Chris Blattman recently asked if Human Rights might be a morally dubious concept, following Adam Martin’s unearthing of an old interview with the libertarian economist F.A. Hayek. Hayek, who was making the argument that apartheid South Africa should have been left alone to run its own business as a ‘civilisation of a kind’, made the claim that intervention was being encouraged by the recent acceptance of human rights in America, just a few years prior to the video being recorded.

Leaving aside the irony of a libertarian regarding a situation in which 90% of humans had severely restricted liberty as unworthy of intervention, I really have to take issue with another point he makes: that human rights were a recent concept to the US when he was interviewed in the 1970s. Martin quotes:

I’m not sure whether it’s an invention of the present administration or whether it’s of an older date, but I suppose if you told an eighteen year old that human rights is a new discovery he wouldn’t believe it.  He would have thought the United States for 200 years has been committed to human rights, which of course would be absurd.

- An absurd statement itself, considering the contents of the Declaration of Independence. In the comments, Adam defends this statement, arguing that Hayek was referring to a new, modern conception of human rights:

… human rights are claims about how governments should act to produce particular patterns of outcomes

Adam contrasts this with the idea that classical human rights were statements about how individuals should treat each other. I’m dubious; a glance at the history of the ideas underlying statehood and rights suggests that the concept of rights was far more amorphous than this dichotomy would indicate, and spoke directly to the actions of the state as well as individuals. In fact the revolutions of America and France were specifically about the responsibilities of the state.

Human rights emerged as the basis of modern states (including the independent America) more than two centuries ago and their expansion from their original base began almost immediately – first incorporating new people and then new rights. The American and French Revolutions pioneered the ideas of ‘human rights’ as actionable concepts. The Declaration of Independence famously holds certain truths to be self-evident, notably that ‘all men are created equal’. France’s revolution was founded on the principles of liberté, egalité, fraternité – still the central elements of the French identity.

Nor were these the first time that universal rights had been invoked. The intellectual foundations for universal rights were laid by the very first Greek and Roman philosophers, and independently by Asian philosophers. These philosophers attempted to isolate the conditions for happiness, rightness and dignity that apply to all men: and thus laid the foundation for the idea of human rights as conditions that must be protected to allow the pursuit of these. As early as the third century BC, Mencius took these ideas further: he claimed that a ruler who tyrannises his subjects loses his divine right to rule and the people have the right to revolution – thus directly linking rights to the actions of states and leaders. The 1776 and 1789 revolutions made this explicit through the ideas they laid at the foundation of the new states they created.

What was amazing in the 1776 and 1789 revolutions was that they established as part of their basic justification the idea that Government had responsibilities and requirements that gave or denied it legitimacy, and that this was a truth that did not derive from exclusively from divine mandate (as with Kings who were either ‘chosen’ or descendent from Gods or the heavens) nor divine knowledge (i.e. from textual religion) – rather that these concepts were immutable, and derived from the condition of humanity. It was the failure to meet these responsibilities that motivated revolution.

The ideas of basic human rights established in these two revolutions have had an incredible enduring power. It is ahistorical to claim that the Sen-inspired approach to rights-based development is anything new. Rather, it’s a further modernization of a conceptual basis to the state that has existed for a great deal of time. The modification and expansion of rights is also not a new phenomenon. The original ideas were immediately passed into common currency and modified even in the few years following the revolutions. And these ideas have always been controversial and open to debate.

The first expansion was in who was covered by these rights. The concepts of the French Revolution were originally restricted to those white, free-born Frenchmen who powered and directed the revolutionary impulse in 1789. Yet within two years the first expansion of these emerging human rights occurred: in St Domingue, slaves took arm and rose under the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, adopting the ideological framework of the French Revolution to their own struggle for freedom from the tyrannical plantation owners.

After an epic struggle, fighting off Napoleon’s armies, a British attempt to seize control of a new slave colony and a Spanish invasion, the free Republic of Haiti emerged. Within a few years, the British abolished slavery internationally and set about policing the newly expanded right of liberty for Africans. (Incidentally, Hayek’s justification for non-intervention in Apartheid South Africa would equally have applied to British attempts to police the end of the slave trade – the limits of libertarianism become quickly apparent in extreme circumstances). At the time, these expansions of human rights were profoundly controversial, shaking the very foundations of how the world was perceived in the West.

The second dimension of expansion was in the rights themselves. The original rights were limited to a basic legal equality and freedom; yet others argued that legal equality and nominal freedom meant very little when conditions of rule and economy denied vast swathes of humanity the ability to earn or harvest enough to avoid periodic starvation. This was considered to be a failure of equality of opportunity and a failure of freedom. This observation was taken in two different directions. On the one hand a new series of revolutions, starting in 1917 in Russia, created states with founding ideals that expanded on those of the French and American Revolutions. These new revolutions asserted that equality must be functional to eradicate the failures of the original rights in securing life. These attempts have either collapsed or been forced to re-examine their methods. The rights they sought to expand came at too great a cost in the other rights that had been established in 1776 and 1789. Yet for a while, these new rights were actively pursued through coercive state action.

A second approach to the same ends began to emerge a few decades later, alongside a development of a new vocabulary of rights. This is the new ‘creeping expansion’ of human rights which forms the basis of much current development discourse. Sen’s Entitlements Theory was essentially an attempt to expand the locus of human rights and give it a new vocabulary. In the modern world, we have been much more responsive to these ideas than we would have been in the 1700s. Back then, food insecurity was common for all but the most privileged, and any attempt to make material well-being a human right would have been utopianism. Now, though, many countries are almost completely free of food insecurity, so in such places the attractiveness of labelling such things rights is massively increased: they are seen as an achievable basic condition of humanity.

These are arbitrary expansions and, like the previous expansions in the ideas of human rights, they’ve attracted controversy. Intellectual critics claim these rights are not immutable; but in a world conceived without a God, no concept is immutable, because nothing is delivered to us from without the world. So immutable concepts are no longer feasible, unless we seek a religious world order. Other critiques are from the technical point of view – what do human rights achieve? What does it mean when we talk of them?

These arguments have been going on for 200 years; but what gives them such legs on the battleground of this newest expansion is that for the first time since the 18^th Century, rights are being coined without any basis in the coercive power of a state. When the French Revolutionary or Soviet states made something a right they would fight, discipline and punish until these rights were adhered to. There is no such possibility for these universal rights to a better life that development actors now champion. As a result, they are far weaker than the rights as first conceived. What it’s crucial to understand is that the rights themselves are not necessarily weak, but the context in which they are delivered is. To have power, they must be backed by coercion, not an organ of discussion like the United Nations.

Human Rights have only ever been political constructs; as such, they function when they are associated with powerful political entities. Debate about the usefulness of a rights-based approach to development needs to recognise this or risk redundancy.

Be careful of what you wish for. You might just get it.

Recently, Andrew Mwenda and five other prominent African intellectuals wrote to the Telegraph suggesting that Africa does not in fact need British development aid. Rather, they would be much happier if Britain contributed to the scrapping of the Common Agricultural Policy as a way of helping Africa.

Unfortunately, it seems like the Conservative-Liberal coalition Government might be giving them half of what they want – and not the good part. Yet another DfID-related leak has revealed that the British aid budget will from now on be allocated with a much stronger emphasis on UK security; in effect, moving aid away from being a stand-alone policy area and into a branch of a foreign policy drive aimed at ensuring the safety of the British public. Cynics will say this is nothing new, but it is surely more explicit and more closely felt than at any time since DfID’s formation.

Just to be clear: the leaked document does not suggest that Britain stop funding schools, or healthcare or even economic growth per se. DfID could continue to be a paragon of virtue in international development circles. What it does mean is that whenever DfID want to spend on these things, it will need to justify them on UK national security grounds. Since UK national security is best served by stable, prosperous, well-educated countries existing around the world this isn’t necessarily a recipe for disaster.

However, it’s another indication that the new Government want to make DfID, hitherto one of the best aid agencies to work with from a developing country point of view, more of a tool for an overall UK Government strategy founded in ideology and realpolitik. This is a real worry. Like the news from a few weeks back that DfID was dropping a number of commitments previously agreed, allegedly including the Paris Declaration, it is an indication that the Government wants to free up DfID to respond to its own priorities first and foremost.

Up til now, one of the reasons why DfID has developed such a good reputation was because it had a fairly high degree of operational independence from the rest of Government. This gave it the flexibility to pursue better aid allocations in the context of wider donor and Government spending, sometimes by taking on risk through budget support and other times by improving resource allocation procedures (budgeting, Parliamentary oversight and the like).

Giving DfID a requirement to justify what they do based on UK national security introduces an important restraint to them: it means that they cannot simply respond to country needs given the allocation of other resources, but needs to ensure it’s own resources pass a fitness test at home. What’s more, this all but rules out general budget support (from the recipient point of view, the best way of getting aid, if you care about building the ability of Government to allocate and account for funds), since there can be no guarantee on where this money will be spent.

All in all, this is a worrying sign though not a guarantee of catastrophe.

A Saudi judge has asked several hospitals whether they would punitively damage a man’s spinal cord after he was convicted of attacking another man with a cleaver and paralysing him, local newspapers reported today…

Abdul-Aziz al-Mutairi, 22, was left paralysed after a fight more than two years ago, and asked a judge to impose an equivalent punishment on his attacker under sharia law, reports said.

Fortunately:

King Faisal specialist hospital said that it would not do the operation. The article quoted a letter from the hospital saying “inflicting such harm is not possible”, apparently refusing on ethical grounds.

No doubt Wronging Rights will come up with something pithy and insightful to say about this, so I’ll sign off with this: gah.

Of all the Declarations, in all the world...

News from this weekend suggests that DfID will be reversing its hitherto strong backing to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. My initial reactions were of shock and disappointment. Shock because DfID has been an ardent supporter of the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda for Action. Disappointment because it was so unexpected: it has a strong, highly competent aid effectiveness department and has also used the Declaration to push Government reform.

I’ve noted after viewing the original leaked memo that the original advice was in favour of maintaining the Paris Declaration as a commitment by DfID. Most of the other commitments dropped simply serve to cut the amount of ringfencing of DfID’s budget and therefore increase its flexibility to meet the needs of different developing countries.

The decision to rescind their commitment to the PD is a much more problematic one, however. The issues essentially break down as follows:

What has DfID Reversed?

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness (PD) is an agreement signed by donor agencies and Governments and aid-recipient Governments in 2005. The Declaration establishes a number of best practices in aid management that all parties promise to adhere to, and twelve targets which all parties are to be assessed on. These targets and commitments were strengthened by the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) in 2008.

The idea behind the PD and AAA is to make it easier for Governments to manage, use and report on aid by simplifying the way aid is contracted, disbursed and evaluated. It also seeks to maximise the benefit to the developing country by untying aid and ensuring that aid be channelled through the working local process of the aid-recipient Government. Thus aid is promised to be channelled through the local budget process, use the local accounting and audit procedures and be evaluated according to local processes. It further stressed the need to make aid as flexible as possible by using fungible General and Sector Budget Support.

Recipient Governments also made pledges to improve their own systems: of audit, budgeting and so on, and to be assessed independently on them.

The Paris Declaration has two very big positive points. The first is that it seeks to increase the ability of local actors to respond to their own problems flexibly and not be dictated to by a multitude of individual donors. It thus helps reduce the coordination problem of aid and encourages local solutions and visions of development.

The second major benefit, related to the first, is that it moves the lines of accountability of aid. Instead of aid money being handled by the donors, in which case the donors are accountable to their own taxpayers and no-one else, it creates dual accountability. First the donor gives money to the recipient Government to use. That Government is thus accountable to the donor, and must show that the money was used appropriately. But far more important than this, because aid money is now on budget and managed by local Governments a second line of accountability is created: of the recipient Government spending the money to the local electorate. Through the budget debates in Parliament, these people have the chance to contest the use of aid through their elected representatives; they also have the ability to vote a Government out of power if it doesn’t use aid money well. The Government now has to justify aid money in the same way it does tax money.

Additionally, the PD addresses lots of smaller, niggling issues that seriously hamper the capacity of Governments, for example setting a target for the reduction of cumbersome and time consuming donor missions by combining them.

The primary weakness of the PD is that it is actually not about the effectiveness of aid itself. At no point does the PD focus squarely on what aid achieves. The most it does is specify that each country *should* examine this. It focuses instead on processes of accountability which should stimulate effectiveness.

What DfID’s Reversal Does NOT Mean

Before going on to the criticisms that DfID opens itself up to by abandoning the Paris Declaration, it’s important to be clear about what DfID has not abandoned. It has not abandoned the impulse towards better, more effective aid. As I’ve pointed out above, the PD does not directly address or measure the effectiveness of aid. Thus, even without the PD, DfID is quite capable of pursuing the effectiveness of its aid portfolio.

DfID has also not abandoned any hope of coordination with other donors nor of making aid easier to manage. These can be addressed from without the framework the Paris and Accra agreements provide. Ideas like the marketization of aid are not covered in the PD.

What DfID’s Reversal Means for DfID

So why all of the hand-wringing? If DfID can continue to pursue more effective aid and coordinate with other donors in each country, why am I disappointed that it has rescinded its commitment to the Paris Declaration? DfID’s decision will cause itself a problem in its dealings with developing country Governments and will also hamper developing country Government efforts to get the most out of aid.

Firstly, there is the message it sends to developing countries. DfID made a multilateral commitment to take action and pursue targets for better aid provision and has unilaterally decided that this is no longer important. This is an appalling message to send to a plethora of developing countries which have made similar commitments to crucial reform processes that are painful, unpopular and against the interests of the ruling elite. Governments which rescind their backing to reform opaque budgeting and auditing systems can now point to DfID’s example and say they remain committed to ideals but no longer wish to tie themselves down on targets, deadlines or specific changes.

Closely allied to this problem is DfID’s loss of moral authority with developing countries. Up until now, DfID have been able to use their leadership on the PD agenda as a lever to push change in developing countries. They could push reforms when they themselves had reformed and were willing to take risks and use recipient-country systems. When local Governments show reluctance to improve their accounting or withdraw support for an independent Auditor General, DfID’s protests are now likely to be met by a response of: ‘What do you care how systems are reformed? Renew your commitment to using them before you start to tell us how to manage them.’ Even worse, the unspoken anger at donor hypocrisy, so tangible in every developing country Government I’ve worked in or advised, will only be strengthened.

More than a diffuse moral authority that comes with the commitment to use Government systems, DfID will also lose the ability to make legitimate threats or remind recipient Governments of their requirements under the PD. The PD actually makes it explicit that the amount of aid that the donor is required to funnel through a Government depends on how good their public financial management systems are, as independently assessed. This carrot and stick are now removed from DfID’s armoury.

What DfID’s Reversal Means for Developing Countries

On the recipient Government side, the defection from the aid coordination game by DfID has different potential problems. The PD is a very powerful document for developing countries because it ties all donors to a set of targets which are transparently and publicly assessed. Developing country Governments can use the PD to push reform through the targets and the commitments made. This is an important tool. Most donors wanted to do well on these targets, either due to central directives or sheer competitiveness. Governments have been able to use this impulse to drive them to greater use of Government systems, strengthening the budget process and hence creating contestability and local accountability in aid. These are significant gains where they have been made.

The reversal of DfID’s support to the PD has two major consequences. Firstly, it provides other donors with an ‘out’, particularly those donors who find it difficult to meet PD targets due to their own institutional strictures. Secondly, it removes a front-runner from the pack, leaving the rest with less of a catch-up distance when the PD is assessed.

What’s more DfID’s support in pushing other donors to improve their practices in line with the PD has been a major driver of change in many countries – one which they now lose some of their capacity for. Without adhering to the PD themselves, it’s difficult to see how they can continue to exert pressure on other donors without backlash.

Finally, technocrats in developing country Governments have been able to use the PD and donor pressure to fulfil the terms of it to push domestic reform processes by demonstrating to political leaders the importance of them to increase aid allocations and reorganise the types of aid received. DfID was again a powerful voice in this, but has lost some authority.

Of course, one donor defecting from the agreement hasn’t at a stroke reduced it to a mess. But it sets a bad precedent and removes on of the strongest proponents of it. It’s also true that the PD hasn’t resulted in gains everywhere. But where the domestic Government has made an effort with it, it has been useful, and this shouldn’t be overshadowed by other places where efforts have been weak.

Reform of aid and developing country processes is painful, slow and difficult. We don’t really need anything to make it more so.

DfID have gone all Anderson Silva on the fight for more effective aid management.

A leaked memo reveals that DfID will be dropping its commitment to the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

This is a massive blow. The PD (as it’s known)  is very imperfect, and even the refinements we made in Accra in 2008 left plenty to be desired. But it’s the only real commitment the international community has made to improving donor systems for the management of aid – to making it easier to use, receive, negotiate. What’s worse, it’s one of the few places where recipient Governments are tied down to improvements in the way they themselves manage aid and their domestic resources.

DfID have been one of the biggest motors behind improving the PD and getting the simplification of access to and usage of aid money improved. This is not insignificant. Anyone who has spent time in a developing country Government can see how much of the recipient Government’s time is spent on managing, applying for and reporting on aid – not to mention following up on problems in its access, flow and predictability, all of which are covered by the PD. A conservative estimate for a heavily aid dependent country like Malawi is about 60% of Ministry of Finance time. Probably as much in the most aid dependent sectors, too. (To clarify – dropping the PD does not mean that DfID are abandoning the fight for better aid – but they are dropping their biggest weapon in the fight for better aid management.)

Dropping the PD means DfID have just lost a massive amount of moral authority in the fight to improve the way aid is used, and equally in the fight to improve the way Governments manage their own resources.

I’ll collect my thoughts for a more detailed post.

A paragon of transparency.

Today’s Guardian runs an eye-opening piece on expenditures made in the last year of the Labour administration. The Tories are, in their drive for transparency, publishing expenditures made by various Government departments online. The documents relating to the Department of Communities and Local Government show:

Among the expenses revealed was £1,673 to a company called Stress Angels, which offers massages, acupressure, Indian head massage and reflexology…

Then there was £626 on a trip to a nature reserve in Nottingham and £539 on an awayday to Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Accommodation at a hotel – the Rubens, opposite Buckingham Palace – cost £17,000. Another £3,670 went to Halfords cycle shop.

The litmus test for the Tories will, of course, be whether they maintain their drive for transparency when it is going to expose even their own Government.  We see this kind of thing happening all the time in Africa, relating to corruption. A new Government comes in promising change and a war against graft. For the first year they push hard to identify and punish culprits, making high profile arrests and prosecutions. These arrests and prosecutions damage the previous administration, normally the opposition party in Parliament.

Then as time goes on, the anti-corruption agency exhausts its ability to prosecute the opposition. It’s eyes turn towards current or recent corruption scandals – those that implicate the current regime. Suddenly, the political will dissipates – they’ve ‘done enough to show that corruption will not be tolerated’. Quietly, the support and direction of senior officials is withdrawn. The old bad habits reassert themselves and the Government continues to make merry with public funds.

Eventually they get voted out, and the whole cycle starts again. This happened in Kenya (though it all went a bit pear shaped when John Githongo showed the tenacity of a bull-terrier); it happened in Malawi and in almost identical circumstances, in Zambia.

It’s easy right now for the Tories to attack the culture of expenditure in Government, because the punches are landing on their opponents. The real win will be when they let the expenditures be published on a monthly or quarterly basis, and let the whip fall on themselves. After all, this is what we demand of developing country administrations. Why should the standards we hold for ourselves be different?

'Never take sides with anyone against the Family again. Ever.'

One of the enduring questions of historical debate is why Western Europe and North America so outperformed the rest of the world economically in the 1800s. Though some (notably Andre Gunder Frank) have argued that the ‘advance of the West’ was really an illusion created by the decline of the rest, it is generally agreed that Western Europe and America had or developed a number of advantages that took their growth forward and retarded the growth of other regions – sometimes through luck, sometimes through natural endowment and often through a combination of the two.

One aspect of these advantages has interested me recently: financial services and the organization of business. It’s now widely accepted that better financial services was part of the reason why Western European companies in particular prospered in this period. The Dutch pioneered the Joint Stock Company to mitigate the risks of long mercantile voyages, and the Dutch East India Company was an early example of the separation of ownership and management. In Britain and then in the rest of Western Europe, regional banks came to prominence and provided the means by which firms could raise capital for expansion. This was generally accompanied by a changing of the structure of firm.

Businesses had till this point been, by-and-large, enterprises that were run by families. The emergence of new forms of financing and capital made it easier to raise money and also made it easier to share risk, as the legal code governing how liability should be assigned to the ownership of a firm changed as different forms of financing became available and different types of company evolved to take advantage of financing which enabled them to exploit risky opportunities overseas.

At the time the East India Company was demonstrating the sheer size that could be achieved through the use of these new firm structures and through exploitation of financing (as well as war-like methods that were part of the ‘trading’ world at the time), almost all the successful Chinese companies were still keeping resources within the family. They were unable to access credit and unwilling to experiment with the new firm structures that expanded ownership and dispersed fiduciary risk to individual owners. Many historians now argue that the innovations in financing allowed the West to expand faster, while the changes in the structure of the firm and the accompanying legal code gave their private enterprises a massive advantage in expansion into new markets.

What I find particularly interesting about this is that the family-ownership pattern has persisted in much of Asia and Africa right to the present day, despite the massive expansion in financial services available. I’m not just talking about the small stalls and dukas which are run by families but major businesses, particularly in India, which are often owned by a patriarchal character, with senior posts in management distributed to sons, sons-in-law and other favoured family members. In South Asia and Africa family networks and even more broadly, ethnic or similar networks remain incredibly important for business. Go almost anywhere where there is an Asian business community – more often than not, you’ll find that there is a network of family run firms, and where they have links to each other, it’s common that they are from the same region or area.

Why has this structure of the firm persisted so long, despite legal and financial advances that should be encouraging larger, less risk-averse firms? The standard answer is ‘trust’. When family or strong ethnic ties bind the decision-makers in an enterprise, the argument goes, it is easier to persuade owners to part with new capital for the expansion of the firm, there are less likely to be financial disputes, theft, and liability can be enforced as it falls within a small circle – no shirking of responsibility is possible. Yet this doesn’t convince entirely. As the infrastructure surrounding firms improves, these issues are less and less binding. Financial institutions now provide far more opportunities for those with collateral, while insurance, commercial courts and dispute resolution all mitigate the risks that using family trust as a basis for commercial enterprises is supposed to leaven.

I think there are deeper motives at work here. These are societies defined by patrimonial networks, and not just recently. One powerful expression of this is the expectation that positions of influence should be used to support family, and in almost any sphere. Politicians routinely seek to channel support to their ethnic group or home region and equally frequently use their influence to secure jobs or contracts to family members. This pattern extents to sports. The Pakistani writer Osman Samiuddin recently wrote about the difficulties of captaining Pakistan’s cricket team. In remarking how two captains in particular had proven successful he also gives an example of how deeply entrenched this culture of using influence for the family gain goes:

[Abdul] Kardar dropped his brother-in-law Zulfiqar Ahmed before Pakistan set out to the West Indies in 1957-58, preferring unrelated youth. A quarter of a century later, Imran [Khan] dropped his cousin and boyhood idol Majid Khan in his very first Test as captain. Both decisions shook not only the sides but a country where nepotism is a way of life.

This extends to business; rather than separating ownership and management, they are kept tightly intertwined to ensure that the benefits from success are kept as close as possible to the bounds of family.

There is, of course, nothing illegal or immoral about this, as far as private business goes at least. The bigger question is whether or not this hampers the prospects of economic progress. If the change in ownership patterns of European and North American firms was one of the reasons why they were able to expand so quickly and exploit new opportunities without delays, does this mean that the comparatively smaller, more less flexible family-business structure constrain the enterprises of parts of the developing world? The family structure of a company does not mean it can no longer access credit or even float on the stock market (though the latter undoubtedly becomes difficult, unless a majority is firmly kept within the family), but it does mean that liability is more tightly focused and risk more acutely felt. It may also mean that, while decisions can be made swiftly, the quality of leadership is variable. A company that draws its senior management from a smaller pool has fewer people of quality to choose from.

If it is a problem, the next big question is how to change it. It’s interesting that China is cited as an example where family-firms was the most frequent avatar of big businesses in the 17th and 18th Centuries, but that now it is characterised by a very different structure of enterprise. Of course, what China went through that most other countries didn’t was a profound change to the very basis of its cultural, economic and legal structures during the conversion to Communist rule. While the policy recommendation from this is clearly not that every country needs a revolution, it may be that in order for older less dynamic economic forms to lose their limpet-like grip on survival a fundamental change to the cultural basis of economic forms is required. Quite how this can happen short of war or revolution, normally the two most fundamentally disruptive events to social forms, is not readily apparent.

I’m not even sure if this is a question we should be asking. If there is a cultural or deeply rooted social basis for economic practices that may be retarding economic development, should we be seeking to change these or seeking to maximize the economic development possible despite these constraints? How deeply should the process of development change a society? These are valid questions that it doesn’t seem that many people ask, let alone answer.

In a recent post I argued that development work paid too little attention to the prospects of unionism as a method of protecting the poor and mitigating inequality in a rapidly growing economy. I mentioned that there have been a number of successful union movements historically that have served this specific purpose. In the comments, Lee (of Roving Bandit fame) made the very valid point that a unionism movement may actually harm some of the poor if it blocks out ‘Outsiders’ to the movement and prevents them from accessing the benefits of organization. These outsiders are, of course, likely to be the unemployed seeking work.

This is of course possible. But a union can function in a number of ways. The most common in the developed world is as a set of insiders seeking to protect their material conditions by collectively bargaining with employers and preventing outsiders from undercutting their position. This is the kind of unionism, relying as it does on an insider-outsider distinction and the coercive ability of the union to exclude outsiders from even entering the realms of discourse, which Lee worries about.

In the developing world, a different kind of unionism can be seen. In many cases the politically loaded term ‘Union’ may not even be the best descriptor for what is observed. We could rather call them ‘workers cooperatives’. Their aims are different: not only to create a better division of an industries surplus between capitalists and labour, but to protect basic rights which are poorly understood and poorly protected. This kind of unionism isn’t as widely required among the workers in the developed west because the state takes this role for all citizens through legislation on health and safety and so on (the obvious exception being for illegal migrant labour, who are denied access to the state’s protection or are operating under the radar and hence opt not to appeal to it).

What these unions or cooperatives exist for has less to do with bargaining and more to do with ensuring that legal frameworks are provided and that workers understand what their rights are vis-à-vis employers. One relatively well known historical example concerned migrant labour which entered South Africa for mining work. Many workers were under the misapprehension that their presence in South Africa was illegal and therefore accepted conditions well below the statutory minimum until a movement built up to ensure that all workers were aware of their statutory status.

Alongside this kind of unionism is another kind – the representation of a ‘captured’ population. The classic case here is of plantation labour descendent from migrants: these are workers who have historically formed a labour pool that is almost bonded, even after being freed. Bonded plantation labour of slave plantations were established across the globe: Zanzibar’s economy was in large part built on slave plantations, and Sri Lanka’s on bonded plantation labour. The case of Sri Lanka is particularly illuminating. Though the plantations were captured labour and virtually bonded through the lack of education and social mobility imposed on them, a number of union movements emerged, including the Ceylon Worker’s Congress. Under its original leadership, the CWC made enormous gains for all plantation workers – improved education, housing, healthcare and wages without apparently operating any penalizing system to punish either those who defected from the union or those who were members of other unions. Similar success stories are apparent in Southern India in particular.

Both of these models could be profitably applied to the African context. Such is the excess of unemployed (more accurately, underemployed) in Africa, that individuals are deeply reluctant to assert their rights to employers. Employers also use strategies to minimize the risk of this, particularly in rural areas, where employers often employ a calculated strategy of using day-workers, changing the individuals picked up regularly. Often, they target female heads of household, who are even less likely agitate, given their precarious financial situation. These areas need movements to educate individuals about their rights and the laws, but also need organizations to represent their voice collectively and therefore reduce the risk associated with individual agitation.

Economic analysis would have it that this kind of organization is extremely difficult: free riders can break the effectiveness of a collective, and an insider-outsider problem could result in a situation where some of the poor achieve better standards while others are condemned to even more extreme poverty. Yet historical analyses demonstrate that these problems are far less common than we would predict. My Master’s thesis was on this specific question, how union movements can overcome collective action problems and I found that South and South-East Asia in particular have many success stories in this vein, some of which have been achieved in the face of severe Government oppression as in the case of Free Trade Union in Cambodia (though this example is more recent than the ones I studied).

What helped unions overcome these problems? The answers seem to be a combination of identity and leadership. Where there was a common identity that either pre-existed or could be created among the workers, the need for a stick to go along with the carrot was much reduced. This, however, did not explain the dynamism of some the unions that existed, nor their varying fortunes over time. Some of the latter was no doubt due to prevailing economic fortunes and the tolerance or otherwise of the Government, but a major aspect was leadership. Some movements were lucky to get charismatic, developmental leaders who aimed at the betterment of all, rather than the enrichment of the few; in many cases, succession to new leaders removed this all-important aspect and the effectiveness of the union declined and occasionally they even turned predatory.

The lessons from this aren’t simple, nor uniformly positive. In certain circumstances workers have been able to collectivise for the common good under inspired leadership; but this hasn’t always been the case. When identity fractures rather than unites invididuals, insider-outsider problems have worsened the prospects of some. When leadership has been predatory rather than inspirational, rather than protecting the rights of workers, unions have joined with capital to predate on their weaknesses. All we can do is try and make conditions as easy as possible for the right kind of workers movements to flourish, while discouraging the predatory kind. This isn’t going to be easy, but it appears to me that even in those countries where the ILO is active, little in the way of real effort is being made.

I mention the ILO with reason. This is an organization with the potential to fulfill this role, but it’s advocacy voice and policy influence isn’t in the same league as some of its fellow UN agencies, which I view as a shame. It’s not perfect by a long sight and I have particular problems with the use of ILO definitions of unemployment for Africa, but if any agency can champion workers’ rights effectively, surely it’s this one.

Weak or Strong?

It was not the case that old states were uniformly ‘weak,’ more that they husbanded their moral and physical authority for specific tasks… Where complex bundles of royal privileges and powers had come into existence, there was often a tendency for them to be broken up, becoming part of the patrimony of some other prince or noble. Kings and emperors often found it lucrative and convenient to ‘farm out’ their rights to the highest bidder…

In China… initially the emperors had been content to cede their power in one area in order to strengthen it elsewhere. In the longer run, however, the decay of these imperial functions gravely compromised the regime’s legitimacy. Recent work on the West African Asante [one of the great pre-colonial African kingdoms] has also shown that this aspiring centralized power was severely limited by local feudatories and lineage groups….

So Government in all of these great states was often something of a trick of the light. State power was powerful and purposive in defined areas, though constant vigilance was needed to stop it seeping away to magnates and local communities. Elsewhere it was patchy and contingent. Over large areas it was deliberately not exercised at all…In the monsoon areas of Asia where great kings vaunted their magnificence, warfare and tax gathering regularly came to a halt when the roads annually became impassable. The state could only deploy a small number of officials or exercise royal justice in particular cases. Everywhere, therefore, the panoply of state and imperial power rested in the longer term on the co-option and honouring of local elites or self-governing local communities.

Every time I open The Birth of the Modern World, I read a passage in which Chris Bayly exposes the complexity of historical reality and dangers of simplification. In this example, he looks at the period leading up to around 1800, in which states were beginning to take modern form. In examining the phenomenon of weak or strong states, Bayly emphasises that states are not static over space, time or function. As such, naming a state ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ may simply cloud the real story, that states choose to exercise power in some areas and not others, not always in the best long-term interest of the state itself and often simply in response to basic opportunity or aims that owe more to symbolic rather than rational ends. The Great Russian Empire existed primarily on paper, for example, with large swathes of land ungoverned – almost a textbook example of a ‘weak’ state. Yet when the state was called upon to exert its authority, it always found the means to, at least until 1917.

We talk a lot about weak states now, and even of ‘failed’ states. These are not new ideas nor new phenomena. When we think about modern failed states, we need to bear in mind that for most there are functions in which they are strong and there are areas in which they govern effectively; it’s from these that strategy on how to incorporate the rest of the nominally governed area must be generated. This may involve subjugation or devolution or both – states are about the exercise of moral and physical authority, which is not always pleasant to witness or be subject to. The process by which a patchily strong state becomes a uniformly strong state is rarely without severe conflict.

In the extreme cases, where ‘states’ govern a few square miles and little else, we are in uncharted territory. Historically, these have never succeeded, and gave way to successor states or anarchy. Our attempts to forestall this may be futile or we may find a way to build a new moral and physical authority to reinforce the state. Given that outside interference almost always involves an abdication of moral authority in the eyes of an insular or jingoistic public, it’s may be that only force can support these.

Before they turned to cookie cutter stadium rock, RHCP cared about the Power of Equality.

I recently wrote a piece for Change.Org about something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I got back from South Africa: the disappearance of equity and redistribution from the vocabulary of development work. Up till about twenty years ago or so, it was a common practice in development work to talk about ‘social and economic equalization’ as an aim in its own right. This normally took the form of deciding on a manner in which redistribution of wealth could be made: through taxation and selective expenditure, through active redistribution of resources, such as land, through subsidization and so on. Over time, this approach was removed completely from the discourse. Structural Adjustment was one reason for this, as it tightened purse-strings and regulated taxation structure. It began to seen as counterproductive, discouraging private sector enterprise. There were many reasons for this decline, many of them sound.

However, the concept of redressing imbalances in society didn’t disappear from development discourse. It simply mutated to a new kind of approach, described as ‘pro-poor’ expenditure. The idea behind pro-poor expenditure is essentially that Governments and donors should focus on development activities that aim most directly at the poorest sections of the population. This is less controversial than redistribution though taxation, subsidization or resource transfer, since it simply means that the portfolio of development projects is weighted in a different way.

This approach is based on a very different set of assumptions about the economy than a redistributive policy mix. By focusing expenditures on activities that are most directly related to the poor, the implicit assumption is that economic development and the improvement in the lot of the poor is best served by spending on activities directly relating to them, and allowing the industrial and commercial agriculture sectors to work on their own, unaided or with much less aid. This is new: prior development policy looked more at the prospects for developing a modern economy, one which generates wealth rapidly, in the mould of most currently developed nations, and then seeking to protect the poor from the worst inequities and exploitation that such an economic system can generate.

This is a fundamental change, one that deserves far more thought than has been given to it. Spending more directly on the poor has an obvious intuitive appeal: you’re not relying on any opaque feedback mechanisms to see support translate into gains for the poor, as you would under the historically far more common approach of pushing for overall economic strength and then redistributing through taxation. The idea is that if you spend directly on the poor, if the project is worthwhile, you will see a gain in their standards of living.

Yet, there’s a big unanswered question about this approach: what is the long-term effect of such expenditure? Does it generate a fast-growing economy which creates jobs internally? Or does it create a sort of smaller-scale, class-based aid dependency, something like the morphine drip Matt suggests aid might function as?

I suspect the latter is much more likely than the former. In the last few years, I’ve had the chance to examine the donor portfolios in a number of countries, and have seen first hand how they use their influence to put pro-poor expenditure at the centre of local budgeting processes as well. Yet, the suspicion lingers that these approaches are not sustainable, and not generating further gains: though we’ve spent the last fifteen or twenty years supporting small scale agriculture in Malawi, for example, there is little sign that these small farms are becoming bigger farms, or even moving systematically away from food insecurity in the long-term. What’s more there’s no counter-example we can give: no example of a currently developed country or even a high-flying semi-developed or middle-income country that has followed the pro-poor route.

What this means for the poor is that they are being targeted with the kind of policies that might keep them just out of poverty, but won’t afford them the opportunity to participate in a dynamic economy – the kind which is likely to drive a country from ‘developing’ to ‘developed’.

Yet the answer isn’t simply to focus all our energies on the major agricultural and industrial arms of the economy in the hope of stimulating rapid growth regardless of the impact on the poor; this is how we end up with townships as found in South Africa, favelas in Brazil and so on. The rights and conditions of the poor, the urban and rural labourers and the unemployed must be protected. If focusing our attention on projects aimed directly at enhancing their coping strategies or limited-potential livelihoods and promoting big business in extremis are both flawed, a third way is required: the poor must be supported in gaining fair access to a large-scale economy. This means getting jobs at reasonable wages, keeping jobs, ensuring that access to labour markets is equal, and that infrastructural development in response to industry links the whole country together.

The first two are crucial: almost every country in the world that has escaped from poverty has done so through job creation rather than small-scale personal or family-based economic activities. But in many developing countries, the rights of workers are poorly articulated and badly publicized, while employers use every trick in the book to avoid paying a fair wage or even using a settled labour force, preferring to pick up different workers each day to reduce the chances of their organization. The Government needs to make sure that it has robust labour legislation, but even more that people know about this – this is why supporting responsible union movements can be so valuable in developing countries. Workers are easily exploited because they have so few options. The possibility of their organization would hugely strengthen their ability to share in the spoils of industrial and agricultural development.

My hopes are not high, however. We’re talking about two things that donors really shy away from: worker’s organization and large-scale industry and agriculture, feeling that the former is too politically fraught and the latter don’t need their money or attention the way subsistence farmers do. It all again comes down to the need to have a coherent idea of what kind of development path to follow – and as I’ve said before, it seems that very few donors or countries have any such vision.