Poverty, Conflict and Reconstruction

It's Monday morning and I'm at a computer in the library, about to get back to my paper for my module: Conflict Analysis. But I'm going to write this post first.  It's about my course of study, like Kurt, letting you know what I've actually been up to.

I'm enrolled in a 1 year Master's (MA) program (or course, as they say here - it's all very confusing for North American's like me) at the University of Manchester (Manchester, UK). I'm just completing term 1.  Classes started on Sept. 27 and ended (for me) last week.  The assessments for my classes (or modules) this term are all 3000 word essays - no exams. So that's what I'm working hard on now, trying to get the bulk of the 4 essays done before New Years so I can have a bit of a holiday with my wife's family. 3 of the 4 essays are due on January 5, 2011.  Then I have a whole month off before term 2 begins.

So, back to my course of study. When I orginally applied, I chose a pathway (within the MA International Development course) called "Economics and Management of Rural Development". Over the course of the induction week (induction always makes me think of a certain process to get babies out more quickly, but here it means "introduction"), I realized that the courses/modules that really grabed my attention were all part of a pathway called "Poverty, Conflict and Reconstruction". So I switched.

I registered for the full load of four modules:

1. Conflict Analysis - an overview of theories that have been developed to explain why conflict (we focused primarily on international or inter-ethnic conflict) occurs. This is not a standard Development module.  It doesn't deal directly with questions of poverty reduction or economic development.  But it's fascinating in terms of thinking about why conflict occurs and, especially, why conflict is prolonged and how conflict affects development. Theories we've looked at include: structural violence - the idea that economic or social structures that limit peoples freedoms constitute a form of violence; greed and grievence - the ideas that people are motived to be violent out of greed or out of a sense of deprivation; and the impact of history and culture on violent conflict - that's what my paper is about.

2. Poverty and Development - a study of poverty and the relatively new poverty agenda in development, whereby poverty reduction has become a primary focus (at least on paper).  In the past, Development has focused largely on stimulating macroeconomic growth in developing countries, assuming that poverty reduction would follow 'naturally'. Here my paper will look at the extent to which the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategies acknowledge issues of exclusion.  In other words, does this new poverty-focused aid vehicle really help to include the very poorest and marginalized who are often excluded from the benefits of economic growth.

3. Perspectives on Development - a broad overview of the history of Development and of major development theories. Interesting, but fairly general.

4. Citizen-led Development - the most interesting of the four courses - looking at development as opposed to Development and how citizen-led groups in poor countries (or the global South) are making a big difference for themselves.  Participation has been a buzzword in Development for the last 40 years or so and has taken on all kinds of faces.  It's based on the idea that Development needs to include the voice and knowledge of the people it's trying to develop.  By 2000, a book came out calling participation "the new tyranny" and all but called for stopping participatory approaches all together, claiming (with some merit) that participatory approaches were doing more harm than good, that they were simply another way of co-opting the poor into a Western-led project for macroeconomic development and market liberlization.  My paper looks at how one citizen-led group, SDI, overcomes a lot of these problems.

This has definitely been an eye-opening 3 months for me. And I'm convinced that Manchester is a great place to be studying this.  Lot's of current development thinking comes straight out of this university. I feel like I'm studying in the context of the really important debates that are on-going.  And, as I've alluded to in past posts, I feel like my ideas about what my own role in development could be are crystalizing. Like Kurt, I see, more than ever, the need for dramatic change in the rich countries in terms of social norms about energy consumption and also about global poverty. Something has to change and change soon.  But I'm also even more committed to the idea of working in development on the ground and trying to be an agent of change, perhaps more in the organizations that I work for than in the context of the people I might work with.

Jordan (Manchester)

What I'm actually up to...

I apologize to all our active readers for the delayed post - it's the end of term for me so things are a bit hectic.

I'm taking my Master's of Engineering in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada. I'm focusing on a stream of courses that focuses on sustainable energy.

 

So this first term I took "Sustainable Distributed Energy" and "Power Systems". The first course covers all the broader technical implications of distributed generation (DG) -ie solar panels, wind turbines, biogas, geothermal scattered here and there all providing power to the grid. It's fairly interesting though so broad that I'm worried what he's going to throw at us for the final. Things that we have covered include all the benefits of having DG as well as all the many, many technical issues that need to be addressed when installing DG.

The main points come down to this:

1. The electrical grid wasn't really set up to handle power being generated all over the place and so lots of the equipment (especially protection devices) need to be considered when analyzing where DG can be installed
2. Renewable DG power (mainly solar and wind) is highly variable and may not match the demand at any given instant. So we need "dispatchable" energy (coal, hydro, etc) that we can turn on and off as needed to fill in the gaps left by renewable energy. This is somewhat a matter of perspective since if you had 1000's of acres of solar panels and wind farms then you would be able to order what you need when you need it. But it is true, 10billion solar panels won't do you much good at midnight.
3. Renewable DG (again mainly solar and some wind turbines) give a very different quality of power that needs to be dealt with. Sometimes the DG can actually help improve the quality of the power but because it's brand new technology it's not allowed quite yet for a number of other reasons. (Oh yes, electricity has quality! And when all your electronics are connected, especially the discount electronics, the power quality goes to pot.)

 

My other course is "Power Systems" - a very standard electrical power engineering course. Just a whole lot of math concerning how to calculate power at points all over the grid as well as other things (stability of the grid, reactions to various fault conditions, etc) It's a lot of complex (as in a + bi) number crunching and not what I'm interested in but fairly foundational to everything else so I'm glad I'm taking it.

 

These courses have given me quite an appreciation for the power grid. It really is probably one of the most complexly, interconnected systems in the world and it's really cool to begin to understand it.

 

And I think this is where this blog has given me food for thought. Through my course projects and looking back at my career I've realized that I'm more interested in facilitating change or looking at the bigger picture than actually designing more efficient solar panels or wind turbines. And through writing this blog I've realized (or verbalized something I already knew) that the real change that needs facilitating is here in North America, not in the developing world. So maybe all this questioning of Mr Easterly will really make me plant my feet firmly on this side of the ocean (don't tell my wife that though!).

 

In ending, I'd like to recommend one website, http://www.grist.org/. It's often fairly light but scattered with new ways of looking at society and the way we could or should be doing things.

Kurtis (Waterloo)