goals. The poorest of the poor, living with less than Sphere standard level services, are out in the cold. However, the moral imperative to help these poor still stands. The moral imperative ruling humanitarian assistance, should protect everybody in a situation that normally leads to humanitarian interventions, even if the state would like to build institutions one day.

The necessity to assure that the poor receive this basic level of services is recognised by Paul Collier in the Bottom Billion, where he advocates for alternative service delivery mechanisms, and the added value for focusing aid on the poor is highlighted by Owen Barder in his presentation to the British House of Lords.

With the Sphere standards, there exists a framework to prioritize assistance according to the needs to the poorest, based on a moral imperative. Once the conditions improve, the more complex development priority setting could take over.

The Sphere standard as an absolute poverty line

The current international poverty line (was it US$1.25 or 2?) is only used as an indicator for poverty. If you are below this line, it doesn’t really help you. Being poor is not leading to any specific action of the international community. On the other hand, there are also the Millennium Development Goals that set benchmarks for overall government action, but little that tells a poor what he could expect as services.

Moving to the Sphere standard for service delivery to the poor, would create instantly a well defined program. It would also solve the moral issue concerning the pockets of poverty in middle income.

Is it necessary to put the Sphere standard on the agenda in Busan? I think so.

Is rent-seeking effective development practice?

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I must admit, I only now read “The undercover Economist”. It made me look with new eyes to the set-up of my environment: development and humanitarian assistance. It made me also look again at some behaviour of development actors in the

Rent-seeking is a natural tendency in the economy: It is always easier to try to make more money without producing anything than going through the effort of competing on the delivery. Typical examples of rent-seeking are protection rackets, cartels and monopolies, regulation or corporatist behavior to keep other entrants in the market out.

Rent-seeking is something we link normally to “corrupt third world bureaucracy”.

However, to what degree is rent-seeking behaviour embedded in the development thinking? Are organisations and institutions better understood when we accept that they maximize income and power instead of doing good according to their mandate and expertise? I will try to highlight some consensus thinking that carries risks for promoting rent-seeking behaviour. In order to decide whether this risk translates in real live rent seeking behavior, a more thorough study would be necessary.

I will touch briefly on 3 elements: the role of the gatekeeper and coördinator, government assistance and humanitarian assistance.

Development and humanitarian aid thinking is being dominated by some initiatives that claim to boost efficiency through the promotion of principles. Do these principles favour innovation and competition or do they strengthen entrenched powers and lobbies?

In most of these efforts, coördination and the role of the coördinator is central. OECD is leading the Paris Agenda on the global level, while the World Bank is leading the budget support efforts in the field. This gives both organisations indeed the possibility to boost their influence, power and ultimately, resources. The discourse of e.g. UNDP on their place at the table for sector wide approaches is telling: it looks like the benefits of being bestowed with the central role are important. The danger for rent seeking behaviour by these central players is important. However, it is not easy to separate a “well deserved leadership role” from the role of a rent-seeking gate-keeper: in most cases the well deserved leadership role could make some rent-seeking possible, with overall positive effects. However, the way the World Bank used flawed research to promote its role in the past is hinting that rent-seeking cannot be excluded.

In the humanitarian reform, the central place of OCHA and the UN-system is officially recognized, while there is de-facto competition from the NGO-sector, the Red Cross movement and MSF.

The OCHA headquarters extra-budgetary expenses increased from 20.5 millions in 2005 to 70 millions in 2009. The overall assessment is that OCHA became a lot more responsive and efficient in that period. However, this is a huge increase, that could have been used elsewhere in the humanitarian system.

The Paris Declaration is the father of all aid efficiency efforts. Only five principles underpin the Paris Declaration. Absent are poverty or governance results. The focus is on the process of aid transfers. By prioritizing the process an not the results, it entrenches the power relations within the described process. A declaration more geared to results would leave more leeway for innovation, in instruments, partnerships and processes.

The Paris Declaration starts from the absolute ownership by developing countries. This squarely puts the monopoly on strategies in the hands of the programme country government. Not the population, nor the Parliament. On a lot of issues this is normal (e.g. security, elections, even education). However, on other issues crucial for development, other actors might be better placed: banking, industrial development, even some forms of private education. Moreover, in some areas where government is the duty bearer, they might be able to limit themselves to a normative role. By putting the ownership fully in the hands of government, the Paris declaration limits the need for getting the backing and legitimacy from the parliament and the population. So it would not be surprising to see the governments getting Paris Type Assistance to have little problems to keep power, just like any petrol based government. This principle is even more risky when considering the number of governments without a popular mandate or without proper feedback systems. It is a fact that poverty alleviation is not a central thought for most governments in the world, not even in the North.

The second principle is that donors align behind the country government objectives and use local systems. Of course, when dealing with core government services, and the local systems are not broken beyond repair, this seems to be a good idea. However, development assistance is more than core government services and local tender procedures are often very much “tied” to national providers that are not always the most efficient or lead to a higher price, as the local market can be rigged.

Harmonisation is the next principle, with different aspects: donor countries coordinate (read: form a cartel, often lead by the member with the highest capacity such as the World Bank or DFID). On the other hand: the simplification of procedures and sharing of information are weapons against rent-seeking.

The other two principles, results and mutual accountability are possibly a protection against rent-seeking: if results are measured and acted upon, this feedback loop would lead to more results, and the increased accountability would equally improve the effectiveness.

The Paris Declaration obviously protects the signing parties, governments and important multilaterals from competition, while including a few guarantees against abuses.

Good Humanitarian Donorship is the other important “principles” document. The principles are legion: 23 principles, many of which are clearly putting results for the beneficiaries central: Principles 1 to 3 states what the results should be, for whom, and how we assure the beneficiaries get the results.

The general principles mostly strengthen this results oriented drive: promoting the humanitarian law, timely, needs based funding, involving of the beneficiaries in the humanitarian response, etc.

A risk for rent seeking resides in the needs based allocations: as it are the humanitarian actors who write the needs assessments and run the programmes afterwards, the manipulations of needs assessments is an obvious danger. Moving to a cartel-like approach with joint needs assessments will not solve this risk. An independent needs assessment or review is needed.

Principle 10 supports and promotes the central and unique role of the United nations in providing leadership and coördination, the special role of the Red Cross and the vital role of the UN, Red Cross and NGO’s in implementing the humanitarian action. Why the leadership to the UN and not to the Red Cross? Why do we give the lead on water provision to UNICEF and not to an NGO? Should there really be a lead? It is important to limit rent-seeking that the different competing actors are explicitly kept on board. Due to the mandate and legitimacy of the UN-system with all governments, this central role can be argued, but should also be earned in every crisis again.

Coherent action is needed in the logistics-intensive urgent operations. An hierarchical, army-like structure comes to mind. However, a regulated monopoly could be more effective than the current vague formulation, authorizing to harvest contributions for coördination, without the means to be held accountable. A privileged position is created, without a strong accountability structure.

Without any doubt, a lot of the improvements in the humanitarian system have been facilitated by principle 10. However, there is a risk for rent-seeking if the accountability is not properly in place.

As the main principles, numbered aptly numbered 1 to 10 are overwhelmingly gearing towards results, rent seeking might be more limited within the GHD-approach than in the Paris approach.

The good practices in donor funding however contain some obvious dangers for rent seeking: funding becomes all but guaranteed for the different humanitarian organisations, and depends solely on the needs of the beneficiaries, not on the efficiency of the execution. New requests are not met by prioritizing, but by new funding.

As an antidote, the standards, accountability and learning principles strengthen the oversight and innovation. Oversight and innovation makes it easier to identify rent-seeking and break entrenched interests.

The role of the civil society is generally recognised in development thinking. In humanitarian assistance the NGOs are even given a “vital role”.

Concluding, in the GHD principles, there are risks of rent-seeking, mostly by creating gate-keeper and coordinator functions. In the Paris Declaration this behaviour seems to most entrenched, and a further study whether this actually leads to rent-harvesting by these gate-keepers would be necessary.

Robin Hood Tax: I voted for it before I voted against it.

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I am in favour of a financial transaction tax, because we can.

Indeed, we all know nothing is sure except for death and taxes, so I honestly think that if financial transactions can be taxed, we should at least try.

For the moment, labour is heavily taxed, while we surely want more work. Consumption is heavily taxed, while most people like to consume, and according to classical economic theory, consumption is a good thing. This is why we are always looking for things to tax, to lift the burden, mostly from labour. If we tax financial transactions, how much can we rake in for financing the global or national commons, before the tax will affect negatively the economy? Or would there be an ideal level, where up to a certain point, taxing financial transactions diminishes volatility while not affecting liquidity to a degree it damages the economy? Most articles and blogs I read seem to argue that financial transactions can be taxed, and up to a certain point, the total effect of taxing these transactions would even be positive, like taxing gambling, leading to less negative externalities. So I definitely think we should tax financial transactions, but we should be cautious and have good feedback systems in place, so we can raise the level until the optimal utility for society is obtained.

What should we use this tax for? This tax should be used to finance the budget of the government that raises the tax. It should be diluted in the total budget, because it is necessary to limit the pressure to raise this tax to a level that is defined not by the carrying capacity of the financial system, but because of the funding needs of one department or sector. We could consider the tax can finance the national government or global governance.

This tax cannot be seen under the same rules as pollution: “the polluter pays” means you pay to redress damages. Most financial transactions don’t do any damages (remittances, foreign direct investment, etc.), while some speculative transactions can do damages or at least don’t bring much added value to the overall economy.

So using the financial transaction tax to diminish the overall tax burden is a good policy, up to a level probably with less externalities than taxes on labour or consumption.

But what if we allocate the financial transaction tax to climate change adaptation or development? The group setting the tax level would be the environmental lobby, craving for income, balanced by the financial sector wanting to limit this transfer. I would be surprised if the result of this power struggle would deliver optimal results for the environment or the financial sector.

The environment and development should be financed as much as needed and affordable; while the financial transaction tax should be as high as useful to maximise its benefits. The two should not be directly linked.

A few more links on Robin Hood:

Galileo Day Campaign: 29 February 2012

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Reposting, because it only gets more actual:

The day to celebrate the Earth and Science

Leap day is the single day we all think about our place in the universe, and how we know that place; it honors the earth we live on and our knowledge of the science of nature.

This is why we propose to baptize the 29th of February 2012 “Galileo Day”: a day of wonder about the beauty of the universe around us. A day to recognize the benefits of science and of the scientific method. Finally, a day to honor the individuals who stand up for what they know is true. As Galileo Day or Earth Moves (Us) Day, Leap Day could eventually become a public holiday.

Now that the last leap day has sped us by, it is the right moment to launch this campaign as it is important to start early. There is still time to weigh the pros and cons of such a day without the need to rush. A day with a message Leap day is the single day where we all think about the workings of the world in the wider universe. Every person using the Western calendar will pause at least once during this day and contemplate the orbit of earth around the sun. An orbit that takes a year, that cannot be exactly divided in a number of full earth days. It is the day every person is just a bit proud that He Understands His Position on a Moving Object in Heliocentric Space, contrary to flat-earthers or geo-centrists, who share, in our mind, a place next to Neanderthals and other extinct species.

Predicting seasons is a practical skill

In the tropical hunter-gatherer societies, seasons came and went, and many of these societies used the lunar year rather than the solar year. It was rather the approximate onset of the seasons than the possibility to predict them with precision that counted. However, agricultural societies or seafaring communities, were very keen on predicting when they could expect the seasons to come. The agricultural societies tended to follow a calendar that follows the movements of the sun, and the skill of predicting the seasons was held in high esteem. Priests and scientists are the custodians of this lore, and we are still in awe of the skills of the Egyptians, Mayans, and Chinese in calculating the calendar and the orbit of the stars.

It is difficult for 21st century city dwellers to grasp the urgency of the precision and difficulty to calculate the calendar up to the accuracy of the need for a leap day. Over the lifetime of a person of 60 years, leap days make a difference of maximum 15 days, while the onset of spring or the rainy season varies by more than 10 days from year to year. In regions with a limited growing season for agriculture, 15 days can mean the difference between life and death. Only through indirect astronomical observations is it possible to define the length of the year precisely. The calculation of the calendar was a practical science for early agricultural societies. However, with the accumulation of scientific knowledge, it became apparent that the reality, as perceived by the direct senses or passed down the generations, did not correspond with the newly acquired powers of observation.

The Greek seafarers and travelers already knew that the earth was not flat, but round (spherical). Near the end of the middle ages, improved observations led Copernicus to propose a new world order, with the Sun in the middle, and the Earth in orbit. As this information initially only travelled in a small circle of intellectuals, this view did not stir much opposition.

E pur si muove! And yet it moves!

This changed when the Renaissance broadened the impact of ideas: hunger for knowledge and science was boosting progress all over Europe and this knowledge was spread more widely. One of the better known proponents of the Renaissance is Galileo Galilei. Galileo was a devout Catholic all through his life. He was a typical renaissance man and well-rounded scientist: a philosopher, physicist, astronomer, and above all, the one considered as the father of the scientific method. He worked from a hypothesis, he tried to test his hypothesis through rigorous experiments, and was ready to accept the results of his experiments instead of his own cherished ideas.

Galileo improved the telescope, invented in the Netherlands, and soon became one of the leading astronomers of his time, able to disprove some long held views of his contemporary scientists. When this public figure gave his full support to the findings of Copernicus, placing the sun in the center and the earth in orbit, his enemies, who had suffered defeat arguing against him on other scientific issues, started a campaign against him. According to some of the clerics, heliocentrism, putting the sun in the center of the universe, was contradictory to the Bible and thus heresy. Galileo took Augustine’s position on the Bible: not everything was to be taken literally, even more so when the passages were meant to be poetic or symbolic. This campaign, like a modern press-smear campaign against a public figure, and the subsequent trial, forced Galileo to recant his position on an object orbiting around the sun. We are talking about the inquisition here, and he was probably glad to make it alive. According to popular legend, Galileo muttered after recanting his theory: and yet it moves…. Recognition of the beauty of the world and the benefits of science Indeed, it still moves us, the earth, spinning around its axis, spinning around the sun and around the center of the Milky Way. Galileo died in 1642 and in 1758 the Church authorized the full publication of Galileo’s work. The acceptance of the Copernican world view was postponed, but as it was grounded in reality, observation and scientific method, it prevailed. This is not the story of faith against science, it is the story of jealous competitors bringing down a brilliant man through a public campaign based on prejudice. And ultimately, the scientific method prevailed, but at a huge personal cost for the involved individual. While Galileo was banned from public life, he wrote what is now considered to be one of the main works of physics ever, and the basis of the work by Newton and others. He is known as the father of modern science, while his enemies can be said to be the at the origins of the tabloid method of justice.

Leap day, Galileo day, a day to celebrate the Earth and Science

29 February 2012: Galileo / Earth moves day. We would like to propose to baptize the 29th of February “Galileo Day”: a day of wonder about the beauty of the universe around us. A day of recognition of the benefits of science and of the scientific method. Finally, a day to honor the individuals who stand up for what they know is true.

In the schools, it would be good to highlight on this day the history of the human knowledge, and the facts on our position in the universe. Scientific institutions should certainly take a day off, and governments should allow their personnel to attend to Galileo day celebrations. Post Scriptum:

Definition of Galileo Day

The 29th of February. A day of wonder about the beauty of the universe around us. A day of recognition of the benefits of science and of the scientific method. Finally, a day to honor the individuals who stand up for what they know is true.

Call it a day

Leap Day would be a logical name, as it is already in use. However, does it speak sufficiently to the imagination? Galileo Day seems rich with images and meaning (like Columbus Day). However, Galileo is very much part of the Western heritage, and the meaning of this name might be lost beyond the people educated in the fine print of European history. Earth Moves Day is nice, but could be confused with Earth Day, held on the spring equinox or the 22nd of April. Another option would be to allude to the centripetal force that holds us in place, and go for Rodaytion.

For now, as one of the editors has just finished a divine pasta dinner accompanied by a superb Italian wine, Galileo Day is the favorite. However, we are open to support another name, depending on the quality of the associated food and drinks.

Not longer, but deeper commitments for more aid predictability

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It is a truth universally acknowledged, that one of the major problems in development is the unpredictability of aid. It is taken on face value that this can be reached by introducing long-term commitments, 3-4 years, and preferably beyond. It seems to me this is the wrong approach. Deepening commitments would lead to more predictability. If badly done, long-term commitments could lead to even less predictability.

Lessons from Egypt
William Easterly wrote a nice summary on why autocrats eventually fail to adapt to changing circumstances. They can deliver immobility which is often misread for stability. It is not: with the end of the reign comes inevitably the disruption and chaos: the necessary changes are too important to implement through mere evolution. Dinosaurs don’t evolve into mammals, they are too far gone on a path that was right under different conditions in another era. Long term immobility is not always good for development. Long term predictability should rather be an engagement than a cast in stone approach.

Lessons from the UK budget discussions.
The UK-civil servants don’t get nervous because the government’s budget is annual. This is strange: their salaries are approved annually by something unpredictable as a MP. Their whole livelihood depends on it, they have no plan B, and they don’t panic.

This is because most of the budget (perhaps something like 85 %, I made the numbers up, don’t quote me on them, you get the picture) is based on a sturdy consensus in the society, beyond parties. Another 10 % is deeply entrenched with the current majority. This leaves only 5 % discretionary spending. Those are the nervous people, mostly on a short term contract.

Typically, in the donor development budget, over a legislature, apart from the “assessed” or negotiated contributions to the World Bank, the EU and the UN, nearly everything is discretionary. Longer-term programmes are as discretionary as the short-term ones. Only a wide consensus on the development budget would move it away from this haphazard spending.

The European Commission creates their policy in such a participatory way. They bring on board input from assessments and evaluations, the 27 governments, the civil society and parliament, before proposing a way forward. And after only two years there is a mid-term review. A programme based on such a wide consensus has more chance to be predictable and long-term than a programme built on the wish of a single politician. Such a broad based program can be predictable, even if all the engagements coming from it are short term.

Stop-start development
With a longer term commitment to a country, near the end of the commitment period, a thorough assessment will take place.
Firstly the donor will asses whether they want to stay engaged in the country. The results of the current programme will inform this donor decision, together with factors beyond the country (herd thinking among donors, new themes coming up, other countries become a donor darling, etc. ).
Secondly there must be decided whether the sectors and regions of engagement will stay the same, and thirdly whether they will do the same things in the same way within the sectors.
The result is, from the viewpoint of the recipient in a specific intervention, mostly a lottery. The success or failure of the programme itself will play only a limited role in the decision whether to drop it.
The process can be compared to the end of a regime. It is often preferred to start from a blank slate than to build on what was done earlier.

The cost of continuity and the cost of disruption
For the poor in the third world, continuity is central to development results. Startup costs are notoriously high, there is a learning curve, and development results must not only be obtained, but also made permanent and institutionalised.
The political economy on the donor side is not in line with the needs of the poor. The political benefit of development results is notoriously low for the donor, while the political benefit from aid announcements is high.
As donors are spread thinly over a multitude of sectors, political visibility is obtained by announcing reforms and new programmes, not by pledging continuity of engagement, nor by highlighting results.

Unacceptable reporting requirements
Long-term commitments span 3 to 4 years. This means they sit astride on 2 donor legislatures, and 2 postings of donor officials. Donor reporting “should be” limited, as this leads to “too much transaction costs” (how much does it really cost to forward an internal report? Or even, to publish it on the Internet?). This means that in a 3 year program, the first report that arrives at the donors’ desk arrives after 15 months, and is not acted upon before the project is half way. As international agreements go, they are executed without too much questioning: the cost of concluding them was too high. Abandoning an agreement is not good. As development is innovative, this means that normally the project will not be reassessed and rewired for success after 6 months of failure. The project will only be reported on after 1.5 years, and will probably continue for the last 1.5 years after the first annual report was received as it is too late to save the project anyway. Depth of commitment means close monitoring, in order to understand and allow change as it is necessary.

The evolving consensus: don’t become a dinosaur.
A short feedback loop for the donor would help him to steer its commitments towards his “comfort zone”. The areas of division of labour where the donor finds an internal consensus that they are committed. Annually, the choices in who does what, where, could be reviewed and fine tuned. Evaluations should inform this process at every turn, but also the opinions of the opposition. Rolling programmes become the norm.

After some evolution, the programmes should stabilize around some areas of commitment, where this donor can act predictably. Other areas, where this donor cannot reach this consensus, should probably be left to other actors who can. Like in Humanitarian Assistance, where the Central Emergency Response Fund has the role of rapid response and gap-filling where there are unaddressed needs, the World Bank and other development partners could play this role in development.

In search of a deeper commitment: identities count.
Long term predictability can only exist if the donor country builds a deep internal consensus on what, where and how needs to be done by whom. This commitment must go beyond principles, as it is possible to do wildly different things from year to year within the same principles. It probably must be hands on. The example of the Dutch in a former era comes to mind. They used to be the one stop shop for engagement, expertise and funding on everything water.
Depth of engagement is not synonymous for micro-management. As donors stop spreading themselves thinly, they will understand better the need for local ownership for getting results. Donor support should evolve from the evil stepmother, nagging the partner at every step, to the fairy godmother, empowering the partner to accomplish what they long for, and live happily ever after.