Thu
05-Oct-2006

day in brussels

Was in Brussels yesterday for a meeting of parliamentarians from development ministries and committees from across Europe. CONCORD had a stall and I took some GCAP and Global Month of Action material along.

The meeting was in the European Parliament, in the Hemicycle, the main debating chamber. I rather like the European Parliament buildings – it's all very grand and modern, spacious but inviting, and with lots of glass, granite and marble.

It was cool sitting in the hemicycle listening to the debate between parliamentarians in loads of different European languages while the various translators whittered away in my headphones. It was rather like the way I always imagined the United Federation of Planets council chamber might be like.

Thu
14-Sep-2006

christian aid rally

Images

The Global Month of Action launched today with a Christian Aid march on the Treasury to demand that the UK government withdraw its funding from the IMF and the World Bank until they stop imposing damaging economic policy conditions on the loans they give to developing countries. Matt and I went along on the march, which had a drumming theme, "beating trade justice home" to the Treasury. Everyone was very excited because that very morning, Hilary Benn had announced that Britain would withhold £50 million of its funding to the IMF, a tiny proportion of the billion pounds or so a year that we give, but an important symbolic gesture in political terms.

Matt was on great form, bouncing around and waving his trade justice placard, and the atmosphere was really good, with sunshine, noisy energising drumming, and lots of campaigners out again and gearing up for action.

Tue
08-Aug-2006

interpal and the panorama documentary

I was very shocked after watching the BBC Panorama programme Faith, hate and charity last Sunday. This purported to be an investigation into the London-based international NGO Interpal, which gives funds to charities on the West Bank. Having been involved with Interpal through work for several years trying to contest their designation by the US as a terrorist organisation, I was obviously quite nervous about what the programme would say.

Panorama claimed that the programme would reveal that the charities Interpal funds “are linked to Hamas and help build support for the movement by spreading its Islamist ideology”. In fact, it didn’t reveal very much at all but engaged in an hour of one-sided Islamophobic mud slinging.

Robert Ware, the journalist who made the programme, is clearly a hysterical believer in the clash of civilisations. He has no sympathy for Muslims whatsoever, be they moderate or fundamentalist, living in peace or living under occupation – to him, they all seem to be enemies in a new cold war between “the West” and Islam.

His investigative journalism relies on a trail of guilt by association which holds that if individuals associated with the charities that Interpal funds in the Occupied Territories are also associated with “political” activities, such as involvement with Hamas or armed struggle against the Israeli occupation, therefore those charities are involved in political activities and therefore so is Interpal. It is a breathtakingly weak case, and Robert Ware gives it substance through lots of cloak and dagger “reconstructions” and highly selective quotations designed to paint Islam as a medieval, bloody, indeed evil, faith.

Nothing is put in context at all. Even the basic fact that the Palestinians are living under a brutal occupation is completely omitted from the picture. There’s a scene in which Ware questions a classroom of Palestinian school children, asking them “Who would you like to be? Who's your big hero?”
A boy replies: “Like a mujahid.”
”A fighter! Fighting for what?”
“We will continue to resist the Israelis until we get them out.”

John Ware presents this as an example of children being brought up to believe in a destructive ideology. To me it sounds like what any child would think, living under a humiliating and frequently lethal occupation. If I lived in Palestine I think, I hope, I would fight for freedom.

In another scene he asks a child in a playground, “what does the Koran mean to you?” and he replies, “I learn from it everything ... it's the way of my life”. Ware’s treats this assertion with suspicion and the implication is that being a devout Muslim is in itself problematic.

He also shows a video of children singing in an out of school girl’s club: “We all sacrifice ourselves for our country. We answer your call and make of our skulls a ladder to your glory.”

Fair enough, that’s pretty racy stuff, young girls singing about martyrdom. But it is hardly unique to Islam. One person who commented on the BBC website quoted a song she used to sing at a state school in England:

Stand up, stand up for Jesus, each soldier to his post, Close up the broken column, and shout through all the host: Make good the loss so heavy, in those that still remain, And prove to all around you that death itself is gain.

It is so easy to see how biased John Ware is. Just take one of his assertions and consider how it would sound if we were talking about Christianity, Judaism or white people. He is completely unreasonable in expecting all Muslims to live up to an impossibly high standard of ethical behaviour, to be peaceful at all times and to refrain from mixing religion and politics in any way, despite the fact that faith plays a massive role in US and Israeli politics.

Interpal was never going to get a fair hearing out of this programme. Even when John Ware talks about its offices, he has to say that Interpal “operates from an anonymous building in Cricklewood”, implying that they are some kind of underground secret agency. I too have visited Interpal’s offices and there is another way of looking at their building. They are cutting costs by working from a fairly basic building in a cheap part of North London, so that as much of the money they raise as possible goes to humanitarian relief in Palestine. I’m sure that if they were in a swanky building somewhere round Westminster, with their name embossed on the windows, then John Ware would also think of something bad to say.

So, all in all, a rather poisonous documentary. Let’s hope Panorama will commission something more balanced next time it wades into the complex discussions Muslims and non-Muslims are having about the nature of Islam.

You can read Interpal’s own statement on the Panorama documentary here.

Mon
21-Nov-2005

kings cross sunsets

We get lovely views of sunsets from our office...

Thu
30-Jun-2005

ngo conference

I’ve spent the last three days up in Manchester at an NGO conference on ‘Reclaiming Development’ – it’s been lovely having time to think about things and to read. There were many interesting themes that were explored throughout the event. This was the fourth of a series of big NGO conferences that have taken place since 1992 and it was prompted by a number of broad contexts. These are: the rise of the security agenda in international development; the internal ‘neoliberalisation’ of NGOs as they adopt the practices of liberal managerialism; the increasingly conservative academic environment; and the agreement that poverty persists, and may be deepening, despite the poverty reduction and democratisation agendas that characterise international development.

A big question was whether NGOs have, broadly speaking, failed and whether international development is in need of being ‘reclaimed’ from the neoliberal agenda. On the whole, there seemed to be a feeling that the appropriate question was not “have NGOs failed?” but “have NGOs done the right thing?” – and here the answer was broadly positive. NGOs have grown in influence over the last twenty years, becoming global players and keeping the spotlight on global governance and states and international institutions. A human rights-based agenda with poverty reduction at its core has become development orthodoxy thanks to NGO efforts.

But, people reckoned that NGOs needed to get to grips with the rise of religion as a potent global force in the world today; NGOs are too preoccupied with guarding their market share to engage in effective broad civil society coalitions or concede ground to other actors like community groups, people’s organisations and trade unions; and a new challenge is presented in the rise of the organised non-governmental right, exemplified by organisations like the American Enterprise Institute or NGO Watch. It was pointed out that academics find it hard to think of such organisations that do not have a liberal or progressive agenda as even being ‘NGOs’.

In looking at the success of these right-wing NGOs and the way that conventional NGOs seem to have become more distant from grassroots social actors as they have become more professional, there seemed to be a general consensus that NGOs need to be more explicit about how ideas and truth are constructed, and need to repoliticise themselves. Right-wing NGOs have partly been successful because they have invested money in trying to co-opt key ideas and words. One speaker described the battle in 1980s and 1990s Brazil between the project of expanding democracy and redefining citizenship and the project of the selectively minimalist neoliberal state. The battle saw both sides attempting to define ‘citizenship’ and ‘participation’ in very different ways. The neoliberal definition of ‘participation’ is an individualist take associated with voluntarism and the sphere of formal democratic institutions, rather than a broader understanding of collective communication in the whole arena of public politics. The neoliberal definition of ‘citizenship’ presents the citizen as a consumer or producer, which tends to cut out notions of labour rights, redistribution or equality.

In seeing NGOs as engaged in discursive battles over such terms, the conference was trying to promote a movement away from an understanding of ‘civil society’ as a juridical and organisational category, where nongovernmental activity – the ‘third sector’ – is alternative to the state and market by definition. Taking inspiration from Gramsci or Habermas, civil society is seen less as an institutional location, more as a terrain on which debates occur about how to organise society, the state and the market. The contest of ideas then becomes central to the role of NGOs. One can also more easily understand that civil society may contain hegemonic neoliberal think tanks as well as counter-hegemonic progressive social movements. This perspective also helps to conceptualise how the state is intricately involved in the terrain of civil society, in a way that the institutional, mutually exclusive categories of ‘state’, ‘market’ and ‘third sector’ do not. This could help NGOs deal with the fact that elements of the state may act in a counter-hegemonic fashion as key proponents of more progressive development projects.

As part of the conference, we also went on a field trip to a regeneration project in north Manchester, which I really enjoyed. There were many parallels between the role of international NGOs in other countries acting as intermediaries between community organisations, donors and governments and the respective roles of local councils, residents associations and the voluntary sector in the regeneration project in Manchester. I really felt the dull hand of liberal managerialism though. Because it was Manchester and I was vaguely familiar with the area, I was finding it hard to think of everything as a ‘development intervention’. As my colleagues asked what the ethnic makeup of the area was, or about strategies for reducing conflict between people of different incomes, I had a little voice screaming in my head “these are real people, not statistics!” It all seemed so top-down at times, describing the area using the tools and statistics of social science and prescribing solutions, developing ‘strategies’ with local people rather than just helping local people do it themselves. This was in a project in a city where I used to live! This was an area I could see myself living in, and the academics seemed to describe it so coldly. It made me think what a terrible gulf of power divides northern development professionals from the southern communities for whom they draw up plans and strategies.

Thu
03-Feb-2005

nelson mandela

We went to Trafalgar Square today to see Nelson Mandela speak at the invitation of Make Poverty History. The square was packed, and all kinds of people were there, chatting, proselytising, giving out white bands. I felt quite heartened. Nelson's speech was inspiring, as you would expect. I found the conclusion particularly moving.

"Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom.

Of course the task will not be easy. But not to do this would be a crime against humanity, against which I ask all humanity now to rise up.

Make Poverty History in 2005. Make History in 2005. Then we can all stand with our heads held high."

I hope so.

www.makepovertyhistory.org

Fri
10-Sep-2004

dissertation

I'm at home trying to write my evil dissertation. Oh the slowness of academic writing!

Minor setback early this morning. I was doing quick bit of hoovering as we were getting up in order to reduce the levels of cat hair blowing around the flat, and Mouse, hating the hoover, tried to run away into the bedroom, met Matt in the corridor, ran back into the kitchen and tried to leap over the plant box with all our herbs in to leap up on top of the cupboard. She got a grip on the edge of the box and tipped it off the ledge, collapsing underneath the box as soil and plants scattered all over the floor across the room.

I saw it all happening in classic slow motion and roared "CAT!" and she ran to the bathroom and whimpered pathetically while Matt and I cleaned up the soil.

My poor herbs! Will they recover? Poor Mouse, as well. I just went over to see her and apologised for shouting.

Better get back to the dissertation...

Fri
07-May-2004

smoke kills

According to a report from ITDG, smoke in the home from cooking on wood, dung and crop waste kills nearly one million children a year. I didn't realise the figure was so high. It is a death toll almost as great as that caused by unsafe water and sanitation, and greater than that caused by malaria.

More than a third of humanity burn biomass (wood, crop residues, charcoal and dung) for cooking and heating and those affected adversely are mainly women and children. I remember from Zimbabwe how sitting in rural kitchens filled with smoke used to hurt my eyes as I wasn't used to it - it didn't occur to me that there was a risk of lung cancer too.

Thu
18-Mar-2004

mmmmmmmmmm, doughnut

Wed
25-Feb-2004

oxfam

Went to visit Oxfam today. They seem to own most of Summertown - impressive swathe of buildings. My impression from this meeting with just two or three people, so maybe not too representative, didn't leave me loving them that much. They weren't very into sharing information or names, more into building up their brand and being seen to be the authority on everything. Not too willing to risk upsetting the authorities or being too open about anything. Obviously, they are still a marvellous campaigning NGO and all that, but it was a bit disappointing. They seem to exemplify that unique 'NGO arrogance' one comes across in the sector, and I have no time for this obsession with hoarding information so as to gain a competitive advantage over other NGOs. The larger mission is more important than maintaining one's brand, surely...

Thu
05-Feb-2004

evil howard

Howard, it seems, has taken to reading my weblog. This is an unforgivable intrusion of work people into the lifeworld. Habermas will be joining me in denouncing Howard for this dangerous venture between worlds. The very fabric of reality could rupture, leaving the space time continuum looking, like, well rough.

tobin tax network meeting

I went along to the Tobin Tax Network's latest meeting at the plush little Jubilee Room off the Great Hall at Parliament yesterday. These meetings are always fun as there are lots of faith group people with huge crosses hanging round their necks advocating things like Tobin Tax mechanisms being controlled by the Roman Catholic Church (in a jokey kind of way!). The religious people often seem to be more chilled out than NGO people in many ways...

The Network, which until now has been considered pretty far out, has basically refined its proposals over the last half a year in an attempt to turn the campaign into something politically and economically feasible that lots of people can unite around.

The meeting was reflecting on a paper written by someone from SOAS that examines the case for and against a currency transaction tax. This reviews the literature, and argues that a currency tax at the kind of rates previously proposed by economists like Tobin (0.1% - 1%) would be economically destructive and politically unfeasible. A tax at one or two base points (0.01-0.02%) would be much more acceptable, and would barely affect market liquidity, but should provide adequate disincentives to traders not to engage in short-term 'noise trading' of the kind that causes such damage to third world economies.

Adrian, a senior person from DfID, gave a talk, taking advantage of the informal atmosphere to chat freely about the paper and about his views on the currency tax and other methods for financing development. He thought there were no technical problems with the proposal, it was a matter of political will. He talked lots of economist-speak about transaction costs, behavioural economics and equilibrium, but his main point was that a currency tax involves setting up new mechanisms, and in terms of political economy, this is more costly than financing development through existing mechanisms, i.e. aid levels.

A guy from the New Economics Foundation gave a talk elaborating on the SOAS paper's arguments and explaining the Tobin Tax Network's new position. They have now modified their proposal, arguing for a very low tax in the region of one or two base points. In trying to make the proposal as mainstream as possible, he pointed out that owing to falling currency transaction costs, levying a tax of one or two base points would take market liquidity levels back to their 1998 position, hardly a crazy proposition. If a tax averted the negative effects of currency speculation, many businesses could stand to gain, and the Network is working on getting totally mainstream business people on their side - so far they are doing quite well. In development terms, the revenue generating potential of such a reduced tax would be much lower - probably only about £10-£15bn a year, but they reckon the spin-off effects would be good in many other respects.

It was a very detailed compelling argument, and worth keeping an eye on, especially with Belgium and France passing Tobin legislation, and large Southern countries like Brazil and India backing the idea.

The discussion afterwards was fun. The guy from DfID was quite frank about the fact he doesn't really have a personal opinion on anything. Bit of a paralysed academic. He pointed out that DfID's 'official' chosen vehicle for financing development is the IFF, and explained what he thought of it by observing that it's the only economic mechanism of those flying around at the moment that was thought up by politicians rather than economists.

Marvellous stuff. Sign the Tobin Tax online petition here. You know you want to.

Wed
12-Nov-2003

aaaarrrgh, stoned

Oh no. I went over to Kal's place for lunch today, which was lovely and fun. We chatted lots and got quite stoned. But now I'm stoned at work! And it's impossible! All my tasks here seem so bizarre and alien, I have so many strange and random responsibilities! How on earth am I meant to decide the tone of a letter to DFID in this state?! Hopefully, no one will ring me up, that's all I can say...

Wed
29-Oct-2003

one world trust meeting

Went to Westminster today for an NGO accountability meeting at One World Trust!

We were in a meeting room - the Jubilee room - off the central hall. The central hall is incredible and huge and lofty! I was very impressed.

Tue
28-Oct-2003

another europe is possible

Or so Howard thinks...

Thu
11-Sep-2003

hm treasury's cross cutting review

Well, today I put on a suit, though with a ragged shirt and a pink tie for the slightly kooky look, and I went to Carr Sheppards Crosthwaite on Gresham Street in the City for an ACEVO conference. The title: Treasury review - 1 year on: Sucess or failure?

It was my first proper day of networking for my new job and it was very interesting. Stephen Bubb, Chief Executive of ACEVO, was clearly very whither the state? about it all. He's likes the idea of third sector organisations expanding to fill the space left by the retreat of the state from direct social provision and health care. He had got John Kay, the economist, along to speak. Kay basically argued that third sector organisations could compete in the marketplace alongside the private and the public sector, lacking the greedy executives and profit-making imperatives of the former and the lumbering centralisation of the latter. He provided a post-Washington Consensus angle on why we need a diverse third sector/NGO sector, citing the need for 'disciplined pluralism', which is his catchphrase for the sort of small-scale, audited experimentation that allegedly generates innovative solutions to human problems.

Many of the voluntary and community sector chief execs there were partly agreeing with the thing about third sector organisations competing alongside private/public sector, and arguing furthermore that they should be allowed to charge for consulting costs, as a market consultant would do, when the government comes to them for advice, or be allowed to raise substantial amounts of capital, and such things. But then they were also partly arguing that, contrary to John Kay's view that there's essentially little difference between public/private/third sector, if the outcomes they were working towards is the same, in fact the ethos of people working in each sector is completely different and this results in very different institutions. A lot of them were mainly there to laugh cynically at the Compact and government attempts to forge a working relationship with the sector. I met some cool people and heard some great stories. There was one guy from an organisation empowering people with disabilities, who has expanded from UK-based work to working abroad, particularly in eastern Europe. He had visited a home in Russia where they put all the albino people, so there were 150 albinos all in one place. Very strange and Soviet. On the whole the organisations represented at the conference were all very national and UK-based. I was just about the only representative from an overseas focused NGO.

Fri
01-Aug-2003

sector advocacy

Goodness! I got the job I applied for within BOND. The decision making process was a bit agonisingly long, as they were debating between different candidates and it was a close thing. But now I'm going to be Sector Advocacy Officer from 22 September. Very exciting, in an dry office job kind of way! I will having to learn a lot more about funding and charity law and regulation. I will be co-ordinating a series of very cool academic seminars on the future of NGOs as well, which is rather fabulous.

Fri
27-Jun-2003

friday intrigue

More BOND office intrigue today, with various members of our team set to mount some kind of HR policy related rebellion against other members of the team. Rah!

Office intrigue is funny. We all do it round the water cooler, by the kettle. A sure sign that something is up is an invitation to go and make a cup of tea together. Face to face bitching is so much more important than email as well, though amusing email exchanges certainly have their place. Email is accompanied by that terrible fear that you'll send it to the person you're bitching about by accident though...