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Nature Speaks

Sea-level rise ‘could last twice as long as human history’

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Research warns of the long timescale of climate change impacts unless urgent action is taken to cut emissions drastically

Huge sea-level rises caused by climate change will last far longer than the entire history of human civilisation to date, according to new research, unless the brief window of opportunity of the next few decades is used to cut carbon emissions drastically.

Even if global warming is capped at governments’ target of 2C – which is already seen as difficult – 20% of the world’s population will eventually have to migrate away from coasts swamped by rising oceans. Cities including New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Calcutta, Jakarta and Shanghai would all be submerged.

“Much of the carbon we are putting in the air from burning fossil fuels will stay there for thousands of years,” said Prof Peter Clark, at Oregon State University in the US and who led the new work. “People need to understand that the effects of climate change won’t go away, at least not for thousands of generations.”

“The long-term view sends the chilling message of what the real risks and consequences are of the fossil fuel era,” said Prof Thomas Stocker, at the University of Bern, Switzerland and also part of the research team. “It will commit us to massive adaptation efforts so that for many, dislocation and migration becomes the only option.”

The report, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, notes most research looks at the impacts of global warming by 2100 and so misses one of the biggest consequences for civilisation – the long-term melting of polar ice caps and sea-level rise.

This is because the great ice sheets take thousand of years to react fully to higher temperatures. The researchers say this long-term view raises moral questions about the kind of environment being passed down to future generations.

The research shows that even with climate change limited to 2C by tough emissions cuts, sea level would rise by 25 metres over the next 2,000 years or so and remain there for at least 10,000 years – twice as long as human history. If today’s burning of coal, oil and gas is not curbed, the sea would rise by 50m, completely changing the map of the world.

“We can’t keep building seawalls that are 25m high,” said Clark. “Entire populations of cities will eventually have to move.”

By far the greatest contributor to the sea level rise – about 80% – would be the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. Another new study in Nature Climate Changepublished on Monday reveals that some large Antarctic ice sheets are dangerously close to losing the sea ice shelves that hold back their flow into the ocean.

Huge floating sea ice shelves around Antarctica provide buttresses for the glaciers and ice sheets on the continent. But when they are lost to melting, as happened the with Larsen B shelf in 2002, the speed of flow into the ocean can increase eightfold.

Johannes Fürst, at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany and colleagues, calculated that just 5% of the ice shelf in the Bellingshausen Sea and 7% in the Amundsen Sea can be lost before their buttressing effect vanishes. “This is worrying because it is in these regions that we have observed the highest rates of ice-shelf thinning over the past two decades,” he said.

Avoiding the long-term swamping of many of the world’s greatest cities is already difficult, given the amount carbon dioxide already released into the atmosphere. “Sea-level rise is already baked into the system,” said Prof Stocker, one of the world’s leading climate scientists.

However, the rise could be reduced and delayed if carbon is removed from the atmosphere in the future, he said: “If you are very optimistic and think we will be in the position by 2050 or 2070 to have a global scale carbon removal scheme – which sounds very science fiction – you could pump down CO2 levels. But there is no indication that this is technically possible.” A further difficulty is the large amount of heat and CO2 already stored in the oceans.

Prof Stocker said: “The actions of the next 30 years are absolutely crucial for putting us on a path that avoids the [worst] outcomes and ensuring, at least in the next 200 years, the impacts are limited and give us time to adapt.”

The researchers argue that a new industrial revolution is required to deliver a global energy system that emits no carbon at all. They conclude: “The success of the [UN climate summit in] Paris meeting, and of every future meeting, must be evaluated not only by levels of national commitments, but also by looking at how they will lead ultimately to the point when zero-carbon energy systems become the obvious choice for everyone.”

“We are making choices that will affect our grandchildren’s grandchildren and beyond,” said Prof Daniel Schrag, at Harvard University in the US. “We need to think carefully about the long timescales of what we are unleashing.

Nature Speaks

Collapsing Greenland glacier could raise sea levels by half a metre, say scientists

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Huge Zachariae Isstrom glacier has begun to break up, starting a rapid retreat that could continue to raise sea levels for decades to come

Development Projects

Does foreign aid always help the poor?

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https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/ana-swanson, Source: https://www.weforum.org/

It sounds kind of crazy to say that foreign aid often hurts, rather than helps, poor people in poor countries. Yet that is what Angus Deaton, the newest winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, has argued.

Deaton, an economist at Princeton University who studied poverty in India and South Africa and spent decades working at the World Bank, won his prize for studying how the poor decide to save or spend money. But his ideas about foreign aid are particularly provocative. Deaton argues that, by trying to help poor people in developing countries, the rich world may actually be corrupting those nations’ governments and slowing their growth. According to Deaton, and the economists who agree with him, much of the $135 billion that the world’s most developed countries spent on official aid in 2014 may not have ended up helping the poor.

The idea of wealthier countries giving away aid blossomed in the late 1960s, as the first humanitarian crises reached mass audiences on television.  Americans watched through their TV sets as children starved to death in Biafra, an oil-rich area that had seceded from Nigeria and was now being blockaded by the Nigerian government, as Philip Gourevitch recalled in a 2010 story in the New Yorker. Protesters called on the Nixon administration for action so loudly that they ended up galvanizing the largest nonmilitary airlift the world had ever seen. Only a quarter-century after Auschwitz, humanitarian aid seemed to offer the world a new hope for fighting evil without fighting a war.

There was a strong economic and political argument for helping poor countries, too. In the mid-20th century, economists widely believed that the key to triggering growth — whether in an already well-off country or one hoping to get richer — was pumping money into a country’s factories, roads and other infrastructure. So in the hopes of spreading the Western model of democracy and market-based economies, the United States and Western European powers encouraged foreign aid to smaller and poorer countries that could fall under the influence of the Soviet Union and China.

The level of foreign aid distributed around the world soared from the 1960s, peaking at the end of the Cold War, then dipping before rising again. Live Aid music concerts raised public awareness about challenges like starvation in Africa, while the United States launched major, multibillion-dollar aid initiatives. And the World Bank and advocates of aid aggressively seized on research that claimed that foreign aid led to economic development.

Deaton wasn’t the first economist to challenge these assumptions, but over the past two decades his arguments began to receive a great deal of attention. And he made them with perhaps a better understanding of the data than anyone had before. Deaton’s skepticism about the benefits of foreign aid grew out of his research, which involved looking in detail at households in the developing world, where he could see the effects of foreign aid intervention.

“I think his understanding of how the world worked at the micro level made him extremely suspicious of these get-rich-quick schemes that some people peddled at the development level,” says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT.

The data suggested that the claims of the aid community were sometimes not borne out. Even as the level of foreign aid into Africa soared through the 1980s and 1990s, African economies were doing worse than ever, as the chart below, from a paper by economist Bill Easterly of New York University, shows.

151023-foreign aid Africa Angus Deaton Wonk Blog

William Easterly, “Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth?”

The effect wasn’t limited to Africa. Many economists were noticing that an influx of foreign aid did not seem to produce economic growth in countries around the world. Rather, lots of foreign aid flowing into a country tended to be correlated with lower economic growth, as this chart from a paper byArvind Subramanian and Raghuram Rajan shows.

The countries that receive less aid, those on the left-hand side of the chart, tend to have higher growth — while those that receive more aid, on the right-hand side, have lower growth.


Raghuram G. Rajan and Arvind Subramanian, “Aid and Growth: What Does the Cross-Country Evidence Really Show?”

Why was this happening? The answer wasn’t immediately clear, but Deaton and other economists argued that it had to do with how foreign money changed the relationship between a government and its people.

Think of it this way: In order to have the funding to run a country, a government needs to collect taxes from its people. Since the people ultimately hold the purse strings, they have a certain amount of control over their government. If leaders don’t deliver the basic services they promise, the people have the power to cut them off.

Deaton argued that foreign aid can weaken this relationship, leaving a government less accountable to its people, the congress or parliament, and the courts.

“My critique of aid has been more to do with countries where they get an enormous amount of aid relative to everything else that goes on in that country,” Deaton said in an interview with Wonkblog. “For instance, most governments depend on their people for taxes in order to run themselves and provide services to their people. Governments that get all their money from aid don’t have that at all, and I think of that as very corrosive.”

It might seem odd that having more money would not help a poor country. Yet economists have long observed that countries that have an abundance of wealth from natural resources, like oil or diamonds, tend to be more unequal, less developed and more impoverished, as the chart below shows. Countries at the left-hand side of the chart have fewer fuels, ores and metals and higher growth, while those at the right-hand side have more natural resource wealth, yet slower growth. Economists postulate that this “natural resource curse” happens for a variety of reasons, but one is that such wealth can strengthen and corrupt a government.

curse

Like revenue from oil or diamonds, wealth from foreign aid can be a corrupting influence on weak governments, “turning what should be beneficial political institutions into toxic ones,” Deaton writes in his book “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality.” This wealth can make governments more despotic, and it can also increase the risk of civil war, since there is less power sharing, as well as a lucrative prize worth fighting for.

Deaton and his supporters offer dozens of examples of humanitarian aid being used to support despotic regimes and compounding misery, including in Zaire, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Biafra, and the Khmer Rouge on the border of Cambodia and Thailand. Citing Africa researcher Alex de Waal, Deaton writes that “aid can only reach the victims of war by paying off the warlords, and sometimes extending the war.”

He also gives plenty of examples in which the United States gives aid “for ‘us,’ not for ‘them’” – to support our strategic allies, our commercial interests or our moral or political beliefs, rather than the interests of the local people.

The United States gave aid to Ethiopia for decades under then-President Meles Zenawi Asres, because he opposed Islamic fundamentalism and Ethiopia was so poor. Never mind that Asres was “one of the most repressive and autocratic dictators in Africa,” Deaton writes. According to Deaton, “the award for sheer creativity” goes to Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, president of Mauritania from 1984 to 2005. Western countries stopped giving aid to Taya after his government became too politically repressive, but he managed to get the taps turned on again by becoming one of the few Arab nations to recognize Israel.

Some might argue for bypassing corrupt governments altogether and distributing food or funding directly among the people. Deaton acknowledges that, in some cases, this might be worth it to save lives. But one problem with this approach is that it’s difficult: To get to the powerless, you often have to go through the powerful. Another issue, is that it undermines what people in developing countries need most — “an effective government that works with them for today and tomorrow,” he writes.

The old calculus of foreign aid was that poor countries were merely suffering from a lack of money. But these days, many economists question this assumption, arguing that development has more to do with the strength of a country’s institutions – political and social systems that are developed through the interplay of a government and its people.

There are lot of places around the world that lack good roads, clean water and good hospitals, says MIT’s Acemoglu: “Why do these places exist? If you look at it, you quickly disabuse yourself of the notion that they exist because it’s impossible for the state to provide services there.” What these countries need even more than money is effective governance, something that foreign aid can undermine, the thinking goes.

Some people believe that Deaton’s critique of foreign aid goes too far. There are better and worse ways to distribute foreign aid, they say. Some project-based approaches — such as financing a local business, building a well, or providing uniforms so that girls can go to school — have been very successful in helping local communities. In the last decade, researchers have tried to integrate these lessons from economists and argue for more effective aid practices.

Many people believe that the aid community needs more scrutiny to determine which practices have been effective and which have not. Economists such as Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, for example, argue for creating randomized control trials that allow researchers to carefully examine the development effects of different types of projects — for example, following microcredit as it is extended to people in poor countries.

These methods have again led to a swell in optimism in professional circles about foreign aid efforts. And again, Deaton is playing the skeptic.

While Deaton agrees that many development projects are successful, he’scritical of claims that these projects can be replicated elsewhere or on a larger scale. “The trouble is that ‘what works’ is a highly contingent concept,” he said in an interview. “If it works in the highlands of Kenya, there’s no reason to believe it will work in India, or that it will work in Princeton, New Jersey.”

The success of a local project, like microfinancing, also depends on numerous other local factors, which are harder for researchers to isolate. Saying that these randomized control trials prove that certain projects cause growth or development is like saying that flour causes cake, Deaton writes in his book. “Flour ‘causes’ cakes, in the sense that cakes made without flour do worse than cakes made with flour – and we can do any number of experiments to demonstrate it – but flour will not work without a rising agent, eggs, and butter – the helping factors that are needed for the flour to ‘cause’ the cake.”

Deaton’s critiques of foreign aid stem from his natural skepticism of how people use — and abuse — economic data to advance their arguments. The science of measuring economic effects is much more important, much harder and more controversial than we usually think, he told The Post.

Acemoglu said of Deaton: “He’s challenging, and he’s sharp, and he’s extremely critical of things he thinks are shoddy and things that are over-claiming. And I think the foreign aid area, that policy arena, really riled him up because it was so lacking in rigor but also so grandiose in its claims.”

Deaton doesn’t argue against all types of foreign aid. In particular, he believes that certain types of health aid – offering vaccinations, or developing cheap and effective drugs to treat malaria, for example — have been hugely beneficial to developing countries.

But mostly, he said, the rich world needs to think about “what can we do that would make lives better for millions of poor people around the world without getting into their economies in the way that we’re doing by giving huge sums of money to their governments.” Overall, he argues that we should focus on doing less harm in the developing world, like selling fewer weapons to despots, or ensuring that developing countries get a fair deal in trade agreements, and aren’t harmed by U.S. foreign policy decisions.

Deaton also believes that our attitude toward foreign aid – that developed countries ought to swoop in and save everyone else – is condescending and suspiciously similar to the ideas of colonialism.  The rhetoric of colonialism, too, “was all about helping people, albeit about bringing civilization and enlightenment to people whose humanity was far from fully recognized,” he has written.

Instead, many of the positive things that are happening in Africa – the huge adoption in cell phones over the past decade, for example – are totally homegrown. He points out that, while the world has made huge strides in reducing poverty in recent decades, almost none of this has been due to aid. Most has been due to development in countries like China, which have received very little aid as a proportion of gross domestic product and have “had to work it out for themselves.”

Ultimately, Deaton argues that we should stand aside and let poorer countries develop in their own ways. “Who put us in charge?” he asks.

This article is published in collaboration with Washington Post. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

To keep up with the Agenda subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Author: Ana Swanson is a reporter for Wonkblog specializing in business, economics, data visualization and China.

Image: People carry food aid distributed. REUTERS/Antonio. 

The Melanesian Way

Democracy, custom and the Melanesian Way

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Is there a democratic Papua New Guinean nation – or is it merely an arbitrary state built on a shaky, crumbling foundation of disparate traditional customs and the ‘Melanesian Way’? Has the system of government become a hybrid of concepts that fail to work on any level – a bastardization of both democracy and custom?

melanesian_wayBernard Narokobi in his book ‘The Melanesian Way’ refused to define the conceptt:

According to Narokobi, those posing the question are “cynics”, “hypocrites” and display “spiteful arrogance.”  The concept is “cosmic” making a definition “futile” and “trite.”  He failed to explain how so.

Apparently, if Moses didn’t ask God to define himself then the messianic Narokobi should not be required to define the Melanesian Way – notwithstanding that he was writing a book about it, making one wonder what the rest of the book is about.

The idea of belonging to the ‘insider’ group that carries the knowledge of the Melanesian Way is so emotionally charged and identity defining that it usually provokes wide-eyed head nodding – but no conceptual challenge.

Yet, concepts only defy explanation when they are not widely understood. Given the nebulous nature of the ‘Melanesian Way’, it has become an exploitable idea.

Prime Minister, Peter O’Neill and his previous coalition partner, Belden Namah when in government, reconciled their differences just hours after Namah had gone on national radio demanding that O’Neill resign.  They explained their curious and confusing behaviour as being the ‘Melanesian Way.’

Friends in politics: Before O'Neill relegated Namah to opposition and subsequently expelled Polye who then unseated Namah to wrest the opposition leadership..
Friends in politics:
Before O’Neill relegated Namah
to opposition
and subsequently expelled
Polye who then unseated Namah to
wrest the opposition leadership.

The reconciliation proved tenuous when, despite their Memorandum of Understanding ongoing into the elections, O’Neill froze out Namah relegating him and his party to the opposition benches while preferring to rekindle old alliances with the Grand Chief (in 2015, the alliance is tenuous) and other veteran power brokers.

It suggests that the Melanesian Way is redolent with self-serving pragmatism and a fickle approach to commitment that can be called on, or not, according to whim.

If Namah thought that the Melanesian Way was going to work for him as he bad-mouthed his former coalition partner, he’d seriously miscalculated. This was western-style politics.

Customary Practices and alien concepts

The customary practices of the Big Man and the wantok system worked well in a small, encapsulated tribal community – it doesn’t translate into the modern political structure of a nation/state where favouring of wantoks is nepotism and arbitrary distribution of largesse in return for allegiance is bribery.  When these customary practices are tolerated within the modern PNG machinery of government, compliance with democratic principles becomes populist lip service.

Introduced, western principles and PNG cultural practices co-exist uncomfortably.  The Christian religion, for instance, missionary imposed, it is now widely embraced.  To be faithful to both social systems requires a series of compromises that either makes a mockery of Christian doctrines or insults the integrity of custom.

Fashioned along the line of the Jewish faith, the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church, for example, forbids the consumption of pork and shellfish.  But pork is the ceremonially meat, and shellfish are a staple part of the diet of those that live on the coast and outlying islands of PNG.

In PNGs social media site ‘Sharp Talk’, there has been a lengthy conversation trying to reconcile Christianity with tradition by seeking a biblical justification for the customary practise of polygamy.

Although PNG has laws against adultery, polygamy is tolerated.  But is polygamy just another name for adultery?  Does the law, (based on Christian ethics) or custom take precedence in PNG or does that depend on the perpetrator?

At independence, PNG was also left with a political legacy that was alien and ill understood and often at loggerheads with custom.

Nicholas Bainton in his book ‘The Lihir Destiny’, noted that in the very first national elections in which Lihirians took part, many locals had no idea what was required.  They wanted to vote for US President Johnson – as they had pleasant memories of the generosity of the Americans stationed there during World War II. It all fitted into a traditional context they understood – President Johnson becoming their ‘Big Man’.

Former MP, Moses Maladina
Former MP,
Moses Maladina

In the middle of the recent elections, two helicopter loads of armed PNG Defence Force personnel landed at Ess’ala Station in Milne Bay.  They stormed the police station and took control of the ballot counting by force.  The returning officer for the area hid, fearing for his life.

The area’s incumbent MP, Moses Maladina had deployed the troops.

Electoral Commission figures had Maladina behind in the count – he never caught up, eventually losing his parliamentary seat.  Was this a factor in the deployment?  Was it a justification?

Maladina is a Big Man – even more so as he recently was awarded a medal in the Queen’s Honour birthday list. Interestingly, the imperial award cements and extends his customary stature: Big Man tribally; Big Man nationally and now internationally.

Perhaps, under PNG custom, Maladina was just doing what would be expected of him as a tribal chief – defending his patch, with force if necessary.

Whatever the justification, Maladina stopped short of physically leading the charge himself. ‘Big Chief Maladina’ sat that one out.

Belden Namah - as he stormed the Supreme Court with his 'storm troopers' to arrest the Chief Justice, mid session
Belden Namah – as he stormed the
Supreme Court with his ‘storm troopers’
to arrest the Chief Justice, mid session

Not so Belden Namah as he stormed the Supreme Court last May to defend his patch.

What hope democracy when quasi-legitimate force is used to stifle the democratic process?

Western law when co mingled with custom proves untenable

While innocent until proven guilty is a western, democratic legal paradigm that has been embraced tightly – especially by the elite of PNG – law enforcement is totally inadequate and open to bastardization by quasi-traditional practices like bribery and a reverence of the untouchable Big Man.

So disdainful are many Big Men towards the law that they simply ignore it as in the recent bribery charges against former Speaker Jeffrey Nape who simply failed to turn up at court.

Former Speaker, Jeffrey Nape, a National Alliance heavyweight
Former Speaker, Jeffrey Nape, a National Alliance heavyweight

To Nape criminal charges are not a novelty, he knows they’re rarely pursued.

Big Man status insulated, Maladina, Nape and Namah from western-style justice – however, that paradigm shifts a little with their fall from grace. Now their fate securely rests with the conquering chief (O’Neill) according to his whim.

For democracy, this is disastrous.

For while parliamentarians may have the customary status of ‘Big Man’, they are not in the village – they are overseeing and participating in a democratic national government – village rules don’t apply and status should not offer impunity from the rules of the system in which they are participating – although, at present, it does.

In light of the hybrid nature of governance, is PNG really a nation or is it an anomalous entity where the democratic political administration of the state has become a series of vested interests paying lip service to national sentiment and democracy?

Whereas in most first-world countries, self-conscious nations create nationalism in a bid for self-determination and statehood, PNG already has a state – but what of the nation?

Source: http://www.pngecho.com/

The Melanesian Way

Aid Dependency: The Damage of Donation

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Written by Victoria Stanford, University of Edinburgh (Contact: ~Written by Victoria Stanford, University of Edinburgh (Contact: vstanford@hotmail.co.uk)

"The Culture of Aid Dependency Need to Change," David Sengeh, Sierra Leone. Photo Credit: www.engineeringforchange.org
“The Culture of Aid Dependency Need to Change,” David Sengeh, Sierra Leone. Photo Credit: www.engineeringforchange.org

Aid has long been the response of richer countries to the imbalance of economic development seen across the globe. In the last two decades however, relatively non-intrusive in-kind giving has been re-branded and intensified to the point where aid today is arguably used as a strategic force in increasingly interventionist global development policy. The aid industry has seen a rapid expansion, characterised by an increase in the number of organisations, amounts of funding and geographical reach (Collinson and Duffied, 2013). The question of aid dependence is an important one; many argue that international assistance paradoxically poses a barrier to recipient country development and sustainable economic growth (Moyo, 2009).

Recent rhetoric surrounding aid dependency is clear- it is an unwelcome and unfortunate side effect of aid and its diminishment is high on the aid policy agenda (Thomas et al., 2011). What is becoming increasingly clear however is that there is an emerging type of aid-related dependency that does not refer to economic or financial factors, but political. Cases of corruption in recipient country governments have been met with the development of more complex modes of donation, including direct programme funding, conditionalities, tied aid, and grants, which give donors more control over the direction and ultimate use of their funds. This often means that those providing aid are increasingly entwined in political processes. This combined with aid uncertainty, questionable sustainability, and a tendency of top-down approaches to political involvement, create a situation where countries in need of aid are dependent upon foreign agendas.

How has aid caused dependency?

Aid dependency refers to the proportion of government spending that is given by foreign donors. Since 2000 this has in fact decreased by one third in the world’s poorest countries, exemplified by Ghana and Mozambique where aid dependency decreased from 47% to 27% and 74% to 58% respectively (3). Aid is not intrinsically linked to dependency; studies have shown that dependency is influenced by many factors, mostly length and intensity of the donation period, and 15-20% has been identified as the tipping point where aid begins to have negative effects (Clemens et al., 2012). What causes dependency is when aid is used, intentionally or not, as a long-term strategy that consequently inhibits development, progress, or reform. Food aid is particularly criticised for this; increasing dependency on aid imports disincentivises local food production by reducing market demand. This is compounded when declining aid is replaced with commercial imports rather than locally-sourced food, either because of cheaper prices or a lack of recipient country food production capacity because of long-term aid causing agricultural stagnation (Shah, 2012). This is exemplified in the situation of Haiti, which is dependent on cheap US imports for over 80% of grain stocks even in a post-aid era, or countries such as the Philippines where aid dependency has forced an over-reliance on cash crops. Dependency relates not only to commodities but also technical expertise and skills which donors often bring to specific aid schemes and projects, which when not appropriately coupled with education create an over-reliance on donors (Thomas et al., 2011).

A more concerning type of dependency

The nature of aid almost intrinsically causes what is increasingly known as ‘political dependency’ by encouraging donor intervention in political processes. Donors need to satisfy the interests, values and incentives of the home country, whilst also providing them with expected results in order to maintain the cash flow. This has resulted in donors either bypassing and therefore destabilising government service provision processes to establish donor projects, a strategy often favoured by USAID and the World Bank (Bräuntigam and Knack, 2004), or intervening directly in policy-making and implementation (Bräutigam, 2000).

The involvement of donors, either foreign governments or international agencies, in recipient country political processes has been shown to reduce the quality of governance (Knack, 2001). It reduces leader accountability; the government is “playing to two audiences simultaneously”- the donors and the public (Hayman, 2008). This means the direction of accountability is between government and donor rather than the public, risking government legitimacy and delaying the progress of political reform and development (Bräutigam, 2000). This is particularly damaging in countries where the need for aid stems from political upheaval or civil unrest such as the Democratic Republic of Congo or Zimbabwe, which have a lengthy history of aid dependence (Moss et al., 2006). The risk here is that donors have political leverage, thus decisions and planning become reliant on donor involvement whose motivation and values may not necessarily align with those of the public or government.

Furthermore, ‘earmarking’ is a strategy favoured by many international donors who fear corruption in recipient governments, therefore ‘earmark’ direct sector or programme funding rather than general government budget support (Foster and Leavy, 2001). This not only shifts the agenda-making power to donors who have the authority to set priorities and direct funds accordingly, but also creates patchy and unsustainable development where some sectors outperform others.

An additional significant problem of dependency upon international agenda-making for countries receiving aid is that globally recommended ‘best practice’ policies often lack appropriate contextualisation to cultural, religious, or social values. A top-down, uniform approach to policy implementation by donors also has logistical barriers whereby local infrastructure is incapable of carrying out donor projects effectively and producing satisfactory results. A good example of this is the widely-disseminated policy encouraging syndromic management of sexually transmitted diseases, which was coercively incorporated into aid channels in Mozambique, despite the clear lack of the technical expertise and human resource capacity that such a robust policy requires (Cliff et al., 2004). This then perpetuates aid dependency because donors do not receive satisfactory project results and may consequently reduce funding without actually solving the problem, thus the poverty cycle continues and aid is required once again.

Demolishing aid dependency

Ending or preventing aid dependency will be contingent on affirmative action from both donors and recipients. Botswana is a key example of recipient-led aid policy that effectively resulted in rapidly reducing aid and therefore dependency. Botswana began receiving aid shortly after gaining independence in 1966 (Bräutigam and Botchwey, 1999). Of primary importance here is that Botswana largely decided the direction and use of funding; areas of priority were identified and donors were matched accordingly, thus avoiding reliance on donor ideas and agendas. Only projects that the predicted government capacity could absorb once aid was reduced in the long-term were undertaken, which ensured sustainability. In contrast, the relative ‘success story’ of Taiwan can be explained by donor-led project planning. Taiwan received much aid from the US in the early 1960’s which focused mainly on building infrastructural capacity-docks, railways, factories-with the aim to increase trading systems and boost the economy. In fact, this scheme was so effective that the US eventually withdrew aid for fear of creating competition (Chang, 1965).

It seems evident that recipient-led schemes and projects are more effective and reduce the risk of dependency. Technically speaking, some argue that aid should only ever be in the form of general government budget support rather than selective sector or project aid because it reduces donor involvement in political processes. It is also less bureaucratic, is less influenced by donor missions who need to produce and report results, and avoids the risk of uneven service provision (Moss et al., 2006). Ideologically speaking, the aid industry today is at risk of forming a novel kind of colonialism where ‘Western’ ideas of development and progress are used to influence and hold power over governments of countries receiving aid.

Concluding thoughts

The aid industry must respond to the problem of economic and political dependence. Coordinated efforts to more effectively monitor donor-recipient relationships, using a widely implemented human rights-based legal and moral framework for aid policy should be the ultimate, collective goal (Ooms and Hammonds, 2008). The reality is however that with increasingly complex humanitarian disasters and the destructive forces of climate change looming, the aid industry will be called upon to increase capacity and intensity which may perhaps re-direct focus from implementing ideological change. Nevertheless, the opportunity to ‘get things right’ in aid policy and practice persists, and it is a moral imperative that the industry and its participants make the attempt.

References:

  1. Bräutigam D and Botchwey K (1999) The institutional impact of aid dependence on recipients in Africa. Chr. Michelsen Institute;Working Paper 1.
  2. Bräutigam, D. (2000). Aid dependence and governance, Almqvist & Wiksell International;Stockholm pp.14.
  3. Bräuntigam D and Knack S (2004) Foreign aid, institutions and governance in Sub-Saharan Africa, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol 52;2, pp.255-285.
  4. Chang D (1965) US Aid and Economic progress in Taiwan, Asian Survey, Vol 5;3, pp.152-160.
  5. Clemens MA, Radelet S and Bhavnani R (2012) Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth, The Economic Journal, 122(561), 590-617.
  6. Cliff J, Walt G and Nhatave, I (2004) What’s in a Name? Policy transfer in Mozambique: DOTS for tuberculosis and syndromic management for sexually transmitted infections. Journal of Public Health Policy, 25;1, p.38-55
  7. Collinson S and Duffied M (2013) Paradoxes of Presence:Risk Management and aid culture in challenging environments, Humanitarian Policy Group, Overseas Development Institute [Online] Available at: http://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinion-files/8428.pdf [Accessed 02 January 2015].
  8. Foster M and Leavy J (2001) The choice of financial aid instruments. London: Overseas Development Institute, pp.4.
  9. Hayman R (2008) Rwanda: milking the cow. Creating policy space in spite of aid dependence. The Politics of Aid, 156.
  10. Knack S (2001) Aid dependence and the quality of governance: cross-country empirical tests, Southern Economic Journal, 310-329.
  11. Moss T, Pettersson G andVan de Walle, N (2006) An aid-institutions paradox? A review essay on aid dependency and state building in sub-Saharan Africa, Centre for Global Development; Working paper No. 74.
  12. Moyo D (2009) Dead Aid, Penguin; London, pp.12
  13. Ooms G and Hammonds R (2008) Correcting globalisation in health: transnational entitlements versus the ethical imperative of reducing aid-dependency. Public Health Ethics, 1(2), 154-170.
  14. Shah A (2012) Food aid, Global Issues [Online] Available at: URL: http://www. globalissues. org/article/748/food-aid [Accessed January 02 2015]
  15. Thomas A, Viciani L and Tench J et al (2011) Ending Aid Dependency, Action Aid; London.
Nature Speaks

Help small island states win their battle against climate change

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Earth’s fate is inextricably linked to 52 nations threatened by rising sea levels – the rest of the world should not let them drown

In this Oct. 13, 2011 photo, Funafuti, the main island of the nation state of Tuvalu, is seen from a Royal New Zealand airforce C130 aircraft as it approaches at Funafuti, Tuvalu, South Pacific. Funafuti is the capital of Tuvalu, a group of atolls situated north of Fiji and northwest of Samoa, in the South Pacific ocean. The atolls are suffering a severe drought and water shortage, coupled with contaminated ground water due to rising sea levels. The governments of Australia, New Zealand and the United States are providing desalination plants to alleviate the critical water shortage for some 10,000 islanders. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)Many of the planet’s most prized destinations, places considered exquisite and idyllic, where nature seems bountiful and people appear at ease, are under threat. In less than a decade, climate change-induced sea level rise could force thousands of people to migrate from some of the world’s 52 small island developing states (Sids).

How Sids respond to threats such as sea level rise, and the degree of support they receive, is indicative of how we, collectively, will adapt to a host of climate change impacts in the coming decades.

When we think of Sids, we may be tempted to imagine small patches of paradise scattered with lightly populated fishing villages, unfettered by the demands of modernity. In fact, almost one in every 100 of us is from a small island developing state.

Sids boast a diversity of cultures, natural resources, biodiversity, and indigenous knowledge that makes them mainstays of our planetary ecosystem. From the multi-billion dollar economy of Singapore, to Papua New Guinea, one of the least explored countries in the world where 1,000 cultural groups are thought to exist, to the very remote Niue, which is one of the world’s largest coral islands – each small island developing state is endowed with its own unique attributes.

Yet what they increasingly share in common are escalating environmental threats that are further aggravated by economic insecurities. Sea level rise is among the most daunting of these threats, which in some regions is up to four times the global average.

According to recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates, if average global temperatures increase by approximately 4C, sea levels could rise as much as one metre by 2100, a scenario that would see nations such as Kiribati, Maldives, Marshall Islands and Tuvalu become uninhabitable, while a large share of the population of many other Sids could be displaced or otherwise.

What makes this situation even more grievous is that the climate change threats facing many Sids are by-and-large not of their own making. Their total combined annual carbon dioxide output, although rising, accounts for less than 1% of global emissions.

Sids are suffering disproportionately from acts of environmental negligence of which we are collectively guilty. Larger economies, until recently, have managed better than small ones to mask the impacts of exhausting their natural capital and contributing heavily to greenhouse gas emissions, but the consequences of this neglect are catching up with them too.

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 A girl sits on a log next to the roots of a tree near the village of Teaoraereke on South Tarawa in the central Pacific island nation of Kiribati. The country consists of a chain of 33 atolls and islands that stand just metres above sea level. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

Responses to these threats that apply the business-as-usual economic models that have brought them to the state of economic and environmental vulnerability they are in today will be temporary at best, and catastrophic at worst. That is why Sids are beginning to take the first steps on a blue-green economy transition – a strategy that targets resource efficiency and clean technology, is carbon neutral and socially inclusive, will provide a healthy environment and help conserve resources, while integrating traditional knowledge and giving priority to island community and culture that will build their resilience to the impacts of climate change.

But we should not look at climate change threats in isolation from other influenced by human activities, because climate change is in fact exacerbating problems that we have already created, such as desertification, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity.

Take the degradation of marine ecosystems as an example. A number of studies show that it is overfishing that currently outweighs all other human impacts on marine ecosystems, including climate change. With Sids accounting for seven out of 10 of the world’s countries most dependent on fish and seafood consumption, reducing emissions alone will not be enough to ensure a sufficient supply of fish in the future.

The governments of these small island states are recognising that many policies of the past have left them ill-prepared to respond to the impacts of climate change, and it is this awareness that is motivating them to make sustainable economic growth the cornerstone of their development.

The energy sector, where they are leading the switch to renewables, is a prime example of necessity driving innovation and change. On average, Pacific island households spend approximately 20% of their household income on energy, and can often pay up to 400% more per kilowatt-hour of electricity than the United States.

As a result, many states are now developing their domestic renewable energy markets. For instance, the small South Pacific island of Tokelau is close to meeting 100% of its energy needs through renewables – even powering generators with locally produced coconut biofuel.

And Barbados, already the leading producer of solar water heaters in the Caribbean, is set to save an estimated $283.5m (£171m) through a 29% switch to renewables by 2029.

From valuing and managing their natural resources, to putting the right incentives in place to switch to renewable energy, Sids are leading the blue-green economy transition. And next week, at the third international conference on Sids in Samoa, they will reaffirm their commitment to advancing national sustainable development goals in front of a global audience. What they need from the rest of the world is the solidarity, technologies, and resources to act on that commitment on a scale that will radically change their fortunes.

It is hoped that the new international climate change agreement currently being negotiated, and which will be adopted at the Paris conference in 2015, might help to relieve some of their economic burden of adapting to the impacts of climate change, while also reducing the severity of the impacts by reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

Supporting Sids on this journey of transition provides an unprecedented opportunity to be part of game-changing socioeconomic solutions that can be applied in broader contexts and bigger economies.

We should look upon Sids as microcosms of our larger society, and not stand back and allow them to grapple with a threat for which they are largely inculpable.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/

Development Projects

China’s Aid to Africa: Monster or Messiah?

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Source: https://www.brookings.edu/ 

In recent years, China’s economic presence in Africa has led to a heated debate, some of it well-informed and some of it not, about the nature of Chinese involvement and its implications for the continent.  The debate is partially motivated by the rapid growth of China’s economic presence in Africa: for example, Chinese investment in Africa grew from USD 210 million in 2000 to 3.17 billion in 2011.[1] Aid is an important policy instrument for China among its various engagements with Africa, and indeed Africa has been a top recipient of Chinese aid:  by the end of 2009 it had received 45.7 percent of the RMB 256.29 billion cumulative foreign aid of China.[2] This aid to Africa has raised many questions, such as its composition, its goal and nature.

What constitutes China’s aid?

Officially, China provides eight types of foreign aid: complete projects, goods and materials, technical cooperation, human resource development cooperation, medical assistance, emergency humanitarian aid, volunteer programs, and debt relief. [3] China’s aid to Africa covers a wide array of fields, such as agriculture, education, transportation, energy, communications, and health. According to Chinese scholars, since 1956, China has provided almost 900 aid projects to African countries, including assistance supporting textile factories, hydropower stations, stadiums, hospitals, and schools.

Official development assistance is defined by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as concessional funding given to developing countries and to multilateral institutions primarily for the purpose of promoting welfare and economic development in the recipient country. [4] China is not a member of OECD and does not follow its definition or practice on development aid. The bulk of Chinese financing in Africa falls under the category of development finance, but not aid. This fact is privately acknowledged by Chinese government analysts, although Chinese literature constantly blurs the distinction between the two categories.

The billions of dollars that China commits to Africa are repayable, long-term loans. From 2009 to 2012, China provided USD 10 billion in financing to Africa in the form of “concessional loans.”[5] During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first overseas trip to Africa in March 2013, he doubled this commitment to USD 20 billion from 2013 to 2015.[6] The head sovereign risk analyst of Export-Import Bank of China announced in November 2013 that by 2025, China will have provided Africa with USD 1 trillion in financing, including direct investment, soft loans and commercial loans. [7]

China’s own policy actively contributes to the confusion between development finance and aid. The Chinese government encourages its agencies and commercial entities to “closely mix and combine foreign aid, direct investment, service contracts, labor cooperation, foreign trade and export.”[8] The goal is to maximize feasibility and flexibility of Chinese projects to meet local realities in the recipient country, but it also makes it difficult to capture which portion of the financing is – or should be – categorized as aid. One rather convincing theory is that the Chinese government in effect pays for the difference between the interest rates of concessional loans provided to Africa and comparable commercial loans. Therefore, only the small difference in interest rates could qualify as Chinese aid.

Who does China’s aid serve?

Despite Chinese leaders’ claim that China’s assistance to Africa is totally selfless and altruistic, the reality is far more complex.[9] China’s policy toward Africa is pragmatic, and aid has been a useful policy instrument since the early days of People’s Republic of China.

During the Cold War, foreign aid an important political tool that China used to gain Africa’s diplomatic recognition and to compete with the United States and the Soviet Union for Africa’s support. Between 1963 and 1964, Zhou Enlai visited 10 African countries and announced the well-known “Eight Principles of Foreign Economic and Technological Assistance.”[10] These aid principles were designed to compete simultaneously with the “imperialists” (the United States) and the “revisionists” (the Soviet Union) for Africa’s approval and support.

These efforts were enhanced during the Cultural Revolution under the influence of a radical revolutionary ideology, motivating China to provide large amounts of foreign aid to Africa despite its own domestic economic difficulties. [11] One famous example was the Tanzania-Zambia Railway built between 1970 and 1975, for which China provided a zero-interest loan of RMB 980 million. By the mid-1980s, China’s generous assistance had opened the door to diplomatic recognition with 44 African countries. [12]

Since the beginning of China’s reform and opening up, especially after 2000, Africa has become an increasingly important economic partner for China. Africa enjoys rich natural resources and market potential, and urgently needs infrastructure and development finance to stimulate economic growth. Chinese development finance, combined with the aid, aims at not only benefiting the local recipient countries, but also China itself. For example, China’s “tied aid” for infrastructure usually favors Chinese companies (especially state-owned enterprises), while its loans are in many cases backed by African natural resources.

Much Chinese financing to Africa is associated with securing the continent’s natural resources. Using what is sometimes characterized as the “Angola Model,” Chinas frequently provides low-interest loans to nations who rely on commodities, such as oil or mineral resources, as collateral.[13] In these cases, the recipient nations usually suffer from low credit ratings and have great difficulty obtaining funding from the international financial market; China makes financing relatively available—with certain conditions.

Though commodity-backed loans were not created by China – leading Western banks were making such loans to African countries, including Angola and Ghana, before China Eximbank and Angola completed their first oil-backed loan in March 2004 – but the Chinese built the model to scale and applied it using a systematic approach. In Angola in 2006, USD 4 billion in such loans probably helped Chinese oil companies win the exploitation rights to multiple oil blocks.[14] In 2010, Sinopec’s acquisition of a 50 percent stake in Block 18 coincided with the disbursement of the first tranche of Eximbank funding, and in 2005, Sinopec’s acquisition of rights to Block 3/80 coincided with the announcement of a new USD 2 billion loan from China Eximbank to the Angolan government.[15]  In 2008, the China Railway Group used the same model to secure the mining rights to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s copper and cobalt mines under the slogan “(Infrastructure) projects for resources.”[16] According to Debra Brautigam, a top expert on China-Africa relations, between 2004 and 2011, China reached similar unprecedented deals with at least seven resource-rich African countries, with a total volume of nearly USD 14 billion.[17]

In addition to securing Africa’s natural resources, China’s capital flows into Africa also create business opportunities for Chinese service contractors, such as construction companies. According to Chinese analysts, Africa is China’s second-largest supplier of service contracts, and “when we provide Africa assistance of RMB 1 billion, we will get service contracts worth USD 1 billion (RMB 6 billion) from Africa.”[18] In exchange for most Chinese financial aid to Africa, Beijing requires that infrastructure construction and other contracts favor Chinese service providers: 70 percent of them go to “approved,” mostly state-owned, Chinese companies, and the rest are open to local firms, many of which are also joint ventures with Chinese groups.[19] In this sense, China’s financing to Africa, including aid, creates business for Chinese companies and employment opportunities for Chinese laborers, a critical goal of Beijing’s Going Out strategy.

How to understand Chinese aid to Africa?

With a few exceptions, there is a strong tendency among observers to assert moral judgments in the assessment of Chinese aid and development finance to Africa: China’s activities are either “evil” because they represent China’s selfish quest for natural resources and damage Africa’s fragile efforts to improve governance and build a sustainable future; or they are “virtuous” because they contribute to a foundation for long-term economic development, through infrastructure projects and revenue creation.

This polarization reveals the two sides of the same coin. On the positive side, China’s aid and development financing fills a void left by the West and promotes the development of African countries. Many Chinese projects require large investment and long pay-back terms that traditional donors are reluctant to provide.  On the other hand, however, these short-term benefits should not form a cover-up for the potential long-term negative consequences associated with neglecting issues of governance, fairness and sustainability. For example, when the “tied aid” is linked to the profitability of Chinese companies, it becomes questionable whether China would prioritize Africa’s interests or its own.

There is also an ongoing debate inside China about the goal and management of Chinese aid to Africa. For the foreign policy bureaucrats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, foreign aid is essentially a political instrument for China to strengthen bilateral ties and facilitate the development of African countries. In their view, political considerations should be the most important criteria in aid decision-making. Economic benefits associated with aid projects, such as profitability, resource extraction, or the acquisition service contracts for Chinese vendors, should only be secondary.

However, trade promoters such as the Ministry of Commerce have rather opposite perspective. In their view, foreign aid serves China’s overall national priority, which by definition is economic growth. Therefore, all aspects of aid decisions should reflect broad economic considerations. Under this logic, the inclination is to allocate the aid budget to countries that offer China the greatest number of commercial opportunities and benefits. Since China’s top economic interest is Africa’s natural resources, aid decisions are inevitably skewed toward resource-rich countries while others receive less favorable consideration.[20]

This practice is problematic in that many of the resource-rich African countries with which China works also suffer from serious political problems, such as authoritarianism, poor governance, and corruption. When the Ministry of Commerce pursues economic gains and associates aid projects with resource extraction, it uses aid packages to promote business relations. This directly contributes to the negative perception that China is pouring aid, funding, and infrastructure projects to prop up corrupt governments in exchange for natural resources. As many Chinese analysts observe, the Foreign Ministry in recent years has been fighting fiercely for the authority to manage China’s foreign aid projects, which are currently under the purview of the Ministry of Commerce.

The intention of China’s aid to Africa is benign but not altruistic. China does not seek to use aid to influence the domestic politics of African countries or dictate policies. Instead, it truly hopes to help Africa achieve better development while avoiding meddling with the internal affairs of African countries through conditional aid. But on the other hand, China is not helping Africa in exchange for nothing. Chinese projects create access to Africa’s natural resources and local markets, business opportunities for Chinese companies and employment for Chinese labors. When Chinese officials emphasize that China also provides aid to countries that are not rich in natural resources to defuse international criticisms, they often forget to mention that China may have its eyes on other things which these countries can deliver, such as their support of Beijing’s “one China” policy, of China’s agenda at multilateral forums, and of China as a “responsible stakeholder.”  In this sense, China’s comprehensive, multi-dimensional agenda of its aid to Africa defies any simplistic categorization.

[1] “Report on Development of China’s Outward Investment and Economic Cooperation, 2011-2012,” [中国对外投资合作发展报告], Ministry of Commerce, December 2012.

[2] He Wenping, “China to Africa: Gives It Fish and Teaches It Fishing,” [中国对非洲：授其以鱼，更授其以渔], JinRongBaoLan, May 6, 2013, http://finance.sina.com.cn/money/bank/bank_hydt/20130506/200915363934.shtml.

[3] “China’s Foreign Aid,” Xinhua News Agency, April 21, 2011, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-04/21/c_13839683_6.htm.

[4] “Official Development Assistance: Definition and Coverage,” OECD, http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/officialdevelopmentassistancedefinitionandcoverage.htm.

[5] “China To Complete 10 Billion USD Concessional Loans to Africa before the End of Year,” [中国将在年底前完成对非洲100亿美元优惠贷款计划], China Radio International, July 20, 2012. http://gb.cri.cn/27824/2012/07/20/3365s3778295.htm

[6] “China to Provide 20 billion USD Loan Credits to Africa in Three Years,” [中国三年内将向非洲提供200亿美元贷款额度], Cai Xin, March 25, 2013, http://international.caixin.com/2013-03-25/100506116.html.

[7] Toh Han Shih, “China to Provide Africa with US$1 trillion financing,” November 18, 2013, South China Morning Post, http://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/1358902/china-provide-africa-us1tr-financing.

[8] Piao Yingji, “The Evolution and Future Trend of China’s Direct Investment in Africa,” 《中国对非洲直接投资的发展历程与未来趋势》, [Hai Wai Tou Zi Yu Chu Kou Xin Dai], 2006 Volume 5. 　www.eximbank.gov.cn/topic/hwtz/2006/1_19.doc.

[9] “Wen Jiabao: China Did Not Exploit One Single Drop of Oil or One Single Ton of Minerals from Africa,” China.com.cn, September 15, 2011, http://www.china.com.cn/economic/txt/2011-09/15/content_23419056.htm.

[10] The principles include: China always bases itself on the principle of equality and mutual benefit in providing aid to other nations; China never attaches any conditions or asks for any privileges; China helps lighten the burden of recipient countries as much as possible; China aims at helping recipient countries to gradually achieve self-reliance and independent development; China strives to develop aid projects that require less investment but yield quicker results; China provides the best-quality equipment and materials of its own manufacture; in providing technical assistance, China shall see to it that the personnel of the recipient country fully master such techniques; the Chinese experts are not allowed to make any special demands or enjoy any special amenities. “Zhou Enlai Announced Eight Principles of Foreign Aid,” China Daily, August 13, 2010.

[11] “African Expert Interprets the 55 Years of Sino-African Relations,” 《非洲专家解读中非关系55年》, China Talk, Feb 23, 2011, fangtan.china.com.cn/2011-02/21/content_21965753.htm.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Yi Yimin, “China Probes Its Africa Model,” China Dialogue, August 18, 2011, http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4470-China-probes-its-Africa-model-1-.

[14] Zhang Changbing, “Opportunities and Challenges in Exploring and Developing African Oil Resources,” [勘探开发非洲石油资源的机遇与挑战], Guo Ji Jing Ji He Zuo, 2008, Volume 3, http://waas.cass.cn/upload/2011/06/d20110619154331656.pdf.

[15] Lucy Corkin, “China and Angola: Strategic Partnership or Marriage of Convenience?”, The Angola Brief, January 2011, Volume 1, No.1 http://www.cmi.no/publications/publication/?3938=china-and-angola-strategic-partnership-or-marriage.

[16] “Projects for Resources, China Railway Heads for DRC to Develop Cobalt Mines,” [以项目换资源 中国中铁赴刚果（金）开发铜钴矿], Zhong Guo Zheng Quan Bao, April 23, 2008, http://ccnews.people.com.cn/GB/7153049.html.

[17] Debra Brautigam, “China: Africa’s Oriental Hope,” [中国：非洲的东方希望], Hai Wai Wen Zhai, August 25, 2011, http://www.observe-china.com/article/51.

[18] Yang Fei, “People Should Rationally Understand the USD 20 Billion Assistance Loans to Africa,” [对“200亿美元援非贷款”应理性看待], China Radio International, March 29, 2013, http://gb.cri.cn/27824/2013/03/29/2165s4069180.htm.

[19] Jamil, Anderlini, “China Insists on ‘Tied Aid’ to Africa,” Financial Times, June 25, 2007, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/908c24f2-2343-11dc-9e7e-000b5df10621.html#axzz2RtN8dPxR.

[20] Interview with a Chinese analyst, Beijing, March 2013.

Asia Oceania

5,000 expected for Solomons blackbirding anniversary

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Descendants of a Malaitan man captured during the blackbirding era are preparing to welcome his Australian family members to Solomon Islands for the 150th anniversary of his capture.

John Kwailiu Fatanowna was taken from the Rakwane tribe of the Fataleka region of east Malaita to work on a sugar plantation in Queensland.

The president of the organising committee says for many of the 60 members of that branch of the family coming from Mackay at the end of the month it is the first time they have left Australia.

Enoch Mani Ilisia says local Rakwane people have been busy over the past few months putting in a new water supply, building toilets, houses and ensuring there are enough swamp taro, potatoes and cassava to feed everyone.

He told Annell Husband there will be more than 5,000 people taking part in the two-day commemoration, with presentations and opportunities to hear the chiefs tell the tribe’s history.

ENOCH MANI ILISIA: Unlike today, when we keep our documents and information in computer hard drives and whatever, back home they’ve stored it in the human brain. The chiefs there are very good at recollecting past information by word of mouth. And it’s kept only with the first borns. And the first borns are the ones who have the right to store that information and pass it orally. Due to instances we come across where people try to steal information and pass on information that is confidential to the community.

ANNELL HUSBAND: And that oral tradition, is that still alive and well, that’s still going well?

AH: That’s right. We have in our village [Indistinct]. It’s simply a house that all the men go to. The ladies are not allowed to go there. And even strangers, too, because in there, that’s where all the confidential information is passed on from our chiefs, our first borns, to the general tribesmen and the younger men, as well.

EML: I guess it could bring up a lot of emotion for people, coming together like this?

AH: A few weeks ago one of the tribal members came over from Mackay. He met with us, the committee members, in preparation for the grand event. We met and we exchanged money. It’s a moving event. [Indistinct] I was there with him. They embraced each other for a long time. It was a very moving experience.

Source: RNZ

Melanesia Network

The Wantok System as a Socio-Economic and Political Network in Melanesia

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Abstract

Understanding the wantok system as a socio-economic and political network in the Western Pacific is critical to understanding Melanesian societies and political behavior in the context of the modern na-tion-state. The complex web of relationships spawned by the wantok system at local, national and sub-regional levels of Melanesia could in-form our understanding of events and development in Melanesian states in the contemporary period. This paper will analyze the concepts and historical roots of wantok and kastom in Melanesia, with particular reference to the Solomon Islands. It will also assess the impact of colo-nialism in the development of new and artificial wantok identities and their (re)construction for political purposes. It concludes with a con-textual analysis of wantok as an important network in the Solomon Islands emphasizing its central role to people’s understanding of social and political stability and instability.

The Wantok System as a Socio-Economic and Political Network in Melanesia (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260002701_The_Wantok_System_as_a_Socio-Economic_and_Political_Network_in_Melanesia [accessed Mar 12 2018].

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/ 

Development Projects

James Lovelock: ‘enjoy life while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the fan’

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The climate science maverick believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do? By Decca Aitkenhead

James Lovelock
James Lovelock. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range of experts, who speculated about fusion-powered hovercrafts and “all sorts of fanciful technological stuff”. When the oil company asked the scientist James Lovelock, he predicted that the main problem in 2000 would be the environment. “It will be worsening then to such an extent that it will seriously affect their business,” he said.

“And of course,” Lovelock says, with a smile 43 years later, “that’s almost exactly what’s happened.”

Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected – if maverick – independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer, and introduced the Gaia hypothesis, a revolutionary theory that the Earth is a self-regulating super-organism. Initially ridiculed by many scientists as new age nonsense, today that theory forms the basis of almost all climate science.

For decades, his advocacy of nuclear power appalled fellow environmentalists – but recently increasing numbers of them have come around to his way of thinking. His latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, predicts that by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; that by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater. The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report deploys less dramatic language – but its calculations aren’t a million miles away from his.

As with most people, my panic about climate change is equalled only by my confusion over what I ought to do about it. A meeting with Lovelock therefore feels a little like an audience with a prophet. Buried down a winding track through wild woodland, in an office full of books and papers and contraptions involving dials and wires, the 88-year-old presents his thoughts with a quiet, unshakable conviction that can be unnerving. More alarming even than his apocalyptic climate predictions is his utter certainty that almost everything we’re trying to do about it is wrong.

On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on – all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won’t make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable.

“It’s just too late for it,” he says. “Perhaps if we’d gone along routes like that in 1967, it might have helped. But we don’t have time. All these standard green things, like sustainable development, I think these are just words that mean nothing. I get an awful lot of people coming to me saying you can’t say that, because it gives us nothing to do. I say on the contrary, it gives us an immense amount to do. Just not the kinds of things you want to do.”

He dismisses eco ideas briskly, one by one. “Carbon offsetting? I wouldn’t dream of it. It’s just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you’re offsetting the carbon? You’re probably making matters worse. You’re far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests.”

Do he and his wife try to limit the number of flights they take? “No we don’t. Because we can’t.” And recycling, he adds, is “almost certainly a waste of time and energy”, while having a “green lifestyle” amounts to little more than “ostentatious grand gestures”. He distrusts the notion of ethical consumption. “Because always, in the end, it turns out to be a scam … or if it wasn’t one in the beginning, it becomes one.”

Somewhat unexpectedly, Lovelock concedes that the Mail’s plastic bag campaign seems, “on the face of it, a good thing”. But it transpires that this is largely a tactical response; he regards it as merely more rearrangement of Titanic deckchairs, “but I’ve learnt there’s no point in causing a quarrel over everything”. He saves his thunder for what he considers the emptiest false promise of all – renewable energy.

“You’re never going to get enough energy from wind to run a society such as ours,” he says. “Windmills! Oh no. No way of doing it. You can cover the whole country with the blasted things, millions of them. Waste of time.”

This is all delivered with an air of benign wonder at the intractable stupidity of people. “I see it with everybody. People just want to go on doing what they’re doing. They want business as usual. They say, ‘Oh yes, there’s going to be a problem up ahead,’ but they don’t want to change anything.”

Lovelock believes global warming is now irreversible, and that nothing can prevent large parts of the planet becoming too hot to inhabit, or sinking underwater, resulting in mass migration, famine and epidemics. Britain is going to become a lifeboat for refugees from mainland Europe, so instead of wasting our time on wind turbines we need to start planning how to survive. To Lovelock, the logic is clear. The sustainability brigade are insane to think we can save ourselves by going back to nature; our only chance of survival will come not from less technology, but more.

Nuclear power, he argues, can solve our energy problem – the bigger challenge will be food. “Maybe they’ll synthesise food. I don’t know. Synthesising food is not some mad visionary idea; you can buy it in Tesco’s, in the form of Quorn. It’s not that good, but people buy it. You can live on it.” But he fears we won’t invent the necessary technologies in time, and expects “about 80%” of the world’s population to be wiped out by 2100. Prophets have been foretelling Armageddon since time began, he says. “But this is the real thing.”

Faced with two versions of the future – Kyoto’s preventative action and Lovelock’s apocalypse – who are we to believe? Some critics have suggested Lovelock’s readiness to concede the fight against climate change owes more to old age than science: “People who say that about me haven’t reached my age,” he says laughing.

But when I ask if he attributes the conflicting predictions to differences in scientific understanding or personality, he says: “Personality.”

There’s more than a hint of the controversialist in his work, and it seems an unlikely coincidence that Lovelock became convinced of the irreversibility of climate change in 2004, at the very point when the international consensus was coming round to the need for urgent action. Aren’t his theories at least partly driven by a fondness for heresy?

“Not a bit! Not a bit! All I want is a quiet life! But I can’t help noticing when things happen, when you go out and find something. People don’t like it because it upsets their ideas.”

But the suspicion seems confirmed when I ask if he’s found it rewarding to see many of his climate change warnings endorsed by the IPCC. “Oh no! In fact, I’m writing another book now, I’m about a third of the way into it, to try and take the next steps ahead.”

Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock’s predictions of doom, and his good humour. “Well I’m cheerful!” he says, smiling. “I’m an optimist. It’s going to happen.”

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it”. But once the second world war was under way, “everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday … so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose – that’s what people want.”

At moments I wonder about Lovelock’s credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it’s not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth – or Gaia – it is in the purest scientific terms all.

“There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.”

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: “Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”