internet

Wild, Booth and Valters’ “Putting theory into practice: How DFID is doing development differently” should have been 5 pages long so more people would read it. The ODI authors spent one year helping DFID change its practices and they document the experience in this paper. At the programme level, these changes look like moving from giving grants to CSOs to using DFID’s political savviness to help CSOs strategically connect with governments, parliaments and the media; or moving from financing the construction of a water and sanitation rural infrastructure to a pay-by-result system that pushes district authorities to construct and maintain the infrastructure. That means a problem driven approach with an emphasis on DFID’s facilitation role and the use of ‘everyday political analysis’. At the process and procedure level, these changes look like distilling mountains of guidelines into a handful of principles, smart rules or top tips.

I spent my Tuesday lunch break listening to NYU CIC’s Sarah Cliffe give an overview of conflict-related trends. Here is my summary. Four main trends: (i) there are more and more protracted crises, and humanitarian work has become development work; (ii) following a drop in international wars after WWII, conflicts and crises are increasingly internationalized again; (iii) multiple and combined sources of risks (eg populism, population growth, resource scarcities) make crises and conflicts harder to solve; (iv) populations are losing confidence in the ability of national and international entities to solve conflicts. Four underlying factors to these trends: (a) decades of inattention to inequalities; (b) lack of investment in shared identities; (c) shifting geopolitical patterns; (d) innovations in ICT. Three big picture solutions: 1. Strengthen the humanitarian-development continuum for better prevention; 2. Join the political/security part of the international system with its humanitarian-development part; 3. Rethink economic and migration models. I found this helpful in structuring my thoughts.

My graph this week is from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s new “Inclusive internet index”. Commissioned by Facebook’s Internet.org, the index codes four enablers of internet inclusion for 75 countries: availability, affordability, relevance, readiness. At the aggregate level, no big surprise in terms of who comes first. But breaking down results by country or enabler gives less expected results. Malaysia comes first and Chile fourth for readiness with Kazakhstan and Argentina at the 10^th and 11^th places. And Nepal, Tanzania and Senegal have the highest overall rankings of low income countries (56^th, 57^th, 58^th).

My quote this week is from Anthony Heyes in “Air pollution brings down the stock market”: “Animals that breathe polluted air fight more than those that breathe cleaner air. People perform less well across a variety of tasks on polluted days than on less polluted days. Peach pickers pick fewer peaches. Baseball umpires are worse at calling balls and strikes. Call center employees field fewer calls.”

Katja Bego’s “The end of the web” predicts a balkanization of the internet as a result of co-existing forces: the rise of cyber-attacks targeting critical infrastructure such as air traffic control towers or nuclear plants; the increasing vulnerability of the web’s under-sea system of cables; the failure to design an internet governance system; the non-neutrality of big techs; and the growing number of countries building alternative island internets. She also sees an opportunity in this chaos to create a new decentralized internet and tells Europe to go for it. No matter how probable the prediction, envisioning our business model with no internet or a fragmented one is a useful scenario to consider when stress-testing the delivery of our strategies.

I’ve flagged the growing impact of the refugee crisis on in-donor expenditures before but in “Making waves: Implications of the irregular migration and refugee situation on official development assistance spending and practices in Europe” Knoll and Sheriff systematically review what’s happening in Denmark, the EU, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. They show a significant increase of in-donor spending (fourfold in Sweden!) affecting long-term Official Development Assistance (ODA); and a reallocation of ODA to humanitarian contexts with direct ties to EU migration, affecting the funding of far-away crises. They also document a shift in the discourse away from maximizing-the-positive-impacts-of-migration towards dealing-with-the-many-challenges-associated-with-migration (eg, smuggling, border governance, return and reintegration). They show how refugee-related data are all over the place and call on better harmonization of reporting via the OECD-DAC. Three other things caught my attention. One, policy papers increasingly make reference to “root causes” by which they mean youth unemployment, access to basic services for refugees and host communities, peace and security, human rights, governance and resilience. But, this growing focus has not led to any changes in funding practices. Two, when ODA is used to support voluntary return and reintegration, higher development impacts are “expected for projects supporting migrants faced with specific socio-economic vulnerabilities”. But programmes are typically not accompanied by vulnerability assessments nor sustainability evaluations. Three, the crisis has accelerated efforts to link humanitarian and development approaches. Most donors are discussing joint strategies and some have started to combine funding (eg Germany tying refugee cash-for-work programmes with funding for permanent waste management structures in Lebanon).

My graph this week is from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world) which just updated their profile of inequalities in China combining unpublished fiscal and wealth data with national accounts and surveys. It shows higher level of inequalities than previously estimated: “the share of the poorest 50% in the national income in China fell from 28% to 15% between 1978 and 2015, while the income of the 10% richest rose from 26% to 41%.” Launched in January, WID.world is a Piketty-driven open-access database with income and wealth time series from an increasingly large number of countries. It is a space to watch as the expanding network of associated economists looks into disaggregating datasets.

Two quotes reflecting different (generational? geographical?) perspectives of the vibe at the World Government Summit. Take your pick! Geopolitical Futures’ George Friedman: “Nations are going to be much more important than multinational organizations. [The] complex commitments by all countries to each other haven’t been working well for most countries so I think we are going to see the nation-state far more important than it was.” And Impact Squared Noa Gafni: “Many of the conversations that took place during the Summit revealed the days of multilateralism are not over. Although traditional players such as the United Kingdom and United States appear to be taking a step back, many frontier markets see this as an opportunity to play a more prominent role.”

And in case you need a boost, read the Bill and Melinda Gates’ 2017 Annual Letter.

What I Read

internet

10 March 2017

17 February 2017