The Economist this week announces plans by the grandly titled Copenhagen Consensus to attempt to prioritise the best use of aid budgets. This is an ambitious undertaking by a panel including many nobel prize winners to perform cost-benefit analyses on ten "challenges".
The challenges are:
•Climate change
•Communicable diseases
•Armed conflicts
•Education
•Financial instability
•Governance and corruption
•Malnutrition and hunger
•Population and migration
•Sanitation and water
•Subsidies and trade barriers
Although the results may be interesting (and will undoubtedly ruffle the feathers of many aid agencies - no bad thing), it could turn into an extremely academic exercise with outcomes heavily dependent on finger in the air estimates of "knowable unknowns"
I think the ten challenges are not directly comparable. Some are what could be termed primary causes or drivers of others. (e.g. malnutrition and hunger in many sub-Saharan countries can be directly attributable to bad governance and corruption - ditto Armed conflicts; subsidies and trade barriers in the West can lead to the financial instability which may result in hunger, disease, lack of sanitation etc. in developing countries)
In short, these challenges are a mixture of causes and symptoms. Deal with the key causes (bad governance and trade barriers) and the symptoms, though not eradicated, have a chance of being effectively dealt with. Hopefully this study will contribute to the debate and highlight the fact that aid budgets should not just be thrown in the direction of the lobby that shout the loudest or have the "best" i.e. worst television footage
Thanks for your debut post on the new blog, Conor!
I think the best way for Aid agencies to prioritise is less to all settle on some kind of consensus but instead to each look individually at a reasonable objective assessment of their action. It is probably true in the majority of cases, excluding sudden emergencies, that aid actually causes more harm than good. In many ways it is analogous to welfare: great for helping you through a bad patch but terrible as a way of life.
Paul Theroux's book: Dark Star Safari, which I read last year, covers a lot of this thinking, almost as an aside to an engrossing travelogue through Africa.
Posted by: Frank McGahon | March 05, 2004 at 03:29 PM
We have decided that this exercise is important enough – and could eventually be misleading enough – to warrant independent coverage and discussions in The Commons Sustainability Agenda at http://ecoplan.org. You are welcome to check it out and join in with your critical comments and observations in the Discussion Forum which you will find on the site.
Posted by: Eric Britton | April 02, 2004 at 04:50 PM
Hello again: I would like to see if there might be any interest here for us to organize an “Always On” Poster Session to cover some of the goings on in Copenhagen. Check out progress on this communications tool at The Commons Sustainability Agenda at http://ecoplan.org, and let us know via [email protected] if you might be interested in taking part in such an open exchange (you will need a broadband connection and a good quality web cam… details on how this works can be had from our colleagues from SUNET - (Swedish University Computer Network) at http://www.meetings.sunet.se/index.html)
Posted by: Eric Britton | April 05, 2004 at 07:41 AM
This so-called "consensus" is a crime against this planet. On the top ten list of priorities, what do we NOT see? Deforestation, considered by all knowledgeable ecologists to be the primary evil of our time, and related to every other form of poverty. Over-fishing. Monetary and accounting reforms that would stop rewarding buying and writing off bigger pulp plants, bigger fishing boats (draggers, even!), and provided ecosystem service payments to keep forests in place.
It is certainly true that cutting industrial CO2 emissions with more expensive technologies is NOT the world's highest priority problem. Loss of forests, particularly biodiverse old growth forests, is. And this is not even on "their" agenda.
This is just as corrupt as the UN Millenium Declaration, and like that document hopelessly confuses the survival of this planet's ecosystems with the survival of its human populations (two different things that can't be confused - the planet needs what it needs and human needs must fit within its limits).
The UN is quickly becoming an enemy of this planet.
Posted by: Forest Troll | April 17, 2004 at 08:07 PM
the planet needs what it needs and human needs must fit within its limits
Err, no. The only "planet's needs" which ought to be recognised is those needs which allow it to remain an optimum habitat for humans. Human needs must always prevail over any abstract "needs" of the environment.
Posted by: Frank McGahon | April 17, 2004 at 11:20 PM
John Quiggin, over on Crooked Timber, has written a number of posts on the Copenhagen Consensus. Well worth the read.
Posted by: Ciarán | March 11, 2005 at 09:50 AM
Thanks for the tip, although I do find the Crooked Timberites to have something of a knee-jerk anti-Lomborg stance which can result in partisan defend-kyoto-at-all-costs-truth-and-logic-be-damned hackery and causes them to overlook or rubbish some important work done by the Copenhagen Consensus. Alex Tabarrok unpicks some of Quiggin's sophistry here
Posted by: Frank McGahon | March 11, 2005 at 11:22 AM