Climate Blowback: What I didn’t say was not what I didn’t mean not to say

My post criticizing Sachs on climate change got many negative responses yesterday. The main problem was that I was much too terse about an issue that people care a lot about (you should probably apply a "weekend discount" to things I post on weekends!). So some understandably jumped to conclusions about what I was saying, which were inaccurate.

Honestly, I know very little about climate change. But I do know a little bit about political economy, which offers cross-disciplinary insights to the climate change discussion. So let me try again.

What I was NOT saying:

Here’s how to solve global warming. How and whether we know man-made global warming is scientific fact (I think it is from what I have read). That I am qualified to provide any detailed guidance on climate change.

What I was saying:

There is no such thing as a neutral technocratic solution. All solutions are political. The aura of the neutral technocracy just winds up giving cover to some political interests who have their own agenda.

The poor have very, very little political power. Because of this, other things equal, they were more likely to be victims of environmental destruction in the first place. And because of this, they could still lose out in attempts to reverse environmental destruction. I am talking here about poor individuals, not about poor country governments.

Current policy discussions on global warming show little sensitivity to these political realities.

When Kenya saved Washington DC

In today's NYT :

... everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into places with little good information. And an important force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation...

{It helped} in Washington, D.C., where The Washington Post partnered to build a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers.Think about that. The capital of the sole superpower is deluged with snow, and to whom does its local newspaper turn to help dig out? Kenya.

Debating Sachs: the Next Generation

I am reluctant these days to post any criticisms of Jeff Sachs, since I know many people are tired of this never-ending back and forth. But I make an exception when my own daughter asks me to take him on. I want to protect her privacy and not involve her directly in what is at times a nasty debate, so let me just says she is a college junior who has studied and thought a lot about the environment. I have listened to her and learned a lot from her, but anything I say here is my own opinion and I don't want to or claim to represent her opinion.

Sachs' opinion column that provoked her was in the March 2010 issue of Scientific American. Sachs is impatient with the political process in the US on Climate Change and invokes the neutral technocratic solution:

Let’s hear more from the president’s science adviser, John P. Holdren, Nobel laureate energy secretary Steven Chu, the National Academy of Sciences and other authorities. The public will learn to appreciate that the scientific community is working urgently, rigorously and ingeniously to better understand the complex climate system, for our shared safety and well-being.

Except, just as in Sachs' approach to ending global poverty, there is no such thing as a neutral technocratic solution. Sachs' solution sounds instead patronizing and top-down.  Any such solution has winners and losers, and the politically powerless poor at the bottom are more likely to be among the losers  ( What about the poor in West Virginia who see their streams polluted and their mountaintops removed to get "clean coal"?)

More generally, and closer to my usual debate with Sachs: Why should the solution to global warming be decided by rich country technocrats? Is this an environmental version of the White Man's Burden, that rich country environmentalists patronizingly impose their solutions on the rest of the world?

Rodrik, Defining Libertarians, Afghan Tribes, Finding Coffee in New York

Links for Friday: Dani Rodrik gets way too excited about changing IMF views on capital controls.

Will Wilkinson: libertarians are liberals who like markets.

The NYT again tries tribal analysis in Afghanistan: did they get it wrong again?

Bonus non-development link: where to find the best coffee in New York

The tragic disappearing of humanitarian neutrality

UPDATES (latest 3/13 2:42 pm New York) -- please read to bottom of post From today's NYT:

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Six Pakistani employees of the American Christian charity World Vision were killed Wednesday and seven others were wounded in an attack on the aid group’s offices in a remote village in northern Pakistan.

The Seattle Times on the same story:

When suspected extremists armed with assault rifles and a homemade bomb burst into a World Vision office in northwestern Pakistan this week, killing six employees of the Federal Way-based relief organization, it was the latest example of the escalating violence that aid groups increasingly face.

In the past 10 years, attacks have risen, with some 122 humanitarian workers killed around the globe in 2008 alone, according to InterAction, the largest coalition of U.S.-based international nongovernmental organizations.

UPDATES: World Vision on its web site conveys the grief and horror:

No threatening letters were received prior to the attack. World Vision's relief and development work in Pakistan is conducted by local citizens, and local leaders have strongly condemned the attack. World Vision sees the attack not only as an attack on its own local staff, but on the Pakistani people themselves.

World Vision remembers those staff who have died as dedicated people seeking to improve the lives of people affected by poverty and disasters.

Since 1992, World Vision has primarily focused on relief interventions in Pakistan.... After the devastating October 2005 earthquake, World Vision expanded its operations in Pakistan.

And lastly, the Jim Wallis evangelical blog:

When was the last time you felt gripped by crushing fear? Like the kind that might take over as you listen to friends and co-workers being killed? This is what members of World Vision’s staff faced Wednesday in Mansehra, Pakistan, as their office was attacked.

Six people working to address the poverty and need of their own country. Six pairs of ears ringing from gunfire, six bodies torn apart by bullets, six families and neighborhoods left to grieve the loss of people they love. When it comes to death and violence, six is not a small number. Nor is one.

....So, what if the cost of less war, of progress and peace, is self-sacrificing courage? Today, humanitarian workers all over the world will choose this as they head to work. Is it a price more of us are willing to pay?

UPDATE 2 (3/13 2:42PM New York)

Change.Org Global Health today has a new thoughtful post on dangers to humanitarian workers. The timing makes it seem motivated by the World Vision attack, yet oddly enough it never mentions the World Vision attack.

When you decide to dedicate your life to humanitarian work in the field, remember this: Not everyone wants you to succeed. As an affiliate of the United Nations or a non-governmental organization, many people won't think of your work as simply providing security, distributing food or teaching children. Though most of the communities served are extraordinarily grateful for the humanitarian assistance they receive, there are plenty of individuals and groups who are not. Accordingly, humanitarians face the fear of kidnappings, hijackings and attacks every day.

Take the peacekeepers who were abducted by gunmen in Darfur just a few days ago.

It's often a mistake to read too much into a non-mention, but I'm wondering if Change.Org NOT mentioning World Vision reflects some of the controversy in the comments to this post whether World Vision is really neutral.

(@transitionland just suggested that the post might have been written before the World Vision attack because of delays in approving Change.Org blog posts)

New UN report says Somali food aid failing to reach the poor (NYT)

Rather than reaching the needy, up to half of Somalia’s food aid ends up in the pockets of radical militants, corrupt bureaucrats and local businessmen, and local UN staff, according to an article in yesterday's New York Times on the findings of a new UN report.

The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times by diplomats, outlines a host of problems so grave that it recommends that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Program’s Somalia operations. It suggests that the program rebuild the food distribution system — which serves at least 2.5 million people and whose aid was worth about $485 million in 2009 — from scratch to break what it describes as a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors.

In addition to the diversion of food aid, regional Somali authorities are collaborating with pirates who hijack ships along the lawless coast, the report says, and Somali government ministers have auctioned off diplomatic visas for trips to Europe to the highest bidders, some of whom may have been pirates or insurgents.

The report will be presented to the Security Council on Tuesday. Early analysis from the UN Dispatch uses the findings to discuss the tension between development and diplomacy objectives (What Happens When Political and Humanitarian Goals Collide?).

UPDATE: The WFP has now declared that it will no longer channel food aid through the three Somali businessmen who have until now been receiving 80 percent ($200 million dollars worth) of WFP transportation contracts, and who are suspected of ties to Islamist insurgents.

For background on US policy in Somalia and recent tensions between the US and the UN there: See the War and Peace blog which argued last month that there is no way to aid Somalia without some part of the assistance flowing to Islamist groups, and asks why the US buys out radical groups in Iraq and Afghanistan but wants to cut them out in Somalia.  A new CFR report argues that the US should step back politically while continuing to channel humanitarian relief and development aid through local authorities, despite the risk of that aid being diverted.

Readers’ Submissions: Honorable Mentions in Best and Worst of Aid

The Aid Watch request for reader submissions for Best and Worst of Aid was our experimental attempt to use informal social networks to collect and spread stories about good and bad aid projects. In retrospect, it was only a partial success: we got a lot of submissions that couldn’t be totally verified, and many that did not explain why their submission deserved to be the best or the worst, problems for us to think about for the next time we try to run a contest, even an informal one like this. Our request for submissions, which we posted here on the blog and emailed to aid practitioner, academic, journalist and blogging contacts, netted double the nominations for Best of Aid than for Worst of Aid. We’re not sure whether to take this as a good sign (people are excited about some of the projects that they’re seeing make a positive difference in aid) or a bad sign (people still don’t want to talk about what’s not working, even when given the cover of anonymity; or alternatively, it’s harder to find well-documented examples of what’s not working).

Thank you to everyone who took the time to send us their ideas. Here are the entries we’ve chosen for honorable mention, according to admittedly non-rigorous and non-scientific criteria, from our readers’ submissions of the best and worst of aid.

(Honorable Mention) BEST new aid finance mechanism: Advance Market Commitment (AMC) for pneumococcal vaccines, nominated by Andrew Steer, Director General for Policy and Research, DFID What: In June 2009, a group of bilateral and multilateral donors launched an open offer to subsidize, at $1.5 billion, the purchase of more effective pneumococcal vaccines to fight meningitis and pneumonia in the developing world. Impact: According to the WHO, pneumonia is the single cause of death in children worldwide, killing 1.8 million kids every year. GAVI has estimated that the pneumococcal AMC will save 900,000 lives by 2015 and over 7 million lives by 2030. More generally, wrote Andrew, “the AMC could represent a radically new and better way to fund technology development and production.” Who is responsible: The AMC idea gained momentum in 2005 with the publication of a report, Making Markets for Vaccines: Ideas to Action by a working group organized by the Center for Global Development, lead authors Owen Barder, Michael Kremer, Ruth Levine, though many others have contributed to the development of this idea over time. Countries, organizations and agencies that have put up funding also deserve credit: Italy, the UK, Canada, Russia, Norway, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and GAVI Alliance partners World Bank, UNICEF and the WHO.

(Honorable Mention) BEST aid agency success story: Aid untying in Canada, nominated by Parker Mitchell, co-CEO of Engineers Without Borders, Canada What: In spring of 2008, Canada announced that it was untying all of its food aid, meaning that Canadian contributions to multilaterals like the World Food Program would no longer have to be in the form of food purchased in Canada. A few months later, Canada announced a plan to fully untie development aid by 2012-2013. These decisions represent recognition of a growing consensus among donors, and growing pressure from NGOs and watch dog groups, that tied aid undermines fair competition and the ability of developing countries to produce competitive goods and services. Impact: In 2008, half of Canada’s food aid and more than one-third of its non-food aid were tied to the purchase of goods and services in Canada. The OECD has calculated that aid can be made 15 to 30 percent more effective by untying it. As more donors untie their aid, pressure will increase on the outliers (including the US) to change their behavior. Who is responsible: CIDA, for carrying out these reforms, as well as the Canadian organization Engineers without Borders and other NGOs that lobbied for the change for over 4 years, and are still watching CIDA closely to make sure that they are on track to fulfill their pledge and are being transparent in how they share information about aid untying.

(Honorable Mention) BEST uses of new technology to transform people’s lives: Mobile-plus, nominated by Diane Coyle, economist and author What: “The technologies and applications that are increasing the capability of poor people to affect and gain control over their lives - summed up as mobile-plus.” Impact: There is still much work to be done in understanding the impact that mobile technologies will have on the social and economic lives of people who use them. M-PESA, a mobile phone-based money transfer service which originated in Kenya, is now three years old and has more then 7 million customers transferring some $1.96 million per day; detailed research studies on its effects are beginning to emerge. More generally, Diane cited reductions in transaction costs, information gains created by access to communication, and the creation of an infrastructure that can be used to deliver other needed services like finance, as clear benefits of these technologies. Who is responsible: Innovators like the founders and funders of M-PESA in Kenya; its younger sibling M-PAISA in Afghanistan; Kiwanja.net’s Frontline SMS, and Ushahidi, a platform which has been used to monitor post-election violence in Kenya and to coordinate disaster relief in Haiti, among other applications.

(Honorable Mention) WORST half-baked idea for which we have almost no information: “Camcorders for the Congo,” nominated by Laura Seay, Professor at Morehouse College What: On Hilary Clinton’s tour through seven African countries last August, she announced a $17 million plan to fight sexual violence in Congo during her stop in Goma. According to the NYT’s coverage of the speech, the plan included “supply[ing] rape victims with video cameras to document violence.” Impact: Unclear, and that’s the point. Unfortunately the USAID does not give further details of the program on their website. We’d need a lot more information to understand exactly who is supposed to benefit from these video cameras, and in what way, especially given that much of the sexual violence occurs in remote areas in which people do not have reliable or affordable access to electricity. For a more-fleshed out description of the potential absurdity of this project, see Laura’s blog, TexasInAfrica, and the Wronging Rights blog. Who’s responsible: USAID…we think.

(Honorable Mention) WORST unsustainable health practice with Cold War-era origins: Project HOPE’s use of pharmaceutical company-donated, brand-name medicines, nominated by an anonymous reader What: Project HOPE was founded in 1958, with funds and donated drugs from pharmaceutical companies and the gift of US Navy floating hospital ship the SS HOPE. The ship’s goodwill missions abroad combined public diplomacy with aid. A study drawing on archival documents cites Project HOPE as an example of the pharmaceutical industry's Cold War era strategy to defend itself against a congressional investigation into US drug pricing practices. Today, the bulk of Project HOPE’s programming and budget goes towards shipping and distributing brand-name drugs and medical supplies donated by pharmaceutical companies to developing countries. Impact: Project HOPE does not publish evaluations on their website, and even looking at their external ratings, tax forms, and annual reports, it is difficult to gauge the impact of their overall work, which also includes health education. Our nominator voiced concerns about the unsustainable use of branded drug donations in developing countries with weak health infrastructure, where the demand for drugs and supplies needed locally likely does not match the supply available from rich-country pharmaceutical companies, and raised questions about the benefits to pharmaceutical companies who are seeking to increase their market share in the developing world and who might gain from the perception that certain brand-name drugs are preferable to generics. While there are cases where branded drug donations may be helpful, Project HOPE’s publicly-available materials don’t provide enough information to know whether theirs are. Who’s responsible: Project HOPE, pharmaceutical company donors

Stay tuned later this week for Best and Worst winners.

Am I useless? A critic needs to listen to critics

The whole idea of searching is that you never quite know if you are getting it right. You need constant feedback from the intended targets of your efforts, to keep adjusting and re-adjusting. This is my motivation for criticizing aid, to try to induce it to change in response to criticism on things that are clearly wrong. And this is why I myself need to listen to my own critics. The blogosphere has recently been a bit hot about my approach in this blog. Commentators on a previous critique strongly endorsed the critique of Aid Watch or strongly opposed it and supported Aid Watch. Another critique from a blog by Siena Antsis:

Perhaps Aid Watch was meant as an outlet for shallow satire among the occasional interesting link and comment. ...Whatever the reason, I personally (along with others and others) find this approach to critiquing the aid industry (which sometimes seems lazy) not terribly helpful and rather discouraging.

Alanna Sheikh offers her very welcome and judicious thoughts in a post "Is Bill Easterly useless?",

I see both sides. I think that Prof. Easterly is too quick to blame aid agencies and NGOs for problems that are systemic. He blames individual actors for doing things that are incentivized by the development industry. I would like him to write and think more about fixing the system than attacking the individual organizations. And I agree that his tone can be snarky to a degree that stops being funny and makes you tune the post out.

On the other hand, the system needs someone who will speak truth to power (or, in this case, development money.) And I know from my own experience that the blunter and snarkier you are when writing about development, the more people listen.

I'm listening.  First, while I believe a critic should use a variety of tools in a critique -- reason, logic, evidence, Economics 101, anger, humor, satire, snark, compassion, evaluation of individual projects and organizations, and systemic analysis -- it's also important to get the mix right. The feedback I hear is that I have recently gone too far in the satire/snark dimension and am not using enough the other dimensions, and I need to adjust.

Second, I need to make much more clear that I have enormous respect for aid workers in the field who do very hard work in very hard places. I agree with Alanna that dysfunctional aid is mainly the result of bureacracies with bad political incentives, and not the personal failings of individuals. Although I don't have rigorous evidence for this, years of casual observation suggest that field workers are more likely themselves to be Searchers, while it's the HQ executives who play politics and become ineffective Planners.

Keep the feedback coming, the search will continue...

New York Times on Millennium Villages

Jeffrey Gettleman reports today from Sauri, Kenya on the debate on the Millennium Villages.

In defense of being mean-spirited: response to a critic

People on Twitter yesterday and today called attention to this thought-provoking critique of yours truly (from Chris Conrad at his blog The Big-Push: Development and Aid Effectiveness)

I did want to take issue with one of Easterly's tweets from yesterday, in which he sardonically impugns USAID's efforts in Afghanistan, suggesting that the most benefit Afghanis have realized from USAID's years of war-time effort is the use of USAID-labeled vegetable oil cans to set up live WIFI nodes in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

...This is a very unproductive and mean-spirited use of anybody's time.  I honestly have no idea what Easterly expects the response to such a post to be -- this adds nothing to the debate, and perversely co-opts what is otherwise very positive news into an outlet for his nihilistic worldview.

To be intellectually consistent, I have to praise criticism of myself as much as I advocate criticism of aid agencies. So thank you, Chris, for taking the time to give me thoughtful feedback. I read something like this and I re-examine if I am going too far in ridiculing unproductive aid organizations. I will consider whether to dial it down.

At the same time, I still believe in vigorous criticism of aid when it deserves it. In other fields, we recognize a constructive role of even very harsh criticism. Alec Baldwin joked at the Oscars last night that James Cameon had sent his rival director and ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow a good-luck present of "a Toyota." This is a mean-spirited joke at the expense of a corporation that has years of quality service to consumers except for one recent accelerator pedal malfunction. And Toyota deserves every bit of it.

"Aid effectiveness" is a sleep-inducing word that has resulted in endless rounds of summits and declarations ("Accra Agenda for Aid Effectiveness, etc.) and little action. USAID is a politically entrenched bureaucracy that has gotten away with scandalous waste of billions of aid in Afghanistan. A mean-spirited joke at their expense is among the least of the consequences they should suffer.

Do what you're actually good at? or what you should be good at?

We have just finished the annual ritual in which Hollywood pretends that its job description is making quality indie movies,  instead of what it is actually good at -- producing crowd-pleasing blockbusters. Avatar was not only in the latter category by $2.5 billion or so and counting, it even got good reviews from critics. But it couldn't win Best Picture under Hollywood's hypocritical self-fantasy that rewards what they think they SHOULD be doing. Wait, I feel another Aid Watch metaphor coming on. How many aid agencies and NGOs have tried to do what they SHOULD be good at, instead of what they are actually good at? Just because a cause is worthy, or of critical importance to development -- does NOT mean that YOU are good at producing what the customers want in that area at a reasonable cost. Women's empowerment, fixing failed states, promoting good governance, community-driven development, social services for the poor -- all sound like things your agency SHOULD do. But where is your evidence that you are any good at doing any of these things? What if you are good at something else?

An interesting case in point is New Zealand aid. Before a major reform, its largest program was givng college scholarships to poor Pacific Islanders. I don't have any decisive evidence on how good they were at doing this, so this example is only suggestive, but a priori a scholarship sounds like a relatively effective way to help somebody help themselves -- the ideal formula in aid. Then the "SHOULD" nannies took over, and now the tiny New Zealand budget is divided among ALL the fashionable causes in development. (The picture below shows the breakdown between 37 possible sectors in foreign aid.)

As the New Zealand example shows (and it is characteristic of most aid agencies), the SHOULD criteria defeats the whole idea of specialization, and even tiny agencies wind up giving 5 percent of the budget each to 20 different causes. Since there are fixed overhead costs of operating in a sector (like employing sector specialists), this means that a lot of the aid budget is going to be wasted on overhead costs.

Who in aid and philanthropy will have the courage to stick to what they are actually good at? and resist pressure to pretend to do what they SHOULD be good at?

Who is best qualified to help Haiti? Why not the Haitian diaspora?

Toronto Globe and Mail columist Margaret Wente:

Who can offer the most help to the desperate children of Haiti? Is it Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs, the World Bank or the UN? Is it the many experts who are calling for a Marshall Plan to “fix” Haiti once and for all, or the donor nations that have pledged billions for the task?

Personally, I would choose people like Eric and Nicole Pauyo. The Haitian-Canadian couple, who live in a prosperous suburb of Montreal, have taken in eight nieces and nephews left orphaned by the Jan. 12 earthquake. “I didn't think twice,” said Nicole, who's 62. The Pauyos have already raised three kids of their own. One of them is at Harvard.

For Haitians, the best way to improve their lives is to leave Haiti. More than a million Haitians now live abroad, including 100,000 in Canada. Life in Haiti, meantime, has become worse. Children go hungry, and barely a third finish primary school. About a 10th are restaveks (from the French reste avec , or stay with) – virtual child slaves who are sent to work as unpaid servants in the city by their impoverished parents....

Afghans and social entrepreneurs improvise when official aid fails

From the blog FabFi (HT to blog Whirled Citizen)

{A} World Bank funded infrastructure project to bring internet connectivity to Afghanistan began more than SEVEN YEARS ago and only made its first international link this June. That project, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, is still far from being complete.

{Meanwhile} the Fabbed Long-Range Wireless Antenna Project, ... as of December 2008 is working on an installation in Jalalabad Afghanistan.

today (Feb 4, 2010)  marks a new peak in the size of Jalalabad's Fabfi network--26 simultaneous live nodes.

Pictured above is a makeshift reflector constructed from pieces of board, wire, a plastic tub and, ironically enough, a couple of USAID vegetable oil cans that was made today by Hameed, Rahmat and their friend "Mr. Willy".

Live Tweeting from Our "Best and Worst of Aid" Conference

1. indabamf Excitedly listening to opening session, Development Research Institute, NYU: Aid & Development Today
2. indabamf @bill_easterly notes that lack of transparency & specialization are 2 factors that have made AID less effective than it could be
3. indabamf There has been a upward trend to providing AID to corrupt countries
4. altmandaniel @bill_easterly gives award for Worst of Aid to Defense/Diplomacy/Development approach of US, UK, Canada
5. indabamf Worst of AID Oscar goes to the 3Ds approach in development: integrating development w defense and diplomacy.
6. indabamf "Rather than face the trade-offs, deny they exist, & so disguise that developmnt is being traded off 4 defense & diplomacy" -
7. indabamf @bill_easterly gives kudos to mobile-based tech: M-PESA @Ushahidi @FrontlineSMS in his presentation
8. indabamf The AID Oscar for Best of AID: the Giving Well movement
9. hotdamnation http://twitpic.com/16qwsg - Development conference w @bill_easterly ... No one wants your old shoes!
10. kristentitus Best of Aid Award goes to... the new movement to give well rather than to just give.
11. indabamf Thanks @bill_easterly & Development Research Inst, NYU for a great conference 2day. Varied perspectives. Brain sufficiently overstimulated!

Live T only from opening session, except for last. Conference (see agenda here)  finished at 2pm. Further news coming on this blog from material presented at conference by speakers Yaw Nyarko, Bill Easterly, Clare Lockhart, Isabel Guerrero, Andrew Mwenda, and Lant Pritchett.

The Wrong Person Wins The Great Economist.Com Finance Debate

Well, at least in my inexpert opinion. The final statements indicated a lot of agreement between Ross Levine and Joe Stiglitz. Yet you can distinguish between the two when each makes their most colorful or most forceful statements: Ross Levine:

Again and again, the regulatory authorities (1) were acutely aware of problems, (2) had ample power to fix the problems, and (3) chose not to.

Joe Stiglitz:

If products like CDSs are sold as insurance products, then they should be subject to insurance regulation, ensuring that there is adequate capital to fulfill their promises; if they are gambling products, then they should be subject to gambling laws and regulated and taxed as such.

Although both agree on the need for financial regulation, their core instincts are very different.

Levine doesn't think any one financial product is inherently good or bad; he thinks the challenge is to get the regulators to do the job that they previously punted on.

Stiglitz thinks the main danger is in the financial products created by the destructive financial wizardsand has a lot of faith in regulators to crack down on them. ("Gambling products"? makes you wonder if Indian reservations are going to take over from Wall Street.)

The Economist is going to announce the winner in a few hours, but we already know: Stiglitz is getting 57% of the votes to Levine's 43%. I think the voters are getting it wrong.

I'm really not sure what to make of this

This Friday: “Best and Worst of Aid” Conference

For aid watchers in New York, this post is a reminder of Development Research Institute’s upcoming conference this Friday, from 9 am to 2 pm, in NYU’s Kimmel Center. Called “The Best and Worst of Aid: Incentives, Accountability and Effectiveness,” speakers and participants will present new findings and discuss and debate the best and worst of what happened in aid this year.

(According to some rumors, the irrepressible light-hearted side of DRI will give Oscar-style Best of Aid Awards – and of course, Worst of Aid Awards – in several important categories).

9:00 am: Welcome and Introduction Yaw Nyarko, Professor of Economics and Co-Director of DRI

9:10 am: Aid and Development Today: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times William Easterly, Professor of Economics and Co-Director of DRI

10:00 am: The Best and the Worst of International Effort on Failed States Clare Lockhart, CEO, Institute for State Effectiveness

10:50 am: Coffee Break

11:05 am: Keynote: What Works and What Does Not Work in Aid and the Transformative Challenges Ahead Isabel Guerrero, Vice President, South Asia Region, World Bank

11:50 am: Thoughts on Aid from a Ugandan Perspective Andrew Mwenda, Founder & Owner, The Independent, Uganda

12:30 pm: Lunch Served

12:45 pm: Lunch Keynote: Historical Lessons: What Did Development Aid Do Best? What Did It Do Worst? Lant Pritchett, Harvard Kennedy School

The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. (More details here. Register here.)

The Development Satire Industry Reaches New Lows: Why?

I just found out about another contribution to the exploding development satire field. It's in EXTREMELY bad taste, is often disgusting, and always features  lacerating and offensive  satire  ... therefore, some of you will LOVE it. It's based around a blog called HR International (to keep our blog's PG-13 rating, I will not at this time spell out what HR stands for).  I found out about it because I am one of the 3 people that @hreliefint is now following on Twitter, along with @jeffdsachs and @talesfromthehood (the latter tipped me off).

A sample of of the HRI blog (from the small part that is printable in a family blog):

Ed and I know a thing or two about emergency coordination as we go back to the days in Aceh, where I’ve hired him to develop HRIs fishing-boat distribution strategy, a program that is currently being monitored and evaluated by HRIs M&E wing: initial findings indicate that this program will become yet another world’s best practice. The 800,000 or so USD that have remained unspent in that program will come in handy as HRI is preparing a dignified launch of the findings report in Bali, with a mass distribution component aimed at making one M&E report available to each family in Aceh and beyond.

What accounts for the explosion in development satire? Of course,  I am as guilty as anyone.  Based on random introspection, observation of a selection-biased sample of the aid industry, and unfounded guesses, the answer is obvious:  it's because of the increase in BS in development & aid. As the BS force keeps exponentially growing, there was bound to be an opposite force of protest.

We are using the only weapon that us weak people oppressed by the BS ruling elites can use: satire. As BS keeps rising, satire is going to keep exploding in revolt. A few of us (not me)  may go over the edge to the extremes of the HRI blog. So, just to be clear, you BS'ers in aid: all this bad taste is YOUR fault.

The War of the Causes in Aid

The development industry seems to be riddled with people whose main job is to divert money to their good cause. The advocates are united by a strong belief in the priority that should be given to their sector (education, water, AIDS etc). They convince themselves that they are speaking for real interests of the poor… Within many aid agencies there is a permanent state of low intensity bureaucratic warfare for resources…{staff} fight to defend and expand funding for the causes they work on. They deliberately stoke up pressure in private alliances with civil society organisations – many of whom they fund – to raise the political stakes through conferences, international declarations, and publications with the aim of committing funders to spend a larger share of aid resources on their issue.  ….But for the aid budget as a whole these are zero sum games, and everyone would be better off – and many lives would be saved – if it stopped.

This quote comes from a blog post by Owen Barder which is now several months old. For some reason we’re just seeing it now, but thought it was still worth sharing with our readers too.

He gives AIDS in Ethiopia as an uncomfortable example of this kind of advocacy distorting aid:

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), in Ethiopia about 65% of the population (52 million people) live in areas at risk of malaria. Malaria is the leading cause of health problems, responsible for about 27% of deaths; and malaria epidemics are increasing. The HIV/AIDS prevalence rate among adults is 2.1% (2007) – that’s about 1.6 million people living with HIV.

Of $5.15 per head provided in aid for health to Ethiopia in 2007, about $3.18 per head was earmarked for HIV  while about $0.26 cents per head was allocated to malaria control.  Given the relatively low burden of HIV, earmarking 60% of health aid for HIV is excessive relative to other needs for health spending.

Of course it is right that we should try to make sure that everybody with HIV has access to medicines to keep them healthy, and … to prevent spread of the disease. But we should also make sure that people have bednets and drugs to stop malaria, provide childhood vaccination to prevent easily preventable diseases, ensure access to contraception and safe abortions, and, above all, enough funding to provide basic health services that would save thousands of lives and suffering.  Yet we are not willing to provide enough money to do all of this.  It is in this context that it is damaging to earmark 60% of health aid to HIV.

Owen is equally blunt about the way forward:

we should, as a development community, heap scorn and opprobrium on anyone caught advocating for more resources in their sector.  We need stronger social norms in development that frown upon this kind of anti-social behaviour.

Links for Chile earthquake

@chrissiy: links for Chile mapping response including Google tools, @Ushahidi http://bit.ly/b80EvW @saundra_s Latest Post: Chile may not need or want foreign assistance http://bit.ly/cLct9C

@AidNews Chile earthquake: Emergency funds released http://dlvr.it/3mL5

@AidNews PHOTOS: Massive quake hits Chile http://dlvr.it/3lwR

@dfid_uk #Chile #earthquake : A #DFID assessment team is on standby. We remain ready to provide humanitarian support if needed http://ow.ly/1c7qB

@dfid_uk RT @foreignoffice: British Ambassador to #Chile describes 'impressive' rescue effort after earthquake yesterday http://ow.ly/1c8Ho

@GlobalGiving New Project! GlobalGiving Relief Fund for Earthquake in Chile http://ow.ly/16GltH

@Oxfam Oxfam sends staff to respond to #Chile #Earthquake http://bit.ly/cTvAYn #terremotochile

@Oxfam Oxfam emergency response team due in Santiago, Chile this pm (Mon) 3pm local time http://www.bit.ly/cTvAYn #earthquake

@sociolingo RT @caribnews: Amazing photo essay of the earthquake in #Chile. (high quality images from AP/Getty/AFP) http://bit.ly/aNv8RV

@carlosmontes1 @bill_easterly but please let's not use this natural disaster as yet another intellectual opportunity to make points about aid

@carlosmontes1 good point, can you explain more what would bother you?

carlosmontes1 @bill_easterly thanks! it would b sad (but human) 4 "aid experts" 2 become disaster paparazzis, now is time 4 ushahidi etc not grand theories

@ithorpe: http://is.gd/9s3Ih"UNICEF and partners stand ready to help after massive earthquake strikes Chile"

@ithorpe: Relief web updates on Chile http://is.gd/9s5HK (incl. OCHA sitreps)