How much of a Consumerist are you?

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Howard Hudson

Some people still believe that, to be happy, we need to accumulate things. Shopping malls have become the destination of choice for human entertainment, in turn making our regions economically dependent on department stores.

Have you ever wondered where so much of what we buy, mostly needlessly, comes from and goes? The system of production and consumption on our planet begins with extraction. You get the necessary natural resources (minerals, water, wood, etc.) from all over the world taken to manufacturing centres. There they are combined with synthetic products, and energy is invested to produce anything from clothing to appliances. So far, so clear.

Yet there are two basic problems with this system. First, there are not enough natural resources in the world to meet the current demand of Western consumption. The USA, with only 5 per cent of the global population, uses about 30 per cent of the world’s resources. Clearly, if other countries follow these rates of consumption – and there are several that threaten to do so including India and China – our resources will run out much sooner than we think.

Second, the world’s largest corporations have amassed so much power that they’re increasingly difficult to regulate. According to the consultancy Global Trends, of the world’s 150 largest economies only 41 per cent are countries; the rest are corporations.

There are various drawbacks to this situation, from the terrible working conditions for employees in developing countries, to the destruction of valuable natural resources without compensation. All this to produce shoes, watches and tablets as quickly and cheaply as possible to satisfy the demand of global consumers.

Although consumption trends are high in many countries (Germany leads in Europe, while the growth in some Persian Gulf countries is astounding), the USA has topped the list since the times of Victor Lebow. This analyst theorized that for the large US economy to maintain its robustness, it would need to make consumption a permanent part of the US lifestyle.

It is seriously difficult to understand prices in US malls. How can a buyer know how much was earned by the Chinese boy who assembled the product by hand? If he was offered social security and health benefits? How much did the fuel cost to bring it from China to Rotterdam to Florida? If it is an electronic device, where did the Coltan come from? And how much was paid to farmers who extracted it? If this mineral – vital for cell phones and games consoles – came from D.R. Congo, did it come stained with blood?

We do not have sufficient space to address the last link in this consumer system: the inevitably gigantic quantities of waste generated. But the message is clear, responsible citizenship requires us, at the very least, to ask ourselves again and again if we really need that new item that we are about to buy.

Although modern advertising may suggest the opposite, and those who call us ‘ecocentric’ are everywhere, it is worth pursuing sustainable lifestyles. Ultimately, parks and fellow humans are worth more than shopping malls and corporations. Because our quality of life doesn’t depend on our level of consumption!

by Carlos Cadena Gaitán, PhD fellow at Maastricht Graduate School of Governance and UNU-MERIT

First published in El Mundo, 9 April 2012. Translated from the Spanish by Howard Hudson.

Toilets Save Lives: Call for Teaching Tools

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Howard Hudson

Remember that scene from Slumdog Millionaire? That’s what most people in developing country slums have as toilets. Yet at the same time there are thousands of abandoned or barely used household toilets in India and in Africa. Abandoned because they are poorly built, because of a lack of water, or for a lack of maintenance or demand.

Many low-cost toilets become deadly points of environmental contamination. So there is a real need to make sure we build QUALITY toilets – which will be used and appreciated en masse – while working towards the MDG of improving access to safe sanitation.

So what’s the problem? There are plenty of books on sanitation in the market. There’s plenty of information on the internet on sanitation. There are costly workshops that policy makers can attend to learn about this subject, as well as simpler workshops given to masons and field supervisors under less glamorous settings.

There are plenty of training programmes, but what is retained of such programmes? We simply don’t know! The problem is there are no tools to assess people’s knowledge of sanitation.

Representing UNU-MERIT (NL) and FIN (India), I aim to create a tool that will help people who are driving sanitation efforts work out what their team members know or don’t know – and how to rectify this.

In partnership with Gita Balakrishnan of ETHOS (India) and Valentin Post of WASTE (NL), I’m organizing a call for contributions to a ‘Sanitation Question-Answer Bank’ under the aegis of the FINISH programme for sanitation coverage in India.

What does this call for contributions to Sanitation Question-Answer Bank mean? It means if you can think of an interesting question (along with a photo) on how to promote safe sanitation – and can also explain the answer – we want to hear from you!

Expert judges will select 1000 winning entries, each of which will be awarded Rs 75 each (or you can contribute this to repair of toilets!). The concept paper giving detailed explanations about the contest and the answer sheet format is available at Ethos India.

All interesting entries will be acknowledged with the name of the contributor clearly mentioned. These will be compiled into an e-book and put in the creative commons – to be used by any agency teaching about sanitation or anyone who wants to test and improve their knowledge on this subject.

Image: Flickr / Waterdotorg (Tamil Nadu, India)

Shyama Ramani, Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT

New Blog on Digital Research Methods: ‘SHARE-IT’

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Howard Hudson

In December 2011 we won a ‘Leading in Learning’ grant of €10,000 to develop a blog on digital research methods. It was launched in April 2012 and is called: ‘Support & Help for Academic REsearchers by using Information Technology’ (SHARE-IT).

Our blog presents knowledge and experience in IT-based ways of doing research. This ranges from the use of online forums for discussing research results to the use of Google for searching for literature; from online reference managers to ways of keeping track of current developments online. Overall SHARE-IT provides short, accessible and critical discussions of such online tricks and tools.

Posts will be written by and for early career researchers. So if YOU’RE a researcher with something relevant to share with the world, why not contribute by contacting us here? You could discuss a particular tool or workaround from you own experience. And beyond sharing your knowledge, it’s a way to make your research better known.

Besides Florian Henning and Martin Rehm, our project team consists of Koen Beumer and Joeri Bruyninckx (at Maastricht University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) and Jeroen van Merrienboer and Daniëlle Verstegen (from the Faculty of Health and Medicine).

Florian Henning and Martin Rehm, Researchers at the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance / United Nations University-MERIT.

Happiness and Entrepreneurship: New Research Insights

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Howard Hudson

Unemployed? Frustrated in your job? Can’t stand your boss? Then you may want to start your own business. You will not earn as much as you would have in your old job (assuming you had one); you will work much longer hours; you will face hassles with banks, tax authorities, officials and fickle customers; cut-throat competition may cause you bodily harm.

Don’t despair – on the contrary, starting your own business is likely to make you a happier person. That is one of the salient facts from the scientific literature that emerged from a recent workshop on Happiness and Entrepreneurship organized by UNU-MERIT and the School of Governance in partnership with the Maastricht School of Management, ERIM and Erasmus University of Rotterdam and held in Rotterdam on 13 April 2012.

In a paper titled ‘Life satisfaction and self-employment: a matching approach‘ Alex Coad and Martin Binder showed, using a 10-year panel dataset from the UK, that entrepreneurs (the self-employed) enjoyed significantly higher life satisfaction than people who were in wage employment. “In our analysis we found that individuals moving from regular employment into self-employment … experience a positive and significant increase in life satisfaction, that actually increases from the first year of self-employment to the second”.

Although they are laughing, entrepreneurs are not laughing all the way to the bank because the average earnings of self-employed persons in UK are lower than that of salaried employees. Their average earnings are for instance much less than the earnings of bankers. It means the non-pecuniary benefits of being an entrepreneur compensate for the downsides mentioned.

What do these non-pecuniary benefits entail? It is the type of work that entrepreneurs do that matters. In a paper on ‘Determinants of job satisfaction: a European comparison of self-employed and paid employees‘, José María Millán and co-authors confirm that entrepreneurs enjoy greater job satisfaction in terms of work than salaried employees: “Self-employment has advantages in providing autonomy as compared to paid employment. Self-employed individuals are in charge and therefore capable of (re)defining their work, suggesting that introducing entrepreneurial aspects (i.e. autonomy, independence, etc.) to paid employed jobs may help to increase the job satisfaction of paid employees with their respective type of work”.

Starting your own business can therefore make you happier. It will make you even happier if you employ people. Moreover, there is a positive correlation between how entrepreneurial a society is and its national level of happiness. Consider the following graph, taken from a paper I co-authored with José Ernesto Amorós and Oscar Cristi and presented at the workshop: it clearly shows that countries that score well in terms of Global Entrepreneurship Development Index (GEDI) also score well in terms of happiness. The causality is likely to be bi-directional (Click to enlarge).

There are two caveats to the above. First, the results refer to the entrepreneurs and the employed on average. Entrepreneurs are a heterogeneous group. Joachim Merz and Tim Rathjen presented a paper based on the German Socio-Economic Panel that finds that even though poor entrepreneurs may earn incomes above the (income) poverty line, they are often still poor in other dimensions of wellbeing, such as time – i.e. entrepreneurs are often ‘time-poor’ compared to the employed.

Second, economic cycles impact negatively on entrepreneurs’ happiness. In their paper José María Millán and co-authors find that although entrepreneurs are more satisfied with their jobs in terms of the type of work they do, they tend to be less satisfied with respect to the security it affords. This may be particularly troublesome during economic downswings, such as during the current economic malaise in Western economies.

According to the International Herald Tribune there has been a significant rise in suicides amongst entrepreneurs in European countries most affected by the economic crisis, particularly where social protection measures have been eroded by the fiscal austerity pandemic: “in the most fragile nations like Greece, Ireland and Italy, small-business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly taking their own lives in a phenomenon some European newspapers have started calling ‘suicide by economic crisis’”.

For increasing national happiness the policy prescriptions for labour market reform and human resource management are clear: employees should be treated more like entrepreneurs; and entrepreneurs more like employees.

Images: UN Photo / Evan Schneider; Naudé, Amorós & Cristi, 2012; Flickr / Adam Cohn

Wim Naudé, Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT and the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance

Neglected Tropical Diseases and the Austerity Pandemic

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Howard Hudson

Dumdum fever (or visceral leishmaniasis) is caused by a parasite (leishmania) and kills more than half a million people every year. After malaria it’s the world’s deadliest parasitic infection, but little has been done to combat it until very recently.

Dumdum fever is what is known as a Neglected Tropical Disease (NTD). Other NTDs include buruli ulcer, chagas disease, cysticercosis, dengue, dracunculiasis, echinococcosis, endemic reponematoses, helminthiases, leprosy, lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, rabies, schistosomiasis, trypanosomiasis, and trematode infections.

More than a billion people are affected by NTDs, yet treatments are rare. On the one hand this is because they are ‘diseases of poverty’, i.e. they mainly affect poor people who can afford neither vaccines nor medical treatments. So there is little incentive for profit-oriented pharmaceutical firms to invest in R&D for treatments.

On the other hand poor-country governments are often fragile states which lack the resources (and often the commitment) to invest in basic amenities which would limit the spread and impact of NTDs, or to provide access to existing medicines. For instance 2.5 billion people still lack proper sanitation and safe water, and 1.5 billion live without electricity.

Continued growth and economic development, coupled with appropriate policies and government investment, is clearly a necessary condition for reducing and eventually eliminating the impact of these diseases. But development takes time, and the benefits of growth are often slow to ‘trickle down’ to the poorest in society.

Moreover, the debilitating effects of these diseases are a contributing factor to poverty. Global intervention is needed to (i) provide access to existing treatments and best practices, but also to (ii) generate, diffuse and use new and more affordable vaccines and other treatments – for many NTDs existing treatments are ‘old, cumbersome to administer, or toxic’ (WHO, 2012:iv).

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced a Roadmap to deal with NTDs, which is an encouraging step as far as the former (i) is concerned. It aims to control or eradicate most of these NTDs by 2020. The report notes a growing number of contributions by multinational pharmaceutical firms to contribute resources– e.g. donating free medicines – but also notes that more than US$ 2 billion is still needed.

The WHO’s Roadmap also calls for increased R&D for treatments, but doesn’t go into much detail. Hence the question remains, how can we stimulate innovation to control and eradicate NTDs?

In a recent MSM-MGSoG-MERIT Joint Seminar presentation on 16 February 2012, Professor Nicola Dimitri from Maastricht School of Management and the University of Siena argued that from a R&D perspective NTDs are now less neglected than they were before the 2000s.

However much more needs to be done, particularly if the Roadmap’s goals are to be achieved and maintained. Dimitri discussed a number of recent initiatives to stimulate private sector innovation for better treatments.

These initiatives are at the forefront of thinking about public policies, procurement and innovation for socially desirable outcomes, and include push (such as public private partnerships), pull (such as advanced market commitments and priority review vouchers) and hybrid forms of incentives.

Thus (hopefully) in a few years’ time there may be no more ‘neglected’ tropical diseases. The only discordant note was sounded in December 2011 by a G-Finder (Global Funding for Innovation for Neglected Diseases) report which asked ‘is innovation under threat?’ With many rich countries facing high debt burdens and implementing fiscal austerity measures, funding for innovation has been declining.

The report documents that funding for innovation on neglected diseases was slashed by over US$ 100 million in 2010, mostly in European countries. For instance Sweden cut its funding for NTD innovation by 43 per cent, the Netherlands by 39 per cent, Denmark 49 per cent, Spain 30 per cent, Germany 12 per cent and Norway by 20 per cent. A neglected consequence of the austerity pandemic in Europe is thus the further neglect of NTDs.

Wim Naudé, Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT and the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance

Working to Boost Social Protection in Cambodia

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Howard Hudson

Cambodia has come a long way since the UN sponsored elections of 1993. Much remains to be done however in terms of social protection and poverty reduction. Although per capita GDP rose 5 per cent per year between 1993 and 2010, Cambodians still face precarious employment, low quality healthcare, and poor basic infrastructure. Plus chronic malnutrition and a high risk of natural disasters.

To address these issues the Cambodian Government launched a National Social Protection Strategy for the Poor and Vulnerable in late 2011. This is part of the country’s plan to rebuild its social services and raise living standards for all its citizens.

The Cambodian Government and UNICEF-Cambodia contracted the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance to help in this work. Our role is to estimate the rates of return on social protection investments in Cambodia, and so help design social protection instruments.

Our study focuses on non-contributory social transfers and their role in socio-economic development. In this context, we find that social transfers reduce income poverty and inequality but also affect household behaviour. For example they increase consumption and the resources available for investment in health, education, livelihoods and productive activities.

The study started in January 2012 with a period of fieldwork to collect data and connect with various governmental institutions and development partners. Overall the study analyses four social protection instruments: cash transfers, scholarships, public works and social pensions.

For this work we are using various quantitative techniques to generate a comprehensive analysis of the potential benefits of social transfers in Cambodia. These draw on national surveys from 2004 and 2009, as well as static and dynamic micro-simulations. The results will be presented at the end of summer 2012 during a workshop in Phnom Penh.

Andrés Mideros Mora, PhD fellow, Maastricht Graduate School of Governance

Fragile States: Critical Questions

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Howard Hudson

What states do, or do not do, matters for development and the wellbeing of their citizens. States have the responsibility to protect their citizens and to progressively promote their material and non-material welfare. Many states cannot or will not live up to this responsibility.

States like these have been labelled ‘fragile’ states, suggesting that the essence of statehood, such as the provision of leadership, public services and infrastructure, safety and security and justice are close to breaking point.

When it breaks, states fail. For instance, at the time of writing ‘Children have been killed by beating, sniper fire and shelling from Government’ in Syria; while in Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s government (whose Gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s have been classified as genocide by Genocide Watch) has been preying on its own citizens while concluding a ‘defence’ co-operation agreement with Iran.

There are unfortunately many more fragile and failed states than Syria and Zimbabwe. The OECD identifies 45 fragile states. These include Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Pakistan and Iraq – countries that like Syria and Zimbabwe are characterized by conflict, civil strife, poverty, and hunger. These are four countries receiving the most foreign aid in the world – almost US$ 18 billion in 2010.

The OECD list also includes small island states such as the Solomon Islands and Kiribati – who receive little aid, have not fortunately seen much mass conflict, but nevertheless struggle to protect their citizens from external threats.

The government of Kiribati is reportedly considering purchasing 20 square kilometers of land on the nearby island of Fiji (another fragile state where a military government is in charge) to relocate its 113,000 citizens in light of climate-induced sea-level rise.

In another fragile small island state, Haiti, only 5 per cent of the rubble from the January 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people has been cleared after one year; more than a million people are still homeless, and thousands have died from cholera.

A positive trend in the development discourse over the past decade has been the recognition that state fragility and state failure is at the heart of many global development dilemmas – including conflict, poverty, terrorism, crime, food insecurity, adaptation to climate change and vulnerability in the face of natural hazards.

The scholarly debate on fragile states has similarly progressed – at the beginning of the 2000s the term was hardly known outside security circles – today many hundreds of documents are available. Many donors are now prioritizing fragile states – for instance the Dutch government reduced its development partnership countries from over 30 to 15, the latter consisting almost exclusively of fragile states – and increasing efforts to harmonize aid to these states.

Furthermore, in November 2011 a group of 19 fragile states (the g7+) and partner countries announced a ‘new deal’ to further state-building and peace-building. In light of the challenges that fragile states pose for global development the United Nations University (UNU-WIDER) launched in 2006 a project on Fragility and Development that I co-directed.

This project has resulted in a number of scholarly outputs – the most recent a book I co-edited with Amelia Santos-Paulino and Mark McGillivray entitled ‘Fragile States: Causes Costs and Responses’ (published by Oxford University Press, Aug. 2011). The book was formally launched at a function at the University of Oxford on 19 March 2012.

In my presentation (watch it here), I summarized the essence of the book: (i) the identification – and prediction – of fragile states are important (for instance the OECD did not include Egypt or Syria in its 2011 list of fragile states); (ii) state fragility is a cause but also a consequence of conflict, and it is characterized by a loss of authority, legitimacy and/or capacity of a state; (iii) fragile states cast significant external costs on their neighbours and the rest of the world, often to the extent that outside intervention is required – not only in ending conflict but also in making peace agreements stick; (iv) in addition to direct international intervention, aid is required in fragile states and can make a difference – but the right aid modalities are important, and more is needed to be learned and done in terms of private sector development in fragile states.

Yet despite the forward step granting fragile states their due attention, one may ask whether or not two steps have been taken backward over the same period – especially since the 2008 global financial crisis? Consider for instance that the share of people living in extreme poverty in fragile states doubled from 20 to 40 per cent between 2005 and 2010.

The number of fragile states has not noticeably shrunk – there were UN peacekeepers in the DRC in the 1960s, they are still there. The World Bank asks in its 2011 World Development Report ‘How is it that almost a decade after renewed international engagement with Afghanistan the prospects of peace seem distant?’ Despite economic growth between 2001 and 2008, and a commodity boom that saw historically high growth rates in Africa and other developing countries, many states remain fragile – even some middle income states.

The global financial crisis, the recession in the USA and some European countries, and the ‘Arab Spring’ has turned the attention away from Sub-Saharan Africa, the location of most fragile states. There, crises in Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Kenya, Senegal, Central African Republic, Madagascar and most recently Mali, have flared up. The practical failure to make progress against fragile states, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, may be seen as a step backward.

Another setback is the position adopted recently by some BRIC countries – particularly Russia and China – complicating adherence to the UN’s responsibility to protect (R2P) principle. For example these countries vetoed a UN Security Resolution against Syria on 4 February 2012.

China remains one of the staunchest supporters of the Mugabe regime, supplying it with weapons (including a recent shipment of 21,000 handcuffs) and cash; and Russia remains one of the world’s major arms exporters. If the international community is to make progress in overcoming state fragility in the near future, getting the all the BRICS on board, and dealing with their own fragilities, much of which stems from economic challenges, may be essential.

In an earlier blog I wrote that ‘while the international community may be slow to assist the people of Syria due to the obstructive behaviour of China and Russia, international intervention was important in 2011 to protect civilians in fragile states including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Côte d’Ivoire’.

At the Oxford book launch of ‘Fragile States’, Paul Collier discussed the lessons from the international interventions in 2011 in Côte d’Ivoire and Libya. One lesson is that a combination of financial pressure and moderate military resistance can topple a regime, even one with a strong army, quite quickly. Economics can unlock a political mess.

In the case of Côte d’Ivoire’s Laurent Gbagbo, refusing to accept defeat in his country’s 2010 presidential elections, a financial embargo meant for his army that they may not get paid. As Paul Collier pointed out, Gbagbo’s opponent Alassane Ouattara is after all an economist, and as a former deputy head of the IMF was very aware of how constricting financial sanctions could be. He was right – the Gbagbo army consequently refused to put up strong resistance; in April 2011 Gbagbo was captured. He now faces four charges of crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

A broadly similar pattern repeated itself in Libya. In both cases the fact that the UN Security Council was not blocked by China or Russia or any other nation (the Security Council was quick to recognize Ouattara as winner of the presidential elections in December 2010) may have been important.

Will the pattern repeat itself in the case of Syria or in other countries where dictatorial regimes fail in their responsibility to protect? Can financial and military pressures be effectively applied without support or consent from China and Russia? And can economic conditions be created in China and Russia, both elite-dominated societies, so that the R2P principle is perhaps not seen as a threat to them?

Along with the need to create jobs and develop the private sector in fragile states, these are among the critical questions facing the international community.

Wim Naudé, Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT and the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance

Six Key Themes for Eco-innovation

Posted on March 22, 2012 by Howard Hudson

Speak of eco-innovation and people immediately think of electric cars and solar power. But the shift to a post-carbon economy depends on much more than technological improvements. It requires a sea change on many levels, from individual lifestyles to commercial investment to international governance.

As of 2012 almost all nations have created policies to stimulate innovation. These are based on two theoretical rationales: a market failure rationale that says that because of the danger of imitation companies will underinvest in innovation, and a system failure rationale that says that the source of underinvestment may lie outside the company (lack of venture capital, barriers to entry).

The latter perspective sees innovation activities as part of a system of knowledge generation, diffusion and use. Here national innovation capacity is shaped by education and training systems, the macroeconomic and regulatory context.

Both perspectives provide general rationales to stimulate innovation but the policies are often mistaken or unnecessary. In many cases they create windfall profits for recipients, providing push when pull is needed and, by being technology-blind (but not neutral), favour incumbents instead of challengers.

We face a double bind. Those who argue for policy coordination usually don’t say much about how this is to be done; while those who favour generic policies turn a blind eye to the need for specific policy to deal with specific barriers (in market entry, regulation, costs).

I wanted to write about this because discussions about eco-innovation are in many cases highly superficial or unnecessarily abstract. This blog is based on a longer article for S.A.P.I.E.NS, where I presented 10 key themes for eco-innovation. Of these I will now focus on six.

Theme 1: Eco-innovation policies should be based on identified barriers
To be effective and not wasteful, innovation policy should be based on identified barriers to particular types of eco-innovation instead of on abstract notions of market failure and system failure. Here are some examples from a 2011 Eurobarometer survey (click to enlarge):

Theme 2: Preventing windfall profits
A drawback of financial support policies is that projects receiving support would also be undertaken in the absence of support. An evaluation in 2002 of the Dutch WBSO fiscal scheme consisting of a subsidy on researcher costs revealed that in 72 per cent of the cases where companies with more than 200 employees use the WBSO, the scheme had no impact on the carrying out of a project. For 4 per cent only it was a deciding factor. For smaller companies the results are more favourable but still not very positive. For all class categories the deciding impact was below 25 per cent.

Theme 3: Specific versus general support
Specific support for R&D has a bad name amongst economists, much more than the generic fiscal support policies, for the reason that ‘government cannot pick winners’. Whilst there is an element of truth in this contention, we have just seen that blind innovation support can be wasteful too. Specific technologies such as algae-based fuels and organic solar cells suffer from specific barriers that no general support scheme can successfully address, which is why we need specific policies. Specific support for specific technologies is not about picking winners but about dealing with specific barriers.

Theme 4: Balance of policy measures and timing
While R&D policy can help facilitate the creation of new environmentally friendly technologies, it provides little incentive to adopt these technologies. Adoption, so important for post-innovation improvements, calls for demand-side measures. Pull policies do not make push policies unnecessary. The need for a balance between supply and demand measures is illustrated by the experiences with the EU emissions trading system (ETS) for carbon emissions. The ETS is the cornerstone of European climate policy, covering 10,800 industrial installations across Europe in four energy-intensive sectors. The total value of carbon trade amounted to 100.5 billion USD in 2008 and 118.5 billion USD in 2009. It was introduced in part because it was believed to stimulate innovation in low-carbon technologies but largely failed to have this effect according to evaluations.

Theme 6: Missions for system innovation
Among innovation experts there is a discussion of whether persistent problems such as global warming warrant mission-oriented programmes. Superficially, the attention to missions seems like a return to the emphasis in the 1950s and 1960s on public goals to guide science and technology development. There is however a big difference between the old missions about space and military technology and the new mission for environmentally sustainable development: the older projects developed radically new technologies through government procurement projects that were largely isolated from the economy.

Mission-oriented projects for sustainable development require the adoption of new technologies and practices across a wide range of sectors as well as changes in consumer demand and behaviour. This brings many actors into the process and will require a range of policies and customized solutions to deal with the many barriers. Innovation missions require policy coordination across sectors and levels of government. Much of the current attention is on high tech options such as advanced batteries for cars. But CO₂ reductions can also be achieved through policies to reduce car-based mobility, through improved public transport, organized car sharing and intermodal systems of transport with an important role for bicycles. Innovation policy should be more concerned with system changes than it currently is. Instead of being concerned with technologies, policies should be concerned with innovation, especially innovations that require a long period of development and long-term investment, which require the involvement of many actors for their development, creating problems of coordination of interdependent activities and problems of appropriating the benefits.

Theme 8: Innovation portfolio
For sustainable development and green growth it is advisable that government support be given to a broad portfolio of options: to widen the search process, which often is unduly narrow. There should also be a good mix between low-risk and high-risk projects. By relying on adaptive portfolios, two possible mistakes of sustainable energy policy may be prevented: 1) the promotion of short-term options resulting from the use of technology-blind generic support policies such as carbon taxes or cap and trade systems (which despite being ‘technology-blind’ are not technology neutral at all because they favour low-hanging fruit and regime-preserving change, and 2) picking losers (technologies and system configurations which are suboptimal) through technology-specific policies.

Conclusions
The case for eco-innovation policy is particularly strong: first because the benefits are undervalued in the market place, and second because power supply and transport are ‘locked in’ to old technologies.

Markets rarely help eco-innovation because prices do not reflect environmental costs; and this is especially the case for green energy, hampered by the low cost of fossil fuels, long development ‘lead’ times, and grid connection issues. I therefore recommend specific support policies for green innovation beyond existing technological paradigms.

However different types of eco-innovation require different policies. Incremental improvements of commercial products rarely need special support, as firms are normally able to produce and fund these. By contrast radical and system innovations need much more support, especially radical transformative innovations. So I advocate strong support for transformative innovation, embracing not only financial but also institutional change in the economic and social world.

Regarding climate change and energy security, EU policy makers have broadly welcomed the concept of ‘mission’ policies (without specifically using the word mission). There is indeed a need for mission policies but the goal of such policies should not be about developing technologies but much more about ensuring the adoption of innovations. To avoid lock-in, these missions should be based on a portfolio of technologies backed up by adaptive policy making, evolving with experience and critical self-evaluation.

To design and roll out effective policies, government officials need to fully understand eco-innovation barriers and innovation dynamics. Blind technology support, favoured by economists, generates little more than windfall profits and rarely sparks radical change. Meanwhile the case for fiscal policies seems weaker than the case for specific focused innovation policies.

In my opinion, much more support should be given to transformative innovation. The above mentioned themes — which are clearly interlinked — help focus attention on relevant policy issues. Effective policy depends on effective governance, both of which depend on policy learning and building long-term strategic perspectives.

René Kemp, Professorial Fellow, UNU-MERIT and ICIS

Tinpots, Crackpots and BRICS: Whatever happened to the ‘Responsibility to Protect’?

Posted on February 27, 2012 by Howard Hudson

Media focus on the BRICS[1] in February 2012 was anything but flattering. As the Syrian regime increased the campaign of violence against its own people, China and Russia vetoed a Security Council resolution on 4 February (not for the first time).

Days later they were again out of step with the rest of the world, in the company of North Korea, Venezuela and Zimbabwe, when they voted against a UN General Assembly resolution on 16 February condemning the human rights violations in Syria.

Just three days earlier Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, outlined to the General Assembly in shocking detail human rights abuses in Syria, including a harrowing report that “Children have not been spared. Children have been killed by beating, sniper fire and shelling from Government security forces … As of the end of January security forces have killed more than 400 children”.

Syria is a fragile (and failed) state – the type of state that has since 9/11 risen to the top of the international development agenda – both for security and development concerns. For as the World Bank states in its 2011 World Development Report, no fragile state is in line to meet a single of the Millennium Development Goals; fragile states cast strong negative economic spillovers onto their neighbours – “Countries lose an estimated 0.7 per cent of their annual GDP for each neighbour involved in civil war”.

The international community therefore has to deal with such states; they cannot be left to themselves to disintegrate into their own murderous chaos. Such intervention can take various forms – from the relatively mild censure to strong forms such as sanctions or even military intervention.

In a recent book on Fragile States that I co-edited (and which will be launched at the University of Oxford on 19 March 2012), Lisa Chauvet, Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler estimate the costs of failing states to be around US$276 billion per annum. These costs may justify their national sovereignty to be overridden by international intervention.

As shown by the conflict in Syria, other recent conflicts in fragile states, as well as an increasing number of debates on global public goods (including climate change), the limits to national sovereignty is one of the most difficult and sensitive matters in international development. It is particularly so as the idea of national sovereignty may be outdated.

Jurgen Brauer and Robert Haywood, writing in the U NU-WIDER Angle state bluntly that ‘Problems of local or global governance, including violent conflict within and between states, can be ascribed not merely to the faulty exercise of state sovereignty but to its very existence’. Hence, while the international community may be slow to assist the people of Syria due to the obstructive behaviour of China and Russia, international intervention was important in 2011 to protect civilians in fragile states including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Cote d’Ivoire.

In light of this another of the BRICS – South Africa – has not had the most flattering coverage in the media. For some inexplicable reason the country is a haven for crackpots. A tragic example in its recent past was when the country became a favourite of AIDS dissidents whose ideas were supported by then president Thabo Mbeki. The consequences were dire: a “genocide by sloth” that according to Nicoli Nattrass lead to around 343,000 avoidable AIDS deaths and 171,000 infections between 1999 and 2007.

In recent weeks the country entertained another crackpot of sorts. At the country’s Mining Indaba held in Cape Town on 6 February the keynote speech was delivered by a climate change skeptic who has been reported to have described climate change as “nothing but a ruse to create a massive global bureaucracy that will rule the world with impunity” (incidentally the same week that other BRICS – China, India and Russia – objected to the EU’s carbon tax on airlines).

The country’s mining sector had perhaps hoped for more leadership and less conspiracy theorizing from the summit because it is a sector under pressure. On 16 February police had to use rubber bullets and water cannon against thousands of mine workers who protested against the retrenchment of 17,000 co-workers at one of the world’s largest platinum mines.

It may seem on the face of it a puzzle why a country with South Africa’s mineral resources has been able to achieve only mediocre economic growth during the greatest ever commodity boom, not to mention losing thousands of mining jobs. What is going on? The influence of crackpot ideas again? Perhaps: the mining sector has been threatened by nationalization. The handling of mineral rights, regulation of the sector by political interests, and nepotism has strangled investment in this sector.

An irony of the past two weeks is a public speech Mbeki made on 16 February condemning international intervention in fragile states, particularly those in Africa. He is reported to have described these (including NATOs role in Libya and the French intervention that helped arrest Gbagbo in Cote d’Ivoire in 2011) as ‘racism’.

Fortunately Mbeki’s opinions are not necessarily shared by the South African government. Still, it is ironic that they are made in a BRICS country at a time when other BRICS have been instrumental in limiting the world’s intervention in Syria.

The irony is especially rich as it comes almost exactly 10 years after the United Nations’ ‘International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty Report’. This report laid down the Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Its intellectual father was an African – the Sudanese diplomat Frances Deng.

Ideas are clearly important in international development. Hence the question now is: how can the world deal with fragile states in future given that the BRICS seem to prefer the idea of sovereignty to the idea of the Responsibility to Protect?

Wim Naudé, Professorial Fellow at UNU-MERIT and the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance.

[1] BRICS is the acronym for the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Third Age Online: Joining up the Generations

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Howard Hudson

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80,” said car marker Henry Ford, who championed innovation till the age of 83. “Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”

This is one of the goals of Third Age Online (TAO), a UNU-MERIT project which aims to keep the elderly active by engaging them online. Here “elderly” refers to anyone over the age of 50, and in some cases even over 100.

One key to building the TAO community, which already has 300,000+ members, is to help seniors help each other online, starting with practical issues like health, welfare and charity work. Another goal is to narrow the gap between generations and therefore ease social integration.

For now TAO focuses on three European countries – Germany, The Netherlands and Switzerland – but it is designed to be transferable and provide a model for older generations around the world. In time this would include emerging economies, where rates of literacy and internet penetration are rising to workable levels.

Above all the project aims to make itself and its services visible and useful for the elderly, who may not fully grasp the interactive nature of the modern web and who typically need more accessibility options, from bigger fonts to crystal clear interfaces .

In this case awareness depends not only on the functionality of the TAO websites but also a clear understanding of what members can do and how they can benefit – hence the focus on charity, community and a growing network of mutual support.

In terms of building communities the experience of one partner stands out. Wikimedia has a great reputation for engaging people of all ages around the world in online collaborative endeavours. Its most famous product, Wikipedia, has become THE online reference tool and the most successful crowdsourcing project of all time, attracting some 350 million unique visitors per month.

Together with project partners like SeniorWeb, as well as Dutch and German universities, TAO is boiling down its combined knowledge into a handbook. A draft version is available below and more updates will be posted in the coming weeks, so watch this space.

Ultimately TAO is building the most user-friendly, accessible and engaging platforms: everything from the most logical user interfaces to surveys, workshops and photo competitions. This means giving the elderly a stake in the project and building a community with their active participation. It means adopting a positive rather than a patronizing approach and accepting that even the slickest of wizz-kids can learn from their older counterparts.

The project runs for three years from October 2010 to September 2013, and has around 3 million euros in funding. Around a half of that is drawn from the European Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) Joint Programme. The project is run from UNU-MERIT by Ruediger Glott and Stijn Bannier, who appears in the audio interview below. Click play to listen in or read on for more details from project coordinator Stijn Bannier.

TAO Q&A
- Who attends TAO workshops?
Bannier: The project workshops aim to attract senior organizations, online communities, and of course the combination of online senior communities. This currently involves online senior communities (SeniorWeb Switzerland and the Netherlands) and Wikimedia’s (Switzerland and Germany), which organize their own workshops on how to actively engage seniors online. For example I will be attending a workshop given by SeniorWeb.NL on social networks (Facebook, Hyves, Twitter, Schoolbank, etc.), where I’ll observe how senior teachers are trained and how teachers then train SeniorWeb members.

- What are the specific needs of seniors? What are the challenges?
Bannier: A study of early users over 60 years old found they are often frustrated by the usability of online communities, i.e. layout, accessibility, and related barriers. These barriers tend to create negative emotions in early users which are then attributed to the online community as a whole. So efforts to motivate older people to join have to address existing counterarguments and stereotypes. Most helpful are positive role models who share the same values, beliefs, interests, age, and level of education with potential new community members. People they can relate to. This approach requires a detailed definition of the target group so that persuasive messages can be tailored accordingly. Simple exposure to an online community is not sufficient for motivation and integration. We need to carefully match personal interests and desires with the online community.

- What do you mean by a “model for older generations around the world”?
SB: ‘Example’ might be a better word. Since the three involved countries are ahead in the area of digital inclusion, innovation and the developing online senior communities, the project partners can offer best practices for other countries, where on the one hand digital inclusion is still an issue and on the other hand aging is not yet an issue.

- Can you give an outline of the handbook?
Bannier: It will be a handbook for online-communities and operators of community platforms, containing effective strategies for improved inclusion of older persons in online communities (with a focus on older persons’ motivation and inclusion). You can follow the online creation of the handbook (and a first draft outline) here.

- Are you making use of data collection studies for accessibility, usability labs, or persona defining?
Bannier: Regarding accessibility and usability, Subproject 2 (software development) of the project is looking into a number of potentially useful aspects.

- How is TAO different from other initiatives like UrbAct or GetYourFolksonline?
Bannier: Where the latter two initiatives aim at getting seniors online, our project aims at engaging them online. TAO focuses on developing and rolling out measures to promote older persons’ participation in online communities. Thus, activating, engaging and mobilizing online seniors to make the most of Web 2.0 and all the possibilities of user-generated content, interaction and participation.

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