Swimming Alone? The Role of Social Capital for Enhancing Climate Resilience in Bangladesh
By Joanne Jordan
Social capital is becoming increasingly recognised as having a key role in enhancing resilience to climate stress. Joanne Jordan, Lecturer in Climate Change and Development at IDPM, considers in a paper recently published in Climate and Development, the relative importance of different types of social capital for enhancing resilience, by exploring how relationships of exchange and reciprocity influence responses to climate stress in South-west Bangladesh. Specifically, she identifies four types of social capital-based support (with monetary support as a subset) and the interlinkages among the types (and processes) of social capital with diverse effects on resilience to climate stress.
Policies for youth employment: What can we learn from Lord Sugar’s The Apprentice?
By Nicola Banks
The Apprentice is one of my TV highlights. Watching through open fingers as Lord Alan Sugar tries to find his next business partner amongst a bunch of hapless contestants makes one thing very clear: No amount of self-belief can make you a successful entrepreneur. Enthusiasm can’t make up for a lack of customer awareness or critical business skills…watching James ‘Multiple Business Owner’ Hill singing The Wheels on the Bus while his tour customers groaned and threw tomatoes (not literally) is one of countless comedic illustrations of this.
Band Aid Thirty, the IMF and the call to trust the doctor!
By Tanja Müller
Of course something was to happen for the 3oth anniversary of Band Aid, and the recent Ebola epidemic provided an opportunity too good to miss for self-obsessed Geldof and company! I will not engage here with the wider critique of the Band Aid approach to ‘Africa’, and have in fact done so in a blog long before the Band Aid 30 announcement and recording.
Band Aid 30: ‘Buy the song. Stop the virus’. Just don’t ask how.
By Róisín Read
Since Bob Geldof announced he was re-recording ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’ the media has seized upon the opportunity to report on every minutiae of celebrity involvement. From whether the BBC would excuse Rita Ora from The Voice (they did), to Adele’s non-involvement (she made a donation to Oxfam instead), to Damon Albarn questioning western ideas of charity, to Fuse ODG’s discomfort with the negative portrayal of Africa, the media has seize upon each new titbit, eager to stir up a storm.
I am not intending to add to the multitude of voices challenging Band Aid for its portrayal of Africa, musical quality, or even the tax records of those involvement (though I share many of these concerns). My concern here is more mundane: how will the money be spent? Or more accurately why no one seems concerned by the lack of information about how the money will be spent.
At first I just tried to ignore Band Aid, but that proved impossible. Every time I turned on the news, listened to the radio or looked at a news website, I encountered articles and features aplenty telling me that Band Aid was raising money to fight Ebola in West Africa. The first couple of times I heard or read this I let it go, but with Bob Geldof’s interview on the Today programme that changed. I waited, listening for that all important question: how would the money be spent? It never came and my #bandaidrage began to simmer.
That morning, I endeavoured to find out. After an hour of searching, the best information available was from the terms and conditions section of the Band Aid 30 website (slogan: ‘Buy the song. Stop the virus’) telling me that ‘All proceeds from the Band Aid 30 competition will be donated to the intervention and prevention of the spread of Ebola’, and on the donations page more helpful information that ‘This year the Band Aid Trust will administer funds from #BandAid30 towards efforts to fight the spread of Ebola and to care for its victims’. Leaving aside the confused reference to proceeds being part of a ‘competition’, I am still in the dark about how the money raised will actually be spent.
The Band Aid Trust’s mandate is apparently the ‘relief of hunger and poverty in Ethiopia and the neighbourhood thereof’. Only a very generous interpretation of this mandate would allow for the fighting of Ebola in West Africa to be included. Furthermore, from the information on the website, there is no commitment that the money will be spent in or even on West Africa.
So, why aren’t the media and the Band Aid buying public asking how the money will be spent? I’ve only encountered two such instances, Laura Seay on The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog and Nigerian musician Breeze interviewed on Radio 4’s The World Tonight. The DEC Ebola Crisis Appeal makes clear which organisations it will pass the donated funds onto, people can look into those organisations and make an informed decision about whether they want to contribute to those activities. With Band Aid, they do not have this option. We don’t even have an idea of the timeframe in which the funds will be spent.
This is blind giving at its very worst. Band Aid has replaced the act of giving to an organisation in support of a cause with a transaction. We have been told in no uncertain terms by Geldof, that it doesn’t matter whether we like the song, we should just buy it anyway. It seems it doesn’t matter if we don’t know how the money will be spent either. The problem with this is that it suggests the act of giving is what matters, when actually it is the outcome that counts.
I think Breeze summed it up pretty well on Radio 4’s The World Tonight:
Breeze: ‘We don’t actually know if the funds that are going to be raised, are going to actually go to the right places. Are they going to get to the organisations that are on the ground, that are actually doing all the hard work in the countries?’
Ritula Shah: ‘We have to hope that that’s the intention’
Breeze: ‘Well, this is it. We have to hope and that’s part of the problem, there’s no transparency’.
My #bandaidrage isn’t just at Bob Geldof and the Band Aid Trust. It’s at the media and the public who seem unconcerned about a huge fundraising exercise with no concrete information about how the money will be spent. As a fundraising initiative #BandAid30 has proved very successful. We have to hope that its spending of that money will be successful too.
This post was originally published at: http://www.blog.hcri.ac.uk/?p=1219
The Data Revolution Will Fail Without A Praxis Revolution
By Richard Heeks
Pose the following to data-revolution-for-development activists: “Show me an initiative of yours that has led to scaled, sustained development outcomes”.
If – as likely – they struggle, there’s a simple reason. We have not yet connected the data revolution to a praxis revolution for development. The data revolution takes advantage of technical changes to deliver new volume, speed, and variety of data. The praxis revolution makes changes to development processes and structures in order to turn that data into development outcomes.
Unequal power dynamics in landscape approaches must not be ignored, expert warns
By Kate Evans
NEW YORK—Social inequality is also part of the landscape—and so must be accounted for in landscape approaches to managing agriculture and forests, a development economics expert urges.
Beyond integration into global lead firms’ production networks
By Rory Horner
Rory Horner observes in an article in the current issue of Journal of Economic Geography how better development opportunities can be available outside global lead firms’ production networks, and how some regions and countries may benefit from restricting engagement with global lead firms.
Integration into the global economy has widely been regarded as a necessary component of economic development strategy since the 1980s. Often drawing on the successful East Asian experience, much research has emphasised how industrial upgrading can depend on participating in the value chains/production networks of the most significant lead firms in an industry.
Give me the money, now! But what will happen tomorrow? Ebola as a symbol for the ‘moral bankruptcy of capitalism’
By Tanja R. Müller
Speaking about one of the latest current global humanitarian crises, the Ebola epidemic in (mainly) Western Africa, Justin Forsyth, Chief Executive of Save the Children is on the BBC flagship radio four Today Programme demanding ‘urgent action’. He continues to say that some money has been pledged but not enough, speed is the answer of the day, time to think is later, act now, we are in a ‘race against time’, we need to do something ‘much more quickly’, ‘we need to get a lot of doctors in’ – those tropes are used repeatedly in a short interview sequence of less than three minutes – on the same day a Defeating Ebola in Sierra Leone Conference was being held in London on 2 October 2014.
Temporary workers in the electronics industry: consequences and potential solutions
By Dr Gale Raj-Reichert
The global electronics industry is one of the largest industrial sectors in the global economy. It is highly competitive, innovative, and fast changing with short product cycles. Some estimate that the industry employs the most workers and generates more revenue than any other sector in the world. In 2010, it was estimated the industry had 18 million workers worldwide. Many if not most of the jobs in the electronics industry take place in factories in developing countries that have been outsourced by companies, in particular brand firms, from developed countries.
Breaking through the Restrictions of Disciplinary Divides
By Rory Horner
Rory Horner observes in a recent Area article how disciplinary divides between geography and development studies can impede understanding of contemporary phenomena, and how those problems can be effectively addressed.
The world economic, social and political map and consequent geographies of development are rapidly changing, as a result of such trends as the growing influence of rising powers and simultaneous forms of crisis in both global North and South.