An exercise in stone rolling

As the DSA/ EADI conference discusses new partnerships in development, Rodger Williamson describes the intellectual and practical realities of working with academics and philanthropists.

What difference does it make to someone trying to live on a dollar a day if a few hundred billion dollars get wiped off the New York or Tokyo stock exchanges? Some things work brilliantly, but a lot of things are in a mess. That’s the contradictory reality of our world. Interdependence provides huge opportunities and also makes us more vulnerable when the economy or the social fabric breaks down.

My role in the Bellagio Initiative is to work on organising the Summit in November. How do we stage a global dialogue around the key themes, and still come out with some clear points for action?

I have spent most of my life in NGOs on issues around human rights, development, peace issues, environment, religion and conflict. The last 11 years have been taken up with organising about 80 international affairs conference for the British government. Then I took early retirement and thought I would settle down and research urbanisation and extreme poverty. But no. The chance to work on this project was far too exciting and I got drawn back into conference organising.

It’s like working with two new ‘tribes’. At the risk of caricature, the academics are great ‘problematisers’. They live in a world of ideas and text, and more analysis always needs to be done. The philanthropists, by and large, have been successful in one area of life and like to get things done: ‘Here are the resources, let’s do something.’ And then the academics start to talk about unintended consequences …

In the meantime, we have got some themes knocked into shape and sent some invitations out. The record reply was three minutes – from Nairobi.

Manuel Castells has told us that networks are now the thing. That’s what we are trying to do – to get networks talking. We want to design a process so the foundations and development specialists, the NGOs and the business people, the innovators and social entrepreneurs all have their say. But just this week my headache is how we get 92 people into the remaining 20 of 40 bedrooms. We also face the reality of visas – you can lose or make millions in seconds on the world’s stock exchanges, but to get a visa for someone is serious long-term work.

Still, I marvel when I get a reply from Mexico saying, ‘I can’t make it, but can we send a co-founder of the firm?’  or a positive response from a representative of a slum dwellers’ organisation in India saying, ‘I’ve got some diary commitments to sort out before I can accept.’ A government minister from Bhutan is keen to inform us about their commitment to a happiness index as a better measure of wellbeing than GDP. But he is aware that running his ministry is also a priority.

It’s exciting stuff. The mix is great. Wellbeing is a fantastic diagnostic tool. With another hat on, I am working on wellbeing in the context of the global epidemic (likely to get worse) of depression. Mark Williams and Danny Penman have coined the phrase ‘frantic world’ - and that sums it up. Suddenly everyone is into ‘balance’. Some of it feels more like it’s teetering on the edge.

But we are keen to carry on making the connections. Some of that is an intellectual task, some of it is practical. A social entrepreneur told me that the way to find out what works (I was asking him about fundraising for the depression project) – ‘Push some stones and see which of them rolls’ …

… But I have invitations to sort out and people to track down.

Roger Williamson is an IDS Visiting Research Fellow. This blog was first posted on the Bellagio Initiative blog

There is an alternative to the relationship of dependency between Southern Africa and the EU

The EU- Southern Africa relations date back to the dark ages of slavery and colonialism. Sort of rider-horse relations with the latter always coming second-best.

The early 1970s ushered in a new era of a relationship that was based on some degree of mutual respect and equality (Lomé Agreement). Southern African countries were full of hope because Lomé granted them trade and economic preferences that had the potential to catapult them to the path of development.

But then came the WTO and the Most Favoured Nation Principle. Southern African countries were forced to abandon Lomé preferences and enter into a reciprocal trade relationship (EPA) with the “much powerful EU”. The Southern African countries are not keen on this. They feel that they do not have necessary capacity to negotiate a good EPA for their people. They fear that EPAs would “Tie” them to the EU forever and endanger their much needed policy space to develop. Surprisingly they have gone on to sign the interim EPAs and they are on track to sign the final EPAs soon.

But why should Southern African countries enter into trade negotiations they are not sure will benefit the people?

The answer is “Dependency”.  Virtually all of them are economically and financially dependent on the EU. As a result, they fear opposing it, in case that support maybe withdrawn. Apparently the EU uses this fear to control their less-fortunate partners. History shows that this has always been the case.

But there is something called “Hope”. The EU can also use it to gain control if it so wishes. That hope is needed in Southern Africa; not “Fear”.

Dr. Medicine Masiiwa is a research fellow with the Institute of Development Studies, University of Zimbabwe. His areas of interest are agricultural development, marketing, international trade and regional integration.

The Dudley Seers questions that are still relevant today

As participants arrive at the DSA/ EADI conference in York today, Sir Richard Jolly outlines his thoughts prior to the Dudley Seers Memorial Lecture.

Dudley Seers, first President of EADI, issued the challenge: 'We have to rethink our views of the transforability of models in the social sciences'

This is a good starting point for the EADI/DSA conference. This quote, copied from the thirty years of EADI website, is a slight misprint for what Dudley probably said – transferability. As a structuralist in his analysis Dudley often warned of the dangers of transferring models of analysis devised for one sort of economy to another. But perhaps today, when development studies is more concerned with strategies of transformation one ought to read the word as “transformability” –though Dudley would surely not have like the word, even if he was sympathetic to the concept. What are the models of transformation? How similar are the experiences of such strategies in different parts of the world. Is there a risk that our models of successful or desirable transformation smack too much of a one size fits all approach? And how much are the possibilities of strategies of transformation affected by the broader macro-strategies being pursued in a country?

           

With his structuralist approach Dudley Seers was and, I’m sure, would still remain highly sceptical of most cross-sectional econometric analyses of GNP and other indicators as a way of understanding patterns of economic development over time. As a statistician, he was also acutely aware of the enormous part which heroic estimations played in the construction of national income indicators and highly critical of  using GNP as an indicator of development. In one of his much quoted addresses on the Meaning of Development, Dudley memorably put it like this:

            “The questions to ask about a country’s development are therefore: What has been happening to poverty? What has been happening to unemployment? What has been happening to inequality? If all three of these have declined from high levels, then beyond doubt this has been a period of development for the country concerned. If one or two of these problems have been growing worse, especially if all three have, it would be strange to call the result ‘development’, even if per capita income had doubled.”

(Dudley seers, The Meaning of Development,  address to SID 1969, reprinted in Development, Forty Years in Development: the search for social justice, Volume 40, No 1, March 1997 (Sage Publications,) 1997)

At a time when GNP growth still rules the waves of most conventional (economic) analysis of development, the EADI/DSA conference provides a major opportunity to explore better and more subtle understandings. It may also provide a chance to explore a second concern of Dudley’s – to break down the artificial barriers between ‘us and them’, between development studies applied to developing countries and the ideas and models used in so-called developed countries. At a time when most of Europe and the United States is stagnating at near-zero growth, with high levels of unemployment and inequality and top incomes mostly rising, York provides a good opportunity to turn our development searchlights onto these problems, using Dudley’s three questions as the staging point for more challenging and more relevant analyses.

Sir Richard Jolly is Honorary Professor and Research Associate of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex

What if the world’s poor live in non-poor countries?

Until now, poverty has been viewed as a poor country issue, but now that most of the world's poor live in middle-income countries, donors will need to rethink their approaches and strategies.

Two decades ago, almost all of the world’s poor lived in countries officially classified as Low Income. Now, 72% of the world’s poor live in Middle Income Countries. This “new geography of global poverty” with the mass of the poor living in stable, non-poor countries—raises important questions for the current model of development assistance, where national per capita income is a key determinant of the volume and composition of aid flows.

Should aid allocation be targeted equally to poor people in poor and non-poor countries, or should special weight be given to poor countries? How, if at all, should international agencies with a focus on poverty reduction re-calibrate their engagement with MICs?

The spectacular growth of a number of populous countries over the last two decades has changed the global map of poverty. On the one hand, growth in countries such as China has contributed to dramatic reductions in the incidence of global poverty—indeed the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG), of halving the incidence of poverty between 1990 and 2015, will be met at the global level. However, two decades of this process has led to another feature of the global map of poverty—more and more of the remaining poor now live in MICs.

The poor haven’t physically moved of course. What has largely happened is that the countries in which many of the world’s poor live in have got richer in average per capita terms and have been reclassified as middle-income countries.

The new geography of global poverty throws into sharp relief development assistance policy towards MICs.

There is no justification for a blanket exclusion of MICs from development assistance. We would argue that the policy has to be crafted on a country specific basis, taking into account the detailed nature of poverty in each MIC, and the specific institutional and implementation context of development assistance.

However, looking further ahead, there will be fewer and fewer poor countries - maybe just 20 in 2025 according to one estimate - and most countries will need and want aid as resource transfers less and less. What does this mean for aid and development cooperation? Is this the end of 'traditional' aid and the birth of something new in terms of development cooperation and global public policy?

We hope that the coming DSA conference will be able to consider some of these dilemmas.

Andy Sumner is a cross-disciplinary Economist based at IDS

Can we be sure that developmental science serves children well?

The final years of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century have seen unparalleled concern globally about the well-being of children, with an attendant rise in the volume of measures and experts dealing with diverse aspects of children’s lives. This activity reflects efforts in research and policy as well as practice to enhance children’s situations, motivated by mounting consensus that young people today are confronting unprecedented levels of risk and uncertainty and that there are some fairly obvious universal solutions to their problems.

The growing sense of urgency around these issues seems to legitimise widespread state intervention into children’s lives; indeed, intervention has become a moral imperative. So, two parallel courses of action have been set in motion. The first provides broad support to all children and involves diverse services such as health and education, sometimes backed by social protection programmes. The second, intended to shield the young from specific risks, entails a range of specialist protective measures centering on social work practice and the law.

The moral authority behind these interventions derives from their framing in terms of progress and children’s rights, as well as their alignment with the latest scientific evidence on child development that seemingly shows how children’s well-being can be best supported. The thinking underpinning developmental science is compelling and has been taken up by the international community through means like the human capital framework and the age grade system in school. Yet, the vast bulk of this evidence draws on research with children in the industrialised world, and hence is both limited and biased; in this way, ‘irrefutable’ science applied in the name of progress globally has generated deep moral norms that go largely unquestioned in measures to promote and protect.

Although few in number, studies with boys and girls in developing countries make it clear that young people growing up in these regions are indeed gaining significantly from the spread of modern values and services, fuelled by macro-economic growth. The first wave of measures, in health, nutrition, water and sanitation, were successful in reducing infant and child mortality. The second, focused on education, considerably increased pre-school and primary enrolment, dramatically changing children’s aspirations.

Nevertheless, these studies are also uncovering the things boys and girls are losing, as well as some of the unintended adverse consequences of interventions. Education gains mask significant inequalities in access and quality; poor children, rural children, the children of poorly educated parents (mothers), ethnic minority children, girls and other marginalised groups get an especially raw deal. At the same time, human capital models which focus on formal learning of a narrow range of academic skills don’t take into account the relevance of these skills for local labour markets or the financial and social costs of keeping children in school and isolating them from everyday activities in their households and communities. Nor do they recognise the many benefits children get from the contribution they make to family and community. And the third wave of measures, aimed at eliminating social risks like workplace exploitation or trafficking, are deeply ideological and have had a very bumpy ride indeed, often producing as many problems as they solve.

We have to recognise that with all its benefits, modernity affects children’s lives in complex ways, leading to competing ideologies of childhood and competing demands on children’s time. Given all of this, can we really be so sure that developmental science and modernity automatically serve children well, for example in their education and protection? Are we sufficiently attentive to the dangers involved and prepared to countenance closer scrutiny of our efforts? It is important to consider what children and families stand to lose through change and who is designating what is good and what bad for children. Above all, we should be wary of standardised policies and programmes that pay insufficient attention to children’s own concerns, to the socio-cultural and economic context they live in, and to children’s roles and relationships within their families and communities.

Jo Boyden is the Director of Young Lives, University of Oxford

Why involve men in work on gender equality?

I am a feminist who has spent 20 years writing about gender, both in the UK and the Global South. I have no doubt that women suffer just because they are women.  But I have also become convinced that if we are ever to move forward in terms of gender equality, we need to involve men too.

Surely this ought to be a no-brainer. Gender is about men and women and the relationships between them. So why is it so problematic?

First, because the focus on men does not always come from a gender equality perspective, but from the idea that it is men who are now the victims. For example, Atlantic Monthly ran an article noting that men are becoming redundant with an ‘unprecedented role reversal now under way’. And in 2010 Newsweek ran a cover story on ‘reinventing masculinity’, analysing assertions that women are taking over the world – or at least the US.

This is dangerous nonsense. Of course there are individual men who face rape or violence from women, but they are in a tiny minority. Overwhelmingly, it is still predominantly women who face abuse, violence and discrimination from men. Things may look better in the rich world, but for example, in the US, a woman is battered by her intimate partner every 15 seconds in the UK, women working full time still earn on average 15.5% less an hour than men.  Globally, women hold only 19% of positions in national parliaments.

Second, there is suspicion from feminists, and from some women and women’s groups about working with men. (Not to mention the scepticism from some women and men about the value of gender work at all in our ‘post-feminist’ era). They question men’s motives. And they feel that the debate is hijacking the focus and the resources from work with women.  They are right.

But it is precisely because patriarchy is the problem that we need to put some of our attention on men and boys.  We need to shine a light on the reasons – social, political, economic and individual - why so many women and girls still face abuse and discrimination in almost every area of their lives. Then we need to involve men as part of the solution rather than as part of the problem. This should be in addition to, not instead of, what is already being spent on women and women’s projects.

In order to do this, men themselves need to see that equality is a matter of justice. They need to recognize that it benefits their mothers, wives, girlfriends, and daughters. And they need to realise that it is in their own interests to change. Because the current gender order, although it may benefit men in many ways,  has its downside for men too. For example, a national survey of adolescent males aged 15 to 19 in the US found that those who adhered to traditional views of manhood were more likely to report substance use, violence and delinquency and unsafe sexual practices. Young men are also more likely than any other group to die in traffic accidents, or through murder or suicide– in Britain, for example, suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 35.

This is not just about individuals, it is also about the huge structural issues that govern society, about economics, politics, globalization… We are still not clear enough about what we mean by involving men. Which men, to do what? Is it men in power who can influence law and policy? Is it men in their homes? Is it male community leaders? All of these? And what do they have the power to change?
What we do know is that men and women need to work together until it becomes socially unacceptable to beat up a woman or discriminate against someone just because they are female. We have come a long way, (thanks mainly to women’s efforts) but in the end men are still in charge - and it is men who now need to change.

Nikki van der Gaag is an independent consultant who specialises in gender and communications

Civil Society at a Crossroads?

The 21st century has seen enormous shifts in dominant perspectives and power balances: with national security agendas dominating international relations and development assistance; the rise of Asia as the fulcrum of global economic development; financial meltdowns in North America and Europe; global assertions of new coalitions of emerging economies influencing global governance; and citizens' movements across different regions demanding democratic freedoms.

As a result, the civil society perspective based on values of solidarity, equity and inclusion finds itself under increasing pressure. Recent trends that have led civil society to a crossroads include intermediary NGOs and professionally-staffed national and international non-profit organisations who are assumed by many to be the mainstay of civil society. It should also be noted that ODA and OECD began to confine the in-country roles of civil society as subordinate to state development (see the Paris and Accra declarations).

Countries in Asia (China, India, Indonesia, South Korea) and elsewhere (Russia, South Africa, Brazil) have expanded their international ‘aid’ to developing countries, without reference to civil society - primarily by stressing state- and market-led approaches. Economic globalisation has also given wealth and influence to private business to shape development policies, including sectors such as sustainable development, education, and health care - which were previously the forte of civil society

Other trends include the global financing of civil society which is increasingly now shifting to private foundations, away from national and global governance institutions. Also the concentration of ODA in a few African countries is creating a ‘new breed’ of external NGOs opening ‘shops’ to access additional funds. Large sections of civil society actors in hitherto excluded regions and languages (such as the Muslim world) mistrust global governance institutions. Humanitarian contributions in post-disaster situations continue to significantly dominate civil society activity.

INTRAC is one of five civil society support organisations (along with CDRA, South Africa, EASUN, Tanzania, PSO, The Netherlands, and PRIA, India) involved in a reflection process about the future of civil society around the world. This will address the question of 'what are the roles, capacities, contributions and limitations of civil society in the changing local and global contexts?'

You are encouraged to join in by sharing thoughts and materials, documenting emerging stories of civil society, and facilitating discussions with your partners and networks. From these reflections, the group will produce publically available materials for practitioners and policymakers.

There are many other contradictory trends. These changing contexts offer both opportunities and challenges for the future development of civil society.

There are also many other key questions to consider such as what are the roles of civil society in emerging, middle-income societies? And how do civil society associations interact with political parties and elected legislatures?

More information on the reflective process

Brian Pratt, Executive Director, INTRAC

Development research's Love-Hate relationship with policy and practice

I was asked to make some introductory comments at the Development Study Association-Ireland (DSAI). DSAI is the newest part of the DSA, and this was its second conference with the theme of linking research, policy and practice.

I started off noting the Love-Hate relationship development research has with policy and practice.

Love: many of us took up development research through some personal motivation to make a difference; normative aspirations are firmly and openly embedded in development studies; many of our institutional homes reinforce this sense of mission; and finally, we are quite good at it by virtue of our multidisciplinarity and our comfort with evaluation and learning.

Hate: on the other hand we are sometimes not so enthusiastic: when there is a sense that the "use" orientation is taking us away from fundamental relationships and questioning assumptions and framings; when we feel we are no longer able to speak truth to power; when we get drawn into researching the amenable and not the meaningful and finally when we are told to do it (e.g. the value for money imperative).

Most of these risks can be managed, it seems to me, and in any case, we can't help it, it's in our DNA this linking of policy and practice.

How do we do it better? I used the Motives/Means/Opportunity model.

Motives: there are many ways of inculcating the motive to connect with policy and practice--supporting young PhD researchers to spend time in the field and recruiting Masters students who have some overseas work experience.

Means: models are useful (I like the problem stream, solution stream and political stream approach of Kingdon)

Opportunities: "build it and they will come" is a slogan for non-dissemination. We need to build relationships with key people we want to influence. Be clear about it and be focused on it.

It's easy for researchers immersed in the daily grind of writing proposals, supervising students, writing papers, teaching courses, doing administration and management of projects etc. to forget the privileged position we occupy. We should not underestimate how inspiring the best of our work can be to people outside the sector. I am constantly reminded of it. That's good, because it is easy to forget the potentially transformative potential our work can have when it is firing on all cylinders.

The DSAI had a couple of terrific panels bringing together researchers and organisations like Trociare (a large Irish NGO) and Irish Aid. We reflected on how difficult it was to make time to develop and invest in these relationships, but we also noted several instances when it had made a big difference.

DSAI seems to have found a valuable niche in bringing research, policy and practice together in Ireland. It has tremendous energy from its members and steering group and I wish it well.

Footnote: At the DSA-EADI conference in York Sept 19-22 --places still available, topic "Rethinking Development in an Age of Scarcity and Uncertainty", over 1000 people will attend--I will step down as DSA Chair after 3 years and a new Chair will be elected from the nominees. I will remain an advocate of the DSA--I believe it does a very good job of promoting development research, connecting researchers with other researchers and with policymakers and practitioners, supporting the next generation of researchers and providing a stimulating space to draw out new ideas.

You should join!

Most bets are off: paradigm shift in development studies

 

The September 2011 conference in York, convened by the UK Development Studies Association and the European Association of Development Institutes, is very timely with its theme of Rethinking Development in an Age of Scarcity and Uncertainty.

A month before the conference and global markets have again tumbled, with sovereign debt crises looming across Europe and the US dropping its triple A rating. Bankers’ bonuses have continued alongside riots across the inner cities of the UK alongside continuing unrest in Greece. Are we presiding over the death knell of neo-liberalism as a contributor to the well-being of hard working, decent people across the world? Is economic growth, even the state supported, Keynesian version, still valid as the route to inclusive, sustainable development? And anyway, who is prepared to pay to stimulate that growth with investors rushing for safe havens and politicians too scared to tax their selfish, individualist rich? What will be the political outcomes of this turmoil and the widespread threats to the livelihoods of ordinary people? It took about 14 years from the post World War 1 failed revolution in Germany to the Nazi permanent war economy. We are in dire straits, with mass poverty now not confined to the poorest countries, but spreading across middle income ones too, alongside rising inequality and social exclusion in the hitherto richer, western economies.

Interestingly these events and processes are bringing Development Studies in from the peripheral cold of the social sciences. Thinking globally and internationally is no longer a minority preoccupation, but essential for all of us. The language of accusatory domestic politics has had to adapt to embrace global explanations for local problems. Of course this also functions as an alibi for the widespread incompetence of an ‘out of their depth’ political class, found desperately wanting. Furthermore, when we factor in climate change as a function of rampant capitalist accumulation, the modernisation bets are off—whether via supportive planning or neo-liberal anarchy. The world will choke to death if China or India repeat the materialist, carbon energy gobbling past of the West. Those paths to development are closed off if the world collectively wishes to survive beyond this century.

From development studies, with its intellectual roots across the social sciences, we can learn that the values, voices and alliances required for human resilience will themselves have to travel from the peripheries of discourse to centre-stage. We can learn that institutions as a function of elite interests over the last 200 years of modern capitalism are no longer fit for purpose. We can learn, dialectically, from the ‘Springs’ that the reproduction of inequality through limiting access will eventually produce its own anti-thesis. We can learn from the evidence of social movements and collective action, to date suppressed and marginalised by power wielding elites, that there are non-competitive, cooperative and inclusive models for maintaining livelihoods which avoid the consumerist revolution of rising expectations. We can learn from the survival techniques of slum dwellers in the rising mega-cities. We can learn that the precautionary principle is a necessary insurance against the possibility of limits to technological ingenuity. We can learn that the Christian philosophy of the rightful domination of humans over nature is refuted by more symbiotic cultural traditions of ecological balance. Above all, we can learn about the necessity of empathy over intra-generational space and inter-generational time as the platform for replacing the criminality of the world’s rich with responsibility and decency. The clock is ticking for elite privilege everywhere. Neo-liberal capitalism is a busted flush. But what comes next?

Geof Wood is an Emeritus Professor of International Development at The University of Bath and a Council Member of the Development Studies Association

ODA, Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction

Recent contributions to the debate on the role of international aid (i.e. Official Development Assistance – ODA – according to the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee’s definition) have focussed on an apparent dichotomy between on ‘security’ objectives and ‘poverty reduction’ objectives. This note will attempt to put forward two main arguments.

First, within the tangled and emotive dispute around the security / poverty reduction dichotomy we are in danger of losing sight of fundamental features of the economic role of ODA.

Second, in some respects the dichotomy between security and poverty reduction may be less clear cut than some of the protagonists have suggested.

Since the mid-1990s the international aid community has given much higher priority to poverty reduction objectives of policy in developing countries and has made this a key criterion for the design of ODA programmes. This has sometimes overlooked the role which policy interventions (and components of ODA programmes) which are not directly and obviously connected to poverty reduction can contribute to the achievement of that objective. This part of the note is concerned especially with the relationship between ODA and economic growth in developing countries.

In the mid-1960s Chenery and Strout introduced the ‘two-gap’ approach to the justification for ODA – the two gaps being ‘savings’ and ‘foreign exchange’. This was linked to the Harrod-Domar capital coefficient approach to economic growth. The idea was that ODA could increase the level of ‘savings’ and investment in recipient countries leading to accelerated economic growth. Given that a significant amount of investment requires imports, the second constraint was eased through the receipt of ODA in the form of foreign exchange.

However, contemporary theories of economic growth focus less on the role of savings and investment (although they are still regarded as being very important) and place more attention on technology change, labour force skills and the policy or economic ‘environment’. The argument in this note is that ODA can make considerable contributions to these three additional ‘gaps’ – making five gaps rather than two.

Further, some researchers have argued that ‘aid effectiveness’ (the extent to which aid objectives are achieved) is much better with a ‘good’ than with a ‘poor’ policy-economic environment. This begs the question of how this ‘environment’ is measured – or at least how its quality is evaluated. More to the point in the current context is the relationship between ODA and the policy-economic environment. About ten years ago Burnside and Dollar concluded that in order to increase aid effectiveness ODA should be targeted on developing countries with a ‘good’ policy environment. However, this conflicts with the fact that many of the countries which have the highest ‘need’ for ODA are precisely those which are most ‘challenged’ in this respect. Countries with significant levels of poverty and which are suffering from the effects of either internal or international conflict, or which are recovering from periods of significant economic mismanagement (or ‘bad’ governance), are precisely those which are likely to have a good case for receipt of ODA. If ODA is designed at least in part to improve the policy-economic environment then its role in contributing to both economic growth and poverty reduction (as well as to aid effectiveness) can be significant. Therefore the Burnside and Dollar argument can logically be ‘turned on its head’.

The second issue targeted by this note is the role of the ‘security’ objective for ODA allocations. This can be conceptualised within the context of conflict prevention, conflict resolution and recovery from the effects of conflict. Significant improvements to aid effectiveness, economic growth and poverty reduction can be achieved through ODA allocations in these areas, and it is difficult to see why there is necessarily a conflict between ‘security’ and more traditional objectives of ODA in this respect.

It is clearly possible that ODA expenditures might be regarded by governments as being ‘fungible’ between ‘development’ criteria (including the security dimensions mentioned above) and ‘defence’ criteria – and in some cases distinctions might be deliberately blurred. However, there is no reason in principle why the ‘security’ dimension cannot be regarded as being of significant ‘development’ interest.

Thus far this note has not distinguished between ODA which is associated with long-term development objectives relating to economic growth and poverty reduction on the one hand, and that associated with ‘emergency relief’. Some types of emergency relief are likely to be linked with ‘security’ and conflict situations rather than to ‘natural disasters’. Again, a degree of flexibility is required in viewing the multiple objectives of ODA within a complex set of ‘international development’ interactions.

This brief note has inevitably skirted around a number of complex issues. A longer version can be viewed on the blog within Simon Maxwell’s website (www.simonmaxwell.eu).


Mike Tribe is the Honorary Secretary of the DSA, and is now semi-retired with current academic connections to the School of Social and International Studies, University of Bradford; the Department of Economics, University of Strathclyde; and the Institute for Development and Policy Management, University of Manchester. In the 2009-10 academic year he also contributed to the Masters Programme in the Centre for Development Studies, University of Glasgow.