Monthly archive for May 2012. Show all posts
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From the Wilson Center:
Comparing Urban Governance and Citizen Rights in China and India
›By Michael Kugelman // Thursday, May 31, 2012Today, according to Xuefei Ren, 129 cities in China and 45 in India have populations of over a million people. Such large-scale urbanization has created major governance challenges. Speaking at a May 23 Asia Program event co-sponsored with the Kissinger Institute on China, United States Studies, and the Comparative Urban Studies Project, Ren, a Wilson Center Fellow, examined two case studies of urbanization-driven governance in China and India and their effect on citizen rights.
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Her first case study involved housing demolitions and urban re-development in Shanghai and Mumbai. In Shanghai, nearly a million households were relocated between 1995 and 2008 to make way for hotels, airports, and luxury apartments. City regulations in 1991 and 2001 legalized forced demolitions, and no prior consent from residents was needed.
However, Ren noted that displaced residents “are not quite powerless.” She highlighted the case of a woman who sued the city government after being relocated and was eventually granted the compensation she had requested. In 2003, China’s central government ordered a freeze on large-scale demolitions. Several years later, it passed a “landmark” property rights law.
Meanwhile, in Mumbai, local officials in the early 2000s had their own re-development plans. The Indian city is rife with overcrowded, low-income housing; slums are populated by seven million citizens (40 percent of the city’s total population), and comprise up to 10 percent of Mumbai’s total land area.
In 2004, aware that most of the slums were located in desirable areas – near airports or in central business districts – city planners recognized a major development opportunity. Over the next two years, officials launched a demolition campaign that left 400,000 people homeless. According to Ren, certain categories of residents were theoretically entitled to compensation, but with “legal protections carrying little weight,” most of them received nothing.
Yet, as in Shanghai, Mumbai’s city dwellers successfully fought back. Housing activists staged acts of “direct agitation,” including a series of street protests and road blockages. Such tactics, said Ren, were “disruptive but effective.” The Mumbai courts sided against the activists in 2006, but India’s Supreme Court later issued a ruling in their favor.
Fighting Land Acquisitions: A Comparison
Ren’s second case study compared land acquisition efforts outside the slums.
Last year, residents in Wukan, a village along China’s southeast coast in the province of Guangdong, launched a protest movement against land seizures. They alleged that government officials had sold their land to developers and failed to provide residents with appropriate compensation. The protestors made two demands: the return of their land and the holding of local elections.
Notably, Ren said, protestors in Wukan affirmed their support for the Communist Party, and never framed their movement as an anti-government effort. In March 2012, local elections were in fact held, with two leaders of the protest movement voted into office (one as village chief, the other as his deputy).
Ren also discussed an attempt by India’s Tata Motors corporation to acquire land in Singur, a village about 100 miles from Calcutta in the state of West Bengal. The company wanted to use this land to construct a factory for the Nano, a small, cheap car marketed to India’s urban middle class. In 2005, the West Bengal government, which had been controlled by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) for nearly 30 years, actively wooed the firm. State authorities “went overboard” in offering Tata Motors subsidies and highly fertile land, said Ren. Small landowners were obliged to surrender their plots at low prices, and in 2006 the corporation formally took over the land (nearly 1,000 acres altogether), despite heavy opposition from peasants.
However, violent protests continued and after several months, Tata Motors was forced to pull out of West Bengal. Then, in a state election in May 2011, the Trinomool Congress Party, led by the populist leader Mamata Banerjee, swept the CPI-M from power. Banerjee had run her campaign on a promise to restore the land to Singur’s farmers.
Just weeks after the new government assumed power, West Bengal passed a law that would allow for about 400 acres from the Tata Motors project to be returned to farmers who had refused government compensation for their land.
Ren acknowledged that in both countries, citizenship rights are not enjoyed by all and tend to be unevenly distributed across social groups. Still, she concluded, Chinese and Indian cities “have become strategic sites for reassembling citizen rights.” By asserting their land and housing rights, city denizens “are becoming active citizens.”
Michael Kugelman is a program associate with the Wilson Center’s Asia Program. He can be reached at michael.kugelman@wilsoncenter.org and on Twitter @michaelkugelman.
Photo Credit: Mumbai pipes, courtesy of flickr user lenskap. -
Environment, Natural Resource Guidelines for Peacekeepers Moves UN Closer to ‘Greening the Blue Helmets’
›By Stuart Kent // Wednesday, May 30, 2012UN peacekeepers not only operate in conflicts where land and natural resources are a component of the fighting but their own bases and operations can also impact the local environment. As well as documenting practical steps to minimize the footprint of field missions, a new report from the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reviews the relationship between natural resources and conflict and what it means for peacekeeping.
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While there’s been talk about “greening” UN peacekeeping for years, the details about the economic, environmental, and mission benefits contained in Greening the Blue Helmets: Environment, Natural Resources and UN Peacekeeping Operations suggest that this talk is getting closer to reality.
As of December 2011, the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations was responsible for 121,591 personnel, 17,000 vehicles, and 257 aircraft across 16 different operations worldwide. These forces account for more than half of the entire UN system’s carbon emissions and can significantly strain the resources of fragile host communities, according to the report.
Building on the 2009 Environmental Policy for UN Field Missions, the UNEP report provides a dozen best practice examples from ongoing missions.
Field cases serve as evidence of how increasing water and energy efficiency, safely discarding solid and hazardous wastes, protecting cultural and historical sites, and ensuring a limited footprint after the closing down of camps, can save environmental and financial resources. These measures, the report claims, also reduce the risk of tension with host communities, such as occurred in Haiti when an outbreak of Cholera was traced to unsanitary water management practices at a UN camp.
Technologies recommended include better waste management systems, improved water systems, energy efficient buildings, and green energy capacities. However, some improvements can be made by simply encouraging behavioral changes; the UN mission in Timor-Leste reduced energy consumption by 15 percent over 12 months using a “CarLog” system to encourage fuel efficiency. With a 2009 global fuel bill of $638 million, even a 15 percent margin relates to a significant figure (much like the logic behind similar efficiency efforts within the U.S. military).
However, uncertain mission lengths are a major barrier to the adoption of more efficient technologies. Despite UN operations lasting an average of seven years and evidence indicating that capital investments could be recovered within one to five years in some cases, year-to-year mandates complicate long-term planning.
Natural Resource Nexus
Conceptually, the nexus of natural resources, conflict, and peacebuilding must be a central concern of peacekeeping operations, asserts the report.
In Africa alone, 13 operations have been conducted in response to conflicts associated with natural resources, at a cost of around $32 billion. Exploitation of natural resources such as diamonds, timber, and oil has financed and fueled conflicts in Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Liberia. Communal tensions over access to scarce land and water resources are also considered an exacerbating influence on conflict dynamics in much of Sudan and now South Sudan, according to the report.
Addressing this nexus can also provide opportunities to reduce and redress conflict. In Darfur, firewood collection is a dangerous task for women and girls. By making “firewood patrols” a regular feature of the UN forces’ protection, the prevalence of sexual violence has been limited.
The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan is cited in the report for its efforts to hire ex-combatant and vulnerable populations to aid in the reforestation of extensively degraded pistachio woodlands from 2003 to 2009.
“Natural resources can provide opportunities for emergency employment and…sustainable livelihoods for former combatants,” write the authors.
Countries recovering from episodes of violence tend to have a low capacity to effectively and equitably manage a natural resource base that itself may have been degraded by conflict. Recent attention, however, is being paid to the peacebuilding potential of managing shared resources.
According to the report, “while only 54 percent of peace agreements reached between 1989 and 2004 contained provisions on natural resources, all of the major agreements concluded between 2005 and 2010 included such provisions.” This includes the renovation of land tenure systems, management of valuable extractive industries, and reallocation of resource rents.
Preventing Predatory Extraction
As peace begins to take hold, “access to land may be a key determining factor affecting the successful reintegration of a former combatant into a community.”
According to interview data from Northern Uganda, 93 percent of male LRA ex-combatants were unable to access land after demobilization. Often due to the death of an elder relative, sale of land by a family member, or land grabs by other members of the community.
While shared resources can build trust between communities, spoiler groups that use aggressive means to secure resource rents in the aftermath of conflict can endanger a fragile peace. The report identifies a role here for peacekeeping forces – and in particular for their civilian contingent – to identify these potential risks and opportunities for action.
In particular, the report recommends a higher level of clarity about the relationship between peacekeeping forces and so called “expert panels” – groups of civilian specialists called upon by the Security Council to provide advice on an official basis about natural resources in the aftermath of conflict.
The UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, was given a direct mandate in 2008 to work with the DRC expert panel and to “use its monitoring and inspection capacities to curtail the provision of support to illegal armed groups derived from illicit trade in natural resources.”
UNEP Program Officer Matti Lehtonen, in an email interview, called the panels a “tremendous asset that is not yet used up to its full potential.” However, he noted, “expert panels and peacekeeping missions are different tools with different objectives so there is also a need to maintain a degree of independence.”
The report identifies a set of key recommendations for the UN moving forward:- Ensure that pre-deployment and in-mission training includes instruction on environment and natural resource management
- Aid and encourage disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration programs to look closely at emergency employment and sustainable livelihoods related to natural resources and the environment
- Support and encourage civil affairs personnel to seek ways to capitalize on peacebuilding opportunities around natural resources and the environment
- Systematically inform the Security Council of linkages between natural resources and conflict in states where the Council may be considering action
- Where natural resources have fueled or financed conflict, provide peacekeepers with a more systemic mandate to act on these issues
- Effectively implement best practices identified in the 2009 environmental policy
Photo Credit: UN peacekeepers in Côte d’Ivoire distribute water during a 2007 mission, courtesy of United Nations Photo. 8MXM49VWC3ZH -
Eye On:
Full Extent of Africa’s Groundwater Resources Visualized for the First Time
›By Stuart Kent // Monday, May 28, 2012“In Africa, groundwater is the major source of drinking water and its use for irrigation is forecast to increase substantially to combat growing food insecurity,” yet, a lack of quantitative data has meant that “groundwater storage is consequently omitted from assessments of freshwater availability,” according Alan Macdonald, Helen Bonsor, and Brighid Dochartaigh of the British Geological Survey, and Richard Taylor of University College London, writing in Environmental Research Letters.
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The authors hope to remedy this with new research presented in “Quantitative Maps of Groundwater Resources in Africa.” They used estimates compiled from geologic data and 283 aquifer summaries from 152 different publications to quantitatively visualize, for the first time, the full extent of Africa’s groundwater resources.
Tapping a Hidden Resource
The study estimates the scale of the continent’s groundwater resources at around 0.66 million km3. This volume, the authors explain, is “more than 100 times the annual renewable freshwater resources, and 20 times the freshwater stored in African lakes.”
Tapping into this massive resource is not always straightforward, however. The largest aquifers, and those most able to support high yielding bores, are concentrated in the arid regions of North Africa. The depth of these aquifers and their distance from major populations creates substantial economic challenges for extraction.
The geographic distribution of aquifers across sub-Saharan Africa is also quite variable, and local geology can determine not just the availability and accessibility of water but also its quality. For instance, geologic specificities can result in elevated levels of arsenic and other undesirable chemicals. Furthermore, “contamination…is common in urban areas from widespread and dispersed faecal effluent from on-site sanitation and leaking sewers.”
Tempering Expectations
Throughout Africa, “groundwater provides an important buffer to climate variability and change,” say the authors. But these buffers are not a singular solution to the threat of future water scarcity.
As the analysis shows, most aquifers, especially south of the Sahara, are unlikely to sustain boreholes of a higher capacity than that required by community-level hand pumps (one liter per second of flow at minimum). Yet, commercial irrigations schemes and urban towns typically demand boreholes greater than five liters per second, according to the study.
So, groundwater extraction may help communities and some small-scale farmers maintain access to water, particularly because many aquifers are found to possess the storage capacity required “to sustain abstraction through inter-annual variations in recharge,” however, “strategies for increasing irrigation or supplying water to rapidly urbanizing cities that are predicted on the widespread drilling of high yielding boreholes are likely to be unsuccessful.” Especially, the authors assert, where drilling precedes detailed local scale mapping of the available resources.
Sources: Environmental Research Letters.
Image Credit: Figures 1 and 3, courtesy of Environmental Research Letters. -
Digging for Crumbs: Michael Klare on the Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources
›By Stuart Kent // Friday, May 25, 2012Yale Environment 360 has a good interview up with Hampshire College Professor Michael Klare about the thinking behind his recent book, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources. According to Klare, increased scarcity and a surging global appetite for natural resources have led us into an unprecedented period of exploitation where maintaining a supply of crucial resources means exploiting ever more remote, fragile, and dangerous regions of the globe (Afghanistan and the Arctic, for example).
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Touching on everything from Canada’s tar sands and “fracking” in the United States, to rare earth minerals and agricultural land grabs, Klare explains the security implications of this newest resource “scramble” and his hopes for future solutions.
We’ve excerpted the first question and answer of the interview, by Diane Toomey, below, but the complete discussion is worth a read.Yale Environment 360: You make the point that when it comes to the age-old competition for raw materials, we’re in an unprecedented age. How so?
Continue reading on Yale Environment 360.
Michael Klare: I do believe that’s the case. Humans have been struggling to gain control of vital resources since the beginning of time, but I think we’re in a new era because we’re running out of places to go. Humans have constantly moved to new areas, to new continents, when they’ve run out of things in their home territory. But there aren’t any more new continents to go to. We’re going now to the last places left on earth that haven’t been exploited: the Arctic, the deep oceans, the inner jungles in Africa, Afghanistan. There are very few places left that haven’t been fully tapped, so this is humanity’s last chance to exploit the earth, and after this there’s nowhere else to go.
Photo Credit: Drilling in Siberia, courtesy of flickr user MOBmole. -
On the Beat:
Imelda Abano on Environmental Reporting in the Philippines
›By Stuart Kent // Friday, May 25, 2012“What we are trying to do is to explore more strategies on how to improve environmental reporting in the Philippines – and on how to reach the government and communities as well,” said Imelda Abano, president of the Philippine Network of Environmental Journalists, Inc. (PNEJ) and senior correspondent at Business Mirror, in an interview with ECSP.MORE
With an overwhelmingly coastal population of around 95 million, the 7,150 island archipelago of the Philippines is seen as highly vulnerable to environmental and climate-related threats. One of Albano’s major aims as president of the PNEJ is therefore to “empower local journalists to report more on environmental issues like biodiversity, climate change, disaster, and other environmental challenges in the Philippines,” she said.
Compelling reporting, she said, comes from “try[ing] to understand what the government is trying to say or what researchers or other organizations are trying to say,” and then relating that information back to the people “in the layman’s terms.”
Environmental issues require a lot of context, she said. One of the most important related issues in the Philippines is population growth.
“When you talk about environment issues, it really resonates or links to population issues,” Abano said. Current UN projections estimate that by 2050, the population could balloon to nearly 155 million. “This really affects our jobs, women, culture, and of course the population around the coastal areas.” -
Guest Contributor:
Poor Land Tenure: A Key Component to Why Nations Fail
›By Tim Hanstad // Thursday, May 24, 2012The murder of five land rights campaigners during the last two months – one in Colombia, three in Brazil, and one in Cambodia – have not captured many headlines, but they are a reminder of the central role land tenure plays not just in rural economic development but also in sparking broadly distributed economic gains throughout a society.MORE
Violence has often been threatened against those around the world who advocate for the land rights of the world’s poor. Even for those who aren’t on the front lines, but rather, like my organization, quietly partner with governments to bring about fundamental and structural change to a country, the hazards can be real.
When I started this work more than two decades ago after graduating from the University of Washington School of Law, a bulletproof vest was as essential as a notebook and pen to conduct fieldwork in certain places.
In fact, three colleagues of Landesa’s founder, Roy Prosterman (including a fellow University of Washington alum, Mark Pearlman), were assassinated while meeting to discuss land rights reform legislation in El Salvador in 1981.
To understand why people continue to risk life and limb to help the poor gain control over the land they depend on and why people are willing to kill to stop them, it helps to review the big picture.
Subsistence Without Investment
Around the world there are more than one billion people who are desperately poor. The vast majority of these poor share two traits: one, they rely on agriculture to survive; and two, they don’t legally control the land they till.
Many are sharecroppers, indentured servants, or informal possessors who struggle to climb out of poverty because they don’t have incentives to invest in their land to improve their harvest and their lives. Their lack of legal control over the land is a huge stumbling block not just for their immediate families, but also for the development of their communities and nations, as highlighted in the wonderful new book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.
The authors, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, of MIT and Harvard, respectively, make clear that even in the most dysfunctional nations, money is being made – often lots of it – but it is not being distributed widely. These “extractive systems,” they argue, are designed specifically to take wealth from a broad class of people (slaves, farmers, mine workers, etc.) to benefit a much smaller subset (the ruling elite, the landed gentry, etc). Sierra Leone’s diamond mines, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s cobalt mines, and Burma’s vast timber and mineral resources are all examples of systems that exploit not just labor but sovereign natural resources and funnels those proceeds to a small group with the goal of continually extracting more wealth.
In these settings, the opposition to democratic land-rights reform rarely stems from fears that compensation won’t be fair. Instead the elite fear that giving the poor ownership gives them power and leverage: the power of economic opportunity and to not be exploited, and the leverage to pull children out of the fields and send them into the classroom, to start home businesses, and to be innovative.
The inherent power in land rights, when multiplied by hundreds of thousands or millions of families, can be exploited during critical junctures to dramatically change the trajectory of a nation’s history to eliminate the extractive systems.
Moving Growth ForwardDespite frequent opposition from powerful vested interests, there are governments around the world who are trying to move toward more inclusive economic systems that offer opportunity to all. Given the current global rush for land, these efforts are particularly timely and critical.
Among the countries currently undertaking such efforts are India, China, Kenya, and Rwanda.
India, with little fanfare, has launched a variety of promising new programs that aim to provide millions of poor rural families with secure titles. In West Bengal, the government is providing landless families with micro-plots of land and training their daughters in organic agriculture. In Odisha, the government is providing indigenous tribes with title to the land their families have farmed for generations without legal control. Because of these initiatives, hundreds of thousands of families across India are now, for the first time, able to send their children to government residential schools, obtain agricultural training, and defend their investments in their own land.
China is gradually rolling out the implementation of documented, 30-year property rights for farmers as well as considering legislative changes that will more effectively protect those rights from later expropriation. While the stand-off in the fishing village of Wukan last year garnered headlines and is certainly not an aberration, the central government is putting together a framework to try to minimize violations of farmers’ land rights.
Kenya just last month adopted land legislation to fulfill the new constitution’s promise to secure land rights for millions of poor farmers. And Rwanda is in the process of formalizing land rights for rural families throughout the country.
Such reforms have been even more effective when women’s land rights are specifically targeted.
Efforts like these should be celebrated and expanded. And new UN guidelines on land rights endorsed last week can provide direction on the necessary national policies, legislation, and programs. Let’s hope that the deaths of so many who have dared to stand up in defense of the lands rights of the poor do not stop brave officials in governments around the world from making progress in the fight against poverty.
As Acemoglu and Robinson note, “Growth moves us forward only if not blocked by the economic losers who anticipate that their economic privileges will be lost and by the political losers who fear that their political power will be eroded.”
Tim Hanstad is president and CEO of Landesa, a global development non-profit that works to secure land rights for the world’s poor. Follow us on Twitter at @Landesa_Global.
Sources: Acemoglu and Robins (2012), Arlington National Cemetery, Columbia Reports, Common Dreams, Food and Agriculture Organization, Landesa, Prosterman et al. (2009), The New York Times, Voice of America.
Video Credit: Landesa Global; Photo Credit: New land rights-holders in India, used with permission courtesy of Deborah Espinosa/Landesa. -
Guest Contributor:
Philippines’ Bohol Island Demonstrates Benefits of Integrated Conservation and Health Development
›By Janet Edmond // Wednesday, May 23, 2012In March 2012, I participated in a study tour to the island of Bohol, near the unique Danajon double barrier reef ecosystem – the only one of its kind in the Philippines and one of only three in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Nowhere is the connection between population dynamics and biodiversity more evident than in the Philippines, one of the most densely-populated countries on the planet, with more than 300 people per square kilometer. Nearly every major species of fish in the region shows signs of overfishing, according to the World Bank.
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Sponsored by the USAID-supported BALANCED Project, the study tour was organized by our partner, PATH Foundation Philippines, Inc. (PFPI), to show the benefits of health organizations working hand-in-hand with conservation groups in areas vulnerable to environmental destruction. Together with mayors and city administrators from around the Verde Island Passage, another strategic marine region of the Philippines, I saw firsthand how local men and women are struggling to improve their families’ quality of life.
Remote communities often lack access to and knowledge about basic medical services, including reproductive health information on how to increase the years between births to ensure healthier mothers, children, and families. In areas like the Philippines, where people are heavily reliant on their natural resources for both sustenance and their livelihoods, beyond the health benefits, access to reproductive health services can also contribute to protecting local biodiversity by slowing growth rates to more sustainable levels.
PFPI is working with municipal, executive, and legislative officials – particularly health, agriculture, and environment officials – and local community associations to deliver an integrated package of population, health, and environment (PHE) interventions.
PFPI helps setup community-based programs composed of adult peer educators, who promote the links between smaller family size and better health; volunteers who work with fishing families to reduce destructive environmental practices and promote alternative livelihoods; and distributors who serve as outlets for PHE information and family planning and reproductive health commodities. Youth peer educators also work to deliver integrated messages to young people, encouraging planned families and small business development in order to break the existing cycle of poverty. Taken together, these synergistic interventions help men and women increase their abilities to better manage their environment and reduce pressures on already-fragile marine resources.
Our study tour to Bohol included visiting several PFPI sites in communities in the northern provinces of Ubay and Bien Unido, some of the poorest areas on the island. In parts of Ubay, according to a provincial official, the poverty rate is an alarming 75 percent. But the people here are clearly motivated and articulate a bold vision of improving their children’s future in terms of health, education, livelihoods, and food security.
During one visit, we heard from a young man who ferries passengers on his motorcycle across town. He spoke passionately of how, as he drives people around, he also talks to them about the benefits and options for limiting family size and promoting a healthy environment.
On our visit to a distant island surrounded by a marine protected area abutting the Danajon bank, we listened to women who talk to their neighbors about the need to improve family health, protect the environment from destructive human activities, and also provide family planning commodities for a small fee. Along the way, we also met an elderly man whose arm had been lost to dynamite fishing years ago. The municipal coastal resources manager explained that although the destructive practices had been outlawed years ago, the need for food often trumps health and safety concerns. As part of the BALANCED Philippines Project, PFPI and community partners are working with the fishermen to respect the protected area’s boundaries, implement improved fishing practices, and develop alternative livelihoods.
By the end of the study tour, the mayors and local officials from the Verde Island Passage clearly understood and were convinced of the need to better integrate and link health and conservation efforts to reduce pressure on coastal resources. They are already implementing their “action plans” with support from Conservation International Philippines and PFPI, through the BALANCED Philippines Project, to integrate family planning and health activities into marine conservation and livelihoods efforts. These local actors are making a significant difference in the lives of their neighbors, friends, and families, by giving them the tools to manage their resources and bodies, building bridges across sectors, and confronting the main threats to biodiversity in this unique country.
Despite the success of these and other integrated population, health, and environment programs, many conservation professionals shy away from addressing reproductive health issues, considering them too sensitive or outside of their organizations’ mission.
But since 2000, approximately 400,000 people have joined the 1.1 billion already living in fragile ecosystems worldwide. Though the natural population growth rate in these areas has undergone a significant drop – from 1.6 percent in 2000 to 1.3 percent today – a significant unmet need for health services remains and growth will continue. The intersection of people and nature in these areas will therefore play a significant role in the success or failure of conservation efforts in the years to come. Integrated PHE programs are not only good for the environment, but they further development efforts by providing valuable health services and encouraging sustainable alternative livelihoods.
Janet Edmond is the director of population and environment at Conservation International and the deputy director for outreach and advocacy for the BALANCED Project.
Photo Credit: Fisherman showing his daily catch in the Verde Island Passage, used with permission courtesy of Giuseppe Di Carlo/Conservation International. -
Valerie Hudson and Chad Emmett: Women’s Well-Being Is the Best Predictor of State Stability
›By Kate Diamond // Tuesday, May 22, 2012“The best predictor of a state’s stability and security is the level of violence against women in society,” said Texas A&M; University’s Valerie Hudson in this interview with ECSP. That link is “based on rigorous empirical analysis,” she said. “There’s something to it. It’s not just political correctness.”MORE
Hudson is the co-author of Sex and World Peace, which she launched with Chad Emmett (also interviewed) at the Wilson Center last month. The book is the product of 10 years of research by Hudson, Emmett, and co-authors Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, and Mary Caprioli. In the world of gender studies, “one of the things that we quickly discovered was that anecdotes abound, but anecdotes do not add up to data,” Hudson said.
To combat that discrepancy the authors created the WomanStats Project, a database of more than 324 variables from 175 countries. Using indicators such as the physical security of women, trafficking in women, sex ratio and son preference, equity in family law, polygyny, female genital cutting, and age of marriage, the authors were able to assess women’s well-being on both a micro-scale and between nations.
Comparing this data to the Global Peace Index, the authors found that contrary to conventional wisdom, “the best predictor of a nation’s stability and security is not their level of democracy, it’s not their level of wealth, it’s not what ‘Huntington civilization’ they belong to,” said Hudson. It’s violence against women.
“We think that there is a link between what’s happening at the micro level with women in the country and what kind of behavior you’re seeing from the state on the world stage.” Given that link, she added, improving the status of women could do more to enhance a state’s security than, “say, exporting democracy or exporting free market capitalism.”
The Obama administration seems to recognize this link. “What’s exciting is that the United States is developing a national action plan to implement this kind of mainstreaming of women into national security, diplomacy, and foreign policy contexts,” Hudson said, adding that “we feel that we could provide the information that would help make this a grounded and effective action plan.”
However, bottom-up initiatives will also play an important role in improving women’s equality and security, said Emmett. As a geographer and Middle East specialist, he pointed out that there are a lot citizen initiatives “coming out of the Islamic world where Muslim women themselves are implementing change, are taking action, are doing things.”
Hudson sees the WomanStats Project as a tool that women around the world can use in their efforts towards equality. “Our feeling is that we want to lower the barriers for people from all walks of life to begin to see and access information on the situation of women…and we’re able to provide that.” -
Reading Radar:
Improving Food Security Through Land Rights and Access to Family Planning
›By Kate Diamond // Tuesday, May 22, 2012“In a future world affected by climate change, population growth is one lever that can be addressed to ameliorate the impacts of climate change, particularly in the area of food security,” write Scott Moreland and Ellen Smith in “Modeling Climate Change, Food Security, and Population,” a recent study for MEASURE Evaluation and USAID. Moreland and Smith combine demographic changes, food needs, and economic capacity into a single aggregate model to assess how family planning and climate change might affect food security from now until 2050. Using Ethiopia as an example, the model finds that if access to family planning services were increased to meet existing needs, the subsequent decrease in demand for food would reduce child malnutrition and effectively counteract a projected 25 percent shortfall in caloric availability from climate change’s impact on agriculture. Programs designed to increase access to family planning should therefore be incorporated into national adaptation and food security strategies, they conclude. “Family planning, especially in countries with high unmet need, provides a potential solution not only for women’s reproductive health, but also for adapting to the effects of climate change.”
MOREThe Food and Agriculture Organization’s Committee on World Food Security recently endorsed a set of voluntary guidelines for land tenure governance in the context of food security that aims to strike a balance between encouraging productive investment and ensuring equitable and sustainable development. Population growth, climate change, and environmental degradation are putting pressure on the legal and cultural systems that govern land rights, resulting in “inadequate and insecure tenure rights” which can “increase vulnerability, hunger and poverty, and can lead to conflict and environmental degradation when competing users fight for control of these resources.” The guidelines, drawn from consultations with hundreds of people from both the private and public spheres and representing more than 130 countries, emphasize the need to safeguard access to land, fisheries, and forests – as well as the resources they provide – in a way that respects customary tenure systems, which are not always reflected in official tenure policies or records. They also emphasize strengthening the ownership rights of women and other traditionally marginalized groups in order to enhance food security and minimize the risk of instability and conflict in the future.
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From the Wilson Center:
The Global Water Security Assessment and U.S. National Security Implications
›By Stuart Kent // Monday, May 21, 2012“Water security is about much more than access to H2O,” said Jane Harman, director, president, and CEO of the Wilson Center at the May 9 meeting, “Global Water Security: The Intelligence Community Assessment.” The event – part of the Wilson Center’s National Conversation Series – brought together a number of experts to discuss a recently released intelligence community assessment of global water security. [Video Below]
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“Water will affect our ability to protect our environment, achieve food [security], provide energy security, and respond to climate change,” said Maria Otero, Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights at the Department of State.
Otero was joined by Kerri-Ann Jones, Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs; Casimir Yost and Maj. Gen. Richard Engel, USAF (ret.), of the National Intelligence Council; Ellen Laipson, director and CEO of the Stimson Center; Alexandra Cousteau of Blue Legacy and a National Geographic emerging explorer; and ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko.
The United States, Otero asserted, possesses a unique capacity to provide its global partners with the “science and technology to really…make a difference…at a scale that is significant.”
The Intelligence Assessment
Water problems in countries important to the United States are likely in the next 10 years, Engel said. “Failure to properly deal with this [will] result in agriculture degradation, productivity-wise, in certain countries that will affect them locally and effect global markets and also disable their ability to really succeed economically.”
The National Intelligence Council (NIC), which directed the intelligence community-wide assessment, looked most closely at the strategically important states that cover “the geography between the Nile and the Mekong, where there was a clear intersection of U.S. national security interests and risks to water availability,” said Yost.
Looking out to 2040, they examined three global drivers for water scarcity: population growth, economic development, and climate change.
In the near-term, economic development and population growth are “the more significant drivers as compared to climate change,” said Engel. However, “beyond 2040 that equation might change significantly.”
Water challenges could trigger social disruption, and in some states where other stressors exist, state failure is possible, Engel said. He pointed out that if these states are stressed, one impact will be that “they won’t be able to support…U.S. policy objectives.”
In other instances, water may be used as leverage between states; for example, “one state would potentially develop its water activity first and deny another state the access to that water.” Or, we could see “water potentially being used as a weapon” by terrorists or by states seeking to marginalize sections of their own populace, said Engel.
Water as a factor in more traditional conflicts between states was seen as unlikely, but plausible, in the next decade.
Diplomacy and Engaging Across Sectors
Several years ago, “getting outside the boundaries of traditional security and traditional definitions of national security was hard,” Laipson said. But “it’s not a hard sell anymore; people really…understand the interconnectedness of hard security and soft security.” Working on these connections requires engaging across sectors and scales and opening up the floor to many different actors.
It is important “to make sure that everybody sees a stake and that this isn’t being done to accrue power or prestige to the United States,” said Laipson. “We’re in the mix with everybody else to try to solve the problem.” “People have to have a more wide-angle lens view of who are the stakeholders,” she said. In many states, “when you bring the water engineers and the hydrologists together…they don’t want to become political actors, they don’t want to be dragged in to brief the prime minister or face the press.”
On behalf of the Department of State, Otero reiterated five priorities for water security, as laid out by Secretary Hillary Clinton: building cross-scale institutional capacity, increasing diplomatic efforts, mobilizing financial support, promoting science and technology, and building sustained partnerships.
At this intersection of diplomacy and development, said Jones, “you have to deal with the issues of the local economies ability to produce what it needs in terms of food and energy and…about how you reach out to other donors and other partners.”
Despite the difficulty, outreach efforts are critical because local actors are often the most knowledgeable, Laipson said. She pointed to the example of the Mekong River, which is shared by millions who, despite not seeing themselves as national security actors, possess critical knowledge about the river system and what future changes might mean for their livelihoods and stability.
Protecting Water to Protect People
In some countries the water security story will be all about cooperation, while in others, there is a real need for concern, said Laipson. “Water problems get managed at the sub-national level and at the super-national level. So, you have water authorities that can do the right thing in part of the national territory, even if at the national level, the policies aren’t so great.”
“The real world is going to be about the disaggregated realities,” she asserted.
Capturing these nuances is difficult said Engels. “Not enough hydrological models are available globally to really understand what’s taking place,” and often the data that is available is simply too aggregated to provide a detailed understanding.
Community-level stories help illustrate the real impact of scarcity and quality issues that sometimes seem abstract, said Cousteau. “We hear a lot about the ‘global water crisis,’” she said. “Part of it is a very immediate human tragedy that we have to address…but we don’t talk enough about the coming human tragedy if we don’t look at these river systems and maintaining their integrity…to support healthy communities.”
These changing river systems “have to satisfy demands from a lot of different, both powerful and not powerful interests,” Cousteau said. “We need to continue looking at these rivers as ecosystems…and understand it’s the systems that provide us with buffers.”
Institutionalizing the protection of these buffers and ecosystem services make a real difference to the security of individuals and of states, she argued. For example, Botswana’s Okavango delta “still exists because, in spite of the fact that the water originates in Angola, which was torn apart by civil war [and] runs almost 2000 miles to the Okavango delta passing through Namibia, which is a desert nation, they have recognized that the Okavango delta needs to exist.” People in all three countries have established a trans-basin commission designed to make cooperative decisions about the watershed system.
Encouraging this sort of collaboration is critical to avoiding water-related conflicts, which have thus far been extremely rare.
“Nearly every sector of human activity relies on water resources,” said Harman, yet “freshwater has no direct substitute.” Taken in aggregate, the bottom line, Otero asserted, is that “left unaddressed, water challenges worldwide are going to present a threat to U.S. security interests.”
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Photo Credit: Sean Peoples/Wilson Center. -
From the Wilson Center:
“Afghanistan, Against the Odds: A Demographic Surprise” Launches ECSP Report 14
›By ECSP Staff // Friday, May 18, 2012A few months ago, Elizabeth Leahy Madsen broke down Afghanistan’s first-ever nationally representative survey of demographic and health issues in a two-part series here on the blog. Now, we’ve published her analysis in a rich new policy brief format. It is the first issue of Environmental Change and Security Program Report 14, the latest volume of ECSP’s flagship publication.MORE
In “Afghanistan, Against the Odds,” Madsen examines the surprising results of this fall’s demographic survey and how the country’s statistics compare to neighboring Pakistan.
“Just as Afghanistan and Pakistan’s political circumstances have become more entwined,” writes Madsen, “their demographic paths are more closely parallel than we might have expected. For Afghanistan, given its myriad socioeconomic, political, cultural, and geographic challenges, this is good news. But for Pakistan, where efforts to meet family planning needs have fallen short of capacity, it is not.”
The publication of this brief marks the re-launch of ECSP Report as an online-only volume, with individual issues scheduled to be released throughout the year. Forthcoming ECSP Report 14 briefs will address the demographic roots of the Arab Spring; the links between population dynamics and environmental resources like water, biodiversity, and food; and the potential impact of climate change mitigation efforts on conflict.
Published since 1996 in hard copy and online, the new ECSP Report will now be available on the Wilson Center website, New Security Beat, and Issuu. You can read the previous 13 volumes of the ECSP Report on the Wilson Center website.
Download ECSP Report 14: “Afghanistan, Against the Odds” from the Wilson Center. -
From the Wilson Center:
Sex and World Peace: How the Treatment of Women Affects Development and Security
›By Kate Diamond // Thursday, May 17, 2012“What we have discovered is that the very best predictor of how insecure and unstable a nation is not its level of democracy, it’s not its level of wealth, it’s not what ‘Huntington civilization’ it belongs to, but is in fact best predicted by the level of violence against women in the society,” said Valerie Hudson, co-author of Sex and World Peace, at an April 26 book launch at the Wilson Center.
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Co-author Chad Emmett joined Hudson, along with Jeni Klugman, the World Bank’s director of gender and development, and Richard Cincotta, demographer-in-residence at the Stimson Center, to discuss the security implications of gender inequality and potential policy responses.
The Paradox of Missing Women
The basis of the book – applying a gender lens to international security – followed from early feedback from her colleagues at Brigham Young University, who suggested that if her goal was to understand the reasons for “blood spilt and lives lost,” she would do better to look at ideological conflict rather than women’s security.
In response, she made a simple comparison of deaths from conflict and the number of “missing women” in the world. Looking at “as many [conflicts] as I possibly could,” Hudson said she totaled 152 million deaths in 20th century fighting. By comparison, the United Nations Population Fund reported that at the turn of the century – just “one generation, if you will, of the century” – 163 million women went missing from Asia alone.
The missing women phenomenon is “a significant paradox” in global development, said Klugman. “On the one hand there have been enormous advances in terms of life expectancy, but at the same time, relative to boys and men, there’s still enormous excess mortality.”
“We see females who are missing at birth – and that’s the fairly well-known problem of sex-selective abortions…in China and India,” she continued. “And then we have girls who die before they reach their fifth birthday…inadequate water and bad sanitation…and then of course we still have fairly high rates of maternal mortality, which are affecting women of child-bearing age.”
Where a woman lives also affects her security, or lack thereof, at different stages of her life, said Emmett. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, relatively balanced sex ratios suggest that females are safer as babies than in South Asia, where ratios skew in males’ favor. As mothers, however, women may have a “more favorable status” in the Middle East and North Africa than sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, given the region’s relatively low maternal mortality rates, he said.
“A Clash of Gender Civilizations”
Looking at these inequalities, Hudson and Emmett, along with co-authors Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill and Mary Caprioli, put the standard question of whether a state’s security affects the security of its women “on its head,” said Hudson, and instead asked “does the security of women impact the security of states?”
Do gender inequities make problems like food insecurity and famine more likely? Do they make poverty, disease, demographic problems, poor governance, and conflict more likely?
In short, the authors say 10 years of empirically-based, interdisciplinary research indicate the answer is yes. “Perhaps the engine of state conflict is actually a clash of gender civilizations,” Hudson said, and not the “clash of civilizations” that Samuel Huntington put forth in his seminal 1993 article.
Looking at health, for instance, the authors found that “the larger the gender gap, the higher the AIDS rate and the higher the rate of infectious diseases,” said Hudson. “And the larger the gender gap, the lower the life expectancy not just for women, but for men.”
Conversely, “the smaller the gender gap, the lower the infant mortality rates, the lower the child malnutrition rates.” Tying the two together, she asked, “might inequitable treatment of women make disease and ill health more likely for the nation?”
The authors repeated that analysis across the board: states with a larger gender gap and fewer rights for women tend to have higher levels of both perceived and actual corruption, lower national incomes, higher and less sustainable fertility levels, and a greater likelihood of both inter- and intra-state violence. Conversely, a smaller gender gap and stronger women’s rights are linked with more durable peace agreements, lower infant mortality and child malnutrition rates, a greater focus on social welfare issues, and higher levels of trust in government.
Convincing the Unconvinced: “A Tough Order”
If gender inequality is one of conflict’s “tap roots,” Hudson continued, “then maybe we would have more success in helping the international system be more peaceful if we concentrated…more on holding nations accountable to their obligations under CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women].”
That goal, however, “is a tough order,” said Cincotta, who was the discussant on the panel. “What we’re talking about is in a world governed by men, largely, countries governed by men, who appeal for their power largely to communities also controlled by men – how do you convince them that giving up some of their power is in their best interest?”
Cincotta pointed to a specific conclusion the authors drew in the book: that states would welcome greater scrutiny of potential rights violations once they understood the connection between stronger women’s rights and stronger state security.
“That to me is a real stretch,” he said. “You’re asking for [states] to say ‘okay, I’m going to bring in [women and human rights defenders], and allow these reports to be made, and I’m going to be better off for it.’”
“[The authors] start out from the beginning warning you that this is the beginning of a long venture and that they can’t prove causality with all the things that they talk about…but they point to certain relationships that are worth thinking about.”
Bottom-Up and Top-Down Progress
Although states may be hesitant to adopt a gendered approach to improving state security, Emmett said women are taking the lead in fostering bottom-up momentum for greater equality. For example, in Saudi Arabia, women activists are pressing the government to be allowed to drive; in Afghanistan, girls are persevering in the face of acid attacks to attend school; and Somali women are raising the call to end female genital mutilation.
The international community also has a role to play, said Klugman. The World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report focused on gender inequality for the first time in its 35-year history, and for the first time made “the explicit recognition that these [gender] gaps do not disappear with [economic] growth.” Achieving greater equality will depend on activists and policymakers at every level, and in all sectors, working in tandem, she said.
“You can intervene if you like in one domain, for example making a formal policy change,” Klugman said, “but unless you’re thinking about what’s happening with respect to the other norms…you’re not really going to realize the hoped-for gains.”
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Dot-Mom:
Adenike Esiet: Building Support for Improving Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health in Nigeria
›By Kate Diamond // Wednesday, May 16, 2012“In Nigeria, young people under the age of 25 are driving the HIV epidemic…and that’s been the opening place for people to begin to say, ‘let’s address the issues of young people’s sexual and reproductive health,’” said Adenike Esiet, executive director of Action Health Incorporated in Lagos, during an interview with ECSP.MORE
On any number of health indicators, girls suffer disproportionately. “For every one boy in the age bracket of 10 to 24 who is HIV positive, there are three girls who are HIV positive,” Esiet said. “Over 60 percent of cases of complications from unsafe abortion reported in Nigerian hospitals are amongst adolescent girls. In fact in literature, 10-15 years ago, this was described as ‘a schoolgirl’s problem’…and it’s still an ongoing problem.” She added: “And for girls too, the issue of sexual violence is huge. It goes largely unreported but it’s occurring at epidemic levels.”
Esiet spoke on an adolescent health panel during the April 25 “Nigeria Beyond the Headlines” event at the Wilson Center. Progress is slow on these issues, in large part because “there’s a whole lot of silence about acknowledging young people’s sexuality,” she said.
Adults “want to believe [adolescents] shouldn’t be sexually active.” But turning a blind eye to adolescent sexuality can mean that efforts “to provide access to education or services is hugely resisted by practitioners who should be doing this.”
Action Health works to fill the gap that emerges. “Our work covers advocacy, community outreach, and service provision for young people,” said Esiet.
“Our primary entry road in to work with young people is creating access to sexuality education and youth friendly services. And in the course of trying to do that, we have to do a whole lot of advocacy with government and also with ministries or education and ministries of health and youth development.”
The group has worked with government officials and agencies to establish a nationwide HIV education curriculum and paired with local healthcare providers to increase access to “youth-friendly” sexual and reproductive health services. Funding shortages and insufficient resources have hampered the curriculum’s success, though, and the pervasive attitude against youth sexuality has limited the reach of services, she said. Ultimately, “there are a whole range of issues that truly need to be addressed” for outreach efforts to be successful. -
‘People and the Planet’ Study Re-Introduces Demography to Sustainability Debate
›John May, Center for Global Development
By ECSP Staff // Tuesday, May 15, 2012The original version of this article, by John May, appeared on the Center for Global Development’s Global Health Policy blog.
Population issues have been conspicuously absent from the discussions on the environmental sustainability of our globalized economy in the run-up to the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, which will take place in Brazil, June 20-22, under the auspices of the United Nations.MORE
Fortunately, the new report, People and the Planet by the Royal Society, should help change this woefully shortsighted approach. The report demonstrates clearly and convincingly that demographic trends cannot be separated from consumption patterns, and that there is no chance to achieve a path of equitable and sustainable development without tackling population growth and consumption at the same time. In short, population and the environment cannot and should not be considered as two separate issues.
This strong and long overdue pitch to bring back the “p” word into the environmental debate is most welcome. In recent decades, international attention has shifted from rapid population growth to other urgent issues, such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, humanitarian crises, climate change, and good governance. But reproductive health and voluntary family planning programs are still very much needed, especially in high fertility countries, and they require political leadership and long-term financial commitment. Broader access to family planning services will be needed to accelerate the decline of high fertility rates, particularly in countries where unmet needs for contraception are high.
Continue reading at the Center for Global Development.
Image Credit: People and the Planet cover, courtesy of the Royal Society. -
From the Wilson Center:
Nigeria Beyond the Headlines: Environment and Security [Part Two]
›By Kate Diamond // Monday, May 14, 2012In the coming years, Nigeria’s cohort of unemployed youth has equal potential to “be converted into either a religious or a regional clash, as certain youths get opportunities and other youths do not,” said Pauline Baker, President Emeritus of the Fund for Peace, during the day-long “Nigeria Behind the Headlines” event at the Wilson Center on the April 25 (read part one here).
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Youth in the troubled Niger Delta offer a case in point. Judy Asanti, executive director of Academic Associates PeaceWorks, a Nigeria-based conflict resolution NGO, said that the 2009 amnesty program the government enacted to disarm militants has, paradoxically, incentivized violence among the country’s marginalized youth as they struggle to establish livelihoods for themselves. Seeing the government pay former militants monthly stipends in exchange for disarming, marginalized youth are now motivated to take up arms against the state with the expectation that it will then have no choice but to pay them for peace.
Conflict in the country extends far beyond Niger Delta, however, and is motivated by a number of factors beyond opposition to the oil industry and its negative impact on local development. “Violence in Nigeria is unfortunately quite regular, quite intense, but also quite varied in its motives, in its scope, and in its direction,” said Peter Lewis.
“There is not a single fault line, north-south, Christian-Muslim, Yoruba-Hausa, or any other such simple division that would explain…the majority of violence in Nigeria.”
There is nonetheless a set of “critical issues” that are reflected across the country’s main centers of conflict, said Baker. In the delta region, central Nigeria, and northern Nigeria, “population issues, health issues, and natural resource issues are all critical,” she said.
Land and Climate ChallengesWith so much at stake in an already unstable region, Anthony Nyong, head of gender, climate change, and sustainable development at the African Development Bank, said climate change exacerbates insecurity.
“Nigeria…is not immune to the threat of climate change,” he said. “We have seen Lake Chad dry up, we have seen people lose their livelihoods, and we’ve seen the migration that has come out of Lake Chad into Nigeria.”
How do you plan for this? The answer, Nyong said, is in figuring out how to “sustain green growth in the face of poverty alleviation.” The upcoming Rio+20 meetings will be an important forum for exploring alternatives, he argued. “We cannot continue on the development paradigm that we have chosen.”
George Akor, senior program manager at the Women Environmental Programme, pointed out the specific gendered impacts of environmental stress. “Climate change impacts, such as water scarcity, and falling agricultural productivity, may disproportionately affect women and girls,” he said, drawing from the 2010 Nigerian Millennium Development Goals Report.
“Women make up some 60 to 80 percent of [the] agricultural labor force in Nigeria – they play a very important role in this sector,” said Akor. Yet they rarely own the land because it is largely a patrilineal society. This disconnect reduces the capacity of Nigeria’s communities to adapt to challenges such as population pressure, severe erosion, uncontrolled logging, land subsidence, flooding in the coastal and riverine states, and drought and desertification in the north, he said.
“Water, land, and biodiversity are under severe pressure,” and that stress is manifested in crop failure, declining yields, and increased work time required for less food and less income. Women’s livelihoods are directly affected by these issues, said Akor.
The urban environment also faces pressure from poor land management, shoddy construction, and the continued growth of slums in major cities.
Industrial activities, such as illegal mining in the north-west, which received media attention after the discovery of widespread lead poisoning, and oil pollution from spillage and gas flares, are also serious environmental issues, Akor said.
Water Mismanagement and Government Opacity
“Water and sanitation isn’t really a hot topic in Nigeria,” said Ameto Akpe of Nigeria’s BusinessDay newspaper. Yet, “every year, almost 200,000 kids under the age of five die from drinking unsafe water [and] many more fall terribly sick from water related diseases like cholera, dysentery, and typhoid fever.” Akpe described challenging authorities on the lack of safe water and routinely receiving answers that were evasive and nonchalant. “It’s something you see over and over again,” she said.
“The water sanitation crisis…is less about the lack of the resource, or even the lack of funds, and more about poor and faulty management failures that have dramatic consequences,” said Akpe. She pointed to a project in the city of Makurdi on the banks of the river Benue, where tens of millions of dollars have been spent on a new water treatment facility in an area that lacks the infrastructure to actually distribute the water to residents.
How could such an oversight occur? The reasons are complex, but corruption and a lack of transparency in government financing are major issues, she said. Despite government promises that 75 percent of Nigerians will have access to clean drinking water by 2015, the water budget has been repeatedly slashed since 2010. It is now 65 percent of what it used to be, Akpe said.
Reasons for Optimism in a Rising Civil Society
The growing rift between Nigerians and their government spilled into the open in January when thousands protested the end of the government’s long-standing fuel subsidy, which caused prices for food, fuel, and transportation to skyrocket overnight. Although there have been protests in response to oil price hikes in the past – notably in 1988 and 2000 – this round was markedly different, said Akwe Amosu, an Africa policy analyst with the Open Society Foundation.
The mood of the January protests was encapsulated by a student quoted in Reuters, said Amosu. “He said, ‘the bottom line is we don’t trust the government to do what they say anymore.’” Paired with the unequal distribution of recent growth, that distrust is reorienting public opinion and galvanizing civil society. Within weeks, the protests prompted the government to reign in the cutbacks and simply reduce, rather than repeal, the subsidy.
“There is a rising level of expectations that…is changing the way that people think,” said Amosu. “People are beginning to feel more acutely the difficulties around poverty, around jobs, around lack of services.” Those rising expectations are contributing to a level of discourse on governance that is unparalleled in the country’s recent history, and which, if sustained, could help brighten the country’s future.
“Nigeria’s never been this divided since the civil war, and yet the country has never been this united in protest in its history,” she said, quoting ActionAid’s Hussaini Abdu. “And I think that speaks to the idea that people are getting a handle on the idea that they are a critical part of holding the nation to account.”
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Stuart Kent contributed to this article.
Photo Credit: Lagos slums, courtesy of flickr user smagdali (Stefan Magdalinski). Map courtesy of UNEP; video courtesy of PBS NewsHour.
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