On having Voice and Being Heard: Participation in the Post-2015 Policy Process

Elizabeth Mills

From their inception and formal agreement in 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have played a significant (and also ambivalent) role in shaping policy agendas, directing aid around the globe, to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation, and discrimination against women. This week, the Post-2015 UN High-Level Panel convenes in London to discuss the shape that the future global development agenda will take following 2015.

The Participate team will use this blog and Twitter to provide a unique window into the the discussions taking place in and around the HLP reflecting on and documenting the policy process as it unfolds.  We will be blogging on the HLP meeting here, working with our partners in the Participatory Research Group, and providing regular updates through twitter using these hashtags: #worldwewant; #post2015; #beyond2015;#post2015HLP. Check back here for regular updates and follow the debate live on Twitter: @IDS_UK

The development policy climate is on the cusp of change and the imperative for active and participatory engagement is crucial to ensure that the post-2015 framework genuinely reflects the priorities of people most affected by poverty and injustice. The field of development, and of participatory research, has and perhaps always will be challenged by the difficulties posed by the disjuncture between the practice of people’s lived realities and the policies that directly (and indirectly) affect them, between thoroughly listening to the voices of the most marginalised and ensuring that these voices are heard by policy makers. This disjuncture calls us all – from marching academics and activists, to striking miners, from HIV community-health workers to international policy makers – to really look at the difference between having voice and being heard, and to hold ourselves and each other accountable in the process of creating a world where policies genuinely speak to people’s needs. The Participate initiative reflects the imperative of listening to voices from the margins and ensuring that these voices are heard in the post-2015 process.

Working with partners in Latin and Central America, Africa, Asia and Europe, Participate aims to provide high quality evidence on the reality of poverty at ground level, bringing the perspectives of people living in poverty into the post-2015 debate.  As discussed previously on this blog by Joanna Wheeler and Danny Burns,  Participate is working with communities, social movements and civil society organisations in more than 25 countries across these regions, to draw together an extensive body of past and current participatory research in order to ensure that the perspectives of those most affected by poverty and injustice directly inform the post-2015 process. Participate will use in-depth methods to gain insight in to the lives of people most affected by development. Some key activities include: creating a Ground Level Panel tomirror the work of the HLP; putting cameras in the hands of the poorest to make films, to share stories from their own lives and provide a more nuanced understanding of the subjective aspects and consequences of development; encouraging policy-makers to spend time living with people and learning firsthand from their experiences. More information on Participate’s activities is available here.

Elizabeth Mills is a PhD candidate working on health, citizenship and HIV/AIDS within the IDS Knowledge, Technology and Science research team.

This article is crossposted to the Participation, Power and Social Change blog  

‘Global development’: the new buzzword?

Maria Cascant

Alex Kelbert

Maria Cascant and Alex Kelbert

Is ‘Global Development’ becoming a new development buzzword? A quick Google search would certainly suggest it could be. The phrase is increasingly popular in describing a global approach to tackling poverty and inequality. Influential blogs such as those by The Guardian and the World Bank talk of ‘Global Development’, while a number of journals and postgraduate courses further explore globalisation and development intersections from varied disciplines. Yet, the term is so broadly defined that it welcomes the most diverse ideological views in it.

Fashionable buzzwords come and go, and while they do, they define the way in which we frame and apply development concepts. It is not the same to say ‘climate change’ (2,080,000 hits on the English version of Google Scholar on 25.09.12) and ‘climate justice’ (881,000 hits), or ‘food security’ and ‘food sovereignty’ (2,180,000 and 211,000 hits) or ‘sustainable growth’ and ‘degrowth’ (1,560,000 and 4,270 hits). Different words bring different worldviews and analytical frameworks, with some being more power-aware than others. It thus becomes important to clarify the words we choose to use and the meaning we give to them.

In our case, we support a critical and bottom-up vision of Global Development – one that puts citizens first and that explores who wins and who loses in globalisation. This requires a multi-levelled analysis of actors, discourses, resources and power relations at the personal, local, state and global levels. It also needs to emphasise that it is people who make globalisation processes happen. To ensure this, globalisation analysis must start at the local level, be ethnographic and place-bound, as it is locally where people’s actions and reactions take place. Some scholars like Michael Burawoy have called this ‘grounded globalisation’ or ‘global ethnography’. Furthermore, any study of the ‘local’ needs to be understood in a ‘global’ context. From there, it is crucial to understand that the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are not distinctly opposite, and that there are in fact multiple levels relational in nature.

In legal studies, Rodríguez-Garavito’s social minefields explore how UrráIndigenous people in Colombia complement other forms of local struggles (i.e. marches) with the ‘prior consent’ mechanism. This international mechanism requires States to consult indigenous communities before accessing or giving access to land permits. Rodríguez-Garavito’s analysis spans the Urrá dam in the Colombian jungle, the Colombian Constitutional tribunals, Washington’s Human Rights Inter-American Commission and Geneva’s United Nations offices of Indigenous Rights – providing insight into how useful these institutions and processes are to the Urrá people.

In agriculture, the European Union’s influential Common Agricultural Policyis based on a narrative of a developed, mass and intensive ‘North’ model of production that the ‘South’ must follow. This, in turn, creates a reactive narrative revolving around a rich and exploitative ‘North’ and a poor and exploited ‘South’. Such a narrative portrays global farming with bad/good, either/or divisions of the world. Alex’s recent research on French farmers, members of the Confédération Paysanne (CP)trade union, shows a more complex, nuanced story. Indeed, CP farmers have looked beyond their own country and broken the alleged opposition of interests between French farmers (i.e. rejecting their granted subsidies) and other small-scale farmers elsewhere. Yet, these narratives are silenced. This is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in 365 pages of the 2008 World Development Report where Via Campesina – an international farmers union, of which the CP is a member and despite its representing of 200 million farmers – is mentioned only once, in a text-box. Blocking these more nuanced and alternative voices is a form of domination and isolates the complex power interactions taking place between what happens ‘here’ and what happens ‘there’.

In these bottom-up visions of Global Development, additional emphasis must be placed on analysing who the powerful actors are in development processes. At the international level, this includes the role of actors such asthe International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, bilateral aid donors and multinationals. One cannot talk of pro-poor access to medicines without exploring pharmaceutical patents; of quality primary education without IMF conditionalities on teacher recruitment; of food price increases without food commodities speculation.

The scenarios of the Urrá people and the French farmers illustrate how Global Development represents a broader analytical framework that can be used for situations where more established Nation-state and North-South frames do not capture the whole picture. A critical and bottom-up approach to Global Development can be ensured by analysing who the privileged actors are (including the global ones) and by constantly looking with a citizens’ lens at the experiences they have of globalisation and the moves they take to adapt, make use of, contest or re-imagine it.

Maria-Josep Cascant Sempere is a PhD candidate working on the theme of popular education, globalisation and social change within the IDS Participation, Power and Social Change research team.

Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert is an MA graduate in Development Studies at IDS. Her dissertation has focused on challenging the North-South discourse in agriculture through a case study of the Confédération Paysanne in France.

This article is crossposted to the Participation, Power and Social Change blog

Timor-Leste Fluid fragilities

Ricardo Goulão Santos

Timor-Leste underwent another rite of passage of its fledgling democracy last July, and did so with flying colours, it seems. Praised, among others, by the UN Secretary General, the European Union and the Lusophone Community, the parliamentary elections, the third since Independence, were peaceful and almost entirely free of the issues which overshadowed the 2007 elections.

That this is something to celebrate and not simply consider a normal, expected, turn of events, stems from the problematic history of this country, during the long period of Portuguese colonisation and more so during the Indonesian occupation under Suahrto’s ruthless  military regime. Historical records, researched by Geoffrey Gunn (1999) show how the Portuguese administrators capitalised on internal divides and contentions between Timorese peoples to stifle any eventual revolt against their colonial hold – the classic ‘divide and conquer’. The Indonesian occupation, from 1975 to 1999, had an extensive record of brutality which scarred most of the Timorese still alive today. The occupation ended with a disturbing example of violent reaction against democratic choice, when, following the massive popular vote for independence, Indonesian military and Timorese militia they sponsored enacted brutal beatings, killings, arson and forced displacement. A testimony of these actions can be found in almost 400 indictments issued by the UN-established Serious Crime Unit. With such a heavy legacy, one could expect difficult times in the wake of independence.

The international discourse, on the other hand, told a different story. After those terrible days, the UN’s effort to reconstruct the new country of Timor-Leste was deemed as a brilliant example of the International Communicty’s new-found capacity for “Nation Building” (see Steele 2002). Sure enough, after the peaceful elections in 2001 for the Constituent Assembly, the UN started to prepare the consignation of full powers for the elected representatives of the Timorese People. In May 2002 the Timorese Independence was restored. The “United Nations Transitional Administration” gave way to a short lived “United Nations Mission of Support”. Basking in the glories of a job well done, it was time for the “forces of peace” to lay eyes on other terrains and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 prompted a sudden redeployment of US forces and their allies. In 2004 the UN considered that Timor-Leste no longer required a military presence. Timor-Leste was a built nation.

Two years after, Timor-Leste was a “Failed State” (for an article discussing this attribution, read Cotton 2007). The fall from grace – “proud example” to “basket case” took but 2 years and yet, the roots of the divisions inside the Timorese Army which triggered the events of 2006 were known by those who closely worked and trained the new Defence Forces of Timor-Leste. Now, it is assumed that the exit was too quick, too ill-prepared. Timor-Leste passed from being an example of “nation building” to gaining the dishonourable status of Failed State , according to the Fund for Peace Failed States Index, where it has been listed since 2008.

After this “re-branding exercise”, better  equipped police forces were sent to Timor-Leste under the mandate of the “United Nations Integrated Mission” (UNMIT). Timor-Leste became, again, a country of concern to United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Following UNSC’s decision, UNMIT’s mission was extended and is under evaluation to eventually end shortly after the elections, now that these have been deemed successful. Timor-Leste may not be that “fragile” after all.

But now, it is Timor Leste that does not shun the qualifier of “fragile state”. Much to the contrary, during the first OECD International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding, held in Dili, the capital city of Timor-Leste, a new group was born: the g7+, a group of countries self-defined as “fragile and conflict afflicted”. They are: Afghanistan, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Solomon Islands, South Sudan, Timor-Leste, and Togo. These countries don’t claim they are not “fragile”, but they clearly reject being “failed”. As their charter proclaims:

“We, the member countries of the g7+, believe fragile states are characterized and classified through the lens of the developed rather than through the eyes of the developing.”

Timor-Leste and its leadership learned from the Independence struggle, that, more than denying reality as others see it, the key to gain momentum and to lead a process of change may sometimes be dependent on assuming a weakness, and making this a source of strength. Not denying the “fragile” classification, their proposal was to change the lens, and, by sharing challenges, stories and experiences, join up ”fragile states” in a not-so-fragile pressure group. They recognized that none of them would be likely to meet any of the Millennium Development Goals’ targets, but, yet, this time, they refused to allow others to lay the blame solely at their doorstep. This time, the international attribution of an especially fragile status would have to come with the recognition that the recipes for aid could no longer be the same. The first victory was the approval of the New Deal for engagement in fragile states approved at the 4^th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan.

This very week, the diplomatic acknowledgement of the new role “Fragile States” must have on the “development” arena came with the appointment of Emília Pires, Minister of Finances of Timor-Leste and chair of the g7+, as one of the members of the High-level Panel of Eminent Persons advising the United Nations on the global development agenda post-2015.

With the elections milestone conquered and a new government sworn this Wednesday, 08 August 2012, all evidence points to the end of the UNMIT mission. Perhaps Timor-Leste is no longer “fragile”. And yet, the original challenges the country faced have not been overcome and it is currently undergoing a self-led “Fragility Assessment”.

An unexpected test to the new status of Timor-Leste came a week after the elections. The most voted party (CNRT) held a congress and opened it to be broadcast on national media. Some officials from the leading CNRT party made derogatory statements regarding the leading opposition party (FRETILIN) which led to rising tensions and some acts of violent protest by their supporters. The spectre of the violence scourging the 2007 elections hung heavy in the air for a few days. Recently arrived in Dili, I could see it in the faces of the people I talked to. I myself felt it. Within two weeks, though, a sense of tranquillity returned. Timor-Leste is different, something has really changed. Perhaps we can hope to say, Timor is starting to overcome its fragilities.

Now that “fragility” may no longer be a platform to overrule and disregard the ownership by “fragile country’s” people, despite the institutional weaknesses and eventual fragile legitimacy of their political leadership, of the efforts to overcome their challenges of “development”, who knows what new word will appear.

Bibliographic References:

Gunn, Geoffrey (1999), Timor Loro Sae: 500 years, Livros do Oriente

Ricardo Goulão Santos is q PhD Candidate within the Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction Team at IDS.

Reflections and refractions: the rights and responsibilities of women as agents of change

Elizabeth Mills[1] 

Sri Lanka’s capital city never sleeps. Arriving late at night, I travelled along roads punctuated by brightly-lit Buddha statues and shrines to Jesus, bearing witness to the country’s sociocultural heterogeneity and its ancient religious history. The roads we travelled also reflected Sri Lanka’s entrenched but slowly declining economic inequality, as we moved from the crowded, pockmarked streets in the city’s periphery to the empty tar- and tree-lined avenues that led us to a marble-floored hotel in Colombo’s centre. In addition to the coconut-juice traders, the whirring tuk-tuks (taxis), and the full-moon festival that saw Buddhist temples laced with frangipani flowers, the city of Colombo was also host to an international conference jointly organised by the ACU and the University of Kelaniya. Entitled ‘Critical women: women as agents of change through higher education’, the conference sought to reflect and develop on the 2011 Commonwealth Day theme: ‘Women as agents of change’.

The conference took place over three days in March 2012 and ended on International Women’s Day, the UN theme of which was ‘Empower rural women – end hunger and poverty’. Both the Commonwealth Day and International Women’s Day themes connect, crucially, on the importance of education in addressing gender inequality. The conference sought to highlight the responsibilities and rights that women have within higher education institutions to advance their careers and to engender positive change in society more broadly. UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon’s message on Women’s Day noted the importance of education for women in and beyond rural areas, stating: ‘The plight of the world’s rural women and girls mirrors that of women and girls throughout society – from the persistence of the glass ceiling to pervasive violence at home, at work and in conflict; from the prioritization of sons for education to the hundreds of thousands of women who die each year in the act of giving life for want of basic obstetric care’. Both themes reflect the imperative of education for addressing gender inequality; they also both reflect a broader development paradigm in which empowering women is viewed as a viable trigger for cascading positive social change across society as a whole.

This paradigm, also evident in the field of HIV, straddles the potential for positive change for women alongside the dangerous entrenchment of structural inequality. As discussed in my conference paper, the principle of empowering women is indisputable, but the underlying rationale of investing in women to invest in societies and nations is problematic. The principle can fuel the blind and bold construction of women as vulnerable subjects requiring rescuing, whereas the rationale risks constructing women as the bearers of responsibility for transforming society, without addressing the socioeconomic and political structures that enable inequality. Ban Ki-moon, for example, states that: ‘Discriminatory laws and practices affect not just women but entire communities and nations. Countries where women lack land ownership rights or access to credit have significantly more malnourished children… Investing in rural women is a smart investment in a nation’s development’. Women’s relative lack of access to resources, such as agricultural subsidies, affects food and nutrition security in households; this is logical and should be addressed. However, the implicit assumption is that women are primarily responsible for ensuring that children are not malnourished; this shifts the ‘development gaze’ on to programmes that invest in children through investing in women and away from programmes that address the structural dynamics that enable men to access education, to move through glass ceilings, to access agricultural subsidies, and to not be held responsible by international actors for the wellbeing of children, households, societies, and nations.

In my PhD, and in my conference paper, I propose that, as critical agents women not only have the right to reflect on these development paradigms, but that we also have the responsibility to generate refractions through the prism of our work that disrupt and challenge linear conceptions of women’s rights and responsibilities in higher education, and in society more broadly.

South Africa and Brazil – my PhD field sites – offer a unique prism for refracting linear conceptualisations that link gender inequality to HIV. In South Africa in particular, HIV incidence has become welded to gender-based violence. The words go hand in hand with statistics that shock and numb; that are so real they become unreal and people become numbers. In a cross-sectional study in three South African districts (spanning rural, urban and city areas) in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu Natal, researchers interviewed 1,738 men aged 18-49 years.[2] This study found that 27.6% of all men had raped a woman or girl; rape of a current or ex-partner was reported by 14.3% of the men; 11.7% had raped an acquaintance or stranger (but not a partner) and 9.7% had raped both strangers and partners. Of all the men who were interviewed, almost half (42.4%) had been physically violent to an intimate partner.[3] Longitudinal analysis of a cluster-randomised control trial undertaken in the Eastern Cape between 2002 and 2006 with 1,099 women aged 15-26 indicated, conclusively, that there was a causal relationship between relationship power inequity and intimate partner violence and an increased risk of HIV infection among young South African women.[4]

In my conference paper, and through my ethnography, I sought to explicate the link between HIV and gender, to make the numbers enumerated above more human and, further, to challenge the hegemonic and ubiquitous development discourse that positions women as ‘vulnerable’ without recognising the nuanced, albeit fraught, strategies that women employ to navigate ‘precarity’. I use the term precarity to designate: ‘That politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Such populations are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection. Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized vulnerability and exposure for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence and to other forms of aggression that are not enacted by states and against which states do not offer adequate protection’.[5] The intersection of HIV incidence with gender inequality was strongly reflected in my overall research findings. However, I also identified a set of more nuanced narratives that refracted through the prism of this intersection: HIV-positive women simultaneously embodied, resisted, and performed precarity in complex configurations that challenged linear assumptions of women as either ‘deserving subjects’ or as ‘autonomous agents’.[6]

Therefore, instead of either affirming or negating the link between gender inequality and HIV, my PhD explores strategies employed by HIV-positive women to navigate not only complex inter-personal relationships characterised by inequality and gender-based violence, but also national, regional and global policy processes in order to ensure access to essential AIDS biomedicine. Based on ethnographic research, including participatory film and photography and conducted over 12 months in Brazil and South Africa, it interrogates: the relationship between women’s embodied experiences of vulnerability linked to socio-economic inequality and HIV-infection; their engagement with the state as citizens through social movements; and the role of national, regional and global governance coalitions in shaping HIV-positive women’s lives. Further, it challenges homogenous conceptualisations of policy processes as predominantly top-down and of HIV-positive women as silent subjects and as inherently vulnerable. It illustrates numerous strategies women employ to challenge and claim power by drawing on legislative and human rights frameworks as HIV activists and citizens in Brazil and South Africa.

In engaging with women as critical agents, it is possible to generate a complex topography of the terrain that women navigate in their lives and in their careers, both within and beyond higher education institutions. ‘Critical women: women as agents of change through higher education’ offered scope for the participants to engage with the practical, institutional and ideological configurations that impede gender equality in higher education.

To this end, the conference was organised around three main themes: leadership; economic development; and research. Speakers, including the vice-chancellors of Cardiff, Pretoria, Oxford Brookes and Fatima Jinnah Women Universities, expanded on each of these themes by drawing on their research and experience in the field of gender equality. The geographic distribution and disciplinary diversity of speakers from around the world illustrated the central importance of addressing gender and underlined the overall value of the conference for challenging frequently invisible, but deeply entrenched, structures that limit opportunities for women within and, importantly, beyond higher education institutions. However, as the conference participants iterated – and as I argue above – this responsibility does not, and should not, lie solely on the shoulders of women. It is critical for both women and men to take responsibility for challenging complex and embedded structural inequalities spanning class, gender, sexuality and race in a bid to make the right to equality a reality for all – whether it be in the agricultural sector through access to seed subsidies, in the HIV sector through access to antiretroviral treatment, or the higher education sector through access to fair and equal career advancement.

Elizabeth Mills is a Commonwealth Scholar from South Africa, completing her PhD at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK.

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[1] In March this year, the Association of Commonwealth Universities (ACU) jointly organised its first gender conference: ‘Critical women: women as agents of change through higher education’. Elizabeth Mills, a speaker at the event, reflects on its theme and on her own research with women living with HIV. This article will be published in the ACU Bulletin. For more information about the ACU, please visit: http://www.acu.ac.uk/

[2] Jewkes, R.K., and others, ‘Understanding Men’s Health and Use of Violence: Interface of Rape and HIV in South Africa’, MRC Policy Brief (South African Medical Research Council, 2009)

[3] Jewkes, R.K., and others, ‘Understanding Men’s Health and Use of Violence’

[4] Jewkes, R.K., and others, ‘Intimate partner violence, relationship power inequity, and incidence of HIV infection in young women in South Africa: a cohort study’, Lancet, 376.9734 (2010), 41-48

[5] See Butler, J., Precarious life : the powers of mourning and violence (London: Verso Books, 2004); and Jewkes, R.K., and others, ‘Intimate partner violence, relationship power inequity, and incidence of HIV infection in young women in South Africa’

[6] See Jones, R.B., ‘Development of Feminist Postcolonial Theory’, in Postcolonial Representations of Women (Heidelberg: Springer Netherlands, 2011), pp.23-38; Jones, R.B., ‘Creating Postcolonial Visual Pedagogy’, in Postcolonial Representations of Women (Heidelberg: Springer Netherlands, 2011), pp.195-219; and Cornwall, A., E. Harrison, and A. Whitehead, ‘Gender Myths and Feminist Fables: The Struggle for Interpretive Power in Gender and Development’, Development and Change, 38.1 (2007), 1-20

The real story after ‘Kony2012’

Marjoke Oosterom

The ‘Kony2012’ documentary film was put online on March 5, by the US-based organisation Invisible Children. Within days the film raised $5m and within a week attracted 70m viewers worldwide. The film calls for the arrest of Joseph Kony, the leader of the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the Acholi region of Uganda. Although the film shows the acute suffering of LRA victims, especially children, what really remains invisible are wounds of a society years after the LRA left.

Since its release, the film has been surrounded by social media hype and the film and the organisation behind it has been subject to much criticism. Concerns have been raised about Invisible Children’s finances; how the ‘slick Hollywood style’ plays straight into the emotions of the (American) audience when seeing children suffer; and how the simplicity of the story doesn’t do justice to the complexity of the war.  Critics have made an effort to give details about the style of the campaign and have challenged the notion that a ‘US solution’ would be the right solution. Quite a bit has been said about problematic video advocacy and manipulation. But here is the real story for after Kony2012, as told in the recent film The Governance Gap to stop Kony does not put an end to the suffering of people.

The Governance Gap demonstrates the enduring – often invisible – legacy of the LRA war through the story of Nighty, a 44 year old Acholi woman. First of all, the Acholi developed a ‘survival mindset’ to cope with decades of violence, from both the LRA and the Ugandan military. Food and safety were people’s priority, not the ordinary governance processes. The conflict undermined the capabilities of the Acholi as citizens and their confidence to re-engage in democratic processes after war. Having lived in a militarised environment, people are still reluctant to raise issues they perceive to be sensitive. Moreover, they have little experience with a developmental state. For years, all they asked for was security and now that they have it, many won’t ask for more. This undermines the ‘demand side’ of governance; Acholi lack experience to actively engage in the reconstruction of their region and in decision-making. Nor are they actively invited to.

Second, it shows the gap in how Acholi perceive themselves as part of the country.  ‘We are like slaves being brought into Uganda,’ Nighty says. The role of the Ugandan state is key in this. Acholi feel treated as second-class citizens. Current post-war reconstruction efforts do not sufficiently target these feelings.

Third, it shows the gap in post-conflict interventions in Acholi, which was one of the reasons to make The Governance Gap. Existing recovery efforts by the government and international donors focus on ‘hardware’; rebuilding physical infrastructure and services. This is important. Poverty in the Acholi region is far worse than in the rest of the country due to the war, and clearly visible. What is not visible is how the past experiences of war and life in the camps are carried on into the present. Interventions should therefore also focus on the ‘software’; building citizen capacities to re-engage in decision-making and democratic processes. And as The Governance Gap shows, reconstruction should include a process of national reconciliation in which the state acknowledges the atrocities committed by the military as well as its failure to end the war. Up to now citizens have few opportunities to have voice in the reconstruction process.

A campaign film such as ‘Kony2012’ may not be expected to provide the detailed nuance of a story. What it did, was remind the world of a ‘forgotten conflict’ where injustice had been done to thousands of people since the late 1980s (and don’t forget, not just by the LRA but also by the Ugandan government, and as some would argue… even by failing humanitarian actors). And true, Kony and his LRA continue to cause suffering. Every victim is one too many. They need to be stopped. They also need to be brought to justice, whether through the International Criminal Court or local forms of justice that seem more culturally accepted and appropriate.

But; if Kony is captured, the objective of Kony2012 campaign, this might solve a forgotten conflict, but not its aftermath. Since Kony left Uganda five years ago both the tangible and invisible consequences are still very real. And deserve as much attention as capturing Kony.

Marjoke Oosterom is a PhD candidate in the Participation, Power and Social Change Team at the Institute of Development Studies. She works on citizenship and participation in (post)conflict settings. The film The Governance Gap is based on her PhD research in the LRA affected areas of Northern Uganda, where she spent a year in a rural village just 10km from the border with South Sudan. For More insights from her research see: http://www.hivos.nl/eng/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Communities/Post-Conflict-Participation/Blog

Follow The Governance Gap on twitter! @GovernanceGap & #TheGovernaceGap

Developmental hackspaces: Fostering a meta-participatory ethos for Information and Communication Technologies for Development

Hani Morsi 

The program for the International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Development Conference includes a paper session titled “Expanding Participation”, which invokes thinking about the clearly rising convergence of many conceptual and practical repertoires of development research, practice and emerging information and communications technologies (ICTs). The sustained interest in participation (as a large and diverse set of methodologies, practices and frameworks) and how it continues to inform the general developmental zeitgeist is paralleled by the steady evolution in technologies and technological practices that have their own embedded manifestations of the participatory ethos. Technically-focused communities such as the open source movement and technologies such as crowdsourcing, with characteristics of openness, social collaboration, and unrestricted information flows mirror the inclusiveness inherent in participatory processes in development work.

With such a similitude in the participative and increasingly democratized cultures characterizing the current evolution in development and technical communities, an important question arises: Are we, as development researchers and practitioners, adequately capitalizing on the potential opportunities created (as a result for such a convergence of shared values) for collaboration with our technical counterparts? Are we able to reimagine development within a context of the accelerating rate of change that the increasingly rapid rate of technological advancement brings about? How are we able to reconceive our ‘traditional’ ways of thinking about the global developmental priorities in a world characterized by such an accelerating rate of change?

The purpose of this blog post is not to offer any adequate answers to these questions, but to present a call to action on an issue with direct bearing on formulating these answers. How can development practitioners and technology professionals capitalize on shared values, more effectively collaborate on solving complex developmental issues and foster a reciprocal cross-pollination of ideas that is mutually valuable in finding practical and sustainable solutions in an increasingly dynamic global environment?  The collaborative spaces already exist, considering the multitude of cross-disciplinary conferences, research programs and development interventions that combine input from and invite partnership between those working in both realms of development practice and technological innovation, as well as local stakeholders and institutions. That is, the attention to inclusiveness and participation as central notions of collaborative efforts across joint undertakings between the development and technology domains is already extant and arguably on the rise. What needs more attention is factors affecting the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of collaboration between those working in development practice and their opposite numbers in the technology and innovation world, and this is what is meant by ‘meta-participatory’ in the title of this post.

Many of the attributes that both groups have in common have already been discussed. What about divergences? What stands in the way of a more vibrant alliance between development and technology? In many cases, it all about finding the right balance. Here are two key observations:

• Disparate views on the role of technology for development: this is an elementary – even obvious – observation, but remains fundamental to bridging gaps in conception of technological tools and processes for development. Without risking treading into territory mined with multifarious and often polarized debates on the subject, and for the purpose of the main thrust of this post, it would suffice to say that development practitioners need to adopt a little more techno-fetishism, while technologists would probably do well to accept an additional degree of practical conservatism. In other words, we need to balance long-term, futuristic outlooks on the possibilities of what technology can (or cannot) do for development with short-term, pragmatic focuses on specific interventions. An equilibrium of far-sighted vision and effective action cannot exist otherwise.
• Conflicting working ‘tempos’: technologists often have a ‘keyed-up’ working pace. Prototypes are built, deployed, tested and improved upon in a cycle that is analogous to but much faster than the slow-paced, deliberative, power-sensitive process that lies at the core of participatory methodologies. In collaborative projects, finding a practical balance of pace is difficult, but achievable.

The late Steve Jobs, one of the technological icons of present times, once said “…innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem”. Sudden moments of clarity and late night phone calls aside, if we are to truly co-construct knowledge about how find technologically-catalyzed solutions for global development challenges, we need to break out of our respective disciplinary silos and start reciprocally but constructively shooting holes in our preconceived notions about how to find these solutions. We need to open sourcedevelopment by building upon the shared values of participation and inclusiveness and promoting a joint discourse of ideas at the intersection of practical intervention, technological innovation and ethical considerations.

Hani Morsi is a PhD candidate within the Participation, Power and Social Change research team at IDS.

This article is crossposted to the Participation, Power and Social Change blog

On Job Applications…

Ricardo Santos 

For those of us considering applying for a job in development, it might be a good idea to read Jeffrey Sachs’ article in the Washington Post. As David Bosco pointed out in The Multilateralist (March 2), Jeffrey Sachs quite simply used his article to submit his CV for the job of President of the World Bank. His opening statement is mission charged:

‘My quest to help end poverty has taken me to more than 125 countries, from mega-city capitals to mountaintop villages, from rain forest settlements to nomadic desert camps. Now I hope it will take me to 18th and Pennsylvania, to the presidency of the World Bank. I am eager for this challenge.’

Nothing like showing enthusiasm towards the new job you’re applying to! It then describes how Sachs perceives the profile of the job in question followed by some paragraphs dedicated to present his vision for the World Bank.

The next step is to highlight his strengths, focusing on his track record as a ‘trusted problem solver’. working to end poverty. In what is arguably a slightly disorganized argument, Sachs then discussed the challenges faced by the World Bank for it to become – in his opinion – a better, more effective organization, and the skills-set and network he can bring to support this change.

Confidently using the future tense, Sachs follows by letting his potential interviewers know that he ‘will work with industry, governments and civil society […], ‘agronomists, veterinary scientists, engineers and communities’ but also ‘with engineers’ (that’s definitely a safe job at the Bank under Sachs) ‘and financiers’ to solve issues such as bringing broadband to clinics, revolutionize knowledge, disease control, education and business but also solve the world energy challenge. Last, but not the least, he ‘will work with urban planners, architects and community organizations’ to meet the challenge of the ‘developing world’s mega-cities’. It shows that a display of ambition is also a key factor for a good job application.

Finally, as with all good applications, he ends with a statement of commitment: ‘Let’s get started’. Jeff Sachs is the man for the job.

But why would anyone want to lead the World Bank? Although understating its allure, Jeff Sachs recognizes that $16 billion of net disbursements in 2011 is ‘a meaningful sum’. It might not compare with the flows of corporate or bank finance or even trade, but it clearly compares with all the other donors of international aid. According to OECD DAC statistics, World Bank disbursements are only lower than the Official Development Assistance from the United States and from the set of European Union countries if considered as a block, making it, therefore, one of the three most powerful donors, and, by far, the most powerful multinational donor agency.

As it happens, the US is also the country with the highest voting power in the World Bank (15.85%), more than double Japan, the second biggest stockholder (for more details see the IBRD voting power realignment document of 2010). Not surprisingly, since its creation the World Bank has been led exclusively by Americans.

However, in the wake of the financial crisis and the rise of emergent economies such as China (since February the second biggest economy in the world, but with only 4.42% of the votes in the Bank), India (2.91% of the votes) and Brazil (recently taking the role as the 6^th largest economy, but with only 2.24% of the votes) and the advent of the G20, new voices seek to be heard in determining international affairs, including aid. Those voices seek to break the invisible rule of American leadership of the World Bank.

This brings us to the final question: to whom should a spontaneous job application be sent? The obvious answer is: to those who have the power to decide. If that’s the case, by presenting his job application in the Washington Post, Jeffrey Sachs clearly demonstrated who, in his opinion, has the power to choose the next president of the World Bank: the United States of America.

Jeffrey Sachs chose to clearly propose himself for the leadership of the world’s most powerful multilateral donor institution. He has already rallied the support of some opinion makers and now has the endorsement of the Kenyan government. But he also revealed that his approach to “development” still flows through the same halls of power that currently command the World Bank. Does this mean a promise of a change in the way the Bank will work? Maybe not…

P.S. By the way, an alternative, humorous, version of Jeffrey Sachs’ “job application” can be found here.

Ricardo Santos is a PhD candidate within Vulnerability and Poverty Reduction team at IDS.