Activism FAIL.

I received an email today from One.org. As regular readers will know, I’ve often spoken well of this charity, having found them to be pretty right on most of the time. The email says that today is the global day of action against extreme poverty. So far so good. What does One.org want me to do? Write to my MP? Organise a march? Write to my local newspaper? Give some money, perhaps?

Not at all. That’s just not sexy anymore. They’d prefer I tweeted:

I’m standing up to end poverty today with @ONEcampaign. Pls RT and join me. #standup09

or posted a Facebook status:

I’m standing up to end poverty today with @ONE. Please post this as your status and join me.

How does this constitute standing up to end poverty? Saying that I’m against poverty? How original. How productive.

Apparently:

The last 2 years we’ve set a new world record, and if everyone takes part and spreads the world, we may very well go down in the pages of Guinness again this year. So start right now. Stand up.

Now I know that the average person doesn’t have time to get involved with in-depth activism. And I know that raising awareness is important. But I wonder if this kind of request isn’t actually counter-productive. If all NGOs can muster for the global day of action is twittering, I simply despair. I see a race to the bottom, with organisations competing against each other to see who can ask for the least committment and the least meaningful action from their supporters. Am I being too cynical?

‘One World Conservatism’: international development policy from the Conservative Party

The Conservative Party here in the UK have been unveiling their proposed policies on international development, should they (as widely expected) win the next general election, expected in May. Having admirably promised to ‘ring fence‘ international development spending, their green paper states that:

Any future government will have to take tough decisions to balance the books – and that means cutting back the rate of growth of government spending. The Conservative Party has made the bold pledge, even in the context of this fiscal squeeze, to increase the level of British aid. We have done so, above all, because it is morally right to do so. Cutbacks must not cost lives.

However, they also propose to:

establish a new MyAid fund, worth £40 million in its first year. Every taxpayer will be able to log on to the MyAid website and view details of ten ongoing DFID-funded aid programmes, and vote for which one they think should receive the extra money. The options will include programmes run directly by DFID, as well as those run by respected NGOs. The Fund will then be distributed between the ten programmes in proportion to how many votes they receive. For example, if 25 per cent of people vote for the DFID programme in Malawi, that programme would receive 25 per cent of the Fund – £10 million. Everyone who votes will be kept up to date with regular email updates about the progress of ‘their’ project.

(H/T Brian Barder.) Now I like to think of myself as a democrat. I also like to think that by and large, on broad moral issues, the people as whole know best. But international development is a much, much more complicated field than many people think. With the greatest of respect to the British citizen, if the average person in the street was able to competently evaluate development projects, then why is it that the development industry continues to be plagued by horror stories of projects gone wrong, even as the expertise of aid workers is ever increasing? The truth is that workable aid projects are really really hard to do well. A vox pop/Big Brother approach is not the way to go about it.

The Overseas Development Institute concluded that ‘there are as many questions here as answers’. This is to be expected of a green paper. Yet:

the devil lies in the detail and there is much in the chapter on value for money, and indeed in the whole report, that raises further questions. On how aid is spent, for example, it is not clear what the criteria will be for allocating aid by country if, as the Green Paper states, the 108 countries in which DFID works at present  is too many (even though 90% of current spending is concentrated in 23 countries).

Duncan Green adds that the Tories ‘love NGOs. Get ready for weird lobby meetings in which NGOs are arguing for channelling funding for essential services via the state, rather than via NGOs’. Yet the Conservatives’ free market preferences haven’t gone down well with charities, particularly when it comes to their proposals on aid vouchers. The vouchers:

would be redeemable for development services of any kind with a supplier of their choice. Such an innovation would help demonstrate what poor people really want – and who they perceive to be most effective in meeting their needs. Clearly, this will only work where there is a genuine choice between different service providers, and is not a substitute for comprehensive efforts to strengthen the capacity of national governments to guarantee access to essential services for their people. We will also examine carefully the case for using a more limited type of voucher in certain emergency situations, where providing people with aid vouchers rather than food would enable them to access products through local markets, rather than shipping in imports and putting local providers out of business.

In response, an Oxfam spokesman emphasised the impotence of vouchers where basic services do not exist, arguing that ‘what is needed is aid money invested in helping poor countries build and maintain free public health and education systems.’ Kevin Watkins was more outspoken, arguing that a voucher system would be ‘using vulnerable people to advance an ideologically loaded, market-based vision for education, which would exclude millions of kids from school. It completely overlooks the achievements of publicly financed, publicly provided education in countries such as Ethiopia and Tanzania. Watkins is right to call out the Conservatives on what they claim is a ‘non-ideological approach’ to aid delivery. There is no such thing.

Pre-European election activism

War on Want are running a campaign to encourage voters to lobby their local candidate for the European parliament on the subject of the EU’s trade politics. Their template looks like this:

I am writing to you as a constituent deeply concerned that European trade policies are exacerbating poverty and misery across the world. I would like to see a major change in the EU’s approach to international trade, so that it puts the needs and rights of poor people before commercial advantage for European companies.

As such, I want to vote for a candidate that will take action to help bring about a full-scale rethink of the EU’s trade policy and to ensure that it prioritises development, environmental sustainability and human rights in the world’s poorest countries. Please sign the pledge below to show your commitment to take action.

“If elected as a Member of the European Parliament in June 2009, I pledge to undertake some or all of the following activities:

• Write to the Trade Commissioner Baroness Ashton, and to the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, urging them to commit to a rethink before the end of 2009.
• Demand a cross-committee investigation in the European Parliament of the development, environment and human rights impacts of EU trade policies in developing countries.
• Sign a resolution in the European Parliament in support of a rethink of the EU’s trade strategy and policies.
• In Autumn 2009, actively participate in scrutiny of the new European Commission and its trade and development strategies.
• Write to the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso and to the Commissioner of Administrative Affairs, Audit and Anti-Fraud, Siim Kallas, to call for a mandatory register of lobbyists.”

Aside from the manifest righteousness of the cause itself, it is pleasing to see an NGO asking its supporters to do something more than just sign an electronic petition. War on Want’s campaign is asking us to enagage in some real interaction with our (would-be) elected representatives. That’s how it’s meant to work in a democratic society. More of this sort of thing, please!