The Crossing

Our blog has moved...

2013-09-26T09:28:00.001+00:00

The STEPS Centre blog has now been integrated in to the Centre's website as part of a package of updates to our web platforms.

The Crossing will remain here as an archive for everything published before 12 September 2013, but every post from way back when we started in 2007 is now available on the main website.

Please do come and visit, we really value your comments and thoughts.

Responses to frequently asked questions on genetically-modified crops and development

2013-09-12T13:34:00.000+00:00

GM Rice / BASF / Flickr Creative Commons

By Andy Stirling, co-director of the STEPS Centre

Questions are never far from the headlines about how the world can farm more fairly, sustainably and productively. What is meant by these qualities varies greatly – including differing ways to raise income for poor farmers, improve nutrition, reduce environmental and health impacts or provide more food to feed growing populations. Almost irrespective of how to think about ‘the problem’, however, GM crops are often presented as a vital part of the solution. Fierce criticism is often dished out to any voices raising concerns – labelling them ‘anti-technology’ environmentalists, irrational media, nervous regulators or an ill-informed public.

But whatever side one is on, this kind of debate can easily miss the single most important fact. ‘GM’ is not one thing. And there exist a wide variety of other innovations – social and organisational as well as scientific and technological – for achieving the same ends (whatever these are). What is most irrational, is to focus disproportionately on ‘GM’ alone. Even more misleading, is to pretend that the issues are just about ‘risk’ – or that the solutions can be determined solely by ‘sound science’ or ‘evidence based policy’. In the end, the answers depend on the questions. Science and evidence have absolutely crucial roles to play, But they are necessary, not sufficient.

The reasons why some GM technologies are often so strongly favoured by seed producers over other innovations, is more to do with commercial competition and profit than any other factor. It does not imply complete rejection of such interests, to see that the issues for society at large are much wider. The real issues are over which directions for innovation should be encouraged and which discouraged. This is not just technical, but a matter for ethical values, political judgement and clear democratic accountability. It is these qualities that are often most endangered by simplistic fixations with ‘GM’.

The brief comments below respond to some questions about the part wealthier countries play in blocking or enabling GM technology, and the role that science and the public play in shaping decisions about GM and other innovations. To delve further in to these issues, take a look at the 10+ years of research in the STEPS Centre's Biotechnology Research Archive.

Why are GM crops stuck in the pipeline of regulatory approval?

The image of GM crops being ‘stuck in a pipeline’ presumes the role of regulation is simply to approve new technologies or products. In fact, as shown by a series of European Environment Agency studies, far from being over-restrictive, the history of European and wider regulation is at least as much one of being over-permissive.

Late lessons from early warnings: the precautionary principle 1896–2000 (EEA, 2001)
Late lessons from early warnings: science, precaution, innovation (EEA, 2013)

Is the EU falling behind other regions in approving GM crops?

The idea that the EU is ‘falling behind’ presumes that there is just one direction of technological advance in this field (and that this is GM). In fact, innovation is at least as much a question of choosing directions to go in, as of how fast to proceed in any one of them.

GM is not the only biotech solution on offer. Marker-assisted selection and other genomic techniques offer important opportunities for enhancing conventional breeding through biotechnology. Investment in long-term, local, context-specific breeding and crop development programmes is needed.

Why the fuss about GM food? Other innovations are available (Andy Stirling, The Guardian - Political Science blog, 28 June 2013)
Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto – full text

This point is underscored by a major recent international assessment:

Agriculture at a Crossroads – IAASTD Synthesis Report (pdf)

What role can science play in influencing policy and public opinion?

It is a foundational principle of science to provide a rigorous arena for engaging contrasting understandings and upholding the value of scepticism.

Like other groups of citizens and organised interests, the diversity of different kinds of science can of course exert influence in many different ways, both on policymakers and on wider public opinions. This is perfectly legitimate - but it should be recognised as a political activity and not something undertaken in the name of ‘science’ as a whole, let alone of ‘objective truth’.

When any “science” organisation invokes the authority of the scientific process in general in favour of any particular technological product, it is being politically partisan. Frequently associated claims to objectivity are also spurious. The result is not only an undermining of reasoned democratic debate, but – by being less than trustworthy – amounts to nothing less than a betrayal of science itself.

Science as a process is equally implicated in a variety of contending innovation trajectories (see above), no one of which is inherently more ‘scientific’ than others.

The “Emerging Biotechnologies” report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics is a good illustration of this point.

Emerging Biotechnologies – Nuffield Council on Bioethics

There often exist more effective innovation pathways that do not rely primarily on science-intensive products. When they advocate science-intensive approaches as preferential to these, then scientists are also being more generally politically partisan. In any case, scientific (and wider expert) understandings of the world can never definitively determine any single uniquely rational ‘way forward’. The available evidence always admits a variety of contrasting interpretations.

Keep it complex, by Andy Stirling (Nature, 2010)

Is the EU’s treatment of GM is having a detrimental impact on developing countries?

In fact, the resources deployed in favour of adopting wider use of GM of various kinds dwarf those arrayed directly against it.

In some circumstances, some farmers have benefited from GM crop technologies; while others had bad experiences or were by-passed altogether.

A STEPS Working Paper by Dominic Glover (2009) shows economic returns are highly variable, dependent on a range of factors. GM crops only perform well in good varieties, GM seed start-up costs and technology fees are sometimes too expensive for poorer farmers, and major adopters are usually richer, with more land. Meanwhile the institutional and policy environment is vital: without support, credit and sustained backing, new technologies often fail.

Africa's biotechnology battle by Ian Scoones and Dominic Glover, Nature
GM crops ten years on: hope, hype and reality (Ian Scoones, Institute of Development Studies, May 2009)
Undying Promise: Agricultural Biotechnology’s Pro-poor Narrative, Ten Years On by Dominic Glover (STEPS Centre 2009)

How crucial is public opinion in the GM debate?

In this debate, as in other areas of political life, public opinion is crucial. Science and innovation present political choices, rather than one-track imperatives which supposedly have no alternatives. It is normally the case that business takes a pride in meeting consumer needs. And governments like that of the UK are usually very supportive of this. But in the field of GM, the pattern is typically oddly different. When consumers express a preference for other kinds of food or agriculture, the mantra is that they should change to fit the needs of producers, rather than the other way around. This is not only bad economics, it is undemocratic. Citizens should have a crucial say in decisions about the directions taken by innovations, including GM.

Innovation, Sustainability, Development: A New Manifesto – full text

Find out more

The STEPS Centre's Biotechnology Research Archive - 10+ years of research into genetically-modified crops, development and the global food crisis
The STEPS Centre's research on GM and biotechnology
See more blogposts about GM and biotechnology

This article was originally posted on The Crossing.

How was a 'policy space' created for pastoralism in Kenya?

2013-09-09T07:49:00.000+00:00

Pastoralism in Kenya has long been neglected and understood. Pastoralists have been seen by some as vulnerable, a source of conflict and a drain on the country's resources. But recent developments have begun to change that narrative.

A new government Ministry, the Ministry of Development of Northern Kenya and other Arid Lands, was formed in 2008. It aimed to create policy and institutional change, refocusing resources to support pastoralists and the areas in which they live and work.

A new Future Agricultures Working Paper by Izzy Birch and Mohamed Elmi tells the story of the Ministry and the circumstances that led to its creation. The authors suggest that a 'policy space' has been opened up, enabling new opportunities, relationships and directions for the region. They also examine what progress has been made and what the future might hold for pastoral development in the country.

In the video embedded above, the authors explain the story in a seminar recorded in May 2013.

Working Paper 68: Creating Policy Space for Pastoralism in Kenya (pdf)

Future Agricultures blog: Has a ‘policy space’ for pastoralism been opened up in Kenya?
Video: The politics of policy making around pastoralism in Kenya - STEPS/Future Agricultures Seminar, May 2013

Further reading: Pastoralism and Development in Africa: Dynamic Change at the Margins

(Image: Garissa cattle market, Kenya by USAID on Flickr)

This article was originally posted on The Crossing.

Against 'monocultures' in agriculture and knowledge

2013-09-04T10:01:00.001+00:00

Faced with the undeniable fact of hunger in developing countries, ‘sustainable intensification’ has been claimed as a science-led solution to food security. In an article for SciDev.Net, Prof Brian Wynne (Lancaster University) and Georgina Catacora (GenØk) tear strips off the large-scale industrial model of agriculture that is supposed to feed the world, and the narrow visions of science that underlie it.

Science is used as an ideological tool to promote some technologies (such as GM) while neglecting others. In some cases, the social impacts of industrial agriculture (displacement, land grabbing etc) are left out of the equation; in others, diverse approaches are simply ignored, and food security is seen simply as a technical issue of production.

The challenge of highlighting alternative pathways in agriculture is no small one. Huge financial interests are invested in pursuing intensive industrial agriculture at the expense of small-scale farming. Opponents are accused of being anti-science and romanticising poverty. But a narrow industrial technical view of science does no justice to the variety of scientific and social approaches to feeding the world and supporting farmers’ livelihoods.

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Climate change: where stereotypes go to die

2013-09-02T20:41:00.000+00:00

What do you mean when you call someone a climate sceptic? I went to a panel discussion last Thursday evening, “Tackling scepticism: How can we most effectively communicate climate change?” which despite the confrontational title, was an enjoyable debate touching on how people on different sides of a sometimes polarised climate debate think of, and treat, each other.

The event started with the audience being invited to name experiences of scepticism by the chair, Ed Gillespie (who’s also blogged about the evening here). This ended up looking rather like a list of types of climate sceptics (see picture). Initially, this exercise rang some alarm bells for me. It mainly served to demonstrate that, rather than one single stereotype of “climate sceptic” or “climate denier”, there are many possible stereotypes. But they are still stereotypes.

The list of types of sceptic.
Source: Futerra blog

In the event, though, I found it useful to see such a list out in the open. A couple of people suggested that many of the stereotypes could easily be turned on their head and applied to the green movement in general or advocates of low-carbon policies in particular. It reminded me that we all instinctively like to put people in categories. We can dish it out but it's a bit harder to take it.

It may be human nature to create them, but caricatures – whomever they are about – can easily do more harm than good, especially when applied to views about a complex problem. They can be fun, even affectionate, or cathartic, but not very productive in the end. What they leave out, or don’t address enough, is a proper engagement with people’s values and what they want the future to look like.

These are things that have been unjustly neglected in parts of the climate debate. Chris Rapley of UCL, on the panel, suggested that two people, given the same information, may end up with different views of what they think is happening and how to respond. I would add that in another scenario, two people with access to the same information might select or prioritise different parts of it. Rather than jumping to portray them as a ‘denier’ or ‘alarmist’, we might ask what politics, values and assumptions lie behind these different visions. The aim should not be to erase these differences or try to convert everyone to our values, or to pretend that climate is a technical issue that we can solve by the application of enough science.

The types of questions that the STEPS Centre specialises in are useful here, I think (although I guess I’m biased). Rather than simply asking “what should we do about climate change”, it’s useful to examine how the people in the conversation frame the issue, what their values and assumptions are, and what they imagine about the future. It also doesn’t hurt to recognise that none of us are in possession of the full facts, and the climate (like many other problems) is as complex and unpredictable as a toddler's birthday party in the way it interacts with other systems. Climate change may be a phenomenon where nature behaves in a way we wouldn’t wish it to: but it is also a human problem – we have to respond to it as citizens and communities with different desires, livelihoods and motivations. Climate change is political, as my SPRU colleague Alice Bell (also on the panel) put it. (Edit: Alice has summarised her opening comments at the event in a blog post for New Left Project.)

Climate change isn't always recognised equally by all as a problem. But even if it were, rather than just asking “what now”, we can ask (in Andy Stirling’s words) “which direction”, “who says”, “why?” and "who benefits?" This is not to say all opinions or options are equally valid, or that all commentators are innocently impartial (be they of the green persuasion or otherwise). If you’re in favour of action to mitigate climate change, for example, consider that climate is one of the justifications used to appropriate so-called “underused, marginal” land for biochar and biofuels projects at the expense of poor people. On the other side, an overly laid-back view of climate change can be an excuse for a stagnant, short-sighted energy policy.

As Chris Rapley pointed out, characterisations of the other as “sad, mad or bad” are usually over-the-top and applied too easily. Yes, there is extremism and ignorance among non-greens and greens alike. But ill-tempered arguments can quickly spiral out of control and it takes a disproportionate amount of time to rebuild trust. Politeness may be stifling, but respect is worth pursuing. This is not a recipe for a naïve debate where anything goes. It’s a reminder that sometimes it is worth stepping back and asking different questions before rushing to judgement.

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Arguing about agronomy: the changing politics of agronomy research

2013-08-28T10:03:00.001+00:00

A new article in Outlook on Agricultureexplores how agronomy has been affected by social change since the 1970s. The science of agronomy informs crucial decisions on development. It is often seen as a practical, problem-solving field, but like other areas of study is affected by politics and power.

The authors suggest a 'political agronomy' approach, which takes account of the contestations that can arise around the generation and promotion of new agronomic knowledge and technology.

From the article:

“…the creation and use of knowledge and technology – which are of course at the heart of agronomy – are embedded in complex political, economic and social worlds that are characterized by asymmetric power relations. In agronomy and agricultural research more broadly, power is (and has long been) exercised in the framing of problems and the setting of priorities, through funding decisions, through ‘partnerships’, through crop variety release procedures and through the peer review and publication process.”

The changing politics of agronomy research byJames Sumberg, John Thompson and Philip Woodhouse, Outlook on Agriculture (vol. 2, no. 2, June 2013)

Contested Agronomy: agricultural research in a changing world - a book in the STEPS Pathways to Sustainability series, edited by Sumberg and Thompson

Image: Healthy barley despite drought under conservation agriculture by CIMMYT on Flickr

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Responsibility at the Science-Publics-Policy Interface: What I learnt at the 2013 Science in Public Conference

2013-07-25T11:49:00.000+00:00

The village of Onna, after the 2009 L'Aquila
earthquake. Photo: Darkroom_Daze (Flickr)

by Stephen Whitfield
DPhil Student, Institute of Development Studies

This year’s 'Science in Public' conference hosted by Nottingham University was excellent. I came away from two captivating days of presentations, discussions and (at times heated) debates having learnt a lot… and inevitably feeling frustrated in the knowledge that there was so much more to be learnt from the panels that I wanted to, but couldn’t, attend.

This is my attempt to summarise the ideas and messages from the conference that most challenged and changed the way that I think about science and society.

Science in Public

In 2012 this annual conference series, which was originally known as ‘Science and the Public’, underwent a radical name change, becoming, as it is today, the ‘Science in Public’ conference. OK, so it’s not a particularly drastic change, but this subtle alteration reflected an important discontent about the separation of science and public as distinct spheres of operation. Of course, such a distinction is neither straightforward nor necessarily appropriate, as I’m sure almost everyone at the conference would agree – with the possible exception of the keynote speaker Harry Collins (whose presentation was aptly described in the most popular tweet of the conference as ‘unusual’).

‘Science in Public’ – which gives a nod to Gregory and Miller’s 1998 book – although perhaps slightly clunky, makes more sense than the previous name. In fact, what was clear across the panels was that science operates within multiple publics; that publics operate within science; and that politics, policies and power pervade. But the organisers can be excused for not opting to host the “Science in Publics in Policy in Science in Policy in Publics in Science” conference, which in all but name the conference was.

Across the panels that I attended, a number of really interesting ideas were expressed about how the components of the science-public-policy nexus relate to each other. I summarise some of those that I found more surprising here:

The public are primarily concerned with how science is governed (even at very early stages). Karen Parkhill (Cardiff University) presented a fascinating report on her involvement in running public consultations around the SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection for climate Engineering) geo-engineering project. She said that much of the public concern was not necessarily about the specific risks and benefits of the project, but that the project should be guided and regulated by structures and processes of good governance – that research funders and policy makers were being closely consulted about issues of uncertainty; that international governments were involved in the conversation around these; and that these conversations should be happening even at the early stage of project feasibility evaluation.
Funders and scientists must consider the diverse political implications and impacts of ‘basic’ research. Richard Jones (University of Sheffield) pointed out that there has been a funding shift in the UK from ‘applied’ science to ‘basic’ science (which focuses more on explaining fundamentals rather than developing products), and as a result there is more pressure on basic science to demonstrate impact. Kirsty Kuo, an engineer working on the SPICE project, described how she came to realise that even a feasibility study, which aimed to better understand the materials and properties of a tube that might ultimately deliver particles into stratosphere (and carried no direct risks or benefits), had political implications. She explained that concerns about the message that such a test may send out about the UK government’s long term geo-engineering intentions, ultimately led to the study being cancelled.
Policy makers need a better understanding of the processes by which science is legitimized. Franca Davenport, a specialist in science communication from the University of West England, pointed out that there is an appetite for and intention to pursue a pluralistic form of evidence-based policy amongst policy makers, but there are a number of challenges in translating multiple evidences into policy. One particular challenge is to be able to make judgements about evidence (a point that also came out in Harry Collins’ keynote), and central to this problem is that policy makers are not familiar enough with the processes (and subjectivities), such as peer review, through which science generates legitimized and accepted evidences. She argued that science communicators could have a role in bridging this gap between the processes of the science community and those by which evidence is translated into policy.

It seems that there are particularly important roles to be played for those at the interface between science, publics and policy. One of the strong themes of the conference was that the roles and responsibilities of science communicators and science media centres are contested, conflicting and often poorly defined, but nevertheless crucial.

Rethinking Responsibility

Coming to the conference, I was familiar with, but by no means an expert on, the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) agenda (pdf) and I was relieved to discover at the conference that there isn’t really a standard interpretation, accepted definition, or application of the concept of RRI within Science & Technology Studies that had somehow passed me by. Discussions over what RRI means – the how, why, what, by who, and for whom – took place throughout the two days. The panels led by Jack Stilgoe, which focused specifically on this subject, were particularly engaging and evidently inspired new ideas, the seeds of which were emerging within the discussions themselves, and I’m sure will be developed as a consequence of them. I was struck by two points in particular:

Responsible innovation is also about making sure that innovation happens. Richard Jones made the point – which on reflection seems blatantly obvious, but it came as somewhat as a revelation to me – that responsible innovation is not simply about safeguarding publics against inappropriate or risky innovations; it’s also about the responsibility of ensuring that beneficial and important innovations do make it to markets and publics, such that the benefits are optimised and that innovation continues to be encouraged and motivated to progress. As such, responsibility relates not only to scientific processes or to the end products of innovation, but also to the pathways of innovation, involving critical and inclusive reflection on the risks and benefits associated with the possible (and uncertain) future trajectories of research and innovation.
We have a responsibility towards scientists. I am much more used to thinking about responsibility as something that scientists do for the public, so it was really eye-opening to hear from people considering the reverse relationship in terms of responsibility. I was fascinated to hear Ikuko Kase (University of Tokyo) talk about how Japanese scientists who had participated in public engagement exercises around the Fukushima earthquake and nuclear plant incident had been ‘wounded’ by the experience, during which they had felt politically conflicted and had been publicly criticised.

This situation was echoed in the case of the Italian scientists prosecuted for the public predictions they made about the L’Aquila earthquake, a case study that was recounted by Giuseppe Tipaldo (University of Turin) at the conference. Ann Kerr (Leeds University) made the point, in relation to some of her work on the careers of post-doctoral researchers in health innovation, that there is a need to recognise a responsibility of care towards scientists and innovators. It was clear from the cases of Japan and Italy that some of this responsibility must fall on publics, media and policy-makers.

Responsibility is a concept that remains up for negotiation, and cases were differently made (and critiqued) for it being founded on principles of ‘justice’ and ‘care’ and involving attitudes of ambivalence and processes of anticipation, reflection, inclusion and response. But what is clear is that responsibility is multidirectional and cuts across the complex relationships that make up the science-publics-policy nexus.

I really look forward to reading the accounts and reflections of others at the conference, which also included sessions on social media (including a live link-up to the International Congress for History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Manchester); ‘science versus the greens’; storytelling as a means of public engagement with science; and the role of science fiction in the social construction of science and technology – all of which I wish I could have attended. I’m sure that the ideas and thinking that the conference has sparked will lead to some really interesting and insightful outputs within Science & Technology Studies over the coming months.

This article was originally posted on The Crossing.

Getting the facts right on land grabs: 5 new (free) articles

2013-07-08T08:03:00.000+00:00

As part of its series on land grabs, The Journal of Peasant Studies has released a collection of 5 new articles on the problem of recording accurate and reliable information on global land deals. The edition includes a contribution from STEPS co-director Ian Scoones.

Here’s the description from the JPS:

“The recent ‘land rush’ precipitated by the convergent ‘crises’ of fuel, feed and food in 2007–08 has heightened the debate on the consequences of land investments.

This ‘land rush’ has been accompanied by a ‘literature rush’, with a fast-growing body of reports, articles, tables and books with varied purposes, metrics and methods. Land grabbing remains a hot political topic around the world, discussed amongst the highest circles.

This is why getting the facts right is important and having effective methodologies for doing so is crucial.

Several global initiatives have been created to aggregate information on land deals, and to describe their scale, character and distribution. All have contributed to building a bigger (if not always better) picture of the phenomenon, but all have struggled with methodology. This JPS Forum identifies uncertainty about what it is that is being counted, questions the methods used to collate and aggregate ‘land grabs’, and calls for a land grab research which abandons the aim of deriving total numbers of hectares in favour of more specific, grounded and transparent methods.”

The articles can be accessed free of charge for a limited period by following this link to the Taylor & Francis website.

Table of contents:

The politics of evidence: methodologies for understanding the global land rush
by Ian Scoones, Ruth Hall, Saturnino M. Borras Jr, Ben White & Wendy Wolford
Messy hectares: questions about the epistemology of land grabbing data
by Marc Edelman
Methodological reflections on ‘land grab’ databases and the ‘land grab’ literature ‘rush’
by Carlos Oya
Creating a public tool to assess and promote transparency in global land deals: the experience of the Land Matrix
by Ward Anseeuw, Jann Lay, Peter Messerli, Markus Giger, and Michael Taylor
Collating and dispersing: GRAIN's strategies and methods
by Grain

This is the second part of the JPS Forum on Global Land Grabbing – Part 1 is here.

Other articles from the Journal of Peasant Studies
The JPS has made 40 articles from its back catalogue freely available online to mark its 40^th anniversary – visit the Journal’s website to download them (free registration required).

New UK climate envoy, Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, on climate change and conflict

2013-07-01T13:44:00.001+00:00

Today's Guardian reports comments on climate change as a global threat from the first interview with the UK's interim Special Representative for Climate Change, Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, since he took up his post.

"Morisetti's central message was simple and stark: "The areas of greatest global stress and greatest impacts of climate change are broadly coincidental."

He said governments could not afford to wait until they had all the information they might like. "If you wait for 100% certainty on the battlefield, you'll be in a pretty sticky state," he said.
The increased threat posed by climate change arises because droughts, storms and floods are exacerbating water, food, population and security tensions in conflict-prone regions."

As Damian Carrington, the article's author, mentions, the military has been making links between climate change and security for some time. It's a theme that was explored at a STEPS/SOAS symposium on the water, energy and food nexus last October.

With an increasing recognition that energy, water and food (among other things) are linked and put under strain by changes in the environment, it's understandable that potential conflicts over access to these resources should have come under attention from the military.

Indeed, some advocates pushing for climate change to be higher up the policy agenda may welcome this interest, but it may come at a price. Framings of climate change as a 'security' issue not only have an influence on foreign policy, but make their way into public statements - in some cases, justifying military or diplomatic engagements with countries or regions which are seen to be under potential or actual stress.

This article was originally posted on The Crossing.

Irrigation isn’t the only way to achieve food security in Ghana

2013-06-27T15:18:00.000+00:00

Farmers attending their livestock in Northern
Ghana (2012) by Ericsson Images / Flickr

By Rachael Taylor, PhD student
SPRU, University of Sussex

Earlier this month, a number of Members of the Ghanaian Parliament presented a statement to the House calling for large investment in irrigation systems throughout Ghana. They advocate the use of irrigation for crop production as the “only way” to ensure national food security. The statement proposes that irrigation would be particularly beneficial for semi-arid Northern Ghana by enabling year-round crop production in a region which only has one wet season and currently depends predominantly on rain-fed agriculture.

The desire to take steps towards more food security in Northern Ghana is understandable. Six percent of the land area of Ghana is currently under irrigation, mostly drawn from small dam and reservoir systems, but in the three regions of Northern Ghana this figure is just 0.6 percent. Over 80 percent of households in Northern Ghana depend on agriculture as their main livelihood, making the population vulnerable to climatic shocks.

There are large socio-economic differences between north and south. Statistics indicate higher levels of poverty (63% in the north and 20% in the south), lower education attainment and literacy levels, and lower access to energy and sanitation infrastructure in the north.

In 2012 the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) completed a Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability Analysis in Ghana, focusing on the northern regions. The WFP analysis identified that 16 percent of households in the three northern regions are moderately or severely food insecure, representing over 680,000 people. It will take a great effort to ensure food security for the many smallholder farmers living in poor rural areas of Northern Ghana.

The poorest may miss out

The benefits of irrigation are not evenly spread, however. There is good reason to think that investing in irrigation alone will not achieve food security for the most vulnerable households in the three northern regions. Experience has shown that wealthier farmers with higher educational attainment are most likely to obtain access to land within irrigation development programmes. Few farmers were compensated for displacement during the construction of the Tono Irrigation Dam near Navrongo in Upper East Region^{^[1]}. Furthermore, the companies responsible for irrigation development require rent-payments for land serviced by the irrigation system, excluding the poorest farmers.

Though it may be appropriate to expand the national irrigation system in Ghana, this will not increase food security and reduce vulnerability to climatic shocks for the majority of farmers in the north. Irrigation alone will not provide a secure food source for the whole population and it would be potentially damaging to invest in irrigation as the only means for achieving this. Not only will irrigation be inaccessible to the poorest and most vulnerable households, but it will detract resources (land, time, money) from the multiple diverse livelihoods that smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana depend upon.

Farmer innovations – another vital part of the solution

Farmers in the northern regions typically practice multiple livelihoods, a strategy which allows them to adapt somewhat to the annual variability of the wet season. Diversity within agricultural production is increasingly being advocated to provide options to adapt to climatic changes^{^[2]}. Through increasing diversity, enhancing adaptive capacity, and encouraging adaptive governance, rural farming communities will be better able to respond to climate variability and uncertainty. This will consequently increase food security for rural farmers - including those without access to irrigation systems.

Aside from irrigation, the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) and the national agricultural research system of eight Research Institutes must recognise farmer innovations. Through experimentation, poor rural farmers can diversify their options, develop locally appropriate practices, and enhance their adaptive capacity without the need to invest scarce finances. This kind of experimentation should be encouraged by MoFA, alongside any improvements in irrigation provision.

Ghana has the potential to achieve nation-wide food security, but only through a combination of approaches which include those that are accessible to poor smallholder farmers in the north. Developing irrigation systems is only part of the solution. The government must broaden its efforts to include farmer innovations, alongside outputs from the eight national agricultural research institutes. Of course, physical infrastructure is important, but there is a need to recognise the importance of farmer-based adaptive capacity as a crucial element of achieving food security among the most vulnerable.

References:[1] Burayidi, M.A. (1996) Maximising Irrigation’s Contribution to Sustainable Development in Africa: Lessons from the Tono Irrigation Scheme in Ghana, In: James, V.U. (Ed) (1996) Sustainable Development in Third World Countries: Applied and Theoretical Perspectives, Praeger Publishers, Westport, CT, pp44-61
[2] Speranza, C.I. (2013) Buffer capacity: capturing a dimension of resilience to climate change in African smallholder agriculture, Regional Environmental Change, 13(3), 521-535. Available online (pdf)

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

‘Golden Rice’ and the GM crop debate

2013-06-24T12:01:00.000+00:00

Golden Rice grain compared to white rice grain in screenhouse of Golden Rice plants / IRRI

Guest blog by Sally Brooks, Researcher and Associate Tutor at the University of York, and former STEPS Centre member

In an interview on the Radio 4 Today Programme last week, Owen Paterson, Minister for Environment, outlined his case for a ‘new push’ by the Government to promote the development and adoption of GM crops in the UK.

Interestingly, Mr Paterson’s argument was largely based, not on evidence demonstrating benefits to UK agriculture, but on an account of a project which aims to develop beta carotene-enriched ‘Golden Rice’ as a way to address malnutrition-induced child blindness and mortality, which is a ‘problem mainly in Southeast Asia.’

The decision to back GM crops was presented as a matter of life and death. As Mr Paterson explained: "Over the last 15 years … every attempt to deploy this Golden Rice has been thwarted. And in that time, seven million children have gone blind or died." The implication was clear - those who had ‘thwarted’ attempts to deploy a life-saving technology bore some responsibility for this tragic outcome. Such people, Paterson suggested, "should really reflect".

This is not the first time that the specific case of the Golden Rice project has been deployed as the lynchpin of an argument for policy and regulatory changes to accelerate the commercialisation on GM crops in general. This is problematic for a number of reasons which I have set out in a new article.

The presentation of Golden Rice as a technology that has been available for 15 years, but whose deployment has been delayed only by excessive regulation, is familiar but misleading. In fact, the first genetic transformation, achieved in a Swiss laboratory in 1999, was just the first step in a complex, interdisciplinary research endeavor that has also included plant breeding (to ‘back cross’ the modified materials into rice varieties adapted to the tropical environments of Southeast Asia) and nutritional testing (to find out whether the beta carotene in Golden Rice converts to usable vitamin A when consumed by malnourished children and adults).

As well as bringing more heat than light to an already overheated debate, the deployment of Golden Rice as ‘poster child’ in the GM crop debate has had serious consequences for the way the research has been carried out ‘on the ground’ over the years. In research stations in Southeast Asia, the pressure cooker environment surrounding the project has not been conducive to the kind of open discussion and debate – among crop scientists, nutritionists, public health experts, and others – that an ambitious research effort such as this warrants and requires. Unfortunately, too much hype ‘upstream’ has tended to close down opportunities for open scientific enquiry and debate ‘downstream’, just where it is most needed.

A recent statement issued by the International Rice Research Institute, based in the Philippines (due to be the first country to commercialise Golden Rice) was therefore an important moment in the history of the project. Why was it so important? Because it stated, unambiguously, what is still a key unknown – whether Golden Rice will actually improve the nutritional status of malnourished children and adults. Moreover, it states clearly that the remaining stages of the project, which include both regulatory assessment and nutrition studies to establish whether Golden Rice does indeed have potential to prevent malnutrition-induced child blindness and mortality, will take ‘two years or more’.

It is important, therefore, that at this critical stage in the project, the researchers and their partners in the Philippines are able to complete these studies – and, most importantly, openly share their results, whatever the outcome – unencumbered by inflated expectations and claims generated in support of the adoption of agricultural biotechnologies elsewhere. In the meantime, the GM crop debate in the UK would surely be better served by evidence sourced much closer to home.

Further reading:

Brooks, S. (2010) Rice Biofortification: Lessons for Global Science and Development, London: Earthscan
More of Sally Brooks' publications can be found on her website

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Exposing the political journey of climate change evidence from Exeter to Africa

2013-06-21T09:40:00.001+00:00

The Met Office's modelling IBM supercomputer

Stephen Whitfield, PhD student, Institute of Development Studies (Knowledge, Technology and Society Team)

For someone more used to the quiet productivity and relative inconspicuousness of the PhD office at the Institute of Development Studies, the headquarters of the UK Meteorological Office in Exeter is impressive and intimidating in equal measure. Mazes of desk separators fill vast open plan offices and obscure a sea of computer screens displaying intriguing and animated maps. It feels very much like the climate modelling hub that it is, as much an industrial factory of climate forecasts as it is a place of intellectual exchange and research. You immediately get a sense of the complexity and scale of the whole operation behind producing climate model projections.

My visit to the Met Office back in January 2012 was the beginning of an exciting year in which I had the opportunity to follow these climate model projections all the way to Kenya, to their use in projects that made predictions of the country’s future yields of maize and ultimately in the design of climate change adaptation interventions for smallholder maize farmers.

It was a fascinating process, not just because of the mystery of the sophisticated computer programmes through which vast data sets gradually became simple pictures of the future world, but also because of the way that understandings and meanings became attached to these pictures.

Undoubtedly what went missing along the journey were the uncertainties, assumptions, and methodological choices that were such a big part of the initial modelling endeavour. By the time it came to promoting technologies designed to help farmers adapt to the growing threat of water shortage, for example, the overwhelming outputs of the Exeter’s weather forecast factory had been reduced a single supposed truth, that ‘climate change will lead to increased drought’.

Of course there is a political motivation captured within this end product, but there is also a politics of knowledge that transcends the whole chain through which it is produced.

In a recent paper published in ‘Climatic Change’ - Uncertainty, ignorance and ambiguity in crop modelling for African agricultural adaptation - I begin to unpack some of this politics of knowledge, by looking critically at how the growing complexity of climate impact modelling endeavours, and the journey that their outputs go on, are changing the industry of climate impact knowledge and the nature of this knowledge itself.

Exposing this politics is not about fanning the flames of often unreflective climate scepticism, but is rather a call for a more inclusive and transparent process of evidence production and evidence interpretation. I argue that from a more plural ‘evidence-base’, adaptation programmes, policies and interventions might respond to uncertainty and contextual appropriateness rather than to a reductionist and linear understanding of change.

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Future Earth takes flight with inaugural scientific committee

2013-06-17T13:56:00.002+00:00

Global sustainability research programme Future Earth has announced its inaugural science committee, with ESRC STEPS Centre director Melissa Leach serving as vice chair.

Future Earth is major 10-year international research programme which aims to provide the critical knowledge needed to address the challenges of global environmental change and to identify opportunities for a transition to global sustainability.

Dr Mark Stafford Smith, science director of CSIRO’s Climate Adaptation Flagship, Australia will chair the science committee with Professor Leach, director of the STEPS Centre and Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK and Belinda Reyers, a chief scientist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa, serving as vice chairs.

“In an era of unprecedented environment and development challenges, Future Earth offers the vital opportunity many of us have awaited: to take forward, at global scale, a new paradigm for interdisciplinary, engaged science that will genuinely help build pathways to sustainability, and wellbeing for those who are marginalised,” said Prof. Leach.

“I am delighted at the chance to bring engaged social science perspectives to this endeavour, and to work with a fantastic group of committee members and partners around the world to help make this vision a reality,” she added.

Future Earth was launched in June 2012, at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20). The 18-member science committee – the first Future Earth governance body to be appointed – will make recommendations on projects and priorities for research. It will oversee the transition of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the International Human Dimensions Programme (IHDP) and Diversitas activities into Future Earth, secure strong partnership with the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) community and provide guidance on new activities for Future Earth.

The initiative seeks to answer fundamental questions about how and why the global environment is changing, what are likely future changes, what are risks and implications for human development and the diversity of life on Earth, and what the opportunities are to reduce risks and vulnerabilities, enhance resilience and innovation, and implement transformations to prosperous and equitable futures.

It aims to deliver highest quality science across natural and social sciences (including economic, legal and behavioural research), engineering and humanities. Its research will be co-designed and co-produced by academics, governments, business and civil society from across the world, encompassing bottom-up ideas.

Future Earth is jointly supported by the International Council for Science (ICSU), the International Social Science Council (ISSC), the Belmont Forum of funding agencies, UN Environment Programme (UNEP), UN Educational Scientific Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and UN University (UNU), with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as an observer.

Dr Stafford Smith said: “Future Earth is going to change the way we do science globally. It represents a unique opportunity to provide the research needed to address the biggest challenges of our time on global sustainability, and to do so in partnership with decision-makers.

“We’ve assembled an impressive and truly international team for this committee; we are all looking forward to continuing to develop the science agenda and global networks for this innovative programme,” he added.

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Summer School 2013 begins

2013-05-16T11:50:00.001+00:00

Group discussion on transitions and grassroots innovation

Our annual Summer School has hit the ground running, with 40 students from around the world descending on Sussex to hear and challenge the STEPS Centre's ideas on pathways to sustainability.

So far, we've had a mix of lectures and discussions on topics from the global political economy of climate change (with a guest lecture by the LSE's Prof Michael Jacobs on Monday night) to innovation and transitions at grassroots level.

This morning, Ian Scoones gave a whistlestop tour of thinking on policy processes. Many of us think we would like to change policy - or perhaps make it - but have we thought of what it actually is, and how it is shaped? As policies are developed and evolve, narratives, politics and practices overlap and interact.

You can see a couple of photos from yesterday's walkshop on the theme of 'uncertainty' through the Sussex countryside here and here. You can also follow highlights on our Storify feed and see participants' comments on Twitter using the hashtag #sss13.

We'll be posting video of Michael Jacobs' climate change lecture soon. There's also a chance to join in with the Summer School next Monday 20 May in Brighton, at a public debate on fuel poverty, climate change and social justice with Doug Parr (Greenpeace), Kirsty Alexander (Nuclear Industry Association), Jim Watson (UKERC) and Alice Bell (SPRU).

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

The GM debate should not be closed down to what is rational, but opened up to multiple rationalities…. A response to Chris Whitty and colleagues

2013-05-08T20:02:00.001+00:00

By Stephen Whitfield, PhD student, Institute of Development Studies (Knowledge, Technology and Society Team)

Genetically modified rice / BASF

In a recent commentary published in Nature, Chris Whitty (chief scientific adviser at the UK Department for International Development) and colleagues rightly argue that the (ever-rich and seemingly-unending) debate over genetically modified crops should be premised on an identification of agricultural and food system priorities. But their suggestion that this would make for a ‘rational’ debate is problematic.

The authors argue that a GM debate that is based on societal needs in Africa and Asia should result in the emergence of a very different emphasis than that which is currently characterised in the GM policies of Europe, because of their (questionable) presumption that issues of poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition are prioritised within these continents.

Actually, their prescription has long been taken up by the organisations behind on-going GM crop development projects, including those identified in the paper, in both continents. Public crop breeding institutions, pro-GM lobby groups, and private multinationals alike have been vociferously making the case within GM debates that food insecurity, poverty, malnutrition, climate change, etc. are the ‘rational’ bases on which their technological, ‘pro-poor’ solutions should be supported.

In the case of the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project, the justification for investment in, and development of, the technology is the climate change-driven threat to the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and food security of Africans. This statement is taken from a WEMA policy brief:

“Persistent incidences of drought in Kenya have continued to threaten the food security situation and subjected millions of Kenyans to starvation… modern biotechnology provides a major opportunity to address perpetual maize shortages that are now being compounded by new threats triggered by climate change.”

But the rationality of such arguments belies the denial of the alternative rationalities that it frames out of the debate. Benessia and Barbiero have recognised the tendency for GMOs to be pushed within ‘grand narratives of urgency based on the assumption of a morally binding necessity to bypass any delaying post-normal knowledge production and decision-making process, in favour of a silver bullet’ (p.84).

Of course Whitty and his colleagues are not arguing that rationality does, or must, come from the transgenic crop development projects themselves, but rather from ‘policy-makers’. But the assumption that there is an arbiter of rationality that presides over the GM debate (singular) and makes a final judgement on it is to grossly misrepresent the politics of GM. Crop development projects themselves often progress largely on the wind of their own their own rationalisation of the problems and solutions; they are, to some extent, the makers of their own policy, as are non-governmental organisations, lobby groups and (to a certain extent) farmers and consumers.

Policy debates focus on particular issues – biosafety, importation, labelling etc. – and are not about agricultural and food system pathways, but about regulation, and not about weighing up risks and benefits, but about particular risks and/or particular benefits. There are multiple layers and multiple locations to the governance of GM.

Within these locations, attempts by individuals, bodies, or organisations – both pro and anti – to narrow down the debate to what is ‘rational’ or not ‘emotional’ (to adopt an equally problematic term used by the authors) belies the value base for their own position and essentially, and politically, acts to frame out alternative values. Arguments are perpetually made by the governments of GMO exporting countries, for example, that biosafety regulations should be ‘science-based’ and limited to a concern with issues of health and environmental safety, and yet the motivation behind their position is trade.

But even these environmental and health risks for which there is a conventional, ‘scientific evidence’ base (and of course the societal risks of GM are not and should not be limited to these alone) should not be void of debate about the completeness of knowledge, underlying assumptions and values, and interpretations. The decision by the Kenyan Ministry of Public Health to ban the importation of GM foods, which the authors describe as an emotional decision, was in fact underpinned by an interpretation of a widely criticised (but nevertheless peer-reviewed) scientific study; highlighting quite clearly the ambiguities of the concept of ‘science-based’ regulation and the reality that there is not one objective evidence-based rationality, but multiple evidence-bases and multiple rationalities.

Similarly the relative and absolute benefits of GM crops are negotiable. Metrics of efficacy and preferences for alternative pathways are not easily categorised as ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’, but might emerge from different rationalities, experiences and evidences. As Dominic Glover, amongst others, has shown, for example, the idea that a technology is pro-poor is not a ‘rational’ evaluation, but is actually highly political and based on assumptions.

In considering the GM debate from the problem-based ‘end of the telescope’, as the authors make a case for, it is important to recognise that not everyone’s telescopes are necessarily the same or pointing in the same direction. The risks faced by smallholder farmers may not be limited to food insecurity, poverty, malnutrition and climate change and these risks themselves may be experienced in different ways by different individuals and in different locations. There is a prior set of debates to be had about the priorities for change in agriculture and these must engage with the multiple mechanisms through which contemporary challenges have been created (e.g. opening up beyond the environmental determinism of climate change-driven drought), and the multiple projections of future change (e.g. opening up to multiple directions of climatic change).

I would make the case, therefore, that DFID’s role in the GM debates is not simply to invest in the development of those technologies that emerge as appropriate, but to invest in the broader governance of agriculture, food systems, and technologies in both Africa and Asia, such that capacities for deliberation and debate around direction and appropriateness can be built. These debates are necessarily for everyone, not to be narrowed down to what is ‘rational’ but to be opened-up to multiple rationalities.

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Bird Flu: Panic, Pandemics and Planning

2013-05-02T22:27:00.001+00:00

A steady stream of reports about bird flu infection cases in China over the past month has given way in the past couple of days to panicked confirmations of deaths (27 as of today) and doom-laden projections about what may lay ahead. The new H7N9 strain of avian influenza in China is causing much conjecture about animal-to-human and human-to-human infection and how the spread of this deadly disease can be stopped. But, how might we have better planned for this outbreak in the first place?

"Preparing for flu is simply not just about flu; it is just as much - if not more so - about the interventions that we need to implement in order to manage a pandemic," wrote Professors Ian Scoones, Melissa Leach and Stefan Elbe in a recent blog entitled Pandemic Flu Controversies: What have we learned? for the Huffington Post.

Scoones, Leach and Elbe argue that a better understanding of the social, political, institutional and policy dimensions of pandemic control and preparedness planning can help us deal more effectively with new outbreaks.

A recent workshop attended by 50 top pandemic flu experts explored lessons learned from past outbreaks about how the complex controversies surrounding pandemics and preparedness plans could be diminished or even avoided.

The best possible evidence for policies, being open about unclear evidence, insistence on transparency, the inclusion of diverse sources and forms of cross-disciplinary and local knowledge and expertise, and ensuring that risk communication remains measured and proportionate, to avoid backfiring warnings, were among the recommendations.

As the current avian flu crisis in China is revealing, an approach that includes new ways of working and new organizational mechanisms for assuring global health is urgently needed.

A recently-published briefing, Zoonoses: From Panic to Planning, from the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium sets out recommendations for a new, integrated 'One Health' approach to zoonoses (animal-to-human diseases) which moves away from top-down disease-focused interventions to putting people first, advocating collaboration between disciplines and between local, national and global scales.

The STEPS Centre has been working on pandemic flu for several years and a range of resources on the website might be useful to explore this subject, including film and video, papers, briefings and books.

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Mike Hulme on planetary boundaries and other metaphors

2013-05-01T12:16:00.000+00:00

Spaceship Earth? Photo: NCC-1701-A
by tram_painter on Flickr (cc-by-nc-nd)

Prof Mike Hulme has a thoughtful post on the UEA's 3S blog today on how metaphors affect the way we think (about science and other things), reflecting on a recent talk by Johan Rockström packed with imagery about planetary boundaries, tipping points and other engaging ideas.

Prof Rockström will be coming to Sussex University on 16 May to speak about planetary boundaries and Sustainable Development Goals - part of our Spring mini-series of lectures and debates.

Prof Hulme writes:

"Metaphors abandon the pretence that we can describe things as ‘they truly are’ from a God’s-eye point of view. Rather, they concede that we can only see the world around us and inside us from a human-eye view. Consequently, metaphors are never innocent.

...This is as true of our understanding of the planet as it is of our own bodies. Is the Earth a spaceship to be steered (by us?) on a journey, an Earth mother with whom we must bond or, as in the case of planetary boundaries, a dashboard with dials to be managed so that the indicators are kept out of the red zone?"

You can read the full post on the 3S blog.

(Related: my colleague Julia Day wrote a summary of the debate a few weeks ago between Melissa Leach, Robert Pielke Jr. and Victor Galaz on what the framing devices of planetary boundaries and the 'Anthropocene' might mean for democratic decision-making.

I've also blogged before about research from the USA suggesting how medical metaphors might affect decision-making in crime policy.)

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Could the 3Ds breathe new life into farming systems research?

2013-04-30T12:33:00.001+00:00

by Jim Sumberg, STEPS centre research fellow

Hans Ruthenberg

Hans Ruthenberg’s Farming Systems in the Tropics, first published in 1971, still stands as a classic. Through detailed and systematic treatment of the major tropical farming systems, he demonstrates how – in principle and in practical application – systems theory can be brought to bear on the analysis of smallholder farming.

While he was neither the first nor the last agricultural economist to advocate a systems approach, Ruthenberg made a major contribution in broadening and enriching the arena of farm management studies. In so doing he also helped set the stage for the development of ‘farming systems research’ (FSR) as an exciting new multi-disciplinary (although most often economist-led) field of study.

Much of the formalisation of farming systems research took place within the CGIAR centres in Nigeria (IITA), Mexico (CIMMYT) and The Philippines (IRRI). USAID and other funders eventually piled in, spawning farming systems research units, projects and training programmes throughout the tropics. What had started as an analytical endeavour was thus transformed into a ‘movement’.

But it was only a matter of time before unrealistic expectations went unfulfilled and the bandwagon moved on to the next best thing. Mike Collinson’s edited volume A History of Farming Systems Research, which appeared in 2000, reads like an extended eulogy to unrealised potential.

Perhaps it is now time to breathe new life into research on farming systems in the tropics. With agriculture once again high on the development agenda, and with new ambitions, actors and alliances, surely a systems-oriented research approach has much to offer. After all, notions such as resilience and adaptation, which have become so central to agricultural development discourse, are themselves rooted in systems theory.

But let’s be very clear – it is not a matter of simply dusting off the old Farming Systems Research training manuals and survey protocols.

What the 3Ds could bring to farming systems research

Instead, I believe that a new era of farming systems analysis can usefully draw from the work of the STEPS Centre. STEPS uses the term ‘pathway’ to refer to the development trajectory of a human endeavour (such as a farming system) which results from the co-evolution of social, technological and environmental systems over time.

When considering the outcomes and impacts associated with, and the sustainability of, pathways, three dimensions are of particular importance.

The directionality of change suggests that while it may be possible to identify alternative routes, these are constrained by amongst other things path-dependency and technological lock-in.
The direction of change can be intensely contested, in part because it shapes the patterns of distribution of the benefits, costs and risks associated with innovation.
The third critical dimension of processes of co-evolution relates to their impacts on diversity (of knowledges, actors, processes, biological and other resources and outcomes) and the links between diversity and system properties such as resilience, robustness and sustainability.

I am suggesting that these same 3Ds – directionality, distribution and diversity – could be at the centre of a whole new generation of farming systems analysis.

Such an approach would build on the solid foundations laid down by Ruthenberg, and could help systems-oriented farm research to reclaim its rightful analytical terrain.

Andy Stirling’s working paper (link below) has more detail about the thinking behind the 3Ds.

Stirling, A. (2009) Direction, Distribution and Diversity! Pluralising Progress in Innovation, Sustainability and Development. Brighton: STEPS Centre

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Public events in May: climate, justice, planetary boundaries

2013-04-23T10:19:00.000+00:00

Next month we're running three public events in Brighton on climate change, social justice and planetary boundaries. These events take place during our annual Summer School on Pathways to Sustainability.

All of them are open to the public and free to attend.

Lecture: Michael Jacobs, Grantham Research Institute / LSE'Capitalism, carbon and climate change'
13 May at 5.30 – 7.00pm
Fulton A Lecture Theatre, Sussex University
(This event is followed by a drinks reception - all welcome)

Lecture: Prof Johan Rockström, Stockholm Resilience Centre
'Planetary boundaries and Sustainable Development Goals'
16 May at 4.00 – 5.30pm
Fulton A Lecture Theatre, Sussex University
(This event is followed by a drinks reception- all welcome)

Debate: Fuel poverty, climate change and social justice
20 May at 7.30pm
Jubilee Library, Brighton
Public debate as part of the Brighton Festival Fringe with speakers:

Kirsty Alexander (Head of Communications, Nuclear Industry Association)
Thurstan Crockett (Brighton & Hove City Council)
Doug Parr (Chief Scientist, Greenpeace)
Jim Watson (UK Energy Research Centre)
Chaired by Alice Bell (SPRU – University of Sussex)

Visit the Spring Series event page for more information on all these events.

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Democracy in the Anthropocene?

2013-04-22T11:22:00.001+00:00

Planetary boundaries / Illustration from Global Change magazine

STEPS Centre director Melissa Leach recently wrote in the Huffington Post: "When the cover of the Economist famously announced 'Welcome to the anthropocene' a couple of years ago, was it welcoming us to a new geological epoch, or a dangerous new world of undisputed scientific authority and anti-democratic politics?" Melissa's blog has provoked a series of fascinating responses and contributions to a vital debate about the planetary boundaries concept, the use of scientific expertise and authority within political processes, and the nature of democratic involvement in sustainability debates.

Melissa was reflecting on her experiences as part of a group of experts convened by the United Nations to discuss science and sustainable development goals. She was writing about a particular UN process, and did not claim that the concepts of planetary boundaries, the anthropocene or the scientists developing and working with these concepts, are undemocratic or authoritarian. Far from it.

However she did express concern that the anthropocene could neatly be aligned with top-down, rather than bottom-up solutions to our planet's most urgent challenges: "The anthropocene, with its associated concepts of planetary boundaries and 'hard' environmental threats and limits, encourage a focus on clear single goals and solutions," She wrote. "It is co-constructed with ideas of scientific authority and incontrovertible evidence; with the closing down of uncertainty or at least its reduction into clear, manageable risks and consensual messages."

The Huffington Post piece roused Roger Pielke Jnr, a professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder in to penning a thoughtful intervention on his blog, entitled Planetary Boundaries as Power Grab. Roger wrote: "For the proponents of planetary boundaries as political authority, issues of legitimacy and accountability are easily dealt with through the incontestable authority of science."

The pieces kicked off a very interesting discussion - which can be followed via the comment sections of both Roger's blog - where Melissa added further clarification about her original piece - and that of the Resilience Alliance's blog, Resilience Science. The latter became involved through a response to Roger's post from Victor Galaz, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in political science at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, where Johan Rockström and colleagues formulated the planetary boundaries concept.

Victor countered that: "There is no such thing as one homogenous “political philosophy” for planetary boundaries. And there is no power grab." He listed a number of "vibrant and diverse ways of studying and exploring the governance implications of planetary boundaries" that help explain how planetary boundaries can be used in open and constructive ways. His piece makes persuasive reading.

Following these debates, two PhD researchers at the University of East Anglia - Martin Mahony and Helen Pallett - have penned some rich reflections about the anthropocene on their blog, The Topograph. First Martin, explored the "relevance of the concept 'Anthropocene' to our understandings of how knowledge and politics, and nature and culture, are related to each other". And then Helen went on to talk about her belief that "as an emergent mode of thinking and acting the anthropocene is a potentially productive concept which goes beyond old certainties, assumptions and forms of action."

All of these pieces make fascinating reading, and the opinions expressed might well make you interrogate your own feelings and thoughts about the anthropocene, scientfic authority and the most effective ways to tackle the challenges facing our people and planet. May this constructive debate continue.

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

What multidisciplinary means: Nature doesn't care about our building blocks

2013-04-11T09:43:00.003+00:00

Rats in a maze, by ithinkx on Flickr (cc-by-nc-nd)

The deeper you dig into most matters, the more complex things become. International development research is no different – and, given that it is people’s wellbeing that is the chief concern here, the imperative to pay due regard to such complexity is great indeed.

Dr Gianni Lo Iacono is a mathematical modeller and a partner in the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa Consortium, a large, multidisciplinary research programme convened by the STEPS Centre. The Consortium is exploring the links between disease, ecosystems and wellbeing.

Gianni recently got to grips with just how ambitious this research programme is and how complex things can become when he undertook a field trip to Sierra Leone. Here, the Consortium is investigating the drivers behind Lassa fever – a rodent-borne viral infection common in West Africa, where there are up to 300,000 cases of the disease and 5,000 deaths as a result of it every year.

Writing on the ‘Nature’ blog Soapbox Science, Gianni explains the attraction of a multidisciplinary project such as the Drivers of Disease one.

‘I am a strong advocate of the old-fashioned, reductionist approach. Accordingly, any complex scientific problem should be broken down into its basic building blocks. Of course nature doesn’t care about our traditional compartmental division of science and therefore there is no reason to think that the building blocks must belong to one and only one discipline.’

He says that visiting Sierra Leone was ‘an amazing experience’ and that it ‘illustrated clearly that forcing ourselves to allocate each building block of a complex ecosystem to one discipline alone seems only to set up a path for failure’.

The field trip saw Gianni returning to the UK with more questions than answers. You can find out why by reading Gianni’s blog in its entirely at Nature Soapbox Science.

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Celestial (policy) navigation

2013-04-05T10:14:00.003+00:00

by Jim Sumberg, STEPS Centre research fellow

The proposition that public policy should be ‘evidence-based’ is now widely accepted (although there is still considerable contestation around the meaning, nature, types, and qualities of evidence, the interpretation of evidence, the politics of evidence etc). The evidence in the phrase ‘evidence-based policy’ is often portrayed as evidence about ‘what works, where and for whom’: the ‘what’ might be a policy or technical intervention, and the ‘works’ is understood as the ability to deliver a particular outcome.

There is a second area of evidence that is less commonly referred to in debates about evidence-based policy. This is evidence about ‘what is, what has been and what is likely to be’, which provides a picture (or more likely multiple, partial and contested pictures) of key structures, institutions, alliances, power relations, drivers, trends, outcomes, dynamics and pathways within a particular sector or policy area. Here there is a critical role for historical evidence as it allows for some understanding of what might be thought of as the ‘baseline of change’.

So, the argument is as follows:

Evidence-based policy discourse that focuses on ‘what works, where and for whom’ presupposes the existence of evidence about ‘what is, what has been and what is likely to be’.
In some key policy domains – e.g. in relations to significant parts of the agricultural sector in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa (our STEPS work on the poultry sector in Ghana is a case in point) – the available evidence about ‘what is, what has been and what is likely to be’ is extremely weak (if not misleading or erroneous).
Without evidence about ‘what is, what has been and what is likely to be’, it is pretty much impossible to move to a meaningful consideration of ‘what works, where and for whom’.

And the question is: what is the alternative approach to policy where the lack of evidence on ‘what is, what has been and what is likely to be’ makes it impossible to move to a reasoned consideration of ‘what works, where and for whom’?

Let’s switch for a moment from policy making to navigation. For the mariner, navigation is essentially about: knowing where you are; avoiding danger and hazards; and arriving (eventually) where you want to go. Modern navigation – with GPS (that very precisely locates the ship), electronic chart plotters, tide tables, accurate weather forecasting, etc – has revolutionised the nature of marine transportation. If you know where you are and where you want to go, take all the relevant factors (tides, wind, weather, hazards etc) into consideration through the appropriate algorithm, and steer a true course, you will have a very high probability of (1) not going aground and (2) arriving where and when predicted.

In this way, modern navigation has some important commonalities with the ideal of evidence-based policy. Perhaps most importantly, it is the knowledge about what is, what has been and what is likely to be that both underpins and links precision navigation and evidence-based policy. It is of course true that neither modern navigation nor evidence-based policy making is immune to gales, freak events or changing political weather, which may well require a change or adaptation to course, speed and/or tactics.

But for centuries mariners navigated without the benefit of GPS, radar or accurate charts. Can we learn something from these early navigators that could inform approaches to policy making where the lack of evidence on ‘what is, what has been and what is likely to be’ makes it impossible to move to a systematic analysis of ‘what works, where and for whom’?

Older approaches to navigation were much more approximate. Instead of steering a course to the nearest degree, a general direction of travel toward a desired destination was maintained using stars or other celestial bodies to provide a rough-and-ready steering guide. ‘What is’ (e.g. knowing where you are) was established by observation and simple calculations of angles, speeds and distances. Evidence about ‘What has been’ drew on sailors’ knowledge and experience, while evidence about ’What will be’ drew on their ability to predict upcoming weather conditions, interactions with tides and so on. All of this information was partial so the critical element was maintaining the general direction of travel in the face of uncertainty and constantly changing conditions, as opposed to predicting precisely the time or location of landfall.

The policy maker who is faced with a lack of evidence on ‘what is, what has been and what is likely to be’ is in a position that is more akin to the traditional than the modern marine navigator. Perhaps the most important thing for policy makers in this position is to establish and maintain a general direction of travel. This could be specified broadly, and could easily accommodate fuzzy boundaries. For example, notions like ‘food security’ or ‘sustainable production’ might provide a ‘good enough’ specification of the general direction of travel.
In addition, important hazards and courses to be avoided could also be identified, and (provisional) success defined as NOT taking a number of specific actions rather than arriving at a precise destination. At the level of policy theory, this means identifying a number of necessary conditions for success. Even without the modern technology, celestial navigators knew that there were numerous ways they could reach the desired location (being successful): but none of these paths entailed running aground, losing their crew or going back to the point of departure. Running into bad weather was not necessarily the end of the world: as long as the crew were safe and the ship was not lost or damaged beyond repair, there was always the possibility of getting back on course.

If we follow the celestial navigation metaphor, the job of the policy maker is to assess, using some trusted ‘guiding stars’, various policy options and interventions as to whether or not they are likely to help maintain movement in the general direction of travel (in addition to whether they are affordable, politically acceptable etc etc). It would also be helpful to identify a set of undesirable actions (such as running aground) that must NOT be taken, because NOT taking them is necessary for success.

This seems like a very different proposition than that commonly portrayed as evidence-based policy making. Critically, the focus has moved up a level to the choice of the general direction of travel and the guiding star. The falsely reassuring idea that it is all about objective, technical (‘evidence-informed’) choice amongst competing policy approaches and instruments is no longer at centre stage.

(Images: Compass Study from calsidyrose on Flickr; HMS Beagle in the Galapagos by John Chancellor from nunataak on Flickr)

This article was originally posted on the Future Agricultures blog .

STEPS Seminar: The Entrepreneurial State and the Risk-Reward Nexus: Implications for Innovation and Inequality

2013-03-22T09:57:00.004+00:00

Mariana Mazzucato, Professor of Economics and RM Phillips Chair in Science and Technology Policy at SPRU Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Sussex, will give a STEPS Seminar on Tuesday 16 April on a new framework to study the relationship between innovation and inequality.

Mariana will present a new framework, called the Risk-Reward Nexus, to study the relationship between innovation and inequality. She asks: What types of economic actors (workers, taxpayers, shareholders) make contributions of effort and money to the innovation process for the sake of future, inherently uncertain, returns? Are these the same types of economic actors who are able to appropriate returns from the innovation process if and when they appear? Who takes the risks and who gets the rewards?

She argues that it is the collective, cumulative, and uncertain characteristics of the innovation process that make this disconnect between risks and rewards possible. When, across these different types of actors, the distribution of financial rewards from the innovation process reflects the distribution of contributions to the innovation process, innovation tends to reduce inequality.

When, however, some actors are able to reap shares of financial rewards from the innovation process that are disproportionate to their contributions to the process, innovation increases inequality. The latter outcome occurs when certain actors are able to position themselves at the point where the innovative enterprise generates financial returns; that is, close to the final product market or, in some cases, close to a financial market such as the stock market.

These favored actors then propound ideological arguments, with intellectual roots in the efficiency propositions of neoclassical economics, that justify the disproportionate shares of the gains from innovation that they have been able to appropriate. These ideological arguments invariably favor shareholder contributions to the innovation process over both worker contributions and taxpayer contributions.

The seminar will take place on Tuesday 16 April, 1pm-2.30pm with a room yet to be confirmed at the University of Sussex, Brighton. The room confirmation and further details will be added to the STEPS Centre event page very soon.

Decorating the Christmas tree with perfect Sustainable Development Goals?

2013-03-07T13:07:00.001+00:00

By Katharina Welle, STEPS Centre PhD student

The 2013 STEPS Symposium on “credibility across cultures” examined questions surrounding ‘best available’ scientific advice in relation to global policy processes on sustainable development. One global process discussed at the Symposium is the current United Nations consultation process for setting new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs will form the core of a new global development agenda that will replace the current Millennium Development Goals after 2015.

While following the consultation process – as I did for water supply and sanitation – it becomes clear that the discussion rallies, unsurprisingly, on setting new targets and indicators. To the credit of sector stakeholders, the sector-internal consultations have picked up many of the criticisms voiced against the MDG on water and sanitation: its focus on technical aspects of access to water supply at the detriment of other key aspects encompassing the human right to water (and sanitation).

The consultation document submitted to the UN proposes targets and indicators related to equity, equality and non-discrimination, and the sustainability of services. So far so good, but what about the reality of monitoring and the traction these will have in the political reality of service delivery?

This takes me to some of the comments made by the speakers at the relevant STEPS Symposium session “From MDGs to SDGs: aspirations, evidence and diversity in setting global goals”. For me, the points made by Duncan Green, Senior Strategic Advisor at Oxfam GB (who blogs here), stood out. He highlighted the politics of setting global targets, comparing the process with decorating a Christmas tree: everyone picks and chooses what she wants to see represented under the SDGs. The real challenge however, according to him, is how the post-MDG agenda will influence national policy making?

So, are the SDGs likely to make a difference? Will they be able to influence national level decision making? Paying attention to the politics of knowledge production and to its contested nature, a key theme in the Symposium, is helpful in answering this question.

For instance, when reading the latest official global figures on water supply access in Ethiopia, we learn that rural water access reached 34% in 2010. However, when comparing these with figures released by the Ethiopian Ministry of Water and Energy, we find that official access figures for rural water supply for the same year were 65.8%. So, which figure is right? Is there even an objective figure that I could confidently quote? Attempting a quick answer one could say that much of the divergence between the figures boils down to using different data sources, different indicators and different methods of analysis. In other words, each actor chooses its inputs in appraising rural water access based on political pressures, professional biases, institutional capacity to collect data etc.

The picture that emerges from such insights is starkly different from the seemingly objective reporting of progress against the global development targets: rather, monitoring can be likened to a theatre play where different actors stage performances that reflect their interests and political affiliations.

In Duncan Green’s words it is “politics and power” that lie at the heart of global monitoring regardless of how inclusive the formulation of the new SDGs are going to be. Monitoring is infinitely manipulable – and therefore it is worth paying attention to the power and political dynamics in local monitoring settings rather than stopping short at the formulation of the ‘perfect’ target to decorate the SDG Christmas tree.

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

Why don't we know how to control the spread of Lassa fever?

2013-03-07T11:04:00.002+00:00

Researchers in Sierra Leone are looking at how to prevent Lassa fever - a particularly nasty haemorrhagic virus which can wipe out entire households - by controlling the multimammate rat, which carries the disease. In the past, research on Lassa fever has tended to focus on detection, vaccine development and treatment. This may reflecting the fact that wealthier countries fear the emergence of such viruses "out of Africa", as they see it. But there is much less evidence on prevention and control in areas where the disease is endemic.

The spread of Lassa could be affected by the way many houses are built (with wattle and daub walls, and mud floors), as well as changes in land use (as some farmers move from subsistence rice farming to more commercially-attractive cassava, rubber and biofuel production).

Dr Lina Moses, one of the researchers in the Dynamic Drivers of Disease in Africa consortium, has written an article for the Guardian's Global Development Professionals Network about efforts to investigate how this largely neglected disease could be understood and controlled at a local level.

You can also listen to Melissa Leach interviewing Dr Donald Grant, Chief Physician of the Lassa ward at the Kenema Government Hospital, in the IDS podcast below.

Zoonoses- From panic to planning: Professor Melissa Leach interviews Dr Donald Grant by Ids (Uk) on Mixcloud

This article was originally posted on the The Crossing.

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