The Crossing

WHY STUDY THE MA SCIENCE, SOCIETY AND DEVELOPMENT AT IDS?

2012-01-26T11:57:00.000Z

What is it like to be an MA student at Institute of Development Studies? A graduate of the 2011 cohort talks about why she moved from New Delhi to take the MA Science, Society and Development.

Shweta Srinivasan, was working for the Indo-Asian News Service, an International News Agency based in New Delhi, India, when she decided she needed to engage more fully with development issues and policy.After thorough research she realised the course that would most meet her needs was the MA Science, Society and Development with its focus on Sustainability and Development and she decided to move to England for a year of study. Here, she talks about the course:

Q: What was the best thing about the course?
A: IDS is the best of both worlds, a University experience and the dynamic work environment of a think tank and policy advisory body of repute. The other thing that stands out for me is the people I met, both personal friends and professional contacts.

Q: What do you feel you got out of the course?
A: The course gave me a very thorough understanding of existing debates in Science, Agriculture, Environment and Health Policy as well as a nuanced understanding of contexts in different countries. I’ve learned to deconstruct many of the predominant framings in development discourse and policy. I now have both relevant skills and a sound theoretical base gained from the international exposure and constant engagement with current research and upcoming issues.

Q: What do you feel was the most important issue you tackled on the course?
A: The course dealt with very fundamental issues linking the use of science, technology and modern "developments" in agriculture and health with the changing landscape of development. This was why I chose the course, the presentation and unpacking of underlying theory will remain etched in my mind for many years ahead.

Q: Which piece of work are you most proud of?
A: My dissertation. I was able to relate my prior experience as a journalist and documentary film maker and mesh it with theoretical concepts that I discovered along the year which weren't necessarily a part of the entire course structure. My dissertation titled Water Grabs in India's Mining Belts used concepts in political ecology and exclusion to unpack some inherent systemic problems in water management in Rajasthan. Without the flexibility of my course and guidance of my supervisor who is part of the KNOTS team that hosts the SSD course, my learning would have been disconnected.

Q: What were the other students like?
A: It was an amazing mix from different countries, professional backgrounds and levels of experience. I now know people from literally across the globe in connected, if not the same, fields of work.

Q: What are you up to now you’ve graduated?
A: I have assisted on research projects at IDS as a research associate and consultant. I’m now trying to find a profile that fits my communications background with policy research.

Q: Do you think you'll go on to further study now that you have an MA?
A: Maybe… after a few years of work.

Find out more about the MA Science, Society and Development or email J.Sumberg@ids.ac.uk
Find out more about the KNOTS team (The STEPS Centre is located in the KNOTS Team at IDS)

STEVE WADDELL ON DYNAMIC SUSTAINABILITIES

2012-01-16T15:11:00.000Z

Steve Waddell, founding Executive Director of Global Action Network Net (GAN-Net) and Leadership for Change (among his many other activities) has written on his blog about the STEPS Centre's recent flagship book, Dynamic Sustainabilities; Technology, Environment, Social Justice.

His piece, entitled Sustainability Networks for Stability, Durability, Resilience and Robustness, takes a critical look at the arguments put forward by the book's authors, Melissa Leach, Ian Scoones and Andy Stirling, and applies some of the thinking to the role of Global Action Networks.

NEW INITIATIVE TO HELP DEVELOPING COUNTRIES ACHIEVE LOW-CARBON GOALS

2012-01-13T11:16:00.000Z

By Julia Day

Friday 13th; unlucky for some. But for a new initiative launching today, we hope the old proverb is wrong and the date will prove auspicious. The Low Carbon Energy for Development Network (LCEDN) – being unveiled in London today - aims to help developing countries move towards low-carbon economies.

The idea behind the network is a bit like a dating game: There are a bunch of people with similar interests, namely research on low-carbon development. Until now there has not been an arena where these people can meet and promote their passion. It is hoped that the LCEDN will be a meeting place to enable collective action and cooperation on energy for development research.

There have traditionally been limited connections between research communities working on this issue, according to the LCEDN. The organisation says there are increasingly urgent issues around energy services in developing nations but a lack of coherence between research and policy agendas.

Thus it is hoped that academics, practitioners, policy-makers and private sector organisations will use the network to find out how new technologies can be used in in different developing economies to create of low carbon energy, aiding the transition to low carbon economies, as well as helping to tackle the chronic problem of energy poverty.

Among its activities, the network will seek to link British energy experts to those in developing economies, helping to identify UK-based skills and knowledge that could help developing economies achieve low carbon futures.

Other areas of work will include reviewing the existing evidence base and current energy/development research in the UK, developing a directory of research expertise and capabilities for policy-makers and practitioners and rapid evidence reviews of specific technologies, particular countries and emerging themes where there is a current policy and research need.

"This is another opportunity for the UK in low carbon energy development. There is a lot the UK can offer and the network could be the first step in doing this,” said Professor Richard Davies, Director of Durham Energy Institute (DEI), in the network’s press release.

"It will allow us to meet and work closely with colleagues elsewhere in the world, to understand their priorities and how they are driving their developing economies forward, feeding from each other's expertise,” Prof. Davies added.

The network is led by DEI and the Midlands Energy Consortium (comprising Loughborough, Birmingham, and Nottingham universities). Three other academic research centres - SPRU Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Sussex, the Energy Futures Lab at Imperial College, the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) are part of the network.

The STEPS Centre - which is based at SPRU and IDS - is also researching low-carbon development issues, headed up by SPRU research fellow and STEPS energy domain convenor Rob Byrne, who also sits on the LCEDN committee.

Rob and other STEPS colleagues, have recently published a Working Paper and briefing looking at pathways to low-carbon development. Both are available for free download on the STEPS website.

The Low Carbon Energy for Development Network (LCEDN), is funded with a £100k grant from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).

LOOKING AHEAD TO RIO+20

2012-01-09T15:25:00.002Z

By Julia Day

It is 2012 already, and the biggest event in our calendar this year (apologies to Seb Coe and the London 2012 Olympic Organising Committee) is the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20.

While June may seem like a long way away, many people in sustainable development networks have been working hard for months to help make Rio+20 matter. But will the event itself deliver any binding agreements or practical solutions? Or, come July, will stakeholders have to continue self-organising for change without any leadership, guidance or input from the UN process? I have written a blog for the Guardian's Poverty Matters site, which explores some of the issues in the run-up to Rio+20. Have a read and comment with your views, it would be interesting to hear how others are feeling at this point.

We will post details of our work for Rio+20 on the STEPS website and here on The Crossing blog. Let's hope 2012 is a productive, positive and peaceful year.

AVIAN FLU BIO-TERROR FEARS

2011-12-20T11:24:00.001Z

By Julia Day

Researchers in a Dutch University laboratory have mutated the H5N1 strain of avian influenza so that it can be transmitted betweem humans through the air via coughs and sneezes, according to a UK newspaper report this morning. The US Government is worried the 'super strain' may escape the lab and cause a pandemic, or if the scientific paper detailing how they did it is published in its entirety, the information may be used by terrorists to create a bio-weapon.

In the report, by The Independent's Science Editor Steve Connor, a US government senior scientific advisor says: "The fear is that is you create something this deadly and it goes in to a global pandemic, the mortality and cost to the world could be massive. The worst-case scenario here is worse than anything you can imagine." Previously, it was thought that 'bird flu' could only be passed betwen humans via very close contact.

The study was carried out by a team at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, led by Robn Fouchier. The Centre's website says: "The discovery will enable scientists to recognize in time when a virus becomes a threat to public health, thereby possibly preventing a pandemic."

The aim of the study, then, was the opposite of what the US government believes could happen as a result of it. But the US thinks disclosure of the full genetic sequence of the mutated virus may lead to dangerous, nay, deadly misuse. And as any sci-fi fan knows, one man's miracle cure is another (mad) man's weapon.

Thus, the US government's National Security Advisory Board for Biosecurity is understood to have advised US officials that key parts of the Erasmus paper should be redacted. Fouchier is not commenting further until a decision has been made about publication, according to Connor's piece.

It's a fascinating and cautionary tale about scientific discovery and transparency. But it also gives an insight in to how preparedness for known threats can be caught off guard by unknown threats. The world has been gearing up for an avian flu pandemic with complex surveillance systms and stockpiles of anti-viral vaccines. But these systems were not banking on scientists creating a super strain in a potentially insecure Rotterdam basement.

The STEPS Centre's Ian Scoones and colleagues have done a lot of work looking at the international responses to avian flu, and what changes are needed to the public health systems that have been put in place nationally and internationally, such as the 'One World, One Health' approach.

If you would like to know more about how virus genetics, ecology and epidemiology link to ecoomic, political and policy processes, take a look at our avian flu resources which includes short briefings, longer papers with case studies from around the world, and a book, entitled Avian Influenza: Science. Policy and Politics.

Plus, SPRU-based colleagues of the STEPS Centre, Caitrıona McLeish and Paul Nightingale have written in Science Direct on the increasing convergence science and security policy in an article entitled: Biosecurity, bioterrorism and the governance of science

BBC COVERAGE OF ZIMBABWE LAND REFORM RESEARCH

2011-12-13T15:08:00.002Z

Zimbabwe’s land reform since 2000 has been intensely controversial. Overturning the settler colonial pattern of land use and creating a new agrarian structure has had far-reaching consequences.

Yet the debate about what happened, where and to who has too often been shallow and ill-informed, and not based on solid empirical evidence from the field.

STEPS co-director Ian Scoones has been working on research which overturns the myths about Zimbabwe's land reform programme. This programme has involved a detailed study of what happened to people’s livelihoods after land reform, across 16 land reform sites and 400 households.

Ian has recently written a series of short blogs on the Zimbabweland website, on some of the misconceptions and inaccuracies that still persist. All the details of the research can be found on the site.

Meanwhile Ian discussed the research at the Yale Agrarian Studies Colloquium session in early December, giving a paper entitled Zimbabwe's land reform: challenging the myths, which can be found on the Yale website.

And the BBC has produced some radio programmes and a web article about the research, which can be accessed via the following links:
BBC Radio 4 Crossing Continents programme on Farming Zimbabwe, by Martin Plaut, World Service Africa editor

BBC Radio 4 ‘From our own Correspondent’ piece by Martin Plaut.

BBC News Africa article Are Zimbabwe's new farmers winning, 10 years on? by Martin Plaut

STEPS AND SEG AT COP17

2011-11-25T20:54:00.001Z

Rob Byrne, convenor of the new STEPS Centre energy and climate change domain, together with Jose Opazo, a doctoral researcher from the Sussex Energy Group, will be at the latest round of global climate talks, COP17 in Durban, to discuss pathways to sustainable energy in developing countries.

Rob will speak at a side event on Wednesday December 7 co-organised with the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN). Based on work by the Sussex Energy Group, STEPS Centre and ECN, the event will provide an opportunity to discuss pathways to sustainable energy in developing countries.

Focussing on policy initiatives such as the UNFCCC Technology Mechanism, Rob will present ideas developed in the new STEPS working paper on Energy Pathways for how frameworks like the Technology Mechanism could be designed to better facilitate pro-poor low carbon development. The event is being held on December 7th from 16:45 to 18:15 in the Hex River room

Rob and Jose will also be helping run a stand in collaboration with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research which will be open during week two of the COP.

Read the new STEPS Working Paper Energy Pathways in Low-Carbon Development: From Technology Transfer to Socio-Technical Transformation by Rob Byrne, Adrian Smith, Jim Watson and David Ockwell
Or
Read a short briefing briefing about the paper

STEPS SUMMER SCHOOL: MAY 2012

2011-11-24T14:11:00.005Z

An event at the STEPS Centre

We're delighted to announce that we'll be holding a two-week Summer School on Pathways to Sustainability next May.

An international group of leading researchers will run interactive sessions drawing on their work into the interactions of social, technological and environmental systems. The Summer School is aimed at a selected group of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers (or those with equivalent experience) who are working in fields around development studies, science and technology studies, innovation and policy studies, and across agricultural, health, water or energy issues.

Topics will include
- the politics of sustainability
- complexity in dynamic interacting systems
- interdisciplinarity in social and natural science
- knowledge and power
- understanding risk, uncertainty and ignorance
- livelihoods, institutions and development

The Summer School will take place at Sussex University during the Brighton Festival – a famously energetic and eclectic celebration of culture and innovative arts running from 5 - 27 May – with plenty of opportunities for students to engage.

>> Summer School flyer (pdf)
>> Summer School webpage

NEW PAPER: LESSONS FROM LATIN AMERICA

2011-11-17T12:06:00.003Z

A new STEPS Centre paper, by Elisa Arond, Iokiñe Rodríguez, Valeria Arza, Francisco Herrera and Myriam Sánchez, investigates the challenges of linking science, technology and innovation to social needs, in the context of Latin America.

Innovation, Sustainability, Development and Social Inclusion: Lessons from Latin America is one of a series of working papers relating regional experiences to ideas proposed by the STEPS Centre's New Manifesto project, following on round table discussions held in Venezuela, Argentina, and Colombia in 2010.
The paper briefly describes the heterogeneous context and history of the Latin American region with specific attention to STI policies and institutions, as well as the particular challenge of effectively linking STI to social needs.

It highlights the important historic contribution of the Latin American School on Science, Technology and Development, and the relevance and synergies of ideas presented by these and contemporary Latin American researchers in relation to the New Manifesto’s ‘3Ds’.

The paper documents some examples – from public, private and civil society spheres – of current Latin American initiatives that illustrate regional efforts to develop, in different ways, a 3D innovation agenda, as well as constructing and putting into practice the different New Manifesto ‘Areas for Action’.

It also questions the relative weight of these efforts compared to conventional priorities of competitiveness and growth, and highlights some of the obstacles to realising 3D aims. In particular, it underscores persistent social and economic inequalities, issues of institutional and political resistance to change, and the role of power relations (at multiple levels) in determining directions of science, technology, and innovation, and STI policy, as topics worth exploring further in the future.

GLOBELICS'11: INNOVATION FOR SOCIAL INCLUSION AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

2011-11-17T11:32:00.001Z

By Adrian Smith, STEPS Centre and SPRU

During the session Innovation for Social Inclusion and Sustainable Development, we heard a rich set of perspectives from different regions around the world. I was particularly struck by the way the challenges of social inclusion and sustainable development both ask searching questions about what we know about innovation and how policy supports it. This is the point I wanted to develop in my remarks to the session participants, by arguing that concerns about inclusion means our economics of innovation has to be complemented even more by work on the politics of innovation. In combination, both can help recast innovation to the purposes of sustainable development and social inclusion. (Photo: Adrian Smith)

Sustainable development has both environmental integrity and social justice dimensions. The World Commission on Environment and Development famously defined sustainable development as ‘development that meets the needs of the present generation without jeopardising the needs of future generations’.

In the following sentence they elaborate two key concepts, which I quote: “The concept of ‘needs’, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.” I’ll come back to the idea of limits . The relevant point here is that sustainable development has at its core two principles of social justice: one regarding redistribution towards the overriding priorities of the poor; and the other towards future generations and ensuring their options are kept open.

Social inclusion involves affirmative action to reduce exclusion from society. This means giving marginalised groups equal access to the rights, opportunities and resources enjoyed by others in society. Without these capabilities the excluded cannot participate fully in social, economic, political and cultural life. Again, redistribution is important, but so too are principles of procedural justice and cognitive: the ability to be recognised, heard and to participate in social development, and to have ones world view and knowledge of the world respected.

Understood in this way, then the question about ex ante identification of inclusive and sustainable innovation is a question of social justice. It suggests innovation trajectories will no longer be the result of science push and market pull, if they ever were, but that innovation systems need to be opened more explicitly to politics and activism.

Note in passing that in addressing questions of innovation for inclusion, we must not overlook how we might stop and prevent innovation that exacerbates social exclusion and contributes to unsustainable development. Nor should we ignore how unsustainable innovations can crowd out and hinder more progressive innovations. Regulating excluding, unsustainable innovation is just as important, but this other side of the coin is left for another discussion.

The vast majority of what we know about innovation has been attained through the study of rent-seeking firms operating in market settings. As researchers, we have followed how firms develop new technologies, products, processes, services and organisational forms. We have analysed their relations with scientific and knowledge institutions. And we have tried to evaluate how different policies and business strategies help and hinder these kinds of innovation process.

Consulted by practitioners, innovation scholars have even advised how to do this kind of innovation better. Various metrics have been developed to help us keep track of the performance of innovation systems: aggregate research funding levels, numbers of scientists and engineers, publications, patents, sales, etc. The ultimate driver of innovation policy is profit and GDP growth – particular economic indicators that set important contexts for innovation.

How much of this knowledge about innovation for market growth is appropriate to innovation for inclusive, sustainable development? Undoubtedly, the economics of innovation has contributed to the rise and spread of industries, including modern agriculture, around the world, and all the benefits that brings. But persistent concerns about livelihoods, job creation, inequalities, and dangerous environmental degradation suggest not all is well. If social justice appears anywhere in this mainstream innovation work, then it is largely implicit, and limited to questions of distribution and redistribution of innovation benefits, e.g. jobs and material wealth. Critical studies point out how issues of intergenerational, procedural, and cognitive justice are largely absent.

We heard in this session how innovation for inclusive, sustainable development has to attend to questions of direction, distribution and diversity: the 3-D agenda. It is an agenda that is addressing situations where effective market demand is usually weak, innovation goals and social demands are contested, relevant knowledge is plural and includes informal forms, and where civil society is often the source of change and, arguably, innovation (with states and markets catching-up later).

In my view, it would be foolish to rush into these situations with economic perspectives on innovation developed in completely different settings. Rather, we need to analyse what 3-D innovation systems might look like around the world. And, even more importantly, we need to learn how to transform existing systems and build innovation systems for more inclusive and sustainable forms development.

Researchers like those in the Sustainability Transitions Research Network are finding that any focus on transformation means bringing the different contexts of innovation into the centre of analysis and considering how those structuring contexts need to be changed too.

We have seen how the 3-D agenda has Areas for Action in agenda setting, funding, capacity-building, organising, and monitoring, evaluation and accountability. What is interesting is how these recommendations seek social inclusion and sustainability in the innovation processes themselves. It seems it is unlikely that any old innovation will generate inclusive, sustainable outcomes. Social inclusion and sustainable development are also about procedural justice, which means innovation itself has to become inclusive and sustainable.

So, how might innovation for social inclusion and sustainable development actually operate? Here, I think the economics of innovation might benefit from a dialogue with political science. All forms of innovation are political in some form or other, but when we start working towards 3-D innovations then the politics becomes much more apparent. Questions like whose innovation; what for; towards which goals; who gains and loses; on what basis can this innovation be justified; and so on, are very political.

I think political science can help with the principles and practice of social justice. There is a rich literature on distributive justice, procedural justice, and cognitive justice that we can draw upon when puzzling over forms of inclusive and sustainable innovation.

But there are other Areas for Action where political science might help. Questions of accountability and authority in innovation can be informed by studies of accountability systems and unaccountable behaviours in political science. Work on governance networks and relations between different political coalitions beyond conventional government and party political systems suggest lines of accountability and authority become much less clear-cut, in similarly complex ways to those implied by the 3-D agenda. Here, work on different theories of democracy, whether representative, participatory, deliberative or radical can help us map the terrain for public participation in inclusive and sustainable innovation.

There is also a fantastic wealth of lessons from work on social movements that could inform 3-D concerns for engaging civil society within innovation systems. Whilst the study of social movements is often in relation to their sociological consequences and demands upon political systems, I have found in my own research that some themes are pertinent to the roles played by civil society in innovation systems too.

Finally, political science is the discipline where power is centre stage – indeed it is often seen as constituting the stage. The areas for action in 3-D innovation challenge many vested interests, established institutions, and powerful agendas. As such, power needs to become a greater and more explicit part of our analyses. The different forms of power theorised in political science can help us grapple with the complexities of power relations.

Now, I am aware that this suggestion could appear to contradict my point about the current economics of innovation. Having said earlier that we need to take care over how appropriate our current theories and policies for innovation are for the 3-D agenda, I then suggest bringing in perspectives from areas of political science that have had nothing to do with innovation at all! But this would be to misconstrue my argument. Just as with the economics of innovation, we need to adapt insights from political science carefully to the new forms, purposes and contexts of inclusive, sustainable innovation. The bodies of knowledge of potential help to a 3-D agenda were developed through the study of governmental systems and political systems; not innovation systems. So there is a need for very precise contextualisation, translation across different intellectual histories, and retaining throughout a clear view of purposes.

I do not think any of our disciplines has complete answers for the profound challenges of innovation for social inclusion and sustainable development. Each provides helpful clues and areas for future work. But it is work that must be done in a problem-focused interdisciplinary way.

Furthermore, it should arise through trans-disciplinary engagement with practitioners and citizens in the wider social world. In many respects, the field of innovation studies has a good track record on interdisciplinarity, and so my argument here is pushing against an open door. But given the mixed and uneven successes of many innovations, our thinking and practice on innovation has to continue to develop and challenge. Perhaps we need a reinvigorated effort at redirecting our interdisciplinarity to address the politics of 3-D innovation?

None of this was news to people here at this Globelics event. It is quite apt that this session takes place in Argentina. Forty years ago the Fundación Bariloche produced its report Catastrophe or New Society in response to the Limits to Growth report. In contrast to the Club of Rome’s extrapolation of consumption and population trends in existing, industrial societies, the Bariloche team tried to model a more participatory and egalitarian society, and by putting developing countries centre-stage. They used their model to explore the biophysical viability of such societies. Unlike the Club of Rome emphasis on bio-physical limits, and unlike the WCED’s view on limits as organisational and technological, the Bariloche team recognised that the real limits initially are socio-political. What was needed was a political analysis of the power and ideology behind different development pathways, and a focus on how social justice could be brought into development much more centrally.

Another interesting feature to the Bariloche report was that it was funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada. IDRC are about to launch a new funding programme for research into innovation for inclusive development, and are organising a workshop with GRIDD right after this conference, here in Buenos Aires. As people embark on a new round of research, I think it is interesting to learn from attempts in the past and elsewhere. Whilst the contexts are very different, careful interpretation can nevertheless generate some very instructive lessons for us now. This is precisely what Hernán Thomas at UNQ and Dinesh Abrol at NISTADS are doing with the STEPS Centre, with a new project looking at grassroots innovation movements in historical and comparative perspective.

Clearly, there is plenty of exciting and important work that has been done and is being done. Strands that help us address the politics of innovation for inclusion will be helpful for our work the future too.

GLOBELICS'11: STEPS CENTRE SESSION WORDLE

2011-11-17T10:45:00.001Z

As the STEPS Centre prepares for it's session at the Globelics conference in Buenos Aires today, member Adrian Smith has created a Wordle based on the contents of his presentation for the Innovation for Social Inclusion and Sustainable Development session. Click on the graphic to have a closer look.

GLOBELICS'11: INNOVATION BEGINS AT HOME

2011-11-17T10:20:00.001Z

By Adrian Ely, STEPS Centre member

Innovation for inclusive development was a resounding theme in the introductory session of the 9th Globelics Conference in Buenos Aires on 15th November. Ministers, the Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires and the academic presenters celebrated Argentina’s focus on innovation, but highlighted the main challenge to the conference – developing innovation policies that generate improved livelihoods for the bulk of the population, rather than those that leave some (in some cases the majority) behind. (Photo: Buenos Aires).

Innovation scholars from Europe and the USA gave their perspectives on the challenges for the participants in Buenos Aires. Bengt-Åke Lundvall introduced Globelics and its key aim – to strengthen research capacity in innovation studies and policy. From 450 full papers submitted, the organisers had selected 240 for presentation over the coming three days.

Luc Soete highlighted the developments since Globelics was established and described a world which could hardly have been imagined one decade ago. He highlighted the increased interactions between the local level (‘localics’) - where building human capital is at the basis of learning and innovation systems - with the global level, where the ‘Washington Consensus’ was giving way to a consensus aligned with the approaches favoured by the ‘G5 group of emerging economies’.

Richard Nelson reflected on Schumpeter’s earlier work and the implications of ‘creative destruction’ for different sections of society. Highlighting the fundamental need for strong education systems and the important role of public sector expenditures (as well as the activities of business firms) in innovation systems, he also explained that countries showed a variety of patterns of innovation-based development.

Some countries (e.g. Japan, Korea and Taiwan) have succeeded in lifting the bulk of their populations whilst others (like Brazil and China) have displayed technological ‘catching up’ in a small section of the population, whilst a significant fraction of the population has been left behind. He posed this as a specific challenge to Argentina.
From the talks of the policy makers present, this already seems to be a key focus of the Argentinean government as Cristina Fernández de Kirchner enters her second term. Establishing the new Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation and implementing talent programmes that have led to the repatriation of more than 800 scientists who had left the country because of poor opportunities are just two recent policy actions, and targets such as 1 graduate (7 years training) for every 4000 inhabitants illustrate the ambition of the administration.

At the same time, Argentina’s vision to diversify the economy will require the participation of different actors, for example through new linkages between universities and the private sector. Through new policy approaches, science, technology and innovation can thus contribute not only to a system based on production rather than financial speculation, but also to development opportunities that are more widely distributed through the economy.

With this challenge, the conference participants start their discussions, drawing on evidence and analyses from across the world. Among these is a panel session convened by the STEPS Centre and partners from Buenos Aires. Dedicated to ‘Innovation for Social Inclusion and Sustainable Development’, the session is due to respond directly to the challenge set by the introductory speakers.

NEW BOOK ON KENYAN MILLENNIUM VILLAGES

2011-11-17T10:03:00.001Z

A new book has just been published on the Kenyan Millennium Villages by Awuor Ponge, entitled Indigenous Knowledge and Sustainable Crop Production: A Study of the Millennium Village Project in Bar-Sauri in Nyanza Province, Kenya.

Ponge, an Assistant Research Fellow and M&E Officer at the Institute of Policy Analysis and Research - Kenya, is also a Visiting Lecturer at the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology. He has researched on various issues on participatory and sustainable development. His current interest is bridging research and policy and impact assessment of research on policy and legislation. Ponge spent some time here at the Insititute of Development Studies in the UK a couple of years ago and made many friends.

His book is published by gGermany's Lambert Academic Publishing and can also be ordered on Amazon.

INNOVATION WITH IMPACT?

2011-11-04T12:46:00.001Z

By Julia Day, STEPS Centre communications manager

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates was asked by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to investigate finance for development and to report back to the G20 in Cannes this week. The key message of Gates' Innovation with Impact report, in a nutshell, appears to be: A levy on share and bond trading would help rich nations meet their aid pledges to the poor to the tune of $48bn (£30bn) a year.

With that kind of potential impact, what's not to love? The exploration of new ways to meet old finanical aid targets in this increasingly unstable economic climate are welcome, and the so-called Robin Hood Tax (sometimes called Tobin tax) is gaining support.

Gates told the G20 leaders that rather than being wholly used to shore up faltering First World economies, it was "critical" that a fraction of any agreed Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) should go towards helping the developing world. An FTT is gaining support - this week the Archbishop of Canterbury threw his weight behind the idea.
However, to make an FTT or other financial measure work, and work effectively, there are a whole host of non-financial issues to take in to account. The funding of science, technology and innovation – whether from public, private or philanthropic sources – needs to be geared much more strongly to the challenges of poverty alleviation, social justice and environmental sustainability.

The most blatently obvious of these issues being the need to include the poorest countries in discussion from the outset. The needs and demands of poorer and marginalised women and men as potential users of technologies, as well as the outcomes of innovation, must be addressed in funding allocations.

And becasue the potential recipients of the Robin Hood tax each have different institutional architectures for the setting of innovation priorities at national and international levels, an adaptable plan is needed. It has been said many times before, but it is always worth repeating: one-size-fits -all solutions just do not work.

Any mechanism put in place would need to enable diverse interests and new voices to be involved in inclusive debate, including those of poorer and marginalised people. In some countries and settings this will involve building on existing institutional arrangements; in others it will require establishing new fora.

But if we are to support innovation for development in the poorest countries, we must build on local innovation capabilities and include the end-users in the decision-making process. The STEPS Centre's Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto contains many more action points on delivering an equitable future for all.

UK PRIME MINISTER URGED TO ATTEND RIO+20

2011-10-26T20:20:00.001Z

By Julia Day, STEPS Centre Communications Manager

"The Prime Minister should promise to attend next year's Rio + 20 Earth Summit to show leadership on sustainability and strengthen global political will to tackle the environmental crisis," say MPs on the Uk parliament's Commons Environmental Audit Committee in a report published today.

The report warns that the planet's environmental problems are now much more urgent than at the first Rio Summit in 1992. Safe limits on the amount of waste, pollution and biodiversity loss that natural systems can tolerate continue to be breached – undermining our ability to use natural resources to support further growth.

Speaking on the publication of the report, Joan Walley MP, Chair of the Environmental Audit Committee, said: "The Rio+20 Earth Summit is a vital chance for world leaders to take action to avert a global environmental crisis. But the financial situation means minds will be focused elsewhere and there is a danger that business-as-usual may end up carrying the day.

The Prime Minister should lead by example. He could make a big difference by demonstrating his commitment to Rio + 20 and letting other world leaders know that he will personally be attending. Lasting prosperity can only be built on a healthy planet."

The STEPS Centre works on many of the issues being discussed in Rio next summer and we are embarking on a series of activites and engagements in the run up to the event.

While it looks like David Cameron will not attend, we hope a strong consensus emerges from Rio+20 that provides a global framework supporting different forms of innovation to address sustainable development challenges at local, national and global levels.

Crucially, we would like to see the interlinked global challenges of poverty reduction, social justice and environmental sustainability take centre-stage in discussions, rather than economic imperatives alone.

INNOVATION AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AT GLOBELICS

2011-10-21T13:48:00.001Z

By Julia Day, STEPS Centre Communications Manager

How can innovation contribute to social justice and sustainable development goals? Two of the STEPS Centre's members will be debating this issue in Argentina next month at the 9th Globelics International Conference in Buenos Aires.

Adrian Ely and Adrian Smith will be speaking on the panel of the “Innovation for Social Inclusion and Sustainable Development” session at The Global Network for the Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems (Globelics) conference.

The STEPS Centre's work on Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto will inform our input to the session, as will Adrian Smith's work around grassroots innovation, social technologies and sustainable development. Patners from Africa, India and China will also be on the panel, giving insight from thier regions and experiences.

The panel has been organised by our partners Mariano Fressoli and Hernán Thomas, del Instituto de Estudios Sociales (UNQ) and the Centro de Economía de la Innovación y el Desarrollo (UNSAM). Watch this space for more news and views about the event.

CGIAR SCIENCE FORUM, BEIJING

2011-10-20T20:25:00.002Z

By ERIK MILLSTONE, STEPS Centre Member

The 2nd Science Forum of the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) took place in Beijing this week, and the discussions represented a challenging occasion for a member of the STEPS Centre, or at any rate for this member of STEPS. (Photo: still from STEPS film on maize pathways in Kenya)

One challenge is to remain awake during the meeting, at least on the first day, not just because of the effect of jet lag, but also because of the unintentional efforts of so many speakers to diminish the global deficit in clichés. The most commonly articulated cliché was the Malthusian assumption that the size of the human population is exploding and will explode so quickly that rapid increases in food production are and will be urgently required. That assumption serves to portray agricultural science and technology (not to mention the scientists and the technologists themselves) as of pivotal importance.

I am not suggesting that the scale and direction of population change are not going to be important variables, but I am suggesting rather that the main challenge to the food and agricultural system, namely chronic under-nutrition, is a function of the prevalence of poverty, rather than a consequence of a presumed scarcity of food or supposed excess number of mouths. Since there is already more than enough food in the world to feed the current population, and more, it is evident that hunger is a consequence of poverty not of scarcity. Moreover people can be a resource as well as a drain on resources; it depends on how societies are organised and how they function.

Fortunately several contributors to the debates insisted on pointing that out. Credit goes for example to Mark Holderness of GFAR, Hans Herren of the Millennium Institute and Bernard Hubert of Agropolis, all of whom insisted on highlighting those key facts, although too many of the other presentations continued to be predicated on Malthusian assumptions.

Another problematic cliché concerned the assumption, expressed by the Chairman of the opening plenary session, that discussions should focus only on science to the complete exclusion of politics, as if debates about priorities for research and resource allocation issues were entirely technical and apolitical. The choice however is not between taking a political position or an apolitical one, but between being explicit about normative framings and interests on the one hand or leaving issues of power, interests and control implicit. In practice, a vocal minority of those attending the forum declined to conform to the chairman’s injunction, and instead emphasised the values they espoused and presumed, for example by arguing that what matters is not aggregate levels of foods production or consumption, but their (mal-)distribution. While the majority chose to talk about aggregates and averages a vocal, and hopefully influential, minority emphasised distributional issues.

One of the discursive tactics that is being adopted by those who choose to keep political issues implicit has been the repeated use of the idiom that I propose to refer to as the ‘referentially opaque “we”’. For example, agricultural researchers and economists repeatedly used expressions such as ‘we can do X’, or ‘we should do X’, or spoke about how ‘we’ could or should manage some problem, where they implicitly represented themselves as if they represented humanity as a whole, or as if they could speak on behalf of poor smallholder farmers in developing countries. That way of talking fails to acknowledge the importance of empowering the poor in developing countries to make and implement their own decisions, rather than just doing what the cosmopolitan technocratic ‘experts’ think they ought to do. For example some influential speakers said things such as ‘we must transform smallholder farmers into agribusinesses’ not ‘as and when, and to the extent that, smallholder farmers wish to become agribusinesses the research and policy community should be clear how they can and should assist those farmers in taking greater control of their lives and choosing their own pathways’.

In a talk about zoonotic diseases arising from the intensification of livestock production, a speaker referred to how ‘we’ should manage such challenges. That form of discourse failed to acknowledge that in practice those challenges must be met by a wide range of different stakeholder groups, but primarily by farmers and farm workers themselves, not by the research community. Of course, other groups such as animal health workers, veterinary authorities and those trading in meat, milk and dairy products have relevant interests and responsibilities too, but theirs may not coincide with those of the farmers or farm workers, let alone the veterinary researchers. Fortunately other participants recognised the need to explore and comprehend the perspectives of a wide range of stakeholders, and to explore the extent to which those diverse perspectives may be congruent or incongruent. The forthcoming STEPS project on zoonotic diseases should fit directly into a knowledge gap that was identified and highlighted by several participants. The forthcoming STEPS project on Commodities: Chains, Networks and Pathways will also find a ready audience amongst some for the more enlightened participants at this meeting.

In his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn argued that, in the natural sciences, new paradigms displace and replace the old ones not because their assumptions, analysis and arguments are superior to those of the old ones, but because young scholars adopt and accept the new paradigm, while those committed to the old paradigm simply die out, leaving the field to the young. That model seemed briefly plausible on this occasion until I realised that not all of those articulating the old paradigm are elderly, and not all of us articulating a new paradigm are particularly young. I guess I disagree with Kuhn, groups such as the STEPS Centre and colleagues elsewhere do have a more powerful and plausible paradigm, and the shortcomings of the reductionist and technocratic paradigm mean that its proponents are simply unable to account for or adequately respond to the realities and complexities of poverty and hunger in developing countries.

JIM WATSON JOINS TELEGRAPH'S AGE OF ENERGY INITIATIVE

2011-10-18T20:32:00.005Z

Jim Watson, Professor of Energy Policy at SPRU and director of the Sussex Energy Group as well as co-convenor of the STEPS Centre's new Energy domain, has been asked to join a panel of politicians, business people and academics for this year’s Daily Telegraph Age of Energy initiative. The theme is the Green Economy.

This year’s debate was launched with a one page special feature in the Telegraph on 13th August. The feature included 200 word pieces by Jim and the other panellists on the theme, and a main article by government minister Oliver Letwin.

Read the initial articles on the Telegraph website

BELLAGIO: THE FUTURE OF PHILANTHROPY

2011-10-18T09:37:00.004Z

By ADRIAN ELY, STEPS Centre researcher

I was lucky enough to participate in a fascinating discussion on global governance and regulation, organised as part of the Bellagio Initiative last week. The Initiative involves a series of global consultations hoping to deliver a new framework for philanthropy and international development in pursuit of human wellbeing in the 21st century.

Gathering an impressive group of experts and practitioners from near and far, the event focussed on questions around the challenge of ‘providing common goods in a global system’ and was just one of a number of global dialogues being held throughout the world in 2011:

>Inclusive Economics: addressing social, economic and political exclusion– Virtual
>Rapid urbanisation & living in growing cities – New Delhi
>Cross market INGOs – International Fundraising Congress, Amsterdam
>Coping with global shocks – Bangkok
>Emerging (Philanthropic) Markets – Budapest
>Information and Communication Technologies: Promises and pitfalls – Virtual
>Environmental sustainability, climate change and economic growth – São Paulo
>BRICS Countries – New Delhi
>Increased Mobility: Forced and Voluntary – Nairobi
>Freedom and rights: – Cairo
>Recipient countries – Accra

Our discussions in London covered the ongoing challenge of bridging from local to national to international levels of governance, and raised many of the same issues that my colleagues and I encountered in the STEPS Centre's ‘Rethinking Regulation’ project and the resultant Regulating Technology book published earlier this year.

The need for transparency and accountability of different development actors featured strongly in the discussion, and the role of philanthropic organisations (both in providing a working model of how such principles could be operationalised, and in advocating their adoption in other institutions) was stressed.

The potential bridging role played by these organisations, which have the opportunity not only to network with their grantees but also often enjoy access to powerful decision-makers, was also highlighted.

A summit conference at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre will consider the messages from the various global dialogues in formulating a new framework for philanthropy and international development in the 21st century.

LAND GRABS: CALL FOR NEW GRANT APPLICATIONS

2011-10-17T09:50:00.011Z

By Julia Day, STEPS Centre Communications Manager

Across the world, especially in the global South, there has been a dramatic rise in ‘land grabs’ - cross-border, transnational corporation-driven and, in some cases foreign government-driven, large-scale land deals.

In-depth and systematic enquiry in to this issue has become a matter of urgency, and to that end, the Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) sponsored a successful a small grant competition last year. Now applications are invited for the second year of small grants.

Grants of up to US$3,000 per study are available to successful applicants who wish to undertake original field research, carry out follow up fieldwork on an ongoing related initiative, or write up a paper based on research that is being/has been undertaken. LDPI is particularly keen on themes around resistance and alternatives but is open to broader topics.

In 2010 LDPI were able to fund 40 small grants. Many of the papers were among the 120 presented at the LDPI-organized International Conference on Global Land Grabbing held at the Institute of Development Studies in April this year.

Some of the small grant-funded papers contributed to policy initiatives including the UN Committee on Food Security (CFS) related studies and deliberations.

Additionally, many of the papers were selected as contributions to three forthcoming journal special issues on land grabs:

>Green Grabs: a new way of appropriating nature?’ guest edited by James Fairhead, Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones, Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS), due March 2012

>The politics of global land grabbing’ guest edited by Ruth Hall, Ben White and Wendy Wolford, Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS), due May 2012

>Governing land grabs’, guest edited by Jun Borras, Ruth Hall, Ian Scoones, Ben White and Wendy Wolford, Development and Change, due July 2012

The LDPI Small Grants Competition Part 2: 2011-12 is now open. Short proposals (500 words maximum) for the research/paper must be submitted by email to landpolitics@gmail.com by
15 December 2011, together with a short CV (maximum one page, including the name of one referee) and small grants will be awarded in January 2012.

For a full explanation of what is required of applicants, please see this PDF document.

MINI-COMIC: WHAT IS FRAMING?

2011-10-13T13:33:00.005Z

by Nathan Oxley, Impact, Communications & Engagement officer, STEPS Centre

I've posted about framings before - how people's choices are affected by the way an issue is explained to them. Here's a little comic I made to illustrate the idea (click the image to enlarge).

>> Related: Virus or beast: how one word changes everything

WE'RE IN THE IDS ANNUAL REPORT

2011-09-29T11:07:00.006Z

By Nathan Oxley, STEPS Communications Assistant

The STEPS Centre is mentioned twice in the beautifully interactive Annual Report of the Institute of Development Studies.

The Knowledge, Technology and Society section of the report cites our New Manifesto project, and Kamal Kar is quoted on our 2011 Water Symposium.

The report's a good way of getting an overview of what IDS is doing - from research into sexuality & development to building knowledge networks.

>> IDS Annual Report 2011

NON-COMMUNICABLE DISEASES: AN INDICATOR OF GREATER SHIFTS

2011-09-20T10:54:00.005Z

By Hayley MacGregor, STEPS Centre member

The UN High-level Summit on Non-communicable Diseases now underway comes at an important moment for the development community. With just over 50 per cent of the world now living in cities, and with the percentage of the global population over 60 years of age expected to double by 2050, we must recognise and internalise that the demographics of the world are changing.

We must think through the implications of urbanisation, not only for health, but also for development and governance approaches more generally.

Societies and systems from the US to Uganda are groaning under the pressures of demographic shifts. Focusing attention on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) at such a high-level forum is one good step in this direction.

The only other time that the UN has focused on disease in this way was in 2001, when concern regarding the effects of the HIV epidemic led to the formation of the Global Fund to fight the 'big three', AIDS, turberculosis and malaria. The discourse today resonates strongly with that time: the urgency of the issue is being conveyed through the language of pandemics, a global crisis and dire consequences if a coordinated response is not forthcoming.

The challenge of non-communicable diseases
The quoted figures are indeed alarming. In particular, it is the growing 'double burden' of communicable and non-communicable diseases in low- and middle-income countries that has crept up on us – a burden that is predicted to increase. 29 per cent of deaths from NCDs are in people under 60 years of age, which has significant economic and social costs.

Diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer, long associated with rich Northern populations, are inflicting a heavy toll of suffering and disability around the globe.

There are the conditions included in the NCD category that have had less time in the limelight, such as: mental disorders; chronic lung conditions associated with smoking; and environmental health effects linked to industrial pollution. Several disease lobby groups are crying neglect and articulating their agendas.

Preventing non-communicable diseases 'upstream'
But a politics of disease hierarchies is not the point. It is the fact that these conditions are considered to be to some degree preventable. They tend to run a chronic, progressive course if not detected early and managed carefully. In this respect, the regimen is classically a combination of long term drug treatment and risk reduction, mostly prescriptions for lifestyle change.

A medicalised view focussing on individual behaviour change modification, or even a health systems approach, is too limited a focus. Key figures in the medical establishment have pointed out the importance of structural factors that need to be addressed in the name of 'upstream' prevention: the regulation of the food, tobacco and alcohol industries has been mentioned repeatedly.

In this respect prevention is no easy challenge and will require considerable political will to take on powerful global players.

The interests of the big drug companies also require greater scrutiny: do they not stand to gain from an increased profile and a 'pharmaceuticalisation' of the problem? And who among them will be the winners and losers as these 'Northern' medical problems go global?

Chinese and Indian firms are on the brink of being able to manufacture generic biotech medicines used to treat various NCDs. In the early 2000s, after a protracted patent battle, generic HIV/AIDS medicines were made available in developing countries. Will drugs for NCDs follow a similar path?

Lessons from development for addressing non-communicable diseases
This is one area where a development perspective could add to the understanding of NCDs: there are lessons to be learned from the HIV experience.

But development perspectives also tell us that it is vital that the experiences and viewpoints of people living in the global South are taken into account in the debates, because policy responses and invested resources are going to require difficult negotiations and trade-offs.

Will the poorer sectors of the rapidly growing urban populations prepare food at home or eat from street vendors in the years to come? How will regulation of the food industry relate to the informal food sector? What will tobacco controls mean for the livelihoods of small-scale farmers? As the world's population ages, who will fill the gaps in the formal and informal care sectors?

The link between chronic illness and poverty is well established. One study for POVILL found that in two rural areas in China, the costs of long-term outpatient treatment of chronic diseases like diabetes were equivalent to one-off inpatient care that did not require surgery. While the costs were similar, inpatient costs were covered by the state-run medical insurance, while outpatient costs were not.

The current millennium development goals (MDGs) do not include targets for NCDs. As we look beyond the MDGs, it is timely to consider what research in governance, social protection, changing livelihoods, patient participation in health care, and health and urbanisation can add to the current debates and future policy processes.

This article was also published on the Institute of Development Studies website

HAVE YOUR SAY: DELHI SEMINAR ON INNOVATION, SUSTAINABILITY AND DEVELOPMENT

2011-07-15T11:02:00.006Z

At last month's seminar on Innovation, Sustainability and Development at NISTADS, participants reflected on the state of innovation in various fields - in food and agriculture, health, ICTs, low carbon technology, and at grassroots level. This is an invitation to talk more about the issues.

For those who couldn't make it to the seminar, or need a reminder of what was said, here's a link to the programme with videos of all the presentations.

Leave a comment below with your views.

VIRUS AND BEAST: HOW ONE WORD CHANGES EVERYTHING

2011-07-06T07:29:00.005Z

Batman and Robin: fighting crime

How does a single word affect the way we deal with a problem? Last night's edition of All In The Mind on BBC Radio 4 offered a striking example. Researchers at the University of Stanford worked with two groups of people, asking them how they would respond to rising crime in a city. Both groups were given the same facts and figures about the crime: the only difference was that for the first group, the crime was described as a “virus”; for the second group, the crime was talked about as a “beast”. In one of the experiments, only a single word (virus/beast) was changed - all the other information given was identical.

On the programme, Prof Lera Boroditsky, one of the authors of the research, explained that the results were as predicted: each group chose strikingly different policies, influenced by the wording. Group A went for diagnosis and prevention, aiming to analyse the causes of crime and “inoculate” the community with social reforms to stop it happening. Group B, who were encouraged to see crime as a beast, chose policies that tended more towards “hunting down” crime and criminals, impose harsher sentences, etc. The use of one word radically altered the way each group went about solving the problem.

This is fascinating enough, but it gets better. How did the groups explain their policies? At this point, they weren't in on the secret. Interestingly, each group claimed their policies were based on the facts and figures given to them about the crime. Neither brought up the wording used. The metaphors of virus and beast had slipped into people's thought processes unnoticed, and were all the more powerful for it.

The virus/beast research is only one more example of how words can have a hidden effect on the shaping of policy - from "floods" of immigrants, to "perfect storms" of food shortages and droughts in poor countries, to disease "emergencies" and "crises". Of course, as Boroditsky points out, it's virtually impossible NOT to use metaphor when talking about complex problems. Even where facts and figures are used, and even if they're accurate and wisely selected, the images and words we use often push or pull us in certain directions, reinforced again and again over weeks, months and years. True, these metaphors can be helpful – but what's even more helpful is to examine them, bring them out into the open, and reflect on their influence. We need to know whether it's a virus or a beast we're facing, or something altogether different.

>> Thibodeau, P.H. and Boroditsky, L. (2011). Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning. PLoS ONE 6(2): e16782
>> All in the Mind (5 July 2011): BBC Radio 4

INDIA SEMINAR: INNOVATION, IDEAS & INSPIRATION

2011-07-05T10:10:00.015Z

by Adrian Ely, Manifesto project convenor

Last week, STEPS participated in a 3-day seminar on "Innovation, Sustainability and Development" in Delhi, India. It was hosted by the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS) in partnership with the Centre for Development Studies-Trivandrum and the STEPS Centre. A full programme with links to video from of each speaker is on the Manifesto website.

Video: Anil Gupta, creator of the Honey Bee network, giving his keynote address

Emerging from three days of discussions around innovation, sustainability and development, I was struck by the depth and diversity of knowledge and experience that had gathered together at NISTADS. It has been a true pleasure – both in terms of academic stimulation and practical inspiration - to see the rich history of alternative thinking around science, technology and innovation in India. As young Indian scholars work to turn innovation towards the goals of sustainability and equitable development, they will indeed be standing on the shoulders of giants.

The discussions were hugely broad and wide-ranging, taking in the fields of food and agriculture, health, information and communication technologies, low-carbon innovations, grassroots innovations and indigenous knowledge. Only the field of water and sanitation was notably and regrettably absent (as remarked by Manish Anand from TERI in the final discussion).

As well as interventions on theoretical frameworks, research methodologies and empirical findings, the programme was filled with seasoned activists illustrating many of these ideas through concrete action. Policy makers discussed the role of government as a facilitator and supporter of these efforts - in many cases embracing ideas that had originated within civil society, as illustrated by the example of the National Innovation Foundation and the widespread adoption of non-pesticide management in Andhra Pradesh.

Many of the projects, initiatives and movements discussed over the three days echo the calls of the revised version of the ‘Knowledge Swaraj’ manifesto, presented by Shambu Prasad (video) on Day 1, by reflecting principles of sustainability, justice and plurality. Others illustrate perfectly some of the messages in ‘Innovation, Sustainability Development: A New Manifesto’, and will be written up as examples of how the ‘3D’ agenda has already been implemented by groups across India.

Working with NISTADS and other networks of partners, the STEPS Centre is keen to translate some of the momentum generated by the Manifesto project (and its other research initiatives) into practical policy engagement and impact in different places and at varying levels. As Navjyoti Singh said in his presentation (video) on Day 3, the transition from projects to a movement is always an ambitious programme. The individuals and institutions discussed at this three day meeting give us hope that it is possible.

>> Programme: Seminar on innovation, sustainability and development, Delhi (with links to video)
>> YouTube playlist: Videos from the seminar

EVERYONE'S A WINNER (EXCEPT IF YOU'RE NOT...)

2011-06-30T13:06:00.011Z

Photo: Jatropha curcas - the biofuel plant from tonrulkens' photostream on Flickr

Our director Melissa Leach is giving the first Annual Piers Blaikie Lecture on Environmental Politics at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in July. She'll be speaking on ‘Green wins or green grabs? Contested pathways to sustainability in Africa’.

In our environmentally-anxious age, ‘win-win’ solutions that address climate change, resource scarcity, food security and poverty simultaneously are hugely enticing. But what if the ‘green wins’ become ‘green grabs’? What do political-ecological pathways mean for farmers - what vision of life and landscape are suppressed?

This public lecture will reflect on these questions through compelling stories from the forests of West Africa and discuss an alternative politics through which emerging global political ecologies might bring justice, rather than oppression.

5-6.30pm Monday 18 July 2011
Thomas Paine Lecture Theatre, UEA

Event details (PDF flyer)
STEPS Centre events

A NEW LEADER AND A NEW BEGINNING FOR THE UN FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANISATION?

2011-06-28T08:43:00.003Z

By John Thompson, co-convenor, STEPS Centre food and agriculture domain and joint coordinator, Future Agricultures Consortium

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) chose Brazil’s José Graziano da Silva as its Director General, the first new leader in almost two decades as the world faces near-record food prices that are driving millions into poverty. Graziano da Silva, 61, the former Brazilian Minister of Food Security, will replace Jacques Diouf, who has served as the head of the biggest UN agency for 18 years, in January 2012. Graziano received 92 votes against 88 for Spain’s Miguel Angel Moratinos Cuyaube.

The FAO, which was set up in 1945 by the UN to lead international efforts to reduce hunger and help developing countries improve agriculture, has often failed in its duties. The agency, whose Latin motto ‘Fiat panis’ means ‘Let there be bread,’ needs a major reform to better tackle food insecurity and poverty. The current administration has been in power far too long and has failed to provide the leadership to fulfil this mandate. Relations between the FAO headquarters and field operations have tended to follow ‘an “all things lead to Rome approach” which, according to a 2007 external evaluation, ‘has been high on costs and low on benefits, with an absence of shared goals.’ This has led to disillusionment among its major donors, who have tended to look elsewhere for technical advice and support on food and agriculture issues. Consequently, the FAO’s funding fell 31% between 1994 and 2005, and staffing dropped 25%. Furthermore, the report concluded that its finances were ‘dire’ and ‘rapidly deteriorating’, and concerns by member states about FAO’s priorities and effectiveness were ‘well-founded’. As a result, today the agency suffers from a credibility and relevance problem, as other groups including the G-8/G-20, the World Bank and the UN Secretary General’s own High-Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis, have filled the leadership vacuum and assumed responsibility for driving efforts to confront global food challenges.

But soon the FAO will have a new DG, one who has a strong track record of addressing food insecurity and appears reform minded. Graziano da Silva was in charge of former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s ‘Zero Hunger’ programme, which started in 2003. The plan reduced hunger in Brazil by half and cut the percentage of Brazilians living in extreme poverty from 12% in 2003 to 4.8% in 2009. FAO awarded Lula the 2011 World Food Prize for Zero Hunger, but it was Graziano da Silva who led the programme. Thus, he has a track record of delivering on big commitments.

The Brazilian Director General-elect said in the statement before the election: ‘The FAO must work more transparently and ‘free staff from time-consuming bureaucratic procedures… Country offices need to enjoy greater autonomy in initiating and implementing projects.’ He went on to argue: ‘I subscribe to the view of FAO’s founders that ending hunger is entirely possible… Ending hunger is not a charity, but an investment in our poorest people and a key to sustainable development.’

Offering an ambitious view of where the FAO should go and what it should do is a good beginning, but if he is to succeed in revitalising that moribund organisation, Graziano da Silva will also need to roll up his sleeves and really get stuck in to driving through long-awaited reforms, including reducing the size of the sclerotic bureaucracy, devolving decision-making at all levels, rebuilding staff morale, and breathing new life into its country programmes and partnerships. He must champion improved governance and coordinated action on hunger and malnutrition internationally, even when it means speaking unpalatable truths to rich countries and agencies that give aid to developing countries to improve their agriculture with one hand, while maintaining restrictive trade tariffs and providing distorting subsidies for their own farmers with the other. Finally, he must build consensus among member states around a vision for a new future for agriculture which puts small-scale producers – who offer the greatest potential for increasing productivity, enhancing growth and reducing poverty and hunger – at the heart of any global food security agenda.

A MISSED OPPORTUNITY: THE G-20 ACTION PLAN ON FOOD PRICE VOLATILITY AND AGRICULTURE

2011-06-28T08:28:00.005Z

By John Thompson, co-convenor, STEPS Centre food and agriculture domain and joint coordinator, Future Agricultures Consortium

The Group of Twenty (G-20), comprised of the world’s 19 largest economies, plus the European Union, was created as a response both to the financial crises of the late 1990s and to a growing recognition that key emerging-market countries were not adequately included in the core of global economic discussion and governance. Collectively, the G-20 countries account for 85% of global gross national product, 80% of world trade and 66% of the world population. On 22-23 June 2011, a meeting of the group’s agriculture ministers was held in Paris – the first of its kind – after France made global food security and commodities regulation a centrepiece of its G-20 presidency following the 2007-08 food crisis. At the end of the meeting, the ministers issued a 24-page communiqué called ‘Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture’, which addresses some of the symptoms of price volatility on agricultural markets, but fails to confront its root causes.

The ministers sidestepped many of the most contentious issues facing global food and agricultural policy, including biofuel subsidies and export bans, as a serious split hampered efforts to reach a broad consensus. The event highlighted how many large agricultural economies, such as the Argentina, Brazil, France, Russia and the US, remain deeply divided over how to respond to record high food prices around the world and improve governance of the global food system.

The action plan does include three notable initiatives: the International Research Initiative for Wheat Improvement (IRIWI), Global Agricultural Geo-Monitoring Initiative (GAGI) and the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS). IRIWI will coordinate research efforts across major wheat growing countries in both public and private agencies, while GAGI would be launched to aid better crop forecasting. AMIS will seek to develop early warning systems on looming food crises in any part of the world by providing a framework for monitoring country-level data production, demand, price, trade and stocks. A 'Rapid Response Forum' will be created in the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to take note of the alerts provided by the early warning system under AMIS – although the agency, already short of money, will have to run it without new funding, so questions remain about its long-term viability. Moreover, private sector players, such as the large grain traders (e.g. ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus), for whom knowledge of stocks and harvests represent a key competitive advantage, are ‘urged’ to participate in AMIS (with promises that it will have ‘a framework to ensure the confidentiality of proprietary and sensitive information’), but no measures are set forth to make certain they work in the public interest. Nonetheless, the good news is that China and India have both agreed to participate in AMIS – a major advance, given that both countries regard food stocks as a strategic issue and have resisted reporting on stocks levels and harvests in the past.

Beyond these valuable, but largely technical efforts, the watered down communiqué contains only vague references to some of the most difficult issues facing agricultural producers in developing countries. While the G-20 nations largely agree on the need to improve agricultural productivity and enhance transparency, they disagree on biofuels, export controls and on the regulation of commodities and financial markets.

The G-20 commissioned international bodies, including the FAO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank, to research how best to deal with rising food prices. A key report, Price Volatility in Food and Agricultural Markets: Policy Responses, underlined the negative role of biofuels on price volatility and recommended a rethink of policies which incentivise biofuels, adopted by many G20 States members. Not surprisingly, two big ethanol producing nations, the US and Brazil, blocked agreement. American geopolitical interest lies in using its vast agricultural surplus to wean itself off Middle Eastern oil, while Brazil's growth is driven by its agroexports. So the biofuels issue has been kicked into the long grass of ‘more studies needed’.

There is also no deal either on giving up export bans when prices spike. During that last food price crisis, several countries stopped exports of key crops to keep the cost of staples in check at home, but added to anxiety about global supplies and fuelled further price rises by doing so. Emerging economy governments, perhaps not surprisingly, were not keen to give up one of the few tools they have to keep the lid on urban unrest in times of food inflation. However, there is agreement that exports for humanitarian aid will not be caught up in export bans in future, but the details are lacking.

Another glaring omission from the action plan is climate change. The impact of extreme climate events – droughts and floods – has been one of the major drivers of food price volatility in the last few years, but it gets short shrift in the communiqué. In it the G-20 stresses ‘the need to invest more and increase cooperation in research and development for climate change adaptation, especially for smallholder farmers, and mitigation technologies, and to help developing countries to enhance their capacity for addressing climate change in agriculture’ and that it supports the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). But there are no specific commitments or initiatives on either the adaptation or mitigation agenda. Instead there is mention of the need for more sustainable agriculture and more responsible use of water resources. Consequently the challenge of meeting growing demand for food as global environmental change impinges on agricultural productivity is reduced to little more than business as usual statements and diplomatic hand-waving.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there was no clear agreement on the regulation of agricultural financial markets, which was supposed to be the cornerstone of the ministerial meeting. While the action plan reflected many of France's ambitious proposals for its G-20 presidency this year, it falls short of calls by Paris for a tough crackdown on derivatives trading, thanks in part to strong resistance from the UK. France had wanted all G-20 countries to commit themselves to imposing so-called ‘position limits’ – a curb on how much of the market an investor can buy into – but this was removed from the final version of the communiqué. Instead, we are left with insipid statements from the agriculture ministers about how ‘appropriately regulated and transparent agricultural financial markets are indeed key for well-functioning physical markets’, but no concerted action for better regulation of those markets. Further, the ministers ‘strongly encouraged’ their counterparts in the G-20 ministries of finance to take decisions for better regulation of agricultural financial markets, leaving it up to them to adopt concrete measures on the matter.

It would appear that we will have to face another food price crisis before the world’s most influential nations get serious about tackling the really tough issues.

COMPLEXITY SCIENCE & DEVELOPMENT

2011-06-21T09:09:00.002Z

In a world where systems change and interact unpredictably, there's a growing interest in using complexity science to tackle questions in international development. Our director Melissa Leach spoke last month at a UKCDS workshop on complexity science and international development (Melissa's slides are on our Slideshare). Ben Ramalingam, visiting fellow at IDS, has written some reflections on the day:

The ideas and concepts of complexity science do have considerable potential relevance for development work. Areas highlighted as worthy of further exploration included economic growth, innovation, institutional change, sustainability, implementation and networks.

There were also some common caveats. Complexity sciences should not be seen as a new 'flashy' technical approach to developing the right answer – instead, it should be seen as vital that this agenda is taken forward in a way that acknowledges and respects diversity of perspectives, cultures and opinions, especially across the so-called ‘North-South divide’.

You can read more of Ben's post on the UK Collaborative on Development Studies website.

Ben also blogs at Aid on the Edge of Chaos.

VIDEO: MELISSA LEACH AT NESS 2011

2011-06-20T14:24:00.008Z

Melissa Leach, STEPS Centre Director, spoke at NESS 2011 (The 10th Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference) in Stockholm last week.

Her talk (56 minutes), "Pathways to sustainability? Environmental social science and justice in a complex, dynamic age" explains the STEPS Centre's work in the context of the rapidly changing, complex world we live in.

Video of Melissa's and other presentations are on the Stockholm Resilience Centre website:

>> VideoL NESS 2011 Conference
>> Melissa's presentation (Slideshare)

INEQUALITY AND FOOD: 10 TASKS FOR THE UK GOVERNMENT

2011-06-20T09:49:00.007Z

by Erik Millstone, STEPS Centre Food and Agriculture co-convenor

There are massive inequalities between industrialised and developing countries, and they have widened over the past 15 years, but there are also considerable inequalities within developing countries. There are consequently divergent interests, at least over the short term, between different groups within developing countries, and between industrialised countries such as the UK on the one hand and developing countries on the other.

Moreover, given the structure and operations of the current global food system, some short-term measures that might be seen as benefiting one of those groups might be unwelcome by others. To tackle global inequalities and promote sustainable development, the structure and operations of the global food system will need to be substantially reformed. The UK government should be taking a lead in advocating and implementing policies that simultaneously tackle inequalities and promote sustainable development.

An example of divergent interests can be provided by considering the impact of ‘favourable’ weather during a growing season or a livestock production cycle. In a ‘good’ season the yields from both arable and livestock farming will be relatively plentiful. For subsistence farmers, this is substantially good news because they have more to eat and more to store, and maybe even a surplus to sell. If however they lack suitable mould- and pest-proof storage facilities then the benefits of that surplus will be short-lived. The benefit of having a marketable surplus may, however, be undermined as ‘good harvests’ often drive down market prices, as a significant ‘overhang’ of perishable foods typically results in a collapse of market prices, sometimes to well below the cost of production. Low food prices are welcomed by the urban poor, but are matters of relative indifference to the urban middle class and substantial indifference to the wealthy. ‘Unfavourable’ weather can drive supplies and prices in ways that may be welcome by commercial farmers who achieved marketable yields, but seriously compromise food security for subsistence farmers and the urban poor.

It is important to recognise that unregulated agricultural markets are notoriously unstable in respect of both supplies and prices; and not just because of the weather. Earlier this decade, before the food price shocks of 2008 and 2010/11, it became for fashionable for some to argue that technological innovations and globalized trade had delivered a stable, secure and sustainable agricultural regime. Recent events indicate that liberalised trade and historical patterns of technological change have not ensured stability, in the long-run they have contributed, and are contributing, to diminishing sustainability. The January 2011 UK Foresight report on the Global Future of Food & Farming recognised, as did UK ministers, that the current regime of policies and practices must change if food security is to be enhanced.

Weather remains, of course, a complicating factor for agricultural policy. Climate change should not be oversimplified as ‘global warming’. Even when long-term warming occurs, increased short-term meteorological volatility should also be anticipated. The probable consequence is increased perturbations of prices and supplies of food in ways that will, in numerous ways, compromise the sustainability of the livelihoods of both subsistence and commercial farmers and many urban consumers.

The various types of market liberalisation that have been implemented since the early 1980s have undermined food security for diverse communities in many different parts of the world, and they have done so through several mechanisms.

Firstly, subsistence farmers in developing countries suffered particularly as a consequence of the ‘Structural Adjustment’ policies of the 1980s and early 1990s, which amongst other things dismantled the agricultural research and extension services from which they had previously benefited. Aid and policy support for those services would be particularly beneficial for subsistence farmers, but the mechanisms through which those systems should operate should utilise extension services not just to disseminate knowledge and technologies but also to gather intelligence from farmers about their needs, priorities and expectations; only under those conditions can the R&D agendas of the scientists and technologists be effectively coupled to the needs, concerns and aspirations of poor farmers. Liberalisation was often justified as an effective means of transforming subsistence farmers into commercial farmers. In practice, that liberalisation frequently drove many of the rural poor out of farming, off the land and deeper into poverty, both rural and urban. While in the long run it may well be in the interests of many subsistence farmers to become increasingly commercial, the timing and rate at which those changes occur should be at their chosen pace, not driven by artificial timetables or unrealistic econometric models.

Agricultural research and development programmes that assume that the rural poor can be helped by technological innovations distributed through market mechanisms fail to reach their intended beneficiaries because they fail to appreciate the constraints imposed by poverty. Subsistence farmers are more commonly looking for ways to diminish risks, not opportunities for potentially profitable but risky investments. Distributing new ‘improved’ seeds through normal commercial channels may well not provide any benefit to poor farmers. Farmers who have not been able to afford any commercial seeds for many years cannot be reached through commercial channels; and many of the rural poor in eg sub-Saharan Africa fall into that category. If they are to benefit from improved seeds, they need to have subsidised access to those seeds, but they also need appropriate tools and knowledge, and the seeds need to have characteristics that the farmers most value. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, farmers typically prioritise resilience to variable weather more than they value maximum yields in optimal conditions, while the research community too often concentrates on optimising and maximising.

Generic policies to accelerate the pace of technological change in eg agriculture often do not benefit those what are in greatest need. Different types of technologies have differential effects on contrasting social groups. For example commercial farmers may be attracted by labour-saving innovations, but landless labourers benefit more from employment-generating technological changes.

A second consequence of the liberalization of agricultural markets has been a reduction in the number and size of public sector buffer stocks. That occurred over the past 10 years in the UK and the EU, as well as the USA, but under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF public sector buffer stock holdings in developing countries have also been markedly reduced in frequency and scale. Urban consumers, especially poor ones, share common interests with rural communities in seeing diminished volatility in food supplies and prices. Food security requires at minimum a sufficient and sustainable supply of food that can be equitably accessed. Sufficiency, equity and sustainability have often only been achieved with public policy measures to create and manage public stocks to buffer supply volatilities. Those stocks should, of course, be managed in careful and accountable ways.

Leaving stocks of foodstuffs to decay or distributing them in corrupt or unaccountable ways brought stockholding into disrepute. The UK policy and research community could make a substantial contribution by helping developing countries to establish and operate legitimate resilient and robust buffer-stock regimes. Several EU Member States have responded to the price volatilities of recent years by re-establishing some of their stocking policies, but not the UK. The current UK government and the European Commission have taken the view that as long as private sector commercial stocks are deemed sufficient by the food industry then food supplies will be secure, but not everyone is convinced that that is anything more than wishful thinking.

A third feature of liberalisation over the past 15 years has been the abolition of rules that prevented ‘naked short-selling’ of food commodities, and the rules that restricted owning and trading in food commodity futures. The ranges of different kinds of ‘investors’ who are now lawfully permitted to gamble on future food price movements has been substantially widened; they are no longer restricted to companies that own or need physical stocks and supplies. Speculative investments by those with no interest in ever holding physical commodities has substantially amplified price fluctuations beyond what could have been anticipated by reference to physical conditions of supply and social conditions of demand.

In the light of those considerations, 10 recommendations emerge:

1. The UK government’s investments (eg by DFID, the BBSRC and the NERC) in R&D for developing country agriculture should be closely and explicitly coupled to the needs and agendas of the intended beneficiaries. As the Gates Foundation’s Agricultural Research Guidelines stipulate, researchers should indicate: “Who are the target beneficiaries of your work and how does your approach specifically serve their documented needs?”

2. The UK government should endeavour to shift the corresponding agendas of the EU, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, the World Bank and the IMF to couple them more closely to the needs, concerns and aspirations of their intended beneficiaries.

3. Investments should be made by the UK and the wider donor community to re-establish and support improved agricultural extension services so that they provide effective reciprocal communications between the research community on the one hand and farmers and landless farm-workers on the other.

4. Investments should be made to help poor rural farmers and landless farm workers gain affordable access to improved means for storing and preserving foods when they are plentiful and cheap.

5. The development and adoption of employment-generating technological changes for developing countries should be no less a priority than labour-saving innovations.

6. Effective steps should be taken within the UK and the EU to re-establish public sector food stocks that can serve to buffer supply and price volatilities.

7. Help and encouragement should be given to developing countries to establish (or re-establish) public sector food stocks that can serve to buffer supply and price volatilities, so as to protect the vulnerable rather than enrich the powerful.

8. To diminish inequalities, chronically poor farmers need subsidised affordable access to diverse ranges of improved technologies appropriate to their needs, concerns and aspirations.

9. A fresh approach to trade policy will be needed. Instead of simply adopting a rhetoric of levelling the playing fields while making sure they remain skewed against poor farmers and poor countries, both the rhetorics and the practices must change, to shift support from eg the CAP that gives most help to those who need it least and least to those that need it most, by inverting that relationship.

10. Rules governing the buying and selling of food stocks and food futures need to be more not less restrictive. Naked short-selling of food stocks or futures should be unlawful. Buying and selling of wholesale food stocks should be restricted to companies that own or use physical stocks. Gambling on the future price of food should be prohibited, except for limited seasonal hedging by companies in the food industry.

Links

>> STEPS research on food & agriculture

THE MANIFESTO: ONE YEAR ON

2011-06-15T09:43:00.005Z

By Adrian Ely, Manifesto project convenor

Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto is a year old! It's been a busy year. In the time since the launch of the Manifesto, we've been engaging with an increasingly diverse set of academic and policy networks around the world about how science, technology and innovation can work in more socially just and sustainable ways.

One of the challenges we received when launching the New Manifesto at the Royal Society last June was “what does this mean in particular places and contexts - give us examples!” The Manifesto’s recommendations were deliberately broad, but it was clear that its users would benefit from case studies from around the world to clarify and illustrate the Manifesto’s ‘Areas for Action’.

Over the year since the launch, this has been our main area of activity. Elisa Arond has been working with Latin American partners, whilst I have collaborated with colleagues at the African Technology Policy Studies Network (ATPS) and the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies (NISTADS, India) to produce examples. They will be published on the Manifesto website later this year.

Both of these partnerships have also led to events that have enabled us to build on some of last year’s discussions. I spoke alongside Kevin Urama at the 2010 ATPS annual conference in Cairo, where the African Manifesto on Science, Technology and Innovation was formally launched. The African Manifesto, which grew out of the SET-DEV (Science, Ethics and Technological Responsibility in Developing and Emerging Countries) project, has also since been discussed at high-level events involving policy-makers and stakeholders from across Africa and elsewhere, an encouraging sign that its messages will have a concrete, positive policy impact.

A conference in Delhi later this month (28-30 June) will provide a timely opportunity for learning and reflection with our partners in India. Co-hosted by NISTADS, CDS-Trivandrum and the STEPS Centre, the meeting will use both the STEPS Manifesto and the updated ‘Knowledge Swaraj’ manifesto as entry points to broader discussions around innovation, sustainability and development in India. Technical sessions will focus on innovation in the agricultural, health, ICT and energy sectors, and the final morning will be dedicated to discussions around grassroots innovation and traditional knowledge. The same event will see the formal launch of Indialics - the India chapter of Globelics (an international network for research into ‘Learning, Innovation and Competence Building Systems’) and the new journal ‘Innovation and Development’.

The STEPS Centre has linked up with many other networks via the New Manifesto project, each inspired by a common vision that sees science, technology and innovation working more directly for poverty alleviation, social justice and environmental sustainability. The Centre looks forward to taking these partnerships forward through targeted impact and engagement work in its second phase through to 2016.

>> Download or browse the Manifesto
>> International Seminar on Innovation, Sustainability and Development, 28-30 June, New Delhi

RISKY ADVICE AND UNCERTAINTY

2011-06-07T13:17:00.004Z

Andy Stirling, STEPS Director and Alister Scott, visiting fellow at SPRU, have an article up at Project Syndicate (and on the Al Jazeera website) on recent technological disasters (Fukushima, BP in Mexico) and how they reflect on the way science is used to support public policy.

Why do we seem to be witnessing an increasing number of nasty technological surprises?

Indeed, this year's Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan and last year's BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have taken their place alongside older problems, such as ozone depletion. We believe that the way in which scientific advice is developed and communicated lies at the heart of the question.

Science is increasingly used to support what are essentially public-policy decisions, particularly concerning new and complex technologies like genetically modified (GM) foods, novel chemicals, and contending energy infrastructures.

>> Risky Advice (Project Syndicate)
>> Risky advice and immeasurable uncertainties (Al Jazeera)
>> Nuclear futures? Andy Stirling (tcktcktck, 18 March 2011)

REVOLUTIONISING DEVELOPMENT: WHOSE FUTURE COUNTS?

2011-06-03T07:42:00.006Z

By Melissa Leach, STEPS Centre director

I first worked with Robert Chambers as a research assistant when I was little more than an undergraduate myself. In the book ‘Revolutionising Development’, launched last Friday, I write about the specific piece of research we did together, and its legacies.

However, over twenty years as a colleague at the Institute of Development Studies, Robert’s work has influenced mine far more widely than this. In particular, four themes in Robert’s remarkable body of work link to challenges that we are now pursuing in the STEPS Centre: the importance of the 'material'; the politics of access; complexity, dynamics and unpredictability; and the framing of goals.

The first is that the material matters. Robert’s work has always brought the technical and the physical into development, from trees (on which I first worked with him, and write about in the book) to water, seeds and now shit and the microbes it carries, in his current work on community-led total sanitation. Equally, he has always drawn attention to the social in the technical (that is, the social arrangements that enable technologies to work). With some notable exceptions – including the recent renewed attention to agriculture - the technical is often surprisingly unfashionable in mainstream development. But we talk of politics, economy, institutions, flows of money and power and governance without acknowledging material and technical issues at our peril. We miss opportunities, expose ourselves to risks, and nature bites back – as it has arguably in a big way with climate change as a product of patterns of capitalist development.

The second theme is that the material matters – but the politics of access to it matter even more. Climate change has returned questions of material resource use and ‘nature’ to centre stage. But with it comes the obligation to ask - as Robert always did - who gains and loses, who has access to resources, and how (to paraphrase the book I first worked on as his Research Assistant in the 80s) to get water and trees ‘to the hands of the poor’. Paradoxically, just as resource ‘crunches’ and climate change are turning development attention back to questions about nature, new global markets for carbon and food, emerging patterns of commoditisation, investment and speculation by actors old and new, are threatening emerging kinds of land, resource and green grabs. In this brave new world of resource trading, we need to understand and intervene in the politics and political economy of resource access towards greater distributional justice.

A third theme is the need to take complexity, dynamics and unpredictability seriously. Financial, food and epidemics crises as they have played out in different contexts (eg climate change) over the last few years remind us that the world involves complex systems: systems in which economic, ecological, social and technical and political elements interact in ways that are often non-linear and non-equilibrial, involve combinations of shocks and stresses interacting across multiple scales, and include a host of uncertainties and surprises.

Robert recognised this in his work with Gordon Conway on agroecosystems analysis and has since maintained an interest in complex systems thinking. This, of course, now involves a vast array of work in complexity science, evolutionary economics, resilience thinking, sustainability science and so on. Much of this has proceeded outside development and development studies. Robert has been amongst and supportive of the handful of people trying to bring it in, and to recognise that ‘development processes’ are themselves complex systems which interact with other system elements in unpredictable ways, so plans don’t work as intended. Instead, we need different forms of understanding and action: emphasising keywords like flexibility, adaptability, iterative learning, reflexivity – and a big one of Robert’s – humility.

Part of the paradigm shift here is also about challenging power: a mainstream development which often goes on portraying and planning for a world as if it were much more stable and certain, and a matter of controllable risks. Incumbent institutions often face imperatives to control situations, or to appear to do so. These are often backed up by bureaucratic processes – for instance aid bureaucracies and what Robert would term ‘normal professionalism’ are simply not geared to dealing with complexity and uncertainty – and by currently resurgent moves towards audit culture and results-based management. Opening up to embrace dynamics, and empower institutions, infrastructures and forms of practice geared to these, is a growing challenge.

A final theme I term framing the future. We can talk about systems and dynamics, but who defines the system and the goals of change? Sustainability of what, for whom? In the STEPS Centre we are working to link questions of system dynamics firmly to those in a more constructivist and participatory tradition to recognise that there are always a multiplicity of ‘framings’ of systems, goals and values for change – and power relations in which particular perspectives and priorities get to prevail. The politics of knowledge, of framings, justify some pathways, turning them in effect into motorways, while relegating others to bush paths.

Such an analysis traces a direct line from Robert’s work on ‘whose reality counts’. I suggest that we need to move the emphasis now towards ‘whose future counts’. In food, for instance, what kinds of food security, for who, where? What are the visions for peri-urban futures? In energy, what will be the balance between different kinds of low-carbon infrastructures? How do we avoid lock-in, and open up to a plurality of possible imaginaries, goals, values?

Inspired by Robert’s revolutionary work, there is room, I think, for a whole new round of methodolological and political revolution that will foster the democratic political debate and deliberation, and perhaps more collective forms of politics and action, that will build just pathways to sustainable futures. The STEPS Centre and our partners will be working to take forward many aspects of this challenging agenda in the years to come.

>> Buy the book from Earthscan (30% discount)
>> IDS News story on Revolutionising Development

"GOLDEN RICE": A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY?

2011-04-20T08:34:00.005Z

by Sally Brooks, Biosafety project convenor

Biofortified crops, for example rice enriched with vitamin A, are claimed as a way of getting vital extra nutrition to poor people. They've also been a topic of hot debate for several years. In a new development in the story of these crops, last week the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced nearly US$20 million in new grants for Golden Rice and BioCassava Plus. The aim of both projects is to develop nutritionally enhanced ('biofortified') staple crops enriched with pro-vitamin A, and make these available to smallholder farmers and poor consumers in Asia and Africa.

Research on genetically engineered ‘Golden Rice’ has been a work-in-progress since the early 1990s. Back then, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer secured funding from the Rockefeller Foundation’s International Programme on Rice Biotechnology. Its premature launch in 2000 as a magic bullet in the global battle against vitamin A deficiency and child blindness generated excitement and criticism in equal measure. However, in the years that followed, important questions about the technical feasibility, nutritional efficacy and pro-poor credentials of the project have been overshadowed by an increasingly polarised debate ‘for and against’ GM crops. Scientific and policy issues that should have been openly shared and publicly discussed got lost amid overblown claims that, if it wasn't for 'burdensome' regulations and 'irrational' opposition, Golden Rice would already be in farmers’ fields.

With the announcement of a new partnership to "further develop and evaluate" Golden Rice, hopefully this will change. The partners include the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), national rice research institutes in the Philippines and Bangladesh (PhilRice and BRRI) and Helen Keller International, known for its work in designing, implementing, and testing vitamin A delivery programmes worldwide.

Nancy Haselow, HKI vice president and regional director for Asia-Pacific, said this month: “we welcome the opportunity to see if Golden Rice is efficacious and can fill the gap in access to adequate vitamin A for all vulnerable groups in a sustainable way”. With this new research, there's hope for a clearer understanding of how much these crops can do for farmers and consumers worldwide.

Further reading

Brooks, S. (2011) ‘Is International Agricultural Research a Global Public Good? The Case of Rice Biofortification’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 38 (1) 67 – 80

Brooks, S (2010) Rice Biofortification: Lessons for Global Science and Development, London: Earthscan

VIDEO: WATER, OIL AND POLITICS IN EGYPT AND SUDAN

2011-04-06T11:01:00.006Z

In a time of intense and dramatic change in North Africa, Sudan splits into two. One of the most crucial negotiations to take place is over water: who gets how much, and at what cost? The whole Nile Basin has been arguing over the issue for decades. As well as being a source of water, the Nile is also an important trade route, with important implications for the region's oil industry.

Ana Cascão from the Stockholm International Water Institute has worked extensively in the region. In this STEPS Water Seminar, she talks about history and politics in the Nile Basin, and what lies ahead - complete with a illustration of the power balance as a giant chessboard.

YouTube: Ana Cascão "Breaking Waters: The Birth of a New Nile State"

Related posts
>> Revolutions on the Nile

FILM: "SEEDS AND SUSTAINABILITY" OUT NOW

2011-04-04T10:30:00.006Z

Our new film, "Seeds and Sustainability: Maize pathways in Kenya", explores how to secure seeds for farmers growing maize – Kenya’s key staple crop - in drought-prone regions of the country. Below is a trailer: you can watch the full version on our website.

The film draws on our research into maize and environmental change in Kenya. It's the second of our two films on pathways to sustainability - the first, "Water and Justice", was out last month.

>> STEPS Centre: Films
>> "Seeds and Sustainability" on Facebook

VIDEO: WATER & SANITATION FOR ALL?

2011-03-31T10:58:00.004Z

We were lucky to have some big names in water & sanitation at our Water & Sanitation Symposium last week. We asked them what the biggest barriers were for water & sanitation for all, and what will happen after the 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals.

Here's Jon Lane, Executive Director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Council:

More videos, including views from India and South Africa, WaterAid and Practical Action: Water & Sanitation Symposium playlist

DIVERSITY, DISTRIBUTION AND DEVELOPMENT THROUGH KNOWLEDGE, NETWORKS AND NATIONS

2011-03-28T15:33:00.008Z

By Melissa Leach, STEPS Centre director

A new report by the Royal Society surveys the global scientific landscape in 2011, noting the shift to an increasingly multipolar world underpinned by the rise of new scientific powers such as China, India and Brazil. Melissa Leach was on the Advisory Group for the report.

The Royal Society’s new report Knowledge, Networks and Nations: Global scientific collaboration in the 21st Century shows how much and how fast patterns of science and knowledge production are changing. New players, both expected and unexpected, are emerging, while an increasing proportion of a growing scientific output depends on networks of collaboration within and between regions and across the world.

A key and welcome dimension of these changes is in contributing to greater diversity in science. As STEPS Centre colleagues and I have elaborated, this is essential to tackling complex global challenges like energy or food security, where no single line of inquiry or technological solution will do: we will surely need multiple pathways, fed by multiple sciences produced in diverse places. Such diversity is also vital to understanding how global issues like climate change or disease pandemics unfold in particular local contexts, and to finding solutions that are attuned to particular conditions and needs as they vary around the world.

Diversity is nowhere more important than in addressing the development problems of the economically poorest countries and people, including in Africa – and to issues of poverty and distribution. African countries do not yet figure in the global top ten of scientific nations, as measured either by numbers of publications or their citations. Yet the report shows that many of them are expanding their investments in science too, especially in areas like health and agriculture which are central to addressing national and local development needs.

Uganda, for example, produced 116 scientific papers in 1996 but 477 in 2008; a huge expansion, albeit from a low baseline. African Ministers have declared 2011 the start of a decade for African science, with a national investment target of 1% of GDP. African countries are also collaborating more extensively, both within the continent – with South Africa intensifying its position as a hub of knowledge networks on the continent - but also with Europe and the US, while a new science and technology partnership established with China in 2009 suggests that science may become a growing element of intensifying China-Africa relations. But who is setting the terms of such collaboration, and how can we be sure that it genuinely meets the development perspectives and priorities of people in Africa, including those who are poor and marginalised?

The report did not set out to address questions of politics and governance in science, yet these will clearly be crucial. So too is capacity-building. As the report notes, this is important to enable poorer developing countries and their scientists to benefit from, draw on and apply global scientific knowledge, and to be in a position to collaborate. At the same time, collaboration can also build capacity, as scientists from European and African university or government institutions, for instance, work together and learn from each others’ respective skills and experiences.

I would add that capacity development also needs to address power relations, to enable poorer countries and localities to collaborate on more equal terms: for African scientists, for instance, to set agendas in collaborations and gear these to local views of what is scientifically interesting or important - rather than collaborating out of funding need in agendas framed by others.

Addressing global challenges such as those highlighted in the report, as well as their local manifestations, can often benefit from combining ‘natural knowledge’ with social, economic or political science, as well as with forms of local knowledge – farmers’ science, citizen science. The publication data that the report used, from Elsevier’s Scopus database, does cover social sciences and humanities – although these accounted for only 8.9% of articles considered. An interesting further analysis might explore the relationship between patterns of global collaboration and patterns of multi- and inter-disciplinarity, asking which scientists where are linking with others not just to combine perspectives within disciplines, but across them.

Significantly, though the data do not cover a large range of sources outside peer-reviewed articles in international journals where these vital strands of science-related knowledge might be found: local and regional peer-reviewed journals, grey literature, project and NGO reports; practitioner newsletters, online networks that link farmers, citizens and local innovators, and local language publications. 18% of the Scopus papers covered are not in English, but this is the tip of a large iceberg of local language publication. The knowledge found in this array of sources often meets standards of scientific rigour and is an important part of the global picture – yet one that remained uncaptured by the report’s methodology.

More effective means and metrics for capturing these contributions to the growing global scientific field are clearly needed. In turn, this should lead to better assessment of – and potentially action to stimulate – investments and collaborations in science geared to development goals.

Links

>>Royal Society: Knowledge, Networks and Nations
>> Download the 'Knowledge, Networks and Nations' report (PDF)
>> STEPS Centre: A New Manifesto

WATER & SANITATION FOR ALL IS ELUSIVE, BUT ACHIEVABLE

2011-03-21T20:42:00.003Z

Here's another guest post on water and sanitation, on the eve of our Symposium on that subject. Barbara Frost is Chief Executive of Water Aid, a charity dedicated to the provision of safe domestic water, sanitation and hygiene education to the world's poorest people.

A great deal has been achieved since the first UN International Decade of Water Supply and Sanitation (1980-1990). But the goal of water and sanitation for all remains elusive, particularly for the world’s poorest countries and communities. Almost 900 million people are without safe drinking water, while a staggering 2.6 billion have nowhere to go to the toilet. The forthcoming STEPS Symposium provides a valuable opportunity to reflect with others on the journey so far and to consider what we have learned as we look forward to Rio+20 and the post 2015 MDG framework.

The Symposium organisers rightly identify the New Delhi Statement of 1990 as a seminal moment in the journey. There have been many such statements over the past 30 years, too many in fact, but it was the Delhi statement that enshrined the principle of ‘some for all rather than more for some’. This principle of equity is fundamental to WaterAid’s own work but unfortunately it has been somewhat eroded in subsequent international agreements. The Dublin principles of 1992, for example, placed much greater emphasis on water as an economic good rather than a social good; and the Millennium Development Goals of 2000 focused on reducing only the proportion of the population without access. The MDG Review Summit in September last year highlighted the need for a much stronger emphasis on equity going forward, so in some ways we have come full circle, but unless it is front and centre of the post-2015 MDG framework, poor and marginalised groups will continue to miss out.

So what else have we learned, and where next? The Delhi statement called for an integrated approach to environment and health, yet sanitation continues to be neglected by national governments and donor agencies alike. WaterAid’s own experience on the ground shows that the enduring challenge is not just how to provide infrastructure, but also how to promote uptake and use of facilities. This is an area where health professionals have a strong track record. Close collaboration with the health sector will be key to accelerating progress on sanitation.

The Delhi statement emphasised participation and the central role of women. WaterAid has long promoted the inclusion of women in decision making related to water and sanitation services, and we are increasingly focusing our attention on other groups excluded or marginalised on the basis of factors such as age, disability, ethnicity or HIV status. We should take some encouragement from the fact that mothers and children are increasingly central to the mainstream development agenda; but emerging strategies for improving nutrition, maternal and child health frequently overlook the critical importance of access to sanitation and water.

The Delhi principle of ‘some for all rather than more for some’ was based on the idea that access to services could be greatly expanded through the use of lower cost technologies managed at community level. This is very much in line WaterAid’s own thinking: our approach has always involved working closely with local authorities in order to support communities to manage services on a sustainable and equitable basis. Unfortunately, in many cases the pendulum has swung too far, with governments disengaging completely and communities left to their own devices. Addressing some of the myths which have grown up around community management will be key to tackling the emerging crisis of sustainability and ensuring lasting benefits from improved in access to water and sanitation.

Open debate around technical and financial aspects of managing water and delivering services remains crucial, but the intervening years since the Delhi statement have highlighted the fact that providing sanitation and water for all is fundamentally a political challenge. WaterAid and partners have made significant progress over the years in raising awareness and demand among communities for improved services, but this alone is not enough. That we are currently so far off track for the sanitation MDG is arguably not due to a lack of demand or lack of technological knowhow, but rather due to political failure to tackle the issue.

It is for this reason that WaterAid has been a strong supporter to the Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) initiative, which seeks to engage politicians at the highest level. The inaugural High Level Meeting in April 2010 was the first time that Ministers of Finance from developing countries had come together with external donors to discuss water and sanitation issues. As such, it marked an important milestone in the development of the sector. In addition to galvanising political will at different levels, SWA provides a forum whereby governments and donors can be held accountable for fulfilling the many political and financial commitments they make. Increasing transparency and accountability for results within the sector is a key challenge going forward and is an essential precondition for monitoring progress towards realisation of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation agreed by the UN General Assembly last year.

We have come a long way in the past 30 years, but there remain many challenges ahead. WaterAid believes that the vision of Sanitation and Water for All is achievable by combining innovative on-the-ground programming with targeted advocacy and campaigning at local, national and international levels. The STEPS Symposium provides a valuable opportunity to reflect and build consensus on next steps.

Other water & sanitation guest posts

>> Gourisankar Ghosh: Rethinking water
>> Erik Swyngedouw: Thinking out of the water box

RETHINKING WATER

2011-03-21T12:41:00.005Z

Our second guest blog for the STEPS Water Symposium is by Gourisankar Ghosh. Gourisankar is the CEO of FXB India Suraksha, a non profit company working for the vulnerable children affected or infected with HIV AIDS. Till recently he was the Executive Director of Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) at the World Health Organisation. He was the plenary keynote speaker on sanitation in the WSSD, Johannesburg and subsequently a member of the UN MDG Task force on water and sanitation. He was the founder director of the National Drinking Water Mission, India (1986-1991), and the main organiser on behalf of the Indian government for the New Delhi Consultation in 1990, when he also chaired the drafting committee of the New Delhi statement.

More than three decades have passed since the beginning of the first International Water Decade in 1980. This is a time for reflection and to evaluate where we stand. The past 30 years have seen a large number of international conferences, regular World Water Fora, and a mushrooming of initiatives from international agencies. What are the lessons from the way water has been handled over that time?

Sad to say, the collective action on water which came out of the International Water Decade has now almost disappeared in the international development scene. All the major international agencies try to pursue their own goals without a collective effort or common messages. In spite of many discussions, there is no common road map shared by agencies competing to capture donor funds for their programmes. International efforts have moved away from research, new innovations, and investment in technology. For more than three decades, the same methodology has been pursued by the different lead agencies without any tangible result on the ground.

The success of the first decade was in its agreed focus on finding low-cost solutions and technologies; the application of these at grassroots level through community frameworks; and a collective effort between the private and public sector to find solutions. Since that decade, the focus on technology has almost disappeared - yet therein lies the main tool and empowerment for the poor and powerless. Development and marketing of hand pumps was a wonderful effort of private-public partnership. Hand pumps helped to eradicate the guinea worm. They also, for example, empowered tribal women in the Udaipur district of Rajasthan in India to be “cycle army” volunteers; the KWAHO women of Kenya took their solution in their own hands; and in the Philippines, slum dwellers introduced improved sanitation in remote districts. But what happened to the numerous case studies as collected at a very high cost by the agencies - and how much have they helped to transform the policies in the respective countries? Do agencies need to change their own policies first before they start preaching to poor countries?

These question should be answered from the donor end. Are these lead agencies perfect or perfect enough to lead for the tasks given to them by the many UN resolutions? Are they competent enough to face the new challenges of maintaining growth with equity? Can they conserve the environment without the harsh impact of the degradation due to over exploitation due to increasing demand for growth? Have they answered the basic questions (which remained unanswered at the end of the 1980s) on financial and institutional models? What will be the exact roles of the private sector, and how can scarce water resources still be treated as a national resource? How can we mobilize extra finance in an imperfect market with high risk factors?

The water market is imperfect. The capacities of the lead agencies are further imperfect. The time has come to open the door to a much active role for academic and research institutions. In the future, private commerce, business enterprises and associations, local bodies and civic society must play a major role in decision-making and in protecting the interests of poor consumers. More research and models are required, and support is needed for financing, institutional reforms and decentralization. There is no alternative to a clear National Water Policy and Action Plan.

Water is life: sanitation is a means to life too, and back then in Delhi, the importance of education and youth and environmental principles were recognised. The issue of integrated water resource management was highlighted first in the New Delhi Statement in 1990. The only solution now is to create a mass movement for conservation of water sources and ecosystems, and an improved immediate environment and protection of this scarce resource for the poor.

Water has a wide influence in the spectrum of development. Neglecting it will not only jeopardize people’s health, but also economic growth. While the demand for water is ever increasing, supply is limited. The real challenge will be to sustain the ever-growing urban centres, to develop pollution-free disposal of industrial waste, to manage the solid and liquid waste in large habitats, and to preserve river basins. The more pollution there is, the greater the cost for its treatment.

We need a complete rethink to reorganize action and look for new technologies. Unfortunately, those working on water remain isolated and end up largely talking to each other. We never see any finance, health or social leaders at the big water events or conferences. So we need to open up the sector and make water a central development issue. It is also time to learn lessons from the reforms in the power and forestry sector. Domestic water supply cannot be in isolation from water for agriculture or water for industrial development. If we want real and lasting change, water needs to move beyond its traditional boundaries.

Other Water Symposium blogs

>> Erik Swyngedouw: Thinking out of the water box

FILM: "WATER AND JUSTICE" OUT NOW

2011-03-21T08:00:00.001Z

Our new film, "Water and Justice: Peri-urban pathways in Delhi", tells the story of three people and their relationship with water in the towns and villages on the edge of the city.

The film draws on our research into water in peri-urban Delhi.

>> STEPS Centre: Films
>> "Water and Justice" on Facebook

THINKING OUT OF THE WATER BOX

2011-03-17T12:23:00.005Z

We're delighted to feature this guest post by Erik Swyngedouw, Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester. This is the first of a series of blog posts by speakers at our Water Symposium next week.

Recent experiences with water privatization experiments have shown that turning water services into profitable and socially acceptable businesses is not an easy task. And demands for full-cost recovery of water-related activities reduce the possibilities for cross-financing and cross-subsidization.

The very term full-cost recovery is an oxymoron. It is self-evident that all investment project costs need to be recovered by someone somewhere. The key question is really a political one – that is, who will be responsible for the recovery of what kind of costs.

When full-cost recovery is discussed in the context of water projects, it invariably refers to the view that water projects should be self-sufficient (i.e. that the cost of investment should be met fully through water rates – that cost recovery is organized via water consumers). This limits the possibilities of cross-subsidization to managing the tariff structure of water delivery in a redistributive manner. This, in turn, precludes the financing of projects from local, regional or national tax revenues or, through development aid, from tax revenues raised elsewhere. However, this has been the only way through which successful development of large-scale water works was achieved in the past in the global North, particularly in terms of solving the contradiction between the collective character of the system and the private organization of its management.

There is no evidence that this will be any different in the developing world. Mobilizing tax revenues permits mobilizing resources obtained from elsewhere or from other activities into collectively more desirable ones. Therefore, the narrow definition of full-cost recovery needs to be replaced by a much wider social and political-economic understanding – one that permits systemic forms of redistribution of financial resources.

In sum, questions of investment in collective commodities such as water are never independent of the question of (re)distribution. To the extent that the water economy is publicly or privately organized (or a mixture of both), these modalities of redistribution will be organized differently.

The pivotal social and political struggles for the years to come will exactly revolve around the modalities of subsidization. In other words, the struggle over mediating the tension between providing bundled territorialized and socialized hydro-social networks, on the one hand, and the private appropriation of surplus value, on the other, will be the pivot around which the social struggle over the construction of hydro-social infrastructure and access to water will be fought. While the private sector effectively claims that private-sector participation will be dependent upon public financial support, there is increasing pressure on public institutions to sustain private-sector investment by means of significant public financial support.

While we have argued above that uneven access to water is primarily a question of economic or monetary power, achieving the Millennium Development Goals for water necessarily implies a major redistribution of capital resources. Guaranteeing access to clean and safe water requires the transfer of considerable amounts of investment capital whose return will have to be carried by the more wealthy sections of the world’s population. This is independent of the question of whether the actual management of water supply and delivery should be publicly or privately organized. The latter question is one of efficient management. Around the world, both public and private (or mixed) companies have proven that they can be effective and efficient. However, the public–private debate should not overshadow (as it has done over the past decades) the question of the origin of the required investments to secure access to water. The private sector, because of the structural requirement for a normal return (profit) on investment, cannot guarantee access to water to social groups with insufficient effective buying power (or, in some cases, willingness to pay) or investment in projects of an uncertain return. The only strategy that can offer a mass solution is one based on subsidies and, thus, on redistribution of capital and income. Moreover, a public organization of investment and of distribution permits considering a much wider range of technological, organization and managerial options.

The key issue, therefore, is not about whether or not water is (or should be) a commodity or commoditized. Water is a commodity to the extent that delivering the right volume of water of the right quality to the right place requires major investments of capital and labour, and these have to be made available and paid for. The central concern is who will pay for what part of the hydro-social circulation process. Adequate and reliable access of water for those who lack access will require a major transfer ofcapital and systematic and sustained cross-subsidization. It is exactly the recognition of water as a commodity that permits effective cross-subsidization. However, the question of subsidization is necessarily a political one that needs to be addressed at local, national and transnational levels. Cross-subsidization of investment requires embedding issues of water access and distribution within appropriate institutional frameworks that discuss, democratically and openly, such questions of distribution. In fact, in the same way as a decision to privatize or ring-fence water services (and to insist on its full-cost recovery) is a political one, so are issues of cross-subsidization. Indeed, if the above argument is correct, then the question of who decides on both investment and distribution becomes an eminently political question, and one that relates directly to issues of democracy and of the distribution of political power.

In conclusion: private-sector participation in the water sector remains limited and the prospects for future private-sector investment rather dim. This leaves no other alternative than public financing to cover the bulk of the required investment. It would be a mirage to believe that the MDGs can be achieved on the basis of massively increased private sector investment in the water sector. It has not happened in the recent past despite great pressure on all actors. The results of the existing experiments are mixed, to say the least, and the prospects for enhanced investment in context of total privatization are not promising. Equally, the call from alternative ‘people’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs)’ to improve water access by improving local-level stakeholder participation and citizen’s involvement can easily prove to be a mirage, too, as a solution for solving the socio-hydraulic problems of the world’s big cities. Without massively enhanced national and international public support, the MDGs will remain an empty promise.

STEPS Centre Water Symposium 2011: event details

JAPAN: NEGLECTED NUCLEAR LESSONS

2011-03-16T15:04:00.006Z

Photo: Screen capture from video of an explosion at the Fukushima Daichi plant in Japan (Reuters)

By Andy Stirling, STEPS Centre co-director

What lessons can be learned from the tragic calamity in Japan, for global debates about nuclear power? With the situation still unfolding, it is too early and uncertain to conclude with any confidence. Indeed, it is somewhat distastefully self-absorbed even to begin to adopt such a narrow sectoral focus, at a time of such continuing and unresolved suffering for so many people. Yet it is questions over the general fate of nuclear power that seem to be commanding premature and parochial attention in much international news media and political debate. With defensive reflexes already in danger of ‘locking in’, the issues are worth considering quite carefully even at this early stage.

One thing is for sure: there are no resounding new revelations over the vulnerability of nuclear power to unforeseen levels of severity in specific natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis. This we knew already. It is to the credit of Japanese nuclear engineering, that Japan routinely adopted a series of additional safeguards of a kind that are typically excluded in nuclear construction elsewhere. In this respect, the lesson is very general: no matter how stringent the precaution, there is always the possibility of surprise. This applies not only in Japan, but also in less earthquake-prone regions, especially where assumptions about the likely magnitudes of storm surges or sea level rise are relatively relaxed. It is not just Japan that has learned lessons about the prospect of events occurring beyond the levels anticipated in official risk assessments. It has long been clear that risk assessment everywhere, systematically excludes many kinds of possible eventuality. There are many other scenarios that can be imagined apart from unusually severe earthquakes, that can lead to the catastrophic combinations of abrupt loss of connection to the grid, coupled with damage to vulnerable auxiliary power supplies (which are often located outside protective structures). It is implicit, for instance, in all four of the UK Government’s ‘top tier’ security threats, that some such scenarios may even be thought more likely in the UK than Japan.

Nor, then, is there any surprising new lesson about nuclear power’s general vulnerability to other kinds of catastrophic accident. This also has long been well known – and well exemplified. It seems recently to have become unfashionable to mention in ‘polite’ policy debates, the relevance of the successive nuclear shocks at Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. Yet features of these events were routinely and assertively declared “impossible” (or of “negligible likelihood”) in ostensibly-rational tones before these accidents actually occurred. After the fact, various kinds of received wisdoms emerged concerning the supposedly “unique circumstances” in each case. But it is worth noting that these claims are all instances of ‘wisdom in hindsight’. The Chernobyl RBMK reactor, for instance, was (before the 1986 accident) even the subject of praise over its potential safety features. And the now often-cited supposedly distinctive safety shortcomings of the RBMK are not as unique as frequently claimed. In fact, neither the notorious ‘positive void coefficient’ (which accelerates, rather than slows down, nuclear reactions after shutdown), nor the lack of secondary containment – two things that were implicated in that disaster – are exclusive to that reactor design. And whatever their mistakes, the Soviet operators twenty five years ago held no monopoly on the capacity for human error. No doubt we can in due course expect similar post hoc exaggerations of supposedly unique Japanese circumstances. Either way, it seems to be assumed that present-day assurances by the nuclear industry on the completeness of risk assessment carry greater weight than the demonstrably self-interested bias and errors of the past. Our vulnerability to such assumptions has long been obvious.

Beyond these familiar issues, there is one striking general lesson that is already arising in current events: the pressures on the media to adopt a narrative of reassurance. With a grim responsibility for preventing the consequences of panic in an already traumatised population, it might at least be understood (if not condoned) that the Japanese Government be circumspect in its readiness to acknowledge the full gravity of the possibilities now faced. But there is no such excuse for media commentators on other continents, many of whom seem explicitly to see their principal responsibility to lie in ‘reassuring’ what is clearly feared to be an inconveniently-sceptical public. Respected institutions that should know better, are allowing their names to be used by individuals who (presented as objective ‘nuclear experts’), are sometimes acting as little more than PR platforms for the partisan interests of a newly-beleaguered nuclear industry.

Uncertainties notwithstanding, this ‘expert’ attention repeatedly takes the form of biased and incomplete understatements of the severity of the present situation and of future possibilities. Manifest hazards such as highly radioactive plumes are qualified as only “potentially” dangerous (as if danger is not always ‘potential’). The seriousness of structural damage by hydrogen explosions is understated as if only a minor encumbrance. Obvious exacerbating factors, like the vulnerable positions of irradiated fuel ponds, remain systematically neglected until realised. Expediently contrived forms of words are concocted disingenuously to confound outcomes like ‘containment failure’, ‘pressure vessel breach’, ‘nuclear explosion’, ‘fuel melt’ and ‘meltdown’. A “main message” is continually referred to – and repeatedly refuted by successive further escalations in unfolding events – that the emergency is likely to be imminently resolved. Contrasting safety features of current reactor designs elsewhere are misleadingly exaggerated. The effect is consistently to imply – and even explicitly assert – that eminently possible severities of consequences, are somehow “impossible”.

The overall effect of much of this ‘expert’ media commentary is one of sustained suppression of plausible (and highly relevant) worst case possibilities – as if blinkered denial is somehow synonymous with well-informed responsible rationality. Perhaps even more incongruously, opportunities are sometimes taken (without prompting or substantiation), gratuitously to denigrate alternative energy technologies. Reference is made to significant Chinese nuclear construction rates, without mentioning the even larger investments of that country in, say, wind energy. It is difficult to imagine a more corrosively partisan position than the monotonously-implied counsel of despair: that there somehow exists “no alternative” to nuclear power.

So the most serious lesson already emerging outside Japan is about the pressures, driven by established nuclear commitments, to obscure information; compromise objectivity; and suppress political choice about energy futures. We may live in hope that there will come a time when more comprehensive and dispassionate attention will be given to the full global potential of viable alternatives to nuclear power. Many of these are manifestly more resilient in the face of technical mishap, natural disaster or deliberate acts of violence. Distributed renewable energy infrastructures, for instance, offer a way to avoid huge regulation-enforced losses of electricity-generating capacity when a series of similar plants have to be closed due to safety failings in any one. They minimise the compounding economic impacts of the knock-on self-destruction of massively expensive capital equipment, some time after an initial shock. They do not threaten to exacerbate natural disaster with forced precautionary evacuations of large tracts of urban industrial areas. And there is no scenario at all – unlikely or otherwise – under which they can render significant areas of land effectively uninhabitable for decades, let alone commit large populations to the potential long-term (and untraceable) harm of elevated low doses of ionising radiation. Although apparently more muted in much politics and the media, it is already the case that global industrial momentum behind renewable energy development significantly exceeds that in support of nuclear. The worldwide potential presented by these technologies is far larger than that envisaged in current nuclear programmes. With political will, the possible timescales are more favourable. And the commercial, industrial, employment and economic benefits that these renewable technologies offer is at least the equal of anything promised by nuclear.

These are the lessons that we may hope to learn in time – and set alongside other relevant considerations. But now is the moment for solidarity and support in the face of the terrible conjunction of natural catastrophe and a threatened – but uncertain – nuclear disaster currently unfolding in Japan. In the end, the most important long term cause for hope on energy is the same elsewhere in the world as it is in Japan. If we are allowed to exercise it, we certainly have the choice.

SCIENCE & INTOLERANCE

2011-02-23T10:29:00.004Z

John Beddington, the UK Government's Chief Scientific Advisor, said earlier this month that scientists should be "grossly intolerant" towards "pseudoscience" and suggested that the media gives too much space to non-scientific commenters on science. But how intolerant can science afford to be? Andy Stirling, co-director of STEPS, has joined the debate in a piece for the Research Research blog:

"The point is that the basic aspirational principles of science offer the best means to challenge the ubiquitously human distorting pressures of self-serving privilege, hubris, prejudice and power. Among these principles are exactly the scepticism and tolerance against which Beddington is railing (ironically) so emotionally! Of course, scientific practices like peer review, open publication and acknowledgement of uncertainty all help reinforce the positive impacts of these underlying qualities. But, in the real world, any rational observer has to note that these practices are themselves imperfect. Although rarely achieved, it is inspirational ideals of universal, communitarian scepticism—guided by progressive principles of reasoned argument, integrity, pluralism, openness and, of course, empirical experiment—that best embody the great civilising potential of science itself."

>> Full post: Let's hear it for scepticism: its suppression is one of the principal threats to science (Research Blogs)

REVOLUTIONS ON THE NILE

2011-02-22T15:24:00.004Z

By Alan Nicol, IDS and Ana Cascão, Stockholm International Water Institute

Today is official Nile Day in the basin and celebrations will be taking place in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the Nile riparian zones. For the assembled dignitaries, however, these are nervous times. This has already been a momentous year for the Nile basin - and 2011 is still only two months old. Egypt and Sudan, which have divided up the river’s flow for 50 years, are now subject to major internal political change. In Sudan a decisive referendum result is leading to the emergence of an 11th Nile state whilst in Egypt, the basin’s most monolithic system is undergoing political convulsions.

Viewed from an upstream perspective, this may be a gratifying sight; and a sign too that the Egyptian-Sudanese ‘dyad’ – which has effectively governed the river since the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement (NWA) – is now falling apart. If not bust completely, it is certainly under unprecedented pressure.

The political direction of any new Southern Sudanese state will be watched carefully in Cairo. Of immediate concern will be any decision that Southern Sudan makes to join the recently-formed ‘breakaway’ upstream states. Their emergence frustrated Egypt and Sudan last year, when five states pushed ahead with a new cooperation framework in spite of downstream protests.

Right now Egypt is more preoccupied with internal protests that are busy reshaping the political scene and generating a more plural political future. This could reshape the way Egypt behaves within existing basin cooperation arrangements – including the Nile Basin Initiative – and engender a wider range of voices in decision making in the basin. But an alternative, and less welcome, outcome would be the emergence of a new politics which would gather disparate political voices around renewed ‘resource nationalism’ - taking Egypt back to the 1970s and 1980s, and towards further belligerence with upstream states. On the brighter side, however, a new political pluralism could generate a more developmental and equitable outlook by Egypt, and could end in the re-establishment of relations with sub-Saharan African states on a more inclusive footing.

For an independent Southern Sudan, the choice is between adhering to the existing 1959 Agreement and demanding a share of Sudan’s existing 18.5 billion cubic metres a year of water (Egypt has 55.5 billion under the NWA), or opting out of the agreement and looking southwards and eastwards towards closer alignment with states of the East African Community – and Ethiopia. If Juba chooses to demand a slice of the existing agreement (say, half of Sudan’s current quota) it may have to agree to completion of the controversial Jonglei Canal project as quid pro quo. This will help to conserve waters flowing through the Sudd (Southern Sudan’s vast swamp and a globally important ecosystem) and increase flows to downstream states. But the Jonglei Canal is hugely controversial, and its initial construction was a key trigger of the long-running civil war.

If the southerners decide to look to stronger alliances upstream and join the ‘breakaway bloc’ this may strengthen their position with respect to future investment under the Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA). Already many donors are viewing the ‘upstreamers’ as capable of taking the CFA forward without Egypt and Sudan. Rapidly expanding markets within an integrated East Africa are one such investor magnet – and, crucially, for the Chinese in particular.

During 2011 both Egypt and Sudan will be invited to join the CFA one last time by the upstream states. Their reaction will shed light on the re-configuration of relationships between old and new Nile basin states. One state watching attentively is Ethiopia. Last week Prime Minister Meles Zenawi announced new hydropower projects in the Blue Nile basin. This apparent attempt to take advantage of weaker downstream neighbours is clearly provocative, but also a sign of increasing upstream confidence. At the same time, however, Meles has also been careful to keep downward pressures on food prices, mindful of the potential for unrest in his own country.

Alan Nicol is a Research Fellow at IDS and the STEPS Centre a.nicol@ids.ac.uk
Ana Cascão is Project Manager at SIWI ana.cascao@siwi.org

>> Our research on Water
>> Stockholm International Water Institute

EGYPT AND SUDAN: POLITICS AND WATER IN A NEW NILE STATE

2011-02-17T12:44:00.004Z

Our STEPS Water Seminar on 22 February is with Ana Cascão from Stockholm International Water Institute, who's recently returned from working in Egypt and Sudan. Ana is a political scientist with a particular interest in the politics of water in the Middle East and North-East Africa. Her main research topic is the hydropolitics in the Nile River Basin. Her seminar will be entitled "Breaking Waters: The Birth of a New Nile State?"

An 11th Nile basin state has almost certainly been added as a result of the referendum in South Sudan. This subdivision of a key Nile state – the most midstream of them all – has important political, economic and social consequences for international efforts at harnessing cooperation and stimulating integration amongst the basin states.

How South Sudan plays its future role will be critical to the whole project of Nile cooperation. It has the capacity to bind together with North Sudan (and Egypt) and maintain the status quo, or look south, to the rapid integration of Nile equatorial states around the East African Community.

To participate in the seminar, email h.lebris@ids.ac.uk

>> Event details
>> Seminar flyer (pdf)

WHAT DOES "ONE HEALTH" MEAN?

2011-02-16T14:00:00.004Z

STEPS Centre researcher Paul Forster is blogging from the International One Health Congress in Melbourne. This is his second and final post from the Congress.

Three full days on from its start on Monday (adding up to 38 hours of hard conferencing plus a further 38 hours of parallel sessions), the 1st International One Health Congress in Melbourne concluded this Wednesday evening, resolving to... meet again in a year or two. Encompassing an astounding number and range of subjects and disciplines - a glance at just two hours from today’s parallel sessions throws up land use, laboratory services, virology, epidemiology, food security, wildlife management, institutional structures, curriculum development, trade, and public health, for example - serious mutterings emerged in the concluding session regarding possible needs for a ‘One Health’ society and a ‘One Health’ journal.

The main issue that remained to be resolved was critical: what is ‘One Health’? How is this putative, cross-cutting, neo-discipline that aspires to link human health, animal health and what is perhaps best described as environmental health, to be defined? At the evangelical end of the spectrum, the enthusiasts talk of a 'movement', urging the laggards to 'get out of their comfort zones'; and are keen to broaden the enterprise to include nutrition, livelihoods and trade, for example, and set metaphorical explosive charges against the thick concrete walls of the silos that exist within many existing institutions and much existing thinking. The less enthusiastic - there are not many, but one or two are vocal, perhaps mischievously so - press for a clear definition, looking to both tear down existing silos and create new ones.

Aside from a definition, which I’d suggest is unnecessary (clichéd phrases like 'let many flowers bloom', or 'horses for courses' come to mind), the other significant matter outstanding at the congress’s conclusion was the need to quantitatively prove that benefits would accrue from the One Health approach. Qualitatively, there’s little or no dispute that a One Health approach makes sense; but as one World Bank representative put it: we need to define some economic drivers for One Health. This is difficult, if not impossible, especially if the enterprise remains loosely defined, with any number of useful fuzzy edges. Estimates suggest that the major zoonotic diseases (excluding HIV/AIDS) have had impacts of at least $80 billion over the last 12 years, but those doing the sums stress that this is more of a guess than an estimate, and excludes the likes of ‘ripple’ and ‘overspill’ effects. There remains a monumental task for someone with both imagination and an extensive spreadsheet.

Having got my two reasonably well rehearsed presentations ('Responding to highly pathogenic avian influenza – surveillance in Indonesia' and 'Responding to highly pathogenic avian influenza – contract farming, market chains, and debt relations') out of the way, my main task today was to fly the STEPS flag as a discussion speaker in a plenary session. I was speaking alongside, among others, David Butler-Jones (Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer) and Jane Halton (currently Secretary of Australia’s Department of Health and Ageing, and a past President of the World Health Assembly). Following in Andy Stirling’s clear footsteps, and his paper 'Keep it complex' in Nature in December last year (Nature 468:1029-1031), the job involved introducing upwards of 300 delegates to what was for most of them a relatively novel approach to a fundamental concept: risk. In a nutshell, Stirling suggests that a narrow focus on risk is an inadequate response to incomplete knowledge. As my synopsis continued, I had a feeling that the panel was ever-so-discreetly shuffling their chairs away from mine, and the audience itself was distant, all but invisible beyond the stage lighting.

As it turned out, at coffee afterwards, it felt better: congratulations and even a "bravely said" from one particularly respected colleague. There were also a dozen requests for Andy’s paper to be sent on. A success perhaps then, both qualitatively and quantitatively defined.

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One Health, One World?

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ONE HEALTH, ONE WORLD?

2011-02-14T11:29:00.006Z

Photo: SARS Mural, from Steel Monkey's Flickr photostream (creative commons)

STEPS Centre researcher Paul Forster is blogging from the International One Health Congress in Melbourne. This is the first of his posts from the Congress.

"Are you from the human side, or the animal side?" The question came from a doctor - an epidemiologist - from Bangladesh. Hmmm. We were twelve hours adrift from London, and it was the first coffee break of what was meant to be the morning at the 1st International One Health Congress in Melbourne. Subtitled (just a shade dramatically) 'Human Health, Animal Health, the Environment and Global Survival', the congress has drawn around 650 global delegates to drive forwards a still-fluid agenda fostered most largely by (in reverse chronological order) the emergence of bird flu, SARS, and HIV-AIDS: all diseases which have crossed the species barrier from animals to infect, and kill, humans. Feeling barely human myself (i.e. capable of speech), I launched into my socio-politico 'science isn't everything' pitch, wondering why there are no doctors, yet, who are charged with attending full-time to the environment.

My questioner had however put his finger on one nub of the issue - the institutional, educational and even emotional divides that separate human health issues from animal health issues, which are well-characterised by another, more rhetorical, question put to me later in the day. "If your Prime Minister, or my President, had the Minister for Health and the Minister for Agriculture sitting across his desk and they did not agree, who would he take most notice of?" Accepting the fact that animals don't have votes, the point had to be accepted, although almost three-quarters of the world's new diseases since World War II have been transmitted to people from animals, a total of around 30 in the last twenty-five years - the most recent of which, H1N1 influenza ('Swine flu'), spread around the world from a pig farm in Mexico in just nine weeks.

Drawn by the promise of "an exciting week of 'One Health' science", the attendees appeared largely to have subscribed to an important, and somewhat humbling, concept. Most medical doctors dealing with infectious diseases are delighted that an issue obvious to them is being taken up more widely. Veterinarians are pleased that their professional importance in the global order of things, scandalously underestimated to date, is being recognised. Epidemiologists on both side of the divide are delighted to be able to say, with a knowing smile: "humans and animals are biologically exactly the same". Political scientists might wish to nuance this slightly, but the point is well made, and well taken. It also provides social scientists with all manner of opportunities to examine and re-examine relatively difficult concepts such as uncertainty, and to stress relatively simple ones such as social justice.

Given that the 'One Health' concept, first formulated in 2004 by the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, is now six or seven years old; and that the notion has been enthusiastically taken up, and developed, by the international agencies charged with responding to avian and pandemic influenza from 2006 onwards; three big questions - at least to this participant - hung over the first day. (1) What happens next? How is this concept driven forwards so that change happens urgently over the next year or two, rather than incrementally, over the decades that it takes for a new generation of health professionals to be trained? (2) Given the willingness of the two major international agencies concerned - the United Nations World Health Organization (UN WHO) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN FAO) - to engage, both conceptually and practically: whither the (officially non-UN) Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), which appears determined to maintain a shadowy, almost non-existent, presence on the sidelines? (3) Perhaps most importantly, who stands for the environment in this professionally-charged debate?

It (the environment) could set a conceptually simple, solid, and popular foundation for the entire enterprise. As it turned out, it was about the only relevant entity I did not hear discussed on the first day of the congress. Human health or animal health? Put it in those terms, and I am cheering for environmental health.

Links

>> STEPS Centre research on Health
>> International One Health Congress in Melbourne

SOLAR STOVES: MAKING THINGS PEOPLE ACTUALLY USE

2011-02-10T11:01:00.003Z

Photo: Solar technology in the CIFRES carpark, by Adrian Ely

By Adrian Ely, Manifesto project convenor

In the car park of the International Centre for Training and Research in Solar Energy (CIFRES) in Dakar, lie the remains of successive attempts to introduce solar technology into Senegal. Each day the researchers drink tea prepared in a solar oven based on the principle of the greenhouse effect, but the same technology has not been taken up widely in villages across the country. Now researchers are trying a new approach that involves community members from the outset.

It has long been recognised that the introduction of technologies without regard to people's cultural contexts and preferences often ends in low adoption and ineffective use. The introduction of solar cookers in Africa in the 1970s largely failed due to cooking preferences amongst local women – they were afraid to burn their hands, preferred not to cook outside at noon and in any case reserved their traditional ‘stove’ for evening cooking. The parabolic cookers in the car park are a testimony to such failures. Now, however, CIFRES is experimenting with the same technology for various forms of food processing, rather than the more culturally-sensitive activity of cooking.

The researcher in charge of solar thermal technologies at the Institute tells me that they have learned from these experiences. They now recognise the role that social scientists, anthropologists and – importantly – users can play in guiding the development of the technology, as well as making sure it’s used widely, and that it’s economically viable and socially useful. A team of researchers is now visiting villages twice a week over a period of months to discuss the various oven designs with women, and to experiment with local artisans on how they can be manufactured using local materials.

Clearly, this kind of research can help move towards more just and sustainable outcomes for the users of the technology. What other methods can be used to guide innovation through understanding social and cultural factors? The STEPS Centre is currently undertaking a project entitled “New Models of Technology Assessment for Development”, financially supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. We are investigating ways in which communities and other stakeholders can be brought into technology assessment processes, which have traditionally been limited to technical debates. Beyond involving an increased degree of participation (for example through citizen panels or juries), the “new models” are more global than previous approaches (a couple of examples are Worldwide Views on Global Warming and the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD)). As discussed in a report produced last year by Richard Sclove (2010), they may also be conducted by flexible networks of actors, and can take place virtually (rather than within formal, rigid institutions like the former US Office of Technology Assessment). Networked governance structures are advocated in the STEPS Centre’s New Manifesto, which suggests national and global bodies to evaluate innovation activities with the aim of improving their outcomes for sustainability and development. Could these networked technology assessments, building on lessons from previous initiatives, inform policies and strategies that drive innovation in better directions for communities in developing countries? If so, the solar cooking stoves of the future might be used for more than a few cups of tea.

References

Châtel, B.H. (1979) Technology Assessment and Developing Countries. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Vol. 13 203-211.

Sclove, R. (2010) Reinventing Technology Assessment: A 21st Century Model, Washington DC, Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars

Links

>> Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto

DILEMMAS IN THE SEARCH FOR APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGIES

2011-02-09T16:40:00.003Z

By Adrian Smith, STEPS Centre member

This post is also available in Spanish at the Tecnologias Sociales blog.

Observing national innovation policies around the world, one is struck by some recurring technological themes. Again and again, governments (and partners in business) seek innovation systems capable of exploiting information and communication technologies, bio-technologies, and nano-technologies. Diverse countries persist in either keeping up with, or catching up with, an apparently universal techno-economic frontier. These dominant technologies constitute the means to economic growth. Each signifies the rise of powerful, apparently autonomous, knowledge bases, around which national institutions of innovation policy, including firms, research organisations, entrepreneurs, and citizens, must forge linkages in order to realise promising competitive capabilities.

Peering beyond the mainstream, however, the careful observer will notice an enduringly awkward demand in the political undercurrents of innovation policy. It is a demand that furnishes its own set of themes for technology. Appropriate technology, peoples’ technology, and social technology signify a different hope for knowledge production and its material application. In contrast to an approach adapting national policy circumstances to specialised fields of technology, these alternative technology approaches call for innovation policies rooted in the particular experiences and needs of local communities, as articulated by those communities. Institutions should forge links with knowledges relevant to the local situation, and empower people to have control over whatever technology development is helpful to them (wherever that technical knowledge comes from).

Of course, proponents of mainstream innovation policy rightly point to the employment and wealth creating benefits of their new technologies. But as emerging economies grow, and advocates seek in ICT-, bio- and nano- the technologies that will upgrade accumulation in their industries, so calls also go out for appropriate technologies that address the people left behind. Instead of waiting for growth to either trickle down or float people upwards, appropriate technology activists advocate innovations that help the marginalised more directly and more immediately. The consequences of distinctions between the innovation mainstream and the appropriate technology undercurrent also binds them together. It is no coincidence that the economic rise of India and Brazil, both of whom are committed to mainstream innovation policies, has been accompanied by social movements (and social programmes) for Peoples’ Technologies and Social Technologies respectively.

Both movements share family resemblances with the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s and 1980s. However, what makes this new generation so interesting, and perhaps less likely to repeat earlier mistakes, is the way they try to put socio-economic organisation and community empowerment at the heart of their projects. Peoples’ Technology Initiatives seek to organise the innovation of production and consumption systems across large numbers of villages, in contrast to the classic AT focus on village level technologies. The idea is that this larger scale can create niche spaces that hold the political economic pressures of global capital at bay, and can facilitate appropriate innovations for those village communities within their niches.

In Brazil, a social technologies network has expanded rapidly since its inception in 2005. It includes over 200 organisations, mostly in Brazil, but also in other Latin American countries and some in Africa (with support from the Brazilian government and corporate social responsibility funds of national banks and businesses). According to the Social Technologies Network (www.rts.org.br), the most important aspect to social technology is the community development process that carries the project. It is this social process that is at the heart of social technology: thereby avoiding earlier appropriate technology fixations on finding the right gadget whilst forgetting the process. On pragmatic grounds, the Social Technologies Network has developed databases and case studies of social technology artefacts, formed in part to demonstrate the extent of activity to funders and potential supporters. These are reminiscent of appropriate technology handbooks of old. But the real purpose behind social technologies is to nurture local innovation and empowerment processes from project to project, and from community to community.
The social technology goal is to empower people and seed wider social transformation through the capabilities acquired during a particular project, and that then drive initiative in subsequent projects in the locality. The partnerships that are formed are not only about making sure immediate solutions are locally appropriate. Additionally, learning to work with neighbours, university researchers, civil society organisations, funders, technology suppliers, politicians, and so on, is also intended to improve the ability of the community to organise and solve further problems, develop and exploit economic opportunities, and create the capacity to mobilise resources from others. Grassroots innovation capabilities are seen as requiring political and economic capabilities whose capacity increases through successions and networks of projects. Social technologies are neither artefacts nor standard products. Each project needs innovations to adapt to local contexts, and hence builds innovative capabilities. However, even this description misses the point made in the paragraphs above, which relates to the social technology deliberately requiring local innovative effort, since it is through this that solidarity will be built and communities empowered. As such, social technologies aspire to be a catalyst for social development in a broader and more mobilising sense than some learning-based approaches to project development (which were, in their turn, informed by appropriate technology critiques of an earlier generation of blueprint approaches to project development).

One example is the ‘cisterna’ initiative in Brazil, which is a rainwater harvesting system. It was developed by a building worker with help from university researchers. The university input was advice over materials and how to ensure the water was collected in ways that kept it in good quality. One might imagine a standard system design could easily be diffused as an affordable product; but it is the self-build aspect that constructs links in the community and initiates the social processes. This not only allows appropriate adaptation, but seeks to empower people too. The water subsequently ‘belongs’ to the self-builders, not to the utilities, nor is it dependent upon the patronage of a local politician. Perhaps it can inspire attempts to build further community resilience through future projects. That at least, is the claim: bringing experimentation and empowerment together. Of course, some people may not wish to engage in this way, and would prefer alternative development processes that provide access to ready-made water systems. Of course, the jobs and (redistributed) wealth arising in mainstream innovation policies might provide the resources for such top-down provision of (even better) water systems; which means a social technology approach has to prove its worth amongst diverse development pathways.

It can be difficult to persuade mainstream innovation policy that social technologies are a serious source of innovation and development for the country. Conventional innovation catch up measures prevail. Even though the science and technology minister sits on the 15 member board of the Social technologies Network, some within the social technology movement are saying it is difficult to open up mainstream innovation policy to allow more space for social technologies. Other ministries are more supportive, since the outcomes of social technologies meet their goals, but this limits social technologies to a social programme, rather than democratising science and technology by building up and building upon grassroots innovation capability.

What might a democratised innovation policy involve? It could begin to re-orientate some of the incentives that constrain scientific engagement and activity in social technology processes. Innovation policy for social technologies could work on a number of fronts. This would include training (action) researchers to realise the complementary value (and satisfaction) in working with local communities, rather than exclusively targeting research efforts towards publications, patents and other international criteria for scientific esteem. Innovation policy support might also convince commercial companies that social technology initiatives can inform their core business strategies in product and service development (such as marketable rainwater systems for other sectors in society). This means going well beyond an add-on corporate social responsibility programme. Innovation policy might also provide institutional support for intellectual property issues with social technologies. The whole ethos of social technologies is to make knowledge about the processes, techniques and products of social technologies freely available, but which nevertheless might need ‘protecting’ from enclosure by more predatory firms and their patenting activities. The Honey Bee Network for grassroots innovation in India is trying to do precisely these things, through a sometimes difficult involvement of activists in the National Innovation Foundation. Firmer innovation policy commitment to social technologies might even extend to feeding lessons back to higher-tech manufacturers, who develop designs more adaptable to social technology processes and enable poorer communities to have greater involvement in the development process. The challenge is for grassroots innovation niches to develop into a power base that could drive a larger proportion of the agendas, resources and institutions of mainstream science and technology. Networks, identities and interests are crucial here.

Such an encounter between grassroots innovation and mainstream innovation policy presents challenges to both sides. In order to win some of the mainstream over to the approaches of social technology, advocates will have to prove their worth on conventional terms of innovation policy; when ideally they wish to change those terms. The development of a broader power base for social technology could mean re-defining it in ways that lose sight of its more radical roots, and the radical routes to democratising technology. The experimentation and innovative results of social technologies need to impress more commercially-minded interests as well as community development advocates. Mainstream innovation policy actors meanwhile will have to let go of certain agendas and resources, in order to open up directions of experimentation to the needs of others. Meaningful dialogue requires the identification of common ground. It is unclear just how broad is this space currently for re-directing mainstream innovative efforts towards more direct sustainability and poverty reducing goals. Opening this space will prove unsettling for the current political economy of science and technology, and as such is very challenging.

Were the grassroots empowerment of social technology policies to lead to the shaping of much more plural and equitable science and technology agendas, then some of the aims for democratising technology that inspired early advocates of appropriate technology in the last century might eventually be fulfilled in this century. But it seems to me, at least, that new approaches to long-standing concerns reveal that some of the fundamentals remain the same.

SCIENCE AND DEMOCRACY: GATHERING MOMENTUM?

2011-02-08T15:03:00.005Z

By Adrian Ely, Manifesto project convenor

The Science and Democracy World Forum is part of a growing movement responding to the challenges of sustainability and development. At this year’s event in Dakar, there are about 300 participants from 90 organisations across the world, with strong representation from the global South and a large number of African delegates.

The SDWF was started in Belem, Brazil in 2009, and this year came to Dakar in advance of the World Social Forum. Since 2009, numbers at the SDWF have doubled, while attendance at the WSF itself has declined – perhaps a sign of an increasing global (sub-)politics of science technology in the run-up to the Rio+20 summit next May.

The groups represented at the forum are hugely diverse – ranging from those working to improve science education at different levels, to organisations focussing on pro-poor technologies or ‘traditional knowledge’, to advocacy groups campaigning for the democratisation of ‘emerging technologies’. I presented the STEPS Centre project Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto, which talks to many of these concerns.

The issues discussed at the many workshops during the forum included some of those highlighted in the Multimedia Manifesto, in particular the important role of civil society in transforming innovation systems, the need for more strategic and inclusive governance of science, technology and innovation at national and international levels, and demands for increased accountability in policies and investments around science, technology and innovation.

I’m particularly encouraged by the solidarity shown across the broad spectrum of people here. There is a sense of a global movement, gathering momentum, that recognises the contributions of knowledge and innovation of all kinds – not only “scientific” – in addressing challenges of sustainability and development.

Links

>> Science and Democracy World Forum
>> Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto

FEEDING THE FUTURE? THE FORESIGHT REPORT ON FOOD AND FARMING

2011-02-07T14:52:00.003Z

By John Thompson and Erik Millstone, STEPS Centre Food and Agriculture Co-Convenors

A new report from the UK Government-commissioned study into Global Food and Farming Futures has called for urgent action to improve food security in the UK and around the world and to avert global hunger. The Foresight report on The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainability recognises that the current food system is unsustainable and will fail to end hunger unless radically redesigned.

At the launch in London last Tuesday, Professor Sir John Beddington, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government who initiated and oversaw the project, stressed that the two-year study “provides compelling evidence for governments to act now.” He declared “the era of cheap food is at an end”, with the real prices of key crops estimated to rise 50-100% during the next 40 years, if productivity growth no longer keeps pace with rising demand for food at a time of rapid environmental, social and technological change.

The Foresight report presents a dark picture of the future: one in which a global food crisis could be triggered by a surge in demand for food and energy by 50% and for fresh water by 30%, at a time when governments must also combat climate change. In his opening address, Prof Beddington characterised this convergence of drivers of change as a “perfect storm”, because the interaction of these complex, interlocking forces operating within the same time may create a crisis with global consequences. He pointed out that this chilling scenario is not inevitable, but it is plausible.

This crisis narrative has more than a tinge of neo-Malthusianism about it and has framed the Global Food and Farming Futures project since its inception. Fortunately, it has been toned down slightly in the new Foresight report. Yet it remains the central conceptual thread running through the entire document and featured in the launch presentations, which emphasised production and consumption-oriented responses to the triple challenges of chronic hunger, malnutrition and obesity over political economic solutions that would address underlying structural constraints and focus on distributional issues and the politics of food allocation more forcefully. Thus, a big part of the Foresight agenda calls for producing a great deal more food for a rapidly growing population with new and old technologies alike. As Prof Charles Godfray of Oxford University and Chair of the Lead Expert Group that guided the project argued in his talk, if food supplies are to increase sufficiently to prevent widespread starvation as the global population heads towards 9 billion by 2050, a new agricultural revolution is needed, one focused on promoting “Sustainable Intensification” – i.e. a method of enlisting all technologies, including genetic modification, to grow more food on the same land area – about 4.6bn hectares – without damaging the environment or requiring excessive inputs of fertiliser, water or energy.

To a degree, this idea of “Sustainable Intensification” is similar to the “Doubly Green Revolution” concept put forward by Gordon Conway well over a decade ago. However, both concepts, while positive in principle, are likely to be highly contentious and difficult to implement in practice. Like the first Green Revolution, such a transformation towards more intensive production will entail convincing millions of farmers to adopt a range of new, often-expensive and hard-to-obtain inputs and, as a result, will confront well-documented barriers to technological change in developing country agriculture. With its environmental overtones, it will also face a number of new obstacles, including a divergence between the interests of policy-makers and farmers; a policy context biased in favour of input-intensive agriculture; and the fact that many environmentally friendly technologies often have relatively high set-up costs. At least in the short run, institutional constraints and corporate biases in favour of commodity crops in which they can maintain control over intellectual property rights over staple food crops (global public goods) will limit the contribution of agricultural biotechnology to overcoming these obstacles. For these reasons, the first Green Revolution may be an overly optimistic model for a shift to a more intensive and sustainable production system.

The Foresight emphasis on “Sustainable Intensification” focuses rather narrowly on farm-level agricultural production and perhaps misses the wider debate about how to encourage appropriate innovation systems that respond to the diversity of needs of highly differentiated farming communities, and how, through such processes, to offer a wide range of technology choice through various combinations of routes – public and private, group-based and individual, deploying scientific and indigenous knowledge. There is a need to use a diversity of technologies and practices too and develop robust institutions, at both local level, but also critically at national and international levels, which see the challenge of technology innovation and development in a more rounded, comprehensive way.

But growing more food more intensively and sustainably may not be sufficient on its own. As Charles Godfray observed, action must also be taken on addressing waste across the entire food chain, as this will be important for any strategy to feed some eight billion people sustainably and equitably by 2030. The Foresight study reports that least 30% of food grown – and as much as 50% according to some estimates – is lost or wasted before or after it reaches consumers. Evidence collected for the study shows that a realistic target would be to halve the amount of food wasted by 2050, which would cut the amount of food required by a quarter of today’s production. This requires not only new food processing and storage techniques, but empowering consumers to become more food literate.

Professor Lawrence Haddad, Director of the Institute of Development Studies and another member of the Lead Expert Group, stressed the shocking fact that hunger is not a major political issue at the moment. But it should be, as an estimated 925 million people still lack enough to eat and another 1 billion suffer from 'hidden hunger' because essential nutrients are missing from their diets. He observed that the task is difficult because the food system is working for the majority of people, while those suffering hunger or at risk of malnutrition have least influence on decision-making. Conversely, a further one billion people are "substantially over-consuming", spawning a new public health epidemic involving the chronic diseases associated with obesity.

This focus on food politics is to be welcomed, but we would have liked to have seen it dealt with in a much more systematic and robust way in the report. As it stands, the discussion about the need to improve governance of the international food system remains rather underdeveloped and disappointingly short on specifics. Nevertheless, economic modelling for the Foresight study does show how perverse trade restrictions can amplify shocks and add to price volatility, as in the 2007-08 food price spike, which led to an extra 100 million people going hungry. Thus, the report calls for the need to reduce agricultural subsidies to farmers in rich (OECD) countries and dismantle trade barriers that disadvantage poor countries. It also recognises that smallholder farmers in poor countries need more public policy support, for example to increase investments in agricultural research and extension services. Finally, the report stresses that for the world to be free of hunger, there has to be physical, economic and social access to food. However, to tackle these multifaceted distributional issues, a more potent and consistent consensus on tackling the root causes of hunger is needed. To achieve this, the Foresight Future of Food and Farming study argues that strong levels of “political courage and leadership” will be required, along with coordinated action across a range of scales to carry this through, but how this would be done is not adequately addressed in the report.

Two key UK Government ministers who attended the launch - Caroline Spelman, the Secretary of State for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and Stephen O’Brien, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for the Department for International Development (DFID) - welcomed the report and said they would push for global action on food security.

Responding to the Foresight’s report’s recommendations, Ms Spelman noted, “This is a report that must not gather dust... We need a global, integrated approach to food security, one that looks beyond the food system to the inseparable goals of reducing poverty, tackling climate change and reducing biodiversity loss – and the UK Government is determined to show the international leadership needed to make that happen We can unlock an agricultural revolution in the developing world, which would benefit the poorest the most, simply by improving access to knowledge and technology, creating better access to markets and investing in infrastructure.”

She went on to say, “We must apply a food security lens to all issues we address. We must also align our policies across government and use the UK’s buying power to drive change. This global challenge requires a global response.”

Stephen O’Brien remarked, “Substantial actions are needed in three areas: (1) invest in sustainable production (2) reduce waste and (3) improve governance of the food system. All actors must be involved – public sector, private sector and civil society – and the role of agriculture must be given higher priority in international development. Land-based development is where we can have the biggest impact in reducing rural poverty in developing countries while producing enough food to provide for a growing global population needs a sustained focus on agriculture.”

Both ministers emphasised that as well as boosting economic growth, investment in agriculture means that poorest countries are able to feed their populations and are more resilient to shocks and stresses caused by changing global food prices and climate change.

Of course, while we wholeheartedly endorse this view and the call for positive and sustained action based on the key recommendations emerging from the Foresight Future of Food and Farming report, the proof of the pudding will, as always, be in the eating.

Links

>> Foresight report and other supporting documents
>> STEPS Centre: Food and Agriculture
>>Biotechnology Research Archive: Poverty reduction and food security - impacts of GM crops

CALL FOR PAPERS: WATER AND SANITATION SYMPOSIUM 2011

2011-01-17T12:07:00.004Z

The STEPS Centre's Water and Sanitation Symposium on 22-23 March is entitled "Some for All? Pathways and Politics in Water and Sanitation since New Delhi, 1990".

We'll be looking at the political economy and politics of water and sanitation in the 21 years since the publication of "Some for all rather than more for some" (aka the New Delhi Statement).

Keynote and plenary speakers will include Gourishankar Ghosh, Jon Lane, Erik Swyngedouw and James Winpenny.

If you'd like to present a paper addressing the themes of the symposium (or simply attend the event), please send an email with a short abstract (maximum 1 page) to N.Vernon@ids.ac.uk by 14th February.

>> Event details: Water and Sanitation Symposium

4 BIG CHALLENGES FOR WATER AND SANITATION

2011-01-05T14:53:00.006Z

Photo: Map of sanitation in Ndeke village, Zambia, from the CLTS Flickr photostream

We live in uncertain times. If you’re looking for something that embodies the changing and conflicting forces of politics, power, the environment and human relations, you can’t do much better than water. It’s a source of life, through drinking water and agriculture; and a bringer of death and destruction in the form of floods or water-borne diseases.

A team at the STEPS Centre have been looking at the dynamics of water & sanitation, and at a recent Symposium, explored four broad areas which contain important challenges for 2011 and beyond. We’ve just produced a Working Paper summarising the symposium (PDF), and an accompanying briefing (PDF) which explains the areas discussed. Here, though, is a quick look at some of the big issues:

1. Climate change and uncertainty

The scientific understanding of the impact of climate change on water isn’t complete. As climate change continues, things get more uncertain and variable, and extreme events occur. For policy makers and managers, who need things to be predictable (or at least have some measure of risk) this causes a problem.

What may help is a new understanding of uncertainty which recognises different kinds of incomplete knowledge – not just risks and probabilities.

2. Peri-urban zones

Over a third of city-dwellers live in slums. In Africa, some governments have tried to fight against rising urbanisation by limiting services, rather than respond to a growing need. Many people access water & sanitation in informal ways, sometimes deliberately opting out of the formal provision. Again, this presents a challenge for sustainability.

3. Sanitation and disease

There is a major gap between sanitation policy and what’s happening on the ground. An equally big challenge is encouraging people locally to adopt more hygienic practices that work for them. Community-Led Total Sanitation is a growing response to this, allowing people space to develop their own sanitation systems – and also feeding back some of this learning to policy makers.

4. Technologies, access rights and uncertainty

Technology is often developed in response to a problem. But when the ecological landscape is changing and uncertain, it makes it difficult to ensure that a specific technology will help. The way people behave around a technology, and use the systems provided for them, adds an extra layer of uncertainty.

In many places, access to water is unfair, and rights of access often emerge through struggles. People don’t come to think of access as a right, until they have mobilised and started making demands. One big challenge is how to recognise and highlight the needs of people who are often marginalised and excluded from decisions about water and sanitation.

>> Briefing: Liquid Dynamics (pdf 195kb)
>> Working Paper: Liquid Dynamics symposium report (pdf 485kb)
>> STEPS Centre research: water and sanitation

VIDEO: BRAND AID - SHOPPING WELL TO SAVE THE WORLD

2010-11-29T13:38:00.004Z

Here's the video of last week's seminar on Bono, "aid celebrities" and the RED campaign, by Lisa Ann Richey, Professor of International Development Studies at Roskilde University.

If embedding doesn't work, here's the link: Brand Aid seminar

For more about our seminars and other events, see the event list on the STEPS Centre website.

AFRICA AND THE MDGs: A MANIFESTO

2010-11-25T16:14:00.011Z

By Adrian Ely, STEPS Centre member

[Edit (7/12/10): The Africa Manifesto has now been launched: you can download it from the ATPS website.]

Ten years after the African Technology Policy Studies network was incorporated, nearly 200 delegates from 29 African countries are gathering in Egypt to discuss ‘The State of Science, Technology and Innovation in Africa: Implications for Achieving the Millennium Development Goals’.

There was a buzz as delegates gathered for the first morning of the conference, many of them greeting friends who they had not seen since last year’s meeting in Abuja. The introductory session included welcomes from ATPS and other delegates representing key stakeholders and drivers of science, technology and innovation in Africa - youth, women and journalists - as well as international partners. Dr Kevin Urama, Executive Secretary of ATPS, provided an introduction to the workshop (which he reminded us was NOT a "talkshop"), stressing that delegates were expected to go away from the conference with a fuller understanding of their potential contribution to Science, Technology & Innovation (STI) for Africa’s development.

The cover of the "African Manifesto"

Dr Urama highlighted the African Manifesto, which will be presented to the meeting tomorrow (he'd spoken about it at the launch of the STEPS Centre Manifesto in June). The African Manifesto was produced under the European SET-DEV project, alongside its ‘sister manifesto’ in India, Knowledge Swaraj. I'll blog more on the African Manifesto tomorrow, but today we learned that it “makes a case for Africa’s sovereignty in science, technology and innovation”, arguing “for full socialization and democratic governance of STI in Africa, for Africans, by Africans as a pre-requisite for sustainable development in Africa”.

Later presentations in the morning focussed on the challenges of STI governance, R&D investment, youth in STI, the risk of brain drain and making the most of the African diaspora.

The afternoon was dedicated to lessons provided from other regions – the Caribbean, Europe and India. The audience was clearly interested in the experiences of these regions, but the question remained: how transferable were they to the African continent? Whilst recognising the benefits of learning from international colleagues, the African Manifesto and the discussions today made it clear that Africa would have to conduct its own experiments, reap its own rewards, and learn its own lessons. The ATPS conference will clearly provide a forum for this learning and an inspiring gathering for those interested in science, technology and innovation in Africa.

Links

> African Technology Policy Studies network: Annual Conference
> Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto

LESSONS IN "SCALING UP" HEALTH SERVICES FROM NIGERIA, CHINA & BRAZIL

2010-11-25T09:50:00.003Z

What happens when you "scale up" health services to try to provide widespread coverage in a region or country? The "Beyond Scaling Up" panel at the Health Systems Research symposium last week posed this question. The speakers answered with success stories from Brazil, China and Nigeria; some cautionary tales from attempts to "scale up" that have gone wrong; and a warning that health programmes need to be aware of lots of factors which can put a spanner in the works:

"There has been a shift from absolute scarcity to problems with safety, quality and cost with changing patterns of inequality, the introduction of new technologies and institutional arrangements, the rise of patient and citizen movements and mixed systems."

Kate Hawkins has written a post reporting on the session on the Future Health Systems blog.

Links

> Future Health Systems blog: Exploring the spread and scale up of health interventions and service coverage
> Beyond Scaling Up panel: details
> STEPS Centre: Beyond Scaling Up working paper & briefing

MONTREUX: ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND HEALTH RISKS

2010-11-22T11:45:00.010Z

By Michael Loevinsohn, STEPS Centre member

On Wednesday I chaired a session on New Directions in Health-Environment Research: Implications for Health Systems.

The topic is a bit off the beam of the Symposium’s thrust: it's one of 13 concurrent sessions, and about 20 people attend. Setting the stage, I describe the methodological challenges researchers are tackling to uncover how environmental change, of different kinds, is creating health risks. Researchers are identifying developmental processes that are loosening structures of risk, and clarifying how the health sector and other sectors can collaborate to realize these opportunities (View or download my slides).

The first case I talk about is an (un)natural experiment: the 2001-03 famine and its impact on the evolution of HIV in Malawi. Using existing data, I show how hunger profoundly affected the distribution of HIV and of people, by pushing people into "survival sex" (sex in exchange for food, shelter or protection) and distress migration. The data also show that hunger was less severe, maize prices less volatile, and migration and change in HIV prevalence less marked, where people had access to robust crops like cassava alongside the maize staple. Cassava appears to have provided a “prevention dividend”.

Richard Coker from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine explains how the economic and social changes that have shaken Russia have altered the landscape of TB risk (view Richard's slides). Driven by the payment system, hospitals release patients in December, regardless of treatment status. Declining budgets have meant patients receive under 2000 Kcal/day, less than a prisoner of war. These and other effects on medical and hospital practice are likely contributing to the spread of drug resistance and the growing burden of TB in the population.

Ashok Dyalchand, Institute of Health Management, Pachod (view Ashok's slides), describes the emergence of new social norms in Indian villages that have taken up Community-Led Total Sanitation. People are disgusted when they realize that, because of open defecation, they are ingesting each others’ feces. They construct toilets and use them more consistently than where outside schemes construct them. Villages are cleaner and people enjoy greater privacy but diarrheal infections are not yet any less frequent. There may be greater collective commitment now to undertake the additional innovations that will be needed to sustainably reduce these risks.

Working in Java, Paul Forster has been examining the political economy of avian flu risks in poultry systems serving the Jakarta market (view Paul's slides). Other studies have followed the movement of birds, and viruses, between breeding, rearing, slaughtering and commercial operations. Paul has shown that by following the money, the critical role of brokers is revealed. Through extending credit to different actors, they maintain the structure of the industry and influence the exposure of those actors to birds and the virus. Any attempt at change must take them into account.

Finally, Hayley MacGregor describes the STEPS Centre approach to understanding epidemics and the complex dynamics at play at the health-environment interface (view her slides). She highlights how epidemic narratives, embodying the perspectives of different actors, shape responses, illustrating this with recent research on haemorrhagic fevers. A “global outbreak” narrative has dominated control efforts particularly for ebola virus. Local understandings indicate the virus has long been endemic and suggest several culturally acceptable measures. More effective responses are possible when such diverse perspectives are acknowledged.

> STEPS Centre: Socio-ecological dynamics of disease
> STEPS Centre: Epidemics
> STEPS Centre: Avian flu

MONTREUX: KNOWLEDGE AND TRUST - HEALTH SYSTEMS RESEARCH

2010-11-22T11:13:00.010Z

By Michael Loevinsohn, STEPS Centre member

You know you’re a discipline or a significant sub-discipline when you can organize and find funding for a global symposium. Twelve hundred participants from umpteen countries also testify to the self-awareness that marks a field. And the Symposium’s theme is fittingly ambitious: Science to Accelerate Universal Health Coverage.

Charlie Chaplin is in town but can’t make it to the Symposium. He’s buried just down the road. But I wonder what his Little Tramp, bowler-hatted and down-at-heels, would make of it. Would he be considered part of the System? Am I? My interest is in the determinants of disease in the turbulent social, economic and natural environment, and what that understanding can contribute, especially to prevention.

A huge variety of material is presented in 110 plenary and concurrent sessions related to the mobilization of knowledge, capacity and financing and the translation of research into policy and action. Access to care and immunization is the focus of most of the discussion. Not much is said about the determinants of disease – which lie outside the health system “proper” – and how they’re understood and responded to. I don’t hear much reference to how other sectors approach complexity and rampant change.

But there are some welcome resonances. A session on neglected tropical diseases – lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis and others, which often occur together – describes how vertical control programs for each visit the same village, sometimes with the same village health worker who distributes drugs, sometimes the same one, to households – but at different times. Integration would make a lot of sense. It becomes clear, however, that the obstacles are not at the local level but mostly at the program level: integration means one program director and four former directors.

Control of one of the neglected diseases, blinding trachoma, includes educating people to wash their face. The message is repeated in Sahelian villages where people have to walk 3 km for a bucket of water – and washing their face is not the first thing they’re going to do with it. There are echoes of condom promotion for HIV – even in places where everyone knows power relations prevent many women from using them.

Irene Agyepong talks as a participant observer on the evolution of health insurance in Ghana. A number of small scale experiments were run by different institutions trying various approaches. A larger scale experiment was also implemented but ran into serious problems. Yet when the political winds build and a broader program can no longer be avoided, it is the failed experiment that most influences its design. Close to hand and ready to go, its proponents say, "we can correct mistakes later". Irene points to rent-seeking behaviour but also says there are no easily-labelled saints or demons. It's the reality of evolution.

René Loewenson from Zimbabwe talks about national health systems as knowledge systems. She points to the vastly under-exploited sources of evidence that exist within countries. Researchers’ attentions shift away from them, swayed by external priorities and funding. The consistency of focus that is essential to build trust with national audiences is lost. It’s not just a problem for health systems.

> First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research
> STEPS Centre work on Health and Disease

MONTREUX: BEYOND SCALING UP

2010-11-16T17:16:00.007Z

Gerry Bloom, STEPS Centre health convenor, will be holding a session tomorrow (Thursday) at the the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Montreux, entitled "Beyond Scaling Up".

Here's a summary:

"This session will present findings and conclusions of a stream of work jointly organised by the Future Health Systems Consortium and the STEPS Centre. It will explore lessons from implementing large scale changes to health systems aimed at increasing access to important health services, particularly by the poor.

It will begin with brief presentations of literature reviews and conceptual frameworks for analysing rapid health system change. These presentations will be followed by papers that present evidence on the experiences with large scale health system change in Nigeria, Brazil and China. These will include a study of the experience of a large donor-funded project for strengthening primary health care services in Northern Nigeria, the experience of the Ministry of Health of Brazil in extending a decentralised, rights-based health system to meet the special needs of indigenous people and the Chinese experience with the management of health system reform in the context of rapid economic and social change. Each paper will present evidence on what worked and why.

The aim is to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the challenge of managing rapid increases in the delivery of health services and the strategies that have been shown to work in addressing this challenge."

Presenters include:

Gerry Bloom, STEPS Centre: "Beyond Scaling Up: Pathways to Universal Access to Health Services"

Ligia Paina: "Pathways to Scaling Up Health Services in Complex Adaptive Systems"

Emmanuel Sokpo: "Beyond Technical Solutions: Critical Pathway in the Political Economy of Health Development in Northern Nigeria"

Xiao Yue: "Implementing rapid health system reform in China: the importance of a learning approach"

Vera Schattan Coelho: "Making the Right to Health a Reality to Indigenous People in Brazil"

Links

First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research
Future Health Systems blog
STEPS: Health overview

MONTREUX: NEW DIRECTIONS IN ENVIRONMENT-HEALTH RESEARCH

2010-11-16T16:59:00.005Z

Some of us are at the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Montreux and running events discussing our recent work (see the STEPS Centre events page for full details).

Tomorrow (Wednesday), Michael Loevinsohn will be chairing a session at Montreux entitled "New directions in environment-health research: implications for health systems". (Michael's session's at 4pm - see also the full day programme.)

Here's what's going to be discussed:

"Environmental health research has traditionally been concerned with the impact of particular aspects of the environment on particular diseases. Rapid and multi-faceted environmental change is increasing the challenge to health systems, creating new sources of ill-health – in many cases zoonotic in origin – and exacerbating existing ones, often in the same place.

Participants in this session will gain a clearer appreciation of methods and approaches that are being employed:
> to elucidate how change is creating situations of risk for multiple sources of ill-health that are experienced and perceived differently by people differently situated;
> to identify and assess developmental dynamics that may be loosening risk structures, with the potential to yield multiple benefits in terms of health and well-being and
> to forge relationships with other sectors to develop and pursue these opportunities."

The speakers include:

Richard Coker, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine(UK/Thailand): TB and HIV in the Former Soviet Union: social transformations and the challenge of control

Ashok Dyalchand, Institute of Health Management, Pachod (India): Benefits of rural sanitation implemented through a community-led social norms approach: implications for health systems

Paul Forster, IDS (UK/Indonesia): Politics, power and economics: how debt creates avian influenza (H5N1) risk in Jakarta's poultry supply chains

Hayley MacGregor (UK): The social dynamics of disease ecology: case studies from African contexts

First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research
STEPS Centre: Socio-ecological dynamics of disease
STEPS: Health overview

TRANSITIONS: HOW GOOD IDEAS GO GLOBAL

2010-11-16T11:19:00.007Z

Traditional forms of energy supply are being challenged. Photo: Gas meter dials by Leo Reynolds on Flickr (Creative Commons)

By Adrian Smith, STEPS Centre member

How does a new way of doing things – say, fair trade, or community energy production – get a foothold? How does it avoid being overwhelmed or crushed by the dominant, existing system? What are the conditions that can help it or prevent it from flourishing?

The study of “sustainability transitions” aims to answer these questions. Sometimes, transitions happen on a massive scale – for example, with the “green revolution” in the 1940s-1970s – and usually with mixed results. Often, however, the dominant system can stifle the emergence of radically novel technologies or practices, so that even good ideas find it hard to gain traction.

For those wanting to promote more sustainable pathways, it’s important to understand how transitions can be nurtured when they’re at a small, vulnerable stage. Transitions thinking talks about supportive spaces (“niches”) where a new practice or technology can develop, sheltered from hostile structures or market forces. Once it has had chance to grow, it can start to move outside the niche and interact and compete more successfully with existing systems.

From fossil fuel to alternative power

An example of a dominant system and a possible transformation is in the area of energy. The dominant model of energy generation and use is currently being challenged by social pressure to reduce climate change, as well as fears over the security of energy supply. The assumption that development can continue to be powered by large fossil-fuel plants, for instance, is increasingly challenged by a variety of alternatives and their advocates. Whether it is nuclear energy, solar power, or managing patterns of demand, there is an increasing amount of political and material support for alternative pathways.

There are parallels to this picture in many development domains. What is needed is more analysis of the interactions and co-existence of plural pathways, and how each is affected differently by the others and the incumbent regimes of provision which they are all trying to displace.

What are niche spaces for?

As researchers, we are interested in the idea of ‘niche spaces’ that allow pathways to materialise and gain momentum through practical experimentation in the real world. Niche spaces are opened-up through networking processes amongst initiatives, which establish and foster alternative pathways.

What can this kind of networking do? Well, it allows people to share lessons – for example, about the development of viable off-grid electricity projects in diverse development settings. But while sharing lessons is a good thing - for example, it's undoubtedly an important area for learning-based development approaches and ideas for strategic niche management - on its own, lesson-sharing is somewhat limited and limiting. So, in addition, we are interested in how the networking that goes on in niche spaces cultivates shared identities, solidarities and mutual interests, which help mobilise demands for changes to wider institutions and social structures – changes that would enable niche practices to diffuse, scale-up and translate into much wider practices. This might happen through new institutions, or transformed markets, or through links with social movements, or through a re-thinking and re-design of large-scale development assistance programmes.

But niche spaces can also find it hard to develop. We need to confront head-on the political economy of incumbent regimes that makes the creation of niche spaces so difficult to establish and grow. Attention to the social movements that challenge these political economies can be helpful here, especially for the opportunities these social movements give to niche space developments.

STEPS Centre work on transitions

There is an emerging agenda for rethinking the roles of bottom-up and alternative social, technological and environmental development initiatives in the construction and realisation of sustainability pathways. The STEPS Centre plans to develop a ‘transitions’ cluster of projects that address this agenda as part of its second phase of work (how we do this depends on some funding decisions happening later this year).

Meanwhile, we continue to engage through a variety of projects and processes that include the following:

UK-based work on Community Innovation in Sustainable Energy. This is part of a broader programme of work on grassroots innovations for sustainable development, again with a UK focus, but which seeks to reach out to research with similar sensibilities in other parts of the world (including an international workshop to be held in Spring 2012). This project will develop insights into how niches are formed and mobilised in civil society settings, through an analysis of the recent ferment of activity on community energy in the UK.

Links with research into "social technologies" led by Hernán Thomas, Mariano Fressoli and colleagues at the Centro de Estudios de Ciencia, Tecnología y Sociedad at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes in Buenos Aires. Social technology is an approach to grassroots innovation for poorer and more marginalised communities in Latin America that seek to develop social integration and sustainability. As such, they hint at an intriguing set of pathways for sustainability which is also of interest to STEPS. The Quilmes team have an IDRC-funded project that is analysing the social technologies movement in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Brazil. Social technology initiatives benefit from a fairly developed network programme in Brazil which is supported by the Federal Government. There are features here reminiscent to earlier movements and debates about appropriate technology. We have been exploring these links through a Visiting Fellowship to the STEPS Centre that Mariano held in October 2010 through an ESRC-SSRC funding scheme, and which we are developing through a paper written by Mariano and Hernán and me.

I am involved in the Sustainability Transitions Research Network which brings together a variety of researchers and projects. Closest to our own STEPS Centre plans have been activities led by Frans Berkhout and Rob Raven from the network, and that are looking at sustainability experiments in South Asia and East Asia, initially through the IHDP, and now in a new NWO-funded project. Special issues of Technological Forecasting and Social Change in 2009 and Environmental Science and Policy in 2010 collected together papers on this topic. Here at the STEPS Centre, Rob Byrne in his DPhil has been comparing niche development processes for home solar electric systems in Tanzania and Kenya, and finding that there is more to relative success in Kenya that market-based claims being made by other analysts. An international conference on sustainability transitions at Lund University in Sweden on 13-15 June 2011 will provide an opportunity for similarly-inclined studies to meet and debate.

Niche spaces and protection. I am also collaborating with Rob Raven in an ESRC-NWO funded project that will analyse and develop the way "niche spaces" offer protection and help nurture the development of socio-technical alternatives. Whilst their study will compare different energy alternatives in the UK and Netherlands, it is nevertheless inspired by the controversial debates about protection associated with the “infant industries” literature in development economics. Insights arising from this project will provide questions and hopefully fruitful lines of analysis for nurturing alternative pathways in development settings in future work.

Natural resource based industries in Latin America. Another IDRC-funded project, led by Anabel Marin at Conicet / Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina and Antonio Carlos Figueira Galvão at Centro de Gestão e Estudos Estratégicos, is interested in applying the STEPS pathways approach to the question of natural resource based industries in Latin America. Influential economists in the region conventionally see natural resource based sectors as a brake on economic development. Anabel is interested in whether niche initiatives can open up more knowledge intensive, more economically interlinked, and more socially inclusive forms of sustainable natural resource exploitation in the region. I am helping her develop sustainability transitions ideas to the analysis for her project, which will also help rethink and revise the basic model, and develop our own thinking further.

Climate change negotiations. It is sobering to compare the innovative thinking around sustainability pathways with the narrow development of technology transfer agreements within international climate change negotiations. Too many of the international discussions consider technology transfer as an event, rather than a process, and see those transfers as rooted in techno-economic criteria, rather than the development of indigenous capabilities. This is despite 40 years of study that identifies socio-technical capability building processes to be so crucial that the term “technology transfer” becomes an unhelpful way to frame the challenges and roles of technology in addressing international climate change. Rob Byrne, Adrian Smith, David Ockwell and Jim Watson, in a new STEPS Centre Working Paper due in December, are considering what new light transitions thinking can shed on these long-standing debates, and whether transitions research might help unlock some advances in this area.

As we do more work on transitions, we’re looking forward to developing a number of exciting new projects and partnerships as part of the STEPS Centre’s ‘transitions’ research cluster. It would be great to hear from others doing similar work.

> STEPS Centre work on Dynamics (including transitions)
> Adrian Smith's profile

BEING "HEALTHILY SCEPTICAL" ABOUT BIOFORTIFICATION

2010-11-15T11:56:00.004Z

Lawrence Haddad, IDS Director, has written about the future of biofortification (and mentioned the STEPS Centre's work) on his blog, Development Horizons:

"To date, biofortification has relied on conventional breeding techniques and behavior change research to answer 3 questions: (a) is there a significant, in terms of human nutrition, variation in the micronutrients zinc, iron, provitamin A in naturally occurring varieties of rice, wheat, maize and tubers? (b) can these varieties be crossed with high yielding varieties so that they are equally profitable for farmers to adopt? and (c) will they be acceptable to consumers?

The evidence is accumulating and is looking increasingly positive on all 3 counts--but not for all crops and not in all contexts."

Full post: Development Horizons: Growing More Nutritious Cereals and Tubers: Will it Work?

BONO, BRANDS AND AID

2010-11-08T16:25:00.008Z

Lisa Ann Richey, Professor of International Development Studies at Roskilde University, will be talking about aid partnerships, RED and "aid celebrities" in the next STEPS Centre seminar on 25 November.

"For decades, aid has been under attack from right-wing political constituencies in the US, and it is now coming under attack even in European countries that have long been ardent aid supporters. Aid, it is argued, is ineffective and wasteful, and business is better at delivering development than traditional aid mechanisms. The international aid community has responded by developing new public-private partnerships, by attempting to reform its delivery mechanisms, and by arguing that given the right conditions, including sufficient funding, aid can make a difference. The involvement of celebrities in pressuring politicians to deliver more and better aid, especially to Africa, has also been part of this response.

“Has there ever been a better reason to shop?” asks an ad for the Product RED American Express card, informing members who use the card that buying “cappuccinos or cashmere” will be helping to fight AIDS in Africa. Co-founded in 2006 by the rock star Bono, Product RED has been a particularly successful example of a new trend in celebrity-driven international aid and development, one explicitly linked to commerce, not philanthropy. Aid celebrities – Bono, Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Farmer – guarantee the ‘cool quotient,’ the management and the target of what we call ‘Brand Aid.’ At the same time, campaigns like RED sell both the suffering of Africans with AIDS and the power of the average consumer to ameliorate it through familiar and highly effective media representations. Rescuing inter-national aid from its dour predictive graphs and disappointing ‘lessons learnt’, Brand Aid spins international development into something young, chic and possible."

For more information, contact steps-centre@ids.ac.uk

> Event flyer: Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World (pdf)
> STEPS Centre events

FINDING PATHWAYS IN AN AGE OF ANXIETY

2010-11-04T12:37:00.005Z

We're living in an age of anxiety where politicians, policy makers and the public search for solutions to narrowly-defined problems and risks.

At the recent CRASSH conference, "Challenging Models in the Face of Uncertainty", Melissa Leach, STEPS Centre Director, spoke about how this search for solutions can lead to social injustice. She argues for a greater appreciation of the various kinds of incomplete knowledge, understanding different ways of imagining futures and the "pathways" to get there. The video's online at the CRASSH website.

> Video: Imagining and Negotiating Pathways in an Age of Anxiety and Incomplete Knowledge

> Conference details: Challenging Models in the Face of Uncertainty
> Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH)

EVENTS TO LOOK FORWARD TO....

2010-11-03T16:40:00.005Z

A few things to look forward to this month:

16 November: STEPS Water Seminar: India and Pakistan’s truculent cooperation: Is 50 years enough? Undala Alam, School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen's University, Belfast (from 1 December 2010). Water seminar flyer (pdf, 58kb)
Venue: IDS. Time: 3.00-5.30pm. All welcome, email h.lebris@ids.ac.uk for enquiries.

17 November: Michael Loevinsohn: "New directions in environment-health research: implications for health systems". Session at the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Montreux, Switzerland.

18 November: Gerald Bloom: "Beyond Scaling Up". Session at the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research.

As always, you can keep up to date with all our events on our events page - which also has materials from past events.

SHIT AND CITIZENSHIP

2010-11-03T15:17:00.015Z

In the last 15 years, the way sanitation is treated in Brazil has changed dramatically. The picture of poor investment and danger to public health is being replaced by climbing investment and a vision of sanitation as an issue of rights, dignity and equity. The seminar "Shit and Citizenship: The Political Economy of Sanitation Investment in Brazil", held at IDS on Monday, explored how and why this has happened.

The speakers were Alex Shankland (from the Participation, Power and Social Change team at IDS) and Ken Caplan (Director of Building Partnerships for Development in Water and Sanitation).

Alex and Ken explained how the politics of sanitation has evolved over that time, both nationally and locally at the level of one city, Salvador. (Brazil was one of four cases in a global study coordinated by Oxford Policy Management for Water & Sanitation Program (WSP) and World Bank on the political economy of sanitation investments.)

At the national level, former President Lula broke certain taboos on sanitation. In December 2009, Lula caused a storm by describing a mission of his government as being “to take the people out of the shit”. He has also cleverly defused ideological tensions on sanitation provision, by introducing laws which allow for a wide variety of approaches to be taken.

Things didn't just change at a national level. In Salvador - a big, vibrant city on the North-East coast - Antonio Carlos Magalhães, a right-wing governor elected in 1990, saw the city's poor sanitation as a disgrace and a barrier to tourism. His vision of the city as a clean, modern tourist destination led him to arrange a massive programme of investment in sanitation.

Sanitation has also moved up the ladder of importance, partly because of a sense of embarassment at Brazil's being left behind compared to other countries. As people gain nearly universal access to electricity and water, sanitation has become the next-in-line priority for the urban poor.

Areas can be transformed by sanitation - not just physically, but in terms of their identity. Alex observes that, when a favela (shanty town) gained a sanitation system, it ceased to become a favela and became a "barrio" (neighbourhood) - raising people's pride in the area, as well as house prices.

In their talk, Alex and Ken cover the highlights of the political economy of sanitation in Brazil over the last 15 years. The talk covers the facts (when and where great changes in investment and provision happened) but also the subtext (why things happened, and what was going on politically to make this possible).

This seminar is one of the events in our series of Water Seminars. For forthcoming events, see the STEPS Centre website.

Links

> Shit and Citizenship: The Political Economy of Sanitation Investment in Brazil (Alex and Ken's presentation, Slideshare)
> STEPS Centre: events
> Participation, Power and Social Change team, IDS
> Building Partnerships for Development in Water and Sanitation

31 OCTOBER: DEBATE ON ENGINEERING, CAUTION AND UTOPIA

2010-10-27T15:25:00.007Z

Professor Andy Stirling, STEPS Centre Co-Director, will be part of a keynote debate entitled "Engineering the future: cautionary tale or utopia?" on Sunday. The debate is part of the Battle of Ideas festival at the Royal College of Art in London.

"Are we are living in a world where utopian thinking is at best idle day-dreaming and at worst downright dangerous? Popular visions of large-scale engineering seem to be overshadowed by the negative aspects of the man-made world, from climate change to unsustainable growth to the unforeseen side effects of cutting-edge technology. Do we have to let go of the vision that engineering and technology can promise us continued improvement in quality of life? Is it really just wishful thinking to argue for a more ambitious role for human ingenuity, and the transformative power of innovation? Are we limited to only doom-and-gloom nightmares of nature taking revenge on humanity’s arrogance, to a perceived need for belt-tightening austerity and a tomorrow of ‘make do and mend’."

Battle of Ideas 2010 - Engineering the Future: cautionary tale or utopia?

STEPS CONFERENCE 2010: VIDEO

2010-10-13T10:43:00.007Z

Our conference featured keynote speeches with ideas on sustainability and the sciences; and a roundtable on policy for the 2012 Earth Summit.

Keynote speech 1: Prof Melissa Leach, STEPS Centre
Melissa explains the STEPS Centre's "pathways" concept, with illustrations from our work on health, water & sanitation, and food & agriculture.

Keynote speech 2: Prof Arun Agrawal, University of Michigan
Prof Agrawal examines how responsible the social sciences are in their use of human subjects and cases.

The videos from the policy roundtable are below, after the jump.

Rio+20 Policy/Research Roundtable
A roundtable on sustainability research and its implications for policy, in the run-up to the Earth Summit 2012.

Full roundtable (54 min)

Extracts from the roundtable:

STEPS CONFERENCE 2010: WATER, SUSTAINABILITY AND INTELLECTUAL JUDO

2010-09-30T14:15:00.003Z

by Katharina Welle, DPhil student

Water is a vital piece in the sustainability jigsaw. It’s also a resource that requires careful management. In the final plenary session at the STEPS Centre’s Annual Conference last week, Andy Stirling encouraged us to exercise “intellectual judo” in pursuing pathways to sustainability: finding "levers" where we can change or redirect the momentum of mainstream ideas to open up more options and directions of change (pathways).

Well, one question that I ask myself sometimes is what role water plays in the pathways concept (for more about pathways, see the STEPS working paper or briefing). More broadly, how do we engage with water as a resource for sustainability in general?

The conference highlighted at least two ways to conceptualise water as part of pathways for sustainability: 1) to concentrate on water itself, and explore sustainable ways to manage it; and 2) to view water as one of many inputs into sustainability and sustainability debates (where other inputs might be land, food, people etc). In Friday's panel on Water Dynamics, the four presentations offered a mixture of these two ways of looking at water.

Christian Stein (Stockholm Resilience Centre) is using social network analysis to look at the interaction of organisations involved in the management of “blue water” (resources in aquifers, lakes and dams) and those working with “green” water (ie water embedded in moisture and soils). In the session, he suggested that water could be managed more sustainably if we better understand the links between these two types of actors. Alan Nicol (Institute of Development Studies) also talked about more sustainable ways of managing water. He proposes using social network analysis to better understand the linkages in water resources management - his particular focus is on river basin management in various parts of Africa. He suggested that river basin management is dominated by the agendas of powerful actors, with possibly negative results for sustainability – nicely expressed in the metaphor of his title “When hippos hug – what happens to the pond life?”

The other two contributions highlighted the role of water in wider sustainability debates. Maria Teresa Armijos (DPhil, Institute of Development Studies) and Synne Movik (independent consultant) used water to illustrate how a resource can be used to increase sustainability or how it can be subject to trade-offs between different social, economic or environmental forces.

Maria Teresa Armijos presented findings from her DPhil field work on the communal dynamics of water resources management. In the Andes, water is used as a political tool to exercise power; but in the community Maria studied in Ecuador, local people also use water to express their sense of identity. This resonated nicely with Synne’s presentation. She asked the interesting question of what role sustainability plays in distributive justice, based on her reading of Armatya Sen’s book The Idea Of Justice. Drawing on a case from South Africa, Synne argued that the subjective framing of sustainability can easily ignore the question of justice. In South Africa, arguments for sustainability tend to focus on economic and environmental sustainability; in the case of water resources management, these arguments portray social justice as a barrier to sustainability.

Both ways of engaging with the domain of water in pathways to sustainability are useful in their own right. But are there more ways of looking at water in relation to sustainability pathways? Let’s continue the intellectual judo!

>> STEPS Centre: Water & Sanitation research
>> STEPS Centre Conference 2010: Pathways to Sustainability

SUSTAINABILITY JUDO: STEPS CENTRE CONFERENCE 2010

2010-09-24T17:10:00.004Z

This year's conference - Pathways to Sustainability: Agendas for a new politics of environment, development and social justice - was chock full of provocations and insights on the STEPS Centre's "Pathways" concept and what it could mean for sustainability science and action.

Among the topics: what sustainability really means; how social and natural scientists talk to each other; why social scientists should stop using people as abstract "instruments" to support their theories... and how we can do "sustainability judo" to influence the rich and powerful.

We've tweeted some thoughts as we went along. Many delegates had differing things to say about the concept of pathways, what's missing, and what could be done in the run up to Rio+20. We'll be digesting these thoughts over the weekend and will blog about it in more detail next week.

Pathways to Sustainability working paper (pdf, 690kb)
Pathways short briefing (pdf, 210kb)

SHIT HAPPENS: SANITATION AND DEVELOPMENT

2010-09-20T16:52:00.003Z

The British Medical Journal's podcast this week features Lyla Mehta, STEPS Centre Water and Sanitation convenor, talking about sanitation and the UN MDGs.

This week, to steal a line from the latest BMJ editor’s choice, we’ll be talking shit. The millennium development goal on sanitation is way off track; Lyla Mehta, a sociologist from the Institute of Development Studies, tells us why, and Kamal Kar, a development consultant from India, explains how his grass roots initiative changes the way people view sanitation.

BMJ podcast: "Shit happens"

INVESTING IN LAND: THE WORLD BANK REPORT ON RISING GLOBAL INTEREST IN FARMLAND

2010-09-20T15:46:00.004Z

by Ian Scoones, STEPS Centre co-director

There is something for everyone in the long-awaited World Bank report, Rising Global Interest in Farmland: Can it yield sustainable and equitable benefits? Some sections contain a damning critique of the situation; others a positive spin, with a narrative offering a bright future. Not surprisingly, then, the press have picked up different angles in the few days since its release. The Financial Times, for example, headlines with “World Bank backs farmland investment”, while Bloomberg reports the World Bank as saying that “Large Land Deals Threaten Farmers”. Both are equally valid interpretations of an often ambiguous report.

The bottom-line, take-home message seems to be that external investment in land is a good thing in some places, especially those where there are “large tracts of suitable land, but also a large proportion of smallholders with very low productivity”, but that governance measures, based on a set of high-sounding principles, are required to make this happen equitably and sustainably. But what does this mean? How should we interpret this report?

Overall, the report certainly offers a useful compilation of existing data and provides a selective review of other studies. Like other research, the report shows how the global ‘land grab’ is complex, often involving multiple actors, including national governments. It is not simply a rapacious grab by outsiders. Despite the concerns raised at the peak of the food crisis, many deals have yet to be put into practice and it is unclear what the longer-term consequences will be. But what new dimensions does it offer? The report has been long trailed, and there has been much excited expectation around its publication. Overall though it is a disappointment: long on detail, but short on analysis and flawed in key aspects of its methodology.

The highlights are some short case studies from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Mexico, Mozambique, Tanzania, Ukraine and Zambia. These show how land investments have very often failed – not only for the investors but also for local people. For Mozambique, job creation was “significantly lower than expected” and the investors “damage non-renewable natural resources (water) without compensation, disadvantaging women”. Issues of poor governance abound. In Tanzanian for example “investors often circumvent land acquisition procedures”, while in Liberia the “investor encouraged illegally on fertile wetlands and displaced 30 percent of the population”. These cases however are given only limited coverage in a long and rather dense study, and a systematic analysis of livelihood impacts and wider consequences for agrarian change in different locales is absent.

Elsewhere a bizarre ‘yield gap’ analysis takes up many pages and pinpoints the potential of vast tracts of land apparently suitable and available for agricultural exploitation in some countries. This of course conveniently forgets that such areas may be used for other purposes, and that existing land use may well be the most productive, equitable and sustainable. The heroic assumptions of the model are not very transparent, and there is little attention to past experiences when grand schemes for the transformation of the unproductive African bush ended in large-scale and embarrassing failures. The seductive imagery of satellite maps and projections of vast riches to be gained from exploitation are not rooted in a ground-truthed understanding of local livelihood conditions.

A set of principles – the famed ‘code of conduct’ - are hailed as the administrative-managerial solution to the troublesome governance problems of large-scale land investment, but there is no political analysis of how they might actually work in such settings. Pleas for an “evidence-based multi-stakeholder approach” are all well and good, but actual practice is a world away from such ideals. Other sections of the report, focusing on institutions and governance, show clearly why such principles are likely to be doomed to failure, given the lack of capacity, failures of institutional authority, corrupt practices and so on. There are clearly strong political economy reasons for a simplistic code not to work, yet this dilemma is not grappled with. Nor are the “open and impartial”, “accountable and representative” mechanisms by which local land rights get recognised, and more importantly, realised in such challenging settings discussed at any length. Good ideas about low-cost, participatory approaches to land registration, alongside broad-based processes of consultation, are forwarded, but will these really work in the forests of the Congo or the savannahs of Sudan?

In sum, the overall message is deeply confusing. The confusion arises from several fronts: methodological, presentational and conceptual. Methodologically, the report draws on data sources of highly varying quality. As the report admits, data on land acquisitions is shaky at best, and the Bank relied on government surveys, which in most settings are less than reliable. The mapping of agricultural potential and suitability is done at a large scale with assumptions which can be challenged on many counts. Yet the case studies, where particular examples of land acquisition are examined, are by comparison much more rich and detailed, offering some starkly contrasting conclusions to the cornucopian vision projected from space. The presentation of these highly contrasting perspectives is very unbalanced in the final report. The case studies occupy just a few pages in the main report, summarised in a one-page table and accompanied by only very tentative, shallow analysis. By contrast the land suitability study is given much more coverage, with its authority projected through a false sense of quantitative precision.

This mismatch between data sources, analytical depth and a failure to add them up into a coherent picture is the consequence of another major weakness: a narrow economistic conceptualisation. A political economy analysis of agrarian change and the role of large scale investments in historical perspective is essentially absent from the report. No surprise for something coming from the World Bank, but this lack of historically-located political analysis is a gaping hole. Without an understanding of what drives investments, what politics surrounds the deals, and the socio-political dynamics shaping livelihood outcomes, it is very difficult to make sense of recent events. The argument that investment in farming – and small-scale farmers in particular – rather than farmland makes much sense, but this is easy to state, but less easy to realise. Why is it that governments prefer large-scale deals over investment in smallholder farming? What factors are pushing the investment in land as an asset? What global connections between state elites, financiers and private businesses are significant? And how is it that the terms of incorporation within leases, contracts and partnership deals seem always to fail the smallholder?

These are very basic, first-stop questions in the fields of agrarian and global political economy. And this is the analytical terrain, unfortunately missed by this report, which reveals the dynamics of land deals, and which allows us to see beyond the economics to the wider politics of land.

HUNGRY FOR RESULTS?

2010-09-15T08:16:00.004Z

By John Thompson, STEPS Centre Food and Agriculture Convenor

In advance of the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Summit in New York on 20-22 September, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released new figures on the number of people worldwide who suffer chronic hunger in 2010. The latest estimates, which will soon be published in its annual State of Food and Agriculture report, show that there are 925 million hungry people on our planet – that’s roughly one in our six of us.

While this is a shockingly high number, the good news is that it is lower than the 1.023 billion people who were estimated to be hungry in 2009 and represents a decline in real terms of over nine percent.

Nevertheless, this figure is still significantly higher than the previous estimates before the global food crisis of 2007-8 and the global financial crisis which followed it.

There are two principal reasons for the decline in the total number of hungry people and both have to do with the reversal of two recent crises: (1) the reduction of food prices from their peak levels of 2007-8 and (2) the projected positive economic growth in developing countries in 2010. These trends contributed to increasing access to food for nearly 100 million people in the last year.

If, however, we look back over the past two decades, we can observe that (except for the current downturn) hunger has been on the increase. Between the early 1990s and 2007, we had periods in which food prices were low and economic growth was strong, but hunger kept rising.

What does this mean? It means that the improvement in the current hunger picture is only the result of the reversal of recent crisis effects. Furthermore, it means that there's a fundamental structural problem with our food system that goes beyond temporary increases and decreases in food prices. That food problem is rooted in poverty and radically unequal distributions of income and assets, within and across countries, which influence both food production systems and food consumption patterns.

If we take the base period from which we track progress towards the MDG target on hunger – to reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger – we observe that the percentage of hungry people in the world has declined from 20 percent in 1990-92 to 16 percent today. However, if we are to hit the actual MDG target, which is to reduce the prevalence of hunger to 10 percent by 2015, we have less than five years in which to do it. According to the FAO, the region with the most undernourished people is Asia and the Pacific with 578 million, while Sub-Saharan Africa remains the region with the highest proportion of undernourished at 30 percent of the total population (239 million). Both regions have significant structural problems that lock people into poverty, limit their access to key assets, keep agricultural productivity low and make it difficult to reduce hunger on any significant scale.

These structural factors must be addressed before we are likely to see any dramatic decreases in either regional or global hunger figures, but this will require a much more concerted effort by the international community. And it is particularly urgent that we start now, because in the years ahead we will probably be seeing more of the turbulence we have experienced over the past few decades, as food and agricultural markets are expected to become more volatile in the medium term because of increases in extreme weather events (e.g., drought in Russia, floods in Pakistan) linked to climate change and the growing influence of non-commercial actors in food commodities markets.

When launching its new hunger data, the FAO called on governments to increase investment in agriculture, expand social protection programmes and enhance income-generating activities for the rural and urban poor. But individual governments alone cannot tackle the root causes of hunger and some greater coordination is needed at both regional and international levels. To be fair, some progress has been made on this since the recent food crisis, in the form of the G8 L’Aquila Food Security Initiative, the United Nations Secretary-General’s High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis and the G20 Pittsburgh Summit Partnership on Food Security, which led to the launch of the World Bank’s Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a multilateral financing mechanism which will allow the immediate targeting and delivery of additional funding to public and private donors to support national and regional strategic plans for agriculture and food security in poor countries.

Much of this appears to be a step in the right direction. But, as my colleague Erik Millstone and I observed in a recent paper we prepared for the UK Foresight Global Food and Farming Project (under review), if we are thinking long-term, we should also be envisioning a new structure for governing the food system through the creation of some kind of Global Food Security Authority (GFSA), which could be housed in the United Nations and implemented by an International Commission, working with different stakeholders, including governments, businesses, civil society and representatives of small-scale producers.

The GFSA would provide an institutional and legal framework to guide the governance of national, regional and international food systems and include binding commitments that seek to meet the four key dimensions of food security at all levels – sufficiency, safety, equitability and sustainability. Governments would, of course, have sovereignty to define their own food and agricultural policies, but they would also be held accountable for international human rights, including the right to food. Moreover, the GFSA would prioritise stabilising international supply and mandate strategic grain reserves for food security. Clear mechanisms would also need to be put into place to moderate commodity speculation and set floors and ceilings to guarantee fair prices for farmers. Further, the GFSA would mandate that trade and investment rules would provide national policy space to allow countries the flexibility to protect their own domestic food systems (within reasonable limits) and to invest in pro-poor agricultural research and development. It would also establish multi-stakeholder participation to develop multilateral and national investment programmes that promote rather than undermine local food sovereignty and small-scale agriculture that is productive, financially competitive and labour absorbing. Lastly, a Global Food Security Authority would link international economic policies to international human rights and environmental norms.

Realising this kind of vision is no small task, but if we are serious about reforming the global food governance system and meeting MDG 1 to as great a degree as possible, there is every reason to try. The burning question now is whether there is the political will to do so.

SOCIO-ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS OF DISEASE

2010-09-14T12:37:00.004Z

We've added three new research projects we're involved in to the website, under the heading "Socio-ecological dynamics of disease". The projects are all looking at the social, ecological, biological and institutional dynamics of disease. The work focuses particularly on diseases originating in animals, using cases in Africa and Asia. Photo: Fruitbat / Brian Gratwicke / Flickr

Diseases that are transmitted through livestock or wildlife take a major toll on people's lives. The research will identify the tipping points and thresholds involved, and how to lessen some of the negative impacts of these diseases on people's lives and livelihoods.

WHOSE KNOWLEDGE COUNTS AT WORLD WATER WEEK 2010?

2010-09-13T10:18:00.003Z

by Timothy Karpouzoglou, research student, SPRU

World Water Week (WWW) 2010 is over, leaving me with some questions. Is WWW really about "opening up" or about "closing down" the debate on water resource management?

The overall theme for this year WWW has been water quality. WWW aims "to highlight positive action and new thinking towards water related challenges and their impact on the world’s environment" and also to "deepen the understanding of, stimulate ideas, and engage the water and development community around the challenges related to water quality". These are all valid and urgent concerns in moving the debate forward.

So what is this new thinking? Some of it can be seen as more of the old thinking restated with today’s policy buzzwords. "Water quality" is still decided by scientists, talking to scientists about the science behind the solutions. The framing of the problem was often about the right technology. Common effluent treatment plants and wastewater treatment plants are commonly-suggested solutions, even if the costs associated are too high and unaffordable in many parts of the developing world.

However, it was good to see the importance of stakeholder participation being included even in some more technically-centred debates, even if it was not always clear what type of participation is desired. Maybe participation is about "letting the people find the solutions themselves", as one engineer from the Pakistan Water Authority wholeheartedly supported.

Encouragingly, juxtaposed with the general air of technological optimism, ideas about "non-linearity", "complexity" and "resilience" have also entered the debate. Friday’s session on resilience, uncertainty and tipping points, convened by the Stockholm International Water Institute, provided a new perspective and sparked a lot of debate. The session was also interesting because it encouraged people to think across each other’s own research and professional experiences. But it seemed to me that social concerns - and particularly the importance of poorer communities that are dependent on vulnerable ecological contexts - were not touched upon enough. How can "systems" thinking become more relevant to the concerns of poorer and ecologically marginalized people?

More generally, my experiences at World Water Week 2010 have also made me wonder: for whom is this event most important? What kind of dialogue can WWW achieve? The clearly divided opinions highlighted by the session on the World Commission on Dams+10 present the challenge of how dialogue can move forward, when the norm is for people to agree to disagree. For those working on water and sanitation, this challenge is not easily solved.

WORLD WATER WEEK: CONTROVERSY AND CONTRASTS

2010-09-09T11:05:00.006Z

By Lyla Mehta, STEPS Centre Water and Sanitation convenor

It’s my fourth day at World Water Week, the annual mecca for policy-makers and players from the World Water Council, the Water and Sanitation Programmes (WSP), Stockholm Water Institute, WaterAid, the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), as well as several UN and bilateral agencies such as DFID and others who can afford to pay the entry fee. Most people seem to come for networking, meetings, dinners and drinks, to launch new initiatives and reports... and occasionally even to attend the odd session.

I've been doing the same, though I had hoped to be more excited by some of the sessions and workshops. Most of them have been highly technical, with many of the same global perspectives and declarations that we have been hearing for a long time. But this is probably a reflection of how mainstream most talk about water is, be it in the media, policy or research realms.

This year’s focus is on water quality: a very timely issue, since worsening water quality and pollution are increasingly affecting human health and wellbeing, as well as the integrity of ecosystems. Still, as a sociologist, I found that the sessions have lacked critical social-science analyses about diverse perceptions of risk and water quality; how water quality affects different social groups differently; and the politics of standards, monitoring and risk assessments. In fact, an American anthropologist told me that her proposal to host a seminar on the cultural dimensions of water quality had been rejected by the organizers. Is the water and sanitation domain as represented in global foras still a bastion of engineers, economists and natural scientists?

At the opening plenary, Dr Rita Colwell, 2010 Stockholm Water Prize laureate, drew on over 35 years of research to demonstrate the reach and spread of cholera pathogens. She described how the use of a simple old sari cloth can keep cholera at bay, if used as a water filter. It would be interesting to hear more about how local practitioners and policy makers could draw on this research to create the right institutions to fight this deadly disease.

It's also heartening to see that the conference includes many sessions on sanitation, with many practitioners, policy makers and academics not shying away from using the word "shit" to talk about different strategies and approaches to end open defecation. This more direct language is, at least in part, thanks to the Community-Led Total Sanitation movement. Every day two million tonnes of shit are released in water bodies.

For me, the highlight of the conference was the session on “Revisiting the Large Dam Controversy” hosted by the very exciting online journal Water Alternatives. It’s been 10 years since the World Commision on Dams published its landmark report, which provided guidelines for dam-building, covering social, environmental, economic and institutional aspects. This was the only session I attended where there was passion and debate, not surprising due to the topic even though a few were hoping for more blood-letting! Ten years on, there has been much progress. WCD guidelines are now mainstreamed in many new and ongoing projects all around the world. The WCD principle on the "right to consent" is also gaining acceptance in many global organisations and institutions.

Still, there are many ideological rifts and no clear consensus on ways forward, with early opponents still openly rejecting the WCD process and conclusions. This was exemplified by the words of ex-World Bank official John Briscoe, who proudly stated that the WCD and similar commissions should pack up since they are often rejected by dam-building nations who reject their guidelines. But Briscoe didn’t seem to do himself or his former institution any favours by continuing to ignore the fact that water resources development remains a highly contested process, often shaped by forces in the wider political economy. Moreover, southern governments who claim to be ‘democratic’ may not necessarily be representing the interests of the poor and marginalised through dam-based development.

On Tuesday afternoon in a session on water and the city, I was struck by the massive differences between water and urban planning in the North and South. In many affluent cities of the global North, water is an aesthetic element in urban planning and can be an objet d’art.

By contrast, in our session on Liquid Dynamics on Wednesday, we presented STEPS research in peri-urban areas to show that water provision for many is non-existent or of highly dubious quality, leaving poor residents to fend for themselves: either by acquiring water through illegal means, or by paying exorbitant prices. Still, even here, poor residents give different meanings to polluted water bodies, and find different ways to cope with worsening water quality and inadequate access. Our session also had presentations on the politics of risk assessment and regulation, and how regulation has largely been framed as a technical discourse, thus leaving out the perspectives and interests of the peri-urban poor.

Unfortunately, I missed some interesting events on Wednesday that coincided with our event. In the afternoon I struggled to find something to keep me awake. A PhD student wondered if there was an Alternative Forum run by critical NGOs that take place every three years. But there was none and she left to check out Stockholm. I went to my favourite spot in the conference, the café where I meet up with old friends. I ran into several people there who proudly told me that they had only attended one or two sessions so far, spending most of the time networking and in meetings. As I wrote this blog, I looked around for other blogs on WWW. But apart from this blog, I couldn’t find any: were most of the sessions so dull that nobody feels compelled to write about them?

Stockholm WWW is an extremely well-organised and well-publicized annual event that attracts most of the well-heeled in the water sector, especially from the global North. It’s become a big jamboree that everyone in the water sector feels compelled to attend. In reality, most of the action takes place over drinks, coffee and dinner and through networking. There are some interesting insights in smaller seminars and side events, where the seating capacity is quickly exceeded. There was some passion and energy in smaller events. Most of the official programme, though, is business as usual - with very little passion, true concern for water justice, or critical debate. It feels like a lot of old water in old bottles.

WORLD WATER WEEK: THE SAME OLD STUFF?

2010-09-07T14:45:00.011Z

by Jeremy Allouche, STEPS Centre Research Fellow

Here’s our first blog from World Water Week - some call it ‘the pilgrimage of water’. Well... the price of the pilgrimage (about £650) makes it difficult to attend and it remains very much an elitist club. In this regard, one always wonders how useful these high-level international events are and whether we are not repeating the same stuff again and again.

The disconnect between the conference and the world outside is sometimes too evident: while the international media reports on the floods in Pakistan and the droughts and floods in Niger, here the focus of the conference is on partnerships between water professionals and projects around new sexy ideas on water. Although water quality is the focus of the conference, climate change is another hot topic here: mainstreaming water and climate change, governance and capacity building for water and climate change, etc...

Still, the big highlight of this morning was the session on “Revisiting the Large Dam Controversy”. Although the World Commission on Dams (WCD) report has been criticised (especially around implementation guidelines), there has been some consensus around the principles and values it articulated. But now, with the development of climate change adaptation strategies and the arrival of new financiers, some fear that the new context (WCD+10) may end this fragile consensus.

Two quotes stood out from the session:

Kader Asmal: "The water situation is now worse than it was ten years ago in Africa despite the promising 'numerical' numbers, and water quality is deteriorating." A useful reminder from Prof. Asmal on the limits and hidden realities of water statistics.

John Briscoe: I didn’t note his exact words, but to paraphrase, he suggests that governments are the legitimate actors; multi-stakeholder forums cannot impose any norms and guidelines on dam building. (To do him justice, read his article on the politics of the WCD in Water Alternatives.)

As somebody who had worked in the World Bank for many years, this view seems quite surprising. What autonomy do countries with structural adjustment programs have? Leaving it all to governments doesn’t help us in dealing with 1) dam building and the issue of transboundary water resources and 2) political economy problems – as raised by many participants at today’s session.

The session was certainly interesting, but there was a lot of confusion between principles and guidelines. Some may feel that reaching a global agreement on common principles is an illusory goal. But principles are undoubtedly an issue to reflect on and push for, given the formidable legacy of the WCD process and report. Moreover, establishing principles also opens up a space for national and local dialogues and the elaboration of guidelines at a range of levels.

Finally, a couple of interesting questions to think about:
> can we learn something from the WCD process for the land grabbing issue?
> how can we include social and environmental issues in the risk assessment process in order to allow more space for deliberation before the design phase?

That's it for now - more from World Water Week soon. Our lunchtime session is tomorrow at 12.45 - follow the link for more details.

>> Liquid Dynamics II: Linking Quality and Access for Pro-Poor Sustainability
>> Our work on Water

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES

2010-09-07T13:48:00.003Z

There's an interview with Adrian Smith, STEPS Centre Research Fellow, about "social technologies and niches for sustainable transformation" in the September edition of Saber Cómo (the monthly newsletter of the Argentinean National Institute for Industrial Technology). There are also contributions from Renato Dagnino from Unicamp and Hernan Thomas from Quilmes University.

Social technologies are processes of technology development that seek to be inclusive towards the poor and marginalised, as well as environmentally sustainable.

For the full article (in Spanish), click on the link below.

>> Saber Cómo: Un debate en ambos lados del Atlántico Latinoamérica: de corazones rojos y mentes grises
>> Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto

STEPS AT WORLD WATER WEEK

2010-09-06T09:30:00.002Z

We're at World Water Week in Stockholm this week. Our session, Liquid Dynamics II: Linking Quality and Access for Pro-poor Sustainability is at 12.45pm on Wednesday.

In the session, we'll discuss the complex interactions between the social, technological and ecological/hydrological dimensions of water and sanitation. These interactions are often sidelined in water and sanitation management.

If you can't make it, we'll be posting blogs and other things from World Water Week here.

>> Liquid Dynamics II
>> World Water Week 2010
>> STEPS Work on Water and Sanitation
>> Community-Led Total Sanitation Working Paper (pdf) / briefing (pdf)

TALKING TOILETS

2010-09-02T15:58:00.009Z

Community-Led Total Sanitation is a rapidly-spreading way of getting local people involved in planning toilets and other facilities. CLTS taps into people's feelings of disgust to encourage action. Photo: Kalangaba Village Open Defecation Free Sign, from the CLTS Flickr photostream

Our new working paper (with a short briefing on the side) looks at how this might work in different cultures, and the difficulties of creating sustainable sanitation. It also looks at how CLTS can interact with governments as other institutions as it becomes more popular.

>> CLTS Working Paper (pdf, 570kb)
>> Briefing: CLTS: Challenges and opportunities (pdf, 240kb)
>> Our work on water and sanitation
>> Community-Led Total Sanitation website