The Future of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

You can breathe a sigh of relief, this will be my last post on Sustainability and hopefully we can return to the topic at hand - development.
The follow excerpt is from another article I wrote (for my church newsletter of all things) which tries summarize the ideas I've put forward in previous posts.

Reduce
It seems to me that the main theme in this latest era of environmentalism is “reduce”: we need to reduce what we use, our global footprint, what we pump into the atmosphere, etc. Although there are scientific reasons why we may need to protect the environment, for many people it has not hit home; environmental actions we take are done voluntarily, out of a gut feeling of altruism rather than from a real understanding of how dependent we are on the environment. As such, The Environment is often not as important to the populace as The Economy or Society issues. In the recent Ontario election debates I didn’t hear a single candidate put the environment ahead of the economy with the possible exception of Mike Schreiner of the Green Party, but even he usually went on to mention jobs and the economy in the same breath. Influential people, such as David Suzuki, have tried for years to demonstrate how inextricably linked humanity is with the natural environment, hoping to give us the ‘wake-up call’ we need to change our ways and put the environment first. They may finally get their wish.
We are now at a point where Mother Earth does not cough up her resources so freely and so, on top of reducing what we use, it is often cheaper to reuse and recycle that which we have already extracted. Increasingly we see many “green” endeavors undertaken for economic reasons. For example, I have little doubt that the recent FIT program here in Ontario (which encourages people to install solar or wind generators) was largely an economic wager to offset the cost of significant upgrades to our electrical system.

Reuse
It seems to me that we are now entering an era of ‘reuse’, a time when the ‘reduce’ no longer needs to be preached but is a natural way to protect our pocket books. We are beginning to reuse and to some extent recycle in ways previous generations never thought possible or necessary. In this age, the true value of our natural resources begins to emerge and we can no longer afford to take them for granted.

Recycle
In the future, another era may begin to emerge -one of recycling. At this time our society will be in a much different place than it is now. People will not have the resources (economic or otherwise) to extract and create what they want; reducing and reusing will be unquestionable aspects of daily life. In order to get ahead people will begin to recycle and recover resources that past generations have discarded as worthless.

Era of	System at the Forefront	Spokesperson
Reducing	Environment	David Suzuki, enough said
Reusing	Economy	Hermann Scheer has a book called “Energy Autonomy” in which he moves the case for environmentalism beyond the environment and begins to talk about the economy and society.
Recycling	Politics and Society	Thomas Homer-Dixon talks about how complex systems need energy to sustain them. He provides a convincing argument that, unless a source of energy can be found to replace fossil fuels, our economy and society are in for some big changes.

Complex Systems

Here’s another way of looking at this progression. I have attended some presentations about ‘complex systems’ and often the speaker introduces the talk about how the environment, the economy or society, are all examples of complex systems. One perspective is that in reality there is only one complex system, the natural environment, and it is the foundation for these other complex systems for which we like to take credit. If we accept that the economy and even our society and politics are simply extensions of the environment then it logically follows that if we destroy or neglect the environment, these other systems risk collapse. It may be too early to say, but possibly someday people will be able to demonstrate how the current economic crises in the United States and Europe are early indicators of damage to the natural environment - but that’s another conversation. Unfortunately, in the name of the “economy” I think governments, most notably our own, are looking to extract even more natural resources in a flailing attempt to prop up our fiscal systems.

In summary, I am not saying the end of the world is near, but rather I hope to help people (and I include myself) cross over to a solid understanding of why we need to protect the environment. If we can reach that understanding on our own, rather than having it forced upon us, we’ll be far better off.

How does this relate to development. Most people in the developing world live in fairly sustainable manner but are largely unaware of this. The irony is that we are increasingly aware of how unsustainable our lifestyle is and yet don't (or can't) do anything about it. I said it before in other ways but development work needs to include a component of helping people understand the broader implications of how they live which implies doing development work in the developed world.

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

ps I'm just starting to read Thomas Homer-Dixon's, "The Upside of Down" and I think he's going to say all that I've been trying to say in a much clearer way.

Paradox

Kurt's reference to Jevon's paradox reminds me of the paradox of carbon trading. I don't really understand carbon trading and carbon tax, etc, but working on a small hydro-electric project in Pakistan, I encountered this odd concept and began to understand something I learned a lot more about this past year. That is, how trends in development are just that and words like sustainable and low-carbon and renewable energy are often understood in very narrow or vague terms, or simply not understood at all.

Here's how I understand carbon trading in terms of renewable energy development. Industry around the world generates carbon and that carbon contributes to the stock of greenhouse gases in the environment. Say there are 100 tonnes being produced at a given time (obviously the real figure is many of orders of magnitude higher). Well, the producers of the 100 tonnes are given a choice, they can either reduce their overall output of carbon or they can pay someone else, in the form of a carbon tax, who is reducing their output of carbon, more or less. The irony of this scheme, however, is that this carbon tax can be used to fund the development of new low or zero-emissions energy generation facitilities, such as small rural hydro-electric plants in developing countries. So let's say the producers of the 100 tonnes pay $10 in carbon tax instead of reducing their outputs by 1 tonne. That $10 can be used to fund new zero emissions energy production.

But in reality, nothing is zero emissions. The development, installation and maintenance of a small hydro facility contributes to carbon emissions. So let's say the new hydro facility generates 1 tonne of carbon. The new net total production of carbon in our hypothetical world is now 101 tonnes. While this is less than if a small coal-fired plant had been built instead of the hydro facility it still represents a net increase. Not only this but the industrial producer has "offset" his carbon production not by paying for reduction somewhere else but by funding a new increase in carbon production. While I fully support the development of rural hydro electric facilities I see this aspect of the carbon tax system as illusory. It claims to do one thing but results in the opposite effect. A paradox.

While I stated in an earlier post that development studies seems to downplay issues around environmental sustainability, it does provide insight into the paradoxical nature of the climate change agenda more generally. As with so many trends in development, efforts to combat climate change often reveal an "add climate change and stir" approach. In other words it's business as usual with programs around climate change bolted on. Furthermore, mitigating against climate change is often talked about more in terms of shielding populations and geographies from the effects of climate change rather than actually taking steps to slow and ultimately reverse it.

On a personal note I should mention that I'm now living in London and have recently started a job with Crown Agents, an international development consultancy. More on that later, perhaps.

Jordan (London)

Reuse.

I want to begin by mentioning that in my last posting I specifically avoided any mention of efficiency. I find that in North America the concept of "reducing" has come to mean using things more efficiently, not to actually reduce the things we do.
In other words, when your electric utility sends out a pamphlet on reducing electricity by using CFL bulbs or turning off power bars they are saying, Please use electricity more efficiently. I'm guessing no one has ever received a brochure with the headline, "Please don't buy any more electronics", or "Do you really need that PS3, you already have a Wii!". That kind of talk is completely taboo in our culture, maybe for the same reasons that environmentalism doesn't come up in development talks.

The truth is, increases in efficiencies often lead to increases in consumption. This is called the Jevons Paradox after William Stanley Jevons who "observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries" (1). (Vaclav Smil also refers to this trend in his, "Energy: A Beginner's Guide"

But moving on, having reduced what we do and use as much as possible, then the next step is to use those items (or energy) as efficiently as possible. And this is where I will get anecdotal.
In North America we have a strong culture of preparedness. We like to have a flashlight by the bed, in the car, for camping, for the kids and a couple for random use. We have a bike for on the road, on the trails, going to work in summer, going to work in winter, cruising with the kids. I could go on and one and on.
This kind of mentality simply does not exist in much of the world. I remember realizing that the hospital across the road from us had one spare tire for multiple vehicles and that one person had a jack that was used all around town. (Sadly, when I tried to use it once I learned that it didn't really work.) Obviously when any of these items were needed it may not have been convenient (think of an ambulance having a flat while picking up a patient and the spare is 10km away) but in terms of efficiency (ie how often an item is used over it's lifetime), it's very impressive. These conditions exist for a number of reasons but most significantly because of economic reasons; people in the developing world simply do not have the economic means or buffer to afford to have resources that are rarely used.
By bringing these countries to our level of economics (I won't say whether it is bringing them up or down) we are simply enabling them to be less efficient with other resources. Cash went farther, much farther, in Tanzania than it does in North America or Europe. Taking this as an indicator of efficiency and assuming that everyone wants to use money efficiently indicates that we should be trying to emulate some of their economics. As the unsustainable nature of our developed world lifestyle becomes more and more evident we will be forced to reduce because we will not have the economic means to support the over head of resources that we are used to in our culture of preparedness.

I believe that the environment provides the foundation for our complex economic, social and political and as it crumbles away so will our systems that were built upon it. And, debt limits and Euro-zone troubles aside, I think our economic system will be the next system to drastically change (fall?), in face of fact that the earth is a zero-sum equation and things have to balance out. (For more on this read, "Energy Autonomy" by Hermann Scheer who actually takes it a step further and says that we need to start living sustainably as a means to protect our political system.)

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

Apologies for the long hiatus in postings - summer vacation was upon us! efficiency

Do More with More

As part of my dissertation research I had a look at the Monterrey Consensus, one of the documents that came out of the UN-sponsored International Conference on Financing for Development held in Mexico in 2002. This is the opening statement of the document:

"We the heads of State and Government, gathered in Monterrey, Mexico, on 21 and 22 March 2002, have resolved to address the challenges of financing for development around the world, particularly in developing
countries. Our goal is to eradicate poverty, achieve sustained economic growth and promote sustainable development as we advance to a fully inclusive and equitable global economic system"(UN 2002:5).

The term "sustainable development", rising to international prominence at the UN conference in Rio de Jenairo in 1992 has now become part of the standard language.  I believe it has been embedded and co-opted by the development establishment and has become all things to all development policy-makers.

In the Monterrey consensus, a number of issues come to a head. First, the basic impetus for the conference was the Millenium Declaration (the precursor to the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of 8 broad quantitative development goals which the international community has signed on to and is attempting to realise by 2015). Essentially, the world had signed up for a huge project and they needed to make a plan to fund that project.  There was, what David Hulme has called, the 'millennium moment', a brief window of time in which there appeared to be an upswing in global goodwill and general agreement around taking economic, social and environmental development seriously. No doubt this was a good thing, an opportunity to grab hold of and the Monterrey conference was one of the early signs of action. The MDGs raise all kinds of other questions in and of themselves, but what the Monterrey consensus and indeed much mainstream development literature ignores is questions of global environmental sustainability.

I've also just finished reading Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart's 2008 book: "Fixing Failed States". What is striking from an environmental perspective is the complete silence on the sustainability of our lifestyle in rich countries, the ultimate goal of state-fixing (in theory), and the silence on whether everyone else joining us in our consumer lifestyle is a good thing.

The focus is simply on the vast amounts of wealth that our global financial system is generating and the need to hook failed states up to this flow and the flows of information criss-crossing the globe.  Implicit is the assumption: what's going on among rich countries is good and failed states need it too. So let's hook them up (not that we can, of course, but that's for another post, perhaps).

Maybe I'm just repeating things I've said and things Kurt has said.  But from the development studies perspective, there's an eerie silence on the viability of the lifestyle we hold up to other countries as both virtuous and as the only alternative. Reducing is the last thing on anyone's mind in development studies and among development policy makers.  What is needed, they say, is not less, but more - Do more with more.

Jordan (Manchester)

Reduce.

As I delve into the world of sustainability (not just development) I am more and more aware of how far our lifestyle is beyond a critical point. Not just environmentally, which will follow, but economically, politically http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifand socially. I apologize to those who feel I may be strong arming the topic at hand, sustainable development, but I ask that you bear with me.

If those of us who live in Europe and North America have an environmental footprint of 6 or more while people in Africa have a footprint of about 1 (see Ecological Footprint) it seems to me that maybe we should be putting a lot more effort to "reducing" our footprint rather than increasing the footprint of the developing world. (This may be a controversial statement but in the end, I think, if we fail to do this the quality of ALL our lives will be far below the current quality of life of many people in the developing world.)

Many, many people are familiar with the Mennonite book "Living More with Less" and the cookbook "More with Less". These were first published in the '80s when the idea that our lifestyle could have significant implications on the world around us was just crossing the line from a fringe idea to an idea that many people began to hear about, if not believe. At the time that might have been true, that by reducing our consumption we may have been able to keep getting more and doing more. Unfortunately I think that time has passed; in 2011 we just need to reduce. Less of more. Less. Period.

John Naish has a very good book called "Enough". It's an easy read about how through the ages, specifically from an evolutionary point of view, we have been programmed to want and need more. However, for the first time in human history, a huge percentage of our population's physical needs are satisfied. Unfortunately we're still wired for more and so that same circuitry that helped us become a dominant species now needs to have the wires cut. Naish says the evolutionary key to the future will be the idea of temperance and knowing when is enough. (Certainly a well known concept throughout the ages.) He goes through the topics of Information, Food, Stuff, Money, Work and demonstrates how far overboard we have gone with each subject and what a detriment it is to our development. BTW, he also lists "Small is Beautiful" by E.F. Schumacher and "Limits to Growth" by Donnella & Dennis Meadows as the best books for this train of thought.

In the same way that people like David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist, have used arctic as an early warning signal of global warming and environmental chaos, I think someday we will understand that the environment itself and upheaval that it is going through is an early warning signal for us has a whole. The environment is a classic example of an extremely complex system where small perturbations have huge effects and some huge perturbations have negligible effects. Going one step back from that, our cultural, political and even economic systems have grown out of this natural environmental system and one could say are even founded upon it. The fact that our natural environment is changing drastically should serve as an early warning signal to us that those other systems are about to change as well.

And the more that we can do to mitigate environmental changes the more we will spare ourselves the pain of dealing with drastic changes to our economy, politics and society.

Kurtis (biking in Waterloo but still living unsustainably)

When is development just local capacity

My mind is quite a few places these days (including my upcoming series of posts!) but Jordan's comments do bring a few thoughts to mind.

1. "[Korten] published a paper proposing a novel planning method. He called it the Learning Process Approach. He based his theory on lessons learned from at least 5 highly successful rural development projects in Asian countries. These projects were started by visionary individuals within developing countries."
I found the paper online and skimmed it. I saw a few patterns that emerged. All five of the projects were started by local people (it seems like they were often fairly charismatic) either from a business or government background. I did not see any mention of IMF, World Bank, UN, USAID, etc. These successful initiatives were all by local people who had a vested interest in the outcome. We have similar business and political figures here in Canada. A politician who took on a particular cause as their own and really ran with it.
My point is that, at what point does standard entrepreneurship and governance become development work? I met a couple of expat businessmen in Tanzania who were helping "develop" the country simply through their industries. This is the case for lots of businesses in Africa. And similarly to the developed world - some fundamental components of our society (national parks, social services) can be traced back to individuals who championed a cause. So why are we surprised when that's how it works in other places as well?

2. My second thought comes from again from another way of achieving a proper fit. The last part of Jordan's post talks about how connected the planning process is to the ground. The triangle of program - organization - beneficiaries, the comments about using various subcontractors and finally the comment about the time involved for successful projects (20 years) all point to locally initiated endeavors. The only people who will really be able to understand the connections between the stakeholders, or who will plan and implement the process with sincerity and stick around to make sure things work out are those with a vested interest - ie local people. (And I would say that someone who has moved into a community and stayed for 20 years is pretty much a local.)
And the examples seem to back this up. The successful projects all had vast amounts of continuity compared to what we think of as development projects now-a-days. I wonder if this criteria alone would go a long way to mend what isn't working in our current development model. "All development workers and projects are expected to continue for a minimum of 10 years, usually 15 to 20." Ok, rereading that I realize that wouldn't solve everything but it would be interesting.

My only last comment is to read the one comment by I.:.S.:.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif - that whole white flag comment strikes as quite appropriate. I wonder if, in the future, people will look back at North America as "winning" the during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Jordan, as usual, thanks for a very well thought out and professional line of thought.

For those who really want to read the report here is a open link to the paper:
References:

Korten, D. C. (1980). Community Organization and Rural Development: A Learning Process Approach. Public Administration Review, 480-511.

Finally, I hope we haven't lost all of our readers due to my slow responses. Over the next few posts I will try to approach development from the first world perspective. In other words, what progress and changes should we be trying to bring about in Europe, North America and the rest of the developed world in order to really qualify as "developed" and a target worthy of the rest of the world to shoot for.

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

Learning to fit in

A paper came out in 2002, after the latest invasion/intervention in Afghanistan was already under way, reflecting on the reasons why mainstream development projects, the ones with billions of dollars behind them, are still planned and managed in much the same way they have been for the past 50 years (Barakat & Chard, 2002). The paper chronicles how best practices in project design and management developed in the 80s have been repeatedly ‘rediscovered’, updated and ignored.

The Marshall Plan, that famous ‘injection’ of cash into the battered Japanese and German economies after World War 2 was based on a particular economic theory, planned and put into action. It was massive, quick and remarkably effective.  Before long the German and Japanese economic machines were running again and within 40 years they had achieved what looked like a development miracle going from their economic death-beds to being members of the global economic elite.  Wow!

Development planners in the 40s and 50s treated development like a natural science.  They developed a theory, then conceived a plan around that theory and implemented it.  Economic development was assumed to follow laws and proceed in a predictable, linear fashion, regardless of the context.  As long as the rules were followed, certain results were to be expected.

It seems ‘we’ are still running development that way despite considerable advances in sociology, anthropology and planning theory.

In 1980, David Korten published a paper proposing a novel planning method.  He called it the Learning Process Approach.  He based his theory on lessons learned from at least 5 highly successful rural development projects in Asian countries.  These projects were started by visionary individuals within developing countries. Korten identified two core elements of these projects that contributed to their long term success. 

The first element was fit (Figure 2).  Korten highlights the importance of fit between program (the set of plans or projects being implemented), organization (the one implementing the program, providing resources and management) and the beneficiaries (those intended to benefit from the program). It should be obvious that fit between these three elements of a project is a fundamental requirement for success.  But a quick read of the news coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade will make it obvious that fit, if even considered in the first place, is very difficult to achieve and not just in conflict-affected countries.

(Korten 1980:495)

Another aspect of fit that should come as no surprise is that it may well take time to achieve fit and that the requirements for fit may change over time.  Thus the organization that learns how to learn and makes learning an organizational priority is much more likely to achieve fit in the long-run.

An organization that subcontracts someone to write a project plan, then, when the consultant has long gone, attempts to implement the plan by subcontracting the execution of it to someone else, is unlikely to learn anything about fit.  But that’s the way a lot of the development projects in Afghanistan and Iraq, and some parts of Pakistan, are being carried out at present – 30 years after Korten published his paper.

If fit is achieved and sustained then a project is likely to proceed through 3 stages  (Figure 4).

(ibid: 400)

Stage 1 involves learning to be effective, stage 2, learning to be efficient and stage 3 learning to expand.  These three phases are self-explanatory.  Transition between phases requires visionary, risk-taking, humble leadership and the whole process can take a lot of time, maybe 20 years.  This is a far cry from the 3-5 year project cycles still in wide use in development.

This is not to say that the learning process approach is fool-proof.  It is clearly a risky endeavour.  And there are projects where the blueprint approach (the mainstream approach described above) is appropriate  (large scale infrastructure projects, for example). The point I’m trying to make is that, especially in conflict-affected countries, billions of dollars are being thrown at ill-fitting, ineffective, unsustainable programming.  My question is, even if the only concern driving these billions is the security and peace-of-mind of middle class Americans and Brits, wouldn't it make more sense to invest the time to learn how to be effective development practitioners, learning together with project beneficiaries over the long term?

References:

Barakat, S., & Chard, M. (2002). Theories, rhetoric and practice: Recovering the capacities of war-torn societies. Third World Quarterly, 23(5), 817-835

Korten, D. C. (1980). Community Organization and Rural Development: A Learning Process Approach. Public Administration Review, 480-511.

Bible and a Gun

As I read Jordan's last post, with the photo burned in my memory, I became increasingly smug as my attitudes towards the military complex were even more deeply confirmed. However, out of the blue, I started thinking about the line from "The Wanderer" by Johnny Cash and U2,
"I went out walking with a bible and a gun
The word of God lay heavy on my heart
I was sure I was the one"

I won't try to analyze the song in this space, I tried very much simply to put the lyrics on the right but to no avail - so I've simply posted a YouTube video to let you listen to the words.

It wasn't so long ago that missionary's made the very same leap of logic. Somewhere along the line people who were in the business of evangelism realized that meeting people's physical needs was an excellent stepping stone to meeting their spiritual needs. (To me, that logic is present right in the New Testament but things got confused along the way.) *

I will not be able to explain my train of thought but after a while I almost began to see myself in that picture. Obviously a gun, as a weapon, creates a very hierarchical relationship but just looking at that picture I get a feel for all the relational dynamics between that soldier and the others in the photo. One of the last activities I did before coming back to Canada was help protect a natural spring so that animals would not pollute the water and people have better access to clean water. Similar to that soldier, I was down in the muck and mire, working away, laying bricks and scooping mud while getting to know the nationals who lived in the area and would eventually (I presume) take advantage of this clean water.

I may not have had a gun but I had a nice watch, a massive car, absolutely no financial concerns and drove off every few days to "recuperate" at home. In other words, although I'm sure I got to know my co-workers much better than GI Joe pictured below, there were some not insignificant factors preventing real relationship building and, as an extension, effective development. I cannot hold my nose too high.

So that was my initial response to Jordan's post; am I able to end this post with a poignant lesson? I'll try. Maybe as the International Committee for the Red Cross, UN, et al protest about the incredible harm that comes from linking military activities and providing aid it will cause them to purposefully study and categorize what they do so as to distance themselves from the military. This naval gazing may result in a broader recognition of some of the side effects of their own actions and cause some re-thinking about development.

In other words, one of the core topics of this blog is the ineffectiveness of traditional aid. Maybe the military getting involved simply magnifies this and will drive all the real aid organizations to really do some soul searching for some ground breaking methods to help those in need.

Not sure how that ties in with my anecdote or even the song but there you have it.

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

*Now, make no mistake, the path from trying to help someone spiritually to being concerned about their physical well being is significantly more straightforward than the winding path between a military presence trying to seek out terrorist individuals within the populace and that same military also helping individuals rebuild their homes. According to the military that path has to get through the towns of "It's for our National Security" and "For their freedom". Other towns along that road, not mentioned on the map include "Civilian casualties", "Toppled government" as well as "Abu Ghraib" and "My Lai". So I'm sorry military, in the short, medium and long term you are not doing one iota of good. Just had to get that rant out, better stop while I'm ahead.

Laying bricks with guns

image source: http://katakamidotcom2.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/children/

The linking of security of development manifests itself in two ways.  I explored one of these manifestations in my last post, that of linking development with the desire on the part of donor countries to increase their own security.  Put another way, this amounts to the assertion or belief that ‘we’ can “develop our way out of [insecurity]”(Beall et al. 2006:64). The second implication of the development-security linkage is a shrinking of humanitarian space and a blurring of the lines between military and civilian actors in countries where development is taking place (Jacoby and James 2010). I want to focus on this second point in this post.

In both Afghanistan (since the 2001 US invasion) and in Iraq (since the 2003 US invasion), reconstruction of both the state and infrastructure have been carried out in the context of ongoing military conflicts and considerable military presence. In Pakistan, along the Afghanistan border, development projects have been implemented in the context of considerable insecurity and instability and subsequently have required remote management by development managers bunkered in their offices in the capital, far from the locations where development activities, such as infrastructure development, are being carried out. In Afghanistan, where heavy military presence continues in most provinces, physical reconstruction and other development activities have been carried out by Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) made up largely of military personal of foreign security forces under NATO command. In these cases, the military are doing development and the distinction between military and civilian, between multinational and unilateral aid, are nearly lost altogether.

The humanitarian community, such as the International Committee for the Red Cross and other organizations, have long aspired to the principles of impartiality and neutrality, committed to operating in conflict or other politically charged contexts without taking sides and focusing on helping those most in need.  The UK’s Department for International Development, created in the 90s, explicitly embodied a legal requirement that UK foreign aid be divorced from its political (diplomatic) and military (defense department) spending and agendas.  As Jacoby and James (2010) point out, these ideals are being severely tested in the contexts of Iraq and Afghanistan, and, I would argue, in the broader context of the fragile states agenda, as discussed previously.

A military is expressly maintained and deployed in the national interest of its country.  It can, in no way, act neutrally or objectively.  And even acts such as building roads and schools are not, somehow divorced from the political and social complexities of all development activities and programmes.  The use of military in development not only obliterates any hope of maintaining neutrality, it belies a positivist, top-down, apolitical view of development.  Development cannot be deployed like an airborne division and somehow fix insecurity or instability as it is rolled out on the ground.  This point links with Kurtis’s insightful comments in last week’s post about the complexity of development contexts and the futility of trying to control or manipulate them from outside. Robert Chambers called these kinds of development contexts, complex, diverse and risk-prone (CDR) and they require a different approach.  I’ll have a closer look at possible alternative modes of development in my next post.

Perspectives on Fragile States

I would like to take a step back from linking fragile states to our [the western world] security. Searching for lists of fragile states I realized that a good number of these failed states would also show up on historical lists of being recipients of western intervention and aid. This is right back to this blog's namesake, Easterly's "White Man's Burden", since this is exactly the analysis that he performs on a number of countries.

So we have the situation where governments and/or other international bodies, such as the IMF, exerted external pressures on a government in order to get it to "shape up" and become just like the rest of the, fairly homogenous, western world. Then a few years down the road, when those pressures and expectations simply do not mesh well with the traditions and cultures of the country, we distance ourselves from the situation, wag our finger and say, "Woah, stay away from them, they are a fragile state. They're insecure, relating with them could be unsafe." (Who else sees the analogies to current socio-economic stratification between individual people here in North America?)

Encouraging internationally a generic form of government, which the US is so keen to do in the form of democracy, is exactly like imposing outside technology when doing development work. (On a side note, I just got news that my work from the past three years has unraveled even faster than I thought possible, which was already pretty fast.) So as aid agencies "discover" that local problems have local solutions, when are we going to make the jump to political institutions?

Please watch this four minute BBC interview with Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a former British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Israel. The last 30 seconds of this clip say it all... (apologies to those with slow internet.) In summary, Cowper-Coles says the key to a stable Middle East is to provide the youth with education and jobs as well as a representative government, not necessarily a Western liberal democracy.

Without promoting a no-government influence Tea-Party type perspective, I think we have to come to the realization that when trying to unnaturally influence and cajole extremely complex systems to move in a direction we feel at the time is the right direction, then the end result is often very undesirable, even in the rare instances when the system did move where we wanted. Science has begun to see this in ecological systems (an introduction of foreign species has unintended consequences), development studies are beginning to understand this (the real development or progress rarely results from the planned activities), and I think one could even find historical examples in the Roman empire or the Catholic church.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, this could even be the case for economic and political systems. We have yet to understand the full effects of all the bail-outs going on around the world whether it's GM in North America or Greece in Europe. Similarly, we simply have not learned from our history of trying to influence politics in Afghanistan and yet we still are sticking our noses in there. Just like unnaturally preventing forest fires annually resulted in massive, unpreventable fires every few years, falsely supporting or even toppling governments will continue to have some unintended consequences, including possibly making this world more insecure for the rest of us.

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

ps. This is a fairly laissez-faire perspective. Ie, hands off, things will sort themselves out, which I tend NOT to agree with, I think there are a number of strong anti-laissez-faire examples from complex systems which I have not mentioned at all. Please, comment away!

Barbarian at the Gates?

Image copyright John MacDonald, published in Walt (1997).

They used to be ‘failed states’, now they are ‘fragile states’, a loosely bounded set of states that are “failing, or at risk of failing, with respect to authority, comprehensive service entitlements or legitimacy” (Stewart and Brown 2009:3). The debate about what exactly constitutes state fragility and which states are fragile is ongoing.  But my question here is: why, according to the people who matter in the development policy world, should we (citizens and policy-makers in rich countries) care about fragile states? Is it on the grounds of morality? After all, we’re told, a large percentage of the poorest people in the world live in these fragile places. Well, it seems not to be that simple.

According to DFID:  “In an interdependent world, insecurity can easily spread. Development agencies cannot ignore the impact that security threats at all levels – local, national and global – have on poor people. At the same time, the world community cannot ignore the critical role of poverty and inequality in increasing risks for us all. We need to ensure that, as an international community, we make progress on both security and development” (2005:8).

I will look more closely at the implications of linking development and security in my next post. Here, I want to point out that DFID is urging (itself, ostensibly) to do more and better in fragile states because “in an interdependent world, insecurity can easily spread”. Security, as a concept in development policy and literature, is rather hard to pin down, it’s poorly theorised.  Whose security are we really talking about? What does insecurity mean?  Here, however, it appears that insecurity is largely contained within fragile states, but there is a possibility of it spreading.  To where? To the country in which DFID is headquartered.  The fragile states literature attempts to explain the drivers of insecurity and instability in these states and to prescribe treatments for this disease.  And apparently we need a cure quickly, because we are closer than ever to the patient in this “interconnected world”.

Anderson sums up a common prescription for fragile states in this way: “Reforming governance arrangements to ensure that they ‘deliver’ is thus seen to have both curative and preventive power: good governance is the medicine needed to heal a fragile post-conflict state, an antidote that can prevent a fragile state from collapsing into violent conflict” (2008:12).

Fragile states are thus seen as isolated entities of malaise characterised by poor governance and lack of trust between government and citizens (Ghani and Lockhart 2008). Consequently, there is little or no attempt to look for causes of state fragility in global political economy systems and structures (Anderson 2008).

State fragility can create conditions for conflict and the spread of instability that may threaten rich donor countries.  But it troubles me that this is the justification that is being provided for providing aid to these countries.  It troubles me for two reasons.  First, this kind of justification highlights the incredibly uneven, politicised way in which aid has flowed to conflict-affected countries (think of Afghanistan or Pakistan pre and post-9/11).  Second, I find it difficult to believe that aid programs built around this theory and planned in rich donor countries will balance the two goals of securing the donor country and reducing poverty in the receiving country.  Furthermore, the apolitical explanations for state fragility provided by fragile states theories obscure many highly problematic and dysfunctional relationships between donor countries and conflict-affected countries, relationships that may, in fact, be fuelling these conflicts, or, at best, perpetuating them.

References:

Andersen, L. (2008) 'Fragile States on the International Agenda', Part I in Fragile Situations: Background papers, Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen.

DFID (2005) Fighting poverty to build a safer world: a strategy for security and development, Department for International Development.

Ghani, A. & Lockhart, C. (2008) Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World, Oxford University Press, New York.

Stewart, F. & Brown, G. (2009) ‘Fragile States’, CRISE Working Paper No. 51, Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity, QEH, University of Oxford. 

Walt, S. (1997) ‘Building up New Bogeymen’, Foreign Policy, no. 106, pp. 176-189.

We're Back

Kurtis has completed two semesters and is into his third in Waterloo and I have completed two terms in Manchester and I’m now starting to work on my dissertation, due on September 5.

We’re both looking forward to getting stuck back into this blog and we hope we haven’t lost our faithful readers along the way.

Leaving our discussion of value frameworks for the moment (although I’m sure that topic will surface again in the posts to come) we will turn to the topic of my dissertation for 6 consecutive posts.  I will offer three posts and Kurtis will respond in a separate post to each of them.  Following those posts, we will shift focus to sustainability, particularly as it pertains to those of us living in OECD countries – those of us consuming –non-renewable resources faster than anyone else, at topic that Kurt is thinking and learning about.

I’m still fine-tuning the topic of my dissertation.  But roughly, I will attempt an analysis of a particular set of development projects ongoing along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. I will look at the project design, plans and implementation, especially in the context of the regional conflict and, in the broader context of the War on Terror and the current development category of fragile states.  In my next three posts, I will first introduce the concept of fragile states (look for that post tomorrow).  Then I will look at the securitisation of development with respect to fragile states theory.  Finally, I will look at theories of development planning in the context of fragile states.  Along the way I’ll offer my two cents on Osama bin Laden’s killing, Three Cups of Tea and Greg Mortenson and a topic on the tips of all your tongues: liberalism’s external sovereignty frontier.