This week the Economist published a slew of interesting pieces examining different fronts in the effort to curb climate change. The first was helpful rundown of the key factors affecting the upcoming United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Bali. Obviously, the issue of climate change has moved a great deal from where it was ten years ago during Kyoto negotiations. The piece helps focus in on the key factors for a meaningful agreement now.

Experienced code-breakers will be looking, essentially, for three things by which to judge whether Bali has been a success or a failure. The first is some sort of long-term commitment by all 192 signatories of the UNFCCC to deal with the problem, involving some sort of goal, such as temperature, emissions cuts or atmospheric carbon concentrations. The second is further commitments by developing countries to cut their emissions. The EU already committed itself to cuts of 20% below 1990 levels by 2020 at its spring conference earlier this year; and since the current American administration continues to oppose binding targets, such promises will have to come from other rich countries, such as Australia or Japan.

The third area concerns developing countries. They are not going to commit themselves to cuts. But activists hope that China and India—the nations everybody is watching—may throw America a bone. If the big developing countries agree to look into cutting emissions from particular sectors—an idea that the Bush administration has pushed—rather than from their economies as a whole, America will be likelier to commit itself to emissions controls. After all, it was the developing world's refusal to countenance cuts that led America to turn its back on Kyoto in the first place.

The second piece looks at one solution to this very problem: how to decrease emissions in developing economies. Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) are $5 billion market resulting from the Kyoto protocol. Under this program, poor countries earn credits for cutting or preventing emissions of greenhouse gases which can be bought by rich countries. Not a perfect solution, but a potential start.

Finally, the Economist examined the burgeoning religious environmental movement in the United States as a swing constituency affecting policy choices on climate change in the years to come.

The bottom line, according to the Economist: "A green jamboree in Indonesia will not achieve anything tangible, but it matters." Such is the way of public policy advocacy.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:18 PM | Permalink

Connect Us, a collaborative effort to get funders of global issues advocacy pulling in the same direction, is fresh off a recent round of funding targeting specific global issues that will be (or should be) at the top of the agenda in the years to come. The organization -- part operating foundation, part grant-maker -- is making its ideas, resources and partners available to the wider global issues community. You can view its new newsletter here and sign up.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:05 PM | Permalink

We've often used and recommended the terminology of "investment" in GII's work on messaging for global development, health and other global issues. A Washington Post article earlier this week confirmed that, for nonprofits, social investments realize impressive returns.

The study, released [Monday], found that many of the area's 7,614 nonprofits deliver such key services as health care in more cost-efficient ways than the government. Nonprofits also address social problems -- including homelessness, hunger, violence and illiteracy -- in the early stages, which prevents additional public spending, according to the report...

Viki Betancourt, community outreach manager of the World Bank, said it is important to document in financial terms the impact of charitable contributions. Applying an economic value to nonprofits may increase donations from corporations and wealthy business leaders, who would consider such giving a smart investment, she said.

"I'm a huge believer that you have to know who you're investing in," Betancourt said. "No one goes out and buys a car and doesn't take care of it for five years. So why would you put your money in a nonprofit and not follow it, not know where it's going? You always want to invest your money wisely."

The study that the Post cited examined mostly nonprofit work that is local to the District, but the implications for nonprofits tackling similar issues around the world are undeniable: nonprofits should welcome such economic analysis. It can help differentiate and legitimize their work as more than simple charity.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:41 AM | Permalink

Foreign Policy's Passport Blog ran a quick analysis of the discussion of global issues (or lack thereof) in last night's Republican YouTube debate. There's nothing surprising about this:

• Iraq: 10
  
• China: 5 (Tancredo and Hunter only)
  
• Afghanistan: 3
  
• Europe: 1 (a complaint from Giuliani about subsidies)
  
• Iran: 1
  
• Russia: 0
  
• India: 0
  
• North Korea: 0
  
• Proliferation: 0
  
• Nuclear: 0
  
• Diplomacy: 0
  
• Sudan or Darfur: 0
  
• Pakistan: 0
  
• United Nations: 0

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 7:08 PM | Permalink

Slate picked up on a fascinating study by two economists who used changes in the Indian political system to examine the effect of gender on the quality of governance. They found that women did better -- but they were appreciated less.

Rural Indians are learning firsthand what it's like to live under female leadership as a result of a 1991 law that restricted one-third of village council elections to female candidates. The villagers' experiences are analyzed by economists Esther Duflo and Petia Topalova in a recent unpublished study. Using opinion surveys and data on local "public goods"—like schools, roads, and water pumps—Duflo and Topalova find that the villages headed by women invested in more services that benefited the entire community than did those with gender-neutral elections, nearly all of which were won by men. But as the opinion polls showed, for all their effectiveness, the women's governance was literally a thankless effort, with the new leaders getting lower approval ratings than their male counterparts.

Ray Fisman, writing for Slate, extrapolates what this might mean if Hillary Clinton were elected as president. The "competent but unlikable" tag that Clinton seems to carry holds up with this and other studies examining how women are viewed when they occupy positions of authority. Even if Clinton does a great job, Fisman wonders whether voters would recognize her accomplishments.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:28 PM | Permalink

During a series of meetings that GII co-hosted with the 3D Security Initiative last fall, we heard repeatedly from participants in uniform how many in the Pentagon were calling for more and better civilian capacity in the development, diplomacy and peacebuilding fields. Yet even with the creation of the Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) in the State Department and talk of a civilian reconstruction corps, development and diplomacy remain the small "D's" and defense remains the big one.

So it's something to hear Defense Secretary Robert Gates call for "a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security — diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action and economic reconstruction and development,” at Kansas State University on Monday. As the Campaign for US Global Leadership points out, a host of reports have called for more parity between the "3 D's," including the 2006 National Security Strategy, the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, and the 9/11 Commission Report. Now, let's see Gates lobby Congress to get it done.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:35 PM | Permalink

Buying pricey paid media in the New York Times is not often, to my mind, a highly effective use of philanthropic dollars. But the John Templeton Foundation got its money's worth in a recent two-page spread that asked leading scholars and practitioners, "Will Money Solve Africa's Development Problems?"

The big ad (which the NYT ran at least a couple of times last weekend) worked because it it did not come off as a simple positioning piece for Templeton's views on the matter -- it communicates those without stopping there. Just as it appears on the site, the ad simply asked the question and listed eight different (and differently reasoned) viewpoints in response, which included some responses we've heard before (William Easterly, Ashraf Ghani) and some that fall outside the standard "pro-poor v. pro-market" debates that we hear regularly. On this front I very much enjoyed Michael Fairbanks' thoughts, which begin, "I thought so..." I relate to his objections to "checkbook development" for the same reasons I relate to objections to overspending on the U.S. military: "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Now, it must be acknowledged that Templeton is clearly looking to undermine the foreign aid paradigm with this ad. But there are plenty of organizations looking to do that. What intrigued me enough about this ad to want to pass it on to friends and colleagues was the fact that I felt I'd been invited into a symposium in broadsheet -- not bashed over the head with pitiful images or shocking statistics of waste. The whole experience felt positively high-brow; perfectly suited for its distinguished vehicle, The New York Times.

A case study for communicators.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:25 PM | Permalink

The Washington Post ran a story today about a new State Department "digital outreach team" that posts to influential Arabic blogs.

The State Department team's approach is to join a blog's conversation, often when it turns to the motivation for U.S. policy toward Iraq, and when others are claiming that the U.S. occupation is meant to help Israel or to secure oil. "Our job is to address that motivation issue and show them that that's not the motivation," MacInnes said.

"You can't just say, 'Well, here's our policy,' and drop it into the blog. You have to have what I call a bridge," MacInnes said. He then described using a sporting or current event or even poetry that would "allow one to get to be in a conversational mode with people."

This is a tricky operation: the conversational blogging format isn't particularly amenable to official government spokes-speak. And of course blogging isn't known as the go-to method for changing minds on an issue -- most blogs preach to the converted as a rule. But it seems that this particular team isn't getting shouted out of the digital room. It's encouraging to hear that somewhere within our public diplomacy apparatus, there is a real conversation happening, with real differences of opinion aired:

Even though the State Department employees were not going into hard-core terrorist sites, the worry, MacInnes said, was that after identifying themselves and using their own names, "we would be, in the parlance of the Internet, 'flamed' when we come on" -- meaning their entries would be subjected to intense attacks.

They were not, and there were such posts as, "We don't like your policies but we're sure glad you're here talking to us about it," MacInnes said. As a result, State is expanding the team to six speakers of Arabic, two of Persian and one of Urdu.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:32 PM | Permalink

As we've observed in the past, it's awfully difficult for major powers like the United States or China to brush away objections to problematic policies with a national branding campaign. The Council on Foreign Relations interviewed national branding expert Simon Anholt on this point, who replied: “I don’t tell countries how to do marketing. I advise them on what sorts of policies they need to undertake in order to earn the reputation they feel they deserve.”

On the flipside, smallish, relatively unknown countries might really benefit from a national branding effort that highlights hidden strengths:

Several experts, including Anholt, note the overwhelmingly positive effects truthful branding can have, especially for small developing countries. Joshua Fouts, who runs the Center on Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, says effective marketing gets smaller countries “involved in the global conversation.” Such marketing opens the possibility of countries more efficiently conveying what they do well, thus becoming “niche players”—regional finance hubs, say, or eccentric tourist destinations, or cultural centers focusing specifically on music or sport.

Go to it, Vanuatu.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:26 PM | Permalink

Writing on the SSIR blog, Lucy Bernholz is chock full of good ideas that new foundations and seasoned philanthropists alike can use to re-think their strategies going into "the giving season" these next few months. Bernholz is the founder and president of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc, a strategy consulting firm that helped to cement some of the formative ideas behind our advocacy evaluation and planning tool, Continuous Progress.

Bernholz is eager for new foundations to build on past shortcomings and avoid the insular, sluggish habits that tempt philanthropists -- who do, after all, set priorities with their funding decisions -- to keep their cards close. She wants new foundations to think about how they might put the "wisdom of crowds" to work; or outsource program decisions to expert partners who "make the direct grants, manage partner relations, and report on metrics." These approaches hold special promise: they could wring more value out of foundations' investments and lead to easier measurement and clearer results among different philanthropies working on similar issues:

The expertise of these expert partners (read: investment manager) can be easily leveraged – lots of foundations can bet their “education” strategy on the same explicit set of metrics and goals. The cost of foundation work would go down, the aggregation of resources would go up, and the use of shared metrics and concrete goals would increase. The market would function to make sure there was both a range of partners, and that they succeeded as promised – those that wouldn’t, would go out of business. The range of entities that might play this outsourced program investment role is wide and diverse – nonprofits, consulting firms, commercial media outlets, public agencies – an attribute that should lead to competitive creation of identifiable niches, markers of success, and more standardized metrics.

There's a lot more: Observing a "bubble" in philanthropic prizes, Berholz wants new foundations to think carefully about their funding strategies to make sure they connect with the foundation's goals over time; she advises foundations to look carefully at "where the information you need to achieve philanthropic progress lives" and how to access and disseminate it; she notes that broader social and market trends can be the best resources to spur (and fund) change; and, finally, Bernholz wants foundations to think about how to reward success the way Kiva.org and other innovative organizations have done.

For foundation planners, philanthropists and program staff, this is a cornucopia of forward-thinking. Be sure to allow time for digestion.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:46 PM | Permalink

News, again, from Bangladesh is bleak. It's early to tell whether a regional or global humanitarian response will be warranted. Although this typhoon occurred on nearly the same date as the epic 1970 storm that claimed up to half a million lives, no reports are approaching this level of devastation, thankfully.

But still, look at the picture of the elephant pushing the bus out of the tree.

That's why I'm writing about this today. Because news coverage of the Bangladeshi storm threatens to join the chorus of "daily bus plunge" stories (although the bus in this story appears to be involved in an intimate relationship with an elephant). The daily bus plunge -- that endless, daily cavalcade of bad news that substitutes for "world news" in most American news sources -- hasn't gone away, and it makes the job of messengers on global issues from CARE to WWF more difficult every day. Look at the International Herald Tribune's cover photo of helpless Bangladeshis huddling in the storm's wake.

Contrast it with this AP photo from the Times of India of a storm survivor holding her grandchild, named "Cyclone," outside a scene of wreckage.

Images like this can make us understand something better, draw the right conclusions or plunge readers down a road of negative conclusions. I cringe as global politics increasingly becomes more threatening to America and more difficult to understand. And I wince at the idea that ordinary Americans will need to build a pretty sophisticated understanding of global politics to draw informed conclusions about our next leaders and our next conflicts.

Take for example what is unfolding now in Pakistan. This link actually takes you to a piece from more than two weeks ago -- before Pakistan underwent a declared emergency and the wheel really began to come off our closest nuclear-armed ally in the Islamic world. The cover line for this story was "The most dangerous nation in the world isn't Iraq. It's Pakistan." Since this story ran, things have grown much more dangerous in Pakistan. The images have been equally devastating. It's easy to see how the confusing swirl of images and news from Pakistan over the last two weeks has left Americans wondering who our friends are in the region.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 10:47 AM | Permalink

A bit outside our norm for this blog, but useful news for communicators everywhere:

New research pioneered at the University of NSW shows the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time.

The findings show there are limits on the brain's capacity to process and retain information in short-term memory.

John Sweller, from the university's faculty of education, developed the "cognitive load theory".

"The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster," Professor Sweller said. "It should be ditched."

"It is effective to speak to a diagram, because it presents information in a different form. But it is not effective to speak the same words that are written, because it is putting too much load on the mind and decreases your ability to understand what is being presented."

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:43 PM | Permalink

My colleagues and I love social math because it tells stories and paints pictures that "stick," to steal a phrase. Earlier this year the Center for Global Development experimented with social math as a way to communicate the links between global warming and hurricanes. This week it put the finishing touches on a project that improves on this earlier work in partnership with the Confronting Climate Change Initiative: CARMA, a new website that pulls together "the world's most detailed and comprehensive information on carbon emissions resulting from the production of electricity."

That data alone, all in one place, is very useful if you're a climatologist or engineer. But from an advocacy communications perspective, the real strength of the site is the way it manages the data, layering it over easily-understood, eye-catching Google maps and allowing users to dig as deep by searching, sorting or parsing as one would like. You can search CARMA by country, state, province, county, metro area, city, power company, power plant, or zip code.

Advocates for action on climate change have had a big year. The issue appears, in one form or another, in business, sports, news and technology publications regularly. Television and film are also coming around. The public acknowledges the problem -- but it's much harder to make the issue a local one. Advocates face a "problem of the commons": Businesses and individuals will ask, "When the problem is everywhere, why should we start with me?" CARMA's big red dots are one good reason.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:44 AM | Permalink

Last fall the GII convened several meetings that examined the role the Department of Defense is playing in delivering U.S. official development assistance. Stewart Patrick, a frequent contributor to our discussions last year, weighed in this week with a new report posted to the Center for Global Development site.

The report is particularly useful if you're interested in drilling down into the budget numbers to see what foreign policy and development activities DoD is engaged in, and where. Amazingly, "The Pentagon now handles more than 20 percent of U.S. official development assistance (ODA), up from 6 percent only five years ago." Of course, much of this is being spent in Afghanistan and Iraq, unique situations that muddy the numbers. Patrick and fellow researcher Kaysie Brown are most interested in whether ramped up DoD assistance will create a new status quo that shifts responsibilities from civilian government agencies toward DoD in the future.

One more piece of the foreign assistance pie to hold your breath about as we wait for resolution to the (slowly) unfolding drama between the State Department and USAID.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:27 PM | Permalink

Presidential candidate Barrack Obama recently stopped wearing an American flag pin on his lapel. Questioned about the absent pin, Obama replied that such flare had "become a substitute for true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security." This fair point notwithstanding, a tempest in a teapot ensued, culminating in this fine summation of the issue from Sean Hannity: "Why do we wear pins? Because our country is under attack!"

As my wife remarked, all this would make for an excellent Onion article. Mad-cap political humor at its finest. But also sad. On Veterans Day weekend, we can do better than this.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:57 AM | Permalink

Not that we needed another reason to question U.S. agricultural subsidies, but it is jarring to read how difficult a time Indian farmers are having when we hear constant reminders of India's relentless march toward prosperity. This week the Council on Foreign Relations released a piece titled "Down on the Farm in India," that explores the large gap between overall economic growth and that in the rural agricultural sector, which accounts for about 60 percent of livelihoods in India.

Reliance on commodities will always make life difficult as prices swing and competition with hi-tech alternatives intensifies, but what's worse is that Indian farmers are playing against a stacked deck:

In the midst of this growing crisis, India has felt international pressure to curb protectionism and cut subsidies to agriculture at the Doha round of the world trade talks. But CFR Senior Fellow Jagdish Bhagwati writes the United States is to blame for stalling trade talks, saying the United States refuses to cut its own farm subsidies but expects Indian peasants to compete with subsidized farmers in rich countries. The Indian Planning Commission’s midterm appraisal (PDF) of the country’s tenth five-year plan (2002-2007) admitted the pitfalls of liberalization for the farm sector. According to the U.S Department of Agriculture, India removed all quantitative barriers to agricultural imports by 2001 and “voluntarily reduced tariffs below required levels for a number of commodities.”

It is truly dispiriting to see the U.S. still gaming international agricultural markets while farmers in India are forced to compete on price with the handicap of vastly inferior infrastructure. Indian farmers are in many senses left behind, both among the priorities set by their own government and by the policies of those abroad. But there are those creating genuinely sustainable solutions for poor, off-the-grid rural farmers with no infrastructure and few options. This is where the future lies for Indian farmers.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:50 PM | Permalink

I don't like to write too much about the presidential campaign except insofar as it concerns the way candidates are approaching global issues, but Gail Collins' column in today's New York Times is simply too tasty a treat to pass up. Having followed Pat Robertson's shenanigans for years as a sort of parlor game (note Mr. Robertson to the right, leg-pressing 2000 lbs), I -- like many others -- was flabbergasted to learn that he chose to endorse Rudy Giuliani for president.

Collins is surprised just like the rest of us, and -- while she can only theorize about Robertson's reasons -- she takes us on a memorable tour of pronouncements, calculated and no:

Even within the ranks of the social conservatives, Robertson is regarded as a tad over the top. Who among us will forget the time he claimed that the special protein shake he was marketing had enabled him to leg-press 2,000 pounds? Or the time he said God had given Ariel Sharon a massive stroke because he let the Palestinians run Gaza? (He did apologize for saying the United States should assassinate the president of Venezuela.)

Still, the endorsement must have been a blow to Mitt Romney. He has gotten a couple of social conservatives on his side. But given the way he’s prostrated himself before the right wing, renouncing every position he’s ever held, all the way down to stem cells, you’d think he’d do better. It’s a mystery why even someone as loopy as Robertson would pass up the exhaustingly virtuous family man for a longtime hound dog like Rudy, who has been qualifying his liberal social positions but never really retracting them.

I really do wonder who will line up in whose camp come next year. I credit Robertson for throwing a curveball. (Though he's not entirely alone. Note that Fred Thompson recently threw one of his own to presumed core constituents.)

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:47 PM | Permalink

Reading about a new wind-up light developed by The Freeplay Foundation -- next to which kerosene, batteries and wood fires seem like seriously retrograde ways to light the homes of poor African families -- I am struck (again) by how pivotal creative design is. It's not that aid workers aren't important, but creative efforts such as this one (and others before it) reshape the very problems on the development agenda. If I were tasked with making the choice on behalf of a developing country, I think I would opt for a contribution of Apple or Google's staff time over an equivalent (or even considerably larger) financial contribution. Of course, what's most needed is not innovators from Apple or Google, helpful as they would be, but creative design from locals who know the constraints of infrastructure and daily life only too well, enabling them to design to meet their own needs.

But the Freeplay Foundation isn't doing so badly either. This latest innovation comes on the heels of its last success: since it was established in 1998, the Foundation has given out more than 150,000 wind-up Lifeline radios.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:24 PM | Permalink

The title of this post may verge on the tongue-in-cheek, but the report that the CSIS Smart Power Commission has been working on for lo these many months was yesterday released to well-deserved fanfare; the project's scope and contributors are impressive. This what CSIS does best: serious rumination from seasoned practitioners at the highest levels -- from Chuck Hagel in the senate to Sylvia Matthews at the Gates Foundation to General Anthony Zinni and John Zogby -- about what constitutes real power (perhaps "sway" is a better word) in the international arena these days.

"Smart Power" is obviously a big topic. After diagnosing the problem (of which readers of this blog are well-aware) the commissioners broke their do-to list down as follows:

1. Alliances Partnerships, and Institutions - Rebuilding the foundation to deal with global challenges
2. Global Development - Developing a more unified approach, starting with public health
3. Public Diplomacy - Improving access to international knowledge and learning
4. Economic Integration - Increasing the benefits of trade for all people
5. Technology and Innovation - Addressing climate change and energy insecurity
The commissioners finish with a special section devoted to "Restoring Confidence in Government."

I've yet to dig into the report, but I know that the topline results from sections 2 and 3, at least, align very closely with the work that GII's friends, clients and partners are doing.

Global development: Elevating the role of development in U.S. foreign policy can help the United States align its own interests with the aspirations of people around the world.

Public diplomacy: Bringing foreign populations to our side depends on building long-term, people-to-people relationships, particularly among youth.

This report could, ideally, serve as a consensus document for the next administration, something particularly valuable to advocates for better development, health, and public diplomacy, who often struggle to fit their work into the big picture alongside defense, terrorism and other weighty issues. At the very least, such a high-level commission gives advocates new allies in this effort.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:03 PM | Permalink

I have been on a hobby horse about Pakistan for a while because I think it represents an object-lesson in the strange condition our foreign policy has found itself here as the Bush presidency winds down.

The hardest thing, I think, is for the public to understand the shift our foreign policy underwent over these last half-dozen years. I think it's safe to accurately map the larger change to the transformation of Secretary of State Rice, which Ilan Goldenberg characterizes accurately as "from the realist Scrowcroft protege into the idealistic and ineffective democracy promoter." Fred Kaplan's ardent attempt to diagram Rice's change is worth reading.

It's hard for the public to understand this because both models -- realist and democracy promoter -- involve some percentage of "the public doesn't want/need to know."

Our realist foreign policy for decades was designed around a noble mission pursued in ways noble and ignoble. The ignoble ways were mostly left off the front page, and the public willingly went along, choosing to notice the clandestine assassinations, installation of puppet governments, training camps for human-rights abusers and on and on only when it made for good film viewing.

The result, in our hyper-aware world was that nobody emerged with clean hands, but we had won the cold war and everyone wanted a piece of that victory, so the realist policies were sustained, then, in the judgment of history.

The Clinton Years seemed anomalous. We still maintained lots of classic realist foreign policy -- propping up/cozying up to regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the interest of regional stability and the free flow of delicious natural resources and the like. The public remained blithely unaware. Indeed, the end of the cold war had essentially convinced them that the world wasn't out to get us after all, and that we should buy lots of internet stocks.

After September 11, 2001, our foreign policy was at a turning point. We could carry on the realist business that had, admittedly, worked for a while. Or we could try something new. Something that might not require all the finesse and compromise of the realist business and could, essentially, take or leave the messy bits about tolerating countries we don't like merely because of strategic interests.

We went this new route, with all kinds of caveats and qualifications, and ended up with the odd patchwork of absolutes and exceptions that we're desperately trying to navigate now as Pakistan lurches toward despotism. This nuclear-armed nation has essentially made none of the progress we've aspired to on their behalf. Prior to the emergency declaration last week, there really wasn't any more of a hope for democracy emerging in Pakistan than there was for a democracy emerging in my shoe. But they had nuclear weapons, and had (with lots of our realist foreign policy help) built al Qaeda and probably knew more about the places Osama bin Laden was hiding than anyone else. We showered them with aid. We looked the other way when perhaps the greatest proliferation threat the world has known, A.Q. Khan, was granted a pardon and greeted as a hero in Pakistan. We found ourselves with fewer and fewer options to pursue to get what we wanted from Pakistan.

Now the last door may be closed. Pakistan holds all the cards, and, it seems we'll sit on our hands but not sit on the money we've been sending Pakistan since 9/11 (what we're buying isn't clear)

The money bit (ha-ha) is here:

In Islamabad, aides to General Musharraf — who had dismissed pleas on Friday from Ms. Rice and Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior military commander in the Middle East, to avoid the state-of-emergency declaration — said they had anticipated that there would be few real consequences.

They called the American reaction “muted,” saying General Musharraf had not received phone calls of protest from Mr. Bush or other senior American officials. In unusually candid terms, they said American officials supported stability over democracy.

“They would rather have a stable Pakistan — albeit with some restrictive norms — than have more democracy prone to fall in the hands of extremists,” said Tariq Azim Khan, the minister of state for information. “Given the choice, I know what our friends would choose.”

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:50 PM | Permalink

Continuous Progress Strategic Services -- the GII's consulting arm -- is happy to present the nearly-out-of-beta Advocacy Progress Planner. We've been field-testing, from a premature debut at a training in Ramallah to a multi-user workshop this week here in our offices, and we're pleased to say that the tool has been holding up well.

The Advocacy Progress Planner was designed to give you and your team an at-a-glance look at the ingredients of your advocacy efforts. It can guide you to clarify the elements of your own campaign: goals and impacts; audience; what you bring to your campaign; the activities and tactics you're planning for; and benchmarks along the way to your goals. As you click on your choices in each area, you will see your campaign strategy come into focus. And you’ll get some clues about how to gauge your progress and make improvements.

As you and your colleagues ask and answer these tough questions, you can improve your model - and your advocacy. When you're ready, you can print out a PDF of the customized logic model with your notes, or click a link to get an individual URL you and your team can use to revisit the logic model. Visit the Advocacy Progress Planner now at planning.continuousprogress.org.

Continuous Progress Strategic Services developed the Advocacy Progress Planner online from a Composite Logic Model built by a team of evaluation experts led by Julia Coffman of the Harvard Family Research Project. Our tool can serve both planners and evaluators. The Composite Logic Model is a more complex and robust tool designed for evaluation and planning experts to deeply analyze a campaign. To learn more about the ways the Composite Logic Model can be used, consider consulting the PDFs available here. They include a one-page layout of the offline Composite Logic Model, an annotated demonstration of a Composite Logic Model used to plan a campaign and one used to evaluate a campaign.

Funding for the original composite logic model came from The California Endowment, the Annie E Casey Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies. The California Endowment funded the creation of the online version.

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 11:18 AM | Permalink

The State Department is getting hammered lately. Low-level folks inside are wondering if they will be sent to Iraq and chafing at the idea. Near-insurrection (for the State Department at least) was in the offing at a town hall meeting this week. That story includes a little detail about the feeling of many FSOs that the Secretary of State isn't fighting for them. It's frightening stuff. I've heard from some in the Department that the next Secretary will spend years rebuilding the institution just to get the train back on the track, not to mention moving forward.

Noticing all that blood in the water combined with Karen Hughes' announced departure this week (she began her goal-post-moving combination "my work is done"/"this isn't as easy as it looks" tour this morning with an NPR interview), I went over to the State Department blog to see if there was anything interesting going on there. Not much, except this days-old piece which seems like a heavily redacted apologia for State's failure to protect/devise escape routes for Iraqis who work with the US in Baghdad. (The George Packer item linked there is disturbing to say the least.)

Remembering that George Packer piece, I was sitting on all this information when I saw Packer's latest blog post about the refugee issue. I love it when there a question in one post and is answered in another. Rafael Foley, the State Department Refugee Coordinator, meets with some of the few Iraqis who get to Jordan to stand for a visa to go to America. Foley wonders "how we could do better, for them and for those like them still needing our assistance."

Packer's got the answer. Don't lobby "against a Senate resolution that would increase the number of special immigrant visas for Iraqis by tenfold and allow applications to be reviewed inside Iraq."

Posted by Tarek Rizk at 12:45 PM | Permalink

The world of public policy and public will advocacy is changing fast. For a field that, just a few years ago, lacked a "community of practice" with agreed standards and metrics, there is a lot of work being done to cement those pieces. This week, Innovation Network released the second issue of a new online newsletter that compiles much of this work in one place. You get the feeling of a field of evolving practice from the newsletter's layout, which includes sections on "What's New," "Evaluation Stories" and "Looking Ahead."

Of note from us at Continuous Progress Strategic Services is item two on the newsletter, which details the Composite Logic Model that provides the foundation for a brand new online tool from our shop: the Advocacy Progress Planner. More on this tool in a few minutes...

But that's not all from the world of advocacy development. See also a post from e-politics.com, with links to a collection of "Free Online Political Advocacy Tools."

[Most useful is] Center for American Progress web guru Annie Schutte’s list of various tools for presenting advocacy information online. Her index covers mapping applications, timeline generators, chart and graph creators and more — the kind of non-sexy technologies that actually help get a message across in a way that words alone can’t.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:18 AM | Permalink