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Forums, October 2007 Development v. Democracy? Is the war on terror the new cold war? Relief v. Development Global Warming: Is it too late to save the poorest of the world? 3rd October, 2007 Development v. Democracy? Panel: Baroness Amos, former Leader of the House of Lords and EU representative to the Darfur; Professor Patrick Chabal, King’s college, London. Chair; Charles Abugre, director of Africa policy at Christian Aid. ‘How to trigger and sustain development’ is the hot potato for aid donors. During the recent years there has been a considerable rise to emphasize democracy as one of the core ingredients to attain development. Yet, there is no consensus either on the meaning of development or on the means to achieve it. The first debate in the 11th series of the Global Development Forum for this year started out with the question: what is the relationship between development and democracy. The two speakers highlighted different approaches to the concept of democracy, which demonstrates how demanding the topic is. Lady Amos referred to democracy as government accountability, transparency and (critical) openness, when Professor Chabal discussed democracy as the actual policies, such as multiparty elections. Mr. Abubre, opened the discussion by throwing some debate provoking questions in the air. For example, why did South Africa have its economic growth and technological advancement peaks during the darkest years of Apartheid if only democracy would bring development? Or what does the Chinese experience, unprecedented economic growth with one party rule, reveal about the connection between development and democracy? Baroness Amos began her speech on the interlocking themes of democracy and development with a Nelson Mandela quote. In his speech in 1964, Nelson Mandela was prepared to die for “the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”. This is necessary to remind us of the heavy burden of apartheid in South Africa. The slave trade, another significant aspect of African history, had an enormous human cost, and its legacy, racism, is still alive. The old name for Africa, the Dark Continent, has a meaning to this day. Recently Africa has become perhaps the ugly fashion word in development, the flesh and blood of poverty. Africa has indeed missed the train. It has stagnated while Asia has moved on. A commonly used example is the case of Ghana and South Korea. The countries had the same GDP per capita at the end of Second World War, yet today they belong to totally different categories of economic prosperity. What kind of difference has lack of democracy made in African countries, and has democracy enabled development in the countries in which it has been implemented? Calling for transparency, Lady Amos stressed the grave effect of the 15 billion dollars capital flight from Africa. It means that 14% of African wealth is held overseas. Capital flight and brain drain have highlighted the course of change since African countries gained independence. With democracy, Lady Amos noted, government would be more accountable to its people. This money could by its own set the continent to a completely new direction. Transparency would enable the citizens to know how state money and national resources are used. Lady Amos stressed the point that the West has also a part to play. It is a necessity to recognise the need for peace and economic development and work for a more equal relationship. She called for regular dialogue with African countries and between the African countries themselves. Nevertheless, “It is not for us, the West, to dictate”, she remarked. Lady Amos was concerned whether the culture in many cases is used as an excuse to deny access of some groups (for example women) from politics and decision making. However, by supporting structures that create participation, the West can offer positive contribution, she pointed out. Lady Amos concluded by saying “The future of the African continent links with the future of the whole world” and the future generations would not forgive us “if we did so little with so much”. Professor Patrick Chabal, the author of ‘Africa Works’, tackled the topic from an academic overview. Answering some of the key questions he unveiled the controversies of democracy in Africa. He started out by asking, why has democracy been at the top of donor agenda. Clearly, the lack of economic growth, unsustainable amount of debt and frequent state bankruptcies in Africa demonstrate why donors have rethought their agenda. Overall, the world has witnessed the failure of state directed policies. Successive waves of democracy have swept different parts of the world at different times, Africa being the most recent and last continent to be touched. The world has moved away from authoritarian rule with the collapse of communism, symbolised by the fall of the Berlin wall. A commonly believed theory in the West is that democracy creates growth. Especially after 1960’s and 1970’s development agents and donors, with leaders such as Thatcher and Reagan, have put democracy as a part of their agenda and a condition for aid. Highlighting mostly multiparty elections, other aspects of democracy, such as freedom and voice of all the people, are left less noticed. Donor agenda has become almost like a check list, Chabal noted. In the African context, the international community encourages a multiparty system, freedom of speech, regular elections, formal role of opposition and political space for civil society. However, holding multiparty elections in Africa is not the issue. Indeed, multiparty elections take place in 2/3 of Africa. Many successes have taken place. Positive accomplishments include free press, wider debate, a more generalised critique of government, opening up space for civil society, including civil society in decision making and pushing the political elite to be more accountable (through the threat of losing in elections). According to Professor Chabal the issue, however, is the conditions. Political competition has revived and strengthened ethnical differences, led to plundering of national resources (due to fear of losing the elections), turning politics into a game, reviving antidemocratic behaviour and focusing into divisions. An aspiration for consensus was a more common policy as there was no space for opposition. Is it possible that democracy in Africa has decreased the discussion and widened the gap between interest groups? Professor Chabal, therefore, found it difficult to conclude whether the current model of African democracy has (or will) indeed contributed to African development. There is no hard case evidence for either way. Historically we have seen democracy grow from development. But clearly, Chabal concluded, aid for democracy has not proved to have been beneficial for development in Africa. The issue remains a hot potato. Anni Leppanen 10th October, 2007 Is the war on terror the new cold war? The second Global Development Forum of this October was truly a forum. The unfortunate absence of the other key speaker did not hinder debate as more time for questions enabled greater amount of perspectives to be discussed. Garry Hindle from Royal United Services Institution approached contemporary terrorism largely from a Western and British point of view. Since 9/11 Britain has been seen side by side with the US fighting ‘the war on terror’. During the past few years things have changed to some extent due to the failures and problems of invading Iraq and Afghanistan. We now understand better the complexity of terrorism and its root causes. Britain has indeed acknowledged new ways to promote international security, understanding that war on terrorism is never going to be won by these foreign ventures. Today Britain’s so-called counter radicalisation projects include education and other peaceful measures aimed at rewarding states that undermine terrorism. Troops are still deployed but tackling the issue with a variety of policies and projects is definitely a some kind of improvement. Mr. Hindle reminded us that this ‘war on terror’ is not just about guns and conflict, but also includes a range of economic policies, politics and social aspects. This seems to be a common characteristic when comparing the war on terror with the Cold War. Another similarity is the use of ideology and terminology. War on terror claims to fight for democracy, against repression. Equally, Cold War fought for capitalism to defeat communism. A member of King’s College commented that the US and its allies in the war on terror use the same rhetoric that was commonplace during Cold War. By harnessing words to hide secret aims, such as economic and political power, both ‘wars’ gained public support. War on terror might be a mission to gain oil resources or political supremacy, but more importantly its deliberate use of such counterproductive and deceptive terminology has resulted in destroying human rights and state sovereignty. Other similarities between the two warlike eras are that they both
exploded the military budgets and distorted the aid priorities. Benny
Dembitzer, Director of Ethical Events, raised the developing world perspective.
He reminded us that international terrorism has always been around,
and serious attacks have been suffered in developing countries. A disturbing
example is the Kenya and Tanzania embassies bombings in 1998. The world
did not start a war on terror then because it did not provoke public
support for any military intervention. Western countries felt too safe
in their havens. Mr. Dembitzer also argued that fear of terrorism has
become a tool in hands for the West to gain power over poorer countries,
with the US having a military presence in 140 countries. In Caucasus,
the US has had a growing interest in controlling the politics of the
area by financial and military support. Yet again their reasons can
be presented in various forms or disguises: are they there to govern
the Caucasus oil and gas resources, to control the Russian influence
or genuinely to prevent large scale conflict and potential terrorist
threats? Several points on Saudi Arabia were raised by the audience. Western support for the current regime, in order to prevent the radicals taking over, divided opinions. It was pointed out that the Western military presence has been withdrawn from the country. A member of the audience argued that the current regime could only stay in power by its alliance with the Wahabis, reminding us that Saudi money is used to export an extremely conservative and oppressive form of Islam. Resistance in Afghanistan and more recent developments in Islamabad, Pakistan, are both largely funded by the Saudi money, he argued. Mr. Hindle’s opinion was that the Saudi regime was threatened by radical terrorists even more than the West. A series of questioners argued that our support for ‘bastards’ is proving counter productive. The West is hugely involved in the arms trade, some of it illegal. Are we providing weapons to our enemies? Are our neoliberal policies promoting weaker states that enable easy access to chemicals and other dangerous substances? Are we, by provoking hatred and cultural misunderstanding, alienating groups and radicalising our own enemies? Many members of audience rejected the notion that the so-called ‘War on Terror’ is a new Cold War. The member of King’s College noted that war on terrorism is considerably more chaotic and asymmetric. Mr. Dembitzer pointed out that war on terrorism represents more groups than the clear division of the Cold War. An interesting point from the audience suggested that the Cold War never ended, but just changed its appearance. Cuba is still in Cold War. Is the world indeed fighting different cold wars, for example Vietnam vs. China and China vs. Japan? A discussion in the forums of the U8, Global Student Partnership for Development, was fed back to the speakers. Raising the question of whether climate change is the new cold war, the U8 students moved the discussion to yet another level. Climate change is indeed a threat to international security. For example, India is building massive border walls to prevent millions migrating from Bangladesh, which risks losing big areas of land to rising sea levels. Climate change, like terrorism, is a multilateral threat. Should climate change be the defining paradigm of international affairs? Some of the questions from the audience were left hanging in the air:
Is one man’s terrorist another man’s freedom fighter? What
is the real origin and reasons behind terrorism? Should the West leave
countries to work out their problems themselves? Why do we need to conquer
countries to get the oil rather than trusting the market? Are we rapidly
losing our claim to stand for democracy and human rights? Will a new
democratic administration in US change its ‘colonialism’
in Middle East? And would a sudden withdraw of US troops from Iraq trigger
a worse conflict? The future seems open. 17th October, 2007 Relief v. Development Deciding between short term relief and long term development is one of the key moral questions for development studies. Should we give the man a fish or teach him how to fish? The third Global Development Forum of October had the privilege of hosting speakers with significantly differing points of view. Confrontation could not be avoided with Ms. Liz Hughes, an experienced relief worker from Red Cross, Mr Roger Riddell, former director of Christian Aid and Mr. Giles Bolton, the author of ‘Poor Story’ and Head of DFID Rwanda. The emergency relief and development aid debate gathers a range of contemporary topics under its umbrella. Global warming, inefficient aid, donor conditionality and the role of the media are some of the burning issues. Recently, there has been considerable growth in the number of natural disasters per year. Mr Riddell mentioned that during 1970s the average number of emergencies was 200, compared with 800 during this decade. The role of climate change cannot be dismissed. Also, modern technology has enabled us to witness these disasters from our living rooms. Media has become one of the most influential actors in raising funds for relief and development and shaping perceptions and policies. It is commonly believed that economic growth contributes to development to some extent. Another widespread assumption is that international aid is the only way to solve problems of poverty and underdevelopment. Ms Hughes did not agree with either of these arguments. For her, there is too much time wasted and generations lost to wait until we see the effects of, for example, primary education. She sees the moral argument of emergency relief as its strongest advocacy. The public has already shown it is prepared to be generous when a disaster strikes. It is something they can relate to. It is also an easy way to clear one’s conscious and see fast results. The global trend is that disasters are becoming more frequent and more complex. Massive population growth, climate change and urbanisation are creating more extreme conditions. According to a recent Red Cross World Disaster Report, ‘everyday is a lottery’. Emergencies undermine and diminish life chances. Ms Hughes questioned strongly the common belief that economic growth makes people invulnerable to disasters. Examples like the Hurricane Katrina show us that disasters, even in the richest countries, make people extremely vulnerable. Her solution would be to make emergency relief top of the agenda and then decide whether international aid works and on what terms. Ms Hughes’ opponents asked whether emergency relief is only a sticking plaster. Mr Riddell argued for more funds for both humanitarian relief and aid to accelerate long term development. He agreed with Ms Hughes that the public response for disasters has indeed been generous but stressed that over 80 per cent of aid is provided by governments, the public providing a considerably smaller a share. The media determine whether a disaster gets enough public response to mobilise relief funding. Smaller emergencies are under-resourced due to a lack of media coverage. When money is not the issue, the quality and management of relief create the biggest challenges. Local response is most crucial, Mr Riddell argued. For example he pointed out that 15 per cent of Hurricane Katrina’s relief funds, that is well over one billion US dollars, have been used for corrupt purposes. Mr Riddell was convinced that development aid is far more important than emergency aid. During the past ten years, until 2004, 900,000 people have died in emergencies compared with the 19 million people dead due to different dimensions of poverty. Consequently, for every person killed in emergencies, 200 people die from preventable causes. It is clear that aid is needed to reduce both these death rates. Mr Riddell’s sees that development aid can contribute to creating positive conditions for growth and development. In reality, aid is clearly able to deliver the tangibles, basic needs. When it comes to the intangibles there is more that can go wrong. Proving the efficiency of aid is difficult due to unreliable evidence and the inadequacy of raw data. Development is too complex—we have too many variables – though it has been less effective than it should have been. Underlying reasons include the political distortion in the allocation of funds and insufficient action to raise aid levels. It is harmful to look at global aid funds, now distorted by so much money flowing into Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The country level tells the bigger picture. According to the UN, none of the aid recipient countries has experienced significant scale up in aid. We also have too many donors and too many small packages of aid, which must each be accounted for differently. At its worst, international aid is unable to deliver development due to its unpredictable nature. In the end, Mr Riddell concluded, aid on its own will never solve the problems of poor countries. However, he was convinced aid makes it easier. Giles Bolton argued that there is no conflict between aid and emergency relief. Aid management, on the other hand, is the main problem. Usually humanitarian aid is more effective and it is also easier to measure its success. It is more accountable as the media make sure that its implementation is reported back to donors and the public. Consequently this creates more incentive for governments to deliver aid in an efficient way. Interestingly enough, only five per cent of all aid is spent in humanitarian response. What happens to the rest, 95 per cent? Aid is the least accountable item of government expenditure. Other expenditure is easier to track as they are services that the citizens use themselves. It is easier to evaluate whether health services or education is delivered well through everyone’s individual experience. In aid, this transparency is almost non existent. There are two sets of problems: quantity and quality. First, the West never spends as much as they promise. Secondly, aid is delivered by inefficient structures, flooding the weak capacity in the developing countries. Indeed, the extent to which developing countries need to report and host donor meetings is overwhelming. But in the end, no bad donor goes out of business. Aid can work well. Mr Bolton reminded us about the positive cases of Uganda and Mozambique. In his mind, aid should be given a full chance to try its wings. There is a lot of consensus on how aid can develop—should we finally try it to the scale and style that we think it works? Mr Giles saw the answer for aid management in more systematic support for Africa and less consultancy from donor countries. We should focus in LDCs and increase aid for infrastructure. There should be more coherence between humanitarian relief and aid. Ideally Mr Bolton would abandon bilateral donors but was sceptical whether it would ever happen. Much of the audience was worried about the politicisation of development actors, such as NGOs. Are the financial donors distorting these organisations? The audience also had many interesting points about making aid more efficient. Some proposed more focus on the private sector and job creation. Others were concerned about how environmental sustainability and development can go hand in hand. One member of the audience was very passionate about Ms Hughes’ point on vulnerability, convinced that life is a different kind of lottery for people depending where they live: in rich or poor countries. There was also some discussion about food aid and how it is used to bolster the US economy by using its surplus food production. Certainly, food aid is one of the most debated issues in humanitarian relief. The answer for this debate lies somewhere in between the two extremes. There is need for both humanitarian relief and well managed, efficient long term development aid. It is easy to conclude that help is needed but more problematic to implement efficient policies and management in practice. Anni Leppanen 31st October, 2007: Global Warming: Is it too late to save the poorest of the world? Climate change and global warming have taken over the world as well as our minds. It has been one of the most successful awareness campaigns in development. The greatest acknowledgement was this year’s Nobel Peace Prize awarded to two pioneers of climate change discussion: Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Some of the key questions in the Global Development Forum’s final session of the year were: who´s responsibility is it to change the course of global warming, and is it too late to save the poorest of the world? Contributing to the discussion, GDF had two prominent speakers, Mr. Ben Southwood, the Director of the World Development Movement, and Mr. Ben Ritchie, currently working with the UN Foundation, the National Environment Trust and the PEW Environment Group. Starting with the science, it has been long known that our climate is dynamic, yet recent changes have been unprecedented. Global warming is a fact, but there is no consensus on the pace and effects of climate change. The road from Rio has not shown enough multilateral commitment, Mr. Ritchie regretted. The current target of lowering carbon emissions by fifteen per cent by 2015 is not enough, he argued. We need shock therapy. Currently the lack of commitment from the U.S. has been throwing severe wrenches in the works of the Kyoto Agreement. The EU, and especially the UK, has shown some capability to act, though Mr. Ritchie questioned whether this has been mostly rhetoric. He lamented that the forthcoming Bali conference on climate change has such low expectations. We should establish a global framework in which all countries commit. Seeking for real action, solutions exist already, Mr. Ritchie stressed. However, for example nuclear power will not provide adequately fast improvements. Instead we should go with renewables. An audience member pointed out the controversial effects of some renewable solutions, such as biofuels. For example in Brazil, a country pioneering the use of ethanol for fuel, food prices have gone up when these crops (e.g. sugar cane) grab valuable land and force farmers to move deeper into Amazonas, cutting down the carbon lungs of our globe. In the scenario of climate change the majority of the most heavily affected are in poor African countries. Poverty creates such vulnerability that these people will have little chance of responding to any changes in their environment. Even now desertification has undermined livelihoods of poor people. Yet these people and countries are not the culprits of climate change, and most importantly, they are least able to contribute to the battle against climate change. Controversially a great deal of the vulnerability has been increased by harmful policies from rich countries, Mr. Southwood regretted. Structural adjustment failed and resulted in worsening the situation. Even today World Bank and IMF conditionality, as well as the World Trade Organization rules, are hindering prospects of many poor countries and people to tackle climate change. We have a global consensus that we need and can eradicate poverty. We might not agree on ways to achieve this but with climate change we have the real solutions available—what we lack is political will, Mr. Southwood argued. Trade and finance are the major sectors hindering this will. Countries are eager to grow and prosper. We want to keep going as usual because the current model of economic growth has proven to lift people out of poverty, Mr. Southwood reflected. He was disappointed how the World Bank report on the world´s economic prospects earlier this year poorly echoed climate change: predicting rosy days of expansive economies, the World Bank left climate change out of its model. Multilateralism in days of globalization provides the only effective tool for climate change because pollution does not respect international borders. The necessity for an international agreement on climate change will determine the credibility and future of the entire system of multilateralism, Mr. Southwood argued. More encouraging, Mr. Southwood stressed the window of opportunity here. The decisions to be made are fairly straightforward. Do we continue business as usual or tackle climate change? We need to decide on investment. However, the simplest question is the most difficult. At the moment even political parties are in complete flux. Discussions are going too fast and policymakers are too slow. In addition to this, science is constantly updating itself and there is a need for targets to follow this development. A member of the audience commented whether carbon trading could fund developing countries tackling climate change. Carbon trading itself is a complex story. Emissions trading, one of the Kyoto Protocol items, has created some positive implementations such as the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, the largest in the world. Marking its first anniversary during this Forum, the Stern report, one of the most acknowledged economic climate change reports, has further encouraged carbon trading as part of our climate change policies. However Mr. Southwood argued that carbon trading is no real solution, it is only matching the current practices – continuing business as usual. Some say that countries like the U.S. have used carbon trading to get away with appalling emission levels. Mr. Southwood saw carbon trading as one of the symptoms of the failure of multilateralism. Bilateralism, the alternative, can hardly be a solution for a multilateral problem. Several points were raised to evaluate which parties should take the most responsibility and who is most to blame. Many stressed the environment chaos in China and similar problems, to slightly lesser extent, in other recently industrialising countries such as India. Some called for leadership from these countries, others for more response from the rich world. Mr. Ritchie was convinced that the international regime is essential. Mr. Southwood agreed that only leading by example could justify our demands for other countries to act. There is significant fear in developing countries that the West is using climate change to attain influence or a form of imperialism. Mr. Southwood was convinced that technology transfers in addition to action in rich countries stand in the core of solutions. One member of the audience noted that science and technology tend to innovate and grow exponentially which can mean that cheap and easy solutions might be just around the corner. He challenged the speakers whether we should indeed sit around and wait a bit for technology to save us. Mr. Ritchie did not agree to wait; he preferred to put the R & D money into renewables—an existing solution. Mr. Southwood agreed that since Rio, the beginning of the journey, we have indeed seen miraculous advances in science and technology. He thought, though, that the simple technologies have already provided the best solutions. Ultimately, climate change is an investment and should not be seen solely as cost. Solutions exist but we hesitate to move. Will we miss the train? And more importantly, what will happen to the people who could not afford to buy the ticket? |