Think conflict

Unfair on the World Bank and the UN? Think about this:

• In Liberia World Bank spending on consolidating peace and security started to decline rapidly in 2008, tailing off by 2011, yet the country still depends on a UN peacekeeping force as the guardian against a return to the 13 years of civil war and depredation up to 2003, and that force is itself is set to be phased out in 2011;
• The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper for Liberia – the strategic development document that is, as in every other developing country, largely a product of the Bank’s work – is 192 pages long and devotes just eight paragraphs to conflict;
• In Burundi, UN Peacebuilding Fund projects have concluded and the integrated UN mission in the country is set to draw down by the end of the year, just when instability and violence are mounting and rumours of fear and a return to war abound;
• In Somalia, the World Bank continues to prioritise development programming that ignores conflict and is increasingly at odds with its own thorough and sophisticated context analyses.

Think context

In 2007 the acronymicly challenged OECD-DAC (Development Aid Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) produced a set of principles for engagement by donor governments in unstable and conflict-affected countries. Rule number 1 is, Take context as the starting point. Seems obvious enough. At International Alert a group of us were recently pondering the way the big development beasts work and I caused genuine hilarity by asking, ‘Do the international institutions take context as the starting point?’

Of course not. The starting point for such behemoths is set by their own institutional norms and realities.

It’s not impossible for big institutions to respond to context rather than to the organisation’s standard operating procedure but it takes effort and it requires – as DFID has done to some degree at least – a process of decentralising some of the key decisions. Subsidiarity in EU-speak – the principle that the decision should be taken at the lowest possible level in any hierarchy so it is shaped by the reality it will itself shape. High-level decision-making should be strategic; the details should be sorted out in the field.

But to do this, it is axiomatic that staff must be well resourced, trained and motivated. Trying to do development in conflict contexts is not easy. It is labour intensive and knowledge intensive work. It needs people who know the issues and who know the country working in a team along with those who know the financial instruments, the technical assistance measures and all the rest of it.

Monitor constantly

The review of multilateral agencies’ use of the UK taxpayers’ money, announced by Secretary of State for Development Andrew Mitchell is, therefore, a very timely opportunity to shine the light precisely onto this issue – the conflict sensitivity and context responsiveness of the big beasts.

But an uncomfortable thought occurs. DFID will find it hard to do this in the time frame that has been announced – a 4-month period in which to review how 30 organisations spend £3 billion a year.

Of course, if DFID had been doing this already, responding when the Secretary of State ordered the review would be much easier. So one outcome of the review should be DFID setting up a monitoring group to keep the multilaterals’ work under continued scrutiny.

Criteria for conflict sensitivity

Sensitivity is a quality. How do you know if an institution is displaying that quality in relation to, in this case, conflict? Here are some template questions for a multilateral agency:

1. Does the agency follow the OECD-DAC principle of taking context as the starting point? Following this line of thought:

• Does it have a country team or other kind of capacity for continuing analysis of the context? If not – if a context analysis is done every few years – you can forget it: contexts change faster than that and you have to be able to follow them as they evolve.
• Who does the country team try to involve in doing the analysis? If the answer is its own staff plus a few officials and NGOs based in the capital, it’s taking a limited view of a complex situation that may be different in different parts of the country. And it may well find it misses out on understanding the power dynamics in the country.

2. If the agency is notionally committed to “local ownership” and participation, as most of them are on paper, does the reality of practice match the intention? Henry Kissinger once warned a US Senate Committee to “watch what we do, not what we say” – a good principle of hard-headed analysis. Agencies frequently go in for lumbering, one-off consultation processes with a few key interlocutors. Findings are very often outdated by the time they are circulated. Better instead to make the consultation wider and continuing. In that theme:

• What does the agency do to draw in interlocutors from outside the capital? Does it pay attention to the different elements of diversity in identifying with whom it should be in discussion?
• Does it publicise its programmes and its consultation so people can contribute uninvited?
• What do people who have been engaged in consultation think about it? (Views on this are consistently acidic.)
• Can the agency show a case where policy was changed (and not just re-spun) in response to results of a consultation process?

3. To analyse the conflict context, the agency’s staff are going to engage with political questions amid diverse and divergent views and in the face of competing needs of different groups: can they do that?

• Does the agency’s mandate support conflict and context analysis? And does management practice extend that support to individual staff or are they out on their own?
• Does the agency have an internal culture that permits disagreement and discussion so as to arrive at the most accurate possible and nuanced analysis?
• What training have the staff received that helps equip them for this work? How is a talent for context analysis spotted and supported?
• Does the agency recognise that gender awareness is not only about the participation of women but also means thinking about the impact of different kinds of masculinity on prospects for peace or conflict?
• When personnel move on, how is their knowledge shared with colleagues including their replacements arriving from a different location and a different kind of assignment?

4. Does the agency understand and measure success in both qualitative and quantitative terms? – because, if not, it’s missed the point entirely.

Mitchell was speaking at a meeting convened by Oxfam and the Policy Exchange and had three messages:

• To the poor of the world: “the people and Government of Britain are on your side;”
• To hardworking british taxpayers: Mitchell will concentrate on  delivering and demonstrating value for money in international aid;
• To all those involved in international development: “Be prepared for change… a fundamental change that empowers people, that creates and sustains wealth rather than simply redistributing it.”

The central policy initiatives in his speech are that the government will create and independent aid watchdog and guarantee transparency in UK aid.

Good stuff and along the way he made a very well argued re-presentation of the case that overseas development aid is a moral and political priority, together with his insistence that the aid must be providd efficiently and effectively.

Nonetheless, the Guardian was ready to query whether the commitment to increase development aid to 0.7% of Gross National Income is as reliable as it sounds. And commenting on their editorial, I was moved to point out that in so many of the countries where UK aid is having the least impact (like everybody else’s aid), the problem is not just poverty but the linked issues of the shadow of armed violence and the debilitation inflicted by bad government. In opposition, Mitchell stressed these themes. It will be interesting to see how he picks them up and operationalises them in government.

Background conditions

Here are some components of the general context: 

• 1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water;
• 2 billion don’t have adequate sanitation;
• the combined population of “water-stressed countries” today is reckoned to be about 2.4 billion;
• by 2015 it’s thought that about 120 countries will be water-stressed;
• Southwest China had its worst drought in a century this year affecting 24 million people;
• the Gobi Desert is expanding by about 2500 square miles each year and its edge is now only some 40-45 miles from Beijing, which frequently suffers severe dust storms;
• a barely reported drought in the Sahel right now affects 10 million people;
• at the current rate of consumption and with no improvement in water retention or new sources, some estimates indicate India is on course to exhaust its freshwater supplies by the middle of this century;
• some analyses indicate Yemen’s capital Sana’a will run out of water around 2017.

These enormous pressing problems explain why the issue of water is not an environmental issue but a fundamental feature of the global political landscape. Or, to put it differently, they explain why an initially environmental issue is a fundamental political challenge. 

Management of risks and resources

World population today is about 6.8 billion. It is expected to be about 9 billion by 2050. Feeding the people is one of the biggest challenges the world community faces in the next half century. To achieve that, the problems indicated by the bullet points above require efficient and creative management

• to find better ways to store and move water so there is less wastage,
• simultaneously to increase the productivity of agriculture so as to use less water in producing more food,
• to involve ordinary people and their communities in identifying the problems and making the decisions that affect their lives,
• and in arriving at equitably shared solutions to common problems so as to minimise conflict risk.

If management of resources and risk is deficient, the consequent problems could be overwhelming – both in the sense of overwhelming poor countries and in the sense of overwhelming the international system’s ability to cope.

As when thinking about the relationship between climate change and conflict, it is misleading to think in terms of a simple causal relationship. The problem is not that water scarcity or climate change more generally will cause violent conflict plain and simple. Rather, the problem is that water scarcity or climate change more generally will inter-act (and, indeed, already are inter-acting) with other features of the social, economic and political landscape to increase the risk of violent conflict. It is where poverty is rampant and governance is weakest and most arbitrary that the risks are greatest and management of them is least effective.

Water wars or cooperation?

In recent years there have been two common statements about the relationship between water and security. The first is that the wars of the future will be about water rather than, say, about oil. Contrariwise, the second is that so far there have been very few international conflicts over water and that shared water resources have more often led to cooperation than conflict.

If the optimism of the second insight vitiates the gloom-laden first, there is sadly some reason to temper that optimism. To begin with, some of the cooperation is between unequal powers and the resulting agreement has been one-sided. In such cases, cooperation masks conflict rather than resolves it.

More importantly, pressure on water resources is likely to grow over the next 40-50 years as the world population continues to grow, urbanisation proceeds apace and more countries, by dint of succeeding with a high growth economic strategy, enter the water-intensive phase of development that China and India are now in.

Global warming, climate change and water

As the globe warms, the consequences for water are the key area of natural consequences that shape the impact of climate change on people and societies. Warmer air retains moisture more than cooler air, which produces a nasty two-sided effect. Many dry areas are, broadly speaking, likely to become drier because the air will more efficiently hold water and deny them rainfall; meanwhile many wet areas will, broadly speaking, get wetter because when the air is ready to dump its water on them there is more water in the air to fall as rain. There are, in addition, areas where drought is likely though it has not previously been experienced very much. There are also areas where the rains will still come but at different times, disturbing both natural cycles and farming patterns. And there are regions where severe weather events are changing their precise location, subjecting new places to typhoons, for example, where residents are not so experienced in dealing with the problems.

Overall, then, climate change will increase water scarcity in some places and increase water excess in others. Both effects are capable of diminishing food security. In different places, the precise effect may be extended drought or an intensification of the monsoon into a shorter period, or less dramatic variations that are nonetheless significant for agriculture. At the extreme, even a rich country like Australia has seen rice production decline vertiginously. In South and Southeast Asia, rice production faces long-term risks of catastrophic proportions, which would have deeply damaging effects for the societies for whom rice is a staple food.

Social consequences

From these effects on food security and livelihood security, there follows a train of knock-on effects – the consequences of consequences – with which regular readers of this blog are now familiar.

It is worth picking one point out of the discussion of conflict effects – the importance of thinking about consequences at different levels. So-called water wars are one thing (so-called because it is axiomatic that no war ever has a single cause, so what might look like a water war when viewed through the lens of water scarcity may look like a completely different kind of war if viewed through the lens of bad governance, ethno-national difference, regional power politics, individual leaders’ political ambitions etc). But the destabilising effects of climate change and its water impact might lead in a different direction.

An article on Reuters AlertNet focuses on the effects of the falling water levels in Lake Naivasha near Nairobi. Less water means less fishing and for those who cannot find other jobs and income it seems that some have turned to crime, for recorded levels of crime in the area are on the increase.

The politics of water management

If water deficiencies are linked to insecurity and conflict risk, it follows that good water management is a part of peacebuilding and peacebuilding can be a part of good water management: both are essential components of human security.

To make this general point via a specific example: in 2008 the Nepalese government knew the Koshi River was at risk of bursting its banks because of a damaged river barrage and contracted an Indian company to carry out repairs in good time. Unfortunately, though the company was ready to start work, a dispute between the labour unions got in the way.

This was not a dispute between labour and management so much as a dispute between the unions themselves, reflecting their conflicting political alignments. These partly reflected divisions in the civil war in Nepal; it had been settled by agreement in 2006 but its conflict divisions persist. Neither the provincial government nor the national government, itself divided between parties whose local and unions representatives were busy feuding, were able to intervene and resolve the conflict over the work on the river barrage.

Accordingly the work on the barrage was not done and the Koshi flooded, displacing over 60,000 people in the Terai region where scores of armed militias are active. The failure of central government to act fed regional resentment and thus instability.

This case shows how conflict complicates good water management, while the absence of good water management (despite good intentions) exacerbates conflict.

To manage the Koshi and rise to other comparable challenges in other developing countries requires the framework of a well functioning state. Where it does not exist because of war or corrupt neglect, the framework of a proper state has to be built. Issues of climate and water management are thus issues of peace and governance; like so much else in development, it is a serious error to let them drift into the category of technical problems that can be quickly fixed.

What is required instead is the slow work of building peaceful states, making it possible for ordinary people in their communities to play their part in the mass of small-scale actions that will be the primary motor for solving the problems of water management. Neither technical nor top-down fixes will meet the bill. But experience in a variety of places is beginning to offer grounds for optimism that small-scale practical solutions can be mobilised and can work. In a report issued by International Alert last November, my colleague Janani Vivekananda and I went into this question and identified some telling examples.

It’s a policy area in which the UK is a major player. Not only is the Department for International Development a major bilateral funder, it has also offered significant intellectual leadership role over the last decade.  And it is a field that matters. Looked at moderately broadly, international development includes, touches on or is partly determined by climate change, the risk of pandemics, trade, peacebuilding and international security. And while the UK government is not ultimately a paragon of joined-up and consistent approaches across the development board, it has made some progress in linking up the different parts of government and government policy that have an impact on developing countries.

The common ground

Last year I did fairly detailed reviews of the development policies of Labour and the Conservatives. There are many ways in which they are aligned with each other. The approach of the Liberal-Democrats fits broadly into the same territory. The ground of discernible consensus in 2009′s policy statements covered at least the following high ground:

• Morality and self-interest unite to construct an overwhelming case in favour of providing assistance to international development in poor countries;
• The level of spending on development should rise to 0.7% of Gross National Income by 2013;
• The UN’s Millennium Development Goals set the framework and targets of international development efforts;
• Though not mentioned among the MDGs, peace and security issues and the political dimension of development have to be engaged with if development efforts are to succeed;
• Crafting a comprehensive response to climate change that both gets the problem under control over time and helps poorer countries to adapt to the effects of climate change have become a key component of development strategy.

Despite those broad areas of agreement, there are differences below the headlines and there are also some issues of nuance and emphasis that may presage important differences if not in declared policy then in its implementation.

In the new government the Cabinet position of Secretary of State (Andrew Mitchell) and the non-Cabinet posts of Minister of State (Alan Duncan) and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Stephen O’Brien) are all held by Conservatives. Now the two coalition partners stress that they have a joint programme for government, so the Liberal Democrats are accountable even for areas of policy where they have no ministers, and the Lib-Dems did secure some important points in development policy during the negotiation of the coalition agreement. It’s nonetheless inevitable that the key questions about how development policy will unfold under the new government are primarily about the Conservatives’ preferences.

Q1. Spending

The government is not only committing itself to spend 0.7% of GNI on overseas development assistance (ODA) by 2013 but, following a practice of legal self-binding that Labour set, intends to introduce a law to ensure it meets the target. This is a Lib-Dem win: the Conservatives were against the idea of a legally binding target until now even though they supported the target itself.

This commitment may provide the answer to the question in pretty short order but it is nonetheless worth asking the question: is the 0.7% commitment durable?

During the past year and a half, with the Conservatives committing themselves to the internationally agreed target of 0.7% and the economic crisis unfolding, there was a steady background drumbeat from some party circles along the lines that, whatever got said in opposition, in government it would be different. As the cuts in other areas of public spending started to bite, would it be possible, they sceptically wondered, to keep on sending large sums of taxpayers’ money ‘over there’?

Is it likely that this summer we will both see an emergency budget with the first of the promised cuts and a bill being laid before parliament to keep increasing ODA?

If that’s an unlikely pairing, we can suppose the bill will be delayed. The coalition agreement says on the outside of the back cover, “The deficit reduction programme takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement, and the speed of implementation of any measures that have a cost to the public finances will depend on decisions to be made in the Comprehensive Spending Review.”

The question is not about the arithmetic of the budget but rather the political signals and symbolism. Does the government think that Britons can tighten their belts at home without also tightening the purse strings abroad? If these things are possible at the same time, they can go ahead; if it’s difficult to get to get the symbolic timing right at the outset, then time passing won’t make it any easier.

The big spending review will report in the autumn – probably not a good time to bring the bill on 0.7% forward. But if it’s delayed till next year, as bigger cuts loom, circumstances will be even less propitious – and less favourable again as the cuts bite into public sector services and jobs. It might not be until economic recovery is well established that it feels straightforward to bring the bill in; that might be a couple of years hence, not far short of the target date of 2013 – and then what would be the point?

In short, the coalition government stands rather close to the top of the slippery slope down to Sometimenever Land where good political intentions go to fall asleep.

It needs to be emphasised that the government has already answered this question with great clarity in the coalition agreement, which, alas, is not enough to lay the question to rest. That will happen only when the bill is actually brought before parliament.

Q2: Conflict and security

Over the past four or five years the case that it is necessary to address conflict and security issues in order for development to go forward has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Many of the bigger development NGOs have resisted this – and some still do – on the rather odd grounds that it ‘securitises’ development. The truth is that development and the issues of conflict and security are inseparable from the outset. This is clear if you look at it as an historical process (as traced in Violence and Social Orders by North, Wallis and Weingast, or with different emphases by Charles Tilly  in Coercion, capital and European states, or with greater differences in  studies such as Liah Greenfeld’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity).* It is equally clear if you look through the lens of human security and consider the way in which development and security are preconditions for each other, as encapsulated in the formulation of the parallel freedoms from want and from fear by the UN Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change that was established by Kofi Annan.

The increasing depth and breadth of the recognition that how a country is governed and whether it is stable and peaceful are core determinants of whether its people will find prosperity and the society will develop has been a welcome feature of the last half decade. The last government’s 2009 development white paper was a major milestone in setting out the importance of engaging with politics and addressing conflict in order to assist development.

The Conservative opposition embraced the same argument but there was a difference.

When their green paper was published shortly after Labour’s white paper, I pointed out in my review of it (24 October 2009) that while there was material in it about the relationship between security and development, most of it focused on the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are wholly un-typical of the kind of insecurity that haunts and undermines development prospects in many developing countries. I also noted that when I had had the opportunity to query Andrew Mitchell – then the shadow minister for development – about this, he had insisted that the importance of the peace and conflict issues were not confined to the high profile, high octane cases of Afghanistan and Iraq where British forces were or had been directly engaged in combat. The issues were, he said, just as pressing albeit in different forms in a range of developing countries afflicted by conflict, insecurity and poor governance.

But the full coalition agreement published today contains only two reference to conflict and security issues in the international development section: one is to announce support for an international treaty “to limit the sale of arms to dangerous regimes” and the other is to promise “a more integrated approach to post-conflict reconstruction where the British military is involved.”

This is not the broad concept of insecurity and conflict that Mitchell talked about in opposition. The coalition agreement’s version is narrow both in that it is confined to places where British armed forces are involved, which is not many, and in its focus on post-conflict reconstruction. No mention of preventing the initial slide into violent conflict. Now “post-conflict reconstruction” can be treated in a relatively broad way, but it also provides a license for narrowness. It is possible and even normal to focus it only onto physical and economic rebuilding without looking at broader peacebuilding needs. And the very word “reconstruction” tends to distract attention from the need not just to reconstruct what was there before, which took the country into war, but actually to build something new. Nor is there any mention here of the problem of development in circumstances of bad governance and fragile states.

I am very readily aware that the coalition programme is a document dealing in headlines and broad categories. But the challenge of assisting development in fragile and conflict-affected circumstances, where the people are assailed not only by poverty but also by arbitrary governance and rampant insecurity – this is not a detail in international development policy, it is a central challenge.

So the second question on development policy is, what happened to the conflict analysis and the governance agenda?

Q3: A sustainable justification

And that brings us to the third question. Re-reading last year’s Conservative green paper on development, I was struck again that there is a genuine enthusiasm for development assistance in these pages and for getting it right and equally that the examples that are taken to show how development assistance can work are projects.

The problem, to be blunt, is that countries do not develop on the basis of development projects.

Development projects can be delivered on time and have the expected impact in terms of literacy or numbers of people immunised – yet development does not happen because the overall patterns of power do not change and a small elite continues to thrive while (and sometimes by) holding the mass of the population back. In these circumstances, these projects can be extremely important but that importance lies in human terms – in the prevention of disease, the alleviation of misery or the expansion of opportunity for those individuals and groups lucky enough to be beneficiaries. If there is a theory of change connected to these projects it is simply that if there were enough such projects, everybody would benefit and then…

And then, unless the distribution of power altered, the country’s development would still be held back.

To make this point a little too bluntly, 0.7% of UK GNI’s worth of projects plus an integrated approach to post-conflict reconstruction in Afghanistan do not add up to a persuasive justification for the government’s commitment to continue spending generously on ODA.

And as I have argued in previous posts, a new and sustainable justification for continued ODA is badly needed. The need arises partly for reasons I outlined above in discussing the juxtaposition of domestic spending cuts with ODA increases. Partly, it’s because the MDGs are not going to be met and in some places the shortfall compared to the goals is going to be extreme. And partly it’s because new challenges are unfolding – the combination of the consequences of climate change and growing population is already generating stresses that many states are simply unable to cope with.

So the third question is about the need to identify a new explanation, a new narrative of development that sustains a new argument for supporting it through ODA and in other ways. The answer would be easier if the new government were to revisit the conflict and security issues in development, re-focus on them, broaden them from the artificially narrow terms of the published coalition programme and put them higher up the development agenda again. And this reformulated narrative of development and of assisting development would itself make the arguments for a law to spend 0.7% of GNI on ODA more credible.

* Douglass C North, John Joseph Wallis & Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cmbridge University Press, 2009); Charles Tilly, Coercion, capital and European states: 990-1992 (Cambridge Ma & Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992); Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press, 1992).

Within the coalition

The election campaign and haggling over the coalition agreement were, inevitably, all about the UK and not so much about how it relates to the rest of the world. But it remains a fundamental role of a state to represent the national interest, policies and preferences in world affairs and the new Foreign secretary, William Hague, has already visited Hillary Clinton in Washington. The new government will also have to take a position in key discussions within the EU, especially on the formation of the External Action Service. On this, it will be fascinating to see the degree to which, if at all, the Liberal-Democrats’ Europhilia tempers the Euro-hostility of the Conservatives; the gulf between the two parties on Europe is deeper and older than on any of the other issues over which they aired significant differences during the campaign. It is potentially more troubling for the coalition than immigration, Trident-replacement, nuclear power or even public spending and economic recovery.

Within the broader framework of foreign policy, there sits policy on international development and overseas development assistance (ODA). This did not surface at all during the campaign (OK – now somebody can email in the link to an article on p12 of a broadsheet but I don’t recall a word on it during the leaders’ debates, for example). This is partly because the country turns inward at election time and at least as importantly because the major parties’ positions reveal a lot of agreement.

In blog posts last year I reviewed the development policies of Labour and Conservatives in some detail. The approach of the Liberal-Democrats, to whom I have not extended the same courtesy, fits broadly into the same territory as their rivals. Development policy is an area of major consensus albeit with significant divergences below the headlines.

One of those divergences is about the coordination of development and foreign policy.

The conservatives and DFID

One of the Conservatives’  criticisms of development policy under Labour was that the Department for International Development (DFID) – a creation of the Labour government – had got somewhat too big for its boots due to having so much money and had started to have its own foreign policy, separate from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office itself. The Conservatives promised to bring this uppity teenager into line, give it some discipline, simultaneously making it look more like a government department while giving it some sort of personnel injection from the private sector, and coordinate it better with the FCO.

The core idea is that the FCO will carry out the analysis and make the political decisions at which point DFID will step forward with its money and technical know-how and carry out the work.

The Lib-Dems did not share these Tory suspicions. The long-serving development shadow while the Conservatives were in opposition, Andrew Mitchell, has taken the Cabinet post as Secretary for International Development so he has a chance not only to put policies into action but to set about generating his preferred institutional culture.

Changing organisational culture

There are five problems with the kind of critique the Conservatives made in opposition about the way that DFID works.

1. Organisational culture emanates from the institution itself and is largely unspoken and ambient. You can tackle it all right but it can be hard for the newcomer to shift the attitudes of the long term staff, especially when the newcomer might be history after a mere 2-3 years for any one of a number of reasons – success (so he’s promoted), failure (so it’s demotion to the parliamentary rank-and-file), the economy (so the government falls), politics (moving on as part of a deal with a different faction of the Conservatives or a tweak in the agreement with the Liberal-Democrats). The incentives for resisting the reform effort and dragging feet increase with the number of possible reasons why it might not last.
2. An important part of the critique is about surface phenomena – about how DFID looks and feels. This is by no means unimportant. It has much deeper practical effect than might at first seem obvious. Whether DFID staff in offices around the world feel and behave as part of the UK’s official overseas presence has a big effect on how priorities are assessed, which of a wide range of UK policies set in London are taken to be the most important, and how success is defined and gauged. But the thing is, how things look can be changed pretty easily. You want them to look more like civil servants? No problem: ties on for the men and no more chinos, jeans, cords or those ghastly checked shirts and dark and sobre suits for the women. It’s that easy and it takes considerable effort from the top to go further especially when the top has an agenda that is filled with poverty, conflict and climate change. It’s not inevitable but the odds are that the leadership loses focus on slow-going institutional change and and settles for the cosmetic change.
3. DFID is a complex institution. Some aspects of the ethos in some corners of it are unattractive (a tendency to be complacent and patronising); perhaps in some places it’s too casual and not business-like enough (not my perception but, since it’s a complex institution, perhaps I simply haven’t seen those parts of it); and in much of the organisation, the ethos is admirable. At its worst, DFID gets into ticking boxes and being bureaucratic; at its best, it has shown considerable drive, capacity to innovate, an ability to learn as it goes along. Of all government agencies of international development, it is capable of being the most impressive at translating lessons learned into new practice and insights into policy proposals. Those virtues grow to a significant degree from the NGO-ish feeling in DFID – specifically from the combination of idealism and practicality – that for other reasons Andrew Mitchell decries.
4. It’s all very well to say that the FCO does the policy and political analysis and DFID does the implementation but the distinctions are not that crisp in practice. And especially if DFID will continue on the path set by the Labour government of engaging in the politics in development assistance and addressing conflict (which is probable – on this, see my next post), DFID will need to retain a considerable capacity for political analysis and engagement.
5. Lastly, it’s OK again to say that the FCO does the political analysis but what if – as many observers have been saying for the past couple of years – what if it doesn’t have that capacity any more at an adequate level? What if it has the time and staffing capacity to get the big picture in a country but can’t really pick up the regional variations, the differences between social groups, the granularity of analysis?

Ethos and motivation

In correcting what he feels to be wrong in DFID – in the values and attitudes, in the way it thinks, plans and goes about its work, in the way it gauges success, in what it rewards in tis staff and its partners and counterparts – Andrew Mitchell will need to distinguish between what needs to change and what does not.

Two things are pretty clear from his speeches and statements over a considerable period as well as from last year’s policy paper.

• The first, ironically enough perhaps, is that Mitchell himself is also motivated by that NGO-type combination of idealism (belief that there should be a better world) and practicality (wanting to make it happen) that in some aspects he decries. For what it’s worth, that same sort of feeling also seems to motivate David Cameron on development; it’s why he was off visiting projects in Rwanda in July 2007 when a lot of England was flooded, including part of his own constituency, and politicians were supposed to make the rounds of stricken areas and voice concern. He took a considerable amount of stick for deciding to fulfil his commitments in Rwanda rather than doing the standard politicians’ thing.
• And the second is that, though they are critical of important aspects of DFID’s work (and have some very good points about DFID’s focus on the scale of input to assisting development rather than the quality of output and outcome), the Conservatives recognise plenty that is worthwhile in DFID’s record.

Retaining what is worthwhile and top quality about DFID while addressing other issues including organisational culture, since that’s what he seems to want to do, will require care.

The need to set out a programme of change

This is not something that gets done by a couple of memos issued from the office of the secretary for international development. A handful of get-togethers with senior civil servants, a couple of go-getters from the private sector, weekend retreats in the home counties – these won’t work either.

If Andrew Mitchell and his team are going to set about the sort of institutional change in DFID that they said in opposition they were aiming for, they are going to need to set out  programme of change that has at least the following features:

1. Strategic clarity: changing the institution is, in its detailed work, largely a matter of forms, structures and procedures but the direction has to come from their relationship to the content of DFID’s mission. Much here depends on whether DFID does indeed prioritise issues of conflict, peace and security more than it has in the past, as Labour, Conservatives and Liberal-Democrats all said was necessary in 2009. If that strategic direction is sustained, much else follows naturally. If it is replaced by another strategic direction, I will be less happy but the logic of an organisational programme of change will still work fine. It is if the strategic directions get muddied and muddled that the problems will arise.
2. A way of assessing progress: benchmarks to know the starting point, indicators to evaluate the effect of changes made, and an overall sense at the outset of what eventual success will look like.
3. Roll-out for staffing: a programme of change will remain declaratory unless it gets into the fine grain of staffing – how people work, what their incentives and rewards are, how long they stay in different posts, which are the prestige positions, the training they get as the move from one post to another.
4. Coordination with the FCO: if indeed the idea is to run down DFID analytical capacity, that can only be done safely if the FCO’s is beefed up. This in turn requires re-thinking analytical needs within the FCO; I remain sceptical that a traditional diplomat’s country-knowledge really does provide an adequate basis for even broad level decisions about what kinds of in-country development assistance is needed. Professional formation, career structure and organisational structure in the FCO thus requires careful attention for this revision in DFID to work.

Of course, if the idea of changing DFID in this way is dropped, the changes in the FCO are then moot.

It will be fascinating to see if and how this task is taken on in the coming months.

City of winds

The first big impressions are about how times have changed. It’s inescapable, hitting your primary senses.

The air I’ve made a small handful of previous visits here – the last time was 2006 and the air in those days was pungent. Maybe the oil was extracted and refined in the roughest way imaginable and that has changed, or maybe I was just persistently unlucky with the prevailing winds off the Caspian Sea. Whatever the reason, the air used to be heavy with petroleum odours of different kinds, none of them pleasant, and now it’s not. You still get the smell as you go past the refineries outside Baku but not in the city, not these days, according to people who visit here much more often than I do.

The urban landscape Large areas of the city are either newly built or newly renovated and much of the rest is swamped by building works, new construction, renovation, roadworks (pot-holes used to make driving in the city genuinely uncomfortable and the roads have been improved beyond recognition; pot-holes remain in places but compared to London after the winter, nothing to write home about). As the winds swirl across the big plazas, the dust from all these work sites attacks your eyes. It’s worth it.

The work continues, part of a massive urban renewal programme that has already turned the sea-front and large parts of the city into places of genuine beauty. It’s a mixture of refurbishment and new building. It’s being done well – when it is finished, Baku will be a genuinely striking capital.

The oil and the wealth

It’s the oil that’s doing it, of course. Azerbaijan is developing fast on the back of its oil wealth. Oil has pushed economic growth along at Chinese rates, though coming down from previously dizzy heights to 9% in 2009, according to the IMF. Of serious concern, non-oil growth dropped in 2009 from 16% to 3% and looks set to fall again this year, which may restrict overall growth to around 3%. But that will be heavily influenced by what happens to oil prices.

Proven oil reserves are estimated to last for about 20 years at current pumping rates; as ever, new discoveries are not ruled out, estimates are uncertain and contested, and pumping rates will decline as reserves diminish. But what is clear is that for further ahead than the coming decade, Azerbaijan is a major oil producer. The question is how it uses that wealth.

Curse or blessing? – the debate

Oil and natural resources in general: blessing or curse? There is considerable evidence and a well established line of academic argument to show that an abundance of extractable natural resources – oil, gas and minerals – is closely associated with high risk of a country contracting one or more of a range of different ills – corruption, political instability, bad governance in general and armed conflict. For interesting summaries of the arguments click here and for an overview of policy views here.

The basis for the “resource curse” argument is the idea that, for the state, wealth gained by extracting natural resources is unaccountable, whereas revenues taken in the form of taxes are accountable wealth. When states build a military and administrative apparatus paid for by their citizens, they become democracies. It’s the principle that those who pay, decide. Taken in broad, the historical record and contemporary experience show that the process takes time, progresses unevenly, sometimes goes into reverse, isn’t inevitable, and sometimes – as in England and France – involves civil wars and revolutions along the way. But it tends to happen. 

By contrast, when states can build the apparatus from royalties paid to them by foreign companies for what comes out of the ground, who cares what the citizens think? States made wealthy by natural resource extraction can buy off their citizenry or clamp down on them if they are too noisy – or go in for a subtle mixture of both – but such states don’t really need to care very much about what their citizens think and want. In short, the argument is that natural resources encourage irresponsibility in government.

The ledger in Azerbaijan

How does Azerbaijan fare in the ledger of resource curse-or-blessing? If you wanted to take it as a case of curse, you’d probably start with corruption. Transparency International’s well respected Corruption Perceptions Index, which is compiled through surveys of perceptions, ranks Azerbaijan at a depressing 143rd out of 180 countries. That position that has slightly improved since last year but has stayed stubbornly unfavourable for too long. Azerbaijan’s rank is worse than that of its regional neighbours Turkey, Armenia and Georgia, but better than bigger neighbours Russia and Iran. Governments regularly protest about the index, sometimes perhaps with justification since perceptions may lag behind reality – but that there is a serious issue here is hard to deny.

You might also look at the conflict situation, since Azerbaijan has a long-running conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, which remains unresolved sixteen years after the fighting ended, and because the high correlation of natural resource wealth with violent conflict is one of the basic reasons for the view that natural resources are a curse upon poor nations. But statistical associations need close interrogation if they are to be more than casual generalisation and this is one case where the association does not stand up. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia has nothing to do with oil and pre-dates Azerbaijan mobilising its potential oil wealth.

It is important to find a way to resolve the conflict peacefully, even though negotiations currently reveal little prospect of imminent success, but it’s not connected to the question of oil and curse or blessing.

And thirdly, of course, you’d look at freedom of expression and democratic rights. Some high profile cases indicate this is a real issue – the murder of the editor of the Monitor, which happened four years ago around the time I was  last here, and earlier this year the arrest and incarceration of two bloggers. This kind of case – especially the bloggers – needs much more depth of knowledge in order to understand them than I can possibly pick up in a few days. But it is a fact that these cases have occurred.

Given the self-confidence that Azerbaijan seems to be gaining as it develops, it is increasingly difficult to understand why the authorities are not more relaxed about freedom of expression. They have more to gain from being more relaxed than they may realise, both in internal stability and in external standing and reputation, and they risk much less than they may fear.

After all, the positive side of the ledger is far from empty. There is a lot to look at, in fact, because the achievements are real.

First, there is the renewal of Baku. It is making an attractive city for people to be in; the building programme is about the Baku people use – this is not the vainglorious monument-and-monstrosity stuffed approach to building a capital city that has been experienced in some periods in some countries.

Beyond that, education policy is progressive: the state wants an educated population. If you get a place at a well-reputed university abroad, the government pays a full scholarship on condition that the student returns to Azerbaijan for a period of years after getting the degree. Given the way some countries in Africa and Asia have been stripped of talent by the brightest students going overseas and not returning, that makes sense. The government can impose the condition because it pays, not a foreign university or foundation, and the government can afford to because of oil.

What I hear is also that the health system is stronger than it used to be and that, unlike in the past and unlike in the other two Caucasus countries, people do not feel the need to go abroad for straightforward operations.

Azerbaijan is using oil wealth to motor non-oil investment. That has slowed down with the global recession but it will almost certainly pick up again. One concomitant of this – made possible by a broad-based investment strategy and, in positive feedback, making it possible – is that there is a visible, prosperous middle class in Baku. You don’t have to go far even within the city confines to find wealth-poverty contrasts, let alone if you head out into the countryside, but there’s many a western capital where those contrasts are all too visible. This middle class is the most likely engine of sustained growth in the coming years – educated, consumerist, motivated for self-improvement.

The prices for ordinary living in Baku are high – food, accommodation, the necessities of life – and one good thing about the recession is that inflation, which was racing at 20% in 2008 came down to 1-2% in 2009. High prices could cause a lot of frustration but the consequences are often explosive when subsidised economies are no longer able to subsidise the basics.

It is a lot more responsible to use oil income for long term infrastructure and economic investment than to fritter it away on subsidies.

Overall, Azerbaijan seems to my quick glance to be making a decent job of development. There will be political difficulties, there is a conflict to resolve, and the lack of regional cooperation holds back the development of all three Caucasus states. But overall, the ledger reads quite well.

Stakes – the long game

What is at stake here is a once-only opportunity to create something different from the norm of foreign ministries handling a myriad details of the relationship of one government to a couple of hundred others. Extending that model to the EU and creating a supra-ministry of European foreign affairs is pointless, probably impossible, and distinctly counter-productive.

• Pointless because there’s no need for another foreign ministry.
• Probably impossible because the EU’s member states won’t let it happen.
• And counter productive because the High Rep, foreign ministers and heads of government would spend their time tripping over each other’s feet as they competed for profile and coverage on the big headline issues.

Instead, the EAS should be designed to deal with some big, 21st century, long-range issues – a broad concept of security, the international politics of climate change and coming to a new and equitable agreement on world trade. On these issues the EAS has the potential to offer something distinctly different, playing a well-prepared long game, providing intellectual muscle and policy stamina on complex issues in which politicians’ instinct to keep launching new initiatives can be useful but won’t be the real driver of a progressive agenda.

A view from outside the vortex

Baroness Ashton’s proposal is the outcome of intensive discussion and not a little lobbying over the past couple of months. The proposal is framed as a resolution, using formal language, and does not contain the supporting arguments for the choices embedded in it. There is a 30 April deadline for finalising and taking the decision.

Those who are closer than I am to the Brussels vortex of code, gossip and personalities may see it differently but to my eyes, the general nature of some of the key passages in the draft decision about who is responsible for what has both the intention and the effect of keeping options open. The argument is going to carry on. That is part of the structure of the eventual decision, with a report from the High Rep due in 2012 and a review of the EAS’s functioning in 2014. But perhaps more importantly it is an implication of the drafting, which has left many issues vague.

I am doubtless blind to nuances of the bureaucratic drafting process, but to me it looks as if in the tussles so far that have led to this draft, Catherine Ashton has successfully gained budgetary independence from the Commission. The draft seems to reflect a vision of the EAS that is closer to the Lisbon Treaty’s original concept of a service that would coordinate the EU’s relationship with the world than it is to some of the narrower versions that have been aired, focused purely on providing diplomatic support to the High Representative and other senior officials. The EAS in this proposal

• would have a somewhat confusing double function, because it is there to support the High Rep but also assist the Commission President (Jose Manuel Barroso), the Commission itself and the President of the European Council (Herman van Rompuy) – and words like “support” and “assist” can have a zillion different disputable meanings in the right hands;
• would be staffed on merit but also so as to be geographically representative of the EU – a balance that is another arena for contestation;
• will get plenty of policy control over security but it is unclear how much it is going to have over other foreign policy areas including development assistance;
• will have thematic as well as geographical desks, which is fundamental.

Muddy and muddier

The relatively brief formulation in the Lisbon Treaty offered what looks now like a pretty strong version of the EAS. The proposal Catherine Ashton has now presented is also a fairly strong version, weaker than the way many interpreted the Lisbon Treaty but not far removed from it.

Against that, different forces - some foreign ministries, parts of the European Commission, some MEPs, some important NGOs – have wanted a weak and even muddier version with little or no leadership on key components of external relations, and in the view of some of the development NGOs, none at all on development assistance. 

There are random alliances among the forces of greater muddiness but they have not and will not come together as a coalition. The preferences and underlying interests of some of these diverse opponents of the strong version are quite different and often at odds with each other. All they share is a preference for a weak EAS – and some of them wouldn’t mind a strong-ish version if they thought their own hands would be on the tiller.

In the midst of all this, keeping options open through some studied vagueness seems to me to be the right way to go. The difficult trick is to have only a moderate amount of vagueness and progressively to replace that with clarity as the issues move along – to dispel the mud and get the EAS into clean water for its launch. If Catherine Ashton can get her proposal through pretty much intact, she will be in a stronger position for keeping to a stronger version of the EAS in the long term.

Three targets for clarity

A group of NGOs and think tanks wrote an open letter criticising the state of debate on the EAS. The letter, dated 22 March, comes from E3G, Bertelsmann Stiftung, Centre for European Reform, demosEuropa, East-West Institute, Global Witness, IDDRI, International Alert, International Crisis Group and Open Society Institute. It says Brussels turf wars are undermining the prospects for the EAS and outlines three areas to focus on:

1. Strategic Policy Coherence: As the actual shape of the EAS is elaborated and refined – as the desks are defined – it is crucial that the High Rep can ensure consistency across all the areas of the EU’s external relations. Keeping the policy areas in separate silos will make it impossible to have coherent policy either on the issues themselves or to shape relations with China, or the US, Russia, India or anybody else. To this end, the EAS has to be the vehicle that provides strategic coordination of big programming commitments such as development assistance.
2. Staff expertise: There has been a strong push to recruit the EAS only from foreign ministries and the Commission. This has opened up a little in the current draft proposal. If the EAS is constituted only by diplomats, it will probably act as a diplomatic service, locked in the policies and the processes of institutions whose DNA belongs to 19th and 20th century. It will not be able to offer something that is distinctively different to meet the distinctive challenges of our age. 
3. Addressing critical priorities: The EAS has to be empowered – with formal mandates if necessary – to generate policy and lead action on core relationships and in key areas such as climate change, energy, peacebuilding, the Neighbourhood Policy.

Prospects

How this pans out now is partly in the hands of the member states of the EU. They should get on board. The turf and functions of the foreign ministries are not threatened by an EAS that takes on the long game on the key issues. They are only threatened if the EAS is shaped like a traditional diplomatic service. In other words, the narrowness of their view risks creating the beast they fear.  They should cut through the murk and start supporting the strong version of the EAS and stop undermining the High Rep.

The outcome is also partly in the hands of the EU institutions – both the Parliament and the Commission. The Parliament is rightly concerned with its prerogatives and maiking sure the High Rep and the EAS are answerable to it. But MEPs should not worry about micro-managing the EAS, its administrative set-up and its budget, and instead focus onto the broad objectives and how to miss them.

And the Commission has to recognise at all levels that when the Lisbon Treaty became law, a new era has begun in the EU’s affairs. Bureaucratic resistance to change and an enthusiastic engagement in turf wars are fighting anachronistic wars. For the parts of the Commission that are resisting the strong version of the EAS put themselves in a lose-lose position: even if they win the short-term bureaucratic battle and see off the change, they will actually have won nothing in the medium and longer term because they will have created nothing. Their “victory” will leave the Commission as a damaged structure of diminishing credibility.

Embracing the change is the only worthwhile option in front of the Commission and it has to be hoped that its leadership will act on that basis.

Scientists and their science are in the dock, policy is in the balance and our common future is on the line. This pushes many environmentally concerned people to want to press the case about global warming, climate change and the need for action ever more firmly, ever more clearly, ever more. But will more of the same be more effective?

The condition of underlying public and political perceptions is certainly worrying but I find myself more bothered by the relatively little attention that is given to the basic issue of cognition in the climate issue. I am referring to the difficulty of the future.

Chaff

‘Chaff’ is war-time deception, deliberate interference in perception, guided obfuscation. Fred Pearce has performed a major public service with his Guardian review of the UEA emails, their contents, context and controversy (if only the Guardian would combine his several articles into one easily accessed document). In covering the response to the case of politicians, commentators and citizens who do not accept that climate change is under way or a problem, and despite being seen by some climate scientists as overly negative and plain wrong in his critical remarks, Pearce neatly skewers several examples of chaff – things that are said that the speaker or author must know are tendentious at best and downright inaccurate at worst. The problem with this kind of chaff is that, once launched, it gets picked up and reproduced all over the blogosphere. Notable among these are the claim that the “hockey stick” graph of world temperatures has been disproven – it hasn’t, it has been replicated by other researchers – and the assertion that the UEA scientists and colleagues discuss a trick for hiding a decline world temperature, which wasn’t a trick in the sense of deception and isn’t about a decline in world temperature today.

Noise

The motivated chaff mingles with a great diversity of misunderstanding, mis-perceptions, particular angles, institutional agendas and hobby-horses to generate a lot of distracting background noise, so often difficult to distinguish from actual chaff.

Any article about climate on a major web-site picks up a mass of comment; it is worth following one thread one time to know where at least one part of the debate stands. One of the best single media overviews of the basic science and the state of knowledge was by Geoffrey Lean in the Telegraph back in December. The comment thread on the online version has some interesting back and forth about the basic science and then there’s the claim that those who think global warming is occurring are only saying so as part of a plan to bring in world government or, for one participant, “to completely and utterly squash the Human race.”

And that’s actually a pretty restrained set of comments. When the Sunday Times profiled the head of the UEA Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, and reported him saying that he had thought of suicide, the comment thread included a torrent of insults, allegations that Jones has gotten rich from faking his science, and a fair amount of encouragement that he go ahead and do it.

Put the emails, the science and Professor Jones himself through a calmer examination and, a different and far more nuanced picture emerges, as you would probably expect once away from the furnace of instant comment on the web.

• There’s no clear reason to think that what he did was in some sense bad science though there are grounds for revisiting some of the temperature research involving climate stations in China.
• As Jones himself has said, he sent ‘awful emails’ but Fred Pearce’s review (link) and one by Associated Press (link) indicates that only a few out of an enormous number were indeed awful. On the other hand, those ones were awful indeed.
• More to the point, the way Jones and colleagues behaved towards scientists who disagreed with them has generated enormous heat and calumny but as far as I can interpret it, they behaved in pretty much the way that academics of all kinds routinely behave towards academics who disagree with them. Dissing each other’s findings in anonymous reviews, protecting peer-reviewed journals they esteem from input they disdain, banding together tribally, getting over-wrought – it’s not good but it is certainly standard practice in the social sciences and I am not in the slightest surprised to see it in the natural sciences too.
• And the strictly limited willingness of Jones and colleagues to release data and methodology is neither more nor less restrictive than that of most scientists – within the band of acceptability albeit not at the very best end of the spectrum.

Overall he comes out of this scrutiny with a pretty average score for a scientist and quite distinctly as a long, long way from malign. Some scientists are good communicators, others not. Like many, I find the most striking thing is how many PR traps he and his colleagues unknowingly laid for themselves. With the benefit of hindsight, how naive they now seem to have been about the fundamentally political nature of their science and the opposition their findings would generate.

And now, I suppose Professor Jones might say if, as we have all been able to see, he is no more than human – now it’s the turn of the other lot to go through the same excruciating process. For example, the Institute of Physics was embarrassed to find out that its submission to the parliamentary committee looking into the emails was shaped by a man who works frequently for major oil and gas companies and thinks that the view that climate change is happening is akin to a religion. Two points about this: first, there is something in the religion charge and, uncomfortable as it is, let’s come back to it. Second, what is notable about almost all the scientific and non-hysterical criticisms of climate change science is that they are extremely weak in postulating alternative explanations.

The critics of climate change science can pick holes, sometimes significant ones, in the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and climate change. They are good and even helpful at identifying uncertainties and any over-statements or dubious inferences. They raise some questions about some pretty fundamental parts of the whole global warming and climate change hypothesis, such as whether sea levels are actually rising. But they don’t offer – or have not so far offered – worthwhile alternative explanations of the observed rise in average global temperatures. They have had nothing significant to say that might offer a different explanation of observed changes in climate. And they have not undone the basic science on the presence and role of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the predominance of carbon among them, and the increase of carbon in the atmosphere thanks to the use of fossil fuels.

The latest major literature review – done at the UK Met Office, looking at more than 100 studies – has once again identified the ‘clear fingerprints’ of man-made climate change; it confirms that, while the science of climate change is not without uncertainties, alternative explanations carry an order of magnitude less conviction. As the Met Office report puts the case, it is an “increasingly remote possibility” that human activity is not the main cause of climate change.

Were there a credible basis for researching a serious hypothesis to make that remote possibility into even a 50:50 chance, we can be sure the research would have been lavishly funded and its findings widely and smoothly disseminated. Big financial interests would be more than happy to help lay the whole climate thing to rest, were it possible to do so.

One day, perhaps? On the record so far, I doubt it. In the meantime, the lack of positive theorisation and hypothesis from the critics of climate science makes it fair to say that even the best of them so far manage only to make noise.

Fog

But let’s get to religion. The Guardian‘s Simon Hoggart refers to himself as a climate agnostic, calling this ‘the only respectable position’ to hold. At a recent off-the-record seminar, I was struck by an American participant ‘s vocabulary. Casting around for a term to describe people who do not accept the global warming and climate change hypothesis, he characterised them as non-believers. Peter Preston says we can only find our way out of the present mess on climate knowledge and policy if a prophet leads us.

Critics of what that prophet might say accuse those who accept that global warming and climate change are real of treating that opinion as a religious belief, while many of those critics themselves display a quasi-religious fervour, use a millenarian discourse, and have the lack of respect for the merit, dignity or simple humanity of their adversaries that is characteristically (though not exclusively) mustered by those who believe their own arguments are blessed by the right faith. But the religiosity of some of the critics of climate change science shouldn’t distract us from acknowledging that many advocates of the global warming and climate change hypothesis do themselves use a kind of religious language. Some who do not, nonetheless have that fervent, religiose tone. Some seem positively to welcome the battle with non-believers, veritable Knights Templar of climatic rectitude.

It’s really pretty distasteful. Beyond the chaff and the noise, a thick fog of unknowing is gathering around climate change as a policy issue and a scientific question. Simply banging on about a true faith cannot dispel that fog, simply add to it. George Monbiot suggests the problem lies both in attitudes to science – especially the distrust of experts and of complexity – and in the attitudes of science – especially its extreme specialisation. There’s a lot in that but I think the problem has deeper roots.

I think climate issues are genuinely hard to absorb and discuss calmly because they demand of us three efforts of cognition that we generally find difficult, that we are not ordinarily good at.

The first is understanding without clarity. We like to know what there is to be known. We like questions to be answered, which means we are mostly interested in answerable questions. The questions we don’t know how to answer generally get put under the heading of mystery, potentially religious. With clear knowledge we can work out where we are going and where it might be better (or worse) to go. But the world of climate change is anything but clear. True, the basic science of greenhouse gases (GHG), global warming and effects on climate is pretty clear. After all, if GHG have an effect on the planet’s warmth, and carbon is the major GHG, and over a century and a half we pump around half a trillion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, you’d sort of expect some sort of effect on planetary warmth, would you not? And the thought that this might have some effect on climates follows easily.

But beyond that it gets pretty murky. Precise climatic effects here or there? Timescale? The cause of this hurricane or that one? Of that drought or this? A great deal cannot be precisely explained let alone accurately predicted. Climate models still have enormous gaps in them and some areas of the world are, inevitably, much less well studied than others for reasons that have nothing to do with the potential seriousness of climate impacts. My personal view is that as science advances, the areas of uncertainty will narrow and the areas of clarity will expand but many relevant questions will continue for a long time to lack definitive and clear clear answers.

And decisions must be made nonetheless.

The second unwelcome effort is to deal with complexity. We like things to be simple. We like life to be straightforward, choices to be clear, cause and effect to be traceable. That way decisions can be made. But the world of climate change is anything but simple. It is all about unexpected side effects, about the inter-action of different causal factors, about the fine balance of things: greenhouse gases are not bad, they are essential to the possibility of human life on this planet – up to a certain level, beyond that, they start to make things difficult. Climate change will make this region much dryer but that one much wetter; it is not affecting the volume of rainfall in this place but rather its timing, so the monsoon seasons comes earlier or later and is shorter or longer, but over there it is not the timing or the volume but the location of the rainfall that is changing.

Beyond the natural effects, the human and social, and thus the economic and political consequences of climate change are even harder to get straight. The social sciences find it hard enough to explain human behaviour and generally demur from predicting it because there are so many variables inter-acting that tracing causation and consequences is exceedingly complicated. For that reason, various branches in several social science disciplines function by using simplified models (of economic behaviour, voting preference, determinants of educational success etc), unfortunately for understanding the social consequences of climate change, these models only work well when they are derived from strong basic data covering a significant period of time and diverse locations. And contemporary climate change has not been around long enough for that kind of research data to build up. So there is no way out of complexity.

And decisions must be made nonetheless.

And thirdly, there is the overwhelming problem of the future. We are generally bad at thinking about the future. There are numerous cliches about politics that essentially add up to saying that what is urgent will always be more persuasive than what is important. It is the sudden shock that gets our attention, not the long-term risk. But it’s true outside politics too. When disaster strikes, recovery happens because for those who survive the disaster there is no other option. But as to prevention – it doesn’t have to happen because a future possibility does not sit as clearly in our minds as a current reality, and because it isn’t imperative, all too often it doesn’t happen. Some may think that modern culture places an historically unprecedented emphasis on the here and now, deferring thoughts about the future until we get there, and casually jettisoning the past as essentially, well, out of date – and if there’s any truth in that, then the difficulty of dealing with the future might be stronger than ever. At just the wrong time.

Systematic thinking about the future happens in risk management and in the insurance industry. But actuarial tables and most management of risk is on the basis of established trends – i.e., they are worked out on the basis of what has happened, revised and kept up to date to cater for latest developments, of course, but heavily shaped by experience. And the trouble here is that the world of climate change is all about the future being different from the past. So even those who are good at thinking about the future – just think how profitable the insurance industry is – are not necessarily so good at thinking about a future re-shaped by climate change.

Stay calm (because nothing else will work)

Faced with this triple challenge to the ways we prefer to know about things, different among us n different ways. Some with denial, some with belief; some with reflection, some by taking a position, some by gauging what others think and taking a view that seems to be respectable (yes, really – it’s why opinion has fashions).

It remains clear that the safe bet is to hedge against climate change by progressively and vigorously shifting to a green economy and by steadily investing in building social resilience of a kind that will make it possible to respond to both the predicted and the un-predicted effects of climate change as it unfolds.

But it is not axiomatic that this is the safe bet, it is simply a reasonable conclusion based on available evidence and the most serious and coherent arguments about that evidence. It is a reasoned conclusion and, to use a familiar parlance, it is a conclusion that is beyond reasonable doubt because it itself permits of doubt.

If further evidence emerges over time on the basis of which it can be argued that this safe bet is no longer necessarily, I will not regret the greening of the economy, which reduces dependence on energy sources that are inherently polluting. And the development of a social resilience will help people, communities and governments to respond creatively to all different sorts of challenges such as conflicts and economic crashes. So the bet remains safe and the right decision even if different evidence emerges.

This means there is no need for quasi-religious fervour among those who acknowledge the reality of global warming and climate change. A lot of that fervour is driven by impatience, by the difficulty of getting the arguments through because of the chaff and the noise and above all the fog created by the general difficulty people have with uncertainty, complexity and the future.

But impatience and frustration like fear and anger offer bad long-term strategies of communication. At its heart, the challenge in the current state of the climate debate is to work out how to refresh the strategy for communicating the need to mitigate and adapt to climate change and the eminent feasibility of doing so. As I wrote in an earlier post, “the path of being responsible about the environment has to be as attractive now as the path of being irresponsible about it” – that is, “Benefit today is what will win the doubters over, not abstract future costs that are avoided.” Doing good for the future, I added, is attractive but does not close the deal alone. A warm and optimistic view of the future will be more persuasive if it has short-term benefit too.

Along with it, a calm and reasoned voice about the issues is essential. It’s enough with all the strident campaigning tones: what we want to hear is a reasoned view of the problem and an optimistic view of the future.

For which century should the External Action Service be designed?

Cathy Ashton’s first big task is to lead the process of constructing the new European External Action Service. It’s common to refer to the EAS as Europe’s foreign ministry and Ashton as its foreign minister. But that’s a mis-translation. Lest you haven’t noticed, allow me to point out that the EU does not have a government. Rather it is made up of 27 of them. If Ashton tries to be Europe’s foreign minister she’s going to collide with the others, or at least they’ll spend a lot of time tripping over each other’s heels. The same goes in trumps for the EAS itself; if she tries to make it into a supra-ministry for foreign affairs she will create a big unholy mess.

One of her smaller problems is that, necessarily, most of the advice she can get about how to construct the EAS and more generally how to do her job is from people who only know foreign ministries. So they can only help her build one. Likewise, most of the criticism she is getting – as reflected in a big piece in the Guardian, for example, or as sharply expressed by the choleric Jean Quatremer, a  well connected French journalist and blogger – reflects this default preference for the new institution to be like a lot of old ones. The irony is that if Ashton successfully creates an EU foreign ministry, she’ll be taken apart for that by the same people.

Quatremer and the boatload of critics quoted in the Guardian piece – some anonymously - need to get their heads round the idea that (a) this is the 21st century, so (b) it would be a waste to use the once-only opportunity of the EAS’s birth to create a 19th or 20th century institution, and in any case (c) when did duplicating national institutions at the EU level become a good idea? Cathy Ashton is streets ahead of her critics in thinking through this challenge.

Gossip and egos

You can always when tell little minds are at large because pointless factual errors are perpetrated and perpetuated. Quatremer hilariously entitles his piece “Ashton doesn’t pick up the European phone after 8pm.” And his equally inaccurate remark that she had never got herself an apartment in Brussels is scaled up by the time the Guardian has it to her having lived in hotel rooms for 18 months as EU Trade Commissioner and now High Rep. Both the no-phone and the no-apartment statements are untrue and silly. What we are dealing with here is gossip rather than a thought-through critique.

Let’s go a bit further with that.

• One criticism of Ashton is that she has gone to the wrong meetings. How do we interpret that? Surely not as a mutter from people who went to a meeting and found to their chagrin that she wasn’t there? Or maybe from the Spanish hosts and organisers of the meeting in Majorca she blew off in order to be in Kiev the same day? Forgive me but I long since stopped taking this kind of thing seriously. The officials who were quoted by the Guardian presumably retained their anonymity because they were embarrassed by their own pettiness.
• Reportedly Pierre Lellouche, the French minister for EU affairs, has complained that Ashton didn’t go to Haiti soon enough. When I saw she hadn’t gone, I applauded the fact that at least one senior politician decided not to block the airport in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake; it was much better to defer her visit until later when, by discussing plans for long-term recovery and how to support them, it could actually do some good to be there. If indeed Lellouche criticised her for not joining the throng that got in the way of the relief effort, we should mourn the fading of a once fine intellect.
• Ashton has also nettled some people by appointing other people to diplomatic posts. That’s certainly a hard one to interpret what it’s all about.
• While the Guardian carries a story full of criticisms that she is ineffectual, in the same issue it has a front-page story that the French and German governments are anxious that she is out-manoeuvring them and they are losing out on key appointments. So, um, which is it to be?

All that and more – it’s a long, long way, a whole Brussels boulevard away from a fully thought-through critique. It’s no more than a hotch-potch of personal axes being ground and some out-dated ideas on international politics, spiced up by entertaining anglophobia from Quatremer (his story’s crap but he unfolds it beautifully) and rank poor reporting from the Guardian.

The long game

Having a go at the High Representative for not being extremely visible begs a couple of questions: if you want the EU to make an impact in world affairs, what impact? And within that, given 27 member states, what is the specific role for the EAS and its head?

The issue really is, what can the EAS bring to the table? What can it add to what 27 member governments already bring? There is nothing to gain and much to lose by duplicating what the foreign ministries can (or should) already do. This means the EAS and its head should not be chasing the headlines, trying to be in the front row for the photo op at the next big disaster or gala. Nor should they be focused on the short-term issues that consume most of the energy of most ministries of foreign affairs for most of the time.

It also means the EAS must try not to be just another foreign service, even if foreign service personnel will make up the bulk of its staff. We don’t want or need another institution doing the same old foreign policy thing; it will be a great gain for the EU and for world politics if the new service is a different kind of service.

What could that mean? One of the abiding biases of all foreign services is their focus on process rather than results. It’s hardly surprising given the nature of diplomacy as unending network and relationship building with an ever-shifting cast of characters; for most of the time, meetings, statements and joint declarations are as close as diplomacy gets to a result. It is also hardly surprising given the way that international politics moves is largely shaped by forces that diplomats and their ministers do not control; diplomacy responds and reflects much more than it initiates or directs. But one of the qualities the EU has is its staying power, the durability of its consensus-forged policies, its long time-lines and, in short, a capacity for the long game. And that has produced real long-term results in Europe, decisively changing the political and economic map, the nature of government and the structure of opportunities available to EU citizens.

There are three key issues around which the EAS can develop a long-game role:

• Security and peace, on which the EU has a history and in which it can claim one of its three greatest successes (spreading prosperity and enhancement of democracy being the other two);
• Climate change and, more broadly, the tough environment and resource issues, in which the world badly needs a new input of sustained drive and direction, and where Europe has some good policies on paper that need to be seen through into action (and a few not so good that have to be seriously reworked);
• Equitable international trade relations, on which the vast majority of individual EU member states (25 out of 27) can have no world impact except by working together – and for France and Germany the prospect of individual impact is more apparent than real.

It is around these three issues that the EAS can weave its policies towards Russia, the Middle East, China, its stable alliances and its support for international development.

The EAS and the High Representative

On visibility and results, Ashton has riffed smartly on the remark by UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband that the EU President should be somebody who could stop the traffic in Washington, DC; she told Time magazine, ‘In fact my job is to keep traffic moving. I’m not interested in the limelight. I’m interested in what we can actually do.’

So it seems that, more by luck than judgement, a High Representative has been selected who is not trying to treat the job as the vehicle for an ego trip. This is one up-side of the much criticised choice of somebody who has never been elected to national representative and legislative office. It is probably a fair point that she cannot be expected to have a career politician’s instinct for how to do politics. Good!

It is also a fair point that she lacks the long contact with senior diplomats and their ministers that can be claimed by others who think they would do a good job in her position. But don’t over-estimate the significance of that lack of familiarity with the diplo-clan – fresh approaches can be a good thing and Ashton’s record in the House of Lords shows she is a deal-maker and a conciliator, a record earned by her ability to win confidence from people whose political views are far from her own.

The challenge is to bring these talents to bear, despite her acknowledged lack of prior deep familiarity with the issues and the problems, in designing an External Action Service that is not just another foreign service and can play a long game on security and peace, climate change and natural resources, and equitable trade.

To do this she is not only going to have to unfold the big vision on these three issues and where the EU should be on them in three to five years time. She is also going to have to pay detailed attention to the structure of the new service and to how its incoming personnel are re-trained and, once absorbed into the new institution, given incentives that keep them focused on the long game and a strategic approach on the three decisive issues. She is going to need to ensure that the policy apparatus on peace and security does not get over-militarised, and she has to figure out how to stop a short-sighted combination of narrow national interests and special corporate interests crawling all over EU policy on climate change, the environment and trade.

Everything else is just noises off from disgruntled diplomats and politicians who lack a proper understanding of the challenges and possibilities in front of EU international policy. The long game is what counts.