Category Archives: Political Commentary

Thinking fast and slow about disaster preparedness

Posted on by
Reply

Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow Author: Daniel Kahneman

Getting back to my notes from “Thinking Fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman, I am still amazed by the diversity of new insights the book provides on how (most) humans think .

Some findings are also relevant for the current thinking in humanitarian assistance on disaster risk reduction (D.R.R. for the incrowd): an important part of the book is dedicated to the human approach to risk, which is not in line with statistical analysis nor economical reasoning.

When talking about risks, the greatest risk seem to be a disaster with a huge humanitarian impact. The book deals specifically with the approach to catastrophic risk by humans, in contrast to the Homo economicus or the statistician. As the political agenda of the humanitarian sector moves towards more investment and more attention to disaster risk reduction and disaster preparedness it might be good to look at his insights. I will heavily rely on quotes from the book.

Humans tend to be very bad at estimating risks and probabilities. We make decisions based on stories, not on a balanced analysis.

“ We pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify.”

“ Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong.”

When working in Humanitarian assistance, your mandate is to save lives, alleviate suffering and maintain dignity when the local government is unable or unwilling to act or is overwhelmed. Roughly 80 % of the work will be in complex crises, the crises that are caused mostly by human interaction, like civil war, usually exacerbated by some bad luck on the side of the natural causes. However, it is the big natural disasters, giant floods or tsunamis and earthquakes that catch the imagination. Within the natural catastrophes, there is a rise in small disasters, with a limited number of victims, that is passing mostly under the radar. DRR is in the first place aimed at these 20 % of the investments, as we do now how to prevent natural disasters to become human catastrophes, but do not really know how to prevent civil war.

As humanitarians, we are tempted to argue that you will save more lives by preventing the catastrophes, and so it might be within our mandate after all. But are we sure of this? The question Kahneman asks is: will humanitarians be the right people to judge the importance of investments on disaster risk reduction compared to other priorities for the society (such as the army, education, etc.)

When you do not ignore the very rare events, you will certainly overweigh them.

The humanitarians are focused exactly on the very rare events and it is their explicit job to advocate for increased attention on these rare events. But what happens when we manage to put a risk squarely on the agenda? Some quotes picture a scenario with ever increasing importance to DRR:

Your judgment of probability was ultimately determined by the cognitive ease, or fluency, with which a plausible scenario came to mind. (Disaster risk reduction seems very plausible just after a catastrophe)

Adding irrelevant but vivid details to a monetary outcome also disrupts calculation.(The figures on the risk are intermingled with media pictures of the human suffering during the catastrophe)

The work of disaster prevention is more complicated by the human approach to “worry” and “regret” :

Reducing or mitigating the risk is not adequate; to eliminate the worry the probability must be brought down to zero.

Here again, people buy more than protection against an unlikely disaster; they eliminate a worry and purchase peace of mind.

So how to go about deciding on the importance of risk reduction within the complete spectrum of priorities?

The dilemma between intensely loss-averse moral attitudes and efficient risk management does not have a simple and compelling solution.

Especially just after there was a disaster or a near disaster:

The typical short-term reaction to bad news is increased loss aversion.
The taboo tradeoff against accepting any increase in risk is not an efficient way to use the safety budget.

There is an important risk of overinvestment in disaster risk reduction, leading to a framework that is just not affordable for the country:

The intense aversion to trading increased risk for some other advantage plays out on a grand scale in the laws and regulations governing risk.

Perhaps the humanitarian sector should see themselves just as one actor with a set of specific skills: humanitarian action, perhaps statistics on probabilities and risk analysis. As an inside actor they might be badly placed to take multiple roles and study, plan and finance the DRR approach:

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

Because as humanitarians we always think about disasters, we are not the best judges when it concerns the allocation of the scarce resources of partner governments or partner communities to DRR. A more humble approach, where the humanitarians leave the planning explicitly to the local partners and only add some seed money and knowledge might be indicated. The world is always risky for the poor, even when there is no disaster: illness, unemployment, accidents, land loss, localized weather phenomena, can be higher on the agenda of the poor family than well known disaster risk.

In summary:

Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.

This is also a stark warning for the humanitarian community to keep full attention to the core mandate of saving lives when governments are unable to act. For the moment a lot of the attention is drawn towards DRR away from access, Humanitarian Law and humanitarian delivery to everybody in need. It might be necessary to pay attention to DRR, but it is sure that the focus on it by the humanitarian community has negative effects for the core mandate, as the most scarce resource in humanitarian action is management attention. Is DRR really worth it? It seems to me that this is a political question that should be answered by the local communities, and not by external humanitarian actors.

The hunger games, the Paris agenda and political sciences.

Posted on by
Reply

I read the 3 parts of the Hunger Games trilogy in only a few weeks. A book that captivates so well its readers cannot be all bad.

What amazes me most  is how “fantasy”writers seems to be better at captivating the realities of the power relations, social interactions and power impact analysis than the drafters of international agreements, like the Busan outcome document. What is real and what is fantasy?

The silent revolution: is the electric bike a black swan?

Posted on by
Reply

The media and the public are staring at the lacklustre growth in the sales of the electrical car, and meanwhile it seems they miss the revolution happening under their nose.

For mobility in the city or the suburbs, the ideal traffic jam-beating device is not the electric car with limited radius. The electric car just solves the exhaust problem, but not the traffic jam. The added value is slim compared to the cheaper gas-guzzlers.

The electric bike extends crucially the use of the bike as preferred option. In a hilly city, biking just becomes this bit easier. For mid-life crisis professionals, it lets you work out without breaking a sweat, while commuting to work. In a clogged city, bikes are as fast as a car. If you feel comfortable biking 6 miles, the electric bike takes you double this distance, to the suburbs, home. This is why some cities do subsidise the purchase of electric bikes. Taking into account the cost of traffic jams and pollution, this is probably a good investment.

The drivers for this change are not the young and chattering classes. It is the silent majority. The pensioners who want to keep getting somewhere while they keep in shape. It are the people who have a house and a family, and start worrying about their health and lifestyle, and the world their kids will live in.

This is the group that normally delivers the momentum for sustainable policy change. Cities on the East coast and the West Coast are getting bike friendly fast, meaning better and faster commutes for bikers . In Europe the infrastructure is changing so fast all over the place that cars drivers are sometimes feeling excluded.

Taking this movement further the electric bike could be a catalyst for livable cities and more concentrated living. Preparing the ground for a quantum leap in carbon economy. The ideal commuter car is a bike. transforming not only the commute in a breeze, but also the suburb and the city in a place with better air, space and green. It takes little space, makes little noise and produces no pollutants. It uses nearly no energy, compared to the competition.

The technology that is still not good enough for cars is very well adapted for bikes. A battery charge brings you easily 40-50 km away, and a recharge is less difficult than with a car. After 80 km of biking, you need a little snack, don’t you? Moreover, the research for cars is bringing fast relief for bikes: better, lighter batteries, faster engines.

The radius of electric bikes makes it the preferred mode of transport for slow tourists in hilly areas, like the Dales or even the Alps.

Already there are more electric bikes than cars driving in China. Up to 30 million bikes are cruising the cities. This creates a mass market, so electric bicycles can be jump-started cheap in the rest of the world. Globally, sales are expected to grow importantly over the next decade. In Europe in some countries up to 53 % of the commuters claim they would be interested in replacing their current commute by public transport or car, by the electric bike.

The most important factor in my assessment is the eagerness the elderly take up the electric bike. Reasonably fit pensioners are the backbone of the electorate in many countries, and the really love their bikes. They will demand their safe roads and bike stalls all over the place.

What do you think?

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

Posted on by
1

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”.

 

Development: The dictator’s handmaiden; Is bad aid almost always good politics?

Posted on by
Reply

I have just finished reading the Dictator’s Handbook, by Bruce Bueno de Mequita and Alastair Smith. I immediately reread some chapters. The book gives you an insight you feel you have known all along, but you just could not act upon it because you don’t want to be seen as a spoil sport, cynic and nutcase.

From reading the book, I think adding a power impact assessment (PIA) before committing to development interventions is necessary.

The book makes a very convincing case that political economy, driven by personal interest, is the major motivation for leaders and potential leaders (surprise). The main objective of a leader is to get and keep power. Good public policy is not more than a distraction in this pursuit.  Leaders ignoring their main objective, will have only a short stint at the top.  So the leader will try to get as much loot from the state and its subjects as possible, and pay just enough to his essential backers for them to stay loyal to him. The rest is preferably stashed away for bad times. She must try to rely on as few possible backers as possible, who should each always need to scramble to keep her favor. The formula is really quite simple, but please, just read the book, I will limit myself to ponder some consequences of this reality of power ( “the world like it is, and not how we would like it to be”) on development assistance.

Easterly is an optimist
The Handbook gives a very black view of the world. We all know a politician or leader who would never act this way. The book however comes close to predict the real choices made by most of the world leaders who manage to stay in power (unlike the gullible friends of ours).

This means that development money that is embezzled by the leader and its cronies is not a bug, it is the main feature of cunning leadership. The whole government ownership agenda is very misguided in this light. It is probably true that the local government knows best what can work and what not. However this is not very relevant if the interest of the local leader in development funding is limited to the use of these funds to help her to stay in power.
Indeed: if the objective of the able leader is to keep the money and distribute it only to his essential backers,  anybody who is not an essential backer will not get anything.

It is also a positive message: understanding this mechanism makes it possible to use strategies to change the incentive structure and change the system.

Forget Paris.

Some types  of development assistance will be very much in demand by autocratic leaders.

  • Infrastructure leads to  excellent corruption and patronage possibilities. Moreover, in the form of big dams, it gives the dictator absolute power on who gets power and who does not.
  • Military support is even better. You can pay your essential generals and distribute bribes. Paying the rank and file is optional: they can “harvest” their own salary from the population.
  • Basic services are necessary to keep the population just intelligent enough to work hard. This is only important in countries without natural resources or without big aid flows. Anything beyond primary education will only lead to emancipation and other trouble. The leaders love basic services provided by NGOs: it authorizes the leader to spend less on the poor and more on themselves. Moreover, it transforms education from a right that the government is accountable for, to a gift from a foreign benefactor.
  • Disaster relief provided through the government services. It authorizes the dictator to embezzle most of it, while giving the rest only to the essential coalition.
  • Dept cancellation will only lead to the dictator strengthening her hold. Dept cancellation should be more conditional to democratic reform, or even better, used after democratic reform happened.  Apparently dept cancellation only works in democracies anyway.

The writers seem to have written the Handbook from a very serious concern to improve the effects of development assistance for the real world, not for the world we would all love to live in.

Their main piece of advice on development is to go for “cash on delivery”. Pay a non-inclusive government only for goods and services it has delivered, not for the process. Indeed even simple processes as capturing a terrorist bring in more loot for the cronies if they are dragged on eternally.

From poverty to power

The main lesson  I take from the book is the need to expand the coalition in power. If the leader has to rely on a wider coalition to stay in power, the kleptocracy deludes into a state delivering public services for most of the people. Indeed by growing the coalition needed to reign, there is a tipping point when it is cheaper for the leader to provide public services than to pay a bribe to the ever-growing number of essential backers.

The book goes in detail on the issue of inclusive governance structures, and ways that are used to limit the power of the public to hold leaders accountable. It proves that the nuts and bolts of the democratic system we use matters, and this as well for governing a country as for a public company or even a club.
While in a democracy a Government theoretically needs the backing of more than half of the voters, in reality this is often much less. The writer explores how the leader can find innovative ways to limit the number of people with actual power in different systems. In a multiparty first past the post-system a group can grab power with as little as 10 % of the total population backing them, just by gaming the system.

All this means that we need a radical emancipation strategy to deliver on development, where expanding the essential coalition in a country is seen as the main goal of interventions. Delivering services in non-democratic countries will not lead to a long-term development agenda; widening the coalition to include the middle class and the poor does. If some services must be delivered, theoretically the cash on delivery system should work.

To take home
Power and incentives matter. In the real world, they might matter more than the moral high ground. However, just like the rational choice is too simple to explain all economics, rational dictators are probably too simple to explain power. It is a start, and it would help us to be less gullible.
This is why I propose to add to each intervention a Power Impact Assessment (PIA), just like an environmental impact assessment.

Darwin awards for international organisations and treaties

Posted on by
Reply

Chatting with a friend over lunch on what is real work and what is just unproductive time-filler, we touched upon the Food Aid Convention. If this international treaty would just vaporise without leaving a trace, the overall effect on food security would probably be positive, as this treaty promotes a one-size-fits-all supply driven approach to food assistance, and its renegotiating takes up a lot of time of food security professionals.

Wouldn’t a “Darwin Award for Development Treaties and Organisations” be useful, to bestow an award on those development organisations and treaties who, by simply obliterating themselves, would contribute more to the development goals they promote then by dragging on. Different from the Darwin award for humans, where the prize is only awarded posthumously, the prize will honor the laureates with the best potential for improvement of the development gene-pool, as, you know, international organisation never die.

When assessing the list of international treaties and organisations however, most of them seem, at least on first sight, to have a potential contribution to development. However, it is only as an insider you notice the disfunctionality of an institution. Probably some more informal get-togethers qualify, like the MOPAN group. The multilateral aid effectiveness exercise by the new government in the UK happening for the moment at DFID might provide some good data for awarding the price.

For my part, I would grant the Food Aid Convention this prize, any more takers?

Aid evolution: a system beyond planning, markets and networks

Posted on by
Reply

Local units obeying local incentives and rules1

I remember the bleak look of the supermarkets in Nicaragua in 1992. Only a few products were available, nearly all from the same low quality brands. So where should we buy diapers, baby toys?  I am speaking about the everyday things you need to run a household with two small kids. On the black market of course: the Mercado Oriental, where you ventured only with enough money to buy what you wanted. A market bustling with activity and offering products from all over the world. The government, which controlled a big chunk of the economy, trade, the borders, could not deliver simple products like diapers to the consumers, while the rough and bustling smugglers could.

Central in the concept of evolution is the principle that the result is not planned, but is obtained by local units obeying local rules and incentives, and each optimize their behavior to get for themselves optimal result, within the limits set by the rules. This is the secret of natural evolution, but also the way the Mercado Oriental could sell my kids a Korean bicycle.

The concept of evolution is interesting to apply to development processes, as it would turn the current paradigm on its head: a lot of proclaimed principles  work against the grain of the self interest of the actors, and by striving to commonly defined goals, the actors flock towards one-size fits all fads instead of trying to optimize the results of their own efforts. An evolutionary approach would make donors flock to high result areas, but also reward higher benefits when specializing in a less crowded area.

Beyond planning, markets and networks

Owen Barder wrote a thoughtful paper explaining exactly why it is important to move away from the current planning paradigm. In essence, the planning paradigm tries to ignore the political economy, the different interests at play in the aid environment. While a consensus is created at a higher level, the incentives to get low-level results are scant. Owen argues that instead of imposing a new plan, we should change the evolutionary pressures in order to get results where it matters, unleashing the powers of evolution by harnessing the potential of a market and network approach.

Perverse effects of joint agendas: the lemming effect.

“Admitting that coordination problems are insoluble could point in a more fruitful direction, such as specializing more and then you won’t have to coordinate“

As only a few aid agencies have the wherewithal for good research, the research of the World Bank and DFID is dominating the discourse on development. It is not surprising that the best course of action for a whale like the World bank is probably not the best course of action for a mountain goat like Luxembourg or Switzerland. Under the current paradigm, the Paris Declaration, this is largely ignored. All should invest more in basket funds and budget aid2. If a small donor would strive to get some expert knowledge in only a niche, like in land management in mountain areas, their credibility and added value would probable be way beyond their monetary contribution, while the value of money in a basket fund is never much beyond the nominal value. What is the best course of action for the World bank might not be the best for the recipients, nor the individual contributing donor. As the consensus tries to cover all aspects af development, it pushes the donor countries to spread their support thinly, towards all good causes. This is something where the World bank might strive for, but for a small donor it leads to a ridiculous number of small contributions.

At the same time, the current consensus leads donors to select the same donor darling countries, or the same sexy themes of gender and development. In the current paradigm, where the budget and not prior evaluation is the tool for deciding on an intervention, the donor has no incentives to search for his own niche.

The planning response to the lemming effect, where all donors fund the same interventions, is to create a trust fund, to support “underfunded” causes. A common complaint is indeed that some actors and causes are just not enough taken on board. The disadvantage of this kind of approach is its tendency to spread the money amongst all stakeholders (“more democratic than strategic”). It is just not done to judge the quality of the participating executing agencies. The possibility that nobody funds a project because of quality issues with the evidence base or the partner organisation is never really taken on board.

The social economy of incentives, rules and indicators

The current paradigm : an amount is a result; everybody using the same instruments and partners

A number is simple and authorises everybody to judge whether it is much or not. However, in development the amount invested is seldom related to the results. The drive for higher project amounts is not based on economies of scale, but rather on the capacity of donors to manage transactions. The difference in efficiency between interventions rank from micro-interventions with huge payback (e.g. the Sant’Egidio community succeeding peace negotiations in Mozambique) to huge interventions with catastrophic results (the US intervention in Vietnam?) with combination in between.

The current incentives are very much skewed to a lemming – like approach to development. A mono-culture of approaches and priorities. If an approach is “hot”, everybody wants to be in the picture and rushes to join the stampede. The incentives are important to do so. Indeed, as the electoral cycle of 4 years coincides with the rotation cycle of development staff, success is not in results, but in announcements, commitments and project start ups, in line with the issues the international seminar circuit agrees upon. You shine today, not in 4 years’ time. Everybody moved on by then. The rules on “good” donor behavior will stimulate the donors to walk jointly the same paths. The current rules that donors abide with are more about how do we do what, than what should we get to. Indeed, if the MDGs would be taken seriously as a basis, the interventions would fight child mortality directly, not basket funds based on long term comprehensive plans.

The current approach, is geared to joint photo-opportunities at coordinating events and funding complex “innovative financial products” such as pooled thrust funds, Cerfs and Errfs, with overall unclear oversight structures.This approach seems to contain risks for an elected official, as all politics are eventually local.

Like buying a government bond as an investment, following the crowd isn’t exactly a bad investment: the results will be dependable, but average. However, development needs bold initiatives, where high returns and failure are the two sides of the same coin, with evaluation as a way to flip it

From identity to added value

In development, like in business, an added investment should never be decided on the average return of the investment, but on the marginal return. What will be the real added value of a small donor topping up a World Bank effort and contribute 0.3 % to a trust fund for basket funding?  Wat is the benefit for a skilled plumber to start an Internet company, because the internet is where the money is? Would taking out a loan to invest in the internet startup be really the best the plumber can do?

What if a donor stopped caring about the effectiveness of the system as a whole, but looked at the results of his own money instead? Deciding on real evidence based results for the beneficiaries.

The main question should not be “what do the others do? ” but “where can I make a difference”. The Easterly post “Do what you are actually good at, or what you should be good at?“makes an eloquent case on New Zealand. But other examples abound: an analysis of the Netherlands development cooperation “less pretention, more ambition” advocates concentrating on what the Netherlands are actually good at, like water management, instead of just supporting the World Bank ideology of the day.

A focus on measuring and expected impact and evaluating results on a case by case basis should be central, in order to determine exactly how high the added value of the marginal investment is. The evidence base of effectiveness should replace the current set of proxy indicators for donor effectiveness, as they are contained in the Paris declaration or the Accra agenda for action.

For a donor politician, this seems an easy sell towards his voters: Our contribution to develpment will be linked to our national identity, like the Dutch building dykes, the New Zealanders training pacific students and helping sheep farming. We are our own man. And where we cannot help, yes, we just abstain or support whoever can do best.

notes

1 The greatest Show on earth, Richard Dawkins, 2009, p 218

2 Let alone the Paris declaration is mostly based on in house World Bank research that has been found inconclusive in subsequent World Bank research reviews.

Ethical eating in a diverse world; cultural idendity and food: from nuclear family to feasting on diversity (Part 5 of a series)

Posted on by
Reply

The cultural identity is based on the biology, but tastes better.

Answering the question “what do we eat” is central to our omnivorous identity, unknown by herbivores nor carnivores, as they just eat the same every day.

The major cuisines of the world compose meals from the main food groups: meat or milk products when available, beans or cabbage when lacking meat, a starch rich staple food, and some fruits and vegetables. As our body has a genetic memory of very lean times, we crave for food high in energy such as oil (fat, cream), sugar and starch. Traditional meals will limit these cravings, by e.g. limiting the deserts to the end. However, as meat has always been in short supply for most of the population, until a few decades ago,  richer people traditionally ate more meat, even more than a few times a week. Meat is worldwide still seen as an indicator of status.

Traditional meals are not “composed” on the basis of a prescription for health, although the element of balance can be found in most kitchens. Once there is enough “staple” and the question “where is the beef?” has been answered, the main element in a refined kitchen is taste. People eating food only for nutrition are frowned upon in most cultures. In times of extremist zeal however, the enjoyment of food, sex and alcohol can be forbidden or heavily regulated.It is remarkable that you can raise a child on traditional food, although the meal is not prepared following scientific prescriptions, while a modern diet taken from a magazine, or the adverts, or even a modern “ism” like veganism, almost certainly will leave you deficient for a few major elements, and overfeed in others. Even following the “food pyramid” based on food science will leave you confused. Modernized traditional meals, with more attention to vegetables instead of the traditional “all the meat we can get” approach seem to be the best available choice. The fun part is that we are not limited to our own tradition. To the contrary: diversifying into other cultures seems to improve the overall value of the diet. Even combining traditions in one meal seems to improve our level of satisfaction. And is contentment not the real fruit of a good meal, and the overall goal of civilization?

The marriage of culinary tradition with global diversity has an ethical aspect on itself: openness to the world, compared to closeness. Looking over the border and enjoy it, while not giving up your own. Your mothers’ kitchen defines your identity, but this identity can only be positive if it is a window to the world: your own kitchen gives you the reference framework to go confidently into the world of taste and other traditions, like speaking your own language well is a boon for learning more languages.

Sam Gardner

Believing in the electric car

Posted on by
1

Electric cars are finally breaking through – perhaps. The electric car is ready, but there is a lot of work to be done before they become successful: habits must be changed and investments must be made for a completely new infrastructure. In this article, it is argued that it is important to make this choice rather sooner than later, and that we must live up to it.

Cars are here to stay, for now

The cities, suburbs and countryside have been rebuilt for the car. Without a car, it’s difficult to organise “normal” family life. Wrong and right choices have led to this situation. Does the current situation lead to a maximisation of “happiness” for society as a whole, and does it even lead to optimal mobility? Individual households don’t have any other choice but to use cars, and the road is still a tragic commons.

Rebuilding a new incentive system leading to a more balanced approach to mobility is a very long-term project. Meanwhile, the earth is burning and climate change could well end the world as we know it. The most urgent fight concerning mobility is to convince the world that liquid fuel (even ethanol) must be replaced by electricity. We already have the science, so it is safe to predict that this will happen. However, it is difficult to predict when. This article deals with accelerating this transition.

Elements of the discussion

Muddling the margins: Energy efficiency

Just after the first oil crisis, in 1976, Volkswagen produced the rabbit Diesel. A small car with a fuel consumption of (as I remember vaguely) 4 liters/hundred km (60 mpg). Now 30 years later, the latest Prius with hybrid technology is hailed as a very fuel efficient car, consuming 5l/100km or 55 mpg.

The golf diesel was a light car. The Prius has a lot more power and possibilities. Moreover, the standards for measuring fuel consumption have evolved. However, in general, with the liquid fuel-based cars, the future is not much different from the past. This is caused by some basic flaws in the process: Heat engines use the “carnot cycle” meaning that efficiency is limited by the first and second law of thermodynamics. Current motors have an efficiency of about 25 %. In very good situations, like a power plant, with economies of scale in a very controlled environment, the efficiency of transforming heat to useful power can be brought up to 45 %. Electric cars don’t face this limitation. The efficiency of an electric motor is already between 79 and 90 %. Including a loss of 10-25 % in the battery, it beats petrol engines hands down, even when starting from liquid fuels in a power plant.

Just like the metric system, the cost of changing from one system to another can be prohibitive, even when everybody knows the alternative would be more efficient to run. Investing in the electric car requires guts, but we’d be investing in the inevitable.

Independence from an energy source

The current paradigm for cars is limited to only one energy source–liquid fuel–with the option to use some limited mixtures like ethanol. This means that choosing your engine defines what energy source you will use for the lifetime of the car, whatever the pricing or scientific advances bring. Transforming alcohol to hydrogen or to petrol comes at a high cost and is inefficient. An electric car, however, uses the mix of the day your utility decides on,  based of the price/tax rate of the day. You can even opt for your own preferences: pure coal or only wind power. The electric car creates a much more efficient energy market and it will be easier to fight monopoly suppliers, compared to the current OPEC-based economy.

Distribution systems

The distribution system for fuel cars, with carbon based fuel, or even hydrogen, is ridiculously complicated, cumbersome, and even dangerous.

  • The fuels can burn and even explode easily. This is good when inside the motor (it’s internal combustion, after all) but transporting the stuff is risky. Moreover the stuff is poisonous when spilled and when inhaled, before and after combustion, for people and for the environment.
  • It needs to be delivered to points of sale all over the country in trucks, covering every patch of the road network. Honest. Not a lot of improvements to this system are expected. We might not want bigger or more trucks. So part of the fuel is used to truck the dangerous liquid around. Did I say it can burn and explode? Unloading the trucks is cumbersome to say the least.
  • Putting the fuel from the local tank in the car is another awkward process, where some dangerous volatile and explosive gasses escape inevitably. The thought that the engines waiting to be filled are combustion engines is not reassuring. Did I say the liquid burns and explodes?

The distribution system for electric cars would be totally different.

  • There would be a grid covering every patch of the country. You can plug your battery in whenever, wherever you want. The charging of batteries is expected to increase in speed and efficiency fast.
  • Loading the energy is just plugging in a well-protected cable.
  • If loading the batteries is too slow for your taste, you can just replace the empty battery by a full one. We do it all the time with our cameras and flashlights, if we agree on a standard of size, form and electrical properties, we can do it for our cars too. A machine will do this for us, as the batteries can be somewhat heavy (several hundred kilograms). A system where there are 3 qualities of batteries at the stations which moves the quality up at predictable intervals, would work to make the system ever more efficient.
An additional point that is often forgotten in calculations of efficiency of energy use of electric cars is that it runs on waste energy. Power plants are not just switched on and off at will. They produce more or less the same amount of energy day and night, whether there is demand for it or not. This means that we can charge the batteries with the electricity which would otherwise be wasted. Even crazier, these stacks of batteries can help to make the grid more effective, by selling electricity back to the grid during the peak hours at a higher price.

Bio fuels

Bio fuels are not relevant to the equation if we are looking for energy efficiency and environmental gains. They occur mostly in an environment of pork-barrel politics or protectionism.

Firstly, using bio-fuels in a power plant and bringing the electricity to the car will always be more efficient than putting them parallel or mixed with the other combustible liquids in the trucking system. You can even use raw switchgrass instead of transforming the biomass to ethanol (with loss).

Secondly, it is not because they have “bio” in their name that they are better for the environment than fossil fuels. It looks like the use of bio fuels from corn or from recently won tropical forest is even more damaging to the environment than fossil fuels. All externalities should be added to their cost.

Thirdly, bio-fuels should be treated as a commodity, like fossil fuel, and as a commodity chances are slim that they will be good business in agriculture. At least not with a growing human population to be fed.

Fourthly, as a strategic option for independence from producers of oil, it could be an option for wet, sunny countries (such as Brazil) but in general it is a wasteful proposition compared to energy efficiency and direct power generation from the sun, wind and water.  I can think of better uses for corn, sugar, palm wine, and rum (alcohol from sugar cane) other than filling my car.

The added value uses of bio-fuels reside probably more in the use of all kind of side-products, residues and stalks than the transformation of high value harvests like maize cobs or palm nuts. Even if the direct transformation to energy of a full crop would be economical, it would probably involve the use of perennial plants, that cover the soil for the totality of the growing season, with an efficient  photosynthesis system (such as C4-grasses). Examples would be elephant grass or sugar cane.

Changing batteries or charging them, it does not matter

The “better place” batteries can be changed in a few minutes. The Tesla batteries in 5 minutes. However, with the newer battery technologies that are available now, and will come on the market shortly, battery recharging might become a matter of minutes instead of hours. If a break of ten minutes is imposed only every 300 kilometers, this might be an acceptable safety measure against overstretched drivers. It is not a showstopper. Even the old, trusted lead-acid batteries might be up to the task in such an environment. With a leasing model for the batteries, they can improve independently from the cars they are used in, and the combetition between battery – utilities can drive the price down and the charge up.

The silent, clean  thing

Cars are not only using costly and imported oil. They make noise, causing a rise in stress levels in the cities with their never ending roar, and they bring sooth in the air, causing thousands of deaths, more than those caused by accidents. The noiselessness might be dangerous for pedestrians though, who now routinely adapt their behavior based on the auditive signals they intercept. With the ubiquitousness of MP3 players, and artificial noise made by electric cars, this argument becomes less relevant.

The pollution is not just moved to the power plants: you can switch your electricity generation to alternative sources easier than car motors, so it is easier to stimulate a change at that level: solar cells, tidal energy, and what more, can all play a role.

The cost of fuel in a shrinking economy

In the slow economy, the cost of petrol based fuels is very low. The price of an electric car and the batteries, the initial investment cost, is higher than the price of the combustion engine. The financial benefits are indeed mostly in the mileage per dollar. The initial investment cost can be prohibitive if the petrol based fuels are cheap. This investment costs will fall importantly with mass production and scientific research. As the electric car complies with important recognized objectives of the governments in the west, such as diversification of fuel dependency, carbon reduction and health improvement, it is acceptable that the government steps in with temporary subsidies to create a sufficiently large market, and to take take this initial hurdle.

And the light shone in the darkness

I saw a Tesla driving. It was like the flight of an owl. The sheer silence, contrasted with the power of movement was eerie. The Tesla is an all electric  sports car, with properties of sports car, a price like a sports car, but extremely low power needs. No kidding. Attacking the market from the top.

The electric car is here. The combustion lobby did not want to build it. The ebay-founders instead of the big car companies financed it. Tesla motors is not (yet) under bancrupcy protection, while the combustion car lobby is scrambling for government aid.

What can we do?

Breaking technological monopolies

In general, it is bad practice for a government to make technological choices: the government should set objectives on energy use, or pollution, and let the market, combined with (stimulated) research, come up with unthought solutions. However, sometimes we are locked into a bad technology, because the cost of switching is too high to take as a single consumer or private company. This is where there is a role for the government in breaking the technological monopoly and level the laying field. This kind of hurdles have been taken before, with massive layoffs and assets becoming garbage overnight, but also with a jump in quality of life, new employment and productivity: e-mail overtaking the fax and telegraph, Switching from MsDOS to Windows, from horses to cars.
If only the bump of the initial investment can be taken, electric cars could win out in the market space, as they consume less and pollute less. Once mass produced, the price of the cars would be low enough to make them affordable and competitive.
A working distribution system for the electricity has to be created that can compete with the current technology. Once the field is level, the market will drive out the inefficient and polluting systems. Leveling the playing field is a task for the government or the electric car industry as a whole: they have to provide the initial investment to make the switch. This means creating the standards for batteries, so all cars can use the batteries from all providers. The standards should leave room for innovation inside the battery, but standardize the connection to the grid, the connection to the car and how they fit to the car, to make switching a quick process. Once these elements are standardized, batteries could be offered more as a lease to car owners, with options between different providers, than as a straightforward purchase. Don’t forget that these batteries can make the energy grid more efficient, by absorbing electricity at night, and giving it back at peak needs. They even can make alternative energy options more attractive, by spreading production and consumption better over the day.
Moreover, a network of charging/changing stations must be built as before the car makers can make the cars, otherwise the cars would be useless.

Individual contributions

Do not worship false idols, know that every stage is a stage towards the full electric car. Don be sidetracked by false profets, who dont understand the second law of thermodynamics.
Plan to buy as your next car an electric car, and therefore wait another 2 or 3 years to buy your new car. If you are a decision maker on corporate or local government level, broadcast your decision to buy only electric cars in 3 years time. Even make it a legal requirement. Write cars off only after 5 to six years, so that the cost of purchase is easier offset by the cost of fuel over the lifetime of a car.
Support legislation for standardizing car batteries, making the playing field for competition level amongst car factories and battery producers, moreover putting a leg up for a distribution system.
by Sam Gardner