President Obama’s emphasis on “smart power” diplomacy has thrust the need for international volunteer service into the global spotlight. On June 23, Global Economy and Development at Brookings and Washington University’s Center for Social Development (CSD) will host a forum examining how international volunteer service can address multiple global challenges simultaneously and build international cooperation. The forum will frame international service as an effective tool for increasing international social capital as well as building sustainable cross-cultural bridges.

This event begins with an address by service champion, Ambassador Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, who leads the Department of State’s Global Partnerships Initiative. Bagley is well poised to foster innovative public-private partnerships, an approach she describes as “Ubuntu Diplomacy: where all sectors belong as partners, where we all participate as stakeholders, and where we all succeed together, not incrementally but exponentially.” The need for multilateral approaches to development has been analyzed by Brookings scholars Jane Nelson and Noam Unger, who explore how the U.S. foreign assistance system works in the new market-oriented and locally-driven global development arena.

This spirit of cross-sector collaboration will carry the June 23^rd forum, beginning with a research panel releasing beneficiary outcome data from a Peace Corps survey completed with over 800 host country nationals, including community members, direct beneficiaries, and collaborators. Peace Corps colleagues, Dr. Susan Jenkins and Janet Kerley, will present preliminary findings from this multi-year study measuring the achievement of “helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women” and “promoting a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served”. Aggregate data about respondents’ views of Americans before and after their interaction with the Peace Corps will be discussed.

This work complements the release of new data on the impact of international service on volunteers, which is supported with funding from the Ford Foundation and a joint Brookings-Washington University academic venture capital fund. Washington University’s CSD has studied international service over the last decade. The current research, first in a series from the quasi-experimental study, compares international volunteers’ perceived outcomes to a matched group who did not volunteer internationally: volunteers are more likely to report increased international awareness, international social capital, and international career intentions.

Building on the demonstrated potential of international service, policymakers and sector leaders will then discuss options for enhancing international service, and provide recommendations for bringing international service to the forefront of American foreign policy initiatives. This policy plenary will introduce and discuss the Service World policy platform: a collaborative movement led by the Building Bridges Coalition, National Peace Corps Association and the International Volunteering Initiative at Brookings. This powerhouse of sector leaders aims to scale international service to the levels of domestic volunteer service with increased impact through smart power policy proposals. What Service Nation did to unite Americans around domestic service as a core ideal and problem-solving strategy in American society, Service World hopes to do on a global scale.

Next week in New York City, the Points of Light Institute and the Corporation for National and Community Service will convene to further spotlight the Service World Platform at the 2010 National Conference on Volunteering and Service. This event will bring together more than 5,000 volunteer service leaders and social entrepreneurs from around the world, including local host Mayor Bloomberg. Michelle Nunn, CEO of Points of Light Institute noted in Huffington Post that “demand, idealism and presidential impact are leading American volunteerism to its…most important stage – the movement of service to a central role in our nation’s priorities.”

Nunn’s statement illustrates the momentum and power that make the voluntary sector a unique instrument in the “smart power” toolbox. According to successive polling from Terror Free Tomorrow, American assistance, particularly medical service, is a leading factor in favorable opinions toward the United States. A 2006 survey conducted in Indonesia and Bangladesh showed a 63 percent favorable response among Indonesian respondents to the humanitarian medical mission of “Mercy,” a United States’ Navel Ship, and a 95 percent favorable response among Bangladeshi respondents.

Personifying the diplomatic potential of medical service abroad is Edward O’Neil’s work with OmniMed. In the Mukono District of Uganda, OmniMed has partnered with the U.S. Peace Corps and the Ugandan Ministry of Health as well as local community-based organizations to implement evidence-based health trainings with local village health workers. Dr. O’Neil is now working with Brookings International Volunteering Initiative and Washington University’s CSD on a new wave of rigorous research: a randomized, prospective clinical trial measuring the direct impact of over 400 trained village health workers on the health of tens of thousands of villagers. 

In the words of Peace Corps architect and former U.S. Senator Harris Wofford, the pairing of new data and policy proposals on June 23^rd will support a “quantum leap” in the scale and impact of international service, advancing bipartisan calls to service from President Kennedy to Bush 41, Bush 43, Clinton and Obama.

      

Event Information

On June 23, Global Economy and Development at Brookings and Washington University’s Center for Social Development hosted a forum to examine how international volunteering and service serve as critical tools for meeting global challenges.

The forum framed international service as an integral component of “smart power” diplomacy and as a cost effective way to build cross-cultural bridges. Ambassador Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, special representative for global partnerships at the U.S. Department of State, delivered a keynote address on how the United States can better promote international service and its impact on American diplomacy, national security and global economies.

The research panel released new data on the impact of international service on volunteers, host communities and host country perceptions of volunteers from the United States. Policymakers and sector leaders discussed options for enhancing international service, and provided recommendations for bringing global service to the forefront of American foreign policy initiatives.

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It was fifty years ago that President Kennedy famously launched the Peace Corps, bringing international volunteerism to its true prominence in this country. Today, a diverse set of international volunteer efforts are supported by federal, state and local governments and through partnerships with NGOs. These efforts have been particularly effective at engaging two segments of our population: students or recent graduates; and retirees or those pursuing second careers.

But the segment that holds perhaps the greatest promise for global development has – for the most part – been underserved. We’re referring to mid-career employees at corporations: particularly large, globally-integrated enterprises. These corporate employees have what is most required for a successful international service engagement: cutting edge skills, deep expertise and relevant strategic knowhow.

Why has this resource largely gone untapped? Because a clear connection to business strategy and return on investment has been made in only a few cases.

There exists a triple benefit from corporate-sponsored international volunteerism. Local communities receive premier business and consulting services. Employees enrich their skill sets by working in international markets and leadership experience from working with diverse teams of colleagues and local partners. And corporations gain experienced leaders, insights into new markets, and brand and reputation enhancement that can ultimately create new global business opportunities.

IBM’s Corporate Service Corps (CSC) was developed with those benefits in mind. Often referred to as a “corporate peace corps,” CSC provides IBM employees with unique opportunities to develop and explore their roles as global citizens. Through one month deployments, IBM’s top talent works in teams of roughly 12 to provide in-depth business and IT consulting support to local entrepreneurs and small businesses, nonprofit organizations, educational institutions and governmental agencies. Already in its third year, Corporate Service Corps has deployed 700 IBM employees from 47 countries on 70 teams to 14 countries including China, Nigeria, Romania, Poland and Vietnam. The result is a leadership development program that has made strides in answering the economic, social and environmental sustainability challenges faced by many emerging markets.

We’re pleased to see that other organizations are adopting similar programs. In fact, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has announced a partnership with IBM to accelerate international volunteerism by leveraging the Corporate Service Corps model. USAID and IBM are creating an Alliance for International Corporate Volunteerism Program to help smaller companies and organizations eager to implement their own corporate peace corps, but lacking the resources and scale to do so.

As we look to help expand international service opportunities, there are several best practices to share based on IBM’s experience.

• In the case of executives, keep the duration of the projects relatively short. This allows for better access to a company’s top talent because rather than interrupting a career, you are asking someone to make service an integral part of it.
• Continue the relationship. While the duration of an individual’s participation may be short, your involvement with the region should be long-term and sustainable. It is not a vendor relationship; it is a partnership.
• Identify the right projects. The most successful development efforts take time and effort to scope out and plan. Partner with NGOs early and often to find the best local opportunities for growth and impact.
• Carefully mix and match skills when forming a team of service participants. This allows them to deliver results quickly and build capacity on the local level.
• Take advantage of technology. Technology can be a powerful tool to help train and prepare service participants. Technology like social networking can also help build a community of service participants and allow them to share their experiences.

The world has changed significantly over the last 50 years. Corporate-sponsored international volunteerism is now building upon the government’s original architecture of the Peace Corps. The same conditions and capabilities that have made the world “flat”, allowing its systems to become smarter, are also opening up new paths for citizen diplomacy. Those seeking out international volunteer service opportunities are no longer limited to government guidance and other official avenues into long-term engagements.

In an interconnected world, citizens have the choice of participating more directly in service through short-term assignments that will not disrupt their careers but enrich them. And it is these mid-career volunteers who possess the skills to make such assignments successful. Forward-thinking corporations with a clear understanding of the benefits of international volunteer programs can empower meaningful citizen diplomacy, contributing to sustainable development practices and building partnerships in a globalized world.

      

David Caprara, a Brookings nonresident fellow and expert on volunteering, says that John F. Kennedy’s call to service a half-century ago led to the founding of dozens of international aid organizations, and leaves a legacy of programs aimed at improving health, nutrition, education, living standards and peaceful cooperation around the globe.

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Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr. guided the Peace Corps from its inception in 1961 (when it was a nascent vision of service and citizen diplomacy) to establish a renowned track record of success over the past half century, in which more than 200,000 volunteers and trainees have served in 139 countries.

The legacy of Shriver’s leadership with the Peace Corps and later with the Office on Economic Opportunity and Special Olympics has reached and changed millions of lives—of both those empowered and those who served—from impoverished communities across rural and urban America to huts and villages in developing nations throughout the world. Yet one of the greatest gifts he leaves us is the foundation to build on those accomplishments to scale-up service as a direly needed “soft power” alternative to establish international understanding and collaboration in a volatile world. As Sarge put it, so simply but powerfully: “Caring for others is the practice of peace.”

Sarge Shriver’s unquenchable idealism today is being advanced by a new generation of social entrepreneurs such as Dr. Ed O’Neil, founder of OmniMed and chair of the Brookings International Volunteering Project health service policy group. With the help of Peace Corps volunteers and USAID-supported Volunteers for Prosperity, O’Neil has fielded an impressive service initiative in Ugandan villages that has expanded the capacity and reach of local health-service volunteers engaged in malaria prevention and education on basic hygiene. 

Timothy Shriver, who succeeded his parents, Sarge and Eunice, at the helm of the Special Olympics, speaks eloquently on the move of a second generation from politics to building civil society coalitions promoting soft power acts of service and love, one at a time. This impulse is echoed in the Service World policy platform which hundreds of NGOs and faith-based groups, corporations and universities have launched to scale-up the impact of international service initiatives. This ambitious undertaking was first announced by longtime Shriver protégé former Senator Harris Wofford at a Service Nation forum convened on the morning of President Obama’s Cairo speech in which he called for a new wave of global service and interfaith initiatives.

I had the privilege of serving as a national director of the VISTA program inspired by Shriver and  to work alongside Senator Wofford and John Bridgeland, President George W. Bush’s  former White House Freedom Corps director, who have co-chaired the Brookings International Volunteering Project policy team. Along with Tim Shriver, they have ignited the Service World call to action, together with Michelle Nunn of Points of Light Institute, Steve Rosenthal of the Building Bridges Coalition, Kevin Quigley of the National Peace Corps Association and many others.

The Obama administration and Congress would best honor the life and legacy of Sarge Shriver by calling for congressional hearings and fast- tracking agency actions outlined in the Service World platform and naming the global service legislation after him. Coupled with innovative private-sector and federal agency innovations, the legislation would authorize Global Service Fellowships, link volunteer capacity-building to USAID development programs such as  Volunteers for Prosperity, and double the Peace Corps to reach a combined goal of 100,000 global service volunteers annually—a goal first declared by JFK.

Those who promote opportunity and service as vehicles to advance peace and international collaboration will continue to draw inspiration from Sargent Shriver’s indefatigable quest for social justice―from the time he talked then-Senator John F. Kennedy into intervening in the unjust jailing of Martin Luther King, Jr. to his refusal to accept wanton violence and impoverished conditions in any corner of the world.

Information on offering online tributes to the Shriver family and donations in lieu of flowers requested by the family of Sargent Shriver can be found at www.sargentshriver.org .

      

Volunteer, civil society and governmental delegates from 22 nations gathered in Johannesburg this month for the Southern Africa Conference on Volunteer Action for Development. The conference was co-convened by United Nations Volunteers (UNV) and Volunteer and Service Enquiry Southern Africa (VOSESA), in observance of the 10th anniversary of the United Nations International Year of Volunteers (IYV).

Naheed Haque, deputy executive coordinator for United Nations Volunteers, gave tribute to the late Nobel Laureate Wangari Mathai and her Greenbelt tree planting campaign as the “quintessential volunteer movement.” Haque called for a “new development paradigm that puts voluntarism at the center of community-centered sustainable development.” In this paradigm, human happiness and service to others would be key considerations, in addition to economic indicators and development outcomes including health and climate change.  

The international gathering developed strategies to advance three key priorities for the 15 nations in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC): combating HIV/ AIDS; engaging the social and economic participation of youth; and promoting regional integration and peace. Research data prepared by Civicus provided information on the rise of voluntary service in Africa, as conferees assessed strategies to advance “five pillars” of effective volunteerism: engaging youth, community involvement, international volunteers, corporate leadership and higher education in service.

VOSESA executive director, Helene Perold, noted that despite centuries of migration across the region, the vision for contemporary regional cooperation between southern African countries has largely been in the minds of heads of states with “little currency at the grassroots level.” Furthermore, it has been driven by the imperative of economic integration with a specific focus on trade. Slow progress has now produced critiques within the region that the strategy for integrating southern African countries cannot succeed on the basis of economic cooperation alone. Perold indicated that collective efforts by a wide range of civic, academic, and governmental actors at the Johannesburg conference could inject the importance of social participation within and between countries as a critical component in fostering regional integration and achieving development outcomes. 

This premise of voluntary action’s unique contribution to regional integration was underscored by Emiliana Tembo, director of Gender and Social Affairs for the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). Along with measures promoting free movement of labor and capital to step up trade investment, Tembo stressed the importance of “our interconnectedness as people,” citing Bishop Desmond Tutu’s maxim toward the virtues of “Ubuntu – a person who is open and available to others.”

The 19 nation COMESA block is advancing an African free-trade zone movement from the Cape of South Africa, to Cairo Egypt. The “tripartite” regional groupings of SADC, COMESA and the East Africa Community are at the forefront of this pan-African movement expanding trade and development.

Preliminary research shared at the conference by VOSESA researcher Jacob Mwathi Mati noted the effects of cross border youth volunteer exchange programs in southern and eastern Africa. The research indicates positive outcomes including knowledge, learning and “friendship across borders,” engendered by youth exchange service programs in South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya that were sponsored Canada World Youth and South Africa Trust.   

On the final day of the Johannesburg conference, South Africa service initiatives were assessed in field visits by conferees including loveLife, South Africa’s largest HIV prevention campaign. loveLife utilizes youth volunteer service corps reaching up to 500,000 at risk youths in monthly leadership and peer education programs. “Youth service in South Africa is a channel for the energy of youth, (building) social capital and enabling public innovation,” Programme Director Scott Burnett stated. “Over the years our (service) participants have used their small stipends to climb the social ladder through education and micro-enterprise development.”

Nelly Corbel, senior program coordinator of the John D. Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement at the American University in Cairo, noted that the Egyptian Arab Spring was “the only movement that cleaned-up after the revolution." On February 11^th, the day after the resignation of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, thousands of Egyptian activists  removed debris from Tahrir Square and engaged in a host of other volunteer clean-up and painting projects. In Corbel's words: “Our entire country is like a big flag now,” from the massive display of national voluntarism in clean-up projects, emblematic of the proliferation of youth social innovation aimed at rebuilding a viable civil society.

At the concluding call-to-action session, Johannesburg conferees unanimously adopted a resolution, which was nominated by participating youth leaders from southern Africa states. The declaration, “Creating an Enabling Environment for Volunteer Action in the Region” notes that “volunteering is universal, inclusive and embraces free will, solidarity, dignity and trust… [creating] a powerful basis for unity, common humanity, peace and development.”  The resolution, contains a number of action-oriented recommendations advancing voluntarism as a “powerful means for transformational change and societal development.” Policy recommendations will be advanced by South African nations and other stakeholders at the forthcoming Rio + 20 deliberations and at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on December 5, the 10^th anniversary of the International Year of the Volunteer.

      

Last October, 200 students from Colombia's Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje (SENA) worked the floor of the campus coliseum at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla. They were among 900 youth volunteer leaders from nearly 40 nations who had traveled the globe to join the second World Summit for Youth Volunteering, convened by Partners of the Americas and the International Association for Volunteer Effort (IAVE) on the 10th anniversary of the United Nations International Year of Volunteers.

As a developing country, Colombia’s increased civil society participation through volunteering is focused on extending poverty-reduction efforts to levels that the government cannot achieve on its own. Volunteers represent a powerful demographic for a new "service generation" by providing a dual benefit. First, volunteering provides critical services in areas such as education and asset development, which are needed to reduce extreme poverty; second, it connects a new generation with like-minded individuals across the world, which provides young people the professional and leadership skills needed to further access to employment opportunities including entrepreneurship.

For SENA, one of the world's largest educational institutions with more than four million students across Colombia, the opportunity was clear: engage talented and often under resourced youth in Colombia — one of the most economically unequal countries in the world– with innovative global volunteer leaders. According to research from Brookings and the Center for Social Development at Washington University, these types of global volunteering connections have the potential to enhance skills development while increasing social capital networks.

Extreme poverty, along with armed conflict, is one of the highest priorities of the Colombian government. Coincidentally, during the same week as the World Summit, the Colombian armed forces eliminated the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leader Alfonso Cano while President Santos created a new national superagency to combat extreme poverty. The strategic focus on poverty reduction includes a strong role for civil society as a partner with the government in meeting the U.N. Millennium Development Goals and other development commitments. Civil society plays an essential role in overcoming internal conflict. And the youth services generation is among some of the most effective in civil society in working to help their country tackle poverty.

Colombia is certainly not the only country where youth have taken the lead through service to combat poverty. Attendees at the summit heard from Australian humanitarian Hugh Evans, who at 14 began his work to create the Global Poverty Project. In 2006, Evans became one of the pivotal leaders behind the successful Make Poverty History campaign, leading a team across Australia to lobby the country’s government to increase its foreign aid commitment to 0.7 percent of gross national income.

Whether or not SENA’s youth will be able to capitalize on their new connections with global service leaders to combat extreme poverty in Colombia is left to be seen. But the SENA volunteers and their international counterparts are more motivated to do so after gaining access to resources and social capital networks with other inspiring young leaders. That is a cause for celebration as the United Nations releases its State of the World Volunteering report in New York in December at a special session of the U.N. General Assembly.

       

INTRODUCTION

In December 2011, the United Nations State of the World’s Volunteering Report was released at the U.N. headquarters in New York along with a General Assembly resolution championing the role of volunteer action in peacebuilding and development. The United Nations Volunteers (UNV) Program report states that:

The contribution of volunteerism to development is particularly striking in the context of sustainable livelihoods and value-based notions of wellbeing. Contrary to common perceptions, the income poor are as likely to volunteer as those who are not poor. In doing so, they realize their assets, which include knowledge, skills and social networks, for the benefit of themselves, their families and their communities…Moreover, volunteering can reduce the social exclusion that is often the result of poverty, marginalization and other forms of inequality…There is mounting evidence that volunteer engagement promotes the civic values and social cohesion which mitigate violent conflict at all stages and that it even fosters reconciliation in post-conflict situations...

The “South Africa Conference on Volunteer Action for Development” convened in Johannesburg in October 2011, and the July 2012 “Africa Conference on Volunteer Action for Peace and Development” co-hosted with the Kenya’s Ministry of East African Community, the United Nations and partners in Nairobi give further evidence to the rise of and potential for volunteer service to impact development and conflict. Indeed, in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring, youth volunteer service and empowerment have emerged as a pivotal idea in deliberations aimed at fostering greater regional cohesion and development.

In “Foresight Africa: Top Priorities for the Continent in 2012,” Mwangi S. Kimenyi and Stephen N. Karingi note that: “One of the most important pillars in determining whether the positive prospects for Africa will be realized is success in regional integration… This year is a crucial one for Africa’s regional integration project and actions by governments, regional organizations and the international community will be critical in determining the course of the continent’s development for many years to come.”

The authors note the expected completion of a tripartite regional free trade agreement by 2014 and the expected boost to intra-African trade, resulting in an expanded market of 26 African countries (representing more than half of the region’s economic output and population). At the same time, the declaration from the “South Africa Conference on Volunteer Action for Development” calls on “Governments of Southern African member states and other stakeholders to incorporate volunteering in their deliberations from Rio +20 and to recognize the transformational power as well as economic and social value of volunteering in achieving national development goals and regional priorities, which can be achieved by facilitating the creation of an enabling environment for volunteering to support, protect and empower volunteers.” This speaks directly to the urgent need to factor the social dimension into the regional integration agenda in the different African subregions.

This paper includes examples of the growth of volunteer service as a form of social capital that enhances cohesion and integration across three regions: southern, western, and eastern Africa. It further highlights civil society best practices and policy recommendations for increased volunteering in efforts to ensure positive peace, health, youth skills, assets and employment outcomes.

The importance of volunteering to development has been noted in recent United Nations consultations on the Rio+20 convening on sustainable development and the post-2015 development framework. As the U.N. reviews its Millennium Development Goals (MDG) process, Africa’s regional service initiatives offer vital lessons and strategies to further achieve the MDGs by December 2015, and to chart the way forward on the post-2015 development framework.

But how does volunteerism and civic service play out in sub-Saharan Africa? What are its institutional and non-institutional expressions? What are the benefits or impacts of volunteerism and civic service in society? Our specific purpose here is to provide evidence of the different manifestations and models of service, impact areas and range of issues in three African regions. In responding to these questions, this analysis incorporates data and observations from southern, western and eastern Africa.

In conclusion, we provide further collective insights and recommendations for the roles of the Africa Union and regional economic communities (RECs), youth, the international community, the private sector and civil society aimed at ensuring that volunteerism delivers on its promise and potential for impact on regional integration, youth development and peace.

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INTRODUCTION

Over the past decade, the focused attention of African nations, the United States, U.N. agencies and other multilateral partners has brought significant progress toward achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in health and malaria control and elimination. The potential contribution of these strategies to long-term peace-building objectives and overall regional prosperity is of paramount significance in sub-regions such as the Horn of Africa and Western Africa that are facing the challenges of malaria and other health crises compounded by identity-based conflicts.

National campaigns to address health Millennium Development Goals through cross-ethnic campaigns tackling basic hygiene and malaria have proven effective in reducing child infant mortality while also contributing to comprehensive efforts to overcome health disparities and achieve higher levels of societal well-being.

There is also growing if nascent research to suggest that health and other humanitarian interventions can result in additional benefits to both recipients and donors alike.

The social, economic and political fault lines of conflicts, according to a new study, are most pronounced in Africa within nations (as opposed to international conflicts). Addressing issues of disparate resource allocations in areas such as health could be a primary factor in mitigating such intra-national conflicts. However, to date there has been insufficient research on and policy attention to the potential for wedding proven life-saving health solutions such as malaria intervention to conflict mitigation or other non-health benefits.

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At the recent celebration of the 50^th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, Dr. King's daughter, Rev. Bernice King, cited Syria and called for international approaches rooted in love and embodying her father's commitment to nonviolence.  It is truly ironic that, after President Obama lauded King's legacy on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the administration announced its plans for unilateral military action to address the Syrian government’s horrific use of chemical weapons.

The situation in Syria causes us to ask:  Have all nonviolent alternatives been exhausted in accomplishing the president’s goal of responding to the brutal crimes of the Assad regime while averting a new regional (potentially global) war?

While, to date, public discourse has focused on the pros and cons of a punitive military strike, has adequate attention been given to the probability that a cruise missile strike will prompt retaliatory action—threatened by Syria, Hezbollah and Iran—against the state of Israel?  Have we considered adequately that the spiral could continue to an unthinkable escalation, keeping in mind Dr. King’s admonition that violence begets violence?  As United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon stated:  "Diplomacy should be given a chance and peace given a chance.”

In sum, before authorizing or taking military action, could Congress and the administration assure us that certain steps (such as the following) have been incorporated as part of a broader regional solution?

Engage nonmilitary options in a multilateral coalition—Rather than going it alone, has the U.S. exhausted all efforts to lead a multilateral coalition to stop and punish Syrian chemical weapons use by other means under international law?  Could the pending United Nations inspections report pave the way for further multilateral interventions, ranging from global sanctions on Syria to criminal prosecution of the Assad regime at The Hague?  Could a tough U.N. sanctions resolution in response to the regime’s criminal use of chemical weapons be issued in preparation for the U.N. General Assembly this month?

Make renewed attempts to engage Russia and China, together with Track II diplomacy partners—The Russians are as concerned as the U.S. about the delivery of materials of mass destruction into terrorist hands.  The International Institute for Sustained Dialogue (IISD), its Dartmouth Conference and other Track II partners could be engaged, along with multilateral and U.S.-Russia congressional exchanges (including China and our allies) to further diplomatic action and sanctions.   

Engage Middle East and global interfaith partners—The sectarian fault lines across the Middle East require serious interfaith dialogue guided by principles and values that are common to all the Abrahamic faiths, addressing the conflict through what has been called the “relationship paradigm" of sustained dialogue. Initiatives such as the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, interfaith endeavors by Pope Francis and the Saudi king’s new interfaith center should be tapped.  A Brookings research report with Terror Free Tomorrow on the soft power effects of interfaith engagement and service in hot spots like Nigeria and South Asia illustrates this largely untapped potential.

Executive Order on Track II diplomacy, interfaith and service initiatives—President Obama could issue an executive order directing the State Department, the Defense Department, the White House Offices on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and Social Innovation and Civic Participation, the Peace Corps and other agencies to report in 30 days on strategies and Track II partners that could further support regional solutions in the Middle East and other global hot spots.  Stepped-up multilateral emergency humanitarian aid for the mounting number of refugees from the Syrian conflict could also be marshaled with the United Nations, the Arab League, NATO and the U.S. 

In taking this “road less traveled” by charting a nonviolent direct action campaign and multilateral coalition to punish Syria and strengthen partnerships for peace, President Obama and Congress would establish a higher ground and marshal moral force with potential to break the cycle of violence, thus continuing the trailblazing legacy of Nelson Mandela, Dr. King and Gandhi.

       

In late October at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UN ESCAP) headquarters in Bangkok, a multi-stakeholder coalition was launched to promote the role of youth and civil society in advancing post-2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The youth initiatives, fostering regional integration and youth service impact in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and counterpart regions of Northeast and South Asia, will be furthered through a new Asia-Pacific Peace Service Alliance. The alliance is comprised of youth leaders, foundations, civil society entities, multilateral partners and U.N. agencies. Together, their initiatives illustrate the potential of youth and multi-stakeholder coalitions to scale impacts to meet SDG development targets through youth service and social media campaigns, and partnerships with multilateral agencies, nongovernmental organizations, corporations and research institutes.

The “Asia-Pacific Forum on Youth Volunteerism to Promote Participation in Development and Peace” at UN ESCAP featured a new joint partnership of the U.S. Peace Corps and the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) as well as USAID support for the ASEAN Youth Volunteering Program. With key leadership from ASEAN youth entitles, sponsor FK Norway, Youth Corps Singapore and Peace Corps’ innovative program in Thailand, the forum also furthered President Obama’s goal of Americans serving “side by side” with other nations’ volunteers. The multi-stakeholder Asia-Pacific alliance will be powered by creative youth action and a broad array of private and public partners from Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, Korea, China, Mongolia, Japan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, the U.S. and other nations.

During the event, Dr. Shamshad Akhtar, ESCAP executive secretary, pointed out that “tapping youth potential is critical to shape our shared destiny, as they are a source of new ideas, talent and inspiration. For ESCAP and the United Nations, a dynamic youth agenda is vital to ensure the success of post-2015 sustainable development.”

Dr. Surin Pitsuwan, former ASEAN secretary-general, called for a new Asia-wide multilateralism engaging youth and civil society.  In his remarks, he drew from his experience in mobilizing Asian relief and recovery efforts after Cyclone Nargis devastated the delta region of Myanmar in May 2008. Surin, honorary Alliance chairman and this year’s recipient of the Harris Wofford Global Citizenship Award, also noted the necessity of a “spiritual evolution” to a common sense of well-being to redress the “present course of possible extinction” caused by global conflicts and climate challenges. He summoned Asia-Pacific youth, representing 60 percent of the world’s young population, to “be the change you want to see” and to “commit our youth to a useful cause for humanity.”

The potential for similar upscaled service efforts in Africa, weaving regional integration and youth volunteering impact, has been assessed in Brookings research and policy recommendations being implemented in the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). Recommendations, many of which COMESA and ASEAN are undertaking, include enabling youth entrepreneurship and service contributions to livelihoods in regional economic integration schemes, and commissioning third-party support for impact evidence research.

A good example of successful voluntary service contributions from which regional economic communities like ASEAN can learn a lot is the current Omnimed pilot research intervention in Uganda. In eastern Ugandan villages, 1,200 village health workers supported by volunteer medical doctors, Uganda’s Health Ministry, Peace Corps volunteers and Global Peace Women are addressing lifesaving maternal and child health outcomes furthering UNICEF’s campaign on “integrated health” addressing malaria, diarrheal disease and indoor cooking pollution. The effort has included construction of 15 secure water sources and 1,200 clean cook stoves along with randomized controlled trials.

Last week, the young leaders from more than 40 nations produced a “Bangkok Statement” outlining their policy guidance and practical steps to guide volunteering work plans for the new Asia-Pacific alliance. Youth service initiatives undertaken in “collective impact” clusters will focus on the environment (including clean water and solar villages), health service, entrepreneurship, youth roles in disaster preparedness and positive peace. The forum was co-convened by ESCAP, UNESCO, the Global Peace Foundation and the Global Young Leaders Academy.

       

2014 was a relatively friendless year for the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea). It publicly lost its best friend and patron, China, to its erstwhile nemesis, the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea), when Presidents Park Geun-hye and Xi Jinping celebrated their growing friendship at the July summit in Seoul. Recently, retired PLA General Wang Hongguang wrote in the Chinese language site of Global Times, which is closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party, that China tired of cleaning up North Korea’s “mess” and would not step in to “save” North Korea if it collapses or starts a war.[1] And there is a vigorous debate in Beijing on whether the DPRK should be treated on a “normal” basis with China’s interests as the sole guide and purpose or be treated as a special case needing China’s indulgence and protection.[2] Since the Sony hack of November, North Korea has been under tighter scrutiny, both real and virtual, by Seoul, Beijing and Washington, accompanied by tighter sanctions in the new year. Bludgeoned by global condemnation of its atrocious human rights record, Pyongyang’s pariah status has intensified. Only Russia has been warming up to North Korea out of its own economic and political self-interest.

Is there any sizable country with good intentions for the region that is not giving up or beating up on North Korea? Is there any country Pyongyang likes and possibly even trusts? Mongolia stands out as the sole candidate, and it is friendly with both the East and the West.

Since the 2000s, Mongolia has played an increasingly constructive and steady role in in its bilateral ties with the DPRK and in its promotion of peace and cooperation in Northeast Asia. President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, who visited Pyongyang in 2013, was the first head of state to reach out to the DPRK since Kim Jung Un assumed power and helped author the “Ulaanbaatar Dialogue on Northeast Asia Security,” which held its first meeting in June, 2014. It is a unique forum that combines official (track one) and unofficial academic/think tank/NGO (track two) participants, on a variety of important regional issues. The goals are to decrease distrust among nations and increase cooperation and peace. Both the DPRK and the ROK (Republic of Korea or South Korea) were represented at the inaugural meeting, as were the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and some European nations.

The UB Dialogue, as a consultative mechanism, has the potential to bring together policymakers, international organizations such as the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), and civil society entities and facilitate a range of initiatives related to economic cooperation; military transparency; environmental issues; non-traditional security threats; regional stability, cultural and educational exchange among the participants, including the two Koreas. These are official agenda items and goals of the UB Dialogue. With the Six-Party Talks nearly defunct and inter-Korean relations unable to address regional issues that affect the peninsula, Mongolia may be able to serve as a “Geneva or Helsinki of the East” as some observers have suggested.

Mongolia’s expanding global presence

Mongolia is uniquely positioned as the only country in Northeast Asia that enjoys good relations not only with North Korea but also South Korea, the United States, China, Russia, and Japan.

Mongolia’ relations with the United States, Canada, and Western Europe have steadily improved and deepened since the late 1980s. In recent decades, both Democratic and Republication administrations in Washington have enjoyed mutually warm and collaborative relations with Mongolia. President George W. Bush was the first sitting U.S. president to visit the country in 2005; he thanked the Mongolians for sending troops to join U.S.-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and for supporting anti-terrorism initiatives. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld also visited in the same year. In 2007, President Nambaryn Enkhbayar visited Washington to co-sign the Millennium Challenge Corporation Compact with President Bush. The next (and current) leader, President Elbegdorj, met U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House in 2011, as did the first civilian Minister of Defense, L. Bold. Vice President Joe Biden included Mongolia on a three-country Asia visit in August, 2011; China and Japan were the other two. A year later, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton took her turn in Ulaanbaatar. The most recent visit by top-level U.S. officials to Mongolia was by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in April 2014.

Mongolia’s pursuit of the “third neighbor” policy allows the country to develop cooperative relations with the United States, Western Europe, ASEAN nations and others partly as “an air pocket” from its economic and security reliance on Beijing and Moscow. The softer side of this diplomatic push has been demonstrated by Ulaanbaatar’s membership in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and its previous chairmanship of the Community on Democracies.”[3]

Western experts on Mongolia applaud the way the country has developed a unique “peacekeeping niche” that facilitates participation in UN peacekeeping activities, international anti-terrorism measures, and humanitarian actions. For its small population of about three million, Mongolia takes on a heavy load of peacekeeping activities, ranking 26^th on the UN’s list of contributing nations.[4]

Since 2003, Mongolia annually hosts the “Khaan Quest” peacekeeping exercises for the purpose of tactical advancement and capacity building for its Mongolian Armed Forces (MAF) and for the improvement of regional confidence building. Although the United States and NATO play prominent roles, the Quest has attracted more diverse participants over the years so that by 2012, the number of interested parties expanded to include representatives from China and India as well as an array of developing nations such as Vietnam and Cambodia. These exercises are acknowledged as gatherings devoted to strengthening international cooperation and interoperability on peacekeeping initiatives around the world.[5]

On the economic side, Mongolia has been diversifying its external relations, with the maintenance of sovereignty and the related desire to reduce its overwhelming dependence on China as important goals. Expansion of economic relations is driven in part by a desire to participate in and benefit from global standards investment funds, and market access is a national priority. In that context, Mongolia’s relations with the West have been constructive and collaborative. For example, in 2013, the United States Trade Representative Michael Froman and Mongolia's Minister for Foreign Affairs, Luvsanvandan Bold, signed the Agreement on Transparency in Matters Related to International Trade and Investment between the United States of America and Mongolia. The Agreement commits the parties to provide opportunities for public comment on proposed laws and regulations and to publish final laws and regulations in Mongolian and English in order to facilitate access, openness, fairness, and procedural coherence in international trade and investment between Mongolia and other countries. “Additional commitments address the application of disciplines on bribery and corruption.” This type of administrative and legal modernization and the incorporation of measures to prevent and correct corruption are exemplary measures that could be helpful to the DPRK and other countries that are unfamiliar with or lagging in appropriate frameworks for doing business with diverse international actors.

Maintaining sovereignty between giants

China and Russia have vied for influence over Mongolia for many decades, from the time when Mongolia was in the Soviet sphere in influence to the present. Although 89 percent of foreign trade in 2013 was with China and Russia provides about 75 percent of Mongolia’s gasoline and diesel fuel and much of its electricity, Ulaanbaatar is assertively broadening and deepening its economic interests with the two big neighbors, especially greater transportation access and cheaper costs (vital to the landlocked nation), participation in the development of the New Silk Road corridor, and the construction of a Russian oil and gas pipeline through Mongolia that reaches China. All three countries have mutual interests and investments in developing Mongolia’s well-endowed mining industry.

But being sandwiched between two giants means Mongolia has to be prudent in preserving its sovereignty and independence, and Ulaanbaatar has done so in practical ways, balancing the two large powers’ interests with its own. The 2010 National Security Concept’s “One-Third Clause” sets a clear limit on the proportion of foreign direct investment from any one country: one-third. Legislation limits (foreign) state-owned companies from gaining control of strategic assets. And as numerous bilateral security and military cooperation agreements link Mongolia with China and Russia, UB has strategically and legally created elbow room for its autonomy. The government’s National Security and Foreign Policy Concepts outline a specific policy of not allowing foreign troops the use of its territory. Such preservationist measures to maintain sovereignty and independence in economic and security terms would be welcome examples to a North Korea which zealously prioritizes national sovereignty.

Mongolia and the Korean peninsula

Mongolia’s potential role as a non-nuclear peace broker in the region was further evidenced by its successful hosting of DPRK-Japan negotiations since 2012, which have yielded bilateral progress on longstanding abduction issues. In March 2014, Ulaanbaatar hosted the first-ever reunion between the parents of one of the abductees, Megumi Yokota (whom North Korea claims is dead), and her daughter, son-in-law, and their child who live in North Korea. Mongolia also served as a neutral venue for high-level talks on normalizing Japan-DPRK relations back in September 2007 as part of the Six-Party Talks framework. Asia Times reported that “arranging this recent meeting reflected Ulaanbaatar's ‘contribution to satisfy regional stability in Northeast Asia’ and how it could play a role in deepening understanding and normalizing DPRK-Japan relations.” President Elbegdorj's administration took particular care in staging the negotiations, including the use of the official state compound in Ikh Tenger as the meeting place. According to Alicia Campi, an American expert on Mongolia and the author of the AT article, Ikh Tenger was requested by the North Koreans.[6]

Mongolian President Elbegdorj is often described as an activist head of state, both for his focused efforts on developing Mongolia internally and advancing the country’s role and contributions internationally. One of his main foreign policy priorities is to promote regional economic integration and cooperation and peace and security. Dialogue and trust-building, two key components of his approach, coincide with ROK President Park Geun-hye’s emphasis on trustpolitik and the proposed Northeast Asia Peace and Cooperation Initiative (NAPCI). Both NAPCI and the UB Dialogue seek to chip away at distrust among Northeast Asian countries and increase collaboration and cooperation through multi-layered activities, including mutually reinforcing Track 1, 1.5 and 2 gatherings. Both emphasize multilateral cooperation on non-traditional security issues and people-to-people exchanges as ways to help build trust and resolve regional problems step by step. NAPCI held a track 1.5 forum in October 2014 in Seoul. In sharp contrast to its reaction to the first UB Dialogue of June that year, the DPRK flatly rejected the invitation to participate in the Seoul dialogue and criticized NAPCI as a cover for pressuring Pyongyang to relinquish its nuclear program and for reunification by absorption.[7]

There is no reason why the Ulaanbaatar Dialogue and NAPCI cannot be complementary and mutually reinforcing. Given that trust in inter-Korean relations is non-existent while Mongolia has gained deeper trust with both Koreas over the past two decades, NAPCI activities could benefit from Mongolia’s unique position in its relations with the DPRK. Ulaanbaatar potentially can serve as a neutral meeting ground, literally and metaphorically, for Pyongyang and Seoul. Moreover, given that the NAPCI seeks to maintain a cooperative relationship with other multilateral bodies and places emphasis on complementarity and inclusiveness, working with and supporting successful rounds of the UB Dialogues would be a principled move on the part of South Koreans. Moreover, engagement with North Korea through the UB Dialogue most likely represents an easier path to increasing inter-Korean trust than bilateral efforts and even easier than the NAPCI. South Korea’s domestic divisions and bitter left-right infighting tend to weaken the government’s position in approaches to the North. Seoul’s military standoff and competition with the North, its alliance with the United States, and participation in international sanctions regimes all cause suspicion in Pyongyang. In short, Seoul’s complex list of concerns and goals, some of which are contradictory to the spirit and practice of trust-building and cooperation with North Korea, create difficult conditions for progress through NAPCI alone.

In addition to lacking this baggage, Mongolia has unique standing with both North and South. It is a former Soviet satellite state that asserted full independence in 1990, and it is notable for successfully transitioning from a communist state to a vibrant democracy without civil war or bloodshed. President Elbegdorj’s 2013 speech in Pyongyang contained strong enunciation of the tenets of liberty. At the elite Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, he addressed students with these bold words: "No tyranny lasts forever. It is the desire of the people to live free that is the eternal power." And the Mongolian government has been keeping its border open to North Koreans who risk the arduous journey out of the DPRK and has permitted its airlines to transport them to South Korea.

Additionally, Mongolia has become a model of economic modernization and prosperous participation in the global economy. Although it faces some economic imbalances, its GDP rate was sky-high at 11.7 percent in 2013. There are good lessons to share with North Korea, and President Elberdorgj has made it clear that Mongolia would be very willing to work with the DPRK on economic development, IT, infrastructure, the management of mining precious earth resources and refineries. The two countries also engage in a worker exchange program, affording DPRK citizens the opportunity to breathe the air of freedom and to be exposed to South Korean television programming while they reside in Mongolia.

In recent years, Mongolia has pursued multiple types of people-to-people activities involving North Koreans, including academic exchanges, northeast Asian mayoral forums, and women’s parliamentary exchanges including female leaders from both Koreas. In June 2015, the second Track 2 conference of the UB Dialogue will convene in Ulaanbaatar with scholars from across the region and the United States with the theme of “Energy, Infrastructure, and Regional Connectivity.”

Sports and cultural initiatives in the past years have included international boxing matches in Ulaanbaatar with boxers from the DPRK, ROK, Mongolia, Russia and China. In 2013, Mongolia established an International Cooperation Fund which has supported children’s summer camps, basketball training and other exchanges with the DPRK in order to promote positive peace and people-to-people development in the region.

In the humanitarian arena, food aid to the DPRK has been channeled through international organizations, and the two countries have cooperated on physician exchanges. Prior research by Caprara and Ballen, conducted in cooperation with United Nations Special Envoy for Financing the Health Millennium Development Goals and for Malaria, has noted the additional soft power benefits of cooperative service development projects.

A recent global development forum hosted at the United Nations Asia-Pacific headquarters in Bangkok launched an Asia Pacific Peace Service Alliance which could build on these bilateral and regional exchanges in the critical area of humanitarian action and development in North Korea. An International Youth Leaders Assembly has been proposed in Ulaanbaatar for June, 2015, which would further the role of youth in fostering track two initiatives of service and dialogue.

Dr. Tsedendamba Batbayar, Mongolia’s Director of Policy Planning in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, visited Washington in November, 2014 and noted the broad range of Mongolia-DPRK exchanges. Together with Mongolia Ambassador Bulgaa Altangerel, he emphasized his country’s desire to serve as a fair broker and mediator for the Northeast Asia region and to pursue prudent and practical measures to help build bridges of understanding between the people of North Korea and other parties.

But despite its uniquely constructive approach to dealing with the DPRK and other regional neighbors, Mongolia faces unique challenges in the mediator role it seeks to achieve. First, Ulaanbaatar has been able to gain Pyongyang’s trust because of the quiet diplomacy it has pursued, staying behind the scenes and out of the limelight. This has enabled a steady channel to the Pyongyang elite, and a focus on bilateral interests has been maintained. In short, drama has been avoided. But if Mongolia plays a more high-profile role with North Korea and multilateral actors, it will most likely be difficult to avoid some drama—posturing, rhetoric, and standoffs—emanating from various parties. Second, any increased or intensified involvement of China, Russia, and the United States in UB-led dialogue could come with the headache of big power arrogance and competition over leadership. The value of Mongolia’s role and activities for regional cooperation and peace stems from the fact that Ulaanbaatar does not assume airs or seek to dominate others. Whether China, Russia, and the United States would be able to refrain from seeking leadership and disproportionate influence in UB-led initiatives is highly questionable. Third, with respect to peninsular issues, for the UB Dialogues to gain more acceptance and credibility regionally and internationally requires that the DPRK become a consistent and collaborative presence at gatherings. Whether any nation or actor has the capacity to deliver consistent and collaborative participation by Pyongyang is an open question.

In addition, some observers believe that the impasse between North Korea and other nations is not simply the result of a trust deficit, but reflects mutually exclusive goals. While Mongolian mediation may not be able to solve the nuclear issue, it can be an effective channel – among others – for increasing communication, finding common ground, and beginning to ease tension.

Mongolia is the one Northeast Asian country that has kept its emotional cool and balanced policy interests with North Korea and other regional actors. It has not tripped over its own feet by politicizing historical grievances with its neighbors. Rather, it has exercised a calm can-do approach while its neighbors have engulfed themselves in hyper-nationalistic and ideological mire. And it has smartly used diplomacy and entrepreneurship to make friends and develop its own economy and people. These are significant assets that can be of benefit not only to UB but also to the region.

Recommendations

1. The Obama administration should actively support the Ulaanbaatar Dialogue process and encourage Seoul to find common cause in advancing greater regional dialogue and collaboration with the Mongolians through Track 2 and 1.5 processes. A precedent for this can be found in the case of Oman, which the current administration effectively tapped for back channel dialogue with Iran, kick-starting the present nuclear talks. Also, support by Washington would build on a prior exchange with Mongolia hosted by the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), where scholars noted potential benefits from three-way economic cooperation and the possibility of providing the North Koreans with a proven model of transformation from a closed statist system to a prosperous and more open system.

2. ROK President Park’s proposed regional cooperation mechanism should receive serious attention together with the Ulaanbaatar initiative. The two parallel efforts could benefit from being part of inter-connected strategies to defuse regional tension and forge greater trustpolitik.

3. The UN ESCAP headquarters can serve as an important multilateral bridge for humanitarian aid together with the multi-stakeholder Asia Pacific Peace Service Alliance (APPSA), which was launched at the UN headquarters in Bangkok last October. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) could partner with UN ESCAP and the World Food Program to establish a verifiable humanitarian aid regime, building on prior food aid oversight protocols developed during the Bush administration. Mongolia also would be an excellent candidate for the training of an international volunteer corps for potential disaster and humanitarian relief and economic development projects concerning the DPRK and the broader Northeast Asia region. Mongolia has excellent working relations with the U.S. Peace Corps, which also helped facilitate the recent launch of the APPSA.

4. In the context of peninsula unification planning, regional economic cooperation on private and multi-stakeholder investment projects and the enabling of market-friendly policies could be further explored with Mongolia and other Northeast Asian partners in areas such as infrastructure, energy, and technology.5. Cultural and educational exchanges between Mongolia and the DPRK could be expanded on a multilateral basis over time to include the ROK, China, Russia, Japan and ASEAN nations together with UNESCO to further cultural bases and norms of peace.

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

Event Information

Northeast Asia has seen significant leadership changes in recent months, with the election of Park Geun-hye as president of South Korea, Xi Jinping as leader of China’s ruling Communist Party, and Shinzo Abe as prime minister of Japan. As leaders of world-leading economies, these key players will no doubt bring about dynamic change in the region’s politics and economy, while balancing relations with the United States and its own newly re-elected president.

On November 28, 2012, the Center for Northeast Asian Studies (CNAPS) at Brookings, the Japan Center for Economic Research, and Nikkei held a one-day conference on “Managing Transitions in Northeast Asia, the Global Economy, and Japan-U.S. Relations.” Three panels, featuring Brookings scholars as well leading experts from across Asia, provided their views on issues of profound importance to the Northeast Asian region including leadership transitions, global economy and trade, global governance, and U.S.-Japan relations in the 21st Century.

Audio

• Part 1: Managing Transitions in Northeast Asia, the Global Economy, and Japan-U.S. Relations
• Part 2: Managing Transitions in Northeast Asia, the Global Economy, and Japan-U.S. Relations

       

Event Information

Around the world today, there are more than 15.5 million refugees and over 28.8 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) uprooted by conflict, in addition to some 32.4 million displaced in 2012 from their homes due to natural disasters. These displacement crises are not simply humanitarian concerns, but fundamental development challenges. Forced migration flows are rooted in development failures, and can undermine the pursuit of development goals at local, national and regional levels.

Linking humanitarian responses to displacement with longer-term development support and planning is not a new concern. Beginning in 1999, for example, the “Brookings Process” – under the leadership of Sadako Ogata and James Wolfensohn – sought to bridge humanitarian relief and development assistance in post-conflict situations. But the challenge remains unresolved, and has acquired new urgency as displacement situations are becoming more protracted, and situations such as the Syrian crisis show no signs of resolution.

The Brookings Global Economy and Development Program and the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement held a roundtable on these issues on May 14, 2013 with Sadako Ogata, former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, former Director of the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, and Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Megan Bradley, Fellow with the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement, facilitated the roundtable, which followed Chatham House rules.

The roundtable addressed several key topics including:

• The relevance of the concept of human security to addressing displacement and development challenges
• Displacement as a development challenge in fragile states
• Protracted displacement
• Contrasts in the approaches and processes adopted by humanitarian and development actors

The event report provides a brief overview of the discussion.

Event Materials

• Brookings IDP Roundtable with Sadako Ogata May 14 2013

       

Abstract

Most pollsters base their election projections off questions of voter intentions, which ask “If the election were held today, who would you vote for?” By contrast, we probe the value of questions probing voters’ expectations, which typically ask: “Regardless of who you plan to vote for, who do you think will win the upcoming election?” We demonstrate that polls of voter expectations consistently yield more accurate forecasts than polls of voter intentions. A small-scale structural model reveals that this is because we are polling from a broader information set, and voters respond as if they had polled twenty of their friends. This model also provides a rational interpretation for why respondents’ forecasts are correlated with their expectations. We also show that we can use expectations polls to extract accurate election forecasts even from extremely skewed samples.

I. Introduction

Since the advent of scientific polling in the 1930s, political pollsters have asked people whom they intend to vote for; occasionally, they have also asked who they think will win. Our task in this paper is long overdue: we ask which of these questions yields more accurate forecasts. That is, we evaluate the predictive power of the questions probing voters’ intentions with questions probing their expectations. Judging by the attention paid by pollsters, the press, and campaigns, the conventional wisdom appears to be that polls of voters’ intentions are more accurate than polls of their expectations.

Yet there are good reasons to believe that asking about expectations yields more greater insight. Survey respondents may possess much more information about the upcoming political race than that probed by the voting intention question. At a minimum, they know their own current voting intention, so the information set feeding into their expectations will be at least as rich as that captured by the voting intention question. Beyond this, they may also have information about the current voting intentions—both the preferred candidate and probability of voting—of their friends and family. So too, they have some sense of the likelihood that today’s expressed intention will be changed before it ultimately becomes an election-day vote. Our research is motivated by idea that the richer information embedded in these expectations data may yield more accurate forecasts.

We find robust evidence that polls probing voters’ expectations yield more accurate predictions of election outcomes than the usual questions asking about who they intend to vote for. By comparing the performance of these two questions only when they are asked of the exact same people in exactly the same survey, we effectively difference out the influence of all other factors. Our primary dataset consists of all the state-level electoral presidential college races from 1952 to 2008, where both the intention and expectation question are asked. In the 77 cases in which the intention and expectation question predict different candidates, the expectation question picks the winner 60 times, while the intention question only picked the winner 17 times. That is, 78% of the time that these two approaches disagree, the expectation data was correct. We can also assess the relative accuracy of the two methods by assessing the extent to which each can be informative in forecasting the final vote share; we find that relying on voters’ expectations rather than their intentions yield substantial and statistically significant increases in forecasting accuracy. An optimally-weighted average puts over 90% weight on the expectations-based forecasts. Once one knows the results of a poll of voters expectations, there is very little additional information left in the usual polls of voting intentions. Our findings remain robust to correcting for an array of known biases in voter intentions data.

The better performance of forecasts based on asking voters about their expectations rather than their intentions, varies somewhat, depending on the specific context. The expectations question performs particularly well when: voters are embedded in heterogeneous (and thus, informative) social networks; when they don’t rely too much on common information; when small samples are involved (when the extra information elicited by asking about intentions counters the large sampling error in polls of intentions); and at a point in the electoral cycle when voters are sufficiently engaged as to know what their friends and family are thinking.

Our findings also speak to several existing strands of research within election forecasting. A literature has emerged documenting that prediction markets tend to yield more accurate forecasts than polls (Wolfers and Zitzewitz, 2004; Berg, Nelson and Rietz, 2008). More recently, Rothschild (2009) has updated these findings in light of the 2008 Presidential and Senate races, showing that forecasts based on prediction markets yielded systematically more accurate forecasts of the likelihood of Obama winning each state than did the forecasts based on aggregated intention polls compiled by Nate Silver for the website FiveThirtyEight.com. One hypothesis for this superior performance is that because prediction markets ask traders to bet on outcomes, they effectively ask a different question, eliciting the expectations rather than intentions of participants. If correct, this suggests that much of the accuracy of prediction markets could be obtained simply by polling voters on their expectations, rather than intentions.

These results also speak to the possibility of producing useful forecasts from non-representative samples (Robinson, 1937), an issue of renewed significance in the era of expensive-to-reach cellphones and cheap online survey panels. Surveys of voting intentions depend critically on being able to poll representative cross-sections of the electorate. By contrast, we find that surveys of voter expectations can still be quite accurate, even when drawn from non-representative samples. The logic of this claim comes from the difference between asking about expectations, which may not systematically differ across demographic groups, and asking about intentions, which clearly do. Again, the connection to prediction markets is useful, as Berg and Rietz (2006) show that prediction markets have yielded accurate forecasts, despite drawing from an unrepresentative pool of overwhelmingly white, male, highly educated, high income, self-selected traders.

While questions probing voters’ expectations have been virtually ignored by political forecasters, they have received some interest from psychologists. In particular, Granberg and Brent (1983) document wishful thinking, in which people’s expectation about the likely outcome is positively correlated with what they want to happen. Thus, people who intend to vote Republican are also more likely to predict a Republican victory. This same correlation is also consistent with voters preferring the candidate they think will win, as in bandwagon effects, or gaining utility from being optimistic. We re-interpret this correlation through a rational lens, in which the respondents know their own voting intention with certainty and have knowledge about the voting intentions of their friends and family.

Our alternative approach to political forecasting also provides a new narrative of the ebb and flow of campaigns, which should inform ongoing political science research about which events really matter. For instance, through the 2004 campaign, polls of voter intentions suggested a volatile electorate as George W. Bush and John Kerry swapped the lead several times. By contrast, polls of voters’ expectations consistently showed the Bush was expected to win re-election. Likewise in 2008, despite volatility in the polls of voters’ intentions, Obama was expected to win in all of the last 17 expectations polls taken over the final months of the campaign. And in the 2012 Republican primary, polls of voters intentions at different points showed Mitt Romney trailing Donald Trump, then Rick Perry, then Herman Cain, then Newt Gingrich and then Rick Santorum, while polls of expectations showed him consistently as the likely winner.

We believe that our findings provide tantalizing hints that similar methods could be useful in other forecasting domains. Market researchers ask variants of the voter intention question in an array of contexts, asking questions that elicit your preference for one product, over another. Likewise, indices of consumer confidence are partly based on the stated purchasing intentions of consumers, rather than their expectations about the purchase conditions for their community. The same insight that motivated our study—that people also have information on the plans of others—is also likely relevant in these other contexts. Thus, it seems plausible that survey research in many other domains may also benefit from paying greater attention to people’s expectations than to their intentions.

The rest of this paper proceeds as follows, In Section II, we describe our first cut of the data, illustrating the relative success of the two approaches to predicting the winner of elections. In Sections III and IV, we focus on evaluating their respective forecasts of the two-party vote share. Initially, in Section III we provide what we call naïve forecasts, which follow current practice by major pollsters; in Section IV we product statistically efficient forecasts, taking account of the insights of sophisticated modern political scientists. Section V provides out-of-sample forecasts based on the 2008 election. Section VI extends the assessment to a secondary data source which required substantial archival research to compile. In Section VII, we provide a small structural model which helps explain the higher degree of accuracy obtained from surveys of voter expectations. Section VIII characterizes the type of information that is reflected in voters’ expectation, arguing that it is largely idiosyncratic, rather than the sort of common information that might come from the mass media. Section IX assesses why it is that people’s expectations are correlated with their intentions. Section VI uses this model to show how we can obtain surprisingly accurate expectation-based forecasts with non-representative samples. We then conclude. To be clear about the structure of the argument: In the first part of the paper (through section IV) we simply present two alternative forecasting technologies and evaluate them, showing that expectations-based forecasts outperform those based on traditional intentions-based polls. We present these data without taking a strong position on why. But then in later sections we turn to trying to assess what explains this better performance. Because this assessment is model-based, our explanations are necessarily based on auxiliary assumptions (which we spell out).

Right now, we begin with our simplest and most transparent comparison of the forecasting ability of our two competing approaches.

Download the full paper » (PDF)

Downloads

• Forecasting Elections: Voter Intentions versus Expectations

      

Editor's Note: A new academic study by David Rothschild and Justin Wolfers concludes that poll questions about expectations—which ask people whom they think will win—have historically been better guides to the outcome of presidential elections than traditional questions about people’s preferences. David Leonhardt of The New York Times conducted an interview with Wolfers by e-mail, focusing on the implications of the study for current presidential polls.

David Leonhardt:In the article, I discussed only briefly the expectations polls about the 2012 race, and some of the Twitter feedback was eager for more. By my count, there have been five recent major polls asking people whom they expect to win — by ABC/Washington Post, Gallup, Politico/George Washington University, New York Times/CBS News, and the University of Connecticut. There is also sixth from Rand asking people the percentage chances they place on each candidate winning. How consistent are the polls?

Justin Wolfers: There’s a striking consistency in how people are responding to these polls. The most recent data are from the Gallup poll conducted Oct. 27-28, and they found 54 percent of adults expect Obama to win, versus 34 percent for Romney. Around the same time (Oct. 25-28), there was a comparable New York Times/CBS poll in which 51 percent of likely voters expect Obama to win, versus 34 percent for Romney.

But these results aren’t just stable across pollsters, they’ve also been quite stable over the past few weeks, even as the race appeared to tighten for a while. Politico and George Washington University ran a poll of likely voters on Oct. 22-25, finding 54 percent expect Obama to win, versus 36 percent for Romney. The University of Connecticut/Hartford Courant poll of likely voters got a somewhat higher share not venturing an answer, with 47 percent expecting Obama to win versus 33 percent for Romney. Finally, the ABC/Washington Post poll of registered voters run Oct. 10-13 found 56 percent expect Obama to win, compared to 35 percent for Romney.

I’m rather surprised by the similarities here – across time, across pollsters, across how they word the question, and across different survey populations (likely voters, registered voters, or adults) – but I suspect that is part of the nature of the question. You just don’t see the noise here that you see in the barrage of polls of voter intentions, which are extremely sensitive to all of these factors.

I always throw out the folks who don’t have an opinion, and count the proportions as a share of only those who have an opinion. By this measure, the proportion who expect Obama to win is: 61 percent (Gallup), 60 percent (The New York Times), 60 percent (Politico), 59 percent (Hartford Courant), 62 percent (ABC). The corresponding proportions who expect Romney to win are: 39 percent, 40 percent, 40 percent, 41 percent and 38 percent. Taking an average across all these polls: 60.3 percent expect Obama to win. Or if you prefer that I focus only on the freshest two polls, 60.7 percent expect him to win.

DL: The results do seem have tightened somewhat since the first debate, which Romney was widely seen to have won, right? Do the patterns — or lack of patterns — in the numbers help solve the issue of what most people are thinking of when they answer the expectation question: Private information (their friends’ voting plans, yard signs in their neighborhood, etc.) or public information (media coverage, speeches, etc.)?

JW: The results of the polls of voter intentions seem to have tightened a bit since the first debate. There’s an interesting school of thought in political science that basically says: voters are pretty predictable. But they don’t think too hard about how they’re going to vote until right before the election. So what happens is that public opinion through time just converges to where it “should” be. And viewed through this lens, the first debate was just an opportunity for people who really should always have been in Romney’s camp to figure out that they’re in Romney’s camp.

So why did the expectations polls move less sharply than intentions polls? One possibility is that your expectations are explicitly forward-looking, and perhaps people saw the race tightening as they saw that some of the support for Obama was a bit soft. Let me put this another way: There are two problems with how we usually ask folks how they plan to vote. First, the question captures the state of public opinion today, while the expectations question effectively asks you where you think public opinion is going. And second, polls typically demand a yes or no answer, when the reality may be that we know that our support is pretty weak, and it may change, or we aren’t even sure whether we’ll turn up to the polls. The virtue of asking about expectations is that you can think about each of your friends, and think not just about who they’re supporting today, but also whether they may change their minds in the future.

I worry that it sounds a bit like I haven’t answered your question, but that’s because I don’t have a super-sharp answer. If I had to summarize, it would be: expectations questions allow you to think about how the dynamics of the race may change, and so they are less sensitive to that change when it happens.

DL: Based on your research and the current polls, what does the expectations question suggest is the most likely outcome on Tuesday?

JW: If a majority expects Obama to win, then right there, it says that I’m forecasting an Obama victory.

But by how much? Here’s where it gets tricky. The fact that 60 percent of people think that Obama is going to win doesn’t mean that he’s going to win 60 percent of the votes. And it doesn’t mean that he’s a 60 percent chance to win. Rather, it simply says that given the information they have, 60 percent of people believe that Obama is going to win. Can we use this to say anything about his likely winning margin?

Yes. I’ll spare you the details of the calculation, but it says that if 60.3 percent of people expect Obama to beat Romney, then we can forecast that he’ll win about 52.5 percent of the two-party vote. That would be a solid win, though not as impressive as his seven-point win in 2008.

The proportion who expect Obama to win right now looks awfully similar to the proportion who expected George W. Bush to win in a Gallup Poll at a similar point in 2004. Ultimately Bush won 51.2 percent of the two-party vote.

Right now, Nate Silver is predicting that Obama will win 50.5 percent of the popular vote, and Romney 48.6 percent. As a share of the two-party vote, this says he’s forecasting Obama to win 51 percent of the vote. Now Silver’s approach aggregates responses from hundreds of thousands of survey respondents, while I have far fewer, so his estimate still deserves a lot of respect. I don’t want to overstate the confidence with which I’m stating my forecast. So let me put it this way: My approach says that it’s likely that Obama will outperform the forecasts of poll-based analysts like Silver.

DL: We’ll find out soon enough. Thanks.

      

Paris and Rome may be famous for romance, but it’s Filipinos who get the most love. That, at least, is a conclusion that can be drawn from a global love survey conducted by the Gallup Organization.

In our latest column for Bloomberg View, we mine the unique Gallup data for insights into the nature of love and its relationship to nationality, age, money and economic development. The survey, conducted in 136 countries, posed the question: “Did you experience love for a lot of the day yesterday?”

In honor of Valentine’s Day, we thought readers might be interested in seeing the full ranking. So here goes. The first number after each country name is the percentage of respondents who said they had experienced love the previous day. The second (in parentheses) is the sample size for the country.

1. Philippines 93% (2193)
2. Rwanda 92% (1495)
3. Puerto Rico 90% (495)
4. Hungary 89% (1002)
5. Cyprus 88% (988)
6. Trinidad and Tobago 88% (506)
7. Paraguay 87% (1986)
8. Lebanon 86% (970)
9. Costa Rica 85% (1985)
10. Cambodia 85% (1961)
11. Nigeria 84% (1965)
12. Guyana 83% (486)
13. Spain 83% (998)
14. Mexico 82% (989)
15. Tanzania 82% (1941)
16. Ecuador 82% (2126)
17. Jamaica 82% (534)
18. Venezuela 82% (997)
19. Cuba 82% (978)
20. Brazil 82% (1038)
21. Laos 81% (1947)
22. Argentina 81% (1985)
23. Belgium 81% (1015)
24. Canada 81% (1006)
25. Greece 81% (996)
26. U.S. 81% (1224)
27. Denmark 80% (1003)
28. Portugal 80% (995)
29. Netherlands 80% (993)
30. Vietnam 79% (1901)
31. New Zealand 79% (1775)
32. Italy 79% (1000)
33. Colombia 79% (1994)
34. Madagascar 78% (998)
35. Uruguay 78% (1969)
36. Turkey 78% (985)
37. Dominican Republic 78% (1976)
38. United Arab Emirates 77% (961)
39. Saudi Arabia 77% (978)
40. Chile 76% (1982)
41. Malawi 76% (1997)
42. Ghana 76% (1986)
43. South Africa 76% (1968)
44. Australia 76% (1199)
45. Panama 75% (1995)
46. Zambia 74% (1971)
47. Kenya 74% (1965)
48. Namibia 74% (996)
49. Nicaragua 74% (1988)
50. Germany 74% (1214)
51. Ireland 74% (992)
52. Sweden 74% (993)
53. U.K. 74% (1200)
54. Switzerland 74% (986)
55. Montenegro 74% (800)
56. Austria 73% (984)
57. France 73% (1217)
58. Kuwait 73% (934)
59. Finland 73% (993)
60. El Salvador 73% (2000)
61. Pakistan 73% (2253)
62. Zimbabwe 72% (1989)
63. Honduras 72% (1947)
64. Peru 72% (1982)
65. Egypt 72% (1024)
66. Serbia 72% (1474)
67. Bosnia and Herzegovina 72% (1896)
68. Sierra Leone 71% (1986)
69. India 71% (3140)
70. Taiwan 71% (984)
71. Bangladesh 70% (2200)
72. Belize 70% (464)
73. Croatia 69% (958)
74. Macedonia 69% (1000)
75. Mozambique 69% (996)
76. Bolivia 69% (1948)
77. Liberia 68% (988)
78. Iran 68% (963)
79. China 68% (7206)
80. Slovenia 68% (1000)
81. Haiti 68% (471)
82. Norway 67% (992)
83. Sri Lanka 67% (1974)
84. Poland 67% (939)
85. Guatemala 67% (1988)
86. Uganda 66% (1961)
87. Sudan 66% (971)
88. Israel 66% (957)
89. Kosovo 65% (983)
90. Thailand 65% (2377)
91. Jordan 65% (998)
92. Albania 64% (855)
93. Guinea 62% (952)
94. Botswana 62% (999)
95. Angola 62% (957)
96. Burkina Faso 62% (1876)
97. Malaysia 61% (2115)
98. Mali 61% (984)
99. Niger 61% (1925)
100. Palestinian Territories 61% (991)
101. Romania 61% (937)
102. Senegal 61% (1805)
103. Indonesia 61% (2013)
104. Afghanistan 60% (1128)
105. Hong Kong 60% (789)
106. Cameroon 59% (1967)
107. Japan 59% (1138)
108. Nepal 59% (1965)
109. Bulgaria 59% (927)
110. Slovakia 58% (991)
111. Singapore 58% (3002)
112. Czech Republic 58% (992)
113. Mauritania 57% (1960)
114. Benin 56% (974)
115. South Korea 56% (2056)
116. Myanmar 55% (1047)
117. Latvia 54% (1942)
118. Togo 54% (988)
119. Estonia 53% (1800)
120. Lithuania 50% (1863)
121. Russia 50% (4667)
122. Chad 49% (1915)
123. Yemen 48% (959)
124. Ukraine 48% (1930)
125. Ethiopia 48% (1913)
126. Azerbaijan 47% (1824)
127. Tajikistan 47% (1847)
128. Moldova 46% (1937)
129. Kazakhstan 45% (1871)
130. Morocco 43% (1011)
131. Belarus 43% (1992)
132. Georgia 43% (1904)
133. Kyrgyzstan 34% (1969)
134. Mongolia 32% (928)
135. Uzbekistan 32% (962)
136. Armenia 29% (1954)

Note: This content was first published on Bloomberg View on February 13, 2013.

      

On Valentine’s Day, even a dismal scientist’s mind turns to love. It’s a powerful feeling, with a value that goes far beyond the millions of chocolate boxes and bouquets that will be delivered this Feb. 14.

Survey data from the Gallup Organization, where Justin works as a senior scientist, allow us to take a uniquely deep look at the state of love around the world. In 2006 and 2007, Gallup went to 136 countries and asked people, “Did you experience love for a lot of the day yesterday?” It’s the largest such dataset ever collected.

The good news: Ours is a loving world. On a typical day, about 70 percent of people worldwide reported a love-filled day. In the U.S., 81 percent felt love, as did 81 percent of Canadians and 79 percent of Italians. Germany and the U.K. were less loving, with slightly less than 3 in 4 people reporting feeling loved. Surprisingly, the same was true of the supposedly romantic French. And if you’re in Japan, please hug someone: Only 59 percent of Japanese said they had experienced love the previous day.

Across the world as a whole, the widowed and divorced are the least likely to experience love. Married folks feel more of it than singles. People who live together out of wedlock report getting even more love than married spouses -- an interesting factoid for conservatives worried about the effects of cohabitation. Women get more love than men, particularly in the U.S.

Young Love

If you’re young and not feeling all that loved this Valentine’s Day, don’t despair: You’re not alone. Young adults are among the least likely to experience love. It gets better with age, ultimately peaking in the mid-30s or mid-40s in most countries before fading again into the twilight years.

Money is related to love. Those with more household income are slightly more likely to experience the feeling. Roughly speaking, doubling your income is associated with being about 4 percentage points more likely to be loved. Perhaps having more money makes it easier to find time for love.

That said, the data aren’t necessarily telling us that money can buy you love. It’s possible that other factors correlated with income, such as height or appearance, are the real source of attraction. Or maybe being loved gives you a boost in the labor market.

What’s perhaps more striking is how little money matters on a global level. True, the populations of richer countries are, on average, slightly more likely to feel loved than those of poorer countries. But love is still abundant in the poorer countries: People in Rwanda and the Philippines enjoyed the highest love ratios, with more than 9 in 10 people providing positive responses. Armenia, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan, with economic output per person in the middle of the range, all had love ratios of less than 4 in 10.

Fun facts aside, we think there is a deeper and more consequential purpose to the study of love. Think about what love means to you. To us, it means caring about others and being cared for. Love is valuable, even if it is absent from both our national accounts and our political discourse.

In the language of economics, love is a form of insurance. It involves bonds of reciprocity that provide support when we’re feeling down, when we’re sick and when times are tough.

More broadly, love has the power to mitigate the free-rider and moral hazard problems associated with social (and private) insurance. Bailing out a bank might encourage executives to take bigger risks in the future, but helping loved ones down on their luck has fewer incentive problems because our loved ones typically care for us in return. Such mutually beneficial relationships make us all more resilient in times of crisis. This is why the household remains one of the most powerful institutions for organizing not just families but also our economic lives.

If we can find more love for our fellow citizens, our society will function better. Hard as this may be to achieve in an era when trust in government, business and one another is low, it’s worth the effort. When you expand the boundaries of trust and reciprocity, you expand the boundaries of what is possible.

Note: This content was first published on Bloomberg View on February 13, 2013.