Why I write what I write

Happy birthday to me! Or, more accurately, happy birthday to this blog, which started with an opinionated post entitled Sustainability 3 years ago today. The blog has proved at least as sustainable as your average aid project, with 240 odd posts written since then, about 80 per year. Combined verbiage is over 110,000 words, and page views cruised over 30,000 some time ago (including email and RSS subscribers roughly doubles that). I reckon the average post is read by a modest crowd of about 250 people. As to why you read it, only you can say, but I can tell you why I write it, or more particularly, why I choose to write about the things I do.

Two dominant themes have emerged and slightly surprised even me with the frequency that I have chosen to write about them:

1. I blog rather more about general development issues than I do about conservation specific ones.
2. I spend an awful lot of time complaining about donors.

Both are outcomes of this blog’s basic premise: to put across the view from the coal face of implementing an actual community-based conservation programme on the ground in the tropics. Working in this context it is impossible to escape the critical fact that just about every single other stakeholder that one deals with is far more interested in economic development than they are in conservation. If you do not learn to sing to this tune pretty quickly your project will be one long and probably unsuccessful struggle.

It is also the context in which you live your life; when the electricity cuts out it affects you. When a government official is not interested in joining you in the field because they would prefer to be back in the office collecting bribes it affects your work, quite apart from all the direct impacts of poor governance on biodiversity conservation (elephant poaching, illegal logging etc). It becomes apparent pretty quickly that most solutions to conservation problems in the tropics have precious little to do with biology, and a lot more to do with basic economics and governance issues.

But in many ways, when it comes to implementing any actual conservation programme, all of that is of secondary importance. For if you have a well designed programme (admittedly a big if), then your principle constraint will be how much money donors give to you and under what conditions. So whilst moaning about arcane details of ever-changing reporting requirements issued by your (least) favourite donor might not seem quite as inspiring as all that glorious biodiversity, if you want to have any chance of saving that biodiversity then dealing with such things becomes critical. And if, by extension, you want to improve the rather disappointingly poor success rate of conservation projects in the tropics, then persuading donors to mend their ways might just be one of the most important jobs you could do.

As it is, most of my time I spend focused on more immediate issues, but occasionally I write a piece for this blog in the hope that someone, somewhere with the actual power to change some of these things is paying attention. The not-so-glamorous life of a conservationist in the tropics.

Not for the first time, and why we might foul it up again

Owen Barder is keeping a nice list of major public figures’ claims that “For the first time ever, we have a real opportunity to end extreme poverty within a generation.” in the words of World Bank president, Jim Kim, the latest to so pronounce. The list goes right back to Woodrow Wilson addressing the League of Nations in 1919. Obviously previous generations have not lived up to such lofty aspirations. Why not? And why should we be any different? I present some wild speculation …

Back in 1919, perhaps for the first time, the western powers could say they truly knew most of the world. The major features had been well mapped, and many distant peoples had been ‘civilized’ (aka colonised by racist imperialists). The sun never set on the British Empire and the industrial revolution had made some Americans fabulously wealthy. There were a lot of poor people in the world, but not so many, and Westerners had a surfeit of confidence as to their capacity to achieve great things. Moreover, in a world before the widespread existence of welfare states, it is possible they were not aiming that high.

What happened? Two major changes. Developing countries won their independence from the colonial yoke. This hugely increased their welfare in one important dimension (political freedom), but possibly impeded progress on technocratic goals such as raising average incomes due, in part, to the need to first concentrate on building the capacity of those new states. One signal success, nonetheless, does stand out: the drastic decline in infant and maternal mortality rates. So while economic development was stalling in many countries, populations were exploding. Suddenly it became a lot harder to eliminate poverty.

Fast forward to 2013 and we have passed an important inflexion point: now the number of desperately poor people in the world is declining in absolute terms, and not just in China. The zero goals some people are suggesting should follow the Millennium Development Goals when they expire in 2015 appear tantalisingly in reach.

So why might we fail again? What new issue might once again expose our hubris? I give you two words: climate change.

Paternalism in conservation and development (reprise)

I’ve blogged a few times before about paternalism in conservation and development. Despite its fallbacks, and pejorative associations, paternalistic is a label I happily apply to myself, because I think it is both accurate, and highly relevant to the successes in which I have been involved up to now. However, it most certainly does have its limits, and one must be constantly on the watch for over-doing it.

As I have argued before, I think just about all aid is inherently paternalistic, so it is not surprising that paternalism is rife within the conservation and development worlds. But I also think it is highly prevalent because that is what practitioners are used to: it has become the default way of thinking for many, and in that lies many dangers. However, these self same practitioners can be highly critical of paternalism when it is done to us, even when, in fact, we might benefit from it; something we would do well to remember when our own paternalistic instincts generate unexpected resistance.

Advice: the gift that is so much easier to give than to receive.

Killing cuddly animals and REDD updates

Catching up on reading this morning, I came across a couple of stories of interest in relation to recent blog posts.

1. Killing some cuddly animals legally may be the only way to stop all of them being killed illegally, according to the Babbage blog at the Economist. The potential arguments around this have the potential to make the recent controversy over hunting polar bears a stroll in the park. Just because there are strong arguments why a trading ban will not work, that does not mean that lifting it and regulating the trade instead will save the rhino and tiger, so I suspect it will be a brave politician who agrees to legalise such a trade. Nonetheless, I think, these are definitely the right questions to ask, for the present strategy appears to be largely failing.
2. The Guyanese national REDD initiative appears to be the complete opposite of the lack of progress elsewhere, I recently blogged about. Instead REDD in Guyana, and Norwegian support for it seems to have been initiated out of nothing by politicians keen to make an impact. The anti-REDD REDD Monitor implies such lack of context is in itself a bad thing, but I am not so sure. Whilst I imagine this start-from-a-vacuum has not been without its challenges, it seems much better to have strong political leadership searching for technical support to fill in the gaps, than the total lack of political interest that applies in some other countries. Leaders are supposed to lead!

It will be interesting to see how both situations develop in coming months and years.

Hat tip for both stories: Mike Shanahan at IIED

Contrasting inferences

Two quite contrasting conclusions can be drawn from my post yesterday.

1. Even the grandest strategies can trip up over little details that are easily overlooked. In development programming never forget to check what is happening in the finance ministry. (Suggested by @BonnieKoenig)
2. If something as simple as lack of an appropriate budget code is what is stopping action then clearly the government concerned are not that interested. Just because the minister read the speech you carefully prepared for them, does not mean they believe in this stuff heart and soul.

Is your glass half full or half empty today? Or is it both?

What’s stopping action on climate change?

Many things apparently. One developing country, I hear today, has no budget code for climate change so officials have no incentive to provide budget for climate change adaptation.

Burying criticism

Chris Blattman thinks that NGOs are atrocious in the way they bury criticism. This was his opinion given in response to a paper showing NGOs were twice as likely to want to work with outside, independent academics who appear to have an a priori view that is supportive of the sector in which they work (microfinance in the study) than they would if the a priori view was critical.

I work for an NGO and largely agree with the Blattman. Indeed this blog has covered NGO unconstructive responses to criticism before (here and here). I also like the study design which reminds me of those experiments where identical CVs were sent out but with different names on top to test latent racist attitudes. But I think there are some important points to make in response.

1. As pointed out in a comment on Blattman’s post, in the study the negative treatment email’s opening sentence of paragraph 2 is pretty uncompromising: “Academic research suggests that microfinance is ineffective.” This blunt approach, which mirrors exactly the positive treatment email, unfortunately does not conform to social norms in how we express disagreement, which is usually hedged in a way to give due acknowledgement of the correspondent’s position. In short the negative email approach does not make them sound like great partners.
2. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. We all struggle to deal with countervailing views. Science is littered with examples of where prominent academics of the time have suppressed publication of a paper that ran counter to their view of the world, only for it later to turn out the author was correct and the bigwigs wrong.
3. NGOs live, work and fundraise in the real world, not some idealised planet populated by homo rationalis. The robust battle of ideas that lies at the heart of academic life may be the anomaly, not NGO responses to criticism. Inaccurate or inappropriate criticism can do a lot of damage to an otherwise successful programme. NGOs may conclude it is better to do their learning behind closed doors, and then change direction if appropriate, than to admit their failures. Like it or not, I suspect many of the most successful NGOs are probably those which more carefully burnish their reputations by controlling the release of bad news about their work.

However, in my view, none of the above constitute sufficient justification for the lack of openness amongst many NGOs in the conservation and development sectors. The time has come for admitting failure and other exercises in honest self-assessment and humility. Though the road may be tough, eventually we will all be stronger for it.