John Kerry to travel to Kenya and Djibouti next week

Exactly one year after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s last multi-country tour of sub-Saharan Africa, he is preparing for another visit to the continent—to Kenya and Djibouti from May 3 to 5, 2015. In Kenya, Kerry and a U.S. delegation including Linda Thomas-Greenfield, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, will engage in talks with senior Kenyan officials on U.S.-Kenya security cooperation, which the U.S. formalized through its Security Governance Initiative (SGI) at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit last August. Over the past several years, the U.S. has increased its military assistance to Kenya and African Union (AU) troops to combat the Somali extremist group al-Shabab and has conducted targeted drone strikes against the group’s top leaders.  In the wake of the attack on Kenya’s Garissa University by al-Shabab, President Obama pledged U.S. support for Kenya, and Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed has stated that Kenya is currently seeking additional assistance from the U.S. to strengthen its military and intelligence capabilities.

Kerry will also meet with a wide array of leaders from Kenya’s private sector, civil society, humanitarian organizations, and political opposition regarding the two countries’ “common goals, including accelerating economic growth, strengthening democratic institutions, and improving regional security,” according to a U.S. State Department spokesperson. These meetings are expected to build the foundation for President Obama’s trip to Kenya for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in July of this year.

On Tuesday, May 5, Kerry will become the first sitting secretary of state to travel to Djibouti. There, he will meet with government officials regarding the evacuation of civilians from Yemen and also visit Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. military base from which it coordinates its counterterror operations in the Horn of Africa region.

Protests erupt as Burundian president seeks third term

This week saw the proliferation of anti-government street demonstrations as current President Pierre Nkurunziza declared his candidacy for a third term, after being in office for ten years.  The opposition has deemed this move as “unconstitutional” and in violation of the 2006 Arusha peace deal which ended the civil war. Since the announcement, hundreds of civilians took to the streets of Bujumbura, despite a strong military presence. At least six people have been killed in clashes between police forces and civilians. 

Since the protests erupted, leading human rights activist Pierre-Claver Mbonimpa has been arrested alongside more than 200 protesters. One of Burundi’s main independent radio stations was also suspended as they were covering the protests.  On Wednesday, the government blocked social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, declaring them important tools in implementing and organizing protests. Thursday, amid continuing political protests, Burundi closed its national university and students were sent home. 

Amid the recent protests, Burundi’s constitutional court will examine the president’s third term bid. Meanwhile, U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon has sent his special envoy for the Great Lakes Region to hold a dialogue with president Nkurunziza and other government authorities. Senior U.S. diplomat Tom Malinowski also arrived in Bujumbura on Thursday to help defuse the biggest crisis the country has seen in the last few years, expressing disappointment over Nkurunziza’s decision to run for a third term.

China invests billions in African infrastructure

Since the early 2000s, China has become an increasingly significant source of financing for African infrastructure projects, as noted in a recent Brookings paper, “Financing African infrastructure: Can the world deliver?” This week, observers have seen an additional spike in African infrastructure investments from Chinese firms, as three major railway, real estate, and other infrastructure deals were struck on the continent, totaling nearly $7.5 billion in investments.

On Monday, April 27, the state-owned China Railway Construction Corp announced that it will construct a $3.5 billion railway line in Nigeria, as well as a $1.9 billion real estate project in Zimbabwe. Then on Wednesday, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (one of the country’s largest lenders) signed a $2 billion deal with the government of Equatorial Guinea in order to carry out a number of infrastructure projects throughout the country. These deals align with China’s “One Belt, One Road” strategy of building infrastructure in Africa and throughout the developing world in order to further integrate their economies, stimulate economic growth, and ultimately increase demand for Chinese exports. For more insight into China’s infrastructure lending in Africa and the implications of these investments for the region’s economies, please see the following piece by Africa Growth Initiative Nonresident Fellow Yun Sun: “Inserting Africa into China’s One Belt, One Road strategy: A new opportunity for jobs and infrastructure?”

      

In early May 2015, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry made a historic but little noticed visit to Somalia, a country no other U.S. secretary of state had ever visited. His trip symbolized both how far Somalia has come—from the blackest days of civil war, clan infighting, and famine in the 1990s; to the brutal rule of the jihadi group al Shabab in the late 2000s; to something getting closer to normal now—and how very far it still has to go.

The fact that a high U.S. official could enter the country at all speaks of real security improvements. During his visit, moreover, Kerry announced the reopening of a U.S. embassy in Somalia, which had been closed since 1991 when the government of long-term dictator Siad Barre collapsed. But the fact that Kerry’s visit was a brief few hours—during which he did not even leave the heavily-guarded Mogadishu airport—also points to deep and persistent security challenges. Moreover, his meeting with Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud and Prime Minister Omar Sharmarke comes at a time when the relationship between international donors and the Somali government has soured and the Somali people have grown increasingly weary of their government. The early optimism that the 2012 election of Mohamoud by appointed members of the Somali parliament would usher in badly needed changes in Somali politics, toward inclusiveness, effectiveness, and accountability, dissipated long ago.

Indeed, an observer’s bullishness about Somalia very much depends on his or her baseline. Compared to the early 1990s or 2011, when al Shabab controlled most of Mogadishu and most of central and southern Somalia, with only the semi-autonomous regions of Puntland and Somaliland escaping its grasp, Somalia is in much better shape. However, when compared to the spring of 2013, when I took a previous research trip there, the 2015 spring (my latest trip), and summer hardly look peppy. Security is tenuous, with al Shabab and the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) forces stuck in a draw, and politics has been regressing to many of the same old discouraging patterns.

The rest of 2015 and 2016 are important times for Somalia. They could either resurrect optimism about the country’s progress or reinforce disappointment. The current AMISOM mandate expires in November 2015. By 2016, as a compact between the international donors and Somalia government specifies, presidential elections are supposed to take place, a constitution redrafting is to be finished, and the transformation of a centralized state into a federal one with states formed is to be completed. From the perspective of the middle of 2015, this agenda looks daunting.

AL SHABAB’S BATTLEFIELD

After struggling against al Shabab for several years and hunkering down in a few blocks of Mogadishu, AMISOM forces, with the assistance of international private security companies and international funding, finally began to reverse the al Shabab tide in 2011. As clan militias defected from al Shabab, AMISOM succeeded in pushing the terrorist group out of Somalia’s major cities. U.S. air and Special Forces attacks against al Shabab leadership eliminated some key figures, such as the group’s amir, Ahmed Godane, in September 2014 and its previous leader, Aden Ayro, in May 2008.

That said, al Shabab is hardly defeated—even if its membership is thought to be down to around 6,000, with the most potent and hardcore Amniyat branch down to perhaps 1,500. (Such estimates, given by Somali government officials and international military advisors, need to be taken with a grain of salt, since the capacity of insurgent groups to replenish their ranks often outpaces the capacity of counterinsurgent forces to kill or arrest the groups’ members.) The group’s spectacular terrorist attacks in Kenya and Uganda, such as the one on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in September 2013 and on a teaching college in the city of Garissa in April 2015, don’t necessarily mean that al Shabab has lost the capacity to operate in Somalia. In fact, if anything, al Shabab’s operations have become more targeted and more effective, and generate more casualties with the militant group losing fewer fighters. The fact that the group has deeply infiltrated Somali military and police forces helps it in that regard.

Although AMISOM still holds the major cities that it won back from al Shabab as part of the 2014 Operation Eagle and Operation Indian Ocean, al Shabab’s presence in supposedly liberated cities is often robust. The group extorts shopkeepers and intimidates the local population with threatening night letters that regularly appear in public spaces. People routinely receive cell phone texts such as “You forgot to pay your zakat (religious tax); tomorrow we cannot guarantee your security.” Such intimidation is prevalent even in Kismayo, a strategic port in the southern region of Juba that used to be a key source of revenue for al Shabab from customs and smuggling items like charcoal. Kismayo, and the newly-formed state of Jubaland, are controlled by Ahmed Madobe, who defected from his role as al Shabab commander several years ago and, with the support of Kenyan forces, took control of the area and declared himself president of the state.

Over the past year, al Shabab attacks have also escalated in Mogadishu. Assassinations are a daily occurrence. Many government officials have to live and work (often in the same room) in hotels close to the Mogadishu airport, a palpable symptom of the decline in confidence and sense of security since 2013. The fact that some assassinations are actually perpetrated by rival politicians, warlords, and businessmen, with al Shabab happily taking the credit, does not lessen the sense of insecurity.

Al Shabab also controls roads and limits AMISOM’s movement. Attacks on AMISOM convoys and IEDs are frequent. In fact, despite its two much-touted offensive operations last year, AMISOM is mostly in defensive garrison mode. Rarely does it actually fight al Shabab; in advance of AMISOM’s clearing operations, al Shabab often disperses. Usually, by the time AMISOM arrives, it finds a ghost village (sometimes destroyed by al Shabab). AMISOM leaves, and al Shabab comes back from the bush. Often locals, at best, sit on the fence and, at worst, continue to support al Shabab because of their calculation that al Shabab will ultimately be the dominant force in their area.

That does not mean that Somalis actually like al Shabab: Its brutality is still shocking; memories of the militant group’s aggravation of the 2011 famine are still vivid; and al Shabab has hardly been a competent ruler enabling local economic growth. Instead, the group often tried to suppress or undermine vital economic markets, such as in qat. And, thanks to its control of the roads, ordinary Somalis fear traveling on them. Those who are willing have to be prepared to pay bribes of about $30 dollars to travel to Mogadishu from Merka and over a $100 to travel from there to Kismayo. Only the wealthy can absorb such costs, increasing Somalis’ frustration and sense of insecurity. Likewise, urban Somalis are quick to point out that inflation, including the cost of basic food items, has significantly increased since deliveries must now either come by air, be smuggled in, or are levied with substantial extortion fees and illegal taxes.

STUCK IN THE SAND WITH AMISOM

On the other side of the fighting, AMISOM nominally numbers 22,000 soldiers from Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. It could and should be much more efficient in its fight against al Shabab. But it is not clear how many soldiers are actually on the ground at any one point. The capacity and training of the AMISOM deployments varies widely across the countries. Some of the forces, such as those from Burundi, do not speak English and have little training overall. Many of these militaries were built during their country’s own political revolutions and have had little deployment or battle experience since. Very few of the deployed troops have had any counterinsurgency training and they lack logistics, medevac, and intelligence and reconnaissance support. AMISOM was to be equipped with ten helicopters, with Uganda promising to provide four and the other United Nations member states the rest. Three, however, crashed into Mt. Kenya as they were flying from Uganda to Somalia, and Uganda is now in dispute with the international community over who will pay for the destroyed aircraft.

Moreover, the original expectation that a United Nations force would eventually replace AMISOM has long since died. Nor do the AMISOM forces necessarily want to get out of Somalia (or fully defeat al Shabab): The international funding they receive for their effort makes for good living for their soldiers and a substantial financial boost for their military institutions. Moreover, their presence in Somalia allows them to pursue their regional interests and enhance their importance with the broader international community.

AMISOM has weak headquarters to which few member countries pass on any information, let alone intelligence, or bother to coordinate. Some AMISOM commanders maintain highly personalized and sometimes outright subversive agendas: There are credible rumors that AMISOM units have sold fuel and arms to al Shabab or looted humanitarian convoys.

The fact that AMISOM is organized into five sectors operated mostly by one of the AMISOM member countries does not help with coordination and planning. The division of the sectors reflects the strategic interests of the intervening forces. Kenya and Ethiopia, although they have suspended some of their mutual rivalries, still mostly cultivate proxies in their sectors to create buffer areas, prevent the leakage of terrorism into their countries, disrupt support for separatists within their own countries, and project land and sea power. Offensive operations are decided mostly on a sector basis, with the forces in each area reporting and taking orders from their own capitals. Whether captured weapons are handed over to Somali forces varies by sector. So does how al Shabab terrorists are dealt with. There is little coordination among the sectors and little planning at AMISOM headquarters; in fact, they are generally only interested in working together when headquarters has something to offer to them, such as logistical support via the United Nations.

Not surprisingly, it has been hard for AMISOM to hold and build a “cleared” territory. At first, AMISOM forces exhibited little interest in providing any governance functions or even conducting stabilization operations, such as repairing bridges or providing clean water systems. They expected the Somali security forces and government to do so. But Somalia hasn’t been able to because local governance structures are frequently destroyed, blocked off by al Shabab, dominated by problematic powerbrokers, or lack resources. And so AMISOM has come under pressure from the United States and the international community to take over these stabilization functions.

Pushing AMISOM into stabilization operations is a difficult call. On the one hand, it should be the responsibility of the local and national government to administer its territory, and the credit for doing so should accrue to the Somali government, not to foreign forces. On the other hand, local communities are frustrated by the lack of security and services after AMISOM clears a territory. In either case, it isn’t clear that AMISOM militaries could do much better at governance, since they, too, lack resources and training. And the political sensitivities abound. Somalis do not see themselves as African, but rather as Arab; and al Shabab can easily label Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia as Christian invaders. Although Somalis are deeply divided along scores of clan divisions, they also identify as nationalists, opposing foreign intervention.

If AMISOM does take on a stabilization role, it should be limited, discreet, and concrete, including short-term support for building water and other infrastructure. One of the current ideas is to deliver quick-impact projects only when some, even interim, local authority has been created and is supported by local peace committees consisting of clan elders, imams, women’s groups, businessmen, and civil society members. Even though the projects could still become fronts for graft, any accountability is better than none.

SOMALI NATIONAL FORCES IN TATTERS

Another major official combatant in the war is Somalia’s own forces, consisting of the army, police, and militarized intelligence service. They have not been able to provide stabilization operations on their own because, as still mostly a collection of disparate militias, they lack the capacity. They remain beholden to clans and powerbrokers, and lack both a national ethos and training. When pressure rises, they mostly fall apart or return to militia behavior. Underpaid and often not paid for months, they frequently resort to selling their equipment to obtain some income. They are also notoriously infiltrated by al Shabab. The paramilitary intelligence service run by the National Intelligence and Security Agency, and the preferred partner of U.S. and Ethiopian counterterrorism efforts, is somewhat better, but also rather brutal and beholden to clan politics.

Not surprisingly, the Somali people do not trust their national forces. Although the federal government nominally controls the national forces (while explicitly not controlling regional militia forces), its presence beyond Mogadishu is limited and it depends on AMISOM and international support for protection from al Shabab and rival powerbrokers. In order to wean itself off AMISOM, defeat al Shabab, and suppress regional conflicts, Somalia’s national forces would need to be significantly bigger than they are now at about 10,000 fighters. But donors, aware that a large percentage of foreign military aid disappears into personal pockets of Somali politicians, are reluctant to commit more money for larger Somali security forces.

The security forces of the semi-autonomous state of Puntland are somewhat more capable, but insecurity in Puntland, too, has been increasing since al Shabab was pushed into the state from central Somalia. Numbering perhaps about 4,000, the forces include a state-armed militia/police force known as darawish as well as other police forces and custodial forces. Many other unofficial entities also operate in Puntland, including the Puntland Security Force, which is paid by the United States to fight al Shabab and presumably reports to the Puntland president, and the Puntland Maritime Police Force, which is paid for by the United Arab Emirates. The latter was originally created to fight pirates, although recently it has also apparently been dispatched to fight al Shabab in the Galgadud area. The Puntland government has little interest in integrating these forces into the Somali national armed forces.

Somaliland remains the most secure part of Somalia with the best functioning government­—although, of course, the local leadership there continues to want to secede from the country and establish independence. Mediation talks in Ankara facilitated by Turkey collapsed in the spring of 2015. Since then, Somaliland has been preoccupied by presidential and parliamentary elections for the state government, which were to be held on June 26, 2015. But despite popular demand and strong pressure from international donors, the elections were delayed by at least 17 months due to a lack of preparedness, (as they had previously been in Puntland). This delay undermines governance and accountability in the state.

THE VICIOUS CIRCLE

It is not just security that has been sliding in Somalia for the past year and half. Equally, the sense of political momentum has dissipated. In 2013, there was a great deal of optimism among the Somalis whom I interviewed that Somalia hit rock bottom in 2011 and that the pernicious clan politics that plagued the country for the past three decades have ended. They placed a great deal of hope in their President, Mohamoud. A Somali professor and member of the country’s civil society, he was not a former warlord nor a member of the diaspora parachuted in. And although he was elected by a parliament of appointed (or self-appointed) clan elders and former warlords, he was not seen as beholden to any particular clan. The international community, including the United Kingdom and the United States, also embraced him.

But that was then. With little control over the country’s armed forces and budget, and unable to tackle pervasive and extensive corruption, the president fell back on one source of support: his Hawiye clan. And so the cycle of exclusionary politics began again, privileging access to business deals for his supporters and promoting clan backers for government positions.

Mohamoud’s government was soon paralyzed by the infighting between him and his prime ministers (a familiar story in Somalia over the past decade), whom he would repeatedly seek to replace. The Somali constitution makes the president the symbol of authority, but his role and relationship with the prime minister is not clearly defined. Ultimately, the constitution is generally interpreted as mandating a Hawiye president and a Darod prime minister. That design is meant to encourage inclusiveness. In truth, however, it mostly led to a struggle between the president and prime minister, mimicking the power fights between the two main clans.

The constant turnover of government officials at the federal and subnational levels is another major problem: With appointments often lasting only a few weeks, officials have far more interest in quickly making money and placing allies in other public sector positions than in governing effectively and building equitable and accountable state institutions—or any institutions for that matter.

To give itself legitimacy, the government has embraced a brand of conservative Islam that is not as far from al Shabab’s teachings as many would like. The president is reputed to have admiration for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and is said to consider Mohamad Morsi, the imprisoned former Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated president of Egypt, a personal friend.

Indeed, the contest for political legitimacy in Somalia revolves around four elements: Who is more Islamic? Who is more nationalistic? Who delivers better security? And who is less corrupt and delivers better services? For years, the Somali federal government has struggled to win on any of these fronts. And it has exhibited little recognition of, or interest in, the problems of clan marginalization and poor governance, even though these grievances thrust Somalis into al Shabab’s hands.

To address some of these problems, under a 2013 compact between the international community and Somalia, Somalia was supposed to hit three milestones by 2016: hold presidential elections; adopt a new constitution; and form subnational states. All are important, and none is easy to do, much less do well, in the given timeframe. Yet international donors, not wanting to repeat their frequent sin of setting up conditions but still delivering aid after a Somali government fails to meet them, are loath to relax the 2016 timeline.

Pervasive insecurity makes holding national elections difficult. It also enables fraud and heightens feelings of purposeful exclusion. AMISOM has helped little when it comes to providing security for a vote. And the government has made few preparations itself. So far, there is not even a voter registry. In late May 2015, the Somali government launched a census effort (a step toward creating a voter registry). However, the census itself could lead to new conflict, particularly if the resulting counts of the Hawiye, Darod, and other clans and subclans make any one group unhappy—as is almost sure to happen. Meanwhile, the fact that the independent electoral commission is located within the presidential palace of Villa Somalia, even if for legitimate security reasons, makes it seem potentially biased and illegitimate.

But there is little alternative to holding a national election. Many Somalis want to see a change in government; and international donors are also increasingly frustrated with the current one. Perhaps the president could again be appointed by members of parliament, with all the legitimacy limits such a process brings. Ultimately, though, a vote and the creation of real political parties is important. It is the only way to realign Somali politics away from narrow clan parochialism and individual patronage networks and toward broader national representation and coalitions. But few Somali powerbrokers have an interest in allowing their formation; even under the best of circumstances, they will not materialize by the 2016 election.

It is also possible that the international community will agree to postpone the elections. It did so in Puntland, it now has to live with it in Somaliland; and it may do so again at the national level. Even if national elections do not take place, it is worth considering whether some subnational elections (such as for the mayor of Mogadishu) could be held to facilitate greater accountability.

The next task is revising the constitution in a way that increases inclusiveness. Donors do not want the redrafting process to drag on for years, as it has in Nepal for over a decade. Somalis are already disappointed with initial drafts, though: Quotas for women have disappeared from the constitution, and progressives have little faith that the current language—women should have a “meaningful representation” in all elected and appointed positions—will achieve progress. Moreover, the constitution drafters are still to tackle some of the most politically contentious issues, including how power (including arms, taxes, and other resources) will be distributed between the center and the newly forming states.

But the fact that Mogadishu has accepted federalism and power decentralization is perhaps the greatest political accomplishment in years. Competition over who controls Mogadishu and crucial resources has, for years, been a major source of conflict and corruption. Few outside of the capital, including Hawiye clans who dominate business there, want to be ruled by it.

However, there is as yet little agreement about the relative balance of power between the center and subnational states, including whether they will be allowed to retain their militia forces as some sort of paramilitary police. In the Jubaland State, Madobe, whose self-declared presidency was accepted by Mogadishu on an interim basis in 2013 for two years, has so far shown no inclination to give up control of any of his forces. In the Southwest State that has also been formed, local state officials decry the absence, incompetence, and untrustworthiness of national forces and clamor for their own armed services.

In both Jubaland and Southwest States, the state formation process was unable to avoid fighting between warlord and clan forces over which areas would be included in which state and under whose control. In Jubaland, the process ended with Madobe’s victory over the forces of Barre Hirale’s (who are still mostly hiding in the bush). In the Southwest State, the two local rivals created a coalition government, with over 60 ministers and plenty of built-in political dysfunction, nepotism, and paralysis. State formation still needs to be completed in other areas, such as the Shabelle. In April 2015, a state-formation conference was launched for the Central Regions State. Some representatives continue to question whether six states are enough and others are debating which state their territory should belong to.

How to generate revenues is another major challenge in the federalization process. Neither the state governments nor the national one trusts the other to share revenues: The states do not want to give up land taxes to the federal state; but the federal government strongly dislikes the idea of having to rely only on the tax revenues from fisheries and maritime routes. And the promise of potentially huge mineral resources under the Somali sand only makes the federal versus state competition more intense.

How control is devolved matters a lot. The biggest danger is that the exclusionary politics over spoils and war rents that have dominated Mogadishu for so long will be replicated at the local level. And given how the state formation processes have been going, there are reasons to fear that the clientalistic patronage networks that systematically discriminate against rivals will be reestablished at the state level. In some areas, especially in the Juba Valley, that is already underway, creating a significant number of internally displaced people and potentially allowing al Shabab to insert itself into the area on the side of the oppressed.

IT’S GOOD GOVERNANCE, STUPID

Over the past few decades, international actors have not paid enough attention to subnational governance in Somalia, and they are running that risk again. Many, including the United States, focus predominantly on the problem of al Shabab, even though al Shabab is merely the latest result of poor governance. Many of the crucial donors lack presence outside of Mogadishu, which limits their understanding of life at the regional, town, and village levels. Local peace committees of clan elders, imams, and representatives of civil society and the business community can be an important mechanism of better governance. But the international donors need to work with them, and to be aware of the politics behind the peace committees—such as, for example, of who is selected for them and who is excluded. Other international actors, such as Kenya and Ethiopia, often embrace problematic powerbrokers for the sake of their strategic and counterterrorism interests, even though these powerbrokers ultimately undermine stability.

Fundamentally, whether Somalia succeeds in breaking out of decades of conflict, famine, misery, corruption, and misgovernance depends on the Somali people. It depends on whether a sufficient constituency for better governance and less conflict eventually emerges or whether Somali businessmen and politicians continue to find the way to work around conflict or make money from it while the Somali people eke out survival amidst the harshest conditions without mobilizing for change. Since 2012, Somalia has had one of the best chances to pull off such transformation in years. It should not waste it.

This article was originally published by Foreign Affairs.

      

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda has been a very effective leader for his small Central African nation. First, he led the Rwandan Patriotic Front when it ended the 1994 genocide and brought a measure of stability to a land that had just suffered a terrible holocaust. Then as vice president until 2000, and president since then (being formally elected under the current constitution twice, in 2003 and 2010), he has helped usher in remarkable economic growth and human development. Many Western leaders have personally offered high praise for Kagame—calling him a “visionary” and among “the greatest leaders of our time”—and have marshalled considerable resources to aid in Rwanda’s post-genocide development.

But his leadership has not been without controversy. There have been some excesses and allegations of abuses of political opponents during the Kagame years. And his abuses of power have arguably increased in recent years—suggesting that, whatever his past accomplishments, his real motives for wanting to stay in office may have less to do with a call to service and more with his increasingly autocratic tendencies.

On balance, though, he has been an effective leader who has saved countless lives. Does that legacy justify his seeking what would be a third seven-year term in the nation’s 2017 presidential elections? Rwandan voters choose today whether to approve a constitutional amendment—already passed by the Senate—that would allow President Kagame another stint in power.

Murky waters 

Kagame has been for his nation arguably what Franklin D. Roosevelt was for our own, given the nature of the emergencies facing Rwanda that led to his ascent to power. And we elected FDR four times. To be sure, after the fact, we thought better of it and decided never to allow that again. But we did it. George Washington chose not to run for a third term, but he was blessed with a legion of founding fathers of remarkable ability all around him, and was succeeded by Adams and Jefferson. Lincoln never had the chance to consider a third term—and maybe we would have been better off in the day if he could have served for many years. 

I am not comparing Kagame with Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt to assert that he belongs in their league. But to dramatize the issue, suppose that he is just as important to his nation as those three gentlemen have been to ours. Would that justify another term? Putting the question this way muddies the waters, but I think it is the only fair way to address the issue. 

More often than not, of course, two terms is more than a given leader deserves. Witness President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, or Pierre Nkurunziza in Burundi who just garnered a third term amidst much violence, or Joseph Kabila next door in the Democratic Republic of Congo who is due to step down next year. Indeed, Kabila may or may not do so—and it would be unambiguously bad for his country and American interests if he stayed past that date. All the more reason that, for consistency, we should want Kagame to step down—otherwise leaders like Kabila could use his behavior to excuse and justify their own attempts to hold onto power indefinitely. 

But is it really so simple in his case, and is it really such an easy call? Another tough case is President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, who has brought a degree of peace and development to his nation after the Amin and Obote periods—but who is now in his sixth term. Perhaps once in a blue moon, a nation can benefit from multiple terms in office for a particularly gifted leader at a particularly fraught and important period in a country’s history.

Mr. Kagame: Prove us wrong 

Ultimately, institution building and the establishment of solid democratic procedures are the only sure guarantor of long-term national stability. Kagame is only 58, but he will not live forever. At some point, Rwanda really will need a succession strategy. 

So I hope Kagame chooses not to run again. But if he does run, we need to pressure him to justify it in terms of the legacy he is helping to create so that Rwanda will have future leaders and institutions that can keep the country moving forward.

Ultimately, institution building and the establishment of solid democratic procedures are the only sure guarantor of long-term national stability.

Thus, if Kagame does persuade the public to change the constitution and does win a third elected term, we should cut aid (though not impose stronger measures like trade sanctions) to show our disapproval. That is, we should cut aid unless he uses the third term—which must certainly be his last—to show his countrymen and the world that in fact his rule is about improving his country, not turning it into another fiefdom run by an African strongman. 

For us, taking this approach will necessitate creating a method for evaluating whether Rwanda’s institutions gradually move closer to true democracy in the years ahead so that, whatever might happen with a third term, a fourth term becomes entirely unjustifiable. Presidents for life are bad for their countries while they are alive, and they are dangerous for their countries when they die. Kagame needs to understand this basic fact before he becomes the next world leader who starts out a noble man and then allows power to corrupt him.

More than two decades after the genocide, Rwanda is ready for a more vigorous democratic process—and any responsible leader should be building up the institutions to prepare for that eventuality. Stronger political parties that do not have exclusive ties to just one ethnic group, clear laws constraining and regulating the nature of political competition so that it is inclusive and nonviolent, strong courts—these are the essence of an established democracy, and Rwanda needs them.

       

What if I told you I’d found a surefire way to decrease community involvement in our local schools while at the same time increasing the costs of providing education for taxpayers? Probably not a political winner, eh? And yet, for well over 100 years we’ve adopted such an approach to governing America’s public schools.

I’m talking of course, about the widespread and increasingly questionable practice of local school district governments holding their school board elections “off-cycle” so that they are contested apart from regular national elections.

Just how significant and widespread are “off-cycle” school board elections? And what are the consequences of using off-cycle elections for the tone and direction of education policy? UC Berkeley Political Scientist Sarah Anzia recently penned a terrific book examining the causes and consequences of off-cycle elections in American politics in which she finds that 90 percent of states hold at least some municipal races apart from major national elections and three quarters of states do so for school board elections. Data from the National School Boards Association seem to confirm Anzia’s descriptive account on the prevalence of these elections.

By exploiting the occasional episode in which a change in state law forced localities to move their elections “on cycle,” Anzia is able to provide some pretty rigorous causal evidence that off-cycle elections decrease voter turnout and equip organized interests (e.g. teachers unions) to obtain more favorable policy outcomes. Anzia’s findings mesh nicely with other work done by University of Pennsylvania Political Scientist, Marc Meredith, who found that when school boards are given the authority to choose election dates for raising revenue (e.g. bond elections) boards will “manipulate” the timing of elections in predictable ways to ensure an electorate that is most favorable to increased school spending.

"While most citizens are tuned into the presidential primary contests this year, the important reality is that thousands of school board members will be 'elected' by tiny and unrepresentative electorates prior to next November’s general election."

While most citizens are tuned into the presidential primary contests this year, the important reality is that thousands of school board members will be “elected” by tiny and unrepresentative electorates prior to next November’s general election. This isn’t an accident or an oversight. The helpless position of today’s “education voter” is a predictable consequence of Progressive era reforms that sought to “take politics out of education.” As Columbia Professor, Jeffrey Henig, explains in his insightful and wide-ranging book, The End of Exceptionalism in American Education, the widespread use of single-purpose governments that are insulated from the electorate has been a hallmark of American school governance that is only recently beginning to come undone.

Advocates of off-cycle elections sometimes contend that holding school elections apart from major federal elections helps foster a more informed electorate. But shouldn’t the onus be on those who defend off-cycle elections to demonstrate better outcomes in districts that cling to a policy that often results in higher costs to taxpayers and diminishes small-d democracy. Of course it’s fair and important to ask, “How much democracy is good for our schools?” However, there are at least three reasons to be skeptical that the benefits of using “off-cycle” elections outweigh the costs:

First, I’m unaware of any scholarly evidence that the voters who participate in off-cycle elections are significantly more informed than the electorates participating in on-cycle elections. More importantly, I am not aware of any scholarly research that demonstrates a linkage between off-cycle elections and better student achievement outcomes. To the contrary, my friend and collaborator Arnie Shober (Lawrence University) and I found a strong association between a district’s relative academic performance and the use of on-cycle elections in a 2014 analysis that we undertook for the Fordham Institute. Although that report could not establish any causal relationship between on-cycle elections and better student achievement (clearly we could not randomly assign on-cycle elections), the fact that we found a positive correlation between on-cycle school board elections and a district’s academic performance arguably puts the ball back in the court of those who would prefer diminished citizen participation and higher fiscal costs.

Second, on the subject of higher costs, consider the takeaway from a recent piece in Governing Magazine that quotes Rice University Political Scientist and local elections expert, Melissa Marschall.  It paraphrases Marschall, saying “There's no doubt about it. Holding concurrent elections is bound to increase turnout…Holding elections less frequently should save them [local governments] money.” In short, even if some benefits (a marginally more informed electorate?) could in theory be demonstrated, one would also need to account for known costs: lower citizen participation and more frequent elections that school districts cannot piggyback onto national or statewide elections.

Third and finally, as Eitan Hersh explains in a hard-hitting recent post on FiveThirtyEight, there’s more than a tinge of hypocrisy when it comes to those who defend off-cycle elections. Ironically, while the Democratic Party and organized labor often advocate for policies that enhance workplace democracy and reduce barriers to voter participation (i.e., opposing voter ID laws, supporting same day registration and vote by mail), these two groups have, according to Hersh, led the charge to retain off-cycle school board elections that all but assure lower and more unrepresentative turnout.  

Admittedly, there’s no perfect approach to governing American K-12 education. And, governance “reform” is hardly a panacea for improving our schools. Nonetheless, as Noel Epstein wisely observed in her 2004 volume, Who’s in Charge Here?, when education governance is fragmented ordinary citizens are challenged to hold policy-makers accountable because it is difficult for the public to mobilize and readily identify which political authority or authorities are responsible. The bottom line: we don’t do the electorate any additional favors by purposefully staggering school board races across multiple off-year election cycles. Consolidating the school election calendar is a small, but nonetheless sensible step in the right direction.  

       

       

Next Sunday’s first round of the Tunisian presidential election is unlikely to produce an outright winner but the country can already lay claim to the most democratic success story in the uncertain post-Arab Spring period.

Earlier this year, the Islamist-led National Constituent Assembly in Tunis produced a pluralist constitution that set the stage for a parliamentary contest on October 26 in which the incumbents lost. That simple fact of political alternation is a historic milestone: Ennahda is not the only Islamist party to lose the confidence of its initial protest-vote electorate, but it is the first to live to tell the tale.

Islamist participation in the democratic process

The birthplace of the Arab Spring offers a tantalizing third way toward Islamist participation in the democratic process: a Goldilocks outcome between Turkish majoritarianism and Egyptian militarism. Tunisia is different: it is smaller, lacks a hegemonic army, and Ennahda doesn’t have anywhere near a majority of votes.

The alluring tableau, however, conceals a fragmented elite and a scattered electorate. Twenty-seven parties declared candidates for president, although a handful have dropped out. Last month, more than 15,000 candidates running on over 1,300 party lists vied for 217 parliamentary seats. Only two-fifths of eligible adults registered to vote and less than two-thirds of them actually voted.

The main pattern to emerge from parliamentary elections is the same that has defined the country for decades: an existential battle between Islamists and anti-Islamists with a majority for neither. The Islamists lost six percentage points (32 percent) but the secularists were not exactly embraced. Taking into account non-registration and abstention, the victorious party Nidaa Tounes’s share of the legislative vote (38 percent) corresponds to roughly one out of five eligible voters.

These results accurately reflect a highly polarized society. Nidaa Tounes is led by presidential frontrunner Beji Caïd Essebsi, an 87-year-old who served under every regime since 1956 independence and who stoked voters’ fear of Ennahda’s “seventh century project” during the campaign. Ennahda’s leadership framed the election as a contest “between supporters of the revolution and supporters of the counter-revolution.” It is the only Muslim-majority country where nearly half of the population claims to never step foot in a mosque.

Do Tunisians favor “authoritarian government”?

For the first time since the 2011 revolution, polling this summer showed a majority of Tunisians favoring “authoritarian government” over an “unstable” democratic government. Also for the first time, Ennahda declined to field a presidential candidate to contain apprehensions about them. While Essebsi mostly enjoys an untainted reputation his party, Nidaa Tounes is a loose coalition including many holdovers from the previous regime.

The last time electoral democracies experienced a comparable juncture was not in 2013 Cairo or Gezi Park, but rather Rome during the tense 1970s. In 1976, the Italian Communist Party received one-third of the votes, making it the largest Communist electoral bloc west of the Iron Curtain. Frequent small-scale terrorist attacks took place against the backdrop of global tensions between NATO and Warsaw Pact members.

It is hard to remember a time when the term “socialism” provoked as much angst as “Sharia” does today, but Tunisia stands at a crossroads analogous to the old Cold War alternatives of Washington and Moscow, with Qatar and other Gulf states filling the shoes of the old “evil empire.”

Recognizing that Italy was too divided to govern alone, party leader Enrico Berlinguer proposed a historic compromise (compromesso storico) with the archenemy Christian Democrats to bridge a seemingly impassible cultural-political gap.

Ennahda party faces doubts

Today’s Ennahda party faces the same doubts as Communist leaders in postwar Europe: are they truly pluralist democrats? Do they accept power sharing? The executive director of Nidaa Tounes, Mondher Belhadj Ali, said in an interview in Tunis earlier this year that Ennahda must undergo the equivalent process of the various leftist parties in Europe during the Cold War. The party needs to renounce its “jihadist logic,” Belhadj said, in the same way that the German left distanced itself from international Marxist-Leninist creed at Bad Godesberg in 1959.^[1]

To be considered trustworthy despite its association with a revolutionary ideology, the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI) underwent key shifts. Its leadership broke with the international Comintern by supporting Italy’s NATO membership. They also refused Moscow’s order of “intransigence” through silent partnership with a Christian Democrat-led government, giving way to the “via Italiana” – an Italian path – to socialism.

Why did the PCI pursue this path at a moment of rising strength, when their share of the vote was peaking at 32 percent? Italian Communists had no doubt noticed that NATO countries were willing to forego democratic outcomes in Chile three years earlier in the name of political stability and anti-communism.

“Alternative to the Islamic State”

It is also apparent that Ennahda’s leadership has correctly interpreted the West’s silence after the arrest of Egypt’s first democratically elected president last year. The party’s agreement to omit the word “Sharia” from the constitution, its decision to ban the extremist group Ansar Echaria and its voluntary departure from political posts in 2013 have been taken as early signs of a willingness to compromise. There is no exact Islamist equivalent to Moscow and the Comintern, but Ennahda has offered itself up as “the alternative to the Islamic State.” Ennahda has also adopted an official party line not to govern alone but only in alliance with other parties. Party leader Rached Ghannouchi said he hopes to avoid “the repetition of the Egyptian bilateral polarizing model.”

Political pressure already forced Ennahda and its partners to wage not merely ideological but also actual military war on violent Islamist extremism. The martyrs of the Tunisian Revolution now include not only the two secular politicians who were assassinated in the first half of 2013 but also the 39 Tunisian soldiers who have been killed since then – including five in an attack earlier this month.

The interim government has not hesitated to combat religious enemies of the state. President Moncef Marzouki, a human rights activist, looked ashen in an interview in his office this summer: “I deeply regret it: it means killing and arresting people but I have to defend this state” – at times leading to the deaths of a dozen combatants per month, including six on election weekend.^[2]

In the years since the revolution, through a mixture of coercion and conviction, the religious affairs ministry whittled down the number of prayer spaces under the control of Salafi extremists from over 1000 in 2011 to under 100 today. This summer, the government fired an imam who refused to say prayers for a soldier who died in a raid on an Islamist cell.”^[3]

Like Berlinguer before him, Ghannouchi has made timely visits to meet with American officials and offer democratic reassurances – but to far greater effect than the Italian Communists ever managed. Washington’s reception of the PCI is captured by the chiaroscuro headshot of Berlinguer on a June 1976 cover of Time declaiming “The Red Threat.” In 2012, the magazine named Ghannouchi one of the “World’s Most Influential People,” someone who offers “a vision of a moderate, modern and inclusive political movement.”

Critics will point out that shortly after the compromesso storico, the Communist Party’s electoral base bottomed out. Left-wing terrorism did taper off but not before the Red Brigades kidnapped and executed the Communists’ main Christian Democratic interlocutor, former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, in 1978.

Compromise may lead to national unity

With counterterrorism support to resist such extremist violence on the fringes and more enthusiastic backing from Western capitals, however, a Tunisian historic compromise may yet deliver the national unity that the country needs to advance to self-confident partisan rule – and mutual faith in political alternation. The recent announcement of joint U.S.-Tunisian counter-terrorism exercises and a gift of $14 million worth of equipment and supplies are small in scale but their timing conveys a broader reassurance.

The lack of a clear political mandate may turn out to be the hidden advantage of this inaugural election season in Tunisia. The country’s political parties can now use the first full presidency and parliamentary session of a democratic Tunisia to blaze a third way between military rule and majoritarian Islamist democracy.

Just as Italian communism was a different animal than the Soviet Communist Party, Tunisian exceptionalism is a real thing. The accelerated modernization period under Independence leader Habib Bourguiba after decolonization left behind the lowest illiteracy rate and lowest birthrate in the neighborhood. Its relatively peaceful democratic revolution has now passed several institutional milestones. As President Moncef Marzouki put it, “if the experiment in Islamic democracy doesn’t work here then it’s unlikely to work anywhere.”^[4]

The Italian Communist Party voted to dissolve itself almost 24 years ago, not long after the Berlin Wall fell and sealed its obsolescence. An equivalent geopolitical shift in Sunni Islam – away from the hegemony of ideologically rigid Gulf States – is as unimaginable now as was the thaw of November 1989. But a great compromise between the region’s modern nemeses – secularist and Islamist – could well dislodge the first brick.

---

[1] Jonathan Laurence interview with Mondher Belhadj Ali, May 2014, Tunis, Tunisia.
[2] Jonathan Laurence interview with Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki, May 2014, Carthage, Tunisia.
[3] Jonathan Laurence Interview with Tunisian Minister of Religious Affairs Mounir Tlili, May 2014, Tunis, Tunisia.
[4] Ibid.

       

"At the end of the day, we need to remember that Daesh is more a product of the civil wars than it is a cause of them. And the way that we’re behaving is we’re treating it as the cause.  And the problem is that in places like Syria, in Iraq, potentially in Libya, we are mounting these military campaigns to destroy Daesh and we’re not doing anything about the underlying civil wars.  And the real danger there is—we have a brilliant military and they may very well succeed in destroying Daesh—but if we haven’t dealt with the underlying civil wars, we’ll have Son of Daesh a year later." – Ken Pollack

“Part of the problem is how we want the U.S. to be more engaged and more involved and what that requires in practice. We have to be honest about a different kind of American role in the Middle East. It means committing considerable economic and political resources to this region of the world that a lot of Americans are quite frankly sick of… There is this aspect of nation-building that is in part what we have to do in the Middle East, help these countries rebuild, but we can’t do that on the cheap. We can’t do that with this relatively hands off approach.” – Shadi Hamid

In this episode of “Intersections,” Kenneth Pollack, senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and Shadi Hamid, senior fellow in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World and author of "Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World," discuss the current state of upheaval in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, and the political durability of Islamist movements in the region. They also explain their ideas on how and why the United States should change its approach to the Middle East and areas of potential improvement for U.S. foreign policy in the region. 

Show Notes

Fight or flight: America’s choice in the Middle East

Security and public order

Islamists on Islamism today

Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East

Ending the Middle East’s civil wars

A Rage for Order: The Middle East in turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS

Building a better Syrian opposition army: How and why

With thanks to audio engineer and producer Zack Kulzer, Mark Hoelscher, Carisa Nietsche, Sara Abdel-Rahim, Eric Abalahin, Fred Dews and Richard Fawal.

Subscribe to the Intersections on iTunes, and send feedback email to intersections@brookings.edu.

       

       

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Cutting-edge technology has led to medical breakthroughs, the information age, and space exploration, among many other innovations. The growing ubiquity of advanced technology, however, means that almost anyone can harness its power to threaten national, international, and individual security. In their new book, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones—Confronting a New Age of Threat (Basic Books, 2015), Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum explore the potential dangers of modern technology when acquired by hostile groups or individuals.

On March 11, Governance Studies at Brookings hosted a book event to discuss the new threats to national security and the developing framework for confronting the technology-enabled threats of the 21^st century. In order to manage the challenges and risks associated with advanced technology, governments, organizations, and citizens must reconsider the intersection of security, privacy, and liberty. What does this mean for domestic and international surveillance? How will the government protect its citizens in an age of technology proliferation?

After the program, panelists will take audience questions.

Audio

• Confronting national security threats in the technology age

Transcript

• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20150311_national_security_technology_transcript

      

An American drone strike that killed leader of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansour may seem like a fillip for the United States’ ally, the embattled government of Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani. But as Vanda Felbab-Brown writes in a new op-ed for The New York Times, it is unlikely to improve Kabul’s immediate national security problems—and may create more difficulties than it solves.

The White House has argued that because Mansour became opposed to peace talks with the Afghan government, removing him became necessary to facilitate new talks. Yet, as Vanda writes in the op-ed, “the notion that the United States can drone-strike its way through the leadership of the Afghan Taliban until it finds an acceptable interlocutor seems optimistic, at best.”

[T]he notion that the United States can drone-strike its way through the leadership of the Afghan Taliban until it finds an acceptable interlocutor seems optimistic, at best.

Mullah Mansour's death does not inevitably translate into substantial weakening of the Taliban's operational capacity or a reprieve from what is shaping up to be a bloody summer in Afghanistan. Any fragmentation of the Taliban to come does not ipso facto imply stronger Afghan security forces or a reduction of violent conflict. Even if Mansour's demise eventually turns out to be an inflection point in the conflict and the Taliban does seriously fragment, such an outcome may only add complexity to the conflict. A lot of other factors, including crucially Afghan politics, influence the capacity of the Afghan security forces and their battlefield performance.

Nor will Mansour’s death motivate the Taliban to start negotiating. That did not happen when it was revealed last July’s the group’s previous leader and founder, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had died in 2013. To the contrary, the Taliban’s subsequent military push has been its strongest in a decade—with its most violent faction, the Haqqani network, striking the heart of Kabul. Mansour had empowered the violent Haqqanis following Omar’s death as a means to reconsolidate the Taliban, and their continued presence portends future violence. Mansour's successor, Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban’s former minister of justice who loved to issue execution orders, is unlikely to be in a position to negotiate (if he even wants to) for a considerable time as he seeks to gain control and create legitimacy within the movement.

The United States has sent a strong signal to Pakistan, which continues to deny the presence of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network within its borders. Motivated by a fear of provoking the groups against itself, Pakistan continues to show no willingness to take them on, despite the conditions on U.S. aid.

Disrupting the group’s leadership by drone-strike decapitation is tempting militarily. But it can be too blunt an instrument, since negotiations and reconciliation ultimately depend on political processes. In decapitation targeting, the U.S. leadership must think critically about whether the likely successor will be better or worse for the counterinsurgency endgame.

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

On December 12, 2015, 195 countries adopted the Paris Agreement, the most ambitious climate change pact to date. The document lays out a plan to curb greenhouse gas emissions, among other climate-related initiatives. Participating countries must now find ways to translate those ambitions into policy, and answer important questions about financing, transparency and accountability, national implementation, and accelerated emissions reduction goals, to name but a few. But one issue looms large: coal.

Coal-fired electricity is responsible for producing 40 percent of the world’s power and about 70 percent of its steel. The coal industry employs millions worldwide and provides billions of people with electricity. Analysts estimate that the world has hundreds of years of coal reserves in the ground, at current consumption levels. Its abundance, low price, and global availability make it a difficult fuel source to give up. But despite coal’s advantages, it poses significant environmental and health risks. Ten percent of coal consists of ash, which contains radioactive and toxic elements. It is responsible for over $50 billion in medical costs annually in the European Union alone. The environmental consequences of coal use, such as water contamination and habitat destruction, are common. Burning coal adds millions of tons of dangerous particulates and greenhouse gases, including carbon, to the atmosphere.

States and societies around the world rely on coal, even though many of its dangers have been known for decades. If the Paris Agreement is to succeed, global leaders must address the reasons why many countries—particularly in the developing world—still rely on coal. Better yet, they must find new ways to provide coal-reliant countries with affordable, alternative energy, and invest in new technologies that could help mitigate coal’s negative consequences.

COAL ACROSS THE WORLD

Globally, coal production and consumption has risen almost continuously for more than 200 years. The International Energy Agency has estimated that the world burned approximately 7,876 million tons of coal in 2013, adding over 14.8 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere. But global coal statistics do not tell us much about markets and trends. In fact, coal usage varies enormously around the world, with some regions transitioning away from the resource as others have increasingly embraced it.

For example, stringent environmental, health, and safety policies in the United States have put increasing pressure on the coal industry. Well-funded environmental groups have succeeded in closing coal-fired power plants, and many states on the country’s west coast and in its northeast have aimed to create a coal-free power grid. Yet market forces have turned out to be the nail in U.S. coal’s coffin. The rise of natural gas in the United States has gave the country’s electricity producers an incentive to shift away from coal. In fact, U.S. coal consumption declined from a billion tons in 2008, to roughly 850 million tons by 2013. This year, analysts suggest that coal will fuel only 32 percent of all U.S. electricity, and natural gas will become the country’s leading electricity source for the first time. As a result of low prices, low returns, and political controversy, investors have shied away from coal, which has caused major coal companies to struggle to stay afloat. Of all announced new electricity generation capacity in the United States, not a single megawatt is coal-fired. Although change is happening, it will likely be decades before coal is no longer an important fuel source in the U.S. economy. Canada’s coal sector faces similar pressures: weak demand from Asia, public opposition to the construction of new export facilities, domestic environmental legislation, and the shale boom have all taken their toll.

In Europe, stringent air quality controls and climate change regulations have cut the use of coal dramatically in Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. But the EU emissions trading scheme, which relies on carbon offsets and carbon dioxide caps, has proven disappointing. In fact, most European countries still lack an economically competitive and readily available alternative to coal. Plus, the coal industry still has political power in capitals like Berlin and Warsaw, which lowers the European common denominator for energy policy, as well as its policies that fight climate change.

Photo courtesy of REUTERS/James Regan/File Photo. Coal is stockpiled at the Blair Athol mine in the Bowen Basin coalfield near the town of Moranbah, Australia, June 1, 2012.

In Asia, both Japan and South Korea are set to expand their use of coal despite signing the Paris Agreement. After the Fukushima disaster, Japan has implemented ambitious renewables and energy efficiency policies, but those cannot take the place of its nuclear energy production on their own. These countries are entirely import dependent, which makes natural gas prices high. This, in turn, makes natural gas a less likely fuel source as the countries transition to greener electricity. In this context, high-efficiency coal plants appear to be a viable alternative, especially as nuclear power remains highly controversial.

And outside of advanced economies, coal often plays the role it once played in Europe and North America. For over a decade, China was the main engine of global coal consumption, driving booms in coal mining and shipping. China’s domestic coal production skyrocketed, and other countries, such as Australia, experienced coal booms to keep pace with Chinese demand. Although China produced and consumed almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined in 2014, it seems that the country’s consumption has peaked. But China will still rely heavily on coal-fired electricity for decades. The country remains a key player in steel production, and millions of its citizens continue to work in the mining industry, despite recent layoffs.

South Asian countries continue to invest heavily in new coal-fired electricity plants and industrial projects. India may appreciate the risks of climate change, but its chief concern is delivering low-cost power to 350 million of its citizens who lack electricity. Coal is set to play a prominent role in meeting such goals. Countries like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam have followed suit as they search for low-cost electricity to power their countries.

In short, coal remains a big player in the global fuel mix, even as it faces tough challenges from stringent environmental regulations, competition from other fuel sources, and a lack of new investments.

Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Sheng Li/Files. A labourer carries honeycomb briquettes at a coal processing factory in Shenyang, Liaoning province in this December 2, 2009 file photo.

WHITHER COAL?

Different strategies apply in different parts of the world when it comes to eradicating coal, despite the global agreement in Paris. Just as there is not a global energy grid, there is also no single, global transition to lower-carbon energy. Although some countries are transitioning away from coal, others continue to transition toward it.

Second, pragmatism and persistence—rather than ideological purity—remain key values as countries transition towards low-carbon economies. Natural gas provides North America with a backup fuel as it transitions to green energy. Without major bulk terminals on the west coast, western U.S. coal producers will not find new markets for their products overseas. And in Europe, policymakers will have to make good on long-promised and long-delayed changes to energy policy and infrastructure. If Germany and other EU states are to achieve promised clean energy transitions, coal production must be scaled back substantially across the continent. European leaders must also build an “Energy Union” that will accelerate the flow of cross-border electricity, if they are to achieve the Paris Accord’s climate change goals. Europe must also reform its existing carbon pricing mechanisms. And across China, Europe, and North America, workers will have to be re-educated for new job opportunities as the coal market dries up.

But for now, coal still keeps the light on around the world. It powers new, high-tech economies, as well as a huge share of traditional manufacturing. If hundreds of millions of Africans and Asians are to gain access to electricity, new coal-fired power plants will have to come online in the years ahead. As coal continues to play a prominent role in industrial processes like steel and cement making, technological investments are required to limit its consequences.

To tackle these challenges, coal advocates, as well as some climate experts, suggest that more countries must invest in carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) research. But such investments are lagging, and the world would require several dozen CCS projects in order to make the technology commercially viable in the long term.

If the Paris Accord is to succeed, the earth’s atmosphere cannot remain a free dump for billions of tons of pollution every year. In fact, virtually all greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced. Countries can impose taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, and regulation to make this happen. Governments will have to design unique strategies that are custom fit to their countries, and, in some cases, find opportunities with their neighbors as well. For example, some private and public institutions have chosen to stop financing coal-fired projects, and the Obama administration has indicated it will not give out new leases for coal mining on federal land. Others will choose to build more coal-fired plants until the alternatives are cheaper, or until someone pays them not to.

Globally, coal may indeed be at the beginning of the end. But the energy transition is not strictly global. It is also national, regional, and local. Coal remains economically competitive—attractive even—in many parts of the world. Some countries will wage wars on coal, which will be as much economic and financial as they are political. But some countries, like India, will host coal booms regardless of the consequences. After Paris, there is no point in ignoring coal. It will be powering the world—and the world’s debates—for decades to come.

This piece was originally published by Foreign Affairs.

       

When the Volkswagen emissions control scandal broke into the headlines in September, I wrote here how I felt like my lifelong love affair with VW had been violated. As an environmentalist, owning a Jetta that zipped along for 42 miles on a gallon of diesel was the best of both worlds. And it was a lie. My wife, Holly Flood, said she felt like she’d been “duped,” and since then she’s vowed never to buy another VW.

I’m not so sure. But I was pleased this week to see the agreed terms for the nearly half million of us who own the smaller diesel engine cars in the U.S. This was the largest car settlement in U.S. history.

What I like is the combination of individual and collective compensation for this crime.

Making it right with the customers

On the individual side, if this deal is approved by the judge in early October, my family will get our 2009 Jetta TDI sedan fixed for free (if the Environmental Protection Agency approves the fix), and we’ll get a check for $5,100. Holly says that’s perfect timing for a down payment on a new car (which will not be a VW).

I’m pushing for a plug-in electric hybrid, which we can charge with renewable energy we get off the grid from our local provider, People’s Power & Light. In our case, for every electron we use, they pay to have one electron put in from wind power somewhere right here in New England. Hopefully we’ll have variable pricing of electricity by then, allowing us to charge the car when the juice is cheapest, like when the wind blows at night but few people are using much electricity.

The unknown for us is whether the VW fix will noticeably harm the performance of the car. I’m guessing it will, perhaps in its remarkable torque, in its gas mileage, or both. But at this point the car has tons of my wife’s commuting miles on it, so we’re hanging on to it as the in-town backup car. Under the settlement we could get an extra $7k and give up the car entirely. That may be tempting, as it’s at that point where it’s getting substantially more expensive to maintain, and the Kelley Blue Book value is around $6k. They apparently aren’t lowballing us.

Making it right with the public

The collective part of this agreement is actually more interesting.

VW agreed to pay $4.7 billion  into environmental programs, which in my estimation will eliminate more harm than they created. One estimate guessed that scores of premature deaths occurred in the U.S. from VW’s “defeat devices” that shut off emissions controls when they were not being tested. Most of the deaths were probably in California, where there were many more sales of diesels than elsewhere in the country. (Of course in Europe the concentration of diesels is much greater and the Guardian put the number of deaths at thousands in the U.K. alone.) 

One part of this fund will go to replace diesel buses with electric ones. This will measurably improve air quality in inner cities, the precise places where extra sooty VWs were causing ill health and premature deaths with their NOx emissions. Another part will go to install electric vehicle charging stations in California. This helps overcome the “chicken and egg” problem of people not being willing to switch to electric vehicles for fear of running out of juice. The settlement says that “Volkswagen must spend $2 billion to promote non-polluting cars (“zero emissions vehicles” or “ZEV”), over and above any amount Volkswagen previously planned to spend on such technology.” That counterfactual will probably be impossible to prove, but the idea here is fairness.

A case of how America deals with environmentally criminal corporations

Sociologically, this is a fascinating case, because it reveals how our society resolves scandals that killed people through knowing contamination of the environment. As Deputy U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates harshly put it, "By duping regulators, Volkswagen turned nearly half a million American drivers into unwitting accomplices in an unprecedented assault on our environment." There are individuals inside this company who deserve criminal prosecution, but apparently most of the thousands of other employees did not know what was going on.

The corporate response has been interesting, and seems to vary sharply from how most U.S. auto firms have dealt with similar lawsuits and scandals in the past. VW did not drag out the battle, but set aside $16 billion immediately as a loss, and then settled rather generously with us. (This spring they had already given us a $500 gift card and $500 in repairs in what was essentially hush money.)

VW’s response to this crisis was creative, forward-looking, and ultimately pro-social. Just a week or so ago they announced that their new business model was to be in electrics: They announced they’d be rolling out 31 electric vehicles in the coming years. This is a remarkable turn for a company that pushed diesels for decades as the solution to climate change. This is what it looks like when a massive corporation whose reputation was built on trust and belief in the integrity of a brand seeks to battle its way back into a changing market.

Spending billions on charging stations and replacing diesel buses may make immediate sense—can we say if this is helping avoid premature deaths or it is merely crass self-interest? Does it matter? 

Of course it does. But my first impression of what VW did this week was of a fair deal that was not just lining my pocket. It was helping us get off fossil fuels as a society and benefiting human health and the environment in a substantial way. And by rebuilding a major employer in Germany, the U.S., and around the world into one that might be a part of the solution to climate change, this is a significant and fairly brilliant business move to position the company for the next half century.

Or am I merely a sucker for my old flame?

       

       

       

       

"At the end of the day, we need to remember that Daesh is more a product of the civil wars than it is a cause of them. And the way that we’re behaving is we’re treating it as the cause.  And the problem is that in places like Syria, in Iraq, potentially in Libya, we are mounting these military campaigns to destroy Daesh and we’re not doing anything about the underlying civil wars.  And the real danger there is—we have a brilliant military and they may very well succeed in destroying Daesh—but if we haven’t dealt with the underlying civil wars, we’ll have Son of Daesh a year later." – Ken Pollack

“Part of the problem is how we want the U.S. to be more engaged and more involved and what that requires in practice. We have to be honest about a different kind of American role in the Middle East. It means committing considerable economic and political resources to this region of the world that a lot of Americans are quite frankly sick of… There is this aspect of nation-building that is in part what we have to do in the Middle East, help these countries rebuild, but we can’t do that on the cheap. We can’t do that with this relatively hands off approach.” – Shadi Hamid

In this episode of “Intersections,” Kenneth Pollack, senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and Shadi Hamid, senior fellow in the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World and author of "Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World," discuss the current state of upheaval in the Middle East, the Arab Spring, and the political durability of Islamist movements in the region. They also explain their ideas on how and why the United States should change its approach to the Middle East and areas of potential improvement for U.S. foreign policy in the region. 

Show Notes

Fight or flight: America’s choice in the Middle East

Security and public order

Islamists on Islamism today

Temptations of Power: Islamists & Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East

Ending the Middle East’s civil wars

A Rage for Order: The Middle East in turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS

Building a better Syrian opposition army: How and why

With thanks to audio engineer and producer Zack Kulzer, Mark Hoelscher, Carisa Nietsche, Sara Abdel-Rahim, Eric Abalahin, Fred Dews and Richard Fawal.

Subscribe to the Intersections on iTunes, and send feedback email to intersections@brookings.edu.

         

Last night, retired lieutenant general Michael Flynn addressed the Republican convention as a headline speaker on the subject of national security. One of Donald Trump’s closest advisors—so much so that he was considered for vice president—Flynn repeated many of the themes found in his new book, The Field of Fight, How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, which he coauthored with Michael Ledeen. (The book is published by St. Martin’s, which also published mine.)

Written in Flynn’s voice, the book advances two related arguments: First, the U.S. government does not know enough about its enemies because it does not collect enough intelligence, and it refuses to take ideological motivations seriously. Second, our enemies are collaborating in an “international alliance of evil countries and movements that is working to destroy” the United States despite their ideological differences.

Readers will immediately notice a tension between the two ideas. “On the surface,” Flynn admits, “it seems incoherent.” He asks: 

“How can a Communist regime like North Korea embrace a radical Islamist regime like Iran? What about Russia’s Vladimir Putin? He is certainly no jihadi; indeed, Russia has a good deal to fear from radical Islamist groups.” 

Flynn spends much of the book resolving the contradiction and proving that America’s enemies—North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, and ISIS—are in fact working in concert.

No one who has read classified intelligence or studied international relations will balk at the idea that unlikely friendships are formed against a common enemy. As Flynn observes, the revolutionary Shiite government in Tehran cooperates with nationalist Russia and communist North Korea; it has also turned a blind eye (at the very least) to al-Qaida’s Sunni operatives in Iran and used them bargaining chips when negotiating with Osama bin Laden and the United States. 

Flynn argues that this is more than “an alliance of convenience.” Rather, the United States’ enemies share “a contempt for democracy and an agreement—by all the members of the enemy alliance—that dictatorship is a superior way to run a country, an empire, or a caliphate.” Their shared goals of maximizing dictatorship and minimizing U.S. interference override their substantial ideological differences. Consequently, the U.S. government must work to destroy the alliance by “removing the sickening chokehold of tyranny, dictatorships, and Radical Islamist regimes.” Its failure to do so over the past decades gravely imperils the United States, he contends.

The book thus offers two very different views of how to exercise American power abroad: spread democracies or stand with friendly strongmen...[P]erhaps it mirrors the confusion in the Republican establishment over the direction of conservative foreign policy.

Some of Flynn’s evidence for the alliance diverts into the conspiratorial—I’ve seen nothing credible to back up his assertion that the Iranians were behind the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Sunni apocalypticists. And there’s an important difference between the territorially-bounded ambitions of Iran, Russia, and North Korea, on the one hand, and ISIS’s desire to conquer the world on the other; the former makes alliances of convenience easier than the latter. Still, Flynn would basically be a neocon if he stuck with his core argument: tyrannies of all stripes are arrayed against the United States so the United States should destroy them.

But some tyrannies are less worthy of destruction than others. In fact, Flynn argues there’s a category of despot that should be excluded from his principle, the “friendly tyrants” like President Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi in Egypt and former president Zine Ben Ali in Tunisia. Saddam Hussein should not have been toppled, Flynn argues, and even Russia could become an “ideal partner for fighting Radical Islam” if only it would come to its senses about the threat of “Radical Islam.” Taken alone, these arguments would make Flynn realist, not a neocon. 

The book thus offers two very different views of how to exercise American power abroad: spread democracies or stand with friendly strongmen. Neither is a sure path to security. Spreading democracy through the wrong means can bring to power regimes that are even more hostile and authoritarian; standing with strongmen risks the same. Absent some principle higher than just democracy or security for their own sakes, the reader is unable to decide between Flynn’s contradictory perspectives and judge when their benefits are worth the risks. 

It’s strange to find a book about strategy so at odds with itself. Perhaps the dissonance is due to the co-authors’ divergent views (Ledeen is a neocon and Flynn is comfortable dining with Putin.) Or perhaps it mirrors the confusion in the Republican establishment over the direction of conservative foreign policy. Whatever the case, the muddled argument offered in The Field of Fight demonstrates how hard it is to overcome ideological differences to ally against a common foe, regardless of whether that alliance is one of convenience or conviction. 

         

France has been struck by an unprecedented three terror attacks in the last 18 months. In what’s called Operation Sentinelle, 13,000 French military personnel now patrol streets and protect key sites across the country, assisting police and other security agencies. “The fact that the armed forces are visible,” said French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian at a Brookings event on July 20, “help to reassure the French people that they are safe both at home and abroad.”

Do the challenges facing France today mean that it should reduce its engagement overseas, focusing instead on security at home? Le Drian doesn’t think so, and I agree. In a new book titled "Who is the Enemy?," he particularly emphasizes the multifaceted ISIS threat. As he said at Brookings: 

"Every war [has] two enemies…[Today’s] war [with ISIS] also sets in place two concepts of the “enemy” that are radically different: From a strategic point of view, we are dealing with a proto-state; at the heart of this entity, there is a terrorist army." 

It only further complicates matters, of course, that France faces ISIS threats on several fronts: in Syria and Iraq, on the one hand, and also on its own territory. This, Le Drian stressed, means “we must seek coherence in our military action.” It also helps explain why France remains one of the most active countries in the fight against the so-called Islamic State, as well as other extremist groups in the Middle East and in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2013 and 2014, France intervened in Mali in order to prevent jihadi groups from taking over the country. The French military also has a presence in Djibouti, Lebanon, Côte d’Ivoire, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Senegal, as well as in the Pacific (in French Polynesia and New Caledonia)—not to mention Syria, where France uses the Mediterranean Sea-based Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier to strike ISIS targets. 

France is not a warmongering country—rather, it is responding to the fact that overseas threats come to it. Although it remains unclear to what extent the Nice attacker had connections with foreign terrorist networks, it has been established that the November 2015 Paris attacks were planned and orchestrated from Syria. This, among other considerations, has prompted France to engage further in Iraq and Syria. The rationale, as Minister Le Drian explained, is: 

“[T]rading our peace by reducing our military involvement doesn’t make sense. The more we let ISIS consolidate its presence on the Middle East, the more it will gather resources, attract fighters, and plan more attacks against us.” 

Team player

French policy isn’t just about ensuring its own security—rather, its many contributions are integrated within global efforts, including U.S.-led ones. As Le Drian said at Brookings: “I am convinced that the French-American relationship is stronger and better than ever.” France is a prominent participant of the 66-member international coalition against ISIS, and in that capacity participated in the first joint meeting of that group’s foreign and defense ministers in Washington this month. 

France remains a key member of the joint military operation Inherent Resolve in Iraq and Syria, which has damaged or destroyed over 26,0000 ISIS-related targets since August 2014. The Charles de Gaulle carrier—with 26 aircrafts on board—has been an essential part of that coalition mission. Following specific instructions from U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter and his counterpart in Paris, Minister Le Drian, French and U.S. intelligence agencies cooperate closely in intelligence-sharing. And just last week, President François Hollande announced that France will soon be supplying artillery to Iraq to support its fight against ISIS. Beyond the Iraq-Syria theater, France is cooperating with the United States and other partners in Libya, another country that is both a victim and source of extremist threats. 

The French Defense Ministry’s efforts to double-down on protecting French citizens within France, therefore, has not reduced its overseas role. Particularly now that the United Kingdom will leave the European Union, France’s military role has never been so important. France—along with Germany, which recently suggested it would raise its defense spending significantly—should continue to play a leading role as one the top defense actors in the West. 

         

ABSTRACT—

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has for many years stressed innovation, knowledge and scaling up as essential ingredients of its strategy to combat rural poverty in developing countries. This institutional review of IFAD’s approach to scaling up is the fi rst of its kind: A team of development experts were funded by a small grant from IFAD to assess IFAD’s track record in scaling up successful interventions, its operational policies and processes, instruments, resources and incentives, and to provide recommendations to management for how to turn IFAD into a scaling-up institution. Beyond IFAD, this institutional scaling up review is a pilot exercise that can serve as an example for other development institutions.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Fragile states present one of the greatest challenges to global development and poverty reduction. Despite much new learning that has emerged from within the development community in recent years, understanding of how to address fragility remains modest. There is growing recognition that donor engagement in fragile states must look beyond the confines of the traditional aid effectiveness agenda if it is to achieve its intended objectives, which include statebuilding, meeting the needs of citizens, and managing risk more effectively. Current approaches are constrained by relying heavily on small-scale interventions, are weakened by poor coordination and volatility, and struggle to promote an appropriate role for the recipient state.

Scaling up (i.e., the expansion, replication, adaption and sustaining of successful policies and programs in space and over time to reach a greater number of people) is highly relevant to fragile settings, both as an objective and as a strategic approach to development. As an objective, it reinforces the logic that the scale of the challenges in fragile states demands interventions that are commensurate in purpose and equal to the task. As a strategy, it encourages donors to identify and leverage successes, and to integrate institutional development more explicitly into projects and programs. In addition, scaling up can assist donors in addressing the priority areas of improved project design and implementation, sustainability and effective risk management.

Successful scaling up in fragile states almost certainly occurs less often than is possible and does not always involve a systematic approach. Donors should therefore look to more systematically pursue scaling up in fragile states and evaluate their performance with specific reference to this objective. This can be done by incorporating relevant elements of a scaling up framework into operational policies, from strategy development through to program design and monitoring.

Contrary to expectations, there are compelling examples of successful scaling up in fragile states. While the conditions prevailing in fragile states create serious obstacles in terms of “drivers” (the forces that push the scaling up process forward) and “spaces” (the opportunities that need to be created, or potential obstacles that need to be removed for interventions to grow), and in terms of the operational modalities of donors, these can be overcome through the careful design and delivery of programs with a clear focus on creating scaling up pathways, and through close partnership and sustained engagement of governments, communities and foreign partners.

Case study evidence suggests that the pathways taken to reach scale in fragile states demand different approaches by donors. Donors need to adopt greater selectivity in determining which areas or sectors for scaling up are justified—a strategy that has also assisted some donors in managing risk. More investment and time are required in upfront analysis and building the evidence for successful scaling up pathways. In some cases, donors require longer time horizons to achieve scale, although demand from government or beneficiaries has sometimes forced donors to move immediately to scale, allowing little or no time for piloting. Regardless of the pace of scaling up, donors that were most successful were engaged early and then remained engaged, often far beyond the replication phase of scaling up, to increase the likelihood of interventions being sustained. Other common characteristics of successful scaling up were simple project design and a focus on the institutional aspects of the scaling up pathway.

Case studies also point to the crucial role of drivers in moving the scaling up process forward in fragile states. Proven ideas and practical models have often been picked up in fragile states, contrary to the expectation that actors may be less responsive to recognizing and acting on the utility of promising results. Leaders undoubtedly have a role to play in supporting scaling up, although there are clear dangers that must be avoided, including avoiding the perception that donors are picking (political) winners by nominating leaders, and tying the survival of projects too closely to the fortunes of a leader’s political career. Incentives were found to be one of the most important drivers in fragile states, and there is a good case to be made for donors introducing new inducements, greater transparency or similar reforms to strengthen the role incentives play. Finally, and in contrast to the standard scaling up framework, community demand was found to be an important driver in many fragile states, both in demanding the expansion of small-scale projects and by facilitating the community’s own resources to support the scaling up process.

The greatest challenge to scaling up in fragile states is the limited spaces these environments provide. This is especially the case in respect to those spaces which concern aspects of governance: political, institutional and policy spaces. When working in fragile states, donors must recognize that spaces for scaling up are almost always more constrained, but look for ways to expand upon them. Some of the most successful examples of scaling up used creative approaches to build space quickly or used existing capacity to the fullest possible extent. Also relevant are the lessons of robust analysis, greater realism and cost control. The case studies confirm the importance of two additional spaces in fragile states. For example, security space often imposed horizontal obstacles to scaling up which could not realistically be overcome while ownership space served as a good indication of the perceived legitimacy of the scaling up process and the likelihood that interventions would be sustained longer term.

Case studies also affirm the importance of emphasizing robust project design and implementation, and the close linkages between the scaling up agenda and the role of risk management and sustainability in fragile states. While sustainability presented a significant problem for many of the projects and programs reviewed, a more focused approach around scaling up may assist donors in addressing sustainability concerns. This would entail adopting a longer-term perspective beyond the immediate confines of any individual project, looking for available drivers and supportive spaces, and focusing on effective implementation and consistent monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Any intervention introduced on a small scale that scores well in sustainability serves as a possible candidate for scaling up.

Similarly, many of the methods used by donors for managing risk—an emphasis on analysis, scenario planning, realism and making use of specialized aid instruments—are equally relevant for supporting scaling up in fragile countries. A persuasive argument can be made that the adoption of a more explicit scaling up approach by donors can form part of a risk management strategy in fragile states. Scaling up can enable donors to more ambitiously tackle development risks without allowing institutional and project risks to grow unchecked. Ultimately, a donor approach that combines good risk management and scaling up requires strong leadership and well-aligned incentives.

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Introduction

During 2006, the United States saw a considerable upswing in the number of new mortgage defaults and foreclosure filings. By 2007, that upswing had become a tidal wave. Today, national homeownership rates are falling, while more than a million American families have already lost their homes to foreclosure. Across the country, boarded houses are appearing on once stable blocks. Some of the hardest hit communities are in older industrial cities, particularly Midwestern cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis.

Although most media attention has focused on the role of the federal government in stemming this crisis, states have the legal powers, financial resources, and political will to mitigate its impact. Some state governments have taken action, negotiating compacts with mortgage lenders, enacting state laws regulating mortgage lending, and creating so-called “rescue funds.” Governors such as Schwarzenegger in California, Strickland in Ohio, and Patrick in Massachusetts have taken the lead on this issue. State action so far, however, has just begun to address a still unfolding, multidimensional crisis. If the issue is to be addressed successfully and at least some of its damage mitigated, better designed, comprehensive strategies are needed.

This paper describes how state government can tackle both the immediate problems caused by the wave of mortgage foreclosures and prevent the same thing from happening again. After a short overview of the crisis and its effect on America’s towns and cities, the paper outlines options available to state government, and offers ten specific action steps, representing the most appropriate and potentially effective strategies available for coping with the varying dimensions of the problem.

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Editor’s Note: The National Perspectives on Global Leadership (NPGL) project reports on public perceptions of national leaders’ performance at important international events. This fifth installation of the NPGL Soundings provides insight on the issues facing leaders at the Seoul G-20 Summit and the coverage they received in their respective national media. Read the other commentary »

The week before the Seoul G-20 Summit was one in which the main newspapers read in Washington (The New York Times, The Washington Post and Financial Times) all focused their primary attention on the “currency war,” global imbalances, the debate on quantitative easing (QE 2), the struggle over whether there would be numerate current account targets or only words, and the US-China relationship. As early as Wednesday, November 10, The Washington Post front-page headline read: “Fed move at home trails U.S. to Seoul; Backlash from Europe; Obstacles emerge for key goals at G-20 economic summit.” By Thursday, November 11, things had gotten worse. “Deep fractures hit hopes of breakthrough; governments are unlikely to agree on a strategy to tackle economic imbalances” read the Financial Times headline on Alan Beattie’s article from Seoul. Friday, November 12, The New York Times front-page headline declared: “Obama’s Economic View is Rejected on World Stage; China, Britain and Germany Challenge U.S.; Trade Talks with Seoul Fail, Too.” By Saturday, the Financial Times concluded in its lead editorial: “G-20 show how not to run the world.”

From these reports, headlines and editorials it is clear that conflicts over policy once again dwarfed the progress on other issues and the geopolitical jockeying over the currency and imbalances issues took centre stage, weakening G-20 summits rather than strengthening them. Obama was painted as losing ground, supposedly reflecting lessening U.S. influence and failing to deliver concrete results. China, Germany and Brazil were seen to beat back the U.S. initiative to quantify targets on external imbalances. Given the effort that Korean leaders had put into achieving positive results and “consolidating” G-20 summits, it was, from this optical vantage point, disappointing, to say the least.

How was the Rebalancing Issue Dealt With?

At lower levels of visibility and intensity, however, things looked a bit different and more positive. Howard Schneider and Scott Wilson in Saturday’s edition of The Washington Post (November 13) gave a more balanced view of the outcomes. Their headline read: “G-20 nations agree to agree; Pledge to heed common rules; but economic standards have yet to be set.” They discerned progress toward new terrain that went beyond the agreement among G-20 finance ministers in October at Gyeongju, which other writers missed.

“By agreeing to set economic standards, the G-20 leaders moved into uncharted waters,” they wrote. “The deal rests on the premise that countries will take steps, possibly against their own short-term interests, if their economic policies are at odds with the wider well-being of the world economy. And leaders are committing to take such steps even before there’s an agreement on what criteria would be used to evaluate their policies.”

They continued: “In most general of terms, the statement adopted by the G-20 countries says that if the eventual guidelines identify a problem, this would ‘warrant an assessment of their nature and the root causes’ and should push countries to ‘preventive and corrective actions.’”

The Schneider-Wilson rendering went beyond the words of the communiqué to an understanding of what was going on in official channels over time to push this agenda forward in real policy, rather than declarative terms. As the Saturday, November 13, Financial Times’ editorial put it, “below the headline issues, however, the G-20 grouping is not completely impotent,” listing a number of other issues on which progress was made including International Monetary Fund (IMF) reform which the Financial Times thought might actually feed back into a stronger capacity to deal with “managing the global macroeconomy.”

The Role of President Barack Obama

Without doubt, the easy, simple, big-picture message coming out of Seoul was that Obama and the United States took a drubbing. And this did not help the G-20 either. The seeming inability of the U.S. to lead the other G-20 leaders toward an agreement in Seoul on global imbalances, the criticism of U.S. monetary easing and then, on top of it all, the inability to consummate a US-Korea trade deal, made it seem as if Obama went down swinging.

But again, below the surface of the simple, one got a different picture. Obama himself did not seem shaken or isolated at the Seoul summit by the swirl of forces around him. At his press conference, he spoke clearly and convincingly of the complexity of the task of policy coordination and the time it would take to work out the policies and the politics of adjustment.

“Naturally there’s an instinct to focus on the disagreements, otherwise these summits might not be very exciting,” he said. “In each of these successive summits we’ve made real progress,” he concluded. Tom Gjeltin, from NPR news, on the Gwen Ifyl Weekly News Roundup commented Saturday evening that the G-20 summits are different and that there is a “new pattern of leadership” emerging that is not quite there yet. Obama seems more aware of that and the time it takes for new leadership and new patterns of mutual adjustment to emerge. He may have taken a short-run hit, but he seems to have the vision it takes to connect this moment to the long-run trajectory.

Reflections on the Role of South Korea

From a U.S. vantage point, Seoul was one more stop in Asia as the president moved from India to Indonesia to Korea to Japan. It stood out, perhaps, in higher profile more as the locus of the most downbeat moments in the Asia tour, because of the combination of the apparent lack of decisive progress at the G-20 along with the needless circumstance of two presidents failing to find a path forward on something they both wanted.

From a Korean vantage point, the summit itself was an event of immense importance for Korea’s emergence on the world stage as an industrial democracy that had engineered a massive social and economic transformation in the last 50 years, culminating in being the first non-G8 country to chair the G-20 summit. No one can fault Korea’s efforts to reach significant results. However, the fact is that the Seoul Summit’s achievements, which even in the rebalancing arena were more significant than they appeared to most (see Schneider and Wilson), but included substantial progress on financial regulatory reform, international institutional reform (specifically on the IMF), on development and on global financial safety nets, were seen to be less than hoped for. This was not the legacy the Koreans were looking for, unfortunately.

Conflicts among the major players on what came to be seen as the major issue all but wiped out the serious workmanlike progress in policy channels. The leaders level interactions at G-20 summits has yet to catch up to the highly significant degree of systemic institutionalization of the policy process of the G-20 among ministers of finance, presidents of central banks, G-20 deputies and Sherpas, where the policy work really goes on. On its watch, Korea moved the agenda in the policy track forward in a myriad of significant ways. It will be left to the French and French President Nicolas Sarkozy to see if they can bring the leaders into the positive-sum game arrangements that are going on in the policy channels and raise the game level of leaders to that of G-20 senior officials.

      

Editor’s Note: The National Perspectives on Global Leadership (NPGL) project reports on public perceptions of national leaders’ performance at important international events. This fifth installation of the NPGL Soundings provides insight on the issues facing leaders at the Seoul G-20 Summit and the coverage they received in their respective national media. Read the other commentary »

The fifth G-20 Summit held in Seoul seems to show signs of a gradual maturing of the process and the forum as a mechanism for communication among leaders and a means of connecting leaders and finance ministers with their national publics, judging from National Perspectives on Global Leadership (NPGL) country commentaries. These growing strengths — looking from the G-20 capitals toward the Seoul summit contrasted with looking from the summit toward the countries — seemed particularly impressive at this Seoul summit, which was characterized by the most intense policy conflicts yet at a G-20 meeting.

Policy Conflicts and the Trajectory of G-20 Summits

The responses to the first question — “Did coverage seem to threaten or enhance the viability of G-20 summits?” — seemed to indicate that, despite the conflicts over external imbalances and currency policies, these issues did not threaten the viability of the G-20 summits as much as one might have expected. Given the focus of the NPGL project on national leadership, what is interesting about this positive result is that the coverage in the media was not just of the debate itself, but the portrayal of their national leader at the summit.

With the exception of an excellent and balanced article on Saturday, November 13 in The Washington Post by Howard Schneider and Scott Wilson, the coverage in Washington and in the Financial Times would lead readers to conclude that the Seoul G-20 Summit was less successful than anticipated, and did not enhance the viability of G-20 summits as much as the Koreans hoped it would.

“Agreements did not have to be worked out,” Andrew Cooper wrote, quoting Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, “this month or next month in order to avert [a] cataclysm…I’m confident we will make progress over time.”

Olaf Corry reported from London that UK Prime Minister David Cameron was quoted in The Guardian as saying that rebalancing “is being discussed in a proper multilateral way without resort to tit-for-tat measures and selfish policies.”

U.S. President Barack Obama said in his press conference that “in each of these successive summits we’ve made real progress.”

Lan Xue and Yanbing Zhang wrote that Chinese President Hu Jintao “highlighted the importance of (the) framework (for strong, sustainable and balanced growth) and also pointed out that it should be further improved,” a far cry from a rejection of it.

“In contrast to previous summits,” Peter Draper reported from Johannesburg, “President Zuma’s interventions did receive some press coverage at home…To judge from this coverage, he seems to have played his cards reasonably well and to have been visible.”

Melisa Deciancio commented from Buenos Aires that ”Cristina Fernandez’s contribution to the G-20 summits has always been substantive…She has also called the members of the (G-20) to work together, cooperate and avoid entering into conflict in relation to the ongoing currency war between China and the U.S.”

“Both (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel and (finance minister) Schaeuble spent considerable effort to explain the positive aspects of summit agreements and praised the ‘spirit of cooperation,’” reported Thomas Fues from Germany.

In each of the cases above, the leader offered a positive interpretation of the Seoul G-20 Summit and the G-20 summit process even in the context of intense policy disputes, which constrained the practical agreements that could have been reached, especially on the global economic adjustment issues. This optimistic stance indicates a forward movement by G-20 leaders on a metric of global leadership in Seoul that the four previous NPGL “Soundings” had found to be wanting at previous summits.

In some countries, the problem continued with the press focusing on the shortcomings and failures of the Seoul G-20 Summit, including the coverage in the influential Financial Times. G-20 leaders were, however, more aggressive in pushing against the media’s interpretation of weakness and failures at the G-20, advancing an alternative narrative that focused on the gradual progress being made and stronger relationships developing with each G-20 summit experience. Leaders now need to assure that the G-20 “framework” and the “mutual assessment process” (MAP) of peer review that goes with it, are able to deliver a credible way forward for global economic adjustment by the time of the French G-20 Summit in November 2011.

Global Economic Adjustment as a Visible Theme

With regard to question two — “How was the rebalancing issue dealt with?”— the common thread running through each of the country commentaries is reflected in Olaf Corry’s comment that “explicit mention of the G-20’s formal ‘framework for strong, sustainable and balance growth’ is very sparse in UK public debate, but the themes it highlights definitely shine through.” The one exception may have been the explicit, detailed understanding of the issue conveyed by Schneider and Wilson in their Washington Post article titled “G-20 nations agree to agree; Pledge to heed common rules; but economic standards have yet to be met.” (See U.S. country commentary.)

The G-20 framework and the MAP may not have received much visibility or coverage from the media, but the intensity of the currency wars, the debate about U.S. quantitative easing (QE 2) and the differences over current account targets were all widely covered, and the message communicated to most publics was that global imbalances are a real problem for all countries and a concerted global economic adjustment is essential. The G-20 leaders will, therefore, have to do far more than simply explain the process to their publics; they need to continue to push each other and their economic officials to reach agreement on a path forward by the time of the French summit in November of 2011.

The difficulty of reaching agreement is reflected in a comment by Ryozo Hayashi of Japan who wrote, “Therefore, it sounds wise to let these countries (the U.S. and China) keep their current policy paths with a political commitment to avoid a currency war and for the G-20 to agree to develop economic indicators. It may become urgent or it may become irrelevant as the situation develops. Given the difficulty of establishing agreed economic indicators, the time element would be important.”

Leadership at Summits and Its Linkages to Domestic Political Support

What emerged more clearly at this summit than in previous G-20 summits was the degree to which the role of individual countries and their leaders (or finance ministers) in G-20 processes had domestic political valence in their home countries.

“The amount of attention devoted by the media to this summit was considerably more than previous ones,” wrote Andres Rozental, “partially because the Calderón administration will host the G-20 in 2012 and Mexico is now part of the G-20 ‘troika.’”

Thomas Fues commented that “The media also appreciatively noted that Germany had been asked to co-chair the G-20 working group on the international currency system, tasked with formulating policy proposals” for the French G-20 Summit.

In South Africa, Peter Draper also found that the press paid attention to the fact that it co-chairs the G-20 working group on development with South Korea, and “the importance of this group’s work to the future of the G-20.”

“In terms of summit diplomacy,” wrote Andrew Cooper, “Harper’s main success was in gaining the role for Canada as one of the co-chairs (with India, supported by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]) with respect to the process of working out a set of economic indicators that all members of the G-20 could use as guideposts for a stable global economy.”

This is all evidence that G-20 activities now generate positive repercussions in domestic public opinion.
Other dimensions of linkages between international committee positions assumed at G-20 summits and domestic political capital are beginning to emerge as the G-20 matures.

In South Africa, Finance Minister Gordhan’s strong criticism of U.S. QE2 in the international press seems “to have added to his growing reputation at home” commented Peter Draper.

German Finance Minister Schaeuble’s criticism of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s move as “clueless,” “forced Merkel to reiterate unswerving support of her key official” at the Seoul summit, Thomas Fues noted.

Cristina Fernandez has consistently and adroitly used her substantive policy positions at G-20 summits to buttress her position at home. Argentina is head of the G77, so Argentine support for development increases its status as a leader of the South and her domestic prestige. Argentine discontent with the IMF has been legend since the 1990s; support of President Fernandez for the G-20 framework and MAP process arises as an alternative to the IMF article IV exercise, which most Argentines are against, reported Melisa Deciancio.

Conclusion

Despite media attention being riveted on the showdown between the United States, Germany and China on currency manipulation and external imbalances at the Seoul G-20 Summit, leaders defended the G-20 processes for working through these issues over time, rather than emphasizing the failure to reach agreement at Seoul. The leaders and their finance ministers found that taking an aggressive stance on key issues paid dividends in terms of their domestic political support.

Explicit efforts by leaders to link international policies to domestic politics is a positive step forward for G-20 summits toward a greater engagement between leaders and their publics. NPGL observers have been watching this dimension of G-20 summitry in London, Pittsburgh, Toronto and now Seoul. (See: www.cigionline.org; Papers; “Soundings”)

The challenge going forward will be finding a way to align the global economic adjustment policy with domestic political linkages in a consistent and reinforcing manner, that will allow for policy convergence rather than the divergence manifested at the Seoul G-20 Summit.

      

Editor's Note: The National Perspectives on Global Leadership (NPGL) project reports on public perceptions of national leaders’ performance at important international events. The sixth series of commentary focuses on the Cannes G-20 Summit and discusses the ongoing euro crisis, the rising G20 profile, and the growing social mobilization around concerns with the global crisis. Read the other commentary »

OVERVIEW: COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON THE CANNES G20 SUMMIT

Despite the euro zone crisis, the profile of the G20 was raised in many member-state capitals, and G20 leaders and media did focus on other agenda items and domestic issues.

Reporting from 13 G20 countries reveals that, through the eyes of the national media, the euro crisis “overwhelmed,” “dominated,” “totally sidetracked” or “hijacked” the Cannes G20 Summit on Thursday night through Friday afternoon, November 4-5, 2011. Only Argentina seems to have been captivated by the bilateral meeting between US President Barack Obama and their leader, President Cristina Kirschner, to such a degree that it overshadowed the global preoccupation with the Greek debt crisis and its implications for the euro zone and the global economy. As she did at other G20 summits, Cristina Kirschner found a way to project her own priorities and portray them to the Argentine public through deliberate preparation with her cabinet beforehand and in regional consultations, and this also held true at her appearance at the B20 (G20 business summit) held just before the G20.

Other Issues

G20 leaders and the national media in G20 capitals were, nonetheless, able to focus on several other G20 issues of vital interest to their publics.

Kirschner and other leaders were indeed able to project to the national media in their capitals other issues and priorities, despite the euro crisis capturing public attention around the world. The two most frequently profiled international issues in the G20 capitals surveyed here, were the financial transactions tax proposal and the G20’s work on tax havens that began in London in 2009. Among the other issues discussed was the strong focus on development by Chinese President Hu Jintao and on least-developed countries by South African President Jacob Zuma. The Financial Stability Board (FSB) action on “too big to fail” banks was highlighted by The Washington Post on Saturday morning, as well as by the Canadian media, in part because Canada’s central bank governor, Mark Carney, was named head of the FSB, replacing Mario Draghi. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda was able to keep his country’s media focused on his priorities.

What was also of interest to NPGL country observers was the extent to which some G20 leaders were able to profile their domestic concerns, linking the Cannes G20 deliberations on either Europe or the on-going G20 agenda to jobs and growth at home. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper highlighted the fact that the G20 Action Plan on Growth and Jobs, which was endorsed in Cannes, corresponded exactly to the title of his government’s 2011 budget. Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff highlighted the International Labour Organization’s social initiative on the G20 agenda, likening it to her government’s domestic program of social inclusion.

South Africa’s Jacob Zuma emphasized jobs as crucial to South Africa’s future, which coincided strongly with the Congress of South African Trade Unions labour leader’s meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy in Cannes. U.S. President Barack Obama’s major thrust in Cannes was to support the Europeans’ efforts to resolve the euro crisis themselves as being critical to jobs and growth in the United States against a background of a U.S. job report the same day. In her appearance at the B20 meeting, Cristina Kirschner declared herself against the “anarchic financial capitalism” that had dramatically impacted people in the real economy, not just bankers and banks.
 
Despite the overwhelming force of events in Greece, Italy and global financial markets on the same days that the Cannes summit took place, events which riveted the world’s attention, G20 leaders and the national media in their capitals were, nonetheless, able to focus on several other G20 issues of vital interest to their publics.

Communications

The global crisis managed to create a higher profile for the G20 in many G20 capitals.

The combination of the euro crisis drama and the growing social mobilization around peoples’ concerns with the global crisis, managed to create a higher profile for the G20 in many of its capitals.
 
Our NPGL colleagues from China begin their commentary by saying: “the first thing that should be reported from Beijing is that China’s media have begun to pay more attention to the G20 than in the past.”

From Germany, we learn that “the Cannes event generated a higher volume of media coverage than previous G20 summits.”
 
“This summit had a great deal of relevance for the Argentine public,” we are told by our NPGL colleague in Buenos Aires. “After London, the summit in Cannes has received the greatest attention by the media,” she adds. “The Cannes summit was seen to have a large impact on the Argentine public.”
 
And in South Africa, “surprisingly, media coverage was not cynical, such as ridiculing G20’s role, which we have witnessed in the recent past. Again this probably was due to the magnitude of the issues at stake, and in that sense, probably more closely resembles the political dynamics around the London summit.”

From Tokyo, “Japanese public and media attention to the G20 meeting in Cannes was higher this time.”

But, interestingly, in contrast to massive attention to the G20 summit held in Seoul a year ago, “very little attention” was paid to the Cannes G20 Summit by the Korean media and public.

Other Leaders, Leading

In this intense context, two sets of leaders stood out visibly in most G20 capitals as the euro crisis–G20 drama unfolded: Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel battling for the core of Europe against George Papandreou and Silvio Berlosconi on the periphery. Barack Obama was given lots of space in the media in France, the United States, Mexico, Australia and South Africa, but he was seen as “marginal” in Germany, “detached” in the United Kingdom, and “not given special attention” in Canada, for example. Christine Lagarde, the new head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), seemed to be given more play in the G20 emerging market economies media, than in the G20 industrial economies of the West. Leaders were varied in the intensity of their participation in the summit and their interactions with the global and national media.

Concluding Remarks

In the end, the euro crisis took centre stage at the Cannes summit in the eyes of most of the world, but as observed through the media in G20 capitals, other issues managed to surface for public attention, and national leaders from G20 countries were able, in several cases, to project their own priorities amid the welter of events in Athens and Rome, as well as Cannes, during those two turbulent days in early November 2011. The profile of the G20 was strikingly more visible in many capitals, but serious questions were raised in Mexico and Korea, especially about the future of G20 summits.

Our NPGL colleague in Mexico noted that “the fact that no specific goals, financial commitments or timelines were set for the principal agenda items included in the communiqué was highlighted in commentaries [in Mexico] that focused on why the leaders’ level G20 is not really the ‘premier’ forum its founders proclaimed it to be and why its very existence as a global steering committee is at stake.” From Korea, we heard that “the image of the G20 leaders that prevailed in Korea was one of a confused and ineffective bunch.” The sense in Australia, however, was that the G20 is “the best option on offer.”

As Mexico prepares to take up the presidency next year, and as we look ahead to Russia and Australia’s presidency in the years ahead, it is clear that many challenges remain.

UNITED STATES

As surely was the case in other countries, the Greek debt drama, with the proposed referendum, withdrawn referendum and the vote of confidence, overshadowed and seemed to stymie action by G20 leaders in Cannes. But the competing headlines in Washington focused on the jobs report for October, which showed mixed results with public sector jobs falling significantly while private sector employment grew steadily again, and the debate in Congress between Republican and Democratic versions of a jobs bill. CNN’s John King was called upon to comment on the G20 summit from his perch in Iowa, reminding viewers that there was a seamless connection between the president’s efforts to push Europeans to deal with their debt and financial fragility, and his reelection prospects.

There is no doubt that in Washington, Athens was more visible than Cannes, and that the G20 summit took a back seat to the euro crisis. The Financial Times opined that the “forum’s high ambitions delivered meager results” as a headline. This certainly is borne out by the communiqué, which indeed did not push forward the specifics of the G20 agenda.

President Obama made his position extremely clear in his actions and words at Cannes, that he regarded the euro crisis as a European problem and the solutions were within Europe’s grasp and did not require outside support for the moment — a geopolitical strategy, which revealed his conviction that Europe is pivotal for the United States economically and strategically, keeping China and Asia more in the background. The fact that the Cannes summit put out an Action Plan on Growth and Jobs and the interdependence of the United States and Europe is the centerpiece for global growth, linked well to his domestic agenda of recovery and employment.

Other Issues

Importantly, the G20 summit approved an FSB report, making public for the first time a list of 29 “too big to fail” banks that would be subject to more vigorous FSB oversight and higher capital requirements, in order to protect taxpayers from bailing out failed banks. This is a highly significant G20 accomplishment, following directly from the seminal London G20 Summit in April 2009, at which the expanded FSB was established, incorporating all G20 countries into what was a highly euro-centric predecessor, and carrying forward the London G20 priority on strengthening national andglobal mechanisms for financial oversight, supervision and regulation. Interestingly, only The Washington Post carried this story as part of its G20 coverage — no articles on this G20 action appeared in The New York Times or the Financial Times.

Communications

President Obama’s press conference at the conclusion of the Cannes G20 Summit was carried live on CNN late on the morning of November 4, with wide CNN commentary afterward, linking Obama’s thrust in Europe with his domestic economic and political agenda. The Washington Post on November 5 grasped the strategic point of the president in an editorial: “Cannes heat: President Obama delivers the right message to Europe.” The Post argued, based on Obama’s remarks in Cannes, that “even if we [the United States] had the money to rescue the euro, it’s not clear that we should make such an investment, unless and until Europe itself had exhausted its resources, which it has not yet done… if the Europeans mean it when they say that the fate of their union itself depends on saving the euro, they will find a way.”

So, whereas the G20 profile receded in the face of the euro avalanche, US global interests were projected clearly and forcefully by the American president to European leaders and to the US public, from his participation in the Cannes G20 Summit. The link between US domestic political imperatives and a global strategic thrust was forged and made visible by Obama’s presence in Cannes.

Other Leaders, Leading

The image of the G20 leaders that prevailed in the US media from the Cannes G20 Summit was predominantly Obama with European leaders, not with Asian leaders or leaders from other parts of the world represented in the G20 grouping. Even The Washington Post editorial contained a photo nested into the editorial itself of Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy and Cameron talking in an animated fashion with the G20 France imprimatur in the background. This was clearly consistent with the dominance of the euro crisis in the meeting itself, and with Obama’s strategic focus and message. In other G20 summits, Obama with Hu Jintao in London, or Berlusconi thrusting himself between Obama and Medvedev in Pittsburgh, were memorable images. In Washington, the West was shown at Cannes as being front and centre stage, with The New York Times carrying an amusing and insightful portrait of the relationship between Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy.

      

Event Information

2015 is a crucial year for the international community. For the first time, all nations will converge upon a new set of Sustainable Development Goals applicable to advanced countries, emerging market economies, and developing countries, with the experience of implementing the Millennium Development Goals to build upon. Implementation is the critical component.

The Brookings Global Economy and Development program hosted a day-long private conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC on Monday, March 30 to focus on “Governance innovations for implementing the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda.”

Hosted in collaboration with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, this high-level conference drew on experiences from the North-South Helsinki Process on Globalization and Development carried out over the past 15 years. The Helsinki Process presaged many of the prerequisites for achieving accelerated progress by linking goal-setting to goal-implementation and by utilizing multistakeholder processes to mobilize society and financing for social and environmental goals to complement sound economic and financial policies. 

Download the conference agenda »
Download the related report »
Download the list of registrants »
Download the conference statement »

Brookings President Strobe Talbott shakes hands with Finland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Erkki Tuomioja after welcoming participants to the conference.

Former President of Finland Tarja Halonen shares insights in the conference’s opening panel.

Over 75 conference participants from governments, multilateral institutions, civil society, the private sector, and think tanks participated in a number of roundtable discussions throughout the day.

President Halonen and Minister Tuomioja share lessons from the Helsinki process as conference participants consider paths forward for implementing the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.

Event Materials

• 330 PostReportFinal
• Conference Agenda_FINAL
• March 30 List of Registrants
• Conference Statement Brookings Post2015 Implementation

       

Event Information

The year 2015 will be a milestone year, with the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the post-2015 development agenda by world leaders in September; the Addis Ababa Accord on financing for development in July; and the conclusion of climate negotiations at COP21 in Paris in December. The draft Addis Ababa Accord, which focuses on the actions needed to attain the SDGs, highlights the key role envisaged for the multilateral development banks (MDBs) in the post-2015 agenda. Paragraph 65 of the draft accord notes: “We call on the international finance institutions to establish a process to examine the role, scale, and functioning of the multilateral and regional development finance institutions to make them more responsive to the sustainable development agenda.”          

Against this backdrop, on April 18, 2015, the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings held a private roundtable with the leaders of the MDBs and other key stakeholders to discuss the role of the MDBs in supporting the post-2015 development agenda.

The meeting focused on four questions:

1. What does the post-2015 development agenda and the ambitions of the Addis and Paris conferences imply for the MDBs?


Given the ability of the MDBs to leverage shareholder resources, they can be efficient and effective mechanisms for scaling up development cooperation, particularly with respect to the agenda on investing in people and to the financing of sustainable infrastructure. New roles, instruments and partnerships might be needed.

2. How can MDBs best take advantage of the political attention that is being paid to the various conferences in 2015?   


The World Bank and selected regional development banks have launched a series of initiatives to optimize their balance sheets, address other constraints and enhance their catalytic role in crowding in private finance. And new institutions and mechanisms are coming to the fore. But the responses are not coordinated to best take advantage of each MDB’s comparative advantage.

3. What are the key impediments to scaling up the role and engagement of the MDBs?


Views on constraints are likely to differ but discussions should cover policy dialogue, capacity building, capital, leverage, shareholder backing on volume, instruments on leverage and risk mitigation, safeguards, and governance. 

4. How should the MDBs respond to the proposal to establish a process to examine the role, scale and functioning of the multilateral and regional development finance institutions to make them more responsive to the sustainable development agenda?   


A proactive response and engagement on the part of the MDBs would facilitate a better understanding of the contribution that the MDBs can make and greater support among shareholders for a coherent and stepped-up role.

Event Materials

• Participant List
• MDB PostEvent Summary

       

2015 is a pivotal year. Three major workstreams among all the world’s nations are going forward this year under the auspices of the United Nations to develop goals, financing, and frameworks for the “post-2015 sustainable development agenda.” First, after two years of wide-ranging consultation, the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September will endorse a new set of global goals for 2030 to follow on from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that culminate this year. Second, to support this effort, a financing for development (FFD) conference took place in July in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to identify innovative ways of mobilizing private and public resources for the massive investments necessary to achieve the new goals. And third, in Paris in December the final negotiating session will complete work on a global climate change framework. 

These three landmark summits will, with luck, provide the broad strategic vision, the specific goals, and the financing modalities for addressing the full range of systemic threats. Most of all, these three summit meetings will mobilize the relevant stakeholders and actors crucial for implementing the post-2015 agenda—governments, international organizations, business, finance, civil society, and parliaments—into a concerted effort to achieve transformational outcomes. Achieving systemic sustainability is a comprehensive, inclusive effort requiring all actors and all countries to be engaged.

These three processes represent a potential historic turning point from “business-as-usual” practices and trends and to making the systemic transformations that are required to avoid transgressing planetary boundaries and critical tipping points. Missing from the global discourse so far is a realistic assessment of the political decisions and institutional innovations that would be required to implement the post-2015 sustainable development agenda (P2015).

For 2015, it is necessary is to make sure that by the end of year the three workstreams have been welded together as a singular vision for global systemic transformation involving all countries, all domestic actors, and all international institutions. The worst outcome would be that the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 are seen as simply an extension of the 2015 MDGs—as only development goals exclusively involving developing countries. This outcome would abort the broader purposes of the P2015 agenda to achieve systemic sustainability and to involve all nations and reduce it to a development agenda for the developing world that by itself would be insufficient to make the transformations required.

Systemic risks of financial instability, insufficient job-creating economic growth, increasing inequality, inadequate access to education, health, water and sanitation, and electricity, “breaking points” in planetary limits, and the stubborn prevalence of poverty along with widespread loss of confidence of people in leaders and institutions now require urgent attention and together signal the need for systemic transformation.

As a result, several significant structural changes in institution arrangements and governance are needed as prerequisites for systemic transformation. These entail (i) political decisions by country leaders and parliaments to ensure societal engagement, (ii) institutional innovations in national government processes to coordinate implementation, (iii) strengthening the existing global system of international institutions to include all actors, (iv) the creation of an international monitoring mechanism to oversee systemic sustainability trajectories, and (v) realize the benefits that would accrue to the entire P2015 agenda by the engagement of the systemically important countries through fuller utilization of  G20 leaders summits and finance ministers meetings as enhanced global steering mechanisms toward sustainable development.   Each of these changes builds on and depends on each other.

I. Each nation makes a domestic commitment to a new trajectory toward 2030

For global goal-setting to be implemented, it is essential that each nation go beyond a formal agreement at the international level to then embark on a national process of deliberation, debate, and decision-making that adapts the global goals to the domestic institutional and cultural context and commits the nation to them as a long-term trajectory around which to organize its own systemic transformation efforts. Such a process would be an explicitly political process involving national leaders, parliaments or rule-making bodies, societal leaders, business executives, and experts to increase public awareness and to guide the public conversation toward an intrinsically national decision which prioritizes the global goals in ways which fit domestic concerns and circumstances. This political process would avoid the “one-size-fits-all” approach and internalize and legitimate each national sustainability trajectory.

So far, despite widespread consultation on the SDGs, very little attention has been focused on the follow-up to a formal international agreement on them at the U.N. General Assembly in September 2015. The first step in implementation of the SDGs and the P2015 agenda more broadly is to generate a national commitment to them through a process in which relevant domestic actors modify, adapt, and adopt a national trajectory the embodies the hopes, concerns and priorities of the people of each country. Without this step, it is unlikely that national systemic sustainability trajectories will diverge significantly enough from business-as-usual trends to make a difference. More attention needs to now be given to this crucial first step.  And explicit mention of the need for it should appear in the UNGA decisions in New York in September.

II. A national government institutional innovation for systemic transformation

The key feature of systemic risks is that each risk generates spillover effects that go beyond the confines of the risk itself into other domains. This means that to manage any systemic risk requires broad, inter-disciplinary, multi-sectoral approaches. Most governments have ministries or departments that manage specific sectoral programs in agriculture, industry, energy, health, education, environment, and the like when most challenges now are inter-sectoral and hence inter-ministerial. Furthermore, spillover linkages create opportunities in which integrated approaches to problems can capture intrinsic synergies that generate higher-yield outcomes if sectoral strategies are simultaneous and coordinated.

The consequence of spillovers and synergies for national governments is that “whole-of-government” coordinating committees are a necessary institutional innovation to manage effective strategies for systemic transformation. South Korea has used inter-ministerial cabinet level committees that include private business and financial executives as a means of addressing significant interconnected issues or problems requiring multi-sectoral approaches. The Korea Presidential Committee on Green Growth, which contained more than 20 ministers and agency heads with at least as many private sector leaders, proved to be an extremely effective means of implementing South Korea’s commitment to green growth.

III.  A single global system of international institutions

The need for a single mechanism for coordinating the global system of international institutions to implement the P2015 agenda of systemic transformation is clear. However, there are a number of other larger reasons why the forging of such a mechanism is crucial now.

The Brettons Woods era is over. It was over even before the initiative by China to establish the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing and the New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai. It was over because of the proliferation in recent years of private and official agencies and actors in development cooperation and because of the massive growth in capital flows that not only dwarf official development assistance (concessional foreign aid) but also IMF resources in the global financial system. New donors are not just governments but charities, foundations, NGOs, celebrities, and wealthy individuals. New private sources of financing have mushroomed with new forms of sourcing and new technologies. The dominance of the IMF and the World Bank has declined because of these massive changes in the context.

The emergence of China and other emerging market economies requires acknowledgement as a fact of life, not as a marginal change. China in particular deserves to be received into the world community as a constructive participant and have its institutions be part of the global system of international institutions, not apart from it. Indeed, China’s Premier, Li Keqiang, stated at the World Economic Forum in early 2015 that “the world order established after World War II must be maintained, not overturned.”

The economic, social and environmental imperatives of this moment are that the world’s people and the P2015 agenda require that all international institutions of consequence be part of a single coordinated effort over the next 15 years to implement the post-2015 agenda for sustainable development. The geopolitical imperatives of this moment also require that China and China’s new institutions be thoroughly involved as full participants and leaders in the post-2015 era. If nothing else, the scale of global investment and effort to build and rebuild infrastructure requires it.

It is also the case that the post-2015 era will require major replenishments in the World Bank and existing regional development banks, and significantly stronger coordination among them to address global infrastructure investment needs in which the AIIB and the NDB must now be fully involved. The American public and the U.S. Congress need to fully grasp the crucial importance for the United States, of the IMF quota increase and governance reform.  These have been agreed to by most governments but their implementation is stalled in the U.S. Congress. To preserve the IMF’s role in the global financial system and the role of the U.S. in the international community, the IMF quota increase and IMF governance reform must be passed and put into practice. Congressional action becomes all the more necessary as the effort is made to reshape the global system of international institutions to accommodate new powers and new institutions within a single system rather than stumble into a fragmented, fractured, and fractious global order where differences prevail over common interests.

The IMF cannot carry out its significant responsibility for global financial stability without more resources. Other countries cannot add to IMF resources proportionately without U.S. participation in the IMF quota increase.   Without the US contribution, IMF members will have to fund the IMF outside the regular IMF quota system, which means de-facto going around the United States and reducing dramatically the influence of the U.S. in the leadership of the IMF. This is a self-inflicted wound on the U.S., which will damage U.S. credibility, weaken the IMF, and increase the risk of global financial instability. By blocking the IMF governance reforms in the IMF agreed to by the G-20 in 2010, the U.S. is single-handedly blocking the implementation of the enlargement of voting shares commensurate with increased emerging market economic weights.  This failure to act is now widely acknowledged by American thought leaders to be encouraging divergence rather than convergence in the global system of institutions, damaging U.S. interests.

IV. Toward a single monitoring mechanism for the global system of international institutions

The P2015 agenda requires a big push toward institutionalizing a single mechanism for the coordination of the global system of international institutions.  The international coordination arrangement today, is the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation created at the Busan High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in 2011.  This arrangement, which recognizes the increasingly complex context and the heightened tensions between emerging donor countries and traditional western donors, created a loose network of country platforms, regional arrangements, building blocks and forums to pluralize the architecture to reflect the increasingly complex set of agents and actors. This was an artfully arranged compromise, responding to the contemporary force field four years ago.

Now is a different moment. The issues facing the world are both systemic and urgent; they are not confined to the development of developing countries, and still less to foreign aid. Geopolitical tensions are, if anything, higher now than then.  But they also create greater incentives to find areas of cooperation and consensus among major powers who have fundamentally different perspectives on other issues. Maximizing the sweet spots where agreement and common interest can prevail is now of geopolitical importance.  Gaining agreement on institutional innovations to guide the global system of international institutions in the P2015 era would be vital for effective outcomes but also importantly ease geopolitical tensions.

Measurement matters; monitoring and evaluation is a strategic necessity to implementing any agenda, and still more so, an agenda for systemic transformation.  As a result, the monitoring and evaluation system that accompanies the P2015 SDGs will be crucial to guiding the implementation of them.  The UN, the OECD, the World Bank, and the IMF all have participated in joint data gathering efforts under the IDGs  in the 1990s and the MDGs in the 2000s.   Each of these institutions has a crucial role to play, but they need to be brought together now under one umbrella to orchestrate their contributions to a comprehensive global data system and to help the G20 finance ministers coordinate their functional programs.   

The OECD has established a strong reputation in recent years for standard setting in a variety of dimensions of the global agenda.  Given the strong role of the OECD in relation to the G20 and its broad outreach to “Key Partners” among the emerging market economies, the OECD could be expected to take a strong role in global benchmarking and monitoring and evaluation of the P2015 Agenda.  The accession of China to the OECD Development Centre, which now has over fifty member countries, and the presence and public speech of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the OECD on July 1^st, bolsters the outreach of the OECD and its global profile.

But national reporting is the centerpiece and the critical dimension of monitoring and evaluation.  To guide the national reporting systems and evaluate their results, a  new institutional arrangement is needed that is based on national leaders with responsibility for implementation of the sustainable development agendas from each country and is undertaken within the parameters of the global SDGs and the P2015 benchmarks.

V.   Strengthening global governance and G20 roles

G-20 leaders could make a significant contribution to providing the impetus toward advancing systemic sustainability by creating a G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council charged with pulling together the national statistical indicators and implementing benchmarks on the SDGs in G-20 countries.  The G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council (G-20 GSDC) would consist of the heads of the presidential committees on sustainable development charged with coordinating P2015 implementation in G-20 countries.  Representing systemically important countries, they would also be charged with assessing the degree to which national policies and domestic efforts by G20 countries generate positive or negative spillover effects for the rest of the world.  This G-20 GSDC would also contribute to the setting of standards for the global monitoring effort, orchestrated perhaps by the OECD, drawing on national data bases from all countries using the capacities of the international institutions to generate understanding of global progress toward systemic sustainability. 

The UN is not in a position to coordinate the global system of international institutions in their functional roles in global sustainable development efforts.  The G-20 itself could take steps through the meetings of G-20 Finance Ministers to guide the global system of international institutions in the implementation phase of the P2015 agenda to begin in 2016. The G-20 already has a track record in coordinating international institutions in the response to the global financial crisis in 2008 and its aftermath. The G-20 created the Financial Stability Board (FSB), enlarged the resources for the IMF, agreed to reform the IMF’s governance structure, orchestrated relations between the IMF and the FSB, brought the OECD into the mainstream of G-20 responsibilities and has bridged relations with the United Nations by bringing in finance ministers to the financing for development conference in Addis under Turkey’s G-20 leadership. 

There is a clear need to coordinate the financing efforts of the IMF, with the World Bank and the other regional multilateral development banks (RMDBs), with the AIIB and the BRICS NDB, and with other public and private sector funding sources, and to assess the global institutional effort as whole in relation to the P2015 SDG trajectories.  The G-20 Finance Ministers grouping would seem to be uniquely positioned to be an effective and credible means of coordinating these otherwise disparate institutional efforts.  The ECOSOC Development Cooperation Forum and the Busuan Global Partnership provide open inclusive space for knowledge sharing and consultation but need to be supplemented by smaller bodies capable of making decisions and providing strategic direction.

Following the agreements reached in the three U.N. workstreams for 2015, the China G-20 could urge the creation of a formal institutionalized global monitoring and coordinating mechanism at the China G-20 Summit in September 2016. By having the G-20 create a G-20 Global Sustainable Development Council (G-20 GSDC), it could build on the national commitments to SDG trajectories to be made next year by U.N. members countries and on the newly formed national coordinating committees established by governments to implement the P2015 Agenda, giving the G-20 GSDC functional effectiveness, clout and credibility.   Whereas there is a clear need to compensate for the sized-biased representation of the G20 with still more intensive G-20 outreach and inclusion, including perhaps eventually considering shifting to a constituency based membership, for now the need in this pivotal year is to use the momentum to make political decisions and institutional innovations which will crystallize the P2015 strategic vision toward systemic sustainability into mechanisms and means of implementation.

By moving forward on these recommendations, the G-20 Leaders Summits would be strengthened by involving G-20 leaders in the people-centered P2015 Agenda, going beyond finance to issues closer to peoples’ homes and hearts. Systemically important countries would be seen as leading on systemically important issues.  The G-20 Finance Ministers would be seen as playing an appropriate role by serving as the mobilizing and coordinating mechanism for the global system of international institutions for the P2015 Agenda.  And the G-20 GSDC would become the effective focal point for assessing systemic sustainability not only within G20 countries but also in terms of their positive and negative spillover effects on systemic sustainability paths of other countries, contributing to standard setting and benchmarking for global monitoring and evaluation.    These global governance innovations could re-energize the G20 and provide the international community with the leadership, the coordination and the monitoring capabilities that it needs to implement the P2015 Agenda. 

Conclusion

As the MDGs culminate this year, as the three U.N. workstreams on SDGs, FFD, and UNFCC are completed, the world needs to think ahead to the implementation phase of the P2015 sustainable development agenda. Given the scale and scope of the P2015 agenda, these five governance innovations need to be focused on now so they can be put in place in 2016.

These will ensure (i) that national political commitments and engagement by all countries are made by designing, adopting, and implementing their own sustainable development trajectories and action plans; (ii) that national presidential committees are established, composed of key ministers and private sector leaders to coordinate each country’s comprehensive integrated sustainability strategy; (iii) that all governments and international institutions are accepted by and participate in a single global system of international institutions;   (iv) that a G-20 monitoring mechanism be created by the China G-20 in September 2016 that is comprised of the super-minister officials heading the national presidential coordinating committees implementing the P2015 agenda domestically in G-20 countries, as a first step;  and (v) that the G-20 Summit leaders in Antalya in November 2015 and in China in September 2016 make clear their own commitment to the P2015 agenda and their responsibility for its adaption, adoption and implementation internally in their countries but also for assessing G-20 spillover impacts on the rest of the world, as well as for deploying their G-20 finance ministers to mobilize and coordinate the global system of international institutions toward achieving the P2015 agenda.

Without these five structural changes, it will be more likely that most countries and actors will follow current trends rather than ratchet up to the transformational trajectories necessary to achieve systemic sustainability nationally and globally by 2030.

References

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