“Corruption in the water sector puts the lives and livelihoods of billions of people at risk,” says the Global Corruption Report 2008, a new report from the Institute for Security Studies and Transparency International, warning that pervasive corruption in the water sector could have devastating consequences for economic and social development, as well as the health of ecosystems worldwide. The report urges policymakers and scholars to address the issue of corruption in the water sector in the context of broader climate change and development discussions.

News coverage of the global water crisis focuses on the familiar circumstance of too many people and not enough water. This report takes a slightly different stance, suggesting that the water crisis is actually a water governance crisis, of which corruption is a major component.

According to the report, 80 percent of health problems in the developing world can be attributed to inadequate access to clean water and sanitation. The report cites China as a particularly egregious example, noting that 90 percent of Chinese cities pull from polluted aquifers and that 75 percent of river water in urban areas is too contaminated for drinking or fishing. This situation violates Chinese environmental standards, but corruption allows polluters to circumvent legal enforcement.

International water governance is increasingly critical. Forty percent of the world’s population draws on water from international water basins. Numerous countries depend on the Nile River, from its origin in the Rift Valley to its mouth on the Mediterranean. The report finds, “where corruption disrupts the equitable sharing of water between countries and communities, it also threatens political stability and regional security.” Ken Conca’s Governing Waterdelves more deeply into the links between poor water governance and new forms of social conflict, which are summarized in a Navigating Peace research brief.


But sharing water resources can also build confidence and increase dialogue. For example, Israel and Palestine discuss the Dead Sea and the Jordan River more frequently, and more productively, than they do political rapprochement.

Water’s global nature demands a comprehensive response involving governments, inter- and nongovernmental organizations, and local institutions. The report puts forth four recommendations:

• Improve measurements of existing corruption;
• Strengthen regulatory oversight;
• Develop a more transparent public procurement process; and
• Implement transparency and participation as guiding principles for all water governance.

ECSP has long been involved in the discussion of water’s place in the international political dialogue. In “Water Wars: Obscuring Opportunities,” published in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs, Geoff Dabelko and Karin Bencala explain how transboundary water use can facilitate cooperation as readily as conflict. It would be a boon to the global community if that cooperation could be harnessed to promote stronger, more transparent water governance.

Graphic used courtesy Transparency International. All rights reserved. ©Transparency International 2008.

“The U.S. military recognizes that the use of conventional military force is of limited use” in advancing U.S. national security, said Reuben Brigety II, director of the Sustainable Security Program at the Center for American Progress (CAP), at a July 18 launch of his report Humanity as a Weapon of War: Sustainable Security and the Role of the U.S. Military. The tragedy of 9/11, as well as the setbacks experienced in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, emphasized to the U.S. defense community that although combat operations remain critical to its mission, the military must also strive to “prevent conflict from emerging in the first place” through activities that stabilize societies, economies, and governments.

Brigety cited efforts by the Combined Joint Task Force for the Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), the nascent U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), and the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) as examples of the U.S. military’s growing appreciation of how development assistance can help stabilize countries, build goodwill toward the United States, and increase U.S. understanding of local socio-political and economic conditions. In recent years, CJTF-HOA has dug wells, vaccinated livestock, and provided health services, while SOUTHCOM has a long track record of providing humanitarian assistance in Central and South America, particularly in the wake of natural disasters.

Although Brigety asserted that it is nothing “new for the military to be involved in addressing basic human needs,” he and his fellow presenters—Elisabeth Kvitashvili of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), James Schear of the Institute for National Security Studies, and Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations—agreed that the Department of Defense (DoD) has been undertaking an increasing share of the U.S. government’s development activities in recent years. As Brigety’s report notes, the “share of the U.S. government’s official development assistance, or ODA, spent by the Defense Department increased to 22 percent in 2005, the last year for which complete data is available, from 3.5 percent in 1998. Over the same time period, USAID’s share of ODA fell to less than 40 percent from 65 percent.”

Earlier this week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made waves when he said that “the United States military has become more involved in a range of activities that in the past were perceived to be the exclusive province of civilian agencies and organizations. This has led to concern among many organizations…about what’s seen as a creeping ‘militarization’ of some aspects of America’s foreign policy. This is not an entirely unreasonable sentiment.”

At the CAP launch, Patrick asserted that one reason why the DoD has become increasingly involved in development activities—in peaceful regions as well as violent ones—is the “massive budgetary asymmetry” between the DoD and the State Department and USAID. Gates made a similar point: “America’s civilian institutions of diplomacy and development have been chronically undermanned and underfunded for far too long—relative to what we spend on the military, and more important, relative to the responsibilities and challenges our nation has around the world.”

Kvitashvili agreed that USAID is underfunded and understaffed, but said the solution was not having the military take the lead in development activities. She argued that the military—which, unlike USAID, is not staffed by development professionals—tends to engage in “feel-good, short-term, one-off” projects that do not lead to sustainable gains for local populations. Instead, she welcomed a stepped-up supporting role for the military in development activities.

“Population, Health, and Environment: Exploring the Connections,” an original ECSP video, offers a lively, brief, and accessible explanation of population-health-environment connections, with examples and photos from successful programs in the Philippines. Presenter Lori Hunter of the University of Colorado, Boulder, spoke at the Wilson Center earlier this year as part of ECSP’s PHE meeting series. View the video on YouTube, then rate it, comment on it, favorite it, or post a video response.

“They say good fences make good neighbors, and maybe they do. But what I’ve learned is that good medicine makes good neighbors, and it makes good foreign policy too,” said Tommy Thompson, former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in a press release received by the New Security Beat. In an appearance at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Thompson announced his new position as global ambassador for the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs). “It is a tragedy,” he said, “that the world’s poorest citizens are suffering from diseases that have been neglected for too long, particularly when we can treat many of them for less than 50 cents a year.”

Thompson’s announcement came amid news of a $3.8 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to raise awareness about the diseases and advocate for increased funding for NTDs, which include leprosy, river blindness, hookworm, and elephantiasis and affect one billion of the world’s poor. Thompson, who will travel to Rwanda next months as part of his new position, was quick to articulate the broader impacts of global humanitarian aid for health. “Through medical diplomacy, we can win the hearts and minds of people in less fortunate areas of the world by exporting medical care, expertise, and personnel to those who need it most,” he said. “America has the best chance to beat the war on terror and defeat the terrorists by enhancing our medical and humanitarian assistance to vulnerable countries.”

In a foreign policy speech on Tuesday attended by several of the New Security Beat’s authors, Senator Barack Obama said the danger posed by the price of oil “is eclipsed only by the long-term threat from climate change, which will lead to devastating weather patterns, terrible storms, drought, and famine. That means people competing for food and water in the next 50 years in the very places that have known horrific violence in the last fifty: Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Most disastrously, that could mean destructive storms on our shores, and the disappearance of our coastline. This is not just an economic issue or an environmental concern—this is a national security crisis.”

“The US security community has been looking at environment and security links for much longer than the current attention around climate/security linkages would suggest,” ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko told the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media, which published a piece examining climate change and national security earlier this week.

“The next president must strengthen civilian professional capacity to carry out diplomatic and development operations. More funding is needed to address the current 17 to 1 spending imbalance in staffing and resources between defense and diplomatic/development operations, and to reduce the use of contractors in foreign assistance programs,” argues a report from Refugees International, U.S. Civil-Military Imbalance for Global Engagement: Lessons From the Operational Level in Africa.

An opinion piece by Laurie Mazur and Priscilla Huang argues against blaming immigrants for environmental degradation. “Environmental impact is determined not just by our numbers, but by how we use resources—our systems of production and consumption and the policies that shape them,” they write. “It’s laughable to blame immigrants and population growth for traffic, as the [anti-immigrant] ads do, without mentioning, say, our chronic neglect of public transportation.”

In a rare display of bipartisan unity, the U.S. Senate voted 80-16 Wednesday to reauthorize the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Originally passed in 2003 and set to expire this September, the White House credits PEPFAR with delivering antiretroviral drug treatment to 1.7 million people worldwide.

Reflecting the bipartisan support of the program, the top two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee heaped praise on the program and the president. Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), chairman of the committee, said the program is “the single most significant thing the president has done.” Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the committee’s ranking member, argued eloquently that PEPFAR benefits U.S. national security and foreign policy. During the floor debate, he made the following statement:

We should understand that our investments in disease prevention programs have yielded enormous foreign policy benefits during the last five years. PEPFAR has helped to prevent instability and societal collapse in a number of at-risk countries; it has stimulated contributions from other wealthy nations to fight AIDS; it has facilitated deep partnerships with a new generation of African leaders; and it has improved attitudes toward the United States in Africa and other regions.

In my judgment, the dollars spent on this program can be justified purely on the basis of the humanitarian results that we have achieved. But the value of this investment clearly extends to our national security and to our national reputation.

The Senate legislation extends the program five years and triples its funding to $48 billion. The bill met with initial opposition from several conservatives, and the Democratic-controlled Senate defeated several Republican amendments earlier this week. The House passed a slightly different version of the legislation in April; differences between the two bills will be resolved in a conference committee.

In “Life in Abundance,” an article from the latest issue of Sierra magazine, Paul Rauber gives us an inside look at family planning in Ethiopia, speaking with women in urban and rural environments to understand what government support of family planning has meant in practice. The government’s official embrace of family planning is a sharp and welcome shift from the previous dictatorship’s ban on mentioning it, but this endorsement, welcome as it is, doesn’t guarantee funding. Consequently, family planning programming, robust in urban areas, has yet to reach much of the vast rural expanse of Ethiopia. It is also heavily dependent on outside donors and NGOs for funding.

Thanks to one of the highest fertility rates in the world—5.4 children per woman—Ethiopia’s population has quintupled in the last 70 years. It now stands at 77 million, and is projected to double by 2050. Other indicators are equally discouraging: Rauber reports that average life expectancy is 48 years, that one in eight children dies before reaching five years of age, and that half of all children are undernourished.

One group trying to improve these statistics is Pathfinder International, whose integrated population-health-environment program in Ethiopia aims to “boost family planning, healthcare access, and environmental-restoration efforts through improving the lot of women and girls.” Rauber notes that Ethiopian women with at least some secondary education have one-third as many children as women with no or little education. Ethiopia, he says, is ripe for such integrated interventions; two-thirds of women want but lack access to family planning, and only one in 10 rural women uses any form of contraception. Pathfinder’s program, strongly backed by communities, has been successful in enrolling women in literacy classes, testing for HIV, planting mango and avocado trees, and curbing female genital mutilation.

For a look at another integrated PHE program in Ethiopia, see ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko’s photographs of the Berga Wetland Project, which includes conservation activities oriented around the White-Winged Flufftail bird; a small health facility offering basic maternal, children’s, and reproductive health services; and a community school.

Ethiopia has hosted several large PHE events in recent months, demonstrating the country’s enthusiasm for the approach. In November 2007, more than 200 members of the PHE community gathered in Addis Ababa for “Population, Health, and Environment: Integrated Development in East Africa,” a conference sponsored by the Population Reference Bureau and LEM Ethiopia. Rauber’s tour of Ethiopia, which also included substantial birdwatching, was jointly organized by the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, both participants at the November meeting. Also emerging from this conference, which ECSP helped organize, was the East Africa Population-Health-Environment Network, a group working toward “an Eastern African region where men, women, and children are healthy, the environment is conserved, and livelihoods are secure.” In May of this year, Ethiopia launched its national chapter of the network, the Consortium for Integration of Population, Health, and Environment, in Ambo.

Photo: Health workers in Ethiopia’s Berga valley, where families average seven children. Now, thanks to the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society’s Berga Wetlands Project, hundreds of local women get contraceptives from health worker Gete Dida, allowing them to limit their family size – and giving the area’s wildlife a chance at survival. Reproduced from Sierraclub.org with permission of the Sierra Club. © 2008 Sierra Club. All rights reserved.

The authors of an article in the most recent issue of Science report that population tends to grow, not decline, around protected areas. Population growth means increased donor funding for conservation programs, they say, but high population density can negatively impact the effectiveness of such programs.

The latest volume of the journal Population and Environment, featuring contributions from former ECSP speakers Lori Hunter, Roger-Mark De Souza, and Judy Oglethorpe, examines the links between the environment and HIV/AIDS in Africa, calling for greater attention to the connections between these seemingly disparate issues.

Population growth rates and conservation are closely and inextricably linked, says a new UN Population Fund fact sheet that argues that slowing growth rates worldwide through family planning programming is a vital, and currently underfunded, component of the fight against environmental degradation.

“Countries have historically been quick to rattle their sabers over water, but they have nevertheless been content to keep them sheathed,” write ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko and ECSP Program Assistant Karin Bencala in “Water Wars: Obscuring Opportunities,” published in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs (PDF previews), which focuses on global water issues.