governance

1 July: Melting Artic. BLM. Helping the poor.

Posted on July 15, 2020 Leave a Comment

Last week witnessed the hottest temperature ever recorded in north-of-the-Artic-circle Verkhoyansk, Russia. Polar heatwaves are very bad news. They accelerate global warming. Melting sea ice gives way to dark water that absorbs more heat. Melting permafrost releases huge amount of ice-trapped greenhouse gases while damaging all man-made infrastructure. These changes are often irreversible.

It has been hard to choose from what I read and listened to on Black Lives Matter. Feel free to share with me what you have found the most helpful and educational. I need it. I would suggest taking the time to listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 podcast series: it is personal, it has good soundtrack, it provides a whole alternative narrative on how slavery shaped the American economy and how black people’s struggles and fights paved the way for other minorities’ struggles and fights.

The Center for Global Development published their 2020 Commitment to Development Index which uses over 50 indicators to assess rich countries’ dedication to helping the poor. While the UAE features last in the list of 40 countries for the overall index, it is in the top-5 countries supporting health multilaterals – assessed through their relative aggregated contributions to WHO, GAVI and the Global Fund.

My quote this week is from Psychiatrist Julie Holland [28’53’’]: “In medicine, un-checked growth is called cancer. And to me it’s pretty much the same in business: If it’s all about growth and profit you are missing public benefits.”

13 April: Multilateralism failing us? Big techs saving us?

Posted on April 13, 2020 Leave a Comment

OECD Angel Gurria is clear: there is not enough international cooperation between governments to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. To be sure, we did not enter the crisis on a strong multilateral footing. And according to Oxford University Ngaire Woods, nationalist responses and competition have so far prevailed. International organizations have also shown the limits of their power – largely a reflection of that given to them by their member states. Stephen Buranyi, for instance, gives a great historical account of why the WHO can’t handle the pandemic. So it was refreshing to see 200 former presidents, ministers and heads of international organizations come together to ask the G20 to step up its game. Initiated by Gordon Brown with LSE Erik Berglof holding the pen, the letter calls for heightened global cooperation in response to the twin health and economic crisis and a $8 billion package to help prevent the second wave of Covid-19. Let’s see if/how finance ministers respond this week when they regroup at the 2020 World Bank and IMF Spring Meetings.

In “How Chinese Apps handled Covid-19”, Dan Grover gives a good overview of the key role played by Chinese big techs in the crisis response. They provided information through integrated tools, helped triage patients towards fever clinics and coronavirus hospitals, scaled telemedicine services, and developed health QR Codes for reporting and tracing. His blog post was published a few days before Apple and Google announced their partnership to develop a new contact tracing platform. Does this further feed into reversing the tech backlash trend flagged two weeks ago? It’s probably wise to take the long view on this one by, for instance, watching the 3-episode PBS “Networld” of Niall Ferguson [available on youtube if you are not in the US]. Little is new in the documentary but I enjoyed thinking about the parallel between today’s digital networks and ancient analog networks used to foster revolutions, and learning about network theory.

My picture this week is from MIT Tech Review Will Heaven’s “Why the coronavirus lockdown is making the internet stronger than ever”. It shows that, with the lockdown, internet connections moved from city offices to suburban homes, ie from highly powered hubs to scattered locations with low bandwidth and outdated cables. According to Heaven this has accelerated traffic capacity upgrade, infrastructure expansion, and data plan loosening – making the internet stronger for more. This is not how I was thinking about this before reading this article. I was thinking about how the lockdown amplifies digital inequalities between urban and rural, and between rich and poor.

My quote this week is from Brookings Kemal Dervis: “A clear parallel between the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change is becoming apparent. Both feature emergence, path dependence, feedback loops, tipping points, and nonlinearity. Both call for eschewing traditional cost-benefit analysis in favor of drastic mitigation to reduce exposure. And, both highlight the need for much closer, forward-looking international cooperation to manage global threats.”

22 April 2018: Management, Spring Meetings, ODA

Posted on April 22, 2018 Leave a Comment

I got excited about this article and that podcast which align with my wish for human-centered management cultures to replace policy-centered ones. The Harvard Business Review’s “Co-creating the employee experience” shows how IBM uses design thinking, crowdsourcing, and prototypes to develop HR policies because “people are much less likely to resist the change when they’ve had a hand in shaping it”. Tom Peters’ “Excellence dividend” [H/T Kathleen Edison] shows why investing in people and their development is the only necessary strategy companies should truly pursue. That quote sums it all: “If it is not incredibly cool and fun and energizing for the boss to walk at 1am in the distribution centre with the front line people who are doing the work, do the world a favour boss: resign tomorrow!”

It was the week of the IMF and World Bank Group Spring Meetings. What caught my attention came mostly from the IMF. Managing Director Christine Lagarde unpacked the trade tensions that were the main backdrop of the Meetings in her Hong Kong speech. In her Beijing speech, she flagged the debt and broader fiscal challenges that the Belt and Road Initiative faces in its expansion phase, and launched the China-IMF Capacity Development Center to train Chinese diplomats. The World Economic Outlook chapter on “Manufacturing jobs” debunked the long held view that development requires moving from agriculture to manufacturing to services. It documents the shrinking contribution of manufacturing to job creation at the global level and shows that some developing countries have skipped the manufacturing stage by rapidly developing service sectors with high productivity (eg telecom, transportation, financial intermediation).

My graph this week is from the OECD 2017 Official Development Assistance (ODA) figures. ODA stabilized at 146.6 billion in 2017 with two trends in reverse gear: (i) a decrease of in-donor spending (i.e. money spent on refugees in rich countries), and (ii) an increase in funds going to poorest countries. ODA remained mostly disbursed in the form of grants but the share of loans grew (+13% from 2016). The broader trend, pointed to by World Bank President Jim Kim, is that since the 1990ies, the ODA share of financial flows going to developing countries has dropped significantly to reach 9% today, reflecting the shrinking financial power of development organizations.

My quote this week is from Zuckerberg in his Ezra Klein interview: “It’s just not clear to me that us sitting in an office here in California are best placed to always determine what the policies should be for people all around the world.”

23 June 2017

Posted on June 23, 2017 Leave a Comment

Youseff Mahmoud et al’s “Entrepreneurship for sustaining peace” is the curtain raiser for one of the International Peace Institute conversation series on prevention and sustaining peace. Mahmoud is argues that the UN refocus on prevention be accompanied by a shift away from deterring conflict towards sustaining peace. Conceptually this means moving away from a highly politicized and securitized approach to prevention. Operationally this means moving away from crisis management tools only. Adopting the sustaining peace approach, this article looks at how economic opportunities contribute to peaceful societies by offering more dignified lives and countering sentiments of marginalization for entrepreneurs, their families, and their communities. It uses two examples to illustrate how that works: Colombia and Tunisia. It highlights the unique potential of youth entrepreneurship by pointing to the correlation between positive peace and the Youth Development Index and arguing that the demographic dividend could also contribute to sustaining peace. And it provides 3 operational recommendations for UN field operations and country teams: map existing entrepreneurial initiatives that have explicit peacebuilding benefits; develop an integrated entrepreneurship development strategy; and encourage host countries to create environment supportive of youth-led social entrepreneurship as part of peace operations.

Several people shared the IOM’s “UN-biased” video with me this week. It speaks of decision biases in the work place and how they affect hiring decisions, in the United Nations. Some numbers. Where equally qualified candidates are considered, mothers are 79% less likely to be hired. Women take 5.4 years to be promoted to a P4 level whereas men take 4.6 years. In performance reviews, women receive 2.5 times more feedback about aggressive communication styles than men. Overall 62% men work in hardship duty stations, and while 30% of applicants are women, they are not selected. At senior level, 16% of males versus 40% of females are more likely to be divorced, separated or single. The video also suggests 5 very practical recommendations to counter biases in recruitment. Just take 5 minutes and watch it. Go IOM!

My graph this week is from CBInsights’ “Google is ramping up pharma activity” and shows that google has made as many pharma deals (6) in the first half of 2017 as it did during the 2010-14 period. While all eyes are on Amazon investing in the food industry, google is moving in the healthcare space with expectations of transforming the sector. What strikes me is tech giants strengthening their monopolies with one hand while growing their philanthropic arms with the other: over the same week Amazon Bezos bought Whole Foods, he also crowdsourced ideas for how to spend his billions.

My quote is from Mark Zuckerberg’s opening speech at the Facebook’s first Communities Summit because, as flagged earlier, it marks another step in how the social media platform is being transformed into a new type of global governance entity: “The idea behind our new mission is to bring the world closer together. Ending poverty, curing diseases, stopping climate change, spreading freedom and tolerance, stopping violence: there is no single group or even country that can take these things on alone. So we have to build a world where people come together to take on these big meaningful efforts. This is not going to happen top down […] We want to help one billion people join [Facebook] meaningful communities and bring the world closer together.”

26 May 2017

Posted on May 26, 2017 Leave a Comment

Megan Roberts’ “The state of the world: report card on international cooperation” summarizes the main findings of the Council of Councils’ 2017 Report Card. It is depressing. The data come from asking the heads of 25 think tanks across the world to grade international cooperation efforts on global challenges. The 2016 overall grade is C minus, down from previous years in the aggregate as well as throughout specific issues from climate change to global health to global trade and conflict. The main driver behind this poor score is the global wave of nationalism coupled with the declining trust in institutions. The report card also ranks global risks and opportunities. Top 3 risks: conflict between states, transnational terrorism, and internal conflicts. Interestingly they are all security-related while the WEF Global Risks Report 2017 had three environmental risks topping its list this year. Top 3 opportunities: combating international terrorism, promoting global health, and advancing development. I cannot draw any comparison with the WEF report as it only looks at risks, contributing to the overall depressing feeling.

Andrew Mayeda’s “World Bank’s star economist is sidelined over war on words” recounts how the World Bank’s Development Economics Group staff mutinied against chief economist Romer and his rough demands to make research more straightforward. Romer requested that researchers connect their work to public debates, define clear purpose for each publication, and make emails shorter. He also had strong views on style, asking for less convoluted wording and more use of active voice while tracking frequency of “and” in reports (which he would not clear if above 2.6%). From this story it seems that requests were conveyed in a painful way. This aside, the rules seem pretty good to me. Especially as I recalled this World Bank research showing that while the Bank spent one quarter of its country service budget on reports, one third were never downloaded and only 13% were downloaded more than 250 times in their shelf-times.

A little extra this week as it is a long week-end for some of us and Bill Gates just shared his summer reading picks. I read two. Homo Deus which I recommended here as a good cerebral trip. It was no surprise to see it in the list as Gates had loved the prequel. What was surprising to me was to see Maylis de Kerangal’s The heart which is more of an emotional trip. de Kerangal is a great writer who can make a page turner out of the science of building a bridge. In The heart, which was entitled “mending the living” in French, you follow a heart being extracted from the body of a young man killed in a car accident to its transplantation in the body of a middle age woman dying of a heart malfunction. It is about grief and how every person around these two protagonists deal with it. It is powerful. I enjoyed it.

My map this week is from Fred Stolle’s “We discovered 1.8 million square miles of forest in the desert”. Stolle and colleagues counted trees on satellite images and found the equivalent of a whole Amazon worth of trees hiding in drylands and deserts. This is good news for the planet. But it also good news for the 2 billion people, most of whom very poor, who live in drylands and depend on these trees for their livelihoods.

My quote this week is from Dame Helen Mirren’s “Tulane commencement speech“: “We do need you to fix things, to make things right, to answer the big and troubling questions of this extraordinary modern world. How is it that we have figured out how to put everything from our resting pulse rate to every book or song we’d ever want to read or listen to on our iPhones – and yet for six years we haven’t found a way to stop little children in Syria from being murdered by poisonous gas?”

28 April 2017

Posted on April 28, 2017 Leave a Comment

Tim Urban’s “Neuralink and the brain’s magical future” is a deep dive on the evolution of the brain from the first nerve appearing in a sponge 600 million years ago all the way to the future of brain-machine interface (BMI). I like Urban’s explain-this-to-me-like-I-am-a-5-year-old blog posts. They are long but entertaining. You can tell he spends hours going down the rabbit hole and processing tons of information to extract what the reader needs to know and to select the funniest, weirdest, and most beautiful illustrations. The post came out as Elon Musk launches Neuralink, a company developing BMI to connect humans and computers. Neuralink is the latest addition to Musk’s electric car/mega-battery/rocket/hyperloop futuristic empire. Musk’s plan is to “bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about 4 years. [And he thinks that] we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability.” Before that announcement, the timeframe for having commercial BMIs for people without disability was 2050. So let me bring this home: his plan could make BMIs part of the “how” of reaching the SDGs.
When asked why he invested in this field, Musk responds that he tried to raise the alarm bell about the possible dangers of artificial intelligence [remember? the group of concerned tech/scientists writing that warning letter] with no traction, so he decided to go ahead and develop BMI options for the social good.
Should we invite him to the UN for an early conversation about BMI governance issues? He may enjoy this trip back in time. But in addition I would suggest that someone from the UN flies to San Francisco now to convince Musk to add an ethicist to Neuralink’s 8-member core team.

UNEP Inquiry’s “The financial system we need” is the second edition of a report that takes stock of the financial system’s alignment with sustainable development. It records a steady growth of sustainable finance initiatives across the banking, investment, and insurance sectors; a rapid expansion of the green bond market ($118 billion); and a growing number of supporting policies and regulatory measures (210 in 60 countries). While these represent only a fraction of the global financial system (eg. green bonds account for less than 1% of total bond issuance), the green movement has successfully infiltrated the finance world over the past decade and offers a number of lessons and opportunities on which the social sector can build from the pricing of externalities to the design of new financial instruments to the engagement with the G20.

My visual this week is from the WEF’s gender gap report browser. It’s the visual story of a decade worth of gender data from 144 countries. It is not new but was nominated for the 2017 Webby Awards for best web campaign, eventually given to UNWomen for their “Women footprint in history“, also really cool.

My quote this week is from Feedback Labs Dennis Whittle’s interview with Denver Frederick “when you put people into a system that does not face competition and that is top-down, and it has too much power, you get a culture where people are trying to impress each other more than having an impact on the ground where they are working. They’re listening to the voice of their colleagues rather than listening to the voice of the people that they seek to serve. That creates strange dynamics that are really unfortunate and sad.”