Showing posts from category UN.
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Jacob Park, Our World 2.0
Will Expanding “Human Security” Really Improve People’s Lives?
›June 16, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Jacob Park, appeared on the UN University’s Our World 2.0.
To those working in the financial markets, the term “securitization” refers to the financial practice of pooling various types of debt, such as residential mortgages, and repackaging them as products like bonds, etc. And you can bet that most of the 2.5 million pages one gets if one searches for this term on the web probably relate to complex financial markets.
Yet the use of the term “security” is not limited to the financial markets and it appears that the United Nations system and the international community seem to be caught up in its own securitization trend. At the April 2011 65th General Assembly of the United Nations, the General Assembly held an informal debate on the human security concept and why it is important to the UN and the international community.
At this meeting, UN Deputy Secretary General Asha-Rose Migiro argued that “in a world where threats could be as sudden and unpredictable as a tsunami or as protracted and unyielding as an oppressive dictatorship, an expanded paradigm of security was needed to encompass the broad range of conditions threatening people’s survival, livelihoods, and dignity.”
In light of the recent triple disaster in Japan and this year’s uprisings in the Arab World, Migiro stated that from “natural disasters and entrenched poverty to outbreaks of conflict and the spread of disease, the dramatic events of recent weeks had underscored the vulnerability of developed and developing countries alike.”
Her views reflect a trend since the 2005 World Summit, where leaders agreed that human security concerned both “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want,” and the definition of human security expanded beyond the traditional military-political paradigm of security to be inclusive of social, energy, and environmental issues.
In fact, a wide range of UN institutions have been active promoting their respective security work; the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in relation to environmental security; the Food and Agricultural Organization in relation to food security; and the United Nations Development Programme/UN Trust Fund for Human Security, among others. (Similarly, the International Energy Agency, founded in response to the 1973/74 oil shocks, today plays an increasingly important role in advising its member countries on energy security.)
Real Solutions or Good Metaphors?
It’s hard to disagree with the expanded definition of security to include a wide range of social, environmental, and human development issues. But toward what ends? What will this diverse focus ultimately lead to?
Perhaps I am being overly pessimistic and need to be more patient for these various security issues to develop as possible policy solutions. However, experience with the term “sustainable development” offers a good illustration of what happens when vague concepts rather than real solutions starts the drive the institutional machinery of global governance.
It seems like at times we’re replacing solutions with metaphors or frames to discuss social, environmental, and human development global concerns. The emerging security narrative feels as if we’re waiting for some military quick fixes; as if there is some special forces unit that can be called upon to get rid of the climate-induced migration problem in the same manner as a special U.S. Navy SEAL team was dispatched to deal with Osama Bin Laden.
Unfortunately, there is a real possibility that these UN programs and initiatives (however worthwhile they may be) on energy security, food security, environmental security, climate security, and human security will attempt to deal with all of these issues at the same time and at the end, risk dealing with none. One thing is certain: more international conferences will be planned on security issues even if it is unclear what real benefits this will provide to the most vulnerable members of the international community, whom this securitization trend is designed to help.
What do you think? Will the securitization of all threats to human life make a difference to “at risk” communities across the globe? Or are we just getting caught up in language and not solutions?
Thoughts? Be sure to follow-up on Our World 2.0 as well.
Jacob Park is an associate professor of business strategy and sustainability at Green Mountain College in Vermont specializing in global environment and business strategy, corporate social responsibility, community-based entrepreneurship, and social innovation.
Photo Credit: “UN Peacekeepers Rescue School Collapse Victims,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo. -
Pakistan’s Population Bomb Defused?
›What is going on over at the UN Population Division? In response to The New Security Beat’s post on the UN’s sub-Saharan projections, Ed Carr of USAID recently highlighted what appears to be gross overestimations in the 2010 population revision for Ghana. Yet in the case of Pakistan, the opposite is seemingly at play – the projections appear to wildly (and unrealistically) underestimate population numbers for the coming decades.
The 2008 revision’s mid-variant estimate for Pakistan in 2050 was 335 million people. The new revision projects only about 275 million by that year. Even the new high-variant estimate (314 million) falls below the earlier mid-variant projection. Furthermore, the constant-fertility variant estimate for 2050 has fallen from 450 million to under 380 million.
What gives? Thanks to some helpful staff at the Population Division and Population Action International’s Elizabeth Leahy Madsen (who helped translate the UN’s demographic-ese for this non-specialist), I can only conclude that the UN has decided to hedge its bets that Pakistan’s fertility rates will fall, simply because its South Asian neighbors (and other nations) have followed this trajectory.
If so, I believe this assumption is spurious. As reported in the Wilson Center’s recent book on Pakistan’s population challenges, though Pakistan’s fertility rate is in decline, it is falling at a considerably slower pace than that of its neighbors, and the rate of decrease has slowed considerably over the last decade. The country’s total fertility rate (TFR) today is just under four, considerably above the replacement level rate (2.1).
By many indications, Pakistan’s TFR does not figure to fall quickly anytime soon. Pakistan’s maternal and reproductive health sector is deeply troubled, with family planning services either of poor quality or nonexistent – particularly in rural areas. Many rural women are obliged to travel on average 50 to 100 kilometers to obtain such services. Meanwhile, the status of Pakistani women is dreadful; female literacy is estimated to stand at only 44 percent (some places it as low as 35 percent), while women’s labor participation rates barely approach 20 percent. Not surprisingly, Pakistan’s contraceptive prevalence rate is quite low (30 percent), while its rate of unmet need for family planning is high (25 percent).
With all of Pakistan’s problems, improving access to family planning is simply not a front-burner issue for Islamabad (in fact, as our book notes, demography on the whole is largely neglected in Pakistan), which makes the 2010 revision’s projections all the more questionable.
The UN is expected to release details on the methodology behind its basic assumptions in the coming weeks; here’s hoping for some clarity. (Editor’s note: As Liz Madsen points out, there’s also a white paper on the new probabilistic model to sift through, if you’re prepared for some heavy reading.)
Michael Kugelman is a program associate for the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Chart Credit: Modification of projections of total fertility based on Bayesian hierarchical model, courtesy of the UN Population Division. -
One in Three People Will Live in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2100, Says UN
›June 8, 2011 // By Schuyler NullBetween now and 2100, three out of every four people added to world population will live in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s what the medium variant of the UN’s world population projections estimates.* As we noted in our previous post on the latest UN numbers, Nigeria leads sub-Saharan growth, but other countries will also grow by major multiples: Tanzania and Somalia will be 7 times larger; Malawi more than 8 times; and Niger, to grow to more than 10 times its current population.
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Ten Billion: UN Updates Population Projections, Assumptions on Peak Growth Shattered
›May 12, 2011 // By Schuyler NullThe numbers are up: The latest projections from the UN Population Division estimate that world population will reach 9.3 billion by 2050 – a slight bump up from the previous estimate of 9.1 billion. The most interesting change however is that the UN has extended its projection timeline to 2100, and the picture at the end of the century is of a very different world. As opposed to previous estimates, the world’s population is not expected to stabilize in the 2050s, instead rising past 10.1 billion by the end of the century, using the UN’s medium variant model.
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Watch: Frederick Burkle on Lessons from Haiti and Professionalizing Humanitarian Assistance
›April 20, 2011 // By Schuyler Null“Haiti – in terms of coordination – was a debacle,” said Frederick Burkle, senior fellow with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and a visiting scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Burkle, who is also a senior public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, said that after the 2010 earthquake, “the large majority of people who showed up were under the age of 30 and this was their first disaster event.”
As a result, “best practices did not necessarily occur,” Burkle said. “Ninety-five percent of the work is probably done by 45 of the major NGOs,” but, he said, the number of “mom-and-pop shows” and other small NGOs in “The Republic of NGOs” is in the thousands.
Non-healthcare providers ended up providing services that they were not trained to provide – even amputations, Burkle said. “We certainly relish the humanitarian spirit of those who show up, but we have to have some coordination to ensure that best practices occur and that it goes in the right direction.”
“The professionalization blueprint really calls for courses, curriculum, and best practice standards,” said Burkle. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative is working with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, World Health Organization, and others to provide these resources.
“There’s a movement afoot within the humanitarian community itself to finally professionalize the humanitarian profession,” Burkle said, spurred on, in part, by the poorly coordinated responses to events like the Haiti earthquake. -
Carl Haub, Behind the Numbers
UN Releases Early Results of Global Population Projections
›April 18, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Carl Haub, appeared on the Population Reference Bureau’s Behind the Numbers blog.
The United Nations Population Division has released preliminary results of its biennial series of population projections for the world’s countries for the 2010 revision. The projections are expected to be finalized later this month.While the global population for 2010 — 6.873 billion — is slightly lower than estimated in the 2008 revision (6.909 billion), the projected population for 2050 is now higher at 9.295 billion compared with the previous 9.150 projected in 2008. That can also be compared to the 2050 population of 9.485 billion on PRB’s 2010 World Population Data Sheet and 9.256 billion in the International Data Base of the U.S. Census Bureau.
The 2010 UN projections differ from the previous series in two significant ways. First, the projection horizon has been extended to 2100, quite far into the future. Second, the UN no longer assumes a uniform “ultimate” level of the total fertility rate (TFR) for all countries, such as the 1.85 level in its medium variant. Instead, multiple possibilities for each country’s TFR are projected with a probabilistic method based on fertility trends for the 1950-2010 period. Then, the median path of those “tracks” serves as the projected TFR for the medium variant series. The high and low variants, however, will be projected as in the past. Those variants have used an “ultimate” TFR of 2.35 and 1.35 for all countries, respectively.
The projected population of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in 2050, the world’s region with by far the largest potential for population growth, is now 1.963 billion, up from 1.753 in the 2008 UN projections. But, since the projections now run to 2100, we can now see beyond mid-century. By 2100, the UN projects that SSA would total an eye-popping 3.4 billion, nearly four times its present size and still be growing by 0.7 percent per year, adding 2 million annually at that time!
Continue reading on Behind the Numbers.
Sources: Population Reference Bureau, UN Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau.
Chart Credit: Data from UN Population Division, created by Schuyler Null. See full chart for interactive version (warning: it’s a lot of data – may slow or crash your browser). -
Climate Adaptation, Development, and Peacebuilding in Fragile States: Finding the Triple-Bottom Line
›“The climate agenda goes well beyond climate,” said Dan Smith, secretary general of International Alert at a recent Wilson Center event. “In the last 60 years, at least 40 percent of all interstate conflicts have had a link to natural resources” and those that do are also twice as likely to relapse in the five years following a peace agreement, said Neil Levine, director of the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID. [Video Below]
Development, peace, and climate stability are “the triple-bottom line,” said Smith. “How would you ever think that it would be possible to make progress on one, while ignoring the other two?” Levine and Smith were joined by Alexander Carius, managing director of Adelphi Research, who pointed out that climate change is both a matter of human security and traditional security. For example, as sea-level rise threatens the people of small-island states, “it also affects, in a very traditional sense, the question of security and a state’s sovereignty,” he said.
The Triple-Bottom Line
Conflicts are never attributable to a single cause, but instead are caused by “a whole pile-up, a proliferation, a conglomeration of reasons” that often include poverty, weak governance, traumatic memory of war, and climate change, said Smith. “Climate adds to the strains and the stresses that countries are under,” and works as a “risk-multiplier, or conflict multiplier,” he said.
Focusing development and peace-building efforts on those regions experiencing multiple threats is both a “moral imperative” and a “self-interested imperative,” said Smith. “We benefit from a more prosperous and a more stable world.”
There are currently one and a half billion people in the world living in countries that face these interlinked problems, said Smith, “and interlinked problems, almost by definition, require interlinked solutions.” Responding to the needs of these people requires developing resiliency so that they can respond to the consequences of climate change, which he called “unknown unknowns.”
“What we need are institutions and policies and actions which guard us not only against the threats we can see coming… but against the ones we can’t see coming,” said Smith. The strength and resilience of governments, economies, and communities are key to determining whether climate events become disasters.
Interagency Cooperation
“Part of making the triple-bottom line a real thing is to understand that we will have to be working on our own institutions, even the best and most effective of them, to make sure that they see the interlinkages,” said Smith.
But even though individuals increasingly understand the need to address security, development, and climate change in an integrated fashion, “institutions have only limited capacities for coordination,” said Carius. Institutions are constrained by bureaucratic processes, political mandates, or limited human resources, he said. “Years ago, I always argued for a more integrated policy process; today I would argue for an integrated assessment of the issues, but to…translate it back into sectoral approaches.”
Levine expressed optimism that with “a whole new avalanche of interagency connections” being established in the last few years, U.S. interagency cooperation has become “the culture.” However, if coordination efforts are not carefully aligned to advance concrete programs and policies, they run the risk of “getting bogged down in massive bureaucratic exercises,” he said. “‘Whole of government’ needn’t be ‘all of government,’ and it needn’t be whole of government, all of government, all the time.”
Building Political Will
Europe has a “conducive political environment to making [climate and security] arguments,” said Smith, but the dialogue has yet to translate into action. In 2007, the debate on climate and security was first brought to the UN and EU with a series of reports by government agencies and the first-ever debate on the impacts of climate change on security at the UN Security Council, said Carius. However, none of the recommendations from the reports were followed and “much of the political momentum that existed…ended up in a very technical, low-level dialogue,” he said.
More recently, the United Kingdom included energy, resources, and climate change as a priority security risk in their National Security Strategy. And Germany, which joined the UN Security Council as a rotating member this year, is expected to reintroduce the topic of climate and security when they assume the Security Council Presidency in July. These steps may help to regain some of the political momentum and “create legitimacy for at least making the argument – the very strong argument – that climate change has an impact on security,” said Carius.
Sources: AFP, UK Cabinet Office, Telegraph, United Nations
Image Credit: “Trees cocooned in spiders webs after flooding in Sindh, Pakistan” courtesy of flickr user DFID -
Youth Bulge, Demography-Security Dialogue, and NATO
PRB Discussion on Population and National Security
›April 14, 2011 // By Schuyler NullThe Population Reference Bureau (PRB) held an online discussion this week with demographer Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba of Rhodes College on the topic of “Population and National Security.” On tap were questions on sex ratios, youth bulge, the definition of “national security,” whether the United States should be giving population and health-related advice, and other demographic security topics. Click through to PRB for the full transcript, or check out some select questions from ECSPers Richard Cincotta, Geoff Dabelko, and Schuyler Null below:
Richard Cincotta: Jennifer, my concern is with the lack of specificity that seems inherent in the youth bulge model in terms of civil and ethnic conflict. In other words, the highest probability of civil conflict (often protracted) is associated with very young populations – the Afghanistan, Iraq, sub-Saharan African situations. But, there is also a situation that arises among populations that are demographically somewhat older that is associated with democratization (i.e., the North African situation). These seem to have been conflated by the press and political scientists, yet they are demographically and politically very different cases. Any thoughts on how to recognize these and separate them?Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba: Rich, I think that until we have a stronger theoretical foundation for understanding the conditions under which a “youthful” population leads to civil conflict (very young pop) or democracy (slightly older pop) it will be hard to relay the difference in these two structures to non-experts. The democratization connection, in particular, needs to be refined to move firmly away from correlation and into causation. Right now, it seems to me that we give the same theoretical reasoning to both conflict and democratization (motive, cohort crowding). Do you agree?
Geoff Dabelko: Is the security community, so accustomed to framing issues as threats, internalize your messages about opportunity? Is there a recognition that low cost interventions such as provision of voluntary family planning services could be part of a holistic sustainable security approach? What are the steps that would need to happen to gain more adherents to this perspective?
(Editor: Read more discussion between Cincotta and Sciubba here and here)Sciubba: I’m sorry to say, but no, not really. The positive perspective does not resonate much because most in defense and intelligence are tasked with imagining the worst-case scenario. Opportunities and happy stories just do not fit in this paradigm (or even most of their job descriptions). I’ve tried to figure out what needs to happen to get them to pay attention to prevention, and the only place I see some chance of breaking through is in discussing Afghanistan. Many realize the challenges posed by Afghanistan’s young and growing population and there is some recognition that family planning may be relevant there. I think that for a paradigmatic shift to occur, it would have to be top-down – the vision of the President, Secretary of Defense, etc.
Dabelko: What would be the benefits of demographers and population experts taking more seriously a dialogue with the security community? Your book shows why security sector actors should pay attention to demography. Why should demographers pay attention to security?Sciubba: Some in the security community don’t necessarily understand the assumptions behind demographic projections or other aspects of the data, which means they sometimes misuse the info or distrust it and discard it all together. I also think that scholars of any discipline have a responsibility to understand how their work is being used.
Dabelko: What will be the subject of your next book?Sciubba: I’ll be returning to the politics of population aging. I’m particularly interested in comparing how different regime types have dealt with these issues, including not just Western European states, but also states like Singapore and Russia.
Schuyler Null: There’s been a lot of talk about how aging populations in Europe will affect defense sectors there, in terms of shifting budget priorities. But there’s also the aspect of how aging might affect European decision-making processes when it comes to foreign intervention (perhaps less willing put boots on the ground, stay for long, etc.).
Can you speak to how aging might affect the decision-making process and behavior of European countries when it comes to conflict in the future? How might aging affect the operation of NATO or the UN?Sciubba: Isn’t France a puzzle right now given your question? France, a low fertility country with an aging population and HUGE challenges ahead in terms of paying for entitlements to seniors, has recently shown a greater willingness to contribute to military missions. There is no doubt that aging states in Europe will be under strain trying to meet their promises to seniors and also maintain defense. But, European states still feel that there are sufficient threats in the world to warrant maintaining a military. They are trying to reduce redundancies among themselves and increase their efficiency – great cost-saving measures. Technology can compensate a bit as well. I think European states are willing to use their militaries when the threat is sufficient. Aging, however, may raise the threshold for what qualifies as “sufficient” and US-European opinions on what qualifies may increasingly diverge.
See the full transcript of questions and Sciubba’s responses at the Population Reference Bureau.
