With the bailout package in limbo, the markets down and the economy stuck for lack of credit, the situation does not bode well for nonprofits (or anyone else, really). Whether you happen to be advocating for a funding increase overall or just trying to cover the operating expenses of your organization, most nonprofits are bound to have a tough time in the coming months.

But do not despair. This sort of funding climate will separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, but it will also make your organization stand out if you present a cogent ask for funding that will grow your operations over time without the need for continuing grants. When funders need to stretch their impact with fewer dollars, this sort of pitch is powerful. The Stanford Social Innovation Review's recent feature, "Money to Grow On," could not be more timely; it's meant to help donors and nonprofits alike approach the question of nonprofit "growth capital" in a serious way. This approach won't fit every organization (or even every worthy organization), but it will help some to evolve their ask significantly.

Finally, a note of optimism: Last week in New York, during full-fledged crisis mode, donors at the Clinton Global Initiative pledged $400 million for the "Global Health Mega-Commitment on Water and Sanitation" alone. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, "The effort aims to reach 8.5 million people and provide a billion liters of clean water to developing areas over the next several years." Not bad for an off week.

---
ADDED ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 3:

This just in from a Clinton Global Initiative organizer:

"At the close of the 2008 meeting, there were already 250 new commitments unveiled, valued at $8 billion to improve 158 million lives. These numbers will only continue to rise."

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:40 PM | Permalink

Thanks to the National Peace Corps Association for this advice on how to submit a question for consideration by the presidential candidates during their October 7 debate:

TAKE ACTION By Thursday, October 2nd: Submit a Question for the Next Presidential Debate

The next presidential debate on October 7th is a town hall forum that will focus on both domestic and foreign policy issues. Whether your passion is expanding Peace Corps, the global environment, poverty reduction, basic education, global health, disaster relief or other concerns, take a few moments to craft and submit a brief question to Senators McCain and Obama. Here's what you do:

Follow this link to MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/mydebates

1. At the Welcome page, click "Continue As A Guest"


2. When you come to the introduction, click "Skip This"


3. In the upper right hand corner, click "Submit a Question"


4. Your question cannot exceed 255 characters. Also, you will have to choose the topic.

Unfortunately, there is no "Foreign Policy" topic listed (topics do include "Iraq" and "Homeland Security") Choose the topic that comes closest, and follow the instructions.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:38 PM | Permalink

I confess to being a renewable energy news junkie. I'm convinced that this issue -- I'm using someone else's line here -- is "the Internet of the 21st century." That is to say, changes in the way we generate and use energy will define and reshape the marketplace and policy landscape the same way that the Internet has. So I didn't start reading The New York Times Magazine's article "Wind-Power Politics" to glean any lessons on advocacy; I started reading because I think that wind power is really cool.

I expected the article to take the tack of most renewable energy coverage: farsighted entrepreneur takes on established industry, changes minds, gains momentum, secures investment, then runs up against cost barriers, fluctuating energy prices and the Hard Realities of the Business. But I was surprised by this article, which traces the story of a big proposed offshore wind power project on the Delaware coast. Under all the R&D efforts, pricing models and industry hurdles, the bottom line is that wind power needs effective advocates. That's the only thing holding it back. The technology and economics are there. "It's about leadership." That's useful for we advocacy types to remember: sometimes political will really is the only thing standing in the way of progress.

Whatever eventually persuaded DeLuca, the lesson in Delaware is clear. "It's about the importance of leadership," says Ryan Wiser, a staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who has studied the barriers to renewable energy and the economics of wind power. Wiser cites Colorado as an example of a state shifting from fossil fuels to wind and other alternative sources of energy after electing a new governor, Bill Ritter, on a platform of green energy. "In a two-year period, Colorado made a total about-face," Wiser says. What was the difference? "The utility was the same. The economics were more or less the same. The decisive factor was the change in leadership." (my emphasis)

...

Nonetheless, many hurdles remain. Federal regulations governing the construction of offshore wind farms, for instance, haven't even been written. In the absence of a coherent federal energy policy, moreover, the states have begun to shape America's energy future. The result is a hodgepodge: 50 different states with different energy resources and utilities with varying degrees of receptivity to new forms of power generation.

"What we need," says Lester Brown, founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute, "is the grid equivalent of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System." Wind energy, according to Brown, would be the centerpiece of such a program because of its ability to scale up fast.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:37 PM | Permalink

What seemed like an interminable primary season has become a general election campaign season that can barely hope to treat rapidly unfolding events in the U.S. economy and around the world. At home and abroad, John McCain and Barack Obama have a lot of ground to cover during this election season. Who should they be listening to and what foreign policy issues, in the midst of all the economic turmoil, are most important?

Last week I wrote about what five former Secretaries of State (Part 1, Part 2) had to say about the foreign policy questions we currently face. This week the Chicago Council on Global Affairs releases its semi-annual poll of U.S. public attitudes on the subject. Some of the key findings, from today's press release, follow:

Days before presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama square off in a debate on U.S. foreign policy, a new poll by The Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows significant support among the American public for a broad range of major changes in U.S. foreign policy. Among the poll's conclusions:

• A large majority of Americans (81% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats) believe improving the U.S. standing in the world should be a "very important" foreign policy goal;
• Americans on both sides of the aisle endorse talking to leaders of "unfriendly" governments including Cuba (70%), North Korea (68%), Iran (65%), Burma (63%) and Zimbabwe (61%);
• A majority of Americans (67%) do not support an open-ended commitment to Iraq;

"Americans remain committed to international engagement and a robust military presence overseas," concludes Marshall M. Bouton, president of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. "But they also want international efforts to be more focused and selective, and to call upon the country's full diplomatic arsenal to resolve conflict, findings that both presidential candidates should take very seriously."

Asked to rate a series of U.S. foreign policy goals, an overwhelming 83 percent said improving America's standing in the world was "very important." This goal received the highest rating of all of the 14 goals presented, even higher than "protecting the jobs of American workers" (80%).

Americans also worried that the United States has recently lost leverage in the world. When asked whether the ability of the United States to achieve its foreign policy goals has increased, decreased, or remained the same in recent years, 53 percent said that it has decreased, while only 10 percent said it has increased...

Not withstanding significant concern about America's involvement in Iraq, the poll showed that a large majority of Americans strongly supported U.S. participation in a number of international treaties and agreements in which the United States has not taken part in the past. Eighty-eight percent said the U.S. should participate in a nuclear weapons test ban treaty, 76 percent supported participation in a new treaty to address climate change, and 68 percent would like the U.S. to sign on to the International Criminal Court which can try individuals for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity if their own country won't try them.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:43 PM | Permalink

These days there is a trend -- a healthy trend -- to make impact evaluation rigorous. Generally, that translates into funders asking grantees to gather more hard data for objective analysis of what indicators improved and how much. This is a great step toward understanding what is working within policy advocacy and service delivery programs and what is ineffective. But we need to deliberately manage expectations, even as advocacy evaluation specifically and impact measurement in general becomes more data-driven.

Over the past two weeks we've witnessed a powerful lesson about the danger of valuing data for data's sake: Wall Street hired the best and brightest "quants" -- mathematicians, computer scientists and economists who gathered an enormous amount of data and built careful models to analyze it in order to protect themselves from making poor subjective judgments. Sadly, writes Saul Hansell in the New York Times, "Wall Street Lied to Its Computers."

I called some old timers in the risk-management world to see what went wrong.

I fully expected them to tell me that the problem was that the alarms were blaring and red lights were flashing on the risk machines and greedy Wall Street bosses ignored the warnings to keep the profits flowing.

Ultimately, the people who ran the firms must take responsibility, but it wasn't quite that simple.

In fact, most Wall Street computer models radically underestimated the risk of the complex mortgage securities, they said... The people who ran the financial firms chose to program their risk-management systems with overly optimistic assumptions and to feed them oversimplified data. This kept them from sounding the alarm early enough.

Deliberate, thoughtful data collection is a good direction for advocacy evaluation to go. But it's not the end-all be-all answer to good decision making. Somehow, that subjective element finds its way in. Best to be up front about it.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:01 PM | Permalink

We gave you a sneak peek of the Center for Global Development's (CGD) new book, The White House and the World: A Global Development Agenda for the Next U.S. President, back in March when we linked to an early chapter on modernizing the U.S. foreign assistance framework. My, how the book has grown. That is only a small piece of the finished product, now available for download by chapter and in the form of snappy, graphically-arresting policy briefs.

There are three things I like about about CGD's work and this book in particular. First, the focus does not skew toward a particular agenda, viewpoint or pet issue, but rather ranges widely and creatively over issue areas and players, from businesses to policymakers to consumers. The research and recommendations are nonpartisan -- taking, for example, the United States to task for our unfair tariff regimes that make it unduly expensive for developing countries to do business with us (might want to revisit that one, Democrats), while calling out strict migration and work visa policies that depress our economy and those of sending countries (are we really protecting our country, Republicans?).

Second, CGD is aware that reforms, however needed, implemented by U.S. and other donors won't fix all the problems. Certainly, there are issues to be dealt with on the "push" side of development policy (reforming U.S. institutions to coordinate and deliver aid effectively, for instance), but there are at least as many innovations needed on the "pull" side, within receiving countries and populations. AIDS prevention must improve; drugs need new delivery methods; infrastructure for power and roads needs to be owned and maintained in-country.

The third thing that sets CGD's work apart from other development-focused research and advocacy is that it's simply well-organized and readable. Poverty, inequality, disease and the threat of rapid climate change are extraordinarily complex problems that interrelate at different levels. Thankfully, CGD doesn't unleash a mountain of data or dense analysis on the reader. You can digest the analysis at whatever level needed, from a quick policy brief to individual subject papers to the panoramic view that The White House and the World provides.

I'm happy to report that CGD has taken this book on the road with both presidential candidates. It should certainly be among the first resources for which the next administration reaches when it settles into office and begins to prioritize its foreign policy agenda.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:39 AM | Permalink

I wrote last week that David Brooks has hit on something: "weirdness" will win this election. Yesterday Thomas Friedman pointed out how John McCain is being weird in all the wrong ways: that is to say, he has chucked his innate maverick-ness and traded it for Republican platitudes. Today, it's Obama's turn. Michael Gerson takes him to task for running the campaign of a conventional Democrat when he's trying to convince us that he is the change we need.

The Democratic conventional wisdom was nearly unanimous. Obama should shelve his highfalutin rhetoric and talk like a real Democrat. Go after McCain. Talk about "bread and butter" issues -- code words for class-warfare attacks on consumers of blinis and caviar.

Obama took this advice to the letter -- at the cost of his political identity. In his Denver speech, it seemed that every American home was on the auction block, every car stalled for lack of gasoline, every credit card bill past due, every worker treated like a Russian serf. And John McCain? He was out of touch, with flawed "judgment." His life devoted to serving oil companies and big corporations. And, by the way, he didn't have the courage to follow Osama bin Laden "to the cave where he lives." In obedience to the best Democratic advice, Obama managed to be conventional, bitter and graceless.

I disagree with that last clause; Obama showed grace in his acceptance speech, but it was discordant with the rest of the convention, just as was the case in McCain's acceptance speech. Both candidates' campaigns are doing their best to obscure their true merits. I hope the winner can recover his former identity in time to lead effectively. With Obama, I worry less that he has ceded substantive ground (whereas McCain has retrenched on many of his maverick policy positions) and more that he must capture lost rhetorical ground.

Gerson again:

Here is a different strategy. Obama could attempt to "beat back the politics of fear, and doubt, and cynicism." He could try to build a coalition that "stretches through red states and blue states." He could reject "the politics where we tear each other down instead of lifting this country up."

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:45 PM | Permalink

We at the GII like to think of nurturing a growing community around global engagement, of which you, dear reader, are a part. Some of you we've worked with, some have attended Aspen Institute convenings and some we've never met but simply share a desire to get Americans thinking about ways they and their leaders can better engage the rest of the world. This is not always easy; there is a lot on the American public's plate at the moment--much to worry about.

But there are ways to reframe Americans' relationship with the rest of the world--to expand horizons beyond risks and obligations toward opportunities. Abby Falik, a longtime friend of the GII, is profiled in today's New York Times for working out a model that gives high school grads an incentive to go abroad for a year and engage deeply in developing countries. Her organization is called Global Citizen Year and its goal, writes Abby, is to "create a pipeline of leaders prepared to combat global poverty and injustice throughout their lives."

An excerpt from Andrew Revkin's interview with Abby Falik:

Through holistic training, long-term apprenticeships and ongoing support we aim to build a new generation of social innovators who are committed to combat poverty and inequity throughout their lifetimes. The GCY training will begin in the U.S. each fall with a monthlong "boot camp" facilitated by experts from across the field of social enterprise and international development. The training will focus on authentic leadership development, and will provide students with an introduction to business basics, global systems and sustainable development.

Students then travel in teams of 10 with a Team Leader (a recent college grad who, over time, ideally took a "Global Citizen Year" him/herself before college), to country posts across Asia, Africa and Latin America. The next month is spent in an intensive in-country orientation where students are immersed in state-of-the-art language and intercultural training, and are introduced to leaders across the private, public and social sectors to help contextualize the experience they will have in their communities.

Fellows spend the next six months living with a family in a rural community and supporting a local development project, in education, public health, appropriate technology or environmental conservation. Each week Fellows will receive visits from their Team Leader, and each month teams will come together to process and integrate their learning.

As a capstone to their year, Fellows return to their hometown to share their experience with others through presentations at local schools, community exhibitions, fund-raisers, and placements in local media. Finally, as GCY Alumni move through college and beyond, we will continue to nurture their involvement as social innovators. Alumni will have the opportunity to attend GCY annual conferences access to regular online forums, webinars and career fairs designed to support their interest in development, and to connect with internship and job opportunities, as well as mentors in a variety of fields.

Over time, our aim is not simply to turn out thousands more international development professionals. Instead, we hope to build an undeniable new force: a movement of social innovators who bring a commitment to poverty alleviation into positions of influence across all sectors.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:47 PM | Permalink

As Madeleine Albright, James Baker, Warren Christopher, Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell raced through (the discussion was, alas, far too short) a litany of foreign policy challenges, it became clear that there are a few areas in which progress would improve our foreign policy prospects in almost every instance. A better handle on these issues would give us new avenues to solve old disagreements with Iran, Iraq, Russia, Afghanistan, Syria, sub-Saharan Africa, India, China and others:

• Albright came back again and again to the idea that we must tackle problems--particularly Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine--regionally. It's much more effective to deal with Afghanistan when you bring India and Pakistan into the picture; much easier to negotiate with the Syrians than between Hamas and Fatah (the Israelis have been doing this for almost a year, recognizing that Syria would like to join the Sunni world of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan rather than being aligned with Shiite Iran, says Baker); it's easier to exit Iraq with Syria's help; better to forestall conflict in the Horn of Africa when everyone is at the table, etc. All agreed (save, perhaps, Kissinger) that direct dialogue should be happening at the Secretary of State level with these countries and within these regions.
• Increasingly, economies dictate the terms of foreign policy. Many times over, Baker and Powell stressed that economic leverage is central. Military force is becoming less and less relevant as economic forces reshape the world. Powell told of sitting, during his tenure, next to the Iranian foreign minister at a social event. Neither man knew he would interact with the other (indeed they were both nervous about the consequences of speaking to the other). Powell jumped right in with an open-ended question to break the ice: he asked his counterpart, "What is the biggest problem Iran is facing?" The Iranian minister responded that most Iranians are under 20; the country needs to create about 600,000 jobs a year, an immense task. It was an opening that, because of tensions over nuclear issues, Powell could not pursue. But the economic incentives for a more cooperative nuclear posture are enormous if the U.S. could manage to think outside the hard security box with respect to Iran.
• Energy supplies are shaping economies and security relationships; the sooner the United States gets really serious about transitioning from fossil fuels, the sooner our interests are served and we regain bargaining power with Russia (financed with fossil fuels), Iran (which claims to need nuclear energy) and find solutions to financing for terrorism and climate change. Emphasis on clean, renewable energy incentives would also recapture a dominant position in global energy markets for the United States, something we ceded years ago.
• Finally, Baker was adamant that the next president needs to be a spokesman for foreign assistance. Someone needs to articulate, with all the problems we have here at home, why foreign aid and development matter to the everyday lives of Americans. This is how we help other countries secure the peace and it goes back to the earlier point about economic leverage. Moderator Frank Sesno mentioned an op-ed by former Representative Charlie Wilson, titled "Charlie Wilson's Peace," that makes this case.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:42 PM | Permalink

On Monday I had the chance to see Madeleine Albright, James Baker, Warren Christopher, Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell sit down together and chat about the foreign policy challenges our next president will face. (You can see this conversation, taped at George Washington University, yourself on CNN at 9pm on September 20.) It's not often one hears five former Secretaries of State chat about U.S. foreign policy. It's still armchair quarterbacking, but these are the people who have actually been on the field, so to speak, and shaped U.S. foreign policy. It's more than punditry; even a former Secretary of State can't get away with reckless or shortsighted advice to the next president when there are four other such alums sitting right there waiting to poke holes. All that to say, such a conversation has an usual dynamic--a highly-informed conversation among peers with built-in checks and balances--that you'll be hard pressed to find in often-esoteric discussions about foreign policy.

So what did they say? Well, with the exception of Henry Kissinger, who was predictably circumspect about almost every topic, all of the discussants agreed that American influence and power is waning abroad and that this constitutes a problem not so much because America is unpopular but rather because we are no longer respected.

All agreed on three actions the next president should take immediately on entering the office in order to restore that respect:

1. Close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
2. Adopt the same strictures on torture/harsh interrogation tactics across all government agencies that the military currently has in place (these tactics are illegal under military law but not for the CIA).
3. Take the lead on an international plan to cut carbon emissions, bolstered by immediate, internally-adopted U.S. cuts.

This last recommendation is interesting because it requires U.S. leadership but also an element of sacrifice. Adopting costs would seem to be at odds with the state of the U.S. economy now. But unlike our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have required the United States to sustain immense costs, leadership on climate and energy emerges as a common element in long-term solutions to a host of foreign policy headaches (Iran and Russia, for example) that are normally put in the "hard power" portfolio. It's odd that energy and economics were two elements that stuck out in a discussion between former Secretaries of State. But such is our changing world. More on this discussion in a subsequent post.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:36 AM | Permalink

As I've written on this blog before, I have a love/hate thing with Thomas Friedman. Once he seizes on an idea, he tends to go on and on about it, generalizing and pontificating from anecdotes. That's the hate part. (It's also one reason his books enter the popular conversation: his ideas are straightforward and sticky.) But, gosh darn it, his ideas are sticky--and usefully provocative. As a commentator in the international public space, he runs circles around a gaggle of establishment foreign policy wonks (much love, CFR) because he gets that what happens among and within countries is not about "international relations" anymore. These days, governments react to the global arena more than they shape it. Friedman doesn't draw bright lines between issues and he points out the silliness of trying to do so.

His New York Times op-ed, "Making America Stupid," is harsh and screechy and it more or less claims that McCain has sacrificed all substantive positions to conservative rants about culture, which I think is not true. But Friedman's second-to-last paragraph--and the underlying point he makes about McCain's approach to oil and nuclear energy--is why my gut tells me that Obama understands better how the world works these days.

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology -- fossil fuels -- rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology -- renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution -- on the eve of PCs and the Internet -- is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. "Typewriters, baby, typewriters."

Of course, we're going to need oil for many years, but instead of exalting that -- with "drill, baby, drill" -- why not throw all our energy into innovating a whole new industry of clean power with the mantra "invent, baby, invent?" That is what a party committed to "change" would really be doing. As they say in Texas: "If all you ever do is all you've ever done, then all you'll ever get is all you ever got."

...

Sorry, but there is no sustainable political/military power without economic power, and talking about one without the other is nonsense. Unless we make America the country most able to innovate, compete and win in the age of globalization, our leverage in the world will continue to slowly erode. Those are the issues this election needs to be about, because that is what the next four years need to be about.

To whit: our military policy becomes moot if our economic engine falters. And much as it pains me, a proud believer in the power of laissez-faire economic policy to create wealth, there are times when an economy reaches an inflection point. Right now, American companies need a kick in the pants; they need incentives to catalyze investment beyond what their short-term focused shareholders will approve for the quarter.

This sort of investment will pay off in spades for the United States over time. Increasingly, nations stand or fall on their ability to innovate. I don't mean that in the marketing-speak way; I mean that our leaders need not only to react nimbly to complex problems by understanding new drivers and proposing suitable solutions but, just as important, they need to infuse that ability into the fabric of our republic. For all his distinguished experience and manifest leadership abilities, I don't see that McCain understands this.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:22 PM | Permalink

Time Magazine published a story, "Jihad Waning in Osama's Homeland," this week. Seven years after 9/11, author Bobby Ghosh recalls al-Qaeda's attacks on Saudi Arabia itself and investigates how Saudi leadership is conducting its own fight against terrorism:

The 9/11 anniversary wasn't big news in Riyadh; Saudis have other things on their minds, this being the holy fasting month of Ramadan. But while counter-terror experts in the West take this opportunity to bemoan the resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it's worth noting that Saudi Arabia is one of the few places where jihadism is on the wane -- with relatively little help from the Bush Administration's "global war on terror."

The clearest sign of that success is the freedom with which Riyadhis can travel around their city during Ramadan. Photographer Franco Pagetti, a frequent visitor to Saudi Arabia, recalls that in 2004, there were checkpoints everywhere, and a highly visible police and military presence on the streets and in public places. Last night, Franco and I drove from one end of the city to another without encountering a single checkpoint. There were no policemen visible amid the crush of midnight shoppers at the souk in the oldest part of the city. As we went up the Al-Faisaliyah tower, the security measures were barely noticeable; it's harder to get into my co-op in the Upper East Side.

Ghosh doesn't pretend that the Saudis accomplished this progress without trampling on the rights of the accused or employing brutal interrogation tactics. But Ghosh also describes "subtle persuasion" and religious argument as a contributing force; this is the face of Saudi Arabia's war on terror that it prefers to show.

It's hard to gauge, then, what proportion of the progress Saudi has made against Islamic extremism is in the "hearts and minds" category and which will only persist as long as the threat of brute force intimidates. The better U.S. foreign policy models and enables the sustainable, non-torture derived sort of progress, the more convincing that option will become.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:08 PM | Permalink

The Washington Post reports that the United States' Voice of America radio program is going off the air in India after 53 years. VOA says political realities, demographics and technology are changing the picture in India. Some of the budget for the program will find its way into VOA programming in the Middle East.

The news is unwelcome indeed for several dozen "VOA listeners clubs" in small towns and villages across India, where radio is still a part of daily life. People there have no Internet, cable television or even reliable electricity. But they have radio.

Prasad's son, Hira Lal, is a goldsmith and heads the village radio club. There is no power in his village, so small groups crowd around battery-powered radios. Sitting by a kerosene lamp, they have listened to and taken part in the popular call-in shows "Hello America" and "Hello India."

VOA goes to considerable trouble to get listeners on the air. First, people send Hindi-language postcards to Washington, announcing their desire to participate and giving a cellphone number. When the show begins, the U.S. studio calls them and for a brief time, they are on the air.

"I am very sad because radio is our life here," said Lal, 30. "VOA is the only station that gives the price of gold and silver around the world. This is very useful for my business. I also like programs about successful Indians in America. They are our estranged brothers, and I ask them questions sitting in my village."

This seems like a strange place to trim the budget. Radio is cheap, and it reaches down to the true grassroots of the world's largest democracy. TV and web programming may be on the rise, but radio still seems awfully cost-effective. Add to that the fact that VOA India had carved out a reputation for reporting the facts when Indian radio hesitated to do so for fear of inciting local unrest. Hindi VOA gave rural India its only glimpse of true freedom of the press. One democracy to another, this is a loss of exactly the kind of established, credible public diplomacy that the U.S. needs to expand in the developing world, among the citizens of a soon-to-be world power.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 12:18 PM | Permalink

There is a tendency, when the country is facing a big challenge like climate change, for advocates to focus on a single message--and understandably so. Those calling attention to climate change have for the most part concentrated their efforts on reinforcing the scientific consensus that the climate is changing because of human activity and that we can and should try to prevent that trend.

An article in this week's Economist details a shift in this thinking, even among committed "preventers" like Al Gore. Long story short, we were slow to prevent serious effects from climate change; now we have no choice but to try to adapt to them. Of course, as with almost any problem, prevention is still cheaper than dealing with the fallout; prevention and adaptation efforts must go forward together.

From the Economist:

Two things have changed attitudes. One is evidence that global warming is happening faster than expected. Manish Bapna of the World Resources Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, believes "it is already too late to avert dangerous consequences, so we must learn to adapt."

Second, evidence is growing that climate change hits two specific groups of people disproportionately and unfairly. They are the poorest of the poor and those living in island states: 1 billion people in 100 countries. Tony Nyong, a climate-change scientist in Nairobi, argues that people in poor countries used to see global warming as a Western matter: the rich had caused it and would with luck solve it. But the first impact of global warming has been on the very things the poorest depend on most: dry-land agriculture; tropical forests; subsistence fishing. In a recent paper* for the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington DC, Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University estimates that African farmers on rain-fed land will lose $28 per hectare per year for each 1°C rise in global temperatures. Global warming erodes coastlines, spreads pests and water-borne diseases and produces more erratic weather patterns.

How to adapt? A smattering of public and private sector approaches mentioned by the Economist:

• "A private Australian company called New Forests cleans up degraded land in South-East Asia, creates "biodiversity conservation certificates" and sells them to big firms which want to be greener."


• "Swiss Re is designing new kinds of subsidised insurance to help poor farmers in a dozen African countries guard against some of the impacts of climate change, creating innovative climate-risk indices and weather derivative contracts."


• "Rich-country governments are levying new taxes and using the revenues for global poverty-reduction and adaptation."


• "Most important, a United Nations conference in Bali last December set up what is essentially a global tax on carbon, with the money to be spent by an international body...In June, it was agreed that 2% of that value (forecast at up to $950m by 2012) will go into an adaptation fund controlled by donors and recipients."

As the graphic above shows, rich countries are most to blame for carbon emmissions, though poor countries will get stuck dealing with most of the fallout. Rich countries are reluctant to start paying out without comparable sacrifices from poorer countries. But the Aspen Institute's own Mary Robinson questions whether that thinking can persist. Another quote from the Economist:

Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland and UN high commissioner for human rights, says that there should be a "rights-based" approach to climate change, meaning poor countries should have some redress under international law for the environmental costs they suffer. This seems like a recipe for alienating rich countries. But it reflects a growing impatience. As the costs of climate change bear down on the poor, so their demands grow that rich countries, which caused most of the problems, should help them cope.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:26 AM | Permalink

Two NY Times columns (by David Brooks and Thomas Friedman) articulate better than anything else I've read about the upcoming presidential election, how the candidates will succeed at or fail to connect with voters. David Brooks calls this the "surprise me most" election: voters want change so badly that they are skeptical of party boilerplate on both sides; the best strategy, he says, is to say surprising, downright weirdly truthful things that under normal circumstances one could not hope to squeeze out of an embattled politician during an election season:

If I were advising the candidates, I'd tell them to double down on weirdness. Obama needs to occasionally criticize his own side. If he can't take on his own party hacks, he'll never reclaim the mantle of systemic change. Specifically, he needs to attack the snobs who are savaging Sarah Palin's faith and family. Many liberals claim to love working-class families, but the moment they glimpse a hunter with an uneven college record, they hop on chairs and call for disinfectant. Obama needs to attack Bill Maher for calling her a stewardess and the rest of the coastal condescenders.

If I were McCain, I'd make the divided government argument explicit. The Republicans are intellectually unfit to govern right now, but balancing with Democrats, they might be able to do some good. I'd have McCain tell the country that he looks forward to working with Congressional Democrats, that he is confident they can achieve great things together.

Friedman says something similar, if more generic: voters vote from the gut. Obama has ceded the rhetorical high ground to run as a more conventional Democrat, thinking that a head to head contest on the issues favors Democrats. But McCain picked a celebrity of his own and doubled back, seizing the ground that Obama thought he'd already captured. Whereas we all expected that the general election would force serious, issue-driven debate, it isn't. It's about reaching voters where they feel, not where they think.

Friedman's point is well-documented. Candidates know they have to grab voters from the gut. Kerry never did, so Kerry lost. Both the McCain and Obama tickets have that ability. But, in a contest to prove who is the better changemaker, I think Brooks has hit on the key. Whichever candidate can bring himself to surprise voters and say shockingly honest things that offend party sensibilities on both sides will take the prize.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 4:11 PM | Permalink

Americans are used to thinking of their country as the teacher in a global classroom of sorts, keeping order and trying to help a lot of unruly countries learn how to make something of themselves. By many measures, this is a pretty accurate analogy for the United States' dominant role in world events post-World War II. Not that Americans are pleased with every aspect of this picture; mixing metaphors somewhat, most wish the U.S. "would spent less time and money playing world policeman." (See the the Stanley Foundation's US in the World-inspired report, Talking About the Connection Between U.S. and Global Security, which is based on polling data to this effect).

Americans are used to arguments about teaching style, so to speak--are we cooperative, responsible and principled or heavy-handed and selfish?--that sort of thing. But that conversation doesn't challenge the "teacher in the global classroom" frame. This is a simplistic frame, and I think most Americans would recognize that at some level we actually "need" other countries--but how and for what remains murky. How to reconcile the "teacher in the classroom" idea--confirmed over and over again by foreign news coverage of chaotic places in which the U.S. tries to sort out the troublemakers and keep things on track--with the idea that the U.S. is somehow dependent on other countries for its economic prosperity and security?

It can be difficult to reconcile global interconnectedness with the "teacher in the classroom"; sometimes I find myself thinking skeptically about aspects of U.S. engagement abroad: How much good can we do in countries that need to be stabilized and rebuilt? Would we be better served concentrating on our problems at home? It's easy for people who work day in and day out on foreign policy and global issues to talk about the importance of U.S. engagement abroad, but what about legislators who must make financial tradeoffs?

This week The Washington Post reported that the top U.S. intelligence analyst, Thomas Fingar, is now documenting the end U.S. dominance. It's not that the United States is becoming a weak nation; it's just that so many other countries are on the rise. Going back to the schoolteacher analogy, our students are growing up, and the old classroom rules don't apply.

In the new intelligence forecast, it is not just the United States that loses clout. Fingar predicts plummeting influence for the United Nations, the World Bank and a host of other international organizations that have helped maintain political and economic stability since World War II. It is unclear what new institutions can fill the void, he said.

In the years ahead, Washington will no longer be in a position to dictate what new global structures will look like. Nor will any other country, Fingar said. "There is no nobody in a position . . . to take the lead and institute the changes that almost certainly must be made in the international system," he said.

Since its inception, the Global Interdependence Initiative has been helping advocates make the case that "the U.S. cannot go it alone." Because of globalization, for better and for ill, what happens abroad comes back to affect Americans, and vice versa. This has broad implications for the way that the United States pursues its own security (cooperation and partnerships take on new value) and economic future (immigration, visas and education become pretty important economic issues, not just social ones).

But the intelligence community's findings are giving the United States new incentives--beyond cuddly arguments for American altruism--to be genuinely constructive (or, to borrow a business term, to "add value") when we engage other countries. It's not a classroom out there anymore; it's more like a global bazaar--let's hope we're offering something the rest of the world will buy.

This entry is crossposted on Chasing the Flame.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:27 AM | Permalink

Say you're conducting an evaluation of a communications campaign. How do you figure out if you're getting through? One way is to scan the language that your audience--especially if that audience is media--is using. Does it reflect the words and phrases you've emphasized in your campaign?

I found this great big word count (I've cropped out a lot of detail in the version above; click through to see the full graphic) from the New York Times really interesting. I wrote earlier about the disorienting effects of political speech writing. This breakdown gives an idea of what words come up most for either party, and (in the full version) who is spending their time on which words.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 3:15 PM | Permalink

International development is fundamentally about supplying resources and opportunities to people who have little of either--but as many well-intentioned development projects have discovered the hard way, it's really about economics: the allocation of scarce resources. Much as we development advocates would like to provide everyone with everything they need, the fact is that resources are scarce and there is an opportunity cost (tradeoff) when one decides to concentrate on a particular objective; other worthy groups and goals must be set aside--for a while.

But that's the beauty of economies when they're working as they should: they grow the pie. This means that not only does the amount of resources available to meet needs increase (i.e. the Gates Foundation's largesse via Microsoft), but the efficiencies in the market itself converge to meet several needs at once.

The Economist ran one such story this week, tracing the path that solar cells, thermoelectric stoves and LED lights have taken from a nifty gadgets in rich countries to game-changing substitutes for kerosene and wood fires in poor countries. These technologies are driving development along health, cost and environmental lines.

It's worth noting that creative application of these technologies does not happen automatically; it took creative thinking and re-application of familiar technologies by the firms that the Economist credits in the story. That's a worthwhile lesson for those of us wrestling with how to approach development-related challenges on multiple fronts.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 2:22 PM | Permalink

Evaluating advocacy is our bread and butter at the GII, and it's certain that the practice has come a long way from its beginnings five or six years ago. Indeed, there is now truly a field--a body of literature, professionals and widely-recognized rules of best practice--of advocacy evaluation. Understandably, much of the research and effort on the subject has up until now focused on examining the inception, planning, execution, measurement and benchmarking along the way, outputs and outcomes of successful (and some unsuccessful) advocacy campaigns. That is to say, the campaigns have mostly been the focus as we try to understand what makes for successful advocacy and indeed how to qualify success.

The Innovation Network just released a study titled "Speaking for Themselves: Advocates' Perspectives on Evaluation" (pdf) that gathers information from more than 200 survey participants who do advocacy from across the nonprofit sector. Rather than focusing on independent evaluations of individual campaigns, the report turns to staff who are executing advocacy campaigns in many different organizations for their collective perspective on doing effective evaluation.

The findings offer a wealth of data on how much advocacy nonprofits do (most are a blend of service delivery and advocacy), how they're funded, and whether they evaluate their advocacy (most don't). If they do evaluate advocacy, who does the evaluation and how is it used?

This is precisely the sort of baseline data that an emerging field of practice--and advocacy evaluation is definitely that--needs in order to establish workable benchmarks and realistic expectations between funders and grantees.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 1:14 PM | Permalink

Why are national conventions, Republican and Democrat alike, so bad? Why, despite the fact that there are smart, inspiring political figures on both sides, do these talented people sound so uninspiring, so platitudinous, so pandering when they enter convention mode? It has something to do with the self-selected, fiercely partisan audience, for sure; it's nigh impossible to suppress the basic human desire to please a crowd that's hanging on the speaker's words.

But, to my mind, there's something more fundamentally caricatured about these speeches. It's like the speakers are disconnected from their own identities, morphing instead into a mouthpiece for the Borg-like (see picture above) hive-mind of the party. Suddenly, any trace of irony (say, railing against how "Washington is broken" when your party has been running it for eight years; or faulting the president for the decline of American competitiveness in entire industries) goes out the window.

I had a hard time putting my finger on what exactly creates this weird dynamic until I read David McGrath's piece, "In the Words of My Speechwriter..." in the Washington Post yesterday. McGrath is an English professor who argues that political speech writing is more or less a habit of rampant plagiarism. Informed consent (from the writer), audience knowledge (about the presence of speech writers) and academic scholarship explanations don't make the practice any less strange, argues McGrath (who wrote other people's term papers for pay until the company he worked for, Termpapers Inc., was shut down by the U.S. Marshal Service in 1972).

McGrath details some of the ways the odd practice of anonymous and uncredited speech writing skews our view of where candidates stand and how to evaluate the ideas that truly matter to them--thus gleaning important information about how they would actually govern. Is it not strange that America "met" Sarah Palin and sized her up on the basis of a speech that had been written weeks prior for a presumably older male nominee? (For the record, this has nothing to do with party, the Democrats would have done the same had they found themselves with a surprise nominee.) Palin refitted the speech for hockey mom delivery, of course, but we have no idea which parts are really hers.

Which brings us to another problem that was immediately apparent when John McCain gave what I heard as a shockingly frank, true-to-himself speech last night--a speech that did not strike the predicable, pandering, partisan notes we are used to hearing from convention speakers. The very fact that he clearly, commendably denied the temptation to let an army of generic Republican speechwriters put words in his mouth gave the convention a discordant feeling. A New York Times editorial sums up the confusing effect that honesty, amid a lot of chatter, creates:

In the end, we couldn't explain the huge difference between the John McCain of Thursday night and the one who ran such an angry and derisive campaign and convention -- other than to conclude that he has decided he can have it both ways. He can talk loftily of bipartisanship and allow his team to savage his opponent.

What makes that so vexing -- and so cynical -- is that this is precisely how Mr. Bush destroyed Mr. McCain's candidacy in the 2000 primaries, with the help of the Karl Rovian team that now runs Mr. McCain's campaign.

There could not have been a starker contrast between Mr. McCain's night on the stage and the earlier days of the convention, a carnival of partisan rancor. It was not a forum for explaining policies or defining ideals, certainly none ever associated with Mr. McCain.

To be fair, I felt much of this same dynamic watching the Democratic convention. Everything--and I mean everything--was the Republicans' deliberate, scheming fault. Then Barack Obama came in with a breath of fresh, civil air.

The bottom line: It would be near impossible to police fair credit for political speech writing (thought there may be ways to effect some accountability). But the candidates who rely less on speechwriters and encourage their supporters and boosters to do the same will come out smelling a lot less fishy.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 10:03 AM | Permalink

Global development work is a long, tortuous process. There are bright spots--many individual stories of success and certainly examples of communities changed. But there are also serious questions and unlooked-for side effects which development assistance advocates and practitioners can either digest and try to adapt to or ignore and risk undermining the integrity of their work.

But the macro success stories--the countries that have lifted tens or hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and malnourishment and have graduated from some forms of aid altogether--are of course the ultimate gold standard. Most of these maco-level successes are in Asia: China, Taiwan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand. These are today's "emerging markets," and they supply much of the world with high-value-added exports, absorb a lot of capital from foreign investors, and allow that capital to appreciate and eventually exit the country in the form of returns to investors.

It often seems that sub-Saharan Africa will never achieve these accomplishments--that somehow Asia found a path out of dire poverty that Africa can't access. But that view is changing, not only in the development community that traditionally acts as Africa's booster, but also in the investment and international finance worlds. The IMF recently released an article that favorably compares where eight sub-Saharan African countries (Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia) are right now compared to where the ASEAN countries were in 1980 at the start of their rise; the chart above shows how close their indicators are. The IMF piece makes a compelling case that these countries could follow the Asia's curve in the coming decade, as South Africa has already done to a large extent. Eight more maturing and attractive markets throughout Africa would do a world of good for the continent--around which aid, for all its targeted successes, can only hope to fill in the gaps.

This entry is crossposted on the Chasing the Flame blog.

Posted by Josh Weissburg at 11:58 AM | Permalink