Governments from across the world met at Busan, Korea in late November to discuss how to better coordinate their aid and ensure its effectiveness. Three GEG researchers were engaged in discussions at this conference. Dr. Isaline Bergamaschi, Dr. Paolo de Renzio and Jiajun Xu kept a live update  over the week with their views on developments at Busan.  To see a full list of their comments click here.

GEG is pleased to announce the release of Making Global Trade Governance Work for Development: Perspectives and Priorities from Developing Countries, published by Cambridge University Press. The compilation was edited by GEG Senior Researcher and Director of the Global Trade Governance project, Dr. Carolyn Deere Birkbeck.

Too often discussion of the governance of global trade and the multilateral trading system is dominated by developed-country scholars and opinion-makers, with inadequate attention to developing country perspectives.

To address this shortcoming, Making Global Trade Governance Work for Development gathers a diversity of developing country views on how to improve the governance of global trade and the WTO to better advance sustainable development and respond to developing country needs. With contributions by senior scholars, commentators and practitioners, the essays combine new, empirically-grounded research and practical insights about the trade policy-making process. They consider the specific governance issues of interest to developing countries and acknowledge the changing dynamics in the global economy and in trade decision-making.

To download an introduction to the book click here

Global financial regulation was deemed essential after the 2008 crash. But some would say little has been achieved. Have we been lulled into a false sense of security?

On 29-30 June 2011, GEG hosted a meeting to examine the minimum global coordination required for national financial regulation to be effective, bringing together high-level officials, including from the Financial Stability Board, the FSA, the Prime Minister’s office (UK), the European Commission, and H.M. Treasury, and senior academics (see the report for a full list). The report of that meeting can be downloaded here.

Emily Jones (Project Associate on Trade) represented GEG at the Fourth United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in Istanbul in May 2011. The Conference brought together 10,000 delegates including heads of state, diplomats, business executives and civil society to forge a ten-year ‘Programme of Action’ to support Least Developed Countries. Jones presented a paper on the panel ‘From Istanbul to 2020: A Vision for LDCs’.

LDCs were promised much by the international community in the last ten-year Brussels Programme of Action, signed in 2001. However, Emily Jones argued that the Programme had only had a minimal impact the economic development of LDCs. Although the commitments made were laudable, many were only partially implemented and the benefits of others were eroded by the ‘small print’. Recent record levels of growth in LDCs present a welcome opportunity for development but so far they have failed to generate employment or improve productivity, and have only led to modest improvements in poverty and human development. Moreover, LDCs are now more vulnerable to international economic shocks. A priority for the new Programme of Action is to raise the profile and voice of LDCs on the world stage including through strengthening their capacity for collective action, greater advocacy around their development needs, improved representation in major decision-making fora, and greater control over implementation.

(Picture: Emily Jones, center)

On 9th and 10th March, the Global Migration Governance Project held a double book launch in New York City for two new books published by Oxford University Press. The first of these – for Refugees in International Relations - was held at The School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University, and featured panellists Michael Barnett (GWU) and Jack Snyder (Columbia), being chaired by Dirk Salomons (Columbia).

The second launch – for Global Migration Governance – was held at the New School and featured Michele Klein Solomon (IOM), Joe Chamie (the Center for Migration Studies), and was chaired and hosted by Alexandra Delano (the New School)

GEG Senior Researcher and Director of the Global Migration Governance project, Dr Alexander Betts, and Dr Jochen Prantl, Senior Research Fellow, represented GEG at the International Studies Association’s (ISA) Annual Convention this March. This year’s convention centered on the subject Global Governance: Political Authority in Transition. Betts and Prantl each presented papers on the panel “Challenged Institutions in Global Economic Governance,” which examined the situation of international institutions, which as a result of change in the distribution of power in the international system, the nature of the original problem for which they were created, or the wider institutional environment, find their original monopoly status within a given issue-area threatened.

Alexander Betts’ paper on ‘Challenged Institutions: How International Organizations Respond to State Regime Shifting’ began with the observation that many international organizations – such as UNDP, UNHCR, the IMF, for example – find themselves increasingly challenged by new institutional competition, and further developed a conceptual model for understanding state-IO strategic interaction in the context of regime complexity. Dr Prantl’s paper, ‘Explaining Cooperation Under Order Transition’, subsequently examined how core liberal international institutions in international security are being challenged by the power shift within the internatonal system. In particular, it set out a theoretical framework for understanding the interaction between formal and informal institutions in world politics, and the conditions under which the relationship is reinforcing or undermining of authority. The paper forms the basis of his forthcoming book, Whither liberal institutions? European Union, NATO, and United Nations in the Post-Cold War Order.

Dr Betts likewise chaired a roundtable discussion on the subject of ‘Global Migration Governance’. The roundtable brought together some of the leading scholars working on the international politics of migration to reflect upon Betts’ new book, Global Migration Governance.

First it was Tunisia. Then Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria, and now Lybia. Civil unrest has gripped Middle Eastern and North African states – many of which have been under authoritarian rule for decades. Yet while domestic in nature, the implications of these protests extend beyond state boundaries.

Here, GEG Global Leaders Fellows Dr Ousseni Illy (Burkina Faso) and Dr Omobolaji Olarinmoye (Nigeria) reflect on the effects of the recent uprisings on their respective home countries in what is the first instalment of a brief GEG commentary series on the ongoing civil unrest in the Middle East . Their brief commentary may be found by following this link.

Former UK Labour Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown, delivered the GEG Special Address on 15 February 2011 in the University’s Examination Schools.  Prime Minister Brown began his lecture with two probing questions which informed the remainder of his remarks that evening: “Why,” he asked,  ”is it that this generation, the most technologically advanced, able to have great scientific advances… why is it that in 2011 people feel more insecure than they did ten years ago, or even fifty years ago?” And why, he continued, “is this insecurity so widespread, particularly in the Western countries, particularly in Europe and America?” Brown proceded to suggest that insecurity is bred not only by the financial crisis or the rise of Asia, but by forces which he deemed “more powerful and transformative than those that were at work during the Industrial Revolution” – namely, the global flows of capital and the global sourcing of goods.

Commenting on his lecture, GEG Visiting Fellow Margret Thalwitz noted, “He laid out options to the young audience on how to cope productively and effectively with the severe challenges they may face.” Emily Jones, GEG Project Associate, further observed, “I was particularly struck by his remarks on the growth and unemployment challenge facing Europe and North America. As he noted, the locus of the global economy has shifted and Western economies need to refocus on producing goods for the rapidly growing middle class in China and other emerging markets. This has left me pondering several questions, [among them], what exactly does this economic restructuring look like?”

Following the lecture, Prime Minister Brown took questions from the audience and offered signed copies of his recent book, Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalisation. Photographs from the evening are available on the GEG Facebook page.

A very Happy New Year! May 2011 bring you continued health and happiness. 2011 at GEG begins with the release of GEG Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Global Migration Governance project, Dr. Alexander Betts’, recent book, Global Migration Governance. The book brings together a collection of essays by the world’s leading experts on migration to reflect upon the institutions, politics and normative dimensions of various aspects of international migration.

Covering issues ranging from low-skilled labour migration, refugees, and human trafficking and smuggling, among others, the book explores three key questions: What, institutionally, is the global governance of migration in that area? Why, politically, does that type of governance exist? How, normatively, can we ground claims about the type of global governance that should exist in that area?

Global Migration Governance represents one of the first serious academic books on the topic, and offers a starting point for a vision of how global migration governance could and should look.

Download the memo as a PDF here.

The OECD’s representativeness and legitimacy in the aid community is contested and it is regularly blamed for being a “rich club”.[1] This is because the organization’s members are industrialized countries only. In the past years however, the OECD/DAC has made considerable efforts and launched several initiatives to better engage with developing countries and incorporate their visions and interests in the global aid agenda. How successful has the OECD been? This piece highlights the main features of “partner” country participation in the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) held in Busan. I first provide a global oversight and argue that “partner” participation did not transform aid recipients into partners in rule-making at the global level. I then outline some of the achievements of, and prospects for, the South-South and triangular cooperation initiative.

Since 2005, governments and some civil society organisations in developing countries have been associated with the implementation and evaluation of the Paris declaration. At the country level, national experts and civil servants have contributed to the elaboration of surveys and monitoring exercises. The Working Party on Aid effectiveness, set-up in 2003, has included developing countries as members to embed an “international partnership for aid effectiveness”.[2] The rhetoric of practitioners has shifted to foster inclusion and address power asymmetries in the aid relationship. While the words “donors” and “recipients” were still found in the OECD literature a couple of years ago, they have now disappeared and been replaced by the constant reference to “partnerships”. Non-OECD members from the South have also led or taken part in working groups, clusters, task-forces and building blocks related to the implementation of the Paris declaration at the OECD in Paris. Emerging and low income countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa (such as Mali, Honduras or Rwanda) were full-right members of the “sherpas” in charge of drafting, negotiating and approving the conference’s final statement.

In the Busan Outcome Document, “partner” country participation is reflected in two main commitments by donors. The first is to “accelerate [their] efforts to untie aid” (paragraph 18) and the second is to “use country systems as the default approach for development co‐operation in support of activities managed by the public sector” (paragraph 19). These are two important achievements for low income countries, whose governments prefer aid to be delivered using national systems and procedures – the national budget, line ministries, spending and monitoring rules – rather than multiple, parallel, donor-driven channels and standards.

In Paris and Busan, one member of the Ghanaian delegation highlighted that the DAC is a valuable arena to discuss aid issues – contrary to what some critiques argue. Even a couple of years ago, some recipient country officials “did not dare to open their mouth” during meetings held at the OECD headquarters – at the Château de la Muette, a building entirely reconstructed by the Baron Henri de Rothschild in 1921-1922 in a former royal castle and hunting area and now situated in Paris’ wealthy 16th arrondissement. Yet, they now come to OECD meetings stating “this is what we want”.

However, my observation of Southern delegates at Busan reveals a slightly different picture, and suggests that there is only token partnership. “Partner” participation was important, and facilitated by important financial support by the United Nations Development Programme, who allocated a trust fund (financed by the European Commission, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, USAID, Korea and Japan) which paid for plane tickets of delegates from developing countries. But the participation of delegates from the South cannot be assessed only by the number of Southern participants, or their contribution to a document that is both binding and deprived of implementation and sanction mechanisms. We must also pay attention to the nature, modalities and forms of their engagement at Busan. In the plenary sessions and the presentations of the different building blocks, “partner” countries were equally represented. Yet very few of the side-events, mini-debates and workshops – which actually made for a big share of the conference’s interest and vibrancy – were actually convened, led or moderated by Southern delegates.[3]

Furthermore, Southern delegates interventions predominantly provided insights about realities “on the ground” rather than opinions or reflections on the features and future of aid from a broader, over-arching perspective. In doing so these interventions risked confining Southern states to the role of ‘local’ experts, as victims or witnesses of underdevelopment, or case-study examples of a developmental meta-truth. Their speeches often dealt with one country and were framed in the linear two-fold format – “progress made” / “remaining challenges ahead” – characteristic of aid reports and thinking. Even when they talked on behalf of global institutions (public or private) in plenaries for example, some of them were tempted to refer to the experience and situation of their “home” country.

The casting of Southern delegates as ‘local’ experts by the overall setting: chairs and moderators focused on the importance of hearing and learning about country realities and lessons learnt “at the country level” when introducing Southern delegates, who in turn probably felt more comfortable presenting themselves under those terms. Indeed, aid-recipient representatives are used to delivering such speeches in their daily “policy dialogue” with donors at the country level, and have learned quite efficiently to say what donors expect to secure continued support in the past, say, thirty years. In addition, HLF4 represented an official venue dominated by diplomatic caution and organised by the OECD – an international institution that recipient countries know relatively little about and which they are not formal members of.

One notable exception to this was the assertive speech delivered by the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, who pointed to donors’ own incapacity to meet their commitments, their “unending questions that no answer can fully satisfy” and the burden they represent for recipient leaders and their administrations in a rather bold way.

The promotion of South-South and triangular cooperation represented another important feature of “partner” country participation at HLF4. The Task-Team[4] started three years ago and seeks to enhance exchange between developing countries, in collaboration with “traditional” donors (hence the reference to a triangle). Since then, the Task-Team has produced deliverables (presented at the Bogotá High Level Event on South-South Cooperation and Capacity Development in March 2010), collected 110 stories of the world and conducted 31 case-studies of South-South cooperation experiences from all regions. After Busan, it will result in a Building Block as part of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation. The latter is the new international political platform in charge of supervising the implementation of commitments, placed under the tutelage of the DAC-chair and led in coordination with the United Nations Development Programme (the framework’s modalities still need to be detailed).

In Busan, events organized by the Task-Team gathered many participants, even on Day Three when a South-South side-event was taking place concomitantly with the final plenary. References to South-South cooperation have “moved up” in the Outcome Document and now appear in its second paragraph (see extracts below), which was a source of satisfaction for the leaders and coordinators of the initiative:

Panels about South-South cooperation were the only ones where Chinese officials were acting as speakers or moderators. The reference to the differential “nature, modalities and responsibilities” of South-South cooperation and the commitment of South-South partners “on a voluntary basis” results from Chinese positions in the negotiation and the OECD’s will to accommodate them to ensure their endorsement of the document.

The South-South initiative as it has developed has three interesting characteristics, which partly account for the momentum it has gained at the OECD in the past years. Firstly, the Task-Team dedicated to this issue is presented as inclusive. It has been led by developing countries, in particular Colombia and Indonesia, and thus appeared more representative and country-led than other OECD or DAC spaces. It seeks to build on the principles of equality, mutual respect and benefit, horizontality and sovereignty, and to associate actors other than states, such as civil society, local governments, the private sector and academia. The format of the side-event on South-South and triangular cooperation itself was designed in a way that allowed greater and wider participation: the room was divided into four relatively small groups along thematic lines. Secondly, the initiative puts the focus on the processes – and not only the results – of aid, and on the human dimension of international cooperation. To many, this appears particularly appealing in an aid field otherwise saturated with quantitative evaluation mechanisms, proliferating statistics and indicators and bureaucratic monitoring exercises. Thirdly, the initiative gave priority to knowledge-sharing and provided considerable room for the engagement of academics from the global South.

I suggest five patterns and pending questions that, in my opinion, are useful to analyse and understand the achievements and future of the Building Block on South-South and triangular cooperation.

1)    What are the link(s) with other South-South cooperation efforts?

South-South cooperation is not new; on the contrary, it has a long history. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, Asian, African and Latin American Countries worked to build joint-projects and coalitions as part as their attempts to develop, emancipate towards the North and negotiate a “New International Economic Order” (NIEO). The Non-Aligned Movement, i.e. the refusal of newly independent countries to choose side (either for the capitalist “free world” or the Soviet bloc) in the context of the Cold war, was established at a conference organised in Bandung (Indonesia) in 1955. Later, dependency theory – whose leading thinkers were from Latin America and closely associated to the work of the Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL) – criticised the unequal interactions between the “centre” and the “periphery” and the “imperialistic” nature of aid.

The geopolitical landscape has changed and such discourses have vanished from the core international policy agenda. Officials from Indonesia mentioned past experiences only in passing in their presentations but did not elaborate on their legacy for the current OECD-based initiative. Recently, President Chavez of Venezuela has tried to use aid as a tool for a global “Bolivarian” revolution.

So the question is: does the OECD wish to build on, or rather depart from past or present competing South-South initiatives? Some pillars of the initiative – solidarity, equality, sovereignty – recall past attempts. But the fact that the initiative refers to “triangular cooperation” and includes “Northern” partners suggests that it does not pursue the ideal of autonomy at the basis of the Non-Aligned Movement and other more recent trends present in Latin America, but this could be made more explicit.

2)    What are the differences with North-South cooperation?

How can South-South and triangular cooperation preserve its specificities and increase its influence to positively affect the way aid is done by “traditional” DAC donors? This ambitious challenge was outlined by the Task-Team’s coordinator, Enrique Maruri (Colombia) at a panel event at Busan.

As previously mentioned South-South cooperation has three specificities in the contemporary aid field: it is led by developing countries, focused on processes and knowledge-sharing. In the case of triangular cooperation, the role of the Northern donors or multilateral agencies/development banks could be defined with greater precision so as to ensure that the principles and goals of equality, non-interference and horizontal cooperation are respected.

3)    What are the interaction(s) with the Paris agenda?

To what extent should the principles, targets and indicators outlined in the Paris declaration apply to South-South cooperation? Some of them – such as aid coordination – are considered irrelevant or inapplicable by emerging donors like Brazil, China or India. While the Paris agenda was arguably elaborated as a response to the defects and perverse effects generated by over fifty years of aid practice and the bureaucracies of “traditional” donors, a country like Brazil does not have an aid agency so to speak, which means that it has different perceptions, resources, positioning and constraints as a donor. In parallel, and although China is very reluctant about this point, the Task-Team insisted on the need to show results and set up monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. This can be traced down to both normative beliefs and a strategic move, which for newcomers consists of embracing and complying with the international standards produced by the OECD in order to be recognized as legitimate and valuable actors. But the Task-Team’s claim to focus on aid processes is innovative and refreshing and should be preserved in future steps.

4)    What South and whose cooperation?

The Task-team on South-South and triangular cooperation was launched and co-chaired by Colombia and Indonesia. The OECD was eager to involve the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in its new “development partnership”. Brazil is not part of it, but some low-income countries are active members. But in Busan, I had the impression that the initiative was mainly driven by delegates from South Africa, Colombia and Indonesia. As a result, one can wonder how and to what extent low-income countries will take part in the coming Building Block on South-South and triangular cooperation.

5)    Knowledge-sharing or development finance?

In terms of the goals and modalities of the new South-South initiative, its promoters have significantly focused on the importance of knowledge-sharing during HLF4 in Busan. This stems from three main factors. First is the wish to exchange experiences, lessons and “best practices” expressed by participants on several occasions. Marco Farani, of the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations, asserted that South-South cooperation is based on a “community of realities and problems” faced by developing countries. Second is the relatively modest financial amounts of funds and scope of current South-South cooperation (with the exception of China, which does not endorse fully its role as an aid donor). Rogelio Granguillhome, Executive Director of the Mexican brand-new Agency for International Development, spoke out on the difficulties of securing sufficient finance. Colombia’s aid is focused on Central America and will only be able to reach Africa or Asia if available aid funds increase. Third is the World Bank’s desire to secure its future role in the changing “aid architecture”, a role of broker between countries who want to learn and those who want to share, and a provider of funds for multi-partner exchange, dialogue and transfer across the global South.

Two sets of questions follow. One was raised by Jonathan Glennie (Overseas Development Institute) in his intervention in Busan: is the OECD-based South-South cooperation initiative only about knowledge-sharing, or is it about development finance? If the answer lies at the second end of the spectrum, then emerging donors will have to “scale up” to become significant players in the aid field.

On the other hand, the involvement of academics has fueled the Task-team’s work so far and is considered instrumental for future “knowledge-sharing”. This is certainly welcomed and a great accomplishment with long-lasting potential, but also raises issues. When presenting one of the case-studies conducted for the Task-team, Ida Ruwaida, a sociologist from the University of Indonesia, explained that her commitment triggered debate at the university, with colleagues arguing that a lecturer at a public university could not be considered as a member of “civil society”.

In her “radical history of development studies”, Uma Kothari recalls that the discipline finds its roots back in European colonial administrations. Since then, she argues, the discipline has been the site for debate between researchers “who feel that the study of development is most closely connected to ideas about social, economic and political change” – and hence to the broader social sciences – and those who “are informed by a more instrumental goal of shaping policy and a practical concern with the implementation and evaluation of development interventions” – and thus feel closer to the agendas and preoccupations of aid agencies and development professionals. This distinction echoes a distinction between research on development and research for development.[5]

In the contemporary era, such debates are revived by the growing urge for universities to offer policy-oriented educational programs – aimed at training practitioners and attracting potential students – and produce “evidence-based” knowledge with direct implications for policy-making – in order to finance research projects. Knowledge about development is closely intertwined with development institutions as academics often work with, and for, governments, NGOs and international organisations. In these conditions, minimal conditions for academic engagement are needed to guarantee the production of critical, independent knowledge that does not systematically embrace but deconstructs the buzzwords coined and interventions led in the name of “development”. These difficult questions relate to the goals of research, the role and place of researchers in policy, politics and society. This is what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called “reflexivity”, thereby encouraging academics to think about these and to interrogate the material, political and social conditions of their work, their sociological, intellectual and political backgrounds, their own positioning in different fields and relations with institutions.

After spending one day with the team gathered around the Task-Team in Busan – as an “observing participant”[6] rather than participant observer! – I have no doubt that they will deploy their dynamism, commitment and creativity to forge a constructive path through the South-South cooperation journey. It surely is an exciting project.

The presence and participation of China in the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness has been a major source of fear and questions. During the last Working Party on Aid Effectiveness last October, its delegates had already systematically suggested to delete all parts of the draft outcome document that did not conform to its aid principles and interests, leaving other country delegates – who were desperately trying to find suitable and consensual formulations – puzzled. In Busan, Chinese delegates left the negotiation table on Monday night (day One) on various grounds. They argued that they had taken part in the forums in Paris and Accra as an aid-recipient country, and that they were not ready to endorse the principles and commitments they felt DAC donors expected them to take as a donor. Like other big powers have done in the past, they are reluctant to make binding commitments when they do not have a clear idea of their meaning and implications. Finally, they do not want to join the evaluation and monitoring efforts constitutive of the Paris agenda on aid effectiveness.

On Tuesday morning (day 2), the atmosphere was gloomy and many feared that it might not be possible to get an outcome document after China left the negotiation table. At the end of the conference, however, China (like Brazil and India) had agreed to endorse the document and Busan subsequently was considered a “success” by its organisers. This has generated mixed feelings amongst participants. Some regret this has come at a cost. Representatives of African countries feared donor commitments were going to be downgraded in hope to get China’s agreement. During the final plenary, civil society organisations underlined that the will to get everybody (and in particular China) on board has contributed to weakened commitments concerning the respect of human rights and the promotion of “democratic ownership”. So what can be said about China’s presence at the negotiation? I argue that controversies over China’s participation at HLF4 are reflective of the current state of aid, and that the country’s delegates may well be engaged in a process of learning – rather than abruptly demonstrating power in multilateral arenas such as the OECD.

On the one hand, rumours and controversies about China’s participation in Busan do not only reveal the country’s position in the negotiations: they also reflect the state of debates, tensions and positioning within the so-called “traditional” aid community. Firstly, they show the OECD’s willingness to integrate emerging countries in the Paris and broader aid processes. The amounts of Chinese cooperation and investments in less developed countries (in Africa, for example) are considerable, and the DAC efforts to track official development assistance are vain if they do not include Chinese aid. Also, because its members are developed countries only, some criticisms blame the organization for being a “rich club”. Jonathan Glennie (Overseas Development Institute) recently argued that that “the OECD should give up control of the aid agenda” to allow “new governance structures for aid” and “greater input from recipient countries”, needed in today’s very different world.[1] As a consequence, including emerging countries is key to enhance the legitimacy of the OECD – whose members are developed countries only – within the aid community. Finally, the will to associate China also reflects a shift in global powers at a time when traditional powers show greater fragility and when global growth and finance comes from the emerging South. Aid is not isolated from but fully impacted by these transformations. For all these reasons, the DAC has been very active at getting China on board, and the diplomatic mediation of the Republic of Korea – host of the Forum – was instrumental.

On the other hand, while there is no doubt that China has taken a strong negotiating position, it is also true that power is relative and built collectively. As a consequence, China’s weight increases when other actors, i.e. so-called “traditional donors” are ready to allow it and show greater doubt or fragility – in aid arenas and others. This is certainly the case of the current international paradigm despite its repeated rhetoric demonstrations of certainty, global moral commitments and self-claimed scientific evaluation of aid impacts and development results. One interviewee from the OECD/DAC ironically commented that representatives of “traditional donors” both feared and enjoyed the “great thrill” created by China’s growing engagement in the aid field.

I was not present in the private negotiation arenas that could only be accessed by official delegates only. But outside these, there was more than Chinese officials demonstrating power. I saw them reading their speeches in an English of variable quality. I heard them repeat, again and again, the Eight Principles of cooperation – i.e. solidarity, mutual interest and benefit, equality, the respect of sovereignty and self-determination – laid out by Premier Zhou Enlai in 1964. These principles continuity hardly reflects the changing context in which Chinese cooperation operates and its evolving nature. While it was first shaped to promote proletarian internationalism in the Cold War context, it is now directed to broader goals that include the promotion of trade and exports, multilateral presence and cultural diplomacy. The situation of China was arguably comparable to that of African countries in the 1950s and 1960s, but the Third World has become so diverse that the principle of “equality” with recipients does not hold anymore, and that China is at times accused of “imperialism” just like other big powers. Finally, I saw Chinese delegates – representatives of the Ministry of Commerce – speak about aid, which they have been reluctant to do for decades, and thus slowly embracing bits of the existing international language. If, as David Ambrosetti has shown about negotiations at the United Nations[2], multilateralism is not only made of Realpolitik but of processes in which norms, interactions and socialization play a big role, then participating in the HLF4 in Busan may well have been, for Chinese representatives, about learning how to play the multilateral game, too.

On December 1st, 2011, the World Bank organized a side event in Busan entitled “The New Aid Architecture: Trends and Opportunities” where delegates from Netherlands, China, Russia, Brazil, Gates Foundation and Liberia shared their views on the changing nature of international aid system from three camps—traditional donors, emerging donors, and NGOs.

The conventional wisdom in this debate has portrayed a landscape with two polarized claims: (a) emerging donors with “new” ideas and aid instruments have “undermined” norms and standards of the existing aid architecture; (b) emerging donors have brought viable “alternatives” to the DAC-led donor club. Yet such simplistic judgment has masked blurring boundaries between so-called traditional and emerging donors and neglected a more fundamentally transformative potential in aid architecture.

To illustrate my argument, I would like to start with a quiz: which of the following quotes is by a Chinese official from the Ministry of Commerce and which by a British Prime Minister?

1. ‘We can spend aid in a catalytic way to unleash the dynamism of African economies, kick-starting growth and development and ultimately helping Africa move off aid altogether.’

2. ‘We will increase the share of grants to Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and transfer agricultural technology. We will strengthen our efforts to reduce poverty to achieve the MDGs.”

An intuitive answer would be that the first is by Chinese and the second by DFID. However, the answer is the other way around. The first is UK Prime Minister David Cameron, speaking in Lagos in July 2011, and the second is Zhu Hong, Deputy Director General of International Department, Ministry of Commerce from China, speaking in Busan Conference, December 2011.

Thus, if we define the new features of aid architecture as new actors with new aid instruments, we would fail to do justice to changing mindsets and policies of both camps—traditional and emerging donors. Then what is (or will be potentially) new about the nature of aid architecture?

To shed light onto this question, I would like to quote a remark from an African scholar who said: “it would be a shame that the Busan conference ends up with a set of quantitatively defined indictors to coordinate among donors themselves. Such coordination on the international level is often mired in shadow indictors that run the risk of diverting our attention from real engineers of economic transformation.” This has been echoed by the delegate from Liberia, Amara Konneh, Minister of Planning and Economic Affairs, “Liberia is not interested in charity…We want donors to coordinate on the country level to combine their comparative advantages.” The Liberia Minister recommended China work with Brazil and criticised their infrastructure building – which falls short of sustainability despite its efficiency and high quality. The Chinese official responded to this criticism honestly stating that the maintenance of infrastructure has been a “headache” for China’s foreign aid programme and China is eager to learn from the World Bank and other donors on how to make its aid projects more sustainable with lasting effects.

The above case suggests that what is new in aid architecture is not merely new financing channels and instruments but also more importantly an increasing momentum of aid coordination on the country level. Aid architecture comes to a new stage where no single organization can define what is best aid practice and marginalize others that differ from mainstream development discourses. It has unleashed both opportunities and challenges that encourage us to take a step forward to move from donor-led aid coordination on the international level to recipient-led aid collaboration on the country-level.

Download this memo here

International conferences are not only about big declarations and new targets. They are also about offering places of socialization in a given field, consolidating the legitimacy of the actors who organize and attend them. This was partially acknowledged by the participants in the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness themselves.

On day 2, the US secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that targets and goals are important but mostly “inspirational”. In informal conversations, some participants regretted that discourses are emptied of political content to facilitate consensus, and that repeated negotiations downgrade commitments to the minimal common denominator. Some underlined that these commitments are either too weak or they contend the risk of not being followed and implemented fully, especially in the absence of clear implementation mechanisms. Others criticize the beauty contest dimension in the venue – with all actors trying to promote their agendas and put forward their own contribution to development effectiveness in an increasingly crowed and competitive aid community – or the big gap between the conference venue and the living conditions of the world’s poorest populations that international aid is trying to help. On their way back home – a two-day plane trip with stops at Shanghai, Seoul, London, Paris or Dubai – some delegates of African countries ironically commented that the “high mass” was over.

But while it is legitimate to be disappointed and critical as citizens or activists, it is not necessarily relevant for the analyst to distinguish between “the surface” vs “reality”, “technical” debates vs “high politics”, the scene and what’s behind, explicit and hidden agendas. Approaching HLF4 as a bazaar[1] enables us to refocus on products other than the much-expected outcome document, which is only one of the conference’s outputs. In the bazaar, old players comfort their position; new ones enter the game and learn its rules. Participants exchange ideas, draft documents and business cards; they create contacts, build networks or coalitions. They adapt their behaviours, learn to speak the international aid language and to present themselves in ways compatible with the agreed format. These elements, in turn, fuel the development “myth”[2], ensure its reproduction as well as the institutionalization of truly global norms, practices and attitudes. If Busan is no exception, then the ceremony held in Busan certainly contributed to the reinforcement of the “aid community”.

As an institutional and political performance, it was also an attempt to better define the future role of the OECD in this community. Indeed, the organization is at a crossroad. Both formally and historically, its members are developed countries only, and the organisation’s core expertise and work is dedicated to provide policy analysis and recommendations made to governments in “rich” countries.

But with the Paris agenda[3], the OECD has consolidated its key role in the aid industry at a time – the late nineties – when the World Bank was prominent in framing a “post-Washington consensus” and a new “partnership” able to restore the legitimacy and efficiency of international development assistance after the mitigated results of previous structural adjustment programs. The Working Party on Aid Effectiveness itself[4] is supposed to disintegrate after Busan. But it is highly improbable that the organization will throw aside the dynamics, expertise and institutional capital gathered through the Paris agenda.

The Fourth High Level Forum held offered the occasion for the OECD to present a draft of its Development Strategy, a key element in drawing directions for the organisation’s way forward. Consultations were organized in Busan, where the OECD secretary-general and DAC-chair asked developing countries to give their input and feedback on the draft development strategy, i.e. tell them how they think the organization can better help and serve them in the future.

On the one hand, the representative of Nicaragua seized the opportunity to offer a critical reading of the international aid community, stating that his country has lost the support of some donors after disagreements on the country’s development strategy in the past years. He highlighted that good results were reached and questioned the notion of “ownership” – and donors’ will to embrace it. He suggested the OECD could play a broker role in solving such conflicts. The institution’s staff replied that the Paris declaration was partially aimed at improving donor-recipient relationships, and recalled that because the OECD is not an aid agency so to speak, it cannot impose rules about aid allocation to its member-States or multilateral agencies/banks.

On the other hand, it may well be uneasy for developing countries to answer the “what is the way forward?” question. There are, in my opinion, two main reasons for this. First, the role of the OECD is harder to grasp from a Southern perspective precisely because it is not an aid agency. The organization only has immaterial resources and power and cannot provide financing for development – which, to a certain extent, makes it less attractive – while its “added-value” lies in expertise, recommendations and the production of “best practices”. On the other hand, governments in developing countries don’t know the OECD very well. Contrary to donor agencies, the OECD does not have country representation in developing countries. As a consequence, it’s not part of daily aid negotiations and “policy dialogue” on development strategies at the country level. When developing countries have engaged with the organization in the aftermath of the Paris declaration (for surveys, evaluation and others), it was in interaction with its Development Assistance Committee – the political organ where member-States are represented – or its Secretariat (also called Development Cooperation Directorate). If the Working Party takes an end and the Secretariat under its current form disappears, then what will be the platform for discussing aid issues and associating developing countries? Development and cooperation issues are not the core of the business of the OECD as a whole.

It will be interesting to follow how the OECD will shape this new Development Strategy and, in the words of the OECD secretary-general and DAC chair, proceed to “mainstream” development within the organisation while affirming its role in the broader aid community. How this will be done in practice remains an open question. But the challenge ahead consists of nothing less than compiling diverging expectations with the possibilities and constraints created by the OECD’s mandate, institutional culture, bureaucratic tools and political structure.

By the time I got to the Bexco Conference Centre, in the morning of the third and last day of the Forum, the outcome document had been finalized, translated, printed and posted on the official website. Arm-twisting, hand-wrangling and last minute negotiations were over, and spirits were high: China, Brazil and India had all agreed to endorse the document. A New Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation, the promise of Busan, was born, but only after the introduction of a paragraph in the preamble that makes principles, commitments and actions agreed in the document valid for so-called ‘South-South partners’ only on a voluntary basis.

So what is new in the document that will guide aid effectiveness efforts over the next few years? And what is different from previous ones? First, the document rightly recognises that today’s world is very different from the world of Paris in 2005. New actors have taken the global stage, and are affirming their views. Mentions of South-South and Triangular Cooperation are numerous. The Brazilian delegation had a very full agenda of bilateral meetings, with everyone scrambling to collaborate and sign agreements with their cooperation agency. Moreover, the role that foreign aid can play is seen as changing from transformational to ‘catalytic’, ensuring that ever larger alternative sources of development finance are better harnessed to promote development and reduce poverty. Second, as already mentioned, the document talks of ‘shared principles’, similar to those of the Paris Declaration, but ‘differential commitments’ for emerging donors, in an effort to gradually bring China and the others into the donor club. The Chinese, in fact, were conspicuous for their absence. No Chinese government speaker was seen on any panel. And apparently Andrew Mitchell (the UK Secretary of State for International Development) had to fly to Beijing himself to talk the Chinese into endorsing the document. Third, while the Paris Declaration had 12 indicators and specific targets set for 2010, the Busan outcome document contains hardly any specific time-bound commitments except for those related to improving aid transparency. This will seriously limit the degree to which the donor community can be held accountable for any of the promises that are in the document. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the document calls for the establishment of a new and more inclusive body to oversee the implementation of the document’s commitments at political level, phasing out the role played by the OECD and its Working Party on Aid Effectiveness. This potentially creates the space for a more legitimate and effective arrangement, but the document lacks any detail on what it will look like, simply setting a deadline of June 2012 for its establishment.

As I read through the document and wrote down these few thoughts, I was left wondering what this ‘Brave New Aid World’ had to offer poor people in low-income countries… not much, is my disappointed answer. While the outcome of the Busan HLF4 is a good mirror of the ways in which the aid landscape has changed over the past few years, it is long on principles and short on commitments, high on rhetoric and low on accountability. For all those preoccupied with the role that foreign aid can play in fighting poverty, and who used to think of Busan as a hopeful destination, the flight home will be spent focusing on a long ‘to-do’ list to make sure previous efforts don’t go to waste. Welcome to the brave new aid world…

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“We are united by a new partnership that is broader and more inclusive than ever before, founded on shared principles, common goals and differential commitments for effective international development.” I quote from the outcome document of HLF4 on Aid Effectiveness.

Forging a more inclusive global development partnership was the key message in the closing ceremony. During the Busan conference, each participant could get a sense of such “inclusiveness” by constantly making a hard choice among various programmes that took place at the same time.

Busan was a multi-actor and multi-issue event. It gave a more open and inclusive space for diverse actors (representatives of developing and developed countries, of civil society, private, parliamentary, local and regional organizations, of multilateral and aid organizations) and various issues (climate finance, fragile states, disaster resilience, etc.).

The world has changed towards a more diversified landscape of development cooperation in an age of scarcity and uncertainty. Moving forward in a collaborative way entails the spirit of tolerance and mutual understanding.

Too often we witness resolute shifts based on aspirational principles in the field of international development. While these principles have merits in their own right, they are often framed in a black-and-white dichotomy. Adherents of their respective principles often implicitly indicate any deviation is undesirable. “Transparency” has become such an aspirational term, and “catalytic aid for economic transformation” is another example.

In principle, transparency and accountability should go hand in hand. With the initiation of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), we might see a trend towards using aid data as a commodity for various purposes. It may enable a burgeoning industry. Then it raises the question of how to manage these data in a responsible way and how we can learn from other fields to avoid unintended counterproductive consequences. To tackle these questions, we need to move beyond aspirations to allow room for experimentation. It would refocus our attention on the enabling environment where concrete policies are not based on good-intentioned principles but context-specific evidence.

By the same token, “catalytic aid for economic transformation” is another aspirational principle to call for self-reliant development through transformative aid. Such a principle often links itself with certain aid instruments and modalities. It has been put forward to redress the limitation of single-minded pursuit of basic-needs approach to poverty reduction. However, if we go to extremes to seek a resolute shift to a catalytic aid allocation principle, we may fall into the trap of fashionable trends. One way out of this dilemma is to open up space for innovative experimentation of how to achieve synergies between public and private financial resources. The answer is not ready made. Thus, it is not enough and even undesirable to come up with a blueprint with clear indicators to urge an agenda shift.

We all come with shared aspiration for a better world in the shared planet. For this to happen, it is insufficient and even counterproductive to merely base our action on good-intentioned principles. What we truly need is the space for mutual recognition and innovative experimentation to get rid of development orthodox.

So when we left Busan, we should not only ask ourselves whether one particular principle is unfulfilled or not but also whether we genuinely engage and understand positions of others that differ from ours. Moving forward, we hope to see a dynamic momentum for experimentation on the country level rather than a set of straight-jacket standards that stifle alternative viable paths to effective development cooperation.

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In the opening ceremony and following-up side events in Busan HLF4, there is a recurring theme from speakers that aid is not charity but investment. I will list a few examples for this claim.

Aid is not charity, but smart investment (that benefits both donors and recipients).

–Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations

Aid is more than a mere charity, but mutual investment. Aid as investment helps to enable recipient countries stand on equal footing.

–H.E. Paul Kagme, President of the Republic of Rwanda

Focusing on aid (as charity) loses a bigger development picture. For aid to be effective, it must be additional to investment and trade.

– Désiré Vencatachellum, Director of the Development Research Department, African Development Bank

At first glance, the above statements appear to convey an identical message that aid is not charity but investment. On a closer scrutiny, however, it reveals that different actors seek to use the same term of “investment” that carries different meanings for different audiences.

Firstly, investment is used metaphorically by donor agencies to convince their domestic constituencies that development assistance is beneficial for both donors and recipients. Donors can benefit from aid not only because shared growth can stimulate employment in donor countries in the short term but also because stable and secure international environment serves long-term donors’ self-enlightening interests. Especially, in the economic downturn after financial crisis, aid as charity could not gain adequate domestic support due to budgetary constraints. Hence, donors have to find new ways to justify their aid budget to convince their voters to win political support by arguing that aid is investment for the future.

Secondly, mutual investment can also be used by recipient countries to criticise the prevailing de-politicised technical view of development assistance in an effort to voice their discontent of unequal power relationship. Aid as charity often comes with lecturing to induce recipient countries to accept policy conditionality. In sharp contrast, “mutual investment” has normative aspiration from recipient countries that both parties are equal partners and that the terms of development cooperation are negotiated by taking into account concerns of both sides. Although numerous empirical research has shown that conditionality does not work in reality, there is still a large gap between the rhetoric of ownership and practice of ex-ante or ex-post conditionality. In Busan, delegates from recipient countries have been very vocal in opposing political conditionality. “Aid should not be tied to political progress, because you can never purchase democracy.” “I don’t like conditionality, because it is not flexible. As fragile states, we have to move fast enough to tackle the problems with our own solutions, but conditionality constrains our hands.” (Emilia Pires, Minister of Finance, Timor-Leste) “Money never buys reform.” (Tertius Zongo, Former Prime Minister and former Minister of Finance, Burkina Faso) Hence, aid as mutual investment has been a vision for recipient countries to refute “good-intentioned” justification of political conditionality based on unequal power relationship.

Last but not least, aid as investment for mutual benefits has been used by emerging donors to distinguish their aid philosophy from the mainstream charity account. From their perspective, aid should be put into a broader toolbox for economic engagement. Based on their own domestic development experiences, they highlight “the additionality of aid” that aid cannot be effective unless it is additional to other primary financial resources. Otherwise, it runs risk of falling into the trap of aid dependence. Aid can be used as a catalyst to attract FDI to help a country to achieve self-sustaining development. That’s why we hear the aspiration from recipient countries that “we want dignity rather than dependence” and that “aid should eliminate poverty and create prosperity.” That’s why the President of Rwanda remarked in the opening ceremony that “we should talk about aid effectiveness together with trade and investment.”

To conclude, whether this heralds a paradigm shift remains to be seen. The field of development cooperation never falls short of catchphrases. It would be of little use if the so-called shift in paradigm is no more than changes in wording. What we really need is a progressive and evolutionary improvement based on empirical evidence on what works and what does not work in practice.

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Despite the cold, wind and rain outside the BEXCO Conference Centre, the celebrity line-up for the Opening Ceremony of the HLF4 tried their best to get delegates excited about the importance of the event and of its outcomes for the future of foreign aid and development. Ban Ki Moon of the UN and Angel Gurria of the OECD both emphasized the need for donors to do more and do better, given the less than encouraging results of the Paris Declaration Monitoring Survey released earlier this year. The need for emerging donors to “step up” and recognize that with more influence comes more responsibility, was another recurring theme. The experience of host country South Korea from war-ravaged, impoverished country 50 years ago to OECD member and donor nowadays, was time and again indicated as an example to follow. But my favourite speeches were delivered by Rwanda’s president, Kagame, who eloquently showed donors’ failure to deliver on their promises, and accused them for their “unending questioning that no answer can fully satisfy”, and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was quite honest about some of the political realities that donors face, and called for increased mutual responsibility in aid relationships, in which both sides take the necessary steps to make aid work better.

While sherpas continue to work at the draft Outcome Document, plenary sessions called Building Blocks were meant to push for more far reaching commitments from sub-sets of actors. I’ve been working on preparing the BB session on transparency for a few months, and it went quite well. All speakers, including Swedish Development Minister Gunilla Carlsson and Sri Mulyani Indrawati, former Finance Minister of Indonesia and now at the World Bank, agreed with the need to link and deepen both aid and budget transparency, in order to promote better accountability and results. What went missing in the rush to give space to the following session, was a clear sense of next steps, and of how this rhetorical commitment can be monitored and followed up on. I made a note to make sure we don’t let this drop off the agenda…

This GEG Memo can be downloaded here.

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The landscape of international development is changing with more actors, more ideas and more voices from different cultural, regional, and historical backgrounds. Are there emerging Asian approaches to development cooperation? If so, what are the key features that distinguish it from the mainstream DAC donors? Has it challenged or complemented the current prevailing approach?

The side event in the HLF4 on “Emerging Asian Approaches to Development Cooperation” tackled the above questions. Panellists from China, India, Vietnam and South Korea shared their views on what they mean by “Asian approaches” (Detailed information for speakers can be found at the end of the report).

“The consensus on development cooperation forged by OECD-DAC has been challenged by emerging non-Western donors.” Dr. Oh-Seok Hyun, President of Korea Development Institute, started his opening remark. The four panellists took a step forward to give meaning to the term of “Asian approaches” from their respective national perspectives. Key points can be summarized as follows:

Development Paradigms: Endowment VS. Bootstrapping Perspective

Dr. Wonhyuk Lim from South Korea argued that Asian donors take a bootstrapping perspective of capacity development that differs substantially from DAC donors’ endowment perspective. Endowment perspective has two core elements: (a) economies lacking “appropriate endowments” (cultural values, “good” institutions, etc.) cannot grow; (b) the state should focus on getting the institutional framework right and then get out of the way letting market forces and individuals play the game. In sharp contrast, bootstrapping approach embraced by Asian donors maintains that initiating growth does not require state-of-the-art institutions. Hence, the challenge is not so much to get growth to start by adopting big-bang reforms, as it to sustain it by devising search networks to detect and mitigate constraints as they emerge.

Priorities in Development: Which Comes First, Economic Growth or Social Sectors?

Professor Li Xiaoyun from China believes that China’s domestic development experiences have informed its own approach to foreign aid programmes in Africa. In the past three decades, China has dramatically reduced poverty by building infrastructure that has built up its own dynamics of development. For this to happen, China has developed its own features of infrastructure building, such as the capacity of long-term planning, co-financing mechanism, and decentralized system of maintenance. Therefore, China believes infrastructure plays a key role in poverty reduction and economic transformation. In contrast, he thought that DAC donors put more emphasis on basic need approach by channelling aid into the social sectors like education, health, and so on.

Self-Reliance: Moving Beyond Charity

Panellists all highlighted that Asian approaches regard aid as “mutual cooperation” rather than charity. It is demand-driven rather than supply-driven. It aims to achieve self-reliant development rather than trapping in aid dependence. As argued by Dr. Sachin Chaturvedi from India, “The crux of SSC is self-reliance and self-help can effectively work only when the recipient countries have clear ideas on goal setting, decision-making, and decision-implementation.” Echoing this point on self-reliance, Dr. Lim from South Korea highlighted that “Korea became a successful aid recipient only after it started its export-oriented industrialization in the 1960s.”

From the above brief summary, we can see that the term of “Asian approaches” is in the making. It moves the debate beyond “non-DAC donors” (a vague term defined by what emerging donors are not) to proactively voice their perspectives with collaborative efforts among themselves.

Such discussion is welcome in a sense that it brings diversity in development thinking and practices that enables recipient countries to have more choices. But it runs the risk of making a dichotomous claim that neglects the diversity within Asian donors and contested opinions within DAC donor club. It may lead us to spend too much time in emphasizing differences rhetorically rather than in exploring what works and what doesn’t empirically.

Therefore, the key point here is not to argue whether Asian approaches are superior to the assumed existing consensus of DAC donors (in fact, the nature of development cooperation is very contested among DAC donors) or whether basic-need approach should give way to Asian approaches to development cooperation aimed to move beyond charity. Such competitive mindset gets us nowhere. What matters is mutual learning between donors with the purpose of more effectivene development cooperation. Hence, the question is not about who moves closer to whom but about what approaches move closer to development effectiveness based on empirical evidence.

Panellists:

Prof. LI Xiaoyu, China Agriculture University

Dr. Sachin Chaturvedi, Research and Information System for Developing Countries

Mr. Dang Huy Dong, Deputy Minister of Planning and Investment, Vietnam

Dr. Wonhyuk Lim, Korean Development Institute

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Should South-South cooperation be part of the “new global partnership for effective development cooperation? And how do emerging economies create cooperation agencies to  receive and provide official development assistance? 

A thematic session on South-South and triangular cooperation was held at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness this afternoon. The main challenges of this form of cooperation –which is not new but has been renovated and increased in the past years – were presented.

Rogelio Granguillhome, Executive Director of the Mexican brand-new Agency for International Development, shared the difficulties faced in securing sufficient finance. He also mentioned the risk of thematic dispersion and of proliferating short-term actions. Finally, he highlighted the need to find evaluation and transparency mechanisms. Marco Farani, Director of the Brazilian Agency for Cooperation, Ministry of External Relations, reminded us that South-South cooperation is based on a community of realities and problems in developing countries. He also pointed to the need for emerging countries to create cooperation agencies that will allow them to both receive and provide official development assistance.

From a Kenyan perspective, Enos Oyaya, Director of the Quality Assurance and Standards Directorate, Ministry of Education, insisted in the need to “decolonise” African minds. According to him, if political systems and economies were successfully decolonized, African states and societies still have struggle to overcome the idea that “what comes from the North is better than South-South”. This type of cooperation must focus on capacity-building, clearly identifying partners and institutionalizing best practices.

Sanjay Pradhan, Vice President of the World Bank Institute, linked the revival of South-South cooperation to the shift in global powers, and underlined that a session focused on this issue would not have taken place at an international conference ten or even five years ago. In this perspective, he raised the issue of the role of multilateral organisations in relation to the rise of South-South cooperation. He suggested the World Bank play a role of broker between countries who want to learn and those who want to share. He outlined two further potential contributions of the Bank: fostering South-South cooperation in the development strategies of the Bank’s clients, and to establishing and financing multi-partner exchanges, dialogues and transfers.

Jonathan Glennie (Overseas Development Institute) offered some concluding remarks. For him, South-South cooperation requires a change in mindset and a broader partnership than just government-to-government. He raised the question whether South-South cooperation is and should be part of the “new global partnership for effective development cooperation” that will emerge in Busan, and recalled that this issue is debated and controversial within the aid community. He finally questioned the nature of South-South cooperation, and stated that its financial component should not be under-estimated and hidden by the knowledge-sharing aspect.

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GEG now has a Facebook page! Follow our latest news updates and events by linking to our page, either by following this link or clicking on the ‘Facebook’ logo underneath the sidebar on our website.

In the last decade a number of countries have gone from aid donor to aid recipient. Korea, the hosts, is one such country and a conference exhibition and the opening speeches reflected on this transformation (photo is from the exhibition).

As host of the fourth summit of this kind organized by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its member-states, the Republic of South Korea is clearly seizing the opportunity to show-case its fast “success” while giving credit to the role of international aid in the country’s reconstruction after World War II. In an exhibition held in the conference hall organized by Korea’s cooperation agency, KOICA, an introductory note states that “the Exhibition of Korea’s ODA (Official development assistance) presents the story of Korea’s development from aid recipient to donor country. The exhibition acknowledges the help Korea received and presents ideas for future ODA”. In his opening speech, Korea’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs presented foreign aid as part of his life experience and recalled growing up in a country that was one of the world’s poorest. He mentioned that he personally benefited from aid as a child, and reminded participants that the Busan conference and exhibition centre in which the Forum is held (BEXCO) was built thanks to cooperation funds (like the port and other of the city’s infrastructures). He says that as a consequence, he feels proud to now be an official representative of the world’s thirtieth economy.

The location of the fourth High-level Forum on Aid effectiveness in South Korea adds a special flavor. The location reveals and reflects the changes at play in the donor and aid community since the OECD’s Paris declaration was signed in 2005. Since then, some Asian countries have consolidated their status as “emerging” countries. In least developed countries, many of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, important efforts have been made to increase national “ownership” of development strategies, focus aid and public expenditures on poverty reduction targets, and rationalize aid management. While Western governments are currently facing difficulties in meeting aid commitments, Asian and Latin American countries – such as China, India, Brazil, Venezuela – have established or revived cooperation policies of their own, thus giving new momentum to South-South cooperation, whose historical origins go back to the Bandung conference in 1955.

In the plenary session this morning, Brian Atwood (OECD/DAC) said: “the world has changed; recipients are also providers. We are no longer in a world of donors and recipients but a world of partners”. This should not be considered as a fact, though, and the OECD/DAC had to make considerable efforts to better include developing countries and incorporate their visions and interests. The OECD’s representativeness and legitimacy as a player in the aid field is at stake since the organization is not based on the “one country, one vote” principle – contrary to the United Nations system – and was once considered a “donor club”. In the past years, the OECD’s Working Party on Aid effectiveness has included members from developing countries – China and Brazil attended a Working party meeting for the first time last September. The governments of developing countries have been – unevenly – associated with the implementation and evaluation of the Paris declaration at the country level, and have led or taken part in initiatives, so-called “task-forces” and “building blocks” in the continued work related to the Paris declaration at the OECD in Paris. For example, Colombia and Indonesia are leading an initiative for South-South and triangular cooperation.

The degree of real participation from developing countries at the High-level forum on Aid effectiveness held in Busan, and its impact on the new international development compact that will emerge of it, remains to be explored.

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Mr. Stephen Jennings, CEO of Renaissance Capital, delivered the GEG Special Address on Friday 5 November 2010 in Rhodes House. Mr. Jennings spoke of the challenges and especially the opportunities for investment in the continent in the coming years:

“I see the opportunity in Africa as greater than anywhere else in the world today not because Africa is different, but precisely because it isn’t a special case. The great majority of African countries will transform their economies in the coming decades just as most of Asia, America and Europe have done in their time. The difference with Africa is simply that the scope for catch up and convergence is greater and is likely to happen more rapidly. However, the convergence path of individual African countries will be highly idiosyncratic and organic. It will reflect the specific institutional, political and economic circumstances of each country rather than idealized Western notions of top-down institutional reform.” 

The full transcript of Mr. Jennings’ Special Address is now available for download.

Global Economic Governance Programme Director, Professor Ngaire Woods, has recently published a new GEG Working Paper on the subject of the G20 Leaders group. In her paper, “The G20 Leaders and Global Governance,” Woods traces the trajectory of the G20 across its first four meetings, ultimately examining the ways in which the organisation might move forward as an agenda-setter and orchestrator of global governance.

For more on the G20, come along to The G20 and Global Governance, with speakers Sir John Cunliffe (Prime Minister’s Advisor on Europe and Global Issues), Mr. Amar Bhattacharya (Director, G24), and Dr. Cyrus Rustomjee (Director, Economic Affairs, Commonwealth Secretariat) on Friday 3 December, Swire Seminar Room, 12 Merton Street, University College.

Alexander Betts, together with Phil Orchard (University of Queensland), was awarded an ISA Venture Grant to organise a pre-ISA workshop on ‘implementation in world politics’ in Montreal in March 2011. The workshop will also involve other GEG researchers, Devi Sridhar and Carolyn Deere. The workshop’s starting point is that International Relations literature on institutionalization tends to look at variation in how international norms get adopted by states, and to assume the story of norm dissemination ends there. However, often, states with similar levels of institutionalisation exhibit different degrees of implementation. This workshop will examine the ‘normative institutionalisation-implementation gap’ across a range of issue-areas and norms including refugees, IDPs, tobacco control, climate change, torture, R2P, and peacekeeping, in order to identify the causal mechanisms that explain variation in domestic implementation in the context of similar levels of international institutionalization.

Devi Sridhar (Director, Global Health Governance) asks whether the benefits of major initiatives like the Commonwealth Games outweigh their costs on her new blog globalhealthpolicy.net.

With Andrew Harmer of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Sridhar’s blog posts analyse the latest developments in global health around the world. Latest posts include Moving beyond MDG Silos, Who’s Really Fighting Hunger?, and Malnutrition in India: Social Change > Handouts.

GEG’s Paolo de Renzio debates cash-on-delivery aid with the folks from the Center for Global Development at the World Education Blog:

Cash on delivery: linking aid to results – Nancy Birdsall, William D. Savedoff and Ayah Mahgoub (CGD); The problem with cash-on-delivery aid – Paolo de Renzio (GEG); What Is the Counterfactual for COD Aid? – William Savedoff and Nancy Birdsall.  For the background, see CGD’s Cash on Delivery aid initiative and commentary  by GEG’s Paolo de Renzio and Ngaire Woods - The Trouble with Cash on Delivery Aid – discussing the effects of COD aid on recipient country governments. For more, see CGD’s Cash on Delivery aid initiative and commentary  by GEG’s Paolo de Renzio and Ngaire Woods - The Trouble with Cash on Delivery Aid – discussing the effects of COD aid on recipient country governments.

Over at the Guardian, Kevin Watkins argues that lives are being lost needlessly because of an aid system that favours crisis response over prevention in Too little, too late for Niger.

‘Survival Migration: A New Protection Framework’, Global Governance, Vol. 16:3, 361-382.

‘Towards a “Soft Law” Framework for the Protection of Vulnerable Irregular Migrants’, International Journal of Refugee Law, Vol. 22:2, 209-236.

‘The Refugee Regime Complex’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, Vol. 29:1, 12-37.

‘Forced Migration Studies: “Who Are We and Where Are We Going?” ‘, Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 23:2, 260-269.

‘Substantive Issue-Linkage and The Politics of Migration‘, in Bjola, C and Kornprobst, M (eds), Arguing Global Governance (Routledge), chapter 5.

Health is at the heart of the Millennium Development Goals, but has the world got its spending priorities right? Devi Sridhar, Director of Global Health Governance at GEG, and Lawrence Gostin pose a new set of questions for global health funding in their article Caring About Health for Chatham House’s The World Today.

How does health compare to other global priorities? What drives success in public health? On what areas should developing country governments focus to improve health?

You can read Caring About Health via Chatham House. You may also be interested in Devi Sridhar’s blog globalhealthpolicy.net and her contribution to World Policy Journal’s The Big Question: What is the Most Pressing Health Crisis and How Can It Be Solved?

The 2010 Levine Prize awarded Special Recognition to The Politics of Global Regulation, edited by Walter Mattli and Ngaire Woods. The Prize Committee said that this volume:

“critically reflects upon the increasing voice among countries to tighten up regulatory control at the national and global levels. Will we see the rise of ‘regulatory states’ of a new kind? This book serves as a timely caution that regulatory capture or hijacking could take place in this newfound enthusiasm for regulation.”

More information about book, including the introductory chapter, is available via Princeton University Press.

GEG’s Expert Taskforce on Global Knowledge Governance invites you to take part in a short international survey on Global Knowledge Governance and Intellectual Property.

The survey will help us gather a diversity of views from around the world on challenges facing the international institutional arrangements and processes that shape the rules and practices for creating, using and sharing knowledge – and related goods and services. We also seek views on principles that should guide reforms and specific options for consideration. The survey focuses particular attention on questions of how global governance influences international intellectual property-related rules and practices.

For more information and to participate in the survey, click here.

In a letter to the Financial Times, Ngaire Woods addresses the Greek crisis, arguing that Greece must must default thoroughly, so as to assure the markets that no further default is likely. She writes:

‘Sir, Well-meaning friends can be perilous. Intervention by the International Monetary Fund and the European Union has staved off Greek default, for the time being. Over a decade ago the IMF intervened in Argentina, providing a $15bn “blindage” or shield against the markets. The result was to postpone Argentina’s inevitable default and to increase the costs to Argentina.

‘Greece has just received the same. The package bails out banks holding Greek debt. It reflects an official view that, above all, default must be averted. But surely Greece must default…see the FT.com

For more, see GEG’s Recommended Reading on Sovereign Defaults.

Ngaire Woods features in the latest Economist debate, defending the motion:

This house believes that making trade fairer is more important than making it freer.

Trade needs saving, Woods argues, but freer trade will not do the trick. Her opponent is Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, and GEG Senior Fellow Kevin Watkins also weighed in on the debate. Read their statements and comments from the floor at The Economist.

*UPDATE* The votes are in: Ngaire Woods won the debate with 55% support. Announcing the result, moderator Saugato Datta remarked:

‘Ngaire Woods, proposing the motion that making trade fairer is more important than making it freer, began with less than half of the vote. But she steadily gained converts through the course of the debate. In the end, a solid majority of 55% voted for the motion, making Ms Woods the winner. Jagdish Bhagwati made many fine arguments and contributed immensely to the process of clarifying just what it was that was being debated, but he could not, in the end, convince enough participants to support him.’

A recent study by Devi Sridhar, GEG Senior Researcher, and Eduardo Gomez examines the role the international community plays in financing in Brazil, Russia and India. Commenting on the study, Laurie Garrett of the Council of Foreign Relations noted in a recent letter:

‘The Big Four emerging market economies, India, Brazil, China and Russia, are still aid recipients, despite their phenomenal economic growths. Since 2002, external aid dependency for domestic health programs has increased in India and China, stabilized in Russia, and only declined significantly in Brazil. Overwhelmingly, these countries accept foreign aid for health initiatives that they might otherwise either ignore, or grossly under-fund in the absence of external pressure, in the form of offered financial support for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, tuberculosis tracking and care, drug abuse aversion programs, malaria prevention, and other initiatives. Though all four countries are overwhelmed by cardiovascular disease, psychiatric illness (especially clinical depression), deaths due to injuries and accidents and cancer, external funding support does not assist in these areas. As a result, there is a tremendous mismatch between government spending priorities for the people of these nations and priority needs’.

As part of the University of Oxford’s OpenSpires project and iTunes U, you can now access many GEG lectures online. Listen again to Ngaire Woods, Sir David King and Cameron Hepburn on governing climate change after Copenhagen; to Poul Nyrup Rasmussen (President of European Socialist Party and former Prime Minister of Denmark) on the post-crisis politics of financial reform; to Helen Clark (UNDP) on the UN’s role in overcoming development challenges; and many more.

To access the audio and video podcasts, visit the University’s podcasts page or search for the Global Economic Governance Programme on iTunes.

GEG Associate Arunabha Ghosh briefed the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the Financial, Economic and Social Crisis (CRIS) on 25 March 2010 in Brussels. Dr. Ghosh was invited to brief the CRIS Committee on the impact of the economic crisis on climate change and international trade and its implications for global governance. More details on the public hearing, chaired by Wolf Klinz (MEP), are available here and Dr. Ghosh’s briefing paper is available here. For more information on Climate Change, visit our Resource Guide to Climate Change.

Dr. Ghosh recently also published a new policy brief on the architecture of the climate regime which can be found here.

In a new GEG Brief, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu provide a guide to understanding the empirical evidence behind the aid debate and show why it is important to exercise caution in extrapolating policy advice from such data. Both the critics of aid, as well as its proponents, rely upon a limited pool of evidence concerning aid’s effectiveness.  Their interpretations of this evidence, argue Stuckler and Basu, suffer from a series of well-known statistical fallacies and misunderstandings about the limitations of global aid data.

Download Six Concerns about Data in the (Dead) Aid Debate and to read more, visit GEG’s Guide to the (Dead) Aid Debate.

GEG’s Global Migration Governance project has just released its 2009 annual report. To catch up on the project’s activities and publications, download Global Migration Governance: Multiple and Contested Institutions, 2009.

The World Bank must address governance and accountability questions, declared Douglas Alexander, UK Secretary of State for International Development in a public lecture at the LSE last week. Emphasising the Bank’s centrality to global action on the most difficult global development challenges, the Minister laid out the UK’s three priorities for World Bank reform: 1) agreement on voting reform, to give the poorest a greater voice; 2) moving staff out of Washington to improve the organisation’s delivery on the front line; and 3) forging a new compact between shareholders and management in which each is held to account for the highest performance. Read the speech at DFID’s website and for more, see GEG’s World Bank Reform resources.

The GEG lecture by Mr. Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, President of European Socialist Party and former Prime Minister of Denmark, is now available online via the University of Oxford’s OpenSpires project.

To listen to the audio or watch the video of The post-crisis politics of financial reform: business as usual or new global order?, visit the OpenSpires project. You can also find it on iTunes U and via the University of Oxford’s podcasts.

Stop aid. Increase aid. Reform aid. The debate about aid and its effectiveness (or lack thereof) received new impetus when Dambisa Moyo, former World Bank and Goldman Sachs economist, proclaimed that aid to Africa simply doesn’t work in her book Dead Aid.

In our new GEG Guide we survey the  aid debate, looking beyond Moyo and other well-known contributors to also include voices from the margins. You’ll find our aid ‘must reads’ as well as links to the GEG blog series on the aid debate.

Read more in the GEG Guide to the (Dead) Aid Debate.

Devi Sridhar’s book The Battle Against Hunger: Choice, Circumstance, and the World Bank makes the Foreign Affairs syllabus on foreign aid.  In ‘What to Read on Foreign Aid‘, John Gershman describes the book as a ‘richly textured’ ethnography, writing:

‘Sridhar provides both a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a World Bank–funded nutrition program in India that, despite a lack of evidence for its effectiveness, has become the blueprint for similar programs elsewhere. She shows how the political objectives of both Indian policymakers and nutrition-policy advocates within the World Bank explain the expansion and replication of a program that fails to address the social conditions responsible for undernutrition in India and other countries.’

For more, see Devi Sridhar’s publications or visit GEG’s Global Health Governance project.

The success or failure of the Copenhagen climate change negotiations will depend not only on the substance of the deal but on the spirit and message of the talks as well, writes Arunabha Ghosh in his latest GEG blog post Making Copenhagen count. Four big questions will dominate: Who participates in the deal? How will it be implemented? Who will pay? And how will the private sector and civil society respond? Read more at the GEG blog and in Dr Ghosh’s latest op-ed Even climate is about money.

For more GEG research, see our new Climate Change Governance resource guide.

In launching the initiative, the Taskforce’s Honorary Advisors emphasised the scope of global knowledge governance challenges at hand…Read more

GEG and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) have published a new study of WTO reform proposals since 1995, by Carolyn Deere-Birkbeck and Catherine Monagle.

To download the report and read more about this project, visit Strengthening Multilateralism. Or visit ICTSD’s page on the report.

Three articles by Carolyn Deere-Birkbeck were recently published. Two articles were each part of a new book and one article appeared in the November Special Issue of International Affairs.

1. Deere-Birkbeck, Carolyn (2009) “Global Governance in the Context of Climate Change: The Challenges of Increasingly Complex Risk Parameters”, International Affairs, 85 (6) November, pp.1173-1194.
2. Deere-Birkbeck, Carolyn (2009) “Reinvigorating Debate on WTO Reform: A Functional and Normative Approach to Analyzing the WTO System” in Redesigning the World Trade Organization for the Twenty-first Century, edited by D. Steger, Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press/Centre for International Governance Innovation/International Development Research Centre. This chapter was also published as a GEG Working paper which you can find here.
3. Deere, Carolyn (2009) “Reforming Governance to Advance the WIPO Development Agenda” in Implementing the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Development Agenda, edited by J. de Beer, Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press/Centre for International Governance Innovation/International Development Research Centre. You can find the chapter by Carolyn Deere here.

In advance of the First Global Ministerial Meeting on Road Traffic Safety hosted by the Russian Government in Moscow, Kevin Watkins and Devi Sridhar have published a report outlining why now is the critical time for action. As Lord Robertson says in the forward to the report, ’This briefing paper provides conference delegates with powerful arguments for why road safety must become a development and health priority’.

To read more, download the full report. Details of the press release are available at the FIA Foundation.

Technology transfer holds the key to a substantive agreement in Copenhagen, argue Arunabha Ghosh and Kevin Watkins in a new GEG working paper. Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change: Why Financing for Technology Transfer Matters takes aim at the current deadlock between developed and developing countries over the timing, pace and distribution of commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions. With a real risk that this impasse will be Copenhagen’s deal-breaker, Ghosh and Watkins present a solution for negotiators: create a Low Carbon Technology and Finance Facility (LCTFF) to fund the immediate, large-scale transfer of clean coal technology to China and India.

For more, download Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change in full and read commentary in The Guardian’s Countdown to Copenhagen.

People in developing countries are suffering disproportionately from this global financial crisis, and international institutions have a long way to go to ensure the financing and mechanisms of assistance that can address this development emergency, writes Professor Ngaire Woods in a policy briefing commissioned by the European Parliament. In many developing countries, what is being crushed and reversed is hard-won progress towards reducing poverty, hunger, and child mortality, and towards increasing primary education, gender parity, access to safe water and sanitation – in short, progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. In this policy briefing, Woods evaluates the responses to the crisis by the IMF, World Bank, G20, and the European Union, and provides a series of recommendations for strengthening the international financial and aid architecture so that it can better respond to the urgent needs of developing countries in deep crisis.

Read the full briefing paper here.

GEG’s latest newsletter is now online, featuring all our latest research activities and publications.

Get your copy here.

Why we need a new global economic order: Brazil, the BRICs and the world economy

Henrique Meirelles, Governor Of The Central Bank Of Brazil, will give the GEG Annual Lecture on Tuesday, 3 November 2009 at 5pm in Oxford’s Examination Schools.

Brazil’s voice in the global economic architecture has become increasingly important over the past year. As one of the “BRICS” (Brazil, Russia, India and China), Brazil has been leading the debate as to how global economic institutions must be reformed if the support and engagement of emerging economies in managing the crisis is to be maintained.

The schedule for the Speaker Seminar series (Michaelmas ’09) has been finalised and is available online.  Please not that the Dead Aid debate, scheduled for 13 November, has been cancelled  and will be scheduled for Hillary Term 2010. Click here to view the schedule.

Refugee protection has historically been characterized by a North-South impasse: while Southern states have had to open their borders to refugees fleeing conflict or human rights abuses in neighboring states, Northern states have had little obligation or incentive to contribute to protecting refugees in the South.  In his new book Protection by Persuasion, Alexander Betts (Director of Global Migration Governance) examines the ways in which UNHCR has sought to foster greater international cooperation within the global refugee regime through special conferences at which Northern states are pushed to contribute to the costs of protection for refugees in the South.  Betts shows that Northern states will contribute to such efforts when they recognize a substantive relationship between refugee protection in the South and their own interests in such issues as security, immigration, and trade.

Read more

In line with the forthcoming (2009) publication of the book ‘The Economics and Politics of Climate Change’ by Helm and Hepburn (eds.) the contribution of Ngaire Woods and Arunabha Ghosh to this book has been published as a GEG Working Paper: ‘Governing climate change: lessons from other governance regimes‘. This paper will also be published by the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment as a Smith School working paper.

Professor Ngaire Woods and Dr Devi Sridhar contributed a short piece to the UNA-UK Magazine ‘New World’ (winter 2009) with the title: ‘Do we need a UN agency for HIV/AIDS?’ discussing the benefits of and the concerns surrounding  a UN agency for HIV/AIDS.

Read the full article here

A review of the book ‘The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors’ edited by Lindsay Whitfield was published on the website of Foreign Affairs. The book review by Nicolas van de Walle, discusses two books: ”The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors’ edited by Lindsay Whitfield and the ‘Smart Aid for African Development’ by Richard Joseph and Alexandra Gillies. In the review, it is argued that these books eschew the broad generalizations and provocative anecdotes that mark most books about aid and instead describe the great variance in outcomes across the continent.

Read the book review in full here.

Alexander Betts and Esra Kaytaz have published a research paper for the UNHCR examining the implications of responses to the Zimbabwean exodus between 2005 and 2009 for the international refugee protection regime. Drawing upon empirical research in South Africa and Bostwana, the paper highlights the inadequacy of the nation and international responses to address the protection needs of Zimbabweans.  The refugee regime needs to adapt by developing a new multilateral normative and institutional framework on subsidiary protection, drawing upon states’ existing commitments under international human rights law.

Read the paper in full here.

Devi Sridhar and Professor David Craig (Auckland) are editing a special issue of Social Science & Medicine on ‘Global Health Assistance: Qualitative Evidence on What Works and Why’. Please find further details and the call for papers under CFP Global health assistance-1

Dr Alexander Betts has authored the second Refugee Studies Centre Policy Briefing ‘Development assistance and refugees: Towards a North-South grand bargain?‘.

In it, he examines the role the development assistance can play in enhancing refugee protection and overcoming protracted refugee situations.  The policy brief argues that an integrated development approach, supporting both refugees and local host communities, can be a ‘win-win’ solution for both Northern donors and Southern hosts, while also benefiting refugees.

Read the policy brief in full here.

The highly successful seminar series ‘Refugees in International Relations’, convened by the Global Migration Project in 2008-09, will be published in a forthcoming book by Oxford University Press, edited by Dr Alexander Betts and Professor Gil Loescher. The volume is due out in April 2010.

Arunabha Ghosh writes in Indian business newspaper, The Financial Express, that developing countries face a triple challenge of increasing income growth, building energy infrastructure and confronting climate change. Reconciling these challenges – and increasing investments in cleaner technologies – would depend on financing, regulatory and institutional reforms, and international cooperation. Read his article here.

Throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, millions of people have been forced to flee their homes. The causes and consequences of this and international responses to displacement lie at the very heart of world politics; however, these important issues have been largely neglected by its primary discipline: International Relations. Redressing this gap, the book systematically applies International Relations (IR) theory to the international politics of forced migration.

This represents the first textbook to merge conceptual tools of IR with empirical analysis of forced migration. It explains the central debates and concepts of IR – International Relations theories, sovereignty and statehood, security, international cooperation, global governance, global North-South relations, globalization, and regionalism – and highlights their relevance to forced migration. Using examples and in-depth case studies, Forced Migration and Global Politics adopts a ground-breaking approach to offer valuable insights to an issue of increasing complexity and importance in today’s world. It will be launched at the IASFM Conference in Cyprus on 28 June 2009.

A special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Global Health Governance, edited by Devi Sridhar and Larry Gostin (Georgetown University), on the topic of ‘Innovations in Global Health in a New Political Era’  has been published.  The articles are from top thinkers in global health governance from around the world. To read these articles click here.

The UNAIDS Leadership Transition Working Group was convened in July 2008 by GEG and the Center for Global Development as an independent ad hoc panel with the mandate to formulate a set of recommendations for the next executive director and the governing Programme Coordinating Board of UNAIDS.

The Working Group, made up of a core of 15 senior experts in global health and HIV/AIDS, published its recommendations in the report UNAIDS: Preparing for the Future.

Read their report in full here.

We’ve collected GEG’s resources on managing financial crisis in one easy-to-access place. While rich countries focus on their domestic economies, GEG highlights the impact of the crisis on development.  We examine the view from developing countries, and make recommendations for global leaders seeking to manage the crisis. Plus we link to the best analysis on the web.

Read more on GEG’s Global Financial Crisis Resouces page.

Senior Research Fellow Kevin Watkins writes on the Guardian’s Comment is Free that the tragedy of Africa’s huge maternal death toll, too often obscured by pop star adoptions, needs urgent donor action.  Over at Propsect Magazine, Kevin critiques the ‘Dead Aid’ argument in his review of Dambisa Moyo’s new book.

Arunabha Ghosh writes in Indian business newspaper, Mint, that reconciling the competing concerns of poverty reduction in and lower emissions from developing countries depends upon a credible multilateral mechanism for technology transfer. Read his article here.

The analysis of the Financial Tsunami presented by Ngaire Woods on BBC Radio 4 can be found here.

Inter Press Service has published a story on GEG’s recent report (co-published with ICTSD) on Rebuilding Global Trade: Proposals for a Fairer, More Sustainable Future, co-edited by Carolyn Deere Birkbeck and Ricardo Meléndez-Ortiz. The article is available in English and French.

Ngaire Woods writes in Chatham House’s The World Today that global leaders will have to show that they are willing and able to take measures to mitigate the harshest effects of this financial crisis at home as well as abroad. Longer term they will need to prove that collectively they can regulate global finance, ensuring that the possibilities of globalisation do not necessarily entail a drunken dash towards casino capitalism. It is a tough agenda and the stakes are higher than ever before. The lessons from previous crises are sobering. Read the article here.

The Indian Express features a report by Arunabha Ghosh, filed from Bonn. Read the article here.

Ngaire Woods presents five steps that G20 leaders must take to mitigate the financial crisis, and the risks that are involved. For the full article which appeared in The Guardian, click here.

The UNAIDS Leadership Transition Working Group Report, co-chaired by GEG and the Center for Global Development, has just been released. The Working Group, made up of a core of 15 senior experts in global health and HIV/AIDS, was formed to provide a set of recommendations to the incoming Executive Director of UNAIDS. You can read the report here.

A relatively small amount of financing for essential services and minor policy adjustments in international institutions could prevent a developing country health crisis. These policy adjustments would serve to strengthen the regulatory framework to protect health, just as the G20 is working to strengthen regulations that protect financial stability and promote recovery. In a new GEG brief, Rajaie Batniji and Ngaire Woods make three urgent recommendations to the G20 for preventing the financial crisis from turning into a health crisis. Click here to access the full brief.

In the face of the urgent need to manage the global economic crisis, the focus of governments around the world should be to stop global trade collapsing, fend off protectionism, and ensure access to trade finance on reasonable terms, particularly for developing countries. The Global Economic Governance Programme and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development have gathered perspectives from a broad range of scholars and experts around the world on trade governance priorities for the G20 and beyond.

For more information about Rebuilding Global Trade: Proposals for a Fairer, More Sustainable Future and to download an electronic copy, click here.

Ngaire Woods presented a documentary on BBC Radio on the impact that the steps to counter recession in developed countries may have on developing countries. An accompanying article can be found here and you can listen to the radio programme or download it here.

On Monday 2 March, Dr Rob Davies, Deputy Trade Minister of South Africa, argued for reclaiming the development dimension of the multilateral trade negotations and offered several recommendations for improving the governance of the WTO to enhance the participation of developing countries. A transcript of his lecture can be found here. For media coverage of the event click here and here. The Geneva Lectures on Global Economic Governance are a joint initiative of the Global Economic Governance Programme and the Centre for Trade and Economic Integration at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

Video now available: Dr Davies’ full lecture can now be viewed here.

The 2009 Global Economic Governance Annual Lecture, entitled Financial Crisis Management: Key Lessons and Future Regulatory Challenge, will be given by Dr Tarisa Watanagase, Central Bank Governor of Thailand. The lecture will be given on Thursday 5 March 2009 at 5pm, at University College, Oxford.  More information about Dr Watanagase is available here. To attend the Annual Lecture, please RSVP to geg@univ.ox.ac.uk

The most recent issue of the American Political Science Association’s Perspective on Politics contains a contribution from Alexander Betts, Director of GEG’s Global Migration Governance project. As part of a symposium on the Politics of Regime Complexity, Dr Betts explores the impact of institutional proliferation on the politics of refugee protection. ‘Institutional Proliferation and the Global Refugee Regime’ can be found here, and the other contributions in the symposium here.

When the WTO starts its work for 2009, three items must be at the top of the agenda: debating the role and mandate of the agency’s Director-General, setting a date for a full Ministerial Conference this year in Geneva and forging a forward-looking agenda for that meeting. The article in BRIDGES can be found here and is also available in Chinese and Spanish.

The Lancet has just launched its landmark series on trade and health with comments from Joe Stiglitz and Mongkol Na Songkhla. GEG Researchers Mayur Patel and Devi Sridhar are co-authors of Paper 2 in the series, ‘Bridging the divide: global governance of trade and health’. An abstract can be found here and further information about the series can be found here.

The Center for Global Development (CGD), an independent Washington-based think tank, invites applications from leading scholars in developing countries for a visiting fellows program sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The program offers one-year sabbatical support for a senior researcher from a developing country on leave from his or her host institution. The ideal candidate will be engaged in policy research in at least one of the areas of CGD focus: aid effectiveness, trade, private sector development, financial markets, global health, or migration. Further information can be found here.

The paper for the eighth seminar in the Refugees in IR series, Refugees and the Regional Dynamics of Peacebuilding, can be found here.

The Report, Assessing the IASB: Results of a Business Survey about International Financial Reporting Standards and IASB’s Operations, Accountability and Responsiveness to Stakeholders, has been released today. The executive summary of the Report by Tim Büthe (Duke) and Walter Mattli (Oxford) is available here. The full report is available here. The news release is also available here.

Walter Mattli and Ngaire Woods write in the Financial Times Economists’ Forum Blog. It can be read here.

The presentation made by Alexander Betts at the Oxford Refugee Study Centre’s Seminar on 5 November 2008 can be found here.

GEG Senior Researcher Devi Sridhar and Research Associate Rajaie Batniji have just published a study in the Lancet examining the financing of global health. The study can be found here.

Ngaire Woods, ‘From intervention to cooperation: reforming the IMF and World Bank’, prepared for the Progressive Leaders’ Governance Conference, London, (2008) is available here.

Ngaire Woods, ‘A Commonwealth Initiative to Support Reform in the IMF and World Bank’, prepared for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting on Reform of International Institutions, London, (9-10 June 2008) is available here.

For the news article and for BBC iPlayer click here or to dowload the MP3 click here.

This workshop will be held on 3-4 October and is by invitation only. Questions about the event can be addressed to esra.kaytaz@politics.ox.ac.uk.
Related files:

• Global Migration Governance Project Workshop Schedule

The ‘Refugees in International Relations’ seminar schedule for Michaelmas and Hilary terms has been announced.
Related files:

• Schedule for Michaelmas Term 2008
• Schedule for Hilary Term 2009

Lecture on ‘International Cooperation and the Global Refugee Regime’, given by Alexander Betts at
Georgetown University, 15th September 2008, available at Georgetown Lecture.ppt

New working paper on the the institutional framework governing the human rights of irregular migrants: ‘Towards a “Soft Law” Framework for the Protection of Vulnerable Migrants’, available at http://www.unhcr.org/research/RESEARCH/48b7f9642.pdf.

In June 2008, GEG launched a study of the constraints facing small developing countries in international trade negotiations, in collaboration with the Commonwealth Secretariat.

The project seeks to enhance understanding of where the salient constraints on small states lie and how, in some cases, they have been overcome. The research methodology employed includes extensive interviews in home capitals, Geneva, and Brussels; an online questionnaire for trade officials; and four in-depth country case studies.

The final report was published in February 2010, along with an accompanying policy brief and interviews with negotiators on lessons learned.

The International Peace Institute (IPI) has published Governing the Global Economy: Strengthening Multilateral Institutions, a Policy Paper by Professor Ngaire Woods. Click here to read the paper or here to visit the IPI’s website.

The latest report from IPI’s Coping with Crisis program, this paper takes a focused look at the multilateral mechanisms geared toward managing international finance, trade, and development. Author Ngaire Woods spells out the key policy shifts needed within three of the world’s most important economic bodies – the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank – in order to foster the development of an international system better suited to the current turbulent economic climate.

In November 2007, GEG collaborated with the Development Research Centre of the State Council and the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) to organize a policy dialogue on global economic governance and trade. For the agenda of that meeting, click here. For a summary of the meeting and list of participants, click here. To see the Meeting Report in Chinese, click here.

On April 29, GEG’s Global Trade Governance Project cohosted a research–policy dialogue with the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva and the Emerging Dynamic Global Economies Network. The conference is one of several dialogues among research and policy officials planned for the coming year in key developing countries, to aid in the identification of their strategic interests in the current and upcoming debates on governance in the multilateral trading system. Information about and outputs from the meeting are available here.

On Tuesday, January 29 2008, 6.30pm, H. E. Dr. Debapriya Bhattacharya, Ambassador & Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the United Nations Offices, WTO and Other International Organizations in Geneva and Vienna, delivered a Geneva Lecture on Global Economic Governance on ‘Creeping Trade and Phantom Aid: LDCs in the Global Context and Priorities for Reform of Global Governance’.

The following literature and media related to the event is now available:

• Agenda
• An audio recording of the speech
• A biography of the speaker

The Brazilian Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim, will give a Special Address on the future and governance of the multilateral trading system in Geneva as part of the Geneva Lectures on Global Economic Governance, jointly hosted by GEG and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, University of Geneva. The lecture will be held at the Graduate Institute in Geneva at 6.30pm at a date in October (to be confirmed). Further information will be posted when available.

IMF ripe for shakeup, Paul Martin says

Read this article from the Globe and Mail about “Bringing Balance to IMF Reform Debates,” an international workshop held in Waterloo, Canada on July 18

Over the past year, CIGI, New Rules for Global Finance, and the Global Economic Governance Programme have been sponsoring a series of regional conferences that have enabled developing countries to articulate their needs and priorities for future services from the IMF. To date, the debate about International Monetary Fund (IMF) Reform has been shaped largely by conversations within and among OECD countries and orthodox or mainstream economists. This project aims to remedy this imbalance within the current debate.

The Global Health Governance project, and its Director Dr. Devi Sridhar, are featured in the University’s new research brochure. The article can be seen here.

The Global Economic Governance Programme convened a High-Level Working Group on ‘Setting a Developing Country Agenda for Global Health’ in order to to identify challenges faced by developing countries in dealing with global health donors and institutions. The group, which met from May 11-13 2008 at Ditchley Park, identified urgent priorities for governance reform in global health and will be collaborating to move these reforms forward. The following literature and media related to the event is now available:

• Short report summarizing key points emerging from the meeting
• Video of Health Public Forum – 13th May 2008. Please note that the video may take a few minutes to load, depending on connection speed.
• Photos of Health Public Forum – 13th May 2008.

Please note: This event has now been CANCELLED

On 3 June at 2:00pm, GEG will be hosting a consultation on the World Bank Group (WBG)’s draft Concept and Issues Paper: Towards a Strategic Framework on Climate Change
and Development (SFCCD) for The World Bank Group. Michele E. de Nevers, Senior Manager of the World Bank’s Environment Department will present the proposed framework and this will be followed by a discussion.

The SFCCD will be proposed for endorsement by the World Bank’s Executive Board
in September 2008 and subsequently discussed at the 2008 Annual Meetings.
Prior to the discussion on 3 June, feedback can be given on the draft paper here and will also be given in meetings with stakeholders.

This event is open to the public.

Speaker: Michele de Nevers (Senior Manager of the World Bank’s Environment Department)

Title: The World Bank’s Strategic Framework for Climate Change and Development

Date: Tuesday 3 June 2008

Time: 2:00pm

Location: Swire Seminar Room, 12 Merton Street, University College, Oxford

On Wednesday, 6 February 2008, at 6:30pm, Pascal Lamy, Director-General of the WTO, delivered a Special Address as part of the Geneva Lectures on Global Economic Governance, jointly sponsored by GEG and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. The topic of Lamy’s Special Address was ’60 Years of the Multilateral Trading System: A Few Lessons.’

The following literature and media related to the event is now available:

• A webcast of the event
• A transcript of Pascal Lamy’s address
• WTO News Coverage of the Event
• Further information on the lecture
• Information on the Geneva Lectures on Global Economic Governance in 2008

On Friday 9 May, at 2:00 pm, the Hon. Professor David Mwakyusa, Minister of Health and Social Welfare in Tanzania since 2006, will visit the Global Economic Governance Programme to discuss his country’s interactions with donors, and the challenges of crafting a national health plan amid so many donor demands. There will be no lecture or prepared remarks; this is your opportunity to ask the Minister about the challenges in addressing Tanzanian health priorities.

Speaker: The Hon. Professor David Mwakyusa, Minister of Health and Social Welfare in Tanzania

Title: The challenge of crafting a National Health Plan amid so much international aid

Date: Friday 9 May

Time: 2:00pm

Location: Swire Seminar Room, 12 Merton Street, University College

On 13 May, GEG will host a public forum where several prominent developing country ministers will reflect on priorities for governance reform in global health. The ministers will discuss the priorities emerging a High-Level Working Group on ‘Setting a Developing Country Agenda for Global Health.’ There will be ample opportunity for audience questions, and a chance to meet some of the ministers in a reception which follows.

This Working Group, convened by Oxford’s Global Economic Governance Programme, brings together health ministers from developing countries, joined by finance ministers and ex-heads of state, to set an agenda for governance reform in global health. The Working Group participants, among the most accomplished ministers from around the world, have been selected based on their success, advocacy, and experience in the pursuit of developing country priorities.

The Working Group is the first which excludes donors and their representatives, and has geared discussion toward the fundamental changes in health governance demanded by developing country officials. This public forum comes at the conclusion of the Working Group meeting.

Title: Public Forum: Setting a Developing Country Agenda for Global Health

Date: Tuesday 13 May 2008

Time: 4:00pm

Location: Lecture Theatre, Manor Road Building, Oxford OX1 3UQ (for a map of the location, click here).

If you would like to attend this event, please RSVP to geg@univ.ox.ac.uk.

Confirmed participants: (Please note that not all will be participating in the forum due to travel schedules.)

Santiago Alcazar, Brazil (International Health Advisor, Ministry of Health)

Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, Ghana (Minister of Finance and Economic Planning)

Eyitayo Lambo, Nigeria (Former Minister of Health)

Stephen Mallinga, Uganda (Minister of Health)

Mahesh Maskey, Nepal (Chair, Health Policy Advisory Group, Ministry of Health)

David Mwakyusa, Tanzania (Minister of Health and Social Welfare)

Charity Ngilu, Kenya (Minister of Water and Irrigation; Former Minister of Health)

Alfredo Palacio, Ecuador (Former President; Former Minister of Health)

Srinath Reddy, India (President, Public Health Foundation of India)

Ismail Sallam, Egypt (Former Minister of Health)

Francisco Songane, Mozambique (Former Minister of Health)

Mongkol Na Songkhal, Thailand (Former Minister of Health)

Siti Fadilah Supari, Indonesia (Minister of Health)

On 21 April, GEG will hold a Special Session to launch the Global Monitoring Report 2008: MDGs and the Environment. The Report, coming at the halfway point in the effort to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, focuses on the link between environment and development.

The Report warns that, if the status quo persists, most developing countries will fall short of meeting the MDGs. Though much of the world is set to halve extreme poverty by then, the goals of reducing child and maternal mortality are unlikely to be met, with serious shortfalls also likely in the primary school completion, nutrition, and sanitation goals. To sustain growth in developing countries, donors and policymakers in developing countries must anticipate long term pressures on the global commons, but also support measures to cushion the impact of food and oil price shocks as well as financial market turmoil on poor people in the short term. To get back on track to meet the MDGs, the report proposes a 6-point agenda for inclusive and sustainable development.

The Report will be presented by Zia Qureshi, currently Senior Adviser in the Office of the Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank, and Kirk Hamilton, Team Leader, Policy and Economics, Environment Department of The World Bank.

Speaker: Zia Qureshi (Senior Adviser in the Office of the Chief Economist and Senior Vice President of the World Bank) and Kirk Hamilton (Team Leader, Policy and Economics, Environment Department of The World Bank)

Event: Launch of the Global Monitoring Report 2008

Date: 21 April 2008

Time: 12:00 noon

Location: Swire Seminar Room, 12 Merton Street, University College, Oxford
Please note: Lunch will not be provided; you are invited to bring your own lunch.

On October 5, Carolyn Deere, Director of the Global Trade Governance Project at GEG, and Rosalea Hamilton, Founder of Jamaica’s Institute of Law & Economics, discussed the theme ‘Making Trade Work for Development: What Can WTO Members do to Ensure the Global Trading System Delivers More for Developing Countries?’. The moderator was WTO spokesperson Keith Rockwell. Click here to access the video.

On October 3 the Geneva Lectures on Global Economic Governance were launched. Dr Diana Tussie (Director, Latin American Trade Network and Director, Department of International Relations, Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO), Argentina) presented on ‘The WTO and Development: The Challenges of Trust and Empowerment in Governing Global Trade’. Opening remarks were made by Mrs. Lakshmi Puri, Acting Deputy Secretary-General of UNCTAD. The series is a joint initiative of the Graduate Institute of International Studies and Oxford’s Global Economic Governance Programme on ‘Governance and the World Trading System’. The following literature and media related to the event is now available:

• Agenda.
• Speaker biographies
• Audio recording of Dr Tussie’s lecture (wma)
• Transcript of Dr. Tussie’s lecture (pdf)

On October 4, the Global Trade Governance Project co-hosted a roundtable with the Graduate Institute of International Studies (HEI) at the target="_blank" name="WTO Public Forum">WTO’s Public Forum 2007 (‘How Can the WTO Help Harness Globalization?’) in Geneva. The roundtable opened the ‘Governance’ theme of the Public Forum in the WTO’s main Conference Room. The topic of the session was: ‘A Governance Audit of the WTO: Roundtable Discussion on Making Global Trade work for Development’. The following literature and media related to the event is now available:

• Speaker Biographies.
• Briefing Note.
• PowerPoint Presentation (pdf).
• Audio Recording (link to WTO Public Forum website).

The GEG session was one of several events on developing countries and the governance of trade.

Dr. Deere and Mayur Patel each also presented in a two-part panel event co-organized by the South Centre and the Research and Information System for Developing Countries (RIS). The South Centre’s event reporting service, the South FACE, covered the events. The South Centre reports can be found
here.

Dr. Deere also presented a talk on fisheries, trade and sustainable development at a session entitled ‘Natural Resources, Sustainable Development and Trade: New Instruments to Promote Sustainable Development Through Trade Agreements’, hosted by the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law.

In September 2007, we will launch the Geneva Lectures on Global Economic Governance – hosted jointly with the Program for the Study of International Organization(s) (PSIO) at the University of Geneva’s Graduate Institute of International Studies (GIIS). In 2007-2008, the Project and PSIO will hold a series of five research seminars on Making Global Trade Governance Work for Development in collaboration universities and research centres in Brazil, China, India, South Africa and Washington, D.C.

On May 3, 2007, Kamal Nath, Minister of Commerce and Industry of India, launched the new Global Trade Governance Project at the University of Oxford. The following literature and media related to the event is now available:

• Press Release.
• Text of Minister Nath’s Special Address.
• Video of Minister Nath’s Special Address. Please note that the video may take a few minutes to load, depending on connection speed.
• Photos of Minister Nath’s Visit.

Mayur Patel, Project Associate with the Global Trade Governance Project published the following article on ‘Building Coalitions and Consensus in the WTO’ in the August 2007 edition of Bridges Monthly Review (ICTSD), 21-22. Forthcoming translations of this article will be available in Russian, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

Mayur Patel, Project Associate with the Global Trade Governance Project
recently published the following policy brief on ‘Economic Partnership Agreements between the EU and African Countries: The Development Implications for Ghana’. It is published by Realizing Rights: the Ethical Globalisation Initiative, an NGO founded by Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland).

On 15 January, H.E. Dr Sri Mulyani Indrawati, the Finance Minister of Indonesia, gave the 2008 GEG Annual Lecture, on the subject “Challenges of Globalisation for Indonesia”.

Dr. Sri Mulyani Indrawati is the Minister of Finance of Indonesia. In 2006, Dr. Mulyani was honoured as the Best Finance Minister in Asia by the Emerging Market Forum, and was given the title “Finance Minister of the Year” by the magazine Euromoney. She is the Governor for Indonesia in the Asian Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank, and the World Bank. She was Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund for the South East Asia group constituency from 2002 to 2004, and Minister of State for National Development Planning and Chairperson of the National Development Planning Agency from 2004 to 2005. The following literature and media related to the event is now available:

• Video of Dr Mulyani’s Special Address Part 1
• Video of Dr Mulyani’s Special Address Part 2
• Video of Dr Mulyani’s Special Address – Question Period
• Please note that these videos may take a few minutes to load, depending on connection speed.
• Presentation Slides [pdf]
• Lecture Text [pdf]

Over 300 international leaders, policymakers, government advisers and experts will come together to debate the theme of “an inclusive globalisation: promoting prosperity for all” at the Progressive Governance conference in London on Friday 4 April.

In the run up to the event, Policy Network has commissioned a series of papers from leading academics and experts across the main themes of the conference – climate change, reform of the global institutions, and trade, poverty and development.

Ngaire Woods’ paper in this series (available here) focuses on the necessary reforms to the institutions themselves, saying that the IMF and World Bank must globalise their governance and move from a stance of intervention to cooperation to meet the challenges of the global age. “In the contemporary global economy there is a serious risk that the established powers will cling to their well-crafted but out-of-date institutions,” she says. “If they do so, they will diminish the possibilities not just for collective action but for a deeper form of global cooperation and the forging of common purposes among governments.”

On 7 June 2007, Liu Mingkang, the Chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, gave a special address for the Global Economic Governance Programme. The powerpoint slides from his presentation are now available here.

Oxford and Princeton are proud to announce a new Global Leaders Fellowship Programme, at Oxford and Princeton, which includes post-doctoral fellowships in world politics and political economy for holders of a doctorate who are nationals of a developing country. Six fellowships, with appropriate stipends sufficient to cover full living costs, will be awarded in each of the next five years, beginning in September 2008, for a year’s study at Oxford followed by a year at Princeton. For further details, please see here.

The GEG has released a newsletter (October 2007) reviewing and previewing related events, research and publications.

Isaline Bergamaschi, GEG Visiting Researcher 2006-7, has had her GEG Working Paper on ‘Mali: Patterns and Limits of Donor-driven Ownership’ (WP 2007/31) referenced by the The Governance and Social Development Resource Centre (GSDRC) of the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

Liu Mingkang, Chairman of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, spoke at a GEG hosted event at the Department of Politics and International Relations on June 7, 2007. The event was featured in an article by Steve Schifferes for BBC News on target="_blank" name="BBC News">‘The Promise and Perils of Globalisation’, June 11, 2007.

Ngaire Woods, Director of the GEG, was recently nominated for the short-list of the International Political Economy Group (IPEG) Book Prize 2007 of the British International Studies Association (BISA). The nomination was for The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank and Their Borrowers (Cornell University Press).

Sammy Gitau from the University of Manchester recently presented at the GEG for the Global Health Governance Project. He spoke on ‘Ownership at the Community Level: Lessons from Kenya’. Literature and media are available on the health events page.

On Friday 22 June, Sadako Ogata, President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency spoke at the GEG on ‘New Directions for Japan’s Foreign Aid’.

The Oxford High-Level Task Force on UK Energy Security, Climate Change and Development Assistance has released its report ‘Energy, Politics and Poverty’.
Media coverage related to the report included the following:

• Discussion by Lord Patten of Barnes, the Chair of the Task Force on Radio 4′s Today Programme, June 4, 2007.
• An article by Larry Elliott in The Guardian on ‘Britain’s Energy Policy Fails to Stack Up’, Says Expert Panel, June 4, 2007.
• An original letter written by members of the Task Force published in The Financial Times on ‘Wrong Energy Policy Could Create New Enemies for Europe’, March 6, 2007.

On June 11-12, a joint Oxford University/Cornell University conference on ‘New Directions in Development Assistance’ was held at Rhodes House in Oxford. The following literature related to the conference is now available:

• Final Programme.
• Conference Report, including synopses of the panels.
• The Statement by His Excellency Mr Joaquim Alberto Chissano, Former President of the Republic of Mozambique, on ‘Why We Should “Rethink” Aid’.
• Thought Pieces Packet, including select papers and presentations.
• Media coverage of the conference from the AIM Newscast, (Mozambican News Agency).

Devi Sridhar, Director of the Global Health Project, recently published the following article on ‘Mainstreaming Nutrition as a Social Welfare’ in the UN Chronicle Online Edition.

A GEG Working Paper by Paolo de Renzio and Joseph Hanlon on Contested Sovereignty in Mozambique: The Dilemmas of Aid Dependence (WP 2007/25) was recently quoted in Development and Cooperation, a German magazine. For details, see here.

GEG Research Associate Leonardo Martinez-Diaz has published the following policy brief outlining the benefits and risks of banking liberalisation in developing countries. It is published by the Brookings Institution here.

Sabeel Rahman, GEG Project Associate, has published a new article, ‘Development, Democracy and the NGO Sector: Theory and Evidence from Bangladesh’, Journal of Developing Societies, 22, 4 (2006): 451-473.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) have published a pamphlet by GEG Director Ngaire Woods (with a foreword by Rt Hon Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for International Development). It can be downloaded from here.

BBC World Service
The Monday Documentary
Trade is the lifeblood of the global economy and it depends on rules decided in tough negotiations behind closed doors. So what really goes on in the international trade talks? In the first of two programmes, GEG Director Ngaire Woods investigates. To listen to both broadcasts see here.