"With these elections, Pakistan has taken an important step towards democracy, but to transform the country in more fundamental ways will require more than (recycled) electoral promises. What Pakistan needs is a bold plan of action, and whether Sharif and his party can deliver on it remains the ultimate question." Maryam Mohsin, SLRC Research Uptake Manager

Read more: http://www.odi.org.uk/opinion/7451-pakistan-election-2013-democracy-governance

"The WDR 2013 has created space for discussion of employment issues in fragile and conflict-affected situations. But we now need to build on the momentum around the current ‘good jobs’ agenda by taking questions of politics, governance and state-society relations seriously, and working out what they might mean for people’s access to employment and markets." Steve Commins, SLRC Researcher, Pakistan Team

As a member of the core team responsible for the 2004 World Development Report (WDR) –  Making Services Work for Poor People – and a consultant to the team that produced WDR 2007 – Development and the Next Generation – I appreciate the scale of the task faced by a WDR team working in a tight timeframe.

In reading the overview to WDR 2013 – Jobs – one thing I particularly appreciated was the way in which this Report, somewhat unusually, built upon a number of themes from previous WDRs, including gender, conflict, youth and urbanization. And, in my view, the connections with previous themes deepened the analysis and added more depth and nuance to the document.

What is missing from the WDR 2013?

Having said that, one area that the report could have usefully explored further, and to which the Bank and other donors should really give more attention, is the political economy of jobs and livelihoods policies. The World Bank and DFID have, amongst others, increasingly focused their discussions and activities on good governance, ambitiously attempting to strengthen mechanisms for social accountability. But the connections between politics and access to good jobs and employment have long been overlooked in the governance and accountability literature (my SLRC colleague, Rich Mallett, argues a similar point here).

This is a problem. As with basic services, clientelism – a method of political distribution and exchange that is conditional on the behaviours, identities and allegiances of individuals and communities – may involve governments designing policies that are structured in ways to benefit specific political allies or favoured religious and ethnic groups. This divide, rather than a clear 'rich' versus 'poor' or 'middle class' versus ‘lower class’, may be an important analytical issue for donors and government reformers in relation to access to employment and livelihood opportunities.

The WDR 2004 introduced the ‘accountability triangle’ to explore the links between governments, service users and providers, and sought to highlight the political nature of service delivery. But, in retrospect, this element of basic services probably required even more emphasis and analysis, as many of the obstacles to service access and delivery that have been studied over the past decade are the result of politics – not some technical failure. Importantly, and as hinted at above, these issues are not confined to the arena of service delivery. If we look, for example, at public works programmes, a good case for examination might be NREGA – India’s pioneering National Rural Employment Guarantee Act. The initiative was recently praised by a senior UN official as ‘exceptional’, but in practice it suffers from problems of corruption and capture, notably linked to the caste and clientelist politics on a state by state or district by district basis in India.

Access to jobs is not a technical issue, but rather goes to the heart of state-society relations

For the policies outlined in the WDR 2013 on jobs, and for alternatives to those policies as well, greater attention needs to be paid not only to the way in which political relations shape jobs policies, but also to the relationship between citizens and the state. We often hear donors and governments talk of the need to enhance citizen engagement in political processes, but making sure this happens in reality is not easy.

Research suggests that for citizen voice to be effective it requires significant engagement and support, as well as channels through which voice can be exercised. Yet, while there are many examples of how states and civic organizations have sought to establish more consistent and institutionalised channels for civic engagement – such as public hearings and consultations, village development committees and participatory district planning councils – it is important to recognize that these are not neutral spaces. Governance and accountability research has shown us how control of the terms of engagement, participation and inclusion is a key issue that must be considered when trying to link citizens to their government institutions. Channels designed to increase citizen voice both reflect, and are infused with, the dynamics of state-society relations – something which may become more problematic in fragile and conflict-affected situations where being overt in voice can be a risky undertaking, with citizens becoming reluctant to ‘speak up’ out of fear.

Relating these points back to the question of jobs and employment, we are confronted with a fundamental question:

If civic engagement is about power relations – among citizens, between citizens and the state and other powerful actors, and between different layers of the state – where and how do livelihood activities and priorities, as well as the political dynamics of markets, affect these relationships?

The WDR 2013 has created space for discussion of these issues, but we now need to build on the momentum around the ‘good jobs’ agenda by taking the ‘governance of livelihoods’ seriously.

 

An earlier version of this blog was posted on Public World.

Share this via Twitter

Follow @SLRCtweet

 

 

Ageing is inevitable. Life becomes a challenge as we grow old, particularly from an economic perspective if you’re in Nepal, something I was reminded of after a recent research trip to Liwang, Rolpa. In Nepal, being elderly without sufficient savings or anyone to look after you is a common occurrence. During the course of the decade long armed conflict led by Maoist insurgents between 1996 and 2006, which claimed around 13,000 lives and displaced over 200,000 people, Nepal’s elders were physically unable or reluctant to leave their homes, despite some living in areas heavily affected by the conflict. Many lost their children or saw their sons migrate out of Nepal.

This context, combined with changing perceptions amongst younger generations about their role and responsibilities in the traditional family set-up, seems to have resulted in a breakdown of traditional forms of social solidarity, and has left the elderly largely neglected.

In attempt to address this issue the government of Nepal has created an inclusive social pension in 1995, the Old Age Allowance, which every elderly Nepali has the right to obtain. Thousands of elderly are now entitled to the benefits every month. However, geographical remoteness, high travel costs and poor implementation, due to weak local capacity to implement this reform, means that this right has yet to be realised. A proper mechanism for implementation is needed to address the practical shortcomings of this important and commendable initiative.

On Sept 25 2012, I went to Liwang, Rolpa, often remembered due to the insurgency, to conduct a survey on livelihoods, basic services and social protection for the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium. Rolpa is spectacular, but its landscape is difficult to traverse, even for the fit and able. Imagine imposing high hilltops and cliffs with treacherous sharp drops. The sheer difficulty in reaching those we were hoping to interview made me wonder how the elderly residing there managed to get to the district headquarters to collect their allowance.

Whilst staying in Liwang, I spoke to many elders who told me about the pension scheme, how they spent the money and the difficulties involved in obtaining it. Many were forced to rely on relatives to help them undergo the journey, when and if they were well enough to travel. Those living relatively close to the pension distribution headquarters had easier access, but for those living further away the journey was often out of the question. Even after having completed the journey, some arrived to find they were unable to get what they were entitled to thanks to an inadequate flow of funds from the central budget, resulting in a waste of time, effort and money. Because of this, many of those interviewed showed no interest in collecting their money, stating that the cost and uncertainty involved was too high.

Interestingly, those who were receiving the benefits, despite the difficulties, were content that the state was doing something to support them and saw this as a sign of respect.  As one senior citizen said, “We are happy, not because we get Rs 500, but because the state has dignified us at this age.” 

The most positive impact the state pension seems to have made so far is the dignity it ascribes to the elderly and its attempt to be inclusive, as there is no ethnicity or caste barrier. The major hurdle seems to be the disproportionate cost and effort that goes into accessing the pension scheme, which is deemed largely unreliable. Fixed collection dates and adequate funding allocation were the two main recommendations suggested by the elderly interviewed. As an 80 year old elderly man affirmed, “What is Rs 500 when we have to walk for hours and come back empty-handed after being told that the money has not arrived?”

The provision of this allowance is an important and widely appreciated first step towards offering security to those elderly people without an income and living alone or in rural areas, but more work needs to be done to overcome issues around accessibility and the mechanisms needed to deliver the pensions so elderly people in the remotest areas are not excluded. This could be achieved through creating a reliable means of acquiring the allowance, ensuring regularity in payment, as well as monitoring and assessing the impact of the provision. SLRC's partners in Nepal, NCCR, will be conducting a survey looking at the Old Age Allowance at the end of 2013 in Bardiya district to assess the effectiveness of the scheme.

We laud the state for the thought given to our nation’s respected elderly, but adding effectiveness to it will make that thought count for more.

Share this via Twitter

Follow @SLRCtweet

"The case of job creation is symptomatic of a broader issue: that, perhaps because of the absence of high quality impact data, largely unjustified assumptions shape policy and programming choices in conflict-affected situations." Richard Mallett, SLRC Research Officer

Read more: http://inec.usip.org/blog/2013/mar/10/supply-and-demand-power-and-data-case-more-restrained-handling-job-creation-program

Share this via Twitter

Follow @SLRCtweet

Follow @rich_mallett

"Difficult and risky contexts should not be an excuse for inaction or inadequate action when it comes to securing livelihoods" Paul Harvey, SLRC Director

I’m just back from a short trip to DRC which included a few days in Bukavu with our DRC research partner ISDR and meetings with people working for international agencies. One of the things that I was asking about was what different actors were doing to support livelihoods in eastern DRC. It’s a familiar and pretty thin list. There’s some food aid, although less than I expected with 350,000 beneficiaries in 2012 from a population of 4.6 million and half of those accounted by school feeding. There’s a fair amount of seeds and tool distributions and now seed fairs and vouchers. After that you have to start scratching around for further examples – a bit of micro-finance, surprisingly few market chain focussed interventions, a little bit of agricultural extension advice, some support to small livestock (chickens, goats and surprisingly guinea pigs) and not much else that I came across. Now that summary comes with a hefty caveat that I was only in town for a few days, didn't talk to everyone and make no claims at all to being comprehensive (do let me know what I've missed in the comments section). But it’s a list that’s depressingly consistent with the findings from ‘Missing the Point’ from a review for ECHO of their funding for livelihoods programmes  and work for WFP evaluating their approach to livelihoods programming.

There are, I think, three basic problems with much aid intended to support livelihoods in fragile and conflict affected places. They are:

1. Lack of scale and coverage
2. The one cabbage problem
3. Lack of imagination and creativity

The first problem is that any livelihoods programming is often relatively small-scale and covering a tiny proportion of the population in need (whether through food insecurity, poverty or displacement). When asked why this is, aid agency staff generally cite the difficulties of scaling up given ongoing insecurity and conflict. But in eastern DRC there are large-scale aid programmes supporting health care, IRC has been implementing a large-scale community driven development programme (Tuungaane) for several years and UNICEF coordinates a large-scale non-food item response to displacement. So the security constraints don’t seem insurmountable – if you can get drugs to clinics and kitchen sets to displaced people then assistance to help people make a living shouldn't be impossible. The lack of scale also seems wrapped up in the idea that support to livelihoods is ‘developmental’ and that donors are reluctant to fund longer-term approaches in a situation where humanitarian funding streams and approaches remain dominant. That’s depressingly true but hasn't stopped longer-term approaches in other sectors such as health and again seems an insufficient and bad reason for inaction. Maybe the new enthusiasm for resilience will help to reinvigorate the old need for better ways of linking relief and development and help donors and agencies see the need for both short and long-term approaches to helping people make a living.

The second problem is one that I've labelled the ‘one cabbage problem’ ever since seeing too many community vegetable gardens in southern Africa in the early 2000s. What I mean by it is that too often, if you dig into the detail of expected benefits from a programme aimed at supporting livelihoods then the net impact on the income of an individual household is likely to be tiny. There are myriad examples of this – ‘community’ projects where each individual household can expect little in return for high investments in time and effort, cash and food for work projects where participation is rationed so any one household can only get a few days pay and food aid where traditions of sharing mean rations are spread thinly between many more households than the intended target.

And the final problem is back to where I started – the depressingly short list of interventions that are being tried to support livelihoods. We still haven’t got much beyond seeds and tools. It would be exciting to see more attention to markets and value chains, to livestock, to petty trading and casual labour, to urban livelihoods and rural to urban links, to remittances and financial inclusion and to land rights but there isn't much sign of it. And there’s not much sign of the humanitarian system learning from best practice in support to livelihoods elsewhere. For an example of scale and ambition there’s the Chars Livelihoods Programme in Bangladesh.

None of which is meant to imply that supporting livelihoods is straightforward in places where conflict and violence are still pervasive. There’s an obvious objection that investments in livelihoods are likely to be reversed when the recipient is robbed or has to flee his / her village for the 3rd time in 3 years. And the risk that livelihoods investments can themselves put people at risk of violence. So supporting livelihoods needs to be sensitive to how conflict affects peoples’ choices and linked much more strongly to protection. But the fact that it’s difficult and risky should not be an excuse for inaction or inadequate action. So here’s hoping that when I'm next in Bukavu I hear about a 12 year programme aiming to support the livelihoods of over a million people in a significant way.

Share this via Twitter

Follow @SLRCtweet

Follow @paulharvey72

"It’s very important that development initiatives – as important as they are – do not result in displacing people from fertile agricultural lands, otherwise they risk having far-reaching negative effects on the health and well-being of the entire nation" SLRC partner, CEPA

SLRC partners, CEPA, looks at the boom in the number of infrastructure projects, as well as private sector initiatives, in the tourism industry and many industrial sectors in Post-war Sri Lanka. These activities create livelihood opportunities in areas that had been deprived of development for many decades. However, a number of these ventures continue to displace people from their homes as well as from rich lands that provide food and nutrition.

Read the full article: http://lmd.lk/2013/01/01/food-security/

Back in November, Katherine Haver wrote in this SLRC blog about taxation and people’s livelihoods in eastern DRC. In it she talked about how ordinary people are forced to pay what are often exorbitant fees on their produce in order to gain market access, as well as the complex, hybrid nature of tax regimes in that particular part of the country. Unfortunately, this is by no means a unique situation. As can be seen in the case of Nepal, multiple taxes imposed on small scale subsistence farmers is a very common phenomenon – a phenomenon which often means that once farmers finally get their produce to market, they are left with little to show for their hard work.

So what happens?

Farmers living near big cities and town centres produce milk, vegetables, potato, eggs, chicken, honey and vegetable seeds, often with the intention of selling them in urban markets. Technically, according to the tax related acts and provisions of the government of Nepal, small scale farmers do not need to pay tax for their agricultural commodities while transporting them within the country. 

But the reality is very different. From the point of origin of their produce to its final destination, farmers are stung with multiple taxes enforced by a range of local government organizations, from municipalities to Village Development Committees (VDCs) to District Development Committees (DDCs). Acting autonomously, these various forms of local government have the power to decide exactly how much tax is imposed on agricultural commodities – and how many times it is charged. For example, a farmer passing through, say, five collection posts will be taxed an equivalent five times on the same produce.

And it doesn't stop there. When farmers go to collect their produce from neighbouring districts, the local government collects nikasi kar – essentially, an export tax – when the produce crosses a district boundary. Further, drivers transporting commodities are forced to pay a road tax, which they will often simply charge back to farmers.

Why does it happen?

Part of this situation arguably stems from the Local Self Governance Act of 1999, which empowered different forms of local government (such as those mentioned above) to collect taxes at the local level. While the Act represented a promising and much needed step towards greater decentralization in Nepal, it has also helped create a complicated and confusing regime of tax laws which has not been accompanied by effective monitoring mechanisms. Faced with a severe lack of alternative livelihood options, poor farmers are thus effectively left with little or no choice but to pay the multiple taxes in order to sell their produce at markets. 

In a promising move, this is an issue which has been presented to Nepal’s Supreme Court. However, while the Court reached the decision to outlaw any imposed taxes except those collected at a commodity’s origin, the implementation of this ruling has proven difficult to enforce. The lack of adequate monitoring mechanisms has not helped matters. Until these good intentions are followed up with proper implementation – which is in turn dependent on political support – Nepal’s farmers will continue to be subjected to the strangling effects of multiple taxation.

"How are people’s attitudes towards government are affected when they are accessing services in two countries simultaneously?" Bishnu Upreti, SLRC Nepal Leader and Rachel Slater, SLRC Research Director

We (Bishnu Upreti, SLRC Nepal Leader and Rachel Slater, SLRC Research Director) were in Ilam District in the far east of Nepal last month, learning from enumerators about their experiences of implementing the SLRC’s quantitative survey.  SLRC is carrying out survey work in all seven focus countries (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, DRC, Uganda and South Sudan) to explore how people’s livelihoods recover after conflict and how delivery of basic services and social protection might affect state legitimacy.

One of the issues that came up was new to the whole enumerator team and unique to one of the wards covered so far in the district.  In that ward, the lack of local health services meant that people were crossing the border (ten minutes away by car or motorbike) to go to clinics and hospitals in India.  It is not a scenario that the Nepal survey team has faced before and the team were not sure whether, if someone was accessing health or education services across the border, it made sense to ask about satisfaction with those services.  We had to find a way of differentiating between people’s satisfaction with local and international services when recording their responses.  Thankfully, we have only encountered a very small number of cases so are now able to make a clear differentiation.  But it does raise a broader question for us about how people’s attitudes towards government are affected when they have clear comparators because they are accessing services in two countries simultaneously.

We’ve heard about similar issues before.  The Justice and Security Research Programme, which is running alongside SLRC in DRC, Uganda and South Sudan, is focusing on looking at and analysing justice and security in cross-border regions.  For them, hybrid political orders do not follow official borders and are not constrained by the territory of a sovereign state.  At a recent  conference on health systems strengthening in fragile states held by Medicus Mundi International and CordAid, Elies van Belle of Memisa, described how refugees in Uganda, who had fled from violence in eastern DRC, were crossing Lake Albert back to DRC  back to DRC in order to access health services in 2006. Although it was still too violent and insecure for refugees to return to DRC to live, they were somehow able (and wanted) to go there to access health services.  The Uganda / DRC case is movement in the opposite direction to that found in eastern Nepal  - in Uganda / DRC people are returning home temporarily to access services whilst in Nepal they are going away from home temporarily to access services.

So far, we’ve not encountered this anywhere else in the SLRC survey countries (though we are still in the field in some places so we may hear more on this from our other country survey teams!).  Until the Nepal survey is complete we will not know the frequency with which cross-border service access occurs in our SLRC Nepal sample of 3175 households.  However, it has already got us thinking about how to tackle this additional layer of comparison in our analysis.  The longitudinal element of our survey means that we will be comparing access to services and the quality of those services in 2012/13 with 2015/2016.  But what do we need to do to if people are not just comparing services over time but also between different countries?  Do border citizens have different expectations of their governments, based on what they are able to receive across the border?  Please post your experiences and if you have the answer let us know!

Share this via Twitter

Follow @SLRCtweet

"We've pick out a few good reads which look at different forms of taxation, development, governance and the New Deal." Paul Harvey, SLRC Director

There’s been a burgeoning interest in issues around development and taxation recently but surprisingly little of it has looked at the impact of taxation on people’s livelihoods or examined issues of conflict and fragility. What I did find was a few good reads on ‘informal taxation’ described below which I was reading because the SLRC is exploring the possibility of developing a proposal with the ICTD on tax and livelihoods in conflicts. If you’re working on any of these issues do get in touch.

Twenty years old now but well worth digging out is a journal article by Prud’homme on informal taxation, which looked at how people were taxed at a local level in Zaire. He distinguished six types of informal taxation; 1) ‘pinch’ or the part of taxes siphoned off by tax collectors and administrators; 2) extortions; 3) requisitions; 4) contributions; 5) gifts and 6) donations (to schools). Importantly, as well as describing the processes the article tries to estimate the magnitude of informal taxation and estimates it as five to ten times larger than formal taxation. Also intriguingly, he argues that ‘informal taxation is a cost-effective way of producing local public services and should not be discouraged’.  His call for ‘more attention to understanding informal taxation processes’ remains largely unheeded.

A much more recent article by Olken and SInghal also looks at informal taxation. It analyses household survey data in ten countries to look at the magnitude, distributional impacts and forms of informal taxation. Its focus is on how people pay in both money and labour to the construction and maintenance of local public goods through systems such as gotong royong in Indonesia. It finds that this sort of informal taxation is widespread and often forms a substantial share of local revenue. It forms a small share of household expenditure and a modest share of total taxes paid by households. The definition of ‘informal taxation’ being used here is very different and much narrower than in Prud’homme’s article but some of the conclusions are similar – the strange neglect of informal taxation in the development literature and so a failure to understand its implications both for people’s livelihoods and for local level governance and government policies.

A World Bank review of the literature on subnational taxation is a drier read. It finds that for decentralisation to work ‘subnational governments require significant real taxing power’. It argues that that there are several potentially sound and productive taxes that could be used, notably regional excises (on vehicles and fuel), making sales and business taxes more effective and exploiting property taxes as fully as possible.

Fjeldstad and Semboja point to the large number of local taxes in Tanzania and their significant economic, political and social impacts in spite of the fact that they represent a small percentage of total national tax revenues. They found that local authorities levy a large number of taxes, licenses, fees and charges which are often hard to distinguish, pointing to the need to define taxation broadly. The description of the fantastic complexity of licenses at District Council level was pleasingly vivid; ‘the by-law on hawking and street trading in Kibaha DC specifies in detail 38 different components (including licenses for bicycles, tyre puncture repairs, shoe shiner, car wash, carpenter, firewood, potato chips seller etc).

Devas, in a project which carried out research in Georgia, Ukraine, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Sierra Leone, found that the local informal economy is being ‘taxed’ in ways that create burdens for informal sector business but these taxes are often not generating resources for local governments to improve local service provision. The limited range of local taxes meant that there is widespread use of instruments such as business licenses, market charges, building permits and road tolls. The revenue instruments that do exist are often poorly administered and levels of collusion, evasion and fraud are high. He found that, ‘nowhere did there seem to be any serious attempt to curb unofficial or illegal levies.’

A great read that does look at how taxation (broadly defined) impacts on livelihoods is a World Bank report looking at poor traders and cross border trade between the DRC and its neighbours (facilitating cross border trade between the DRC and its neighbours). It found that, ‘the livelihoods and activities of the primarily female traders are currently being undermined by high levels of harassment and physical violence at the border and the prevalence of unofficial payments and bribes’. A female egg and sugar trader interviewed talked about having to give an egg to each official and that ‘some days I have to give away 30 eggs’.

On another subject I was reading up on the implementation of the ‘New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States’. ‘Promises and Pitfalls' by Stewart Patrick stresses that, whist the New Deal has a lot going for it, a huge stumbling block is the ‘ugly reality of fragile state governance’. He argues that at its foundation the New Deal presumes that governments are weak but well intentioned when they might be run by corrupt even kleptocratic elites. To which I’d add that it also assumes that relations between donors and fragile state governments are positive and risks neglecting some of the hardest places to make progress where relationships are much more difficult.

That sent me back to a review by ODI from 2004. It is a measure of how fast the debate on fragile states has moved that the term itself is a relatively new one. Less than 10 years ago, the tendency was to talk about ‘poorly performing’ countries. A review by ODI of that debate is well worth digging out because of its emphasis on the relational aspects of labels whether they’re ‘poor performer’ or ‘fragile’. It concluded that, ‘the problem of poorly performing countries must also be understood as relational, in other words that the labelling of a country as poorly performing is in part a reflection of the political, security and aid relations between the country and the international community’. This perspective on the importance of relations between conflict and fragile affected countries and the international community has been somewhat lost in more recent debates about fragility but it continues to play an important role in how and with what aid instruments donor countries seek to support populations in need.

Finally, there a new IDS report on governance in Sierra Leone which looks at the role played by chiefs both during the war and after it. It finds that many chiefs hung on to their legitimacy or were quickly restored to power after the war. It introduced (to me at least) some new terminology, ‘multileveled and networked governance’ and the fact that there is a research programme at IDS led by David Leonard focused on ‘security in an Africa of Networked, Multilevel Governance. 

"Are people right to be so scathing or sceptical about us trying to use quantitative survey methods in the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium, or about us attempting a panel?"  SLRC Research Director, Rachel Slater

SLRC is doing a quantitative survey in its seven focus countries to explore how livelihoods recover following conflict and how access to basic services affects perceptions of government.  Not only are we trying to do a representative, statistically significant survey, we aim to make it into a longitudinal panel by returning to the same households in three years time.  We have just completed the first round of the survey in DRC, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, are currently in the field in Uganda, and will go to the field soon in Afghanistan.

When I tell people that we are doing a quantitative panel survey, I get three reactions from people. The first is a frown. It may be accompanied by the second reaction – (often fierce) shaking of the head.  The third (definitely the worst!) is a reaction which feels like I'm being patted on the head and told ‘never mind, my dear, you’ll soon learn’.  So, are people right to be so scathing or sceptical about us trying to use quantitative survey methods in the SLRC, or about us attempting a panel?

We certainly recognise that our approach brings risks – especially the security of our respondents and enumerators – but after spending the time last month with the SLRC Nepal survey team, in Ilam district in the far west of the country, I'm more convinced that our approach is justified. This is why:

Enumerator(s) picking their way across a small landslide in Eastern Nepal

It starts with the journey into Ilam.  We fly to Biratnagar and then on by road.  At one stage we stop for tea (a famous Ilam product) and across the valley see a huge landslip scarring the mountainside.  On closer inspection, we realise that it is the landslip of 30th September.  I can feel the heart of Bishnu (SLRC’s leader in Nepal) grow heavy as we contemplate the 22 bodies forever entombed in the mud, soil and rocks.  A few days later, I find myself gingerly picking my way across smaller landslip, urging the team of ten enumerators in front of me not to dawdle and to stop chattering so they can hear any rock fall coming from above.  All this reminds me that, as a team, we frequently catch ourselves sliding into what we've called ‘conflict exceptionalism’, where we automatically assume that conflict is the cause, or outcome of all that we find.  Here in Nepal, I'm reminded at every turn of the path winding from one household to the next that there are numerous threats to people’s livelihoods and well-being and that our survey will help to capture that multiplicity.  

We also face other challenges in the survey that are not directly related to conflict: enumerators walking up to five hours between households; difficulties preventing a small (or large!) crowd gathering to listen to (and sometimes attempt to join in with) the interview; very elderly respondents who, although we’d love to know more about how they perceive the government, cannot understand our questions well.  In Bardiya district, where young women and girls were being kidnapped and taken across the border into service in India, we had to reorganise our enumerator teams to ensure that all our female enumerators worked far from the border.

So, should we avoid doing quantitative work in conflict-affected places because of these challenges? I’m left feeling that conflict should not be an automatic excuse for not doing quantitative survey work and that we need to look at situations on a case by case basis.  Nepal may currently be safer than Pakistan or DRC and these will certainly present other challenges, but nothing we have confronted so far is a reason not to try and deliver a high quality survey.

I find myself coming face to face with the second question – should we try a longitudinal panel? - in the first Ward where I accompany enumerators.  Beside the logistical challenges (for example attrition in our sample), we’ve been told by many people that that in three years we’ll never see enough shifts, either in people’s access to health, water, education and social protection, or in their attitudes towards government, for us to say anything useful about how far delivering services can contribute towards state legitimacy and state building.  And the truth is that we won’t and can’t know what change we’ll get until 2015.  Until now, we've been arguing that if we find very little change in access to services or to attitudes, this will at least contribute to a recognition of the sorts of timelines that are required to get changes in people’s perceptions of their governments.  Then, en route to our first interview, I'm taken by Suresh Prasain to look at the local health post.  It’s a small, dilapidated building but right next to it the foundations are being laid for a new 20 bed inpatient facility.  So here, at least, we are likely to see either some change in access to health service provision.  And if construction should grind to a halt, or the facility is not staffed, we can expect to hear our respondents voice their frustrations in three years’ time.

So, my visit to Ilam has left me feeling that in Nepal we can deliver a high quality survey and there is huge value in tracking change over the next 3 – 4 years.  We face significant logistical constraints, especially tracking down our respondents in the future, but we've a strong plan to tackle them.  Finally, the survey has thrown up some new analytical challenges for us to deal with – not least how we analyse ‘cross-border perceptions’ – but Bishnu and I will tell you more about that next week!

Share this via Twitter

Follow @SLRCtweet

"The New Deal is an exciting new development, but this shouldn't prevent critical analysis of its limitations" Paul Harvey, SLRC Director

The New Deal has been generally hailed as an important step forward in how the international aid system works with fragile states. I’d certainly agree with that and we hope, through the research of the SLRC, to contribute towards the evidence base of how to make progress against the peacebuilding and statebuilding goals that are at its core. The fact that fragile and conflict affected states were the driving force behind the initiative is hugely significant. However, the fact that it’s an exciting new development shouldn’t prevent critical analysis of its limitations, and in that spirit here are some very preliminary thoughts about the likely limits of its scope.

The New Deal is in some respects a restating within fragile contexts of Paris principles around ownership. National governments unsurprisingly, whether fragile or not, want to have greater sovereign authority around development planning processes and for aid to be provided within agreed nationally driven planning frameworks. As Booth argues, the Paris Declaration ‘makes the diplomatic assumption that recipient countries are already led by people for whom national development is a central objective’ and that sadly this is not always a valid assumption.

So the New Deal is all very well in contexts where OECD donors are politically supportive of fragile state regimes but fails down when they’re not. It’s relatively straightforward in East Timor or South Sudan but presumably isn’t meant to apply to North Korea and is pretty problematic in North Sudan, Myanmar and Zimbabwe. So the whole New Deal process leaves unresolved the age old problem of how international actors support vulnerable populations in places where donor governments are politically at odds with national governments.

Linked, but somewhat separate from this point about diplomatic relations between donors governments and the fragile countries that they hope to assist is the question of whether or not states that are fragile or affected by conflict have any interest in providing basic services to or supporting the livelihoods of their citizens. A central part of many definitions of fragility is governments that are ‘unwilling’ to provide basic services. This point has been made before. Stewart Patrick points out that a huge stumbling block for the New Deal is the ugly reality of fragile state governance and that; ‘its immediate application may be limited to well-meaning governments’.  But who decides whether or not states are legitimate? Clearly there are problems with donors sitting in judgement on other states but equally problematic is the idea of governments defining their legitimacy for themselves. More could perhaps be done to bring in the perspectives of people living in countries affected by conflict and fragility building on perception survey work such as that carried out by the Asia Foundation and expanding surveys like Afrobarometer into more fragile and conflict affected countries.

A response to this problem in a comment on Patrick’s piece from the coordinator of the International Dialogue on Statebuilding and Peacebuilding is a hope that the New Deal can inspire creative approaches and innovation. That it can be used by country level actors to push for different ways of doing business, that it can serve to pull together ‘well intentioned’ people and initiate gradual reforms and that the indicators being developed for the Peacebuilding and Statebuilding goals will ‘leave little space for hiding the poor investment in key areas like security’.

These are all good points and in piloting the New Deal, it clearly makes sense to start where it’s most possible to make progress. But there is a risk that in the enthusiasm for the New Deal and the desire for it to succeed the focus shifts to places where donor and host government relationships are positive and that this exacerbates the neglect of difficult places.

It is a measure of how fast the debate on fragile states has moved that the term itself is a relatively new one. Less than 10 years ago, the tendency was to talk about ‘poorly performing’ countries. A review by ODI of that debate concluded that, ‘the problem of poorly performing countries must also be understood as relational, in other words that the labelling of a country as poorly performing is in part a reflection of the political, security and aid relations between the country and the international community’. This perspective on the importance of relations between conflict and fragile affected countries and the international community has been somewhat lost in more recent debates about fragility but it continues to play an important role in how and with what aid instruments donor countries seek to support populations in need.

The New Deal has helped to advance the debate about how international aid deals with conflict and fragility but it’s important not to lose sight of the importance of political relations between countries in shaping how aid works in a fuzzy, feel good assumption that donor and recipient governments will always work happily together. Perhaps we should focus more on the term ‘deal’ and all that this implies in the sense of a transaction between parties with obligations on both sides for the deal to be fulfilled.

There’s a need in welcoming the New Deal and seeking to make progress in its implementation not to lose sight of countries where donors and the regimes currently in power are politically opposed. These have always been the contexts where aid is most difficult to deliver and where better alternatives to state-centric models for aid still need to be developed.

Share this via Twitter

Follow @SLRCtweet

Follow @paulharvey72

“What do we do if we need results to justify a development or humanitarian programme, but don’t have the evidence to demonstrate what works?” SLRC Research Officer, Richard Mallett

As Rachel Slater and Samuel Carpenter recently argued, getting aid programming right in fragile and conflict-affected situations is challenging but hugely important. From a purely monetary perspective, there’s $46.7 billion at stake – which is a lot of money to demonstrate good value for.

A sizable chunk of this is spent on programmes aimed at supporting livelihoods and stimulating economic recovery, and many donors, DFID included, are increasingly looking to justify the specifics of this spend on the basis of results. Many aspects of this approach are hard to disagree with: the argument that we should know what works before throwing around funds is a no-brainer, and programme effectiveness is to many a more sensible mechanism for allocating aid than, say, the logics of self-interest and soft power.

But do we actually know what works?

Partly as a result of the sharpened focus on results and value-for-money, DFID country offices are now required to assemble business cases for new spending that cite evidence to justify their decisions. However, a new review of the evidence on growth and livelihoods in conflict-affected situations suggests that there is surprisingly little out there for them to draw on. Despite the range of programmes on offer to aid agencies and governments wanting to protect livelihoods and promote economic recovery – from public works programmes to the distribution of seeds and tools – in many cases the impact data just aren't there. Much of the time, it seems, we simply don’t know whether programmes are working for beneficiaries, having no effect at all or, worst case scenario, making things worse. (It should be noted that although we are talking primarily about the micro-level impacts of programmes here rather than the meso- and macro-level impacts of reforms, it is also understood that many developing countries similarly suffer from a lack of data on macroeconomic performance – see page 8 of this newsletter from the Centre for the Study of African Economies).

This may come as some surprise to those who have spent any time with the burgeoning literature on livelihood and economic programming in conflict-affected situations. There is no shortage of claims and recommendations to be found within the abundance of donor reports and policy briefs, suggesting that the impact evidence base is pretty strong and that our level of knowledge is pretty good. But as soon as we start asking serious questions about the sources for claims and the basis for recommendations, their mask of certainty and assuredness starts to slip. Most of the time, study methodologies are rarely discussed in any detail; sometimes, they are barely mentioned at all. For something so straightforward – and so fundamental – this is baffling.

Studies that are clear on methodology and that examine impact are massively in the minority. One illustration of this emerges from our review. As part of our review methodology – and in an attempt to inject some additional rigour into the process – we undertook two systematic reviews in addition to more orthodox review practices. We wanted to know about the impacts of two separate interventions – seeds-and-tools programmes and ‘markets for the poor’ (M4P) interventions – in countries defined as fragile and / or conflict-affected. Even without specifying which outcomes we were interested in, our two systematic reviews yielded a depressingly low number of relevant studies – nine on seeds-and-tools and just three on M4P – and, of these, the quality was generally low.

What might explain this sizeable gap in the evidence base?

It’s difficult to be sure, but there may be a number of reasons why there is so little evidence of impact. In no particular order:

• Doing impact evaluation well is not easy or cheap. Studies that take impact, causality and attribution seriously take a long time to do and attract substantial costs – even more so in difficult contexts.
• Fund programmes, not studies. In conflict-affected situations, donors are faced with a huge number of urgent humanitarian and recovery needs. Funding research may not be at the top of their list of priorities when there are other, more pressing things to invest in.
• Assumptions of effectiveness can prove remarkably resilient. To many, it may seem obvious that giving people jobs in war zones is a good thing to do – why spend money on research that will simply tell us what we already know? Deductive logic such as this is certainly compelling, and often convincing, but research can turn conventional wisdom on its head.
• The truth might hurt. If a donor has been funding programme x for several years, it may not be in their interest to then fund research that tells them they’ve been doing it wrong.
• We are measuring impact! Many studies we came across in our review used ‘impact’ to refer to how well a programme functions in terms of its own design – i.e. was it completed on time? Was the right amount of, say, seed distributed? This may be one way of measuring success, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what the programme did for beneficiaries.

Managing the gap

So, what do we do if we need results to justify a programme, but don’t have the evidence to demonstrate what works? In such circumstances, it may be tempting to argue for donors to reduce the burden of proof required to justify decisions, to ‘lower the bar’ for evidence-based policy making in conflict-affected countries.

But we’d argue that this would be the wrong approach to take. It is possible to do high quality, methodologically rigorous research in difficult places, and there are plenty of cases of where this has been done. Take, for example, the Households in Conflict Network and MICROCON research programme who, together, have generated a valuable body of robust, fascinating and methodologically clear evidence on the micro-level causes and consequences of war. Or how about the multi-year study of rural change in eight Afghan villages conducted by researchers at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit? Such examples provide clear demonstrations that doing high quality research in conflict-affected environments is not beyond the limits of possibility.

Thus, rather than throw out the results-based agenda altogether, we would instead suggest a number of recommendations that might help move us forward.

First, there should be an obligation for people doing both research and monitoring and evaluation in conflicts to be much more systematic and rigorous in presenting their methodologies.

Second, given the current lack of impact evidence, donors and aid agencies need to be more cautious in their policy recommendations.

Third, there’s also a need to guard against conflict exceptionalism – not everything about conflict-affected places is qualitatively different. Aid actors working in conflicts could do better at drawing on evidence from other development contexts and considering how approaches could be adapted to deal with the challenges of conflict (as has been argued in relation to delivering social protection).

Finally, we simply need more and better research…which is what researchers always think but this time there really is a clear cut case for it!

Read the full Working Paper: Growth and Livelihoods in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations and the accompanying 4-page Briefing Paper: Growth and livelihoods in conflict-affected situations: what do we know?.

Share this via Twitter

Follow @SLRCtweet

Follow @rich_mallett

"For those living in the villages we visited, it is often impossible to carry out daily activities without being taxed... But can an 'all-pervasive system of taxation' have an upside?" Katherine Haver, Humanitarian Outcomes.

In 2009, I carried out some research with Oxfam GB and four local organisations in eastern DRC. Our question was: how do people cope with extreme violence, and is there anything aid agencies can do to support ‘self-protection’ mechanisms? We spoke with over 700 people in 24 communities across North Kivu and South Kivu. Our report concluded, perhaps unsurprisingly, that there was no ‘magic cape’ that could easily be supported or replicated. Rather, the most successful strategies – fleeing, submitting – also entail the worst negative side-effects.

Along the way, however, we learned a lot about the links between protection and livelihoods. An informal, predatory, almost omnipresent state is continually eroding people’s ability to earn a living. It is not so much that the state does not function, but that it functions too much — violently, without rules and without limits. As summarised in a recent SLRC report, much of this was legitimised under the Mobutu regime, which encouraged public servants, including the army and the police, to self-finance salaries and operational costs through informal taxation and extortion of the general public. 

Taxing livelihoods

For those living in the villages we visited, it is often impossible to carry out daily activities without being taxed. Need to travel to the next village to visit a sick relative? Pedestrians pay $0.24, those on a bicycle $0.35. Want to produce some palm oil? For every 20-litre bottle (which can be sold for around $10), the state takes 7 litres as well as $0.12 and the military takes 7 litres as well as $0.25, and there’s another $10 per year to access the trees plus a tax on the machine to extract the oil. Want to buy some food? In one town, the number of tax inspectors (and their agents) had become so high that people were afraid to go to the market. 

It is difficult to distinguish illegal taxes from simple theft. Those who wield more power often justify their theft as an official requirement or payment. Lacking information about what taxes are legal, civilians find it difficult to challenge those making demands, who in any case are often armed. Seemingly everyone collects taxes: agents of the state (including the military (FARDC), the police, the national intelligence agency (ANR) and even ‘anti-fraud’ agents in one place); customary authorities, such as local chiefs; and armed groups such as the Mai Mai and Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). 

Armed groups will often justify taxes as payment for their ‘protection’ of the population, whereas local chiefs will refer to the need to respect tradition. All of these taxes leave people wondering what the government does with the money. As one participant said, ‘We do everything for the state, but it does nothing for us.’ 

Can an ‘all-pervasive system of taxation’ have an upside?

Given all this, what was surprising was that people did not want the state to disappear. Rather, one of their most frequent (and spontaneous) requests was for information and training – for both themselves and the authorities – about their rights and obligations, and the relevant laws, especially tax laws. When asked how this would help keep them safe, people said they felt that increased clarity would itself prevent abuses by making it more difficult for state agents to justify their actions. People seemed to feel that this knowledge would give them power to stand up for their rights. 

I approached this request with a healthy dose of scepticism. Could it be that people perceived that Oxfam or its partners were providing this type of information, and hence that it was what they thought they should ask for? Had they heard about someone who had received a per diem for attending a training session? In the end, the number of times it was repeated, in different ways by different people, convinced me that there existed a genuine desire for a credible outside actor to help facilitate some kind of dialogue between residents and the relevant duty-bearers. 

I also came away impressed by people’s understanding of the purpose and potential utility of taxes. People want to see something for their money. They want schools with teachers in them, markets with shelters from the rain, drugs in the clinics and roads that are passable. There is a sense that the contract between the people and the leaders who tax them could thrive, even in an informal, local, perhaps even technically illegal way. After all, people are used to paying school and health fees, even if they receive only a rudimentary service in return. Could this ‘all-pervasive system of taxation’, which has become so much a part of the culture, have an upside? I came away thinking that we shouldn't assume that taxes are bad just because they’re informal. 

There are heaps of questions to ask before venturing to say what changes in taxation policy and practice would be of benefit to people’s livelihoods. A good first step would be a better understanding of who is being taxed, how and how much. What kinds of contracts – good or bad, peaceful or violent – exist between the people taxing and the people being taxed? Among the many aid organisations operating in eastern DRC, there is surprisingly little knowledge of how taxation affects people’s livelihoods — and very little understanding of how aid interventions enrich or impoverish the taxers and the taxed. But it is relatively easy to find out this information, if you ask.

This is a guest post by Katherine Haver. Katherine is a partner with Humanitarian Outcomes where she works on operational security management, cash based responses, humanitarian coordination, and disaster preparedness. Before joining Humanitarian Outcomes, she worked as a policy advisor for Oxfam based in DRC, where she authored reports on developing responses to displaced people in host families; improving the targeting of humanitarian assistance; and designing programmes to better support community self-protection mechanisms. 

"Are 'fragile states' failing to meet the MDGs? The answer might not be as black and white as one might expect." SLRC Director, Paul Harvey

Almost whenever you read anything about fragile states, the introduction notes that, ‘no low-income fragile or conflict-affected country has yet to achieve a single United Nations Millennium Development Goal'. This is a quote from the overview from the 2011 World Development Report on conflict, security and development. It seems to be an elaboration of a quote from the main body of the report that is subtly but importantly different.  ‘No low-income, fragile state has achieved a single MDG, and few are expected to meet targets by 2015.’

The WDR report was focussed on a clear definition of fragile and conflict affected countries or countries affected by very high levels of violence which were countries with:

1. homicide rates greater than 10 per 100,000 per population per year; 
2. major civil conflict with battle deaths greater than 1,000 per year between 2006 and 2009;
3. UN or regionally mandated peacebuilding or peacekeeping missions; and 
4. low income countries with institutional levels in 2006-09 (World Bank’s CPIA less than 3.2) correlated with high risks of conflict and violence
   
   

This definition does produce a set of countries that as of 2009 (the most up to date data when the WDR was being written) hadn’t met any MDGs. The more up to date MDG data now available does suggest that some of the countries in this definition have or will achieve some MDGs.

The quote from the overview that ‘no low income or conflict affected country has yet to achieve a single MDG’ however doesn't match this definition.  It implies that any conflict affected country hasn’t met any MDGs not just low income and conflict affected countries.  There are four countries that the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCPD) categorises as conflict affected in 2011 that have achieved MDGs. They are Colombia and Russia, which have achieved universal primary education, Thailand which has achieved seven of the eight MDGs, and Turkey which has achieved two (see MDG Monitor). All four governments claim to be affected not by conflict but by terrorism but that in itself highlights the important point that being labelled (or accepting the label) as conflict affected is an intensely political as well as technical issue. Countries with very homicide rates such as Mexico and Brazil have also achieved MDGs.  

But the quote is also misleading because there are plenty of conflict affected countries that are on track to meet several MDGs by 2015. Seven countries listed as conflict affected in the background paper to the WDR on the MDGs (Algeria, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Syria) are on track / very likely to meet at least five of the eight MDGs (See Gates et al 2010 and MDG Monitor).

These aren't all countries that would fall within the list of countries that the Bank used for the WDR, as the conflicts haven’t reached the threshold of 1,000 battle deaths per year and there are plenty of reasons to doubt the quality of the data on MDG progress in many fragile and conflict affected countries. But they are countries that fit within broader definitions of conflict and as the quote ‘no low-income fragile or conflict-affected country has yet to achieve a single MDG’ is reproduced elsewhere, the narrowness of the footnoted Bank definition gets lost. 

Is this any more than quibbling? Arguably, it’s just an editing issue – using ‘fragile or conflict affected’ rather than ‘fragile and conflict affected countries’. Or a definitional one – resting on whether or not you see Colombia, Russia, Turkey and Thailand as conflict affected and what threshold of battle deaths you use for the definition of ‘conflict affected’. Conflict certainly has dire economic consequences and the effects of conflict have made it more difficult for the countries affected to meet MDGs, shown in detail in Gates et al (2012 and 2010). Given the Bank’s poverty mandate, their main objective in the opening WDR chapter was explaining the poverty reduction challenges associated with violence and fragility.  

But I would argue that the quote is problematic both because it is so widely cited and because it reflects a wider tendency to conflate conflict and fragility in problematic ways. History shows that rich, middle income and poor countries can be affected by conflict but the current conflation of fragile and conflict affected situations risks equating conflict with poor and fragile countries. The conflation of conflict and fragility is often politically convenient because it allows people to ignore conflicts in richer, more powerful or strategically important countries. So debates around conflict and fragility focus more on countries such as DRC, Somalia and Liberia and less on places like the Philippines (Mindanao), India (Naxalites) and Russia (Chechnya) or indeed the USA and the United Kingdom (costs of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya).  That in turn risk setting up conflict as something ‘other’ – something that affects poor and difficult places rather than something that affects a much bigger swathe of the globe and that rich as well as poor countries are involved in.

Source: MDG Monitor. For the full table click here. Notes: In order to work out the ‘overall’ level of progress for each country, we took the mode status for each country (e.g. Angola is ‘off track’ against one MDG, ‘likely’ against two, ‘possible’ against four, and has ‘insufficient data’ for one – therefore, for our purposes here we classify Angola as ‘possible’).   The following countries have not been included in the overall map due to them having two modes: DRC, Djibouti, Sierra Leone, Timor Leste.

In SLRC’s work we prefer to talk about conflict rather than fragility and stress that strong as well as weak and rich as well as poor states are affected by conflict. The challenges governments face in delivering services and supporting livelihoods in South Sudan and DRC are clearly very different from those in Pakistan and Sri Lanka where state capacities are very different. Policy recommendations relating to recovery from conflict need to be tailored to recognise this diversity. 

"Since 2007, OECD DAC members have been signed up to state-building as the ‘central objective’ of their engagement in fragile and conflict-affected situations. It is a compelling narrative: deliver basic services (health, education water and sanitation) and – voilà! – better prospects for long-term peace and stability." SLRC Research Director, Rachel Slater and Samuel Carpenter

Read more: http://www.odi.org.uk/opinion/6884-service-delivery-state-building-conflicted-affected-states

"For me, the volume is more than anything about the blurring of boundaries – analytical  and spatial – and the (increased) hybrid nature of politics and power during and after  conflict." SLRC Research Officer, Richard Mallett

Read more: http://africanarguments.org/2012/08/24/big-men-african-conflicts-and-informal-power-a-review-by-richard-mallett-odi/

"How useful is the concept of political settlement? Not very, according to a recent post by Mick Moore. Taking particular issue with the lack of consensus regarding definition, Mick questions the legitimacy of the concept, closing with a somewhat pessimistic evaluation of its added value." SLRC Research Officer, Richard Mallett

Read more: http://www.odi.org.uk/opinion/6816-political-settlements-matter-response-mick-moore

"Although well established in the natural sciences, systematic reviews are relatively new to the world of international development research. But they are being increasingly promoted as an important step in strengthening evidence-informed policy-making amongst aid agencies." SLRC Research Officer, Richard Mallett

Read more: http://www.odi.org.uk/opinion/6283-systematic-reviews-international-development-slrc