What I want to know is how much the rankings in list one differ from list two. An easy way to do that (Solution A)  is to compare the differences:

• A(L1) to A(L2) = three spots lower i.e. -3
• B = three spots lower i.e. -3
• C = same spot i.e. 0 change
• D = three spots higher i.e. +3
• E = three spots higher i.e. +3

Net result is essentially 0, as it should be…for every displacement in list 1 to list 2, there is a corresponding displacement of another item. In the end, they’ll net out at zero change.

So, the proper statistical technique (Solution B) would be to use nominal values — ignoring the +/- — and ending up with 4 changes of 3 spots and 1 change of 0, for a total of 12 spots of difference over 5 items in the list or an average difference of 2.4. So I could argue that the difference in rankings between list one and list two is about 2.5 spots on average. I’m okay up to that point. Not completely sure what that tells me, but it’s a number. I almost think I’m looking at two separate samples from a pool and calculating their degree of deviation from each other, but not quite since it is a full sample of the whole population (i.e. there are only five items in that example), not a “sample”, so I can’t use sampling methodology to see how different it is from some generic population.

So we come to the two complications…the first complication (call it C1) is of scale. My lists aren’t five items long, they are a 100 items long. I don’t think that complicates it too much, just one of “scope” more or less.

The second complication (C2) is much more insidious…the first list is fully ordered, #1-100. The second list, however, is grouped into five unequally sized tiers. I’ll use a smaller example than 100, just 10 to make it plain, and I’ll reverse them just so it is obvious the lists are different…I’ll also tuck in a third list that is for all intents and purposes identical to List One, just grouped differently:

The obvious choice would be to convert List One or List Two to “match” each other…I could, for example, rank I vs. J in List Two to get a #1 and #2 slot, then F vs. G vs. H to get #3,4,5 (Solution C). However, that would require a lot of subjectivity on my part that isn’t very functional. In my list two example, I & J are basically “tied”, no way to differentiate them further.

I could however decide that, like in a sports competition:

• I & J share rank “1″;
• F,G,H share rank “3″;
• D,E share rank “6″;
• C would have rank “8″; and,
• A & B would have rank “10″.

Seems like a good solution (Solution D), right? It’s the way tournaments do it. The problem is if I apply this technique to List Three, which is virtually identical to List One, just grouped into 5 levels instead of 10, the numbers don’t tell you that (i.e. 1: A,B; 2: C,D,E; 3: F&G; 4: H; 5: I&J). If I do comparisons, I’d end up with a total difference of “A=0, B =1, C=0, D=1, E=2, F=0, G=1, H=0, I=0, J=1″ for a total of 6/10 or .6 difference), even though the lists are basically identical.

A second alternative (Solution E) to converting List Two/Three to List One format is to do “average” and uneven rankings…so from List Three, A&B wouldn’t be in position “1″, they would be between 1&2. So I would give them both the average of 1.5; C,D,E would average out at #4 (i.e. spots 3, 4, and 5, averaging out to spot 4), etc. Nominally this would work, i.e. they would “net out” correctly and not nominally, but I would still be left with calculating a difference not in terms of ranking but in terms of methodology of ranking.

Soooo, I think I need to find a way to convert List One into List Two/Three format. Since List Three shows me whether or not my methodology “works”, I’m going to compare List One and List Three for the next part. One way to convert L1 to L3 format is to just divide L1 into equal chunks (Solution F):

1. A,B
2. C,D
3. E,F
4. G,H
5. I,J

This maintains the list format, divides it into equal chunks so not reflecting any bias of methodology in List Three, and preserves the ranking order. But if I then compare this “new” list one with List Three, I would get: A=0,B=0,C=0,D=0,E=1,F=0,G=1,H=0,I=0,J=0 for a net difference of 2 spots out of 10 items. It would show the list was “slightly” different, but not radically so, and would reflect essentially the difference in methodology in this “pure” example. Even if I bump it up to 100 items, those differences should be relatively minor. But again, primarily focusing on methodological differences.

Lastly, I have Solution G — I’ll convert List One into five levels, same as for List Three, but I will make them unequal size i.e. matching the size of the groups from List Three. If I do this for List One, it basically will look identical to List Three and comparing them would give me “net change = 0″ and “nominal change = 0″. Which sounds good, but it basically means that I am “weighting” the results of List One to match the secondary lists’ ranking approach — for example, perhaps the original “weighting” would have been 9 items in Level 1 and 1 item at Level 5, but I wouldn’t know that.  Instead, I’m imposing the ranking / weightings of List Two/Three’s methodology onto the pre-established list in List 1.

Summary

• Solution A (Net changes, matching lists) — doesn’t work as nets out and lists aren’t matched in my applied example;
• Solution B (Nominal changes, matching lists) — doesn’t work as lists are matched in my applied example;
• Solution C (Re-rank List 2) — doesn’t work as no way to differentiate List 2;
• Solution D (Sports tournament) — doesn’t work on similar lists, adds a methodological problem to a ranking approach;
• Solution E (Average rankings) — doesn’t work as it eliminate second methodological problem but still leaves measurement of the different approaches to rankings;
• Solution F (Equal chunks) — semi-works but it would still measure difference in methodology and ranking approach; and,
• Solution G (Weighted chunks) — semi-works as it reflects nominal change of 0 in matching lists, but adds bias of second ranking approach.

The only other thought I had was to combine the results of Solutions D, E, F, and G and take an average of the four approaches. Not sure if that helps or if I’m just compounding my methodological and ranking problems.

Would love some thoughts if anyone has any to share…FYI, this is for personal use, not a work issue, so it doesn’t have to be entirely statistically pure, but I would like a little more comfort with an approach than I have for Solution G currently.

Happy reading,

PolyWogg

When I read the various Op Eds about whether the merger of CIDA and DFAIT will skew “development”, I am constantly shocked by how “general” the conversation is, often talking about one aspect of development while ignoring four others. For those worried that the merger will suddenly mean Canada is no longer doing “development”, don’t be. Canadian projects will still have to fall within the OECD’s definitions of development in order to qualify as “official development assistance” (ODA). DFAIT isn’t suddenly going to start paying for embassies with the International Assistance Envelope and calling it development. Development requires five tests to be met.

1. Money has to flow. It can’t be in-kind contributions or cutting tariffs as part of a new trade deal, it has to be an actual flow of resources. No flow, no aid.

2. Only government money counts. The private sector or the public can do aid too, of course, it just doesn’t count toward ODA. Lots of countries want to count the other organizations too, reflecting  a different view of the role of government and the people, but only government assistance counts.

3. A developing country has to be the recipient. This means we can’t suddenly do “aid” in the U.S. or France. However, considering there are 148 countries on the OECD’s list of eligible recipients, including some high-income developing countries, this may give some pause. On the other hand, India, China and Brazil have disparity issues with huge populations living below the poverty line that would dwarf the combined population of the lowest 48 on the list. In other words, you can still do aid in those countries and focus on those who need it most, and still be doing “development”.

4. Benefit of developing countries. This is the big element in CIDA’s favour as you can’t suddenly just do things in Canada’s interest and call them aid. So the OECD has a list of activities that count (health, education, etc.) and a list of those that don’t (military spending, peacekeeping, anti-terrorism). While you may see Canada do some upstream activities like PSD or trade-related technical assistance rather than “basic human needs” type programming, most of the rhetoric focuses on the potential for skewing priorities away from the most vulnerable — like those receiving humanitarian assistance. But DFAIT has always been on board for humanitarian assistance, so no reason to expect that to change.

5. Grant / concessionality. Since most donors don’t do “loans” anymore, this is almost irrelevant because all the Gs&Cs are “grant/concessional” (i.e. the test is if more than 25% of the project is concessional, while in fact CIDA projects are 100% concessional).

So when pundits say that “pure development” will be compromised, I think they’re dancing on the head of a rhetorical pin. While they want to suggest that the money won’t be for development anymore, projects still have to fit the OECD definition of development (however wobbly that definition is). For Canadian aid, of the five elements, 1 (flow), 2 (government money) and 5 (grant) won’t change. The only possibility for change is on 3 (which countries) or 4 (types of projects). It’ll still go to developing countries, it’ll still be development projects.

But if we’re going to have the conversation about how part 3 or 4 will be compromised, can we at least dig down a little deeper? Because there is a lot better debate if one is talking about in which eligible countries the aid will reach the most in need or talking about how one form of development is better/more effective than another, rather than just using ill-defined rhetoric to sayi CIDA’s way is development and DFAIT’s suggestions are not.

 Okay, so I missed a lot of my content. But at just under 600 words, it’s not a bad summary of what I was trying to say.  Thanks for the challenge!

Happy reading,

PolyWogg

Yet, even as people focus on the short-term (CIDA: We got FACked!, FAC: DFATD, not DeFeATeD!) and medium-term (calling all pundits), it isn’t in my opinion anything close to the greatest threat facing the new DFATD in the long-term.

To borrow a cliché, CIDA and FAC are two unique cultures separated by a common language around Canada, goverment and internationalism.

FAC has culture?

I know, it comes as a shock to most people. But I mean small “c” culture, not Cultural Affairs-type culture, although many of them have that too. So, let’s look at that culture. And, reader beware, I might even say some nice things about them.

Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) are a pretty impressive workforce, at least on paper. Highly educated, a lot of lawyers and economists, many with strong international experience before they join, and language skills. With thousands applying every year, and ongoing recruitment almost every year for 100 lucky souls, FAC has a pretty good system and time-honed methodology for recruitment and interviewing. Sure, they tweak it a little bit here and there, sometimes looking for more lawyers here or fewer economists there, this or that language speciality, etc., but they know what they are getting.

That’s just to get in the door. Then they send them all on french training to get their CCC profile in their second language, although many get EEC or EEE. While the rest of the government gets by on English / French essential or BBB profiles, Foreign Affairs needs fully bilingual people to represent our country in our two official languages. The downside of course to full-time language training is two-fold. The obvious one is cost, and the main reason other departments don’t do it. The second, less obvious, downside is that full-time language training is not as much fun as one might think, and you spend up to a year talking about your job, your background and your opinions on anything and everything. Isolated. With other FSOs who look like you, talk like you, and on a bad day in the mirror, are, in fact, you. This may lead to one of two extreme results — you’re either so fed up with talking about yourself that you’re willing to do anything else, or you end up a raging narcissist who firmly believes in the divine right of Kings passing from King/Queen to PM to FSO. That’s not a side-effect for some, but part and parcel of being able to say to someone, “Canada believes…” and not feel the least bit ridiculous doing it.

Then they start actually working at HQ. Fort Pearson. Again, extremely isolated from the rest of Government. So who do they talk to? Diplomats from other countries during working hours, each other at lunchtime and in the halls, and if you’re a baby diplomat, a lot of young politicos on the Hill in your dating life. Many with the same credentials and background. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about blue blood backgrounds, although there are some of those, just that you get a very unique crop of people if everyone has a pretty strong resume just to start work.

But I know what you’re thinking — didn’t I say I was going to say something nice about FSOs? I am. Really. Right now. Between the selection process, early training, and early work experience, plus a very top-down heirarchical organization, you get a very polished product out of all of it. Highly educated people going in, fully bilingual people coming out with knowledge of political relations, trade deals, negotiations, compromise, and building interpersonal (albeit superficial and transient) relationships with partners.

If you take a group of strongly skilled individuals, isolate them from the rest of Government, wave a flag in front of their nose, spend tons of money on training them, get them to the point where they feel comfortable speaking on “behalf” of a country without the pain of an election, and then make them define themselves in basic competition with other diplomats, you get a very strong corporate identity for the Foreign Service Officers who survive the first five year assimilation process.

They become Canadian FSOs. They think corporately, they share information corporately. They respect hierarchy as the saviour from chaos or at least from looking inconsistent. They meet high level foreign diplomats and talk about issues of substance, but they see themselves as part of the machinery that shapes, molds, and delivers Canadian Foreign Policy. They are strong, they are proud, and they operate with a common groupthink mentality. Or at least that is how it seems to a lot of outsiders — indistinguishable widgets. One country desk, one FSO, and if one falls, there’s another lining up to take their place.

Take for example a trip by an FSO. Sorry, I mean a mission. What is the first thing they do when the mission ends? They write a report. They’ll sanitize the crap out of it, make it almost bland by the time they’re done, but it will be tighter than most academic papers at even a graduate level. No mistakes in nuance. Nothing left to interpret unless it’s sensitive. They know the difference between enhance, strengthen and improve, and they care deeply which one they use to convey the perfect description. They live and die by the word, and it will be clear and informative. Then they send it. And they will copy a good chunk of the Department. Anyone who could possibly benefit from that report will get a copy. You do not hoard information from the Collective, unless it’s sensitive. Because heaven forbid that a FSO who works on China desk didn’t get a copy of the latest APEC reporting email (I almost wrote TELEX there, dang I’m old) and doesn’t know what China, Taipei and Hong Kong said at the meeting on trade promotion. In the past, it was also a given that you sent it to “divisions” (i.e. you would send it to the China division), not to named individuals. It was their position in the structure that made them be copied, not just their personality. Plus, with a highly rotational staff, someone else could be doing the job this week. So you copied the division.

If you work in another department, you could read that paragraph above, and think “So what? We copy everybody too.” Except you missed the nuance — they copied people not to cover their own ass, but to share info. It’s expected. You have to do it. Thou shalt not leave someone off the official distribution list. One of the first rules of Fort Pearson. But here’s the real kicker — people actually read the dang reports. And use the info from it. LOTS of people. It’s part of their job. They are super-desk-officers who crave intel from anyone, anytime, anywhere. They are sponges who absorb, never knowing when it might be useful. But they all do it. Both in sending and receiving. Maybe not automatically or by instinct in the first five years, but if you do your first posting, return to the hell that is headquarters, and stay on, you will be assimilated into that culture.

Of course, around town with other departments that do international affairs, most of them think FSOs are all a bunch of giant asses. Arrogant, substance-free, suits with no idea of how real policy or programming is done. Indistinguishable widgets who know nothing about the substance of the OGD’s files, but want to tell them how to do international relations. Of course, from the FSO perspective, most of the OGD’s are not people you want to take to dinner with foreign diplomats, nor trust with “representing Canada”. Heck, most of them aren’t even fluently bilingual let alone the fact that they’re willing to push narrow policy agendas over ensuring lasting bilateral relations.

But FSOs are, as a bunch, extremely impressive. I’m of the view that no matter where you work, what sector or industry, what type of work you do, etc., there is always deadwood somewhere around you. The guy who just phones it in and couldn’t care less, the gal who spends too much time socializing. Usually you can figure out in a few weeks or months at most who are the “strong” players and who are the “weak” members of the herd. When I worked at DFAIT, it took me almost two years to be able to tell “weak” FSOs from “strong” ones, but I would generally say it was more “average ones” from “really strong ones”. They’re professional, they clean up nice, they write and talk well, and they deal with weighty issues. And they represent THEIR COUNTRY! Heck, if they worked for DND, they’d be taking over countries and establishing colonies. Let’s be grateful they only fire words at other people.

CIDA embraces cultures

So imagine going from that environment — strongly hierarchical, strongly corporate, highly professional environment, where most wear suits every day — to CIDA. CIDA is not hierarchical, it is not corporate-minded in its operations, it is highly professional but in a very different way, and most people do not wear suits unless they’re an EX. Culture shock isn’t the word for it.

Let me tell you about how I went from DFAIT to CIDA in the first place. Despite having far more interest in municipal government than international government, I left my academic studies as a law and MPA student to work for DFAIT. I started as a lowly graduate co-op student, then a contractor with larger and larger per diem rates, then a general desk officer, and then a term information officer. I did summits, logistics, wrote reports, attended bilateral meetings, wrote more reports, acted as liaison officer a few times, etc. Lots of junior FS type work, without the formal training. And generally got indoctrinated into the culture.

It really wasn’t a good fit for my blue collar domestic administration leanings, but they are a pretty impressive bunch, so I wrote the exam and made it to the interview stage before bombing out. My bosses told me to reapply the next year, and so I did. Except they had changed the criteria somewhat and one of the academic groups I’d qualified in before wasn’t available that year. So I said that I had 3 years experience working for the Department. In the wonkiness that is DFAIT HR, they decided that experience working for the Department doing junior FS work was not as relevant as having studied abroad, and I got screened out. Apparently they even had to have a meeting to discuss me because a bunch of people on the board disagreed with the screening out — I met one of the Board members almost 10 years later, and he remembered my name enough to ask me if I had been that guy! At least I made an impression. The next year they instituted a dual process — one for internal candidates and one for external candidates, but by then I had already made it through the process at CIDA. For me, it was another international department, a way to become indeterminate. I wasn’t a Birkenstock-wearing, dyed in the wool (literally), card carrying development officer. In fact, I apparently shocked CIDA because I requested the Multilateral Branch as my first choice, UN Division if possible. Nobody had ever asked for a non-bilateral branch before.

So my first week at CIDA was that shock I mentioned. One of my first assignments was to comment on a paper from their policy branch. It had been drafted, talked about what was going on internationally on a narrow but emerging area, and they circulated it for comment. As I read it, I realized that they had almost nothing about what the UN had done on the file, nothing from G8, nothing from Commonwealth, APEC, etc. It really just summarized what a couple of key donors had done. It was good, but far from what DFAIT would have considered complete. So I did a bunch of research, even stayed late a couple of nights to drill down on some of the details, added about 6 pages of tight prose to a 10 page document, covered a bunch of multilateral institutions. I was green, so I missed a couple of big ones that I should have known about, but it was pretty good. So I showed it to my supervisor who basically admitted he hadn’t expected that much work so fast, and that level of substance. He read it, our DG read it, and they approved it. With no changes other than a minor edit or two. At DFAIT, it would have gone through at least three edits, and the first one would have been fairly substantial. Nope, I got “Good work. Send it.”

I realized as I was about to press send that it was on behalf of the branch, so I checked to be sure I was copying the VP (ADM level) of our Branch. Yep, there was her divisional acronym. Clicked on it, the computer whirred for a second, and it replaced the link with her name. Did it again, same result. Asked my boss who said, “Oh, right, good idea, let’s copy her. And yes, it goes to her by name, not division.” I gave them a draft of the email, with the distribution list — but only got a puzzled response. They really couldn’t figure out why I was asking who else to copy. First rule of DFAIT — don’t leave anyone off. First rule of CIDA — send first, copy later if you think of it. So I pressed send.

That night, as I was getting ready to go, the ADM stopped by my cubicle. It was before 5:00. She was leaving. I had met her earlier in the week, as part of the general meet and greet tour, but you do that just about anywhere. Remember, this is an ADM level person in charge of $500M in programming per year. She stopped by my cubicle, having to go out of her way to get there, to tell me she appreciated the work I did on the input, and even mentioned a couple of key sections she liked (to show she’d read it). After she left, I went to see our DG and the deputy director and I told them they had to ease me into this culture thing at CIDA — positive feedback, relaxed approach to writing reports, fast approvals, flat hierarchies? That was NOT the government work I was used to! But I liked it!

So, let’s back up a bit and do the same analysis as for FAC. CIDA was not actively recruiting every year like DFAIT — CIDA’s workforce is relatively stable. It doesn’t turn over like DFAIT’s did, people tended to come and stay pretty much for life. There were no front page articles in the Ottawa Citizen saying you could make more money as a roofer than an FSO or that it was more fun in academia. People often got hired through interactions already with the Department. Or straight from NPSIA. Some people hired back in the late 70s, early 80s did so by coming for an interview, and being told to “take any desk”. They hired people with development backgrounds, sure, but it wasn’t based on a tried and true methodology like DFAIT had been using. It was simpler and it worked just fine — like DFAIT’s recruitment base, if you want to work for government and do development, there’s only one real place to go. So when there was an opening, CIDA had no trouble filling it with a bright shiny development wonk.

The other influx of people at CIDA were a strong cadre of former FSOs who were given a choice at one point — convert to being a political FSO or move to CIDA. Those who were unhappy in the DFAIT structure jumped to CIDA where promotions were more likely and less political. Not surprisingly, a lot of women jumped at the time. While it would be hard to say CIDA management has been gender friendly writ large for its staff, it shines in comparison with DFAIT where representation in upper ranks used to be abysmal and if you got pregnant while on posting, you were sent back to Canada, never to return. Your posting was just “done”.

Training at CIDA is, umm, what’s the word…missing. Yeah, missing. As in mostly non-existent. Forget language training to full fluency, it’s not needed. If they need C level french for programming, they use francophones. BBB is encouraged, but getting approved for it is far from automatic. You can however have as much training as you want in how to work the financial systems. That is the bread and butter of bilateral programming — disbursing funds. No money, no development. So you get MAs and Ph.Ds approving contracts and contribution agreements, working computer systems to get project memos going, and generally doing a lot of administration that most departments do on the “back-end” with non-subject-matter-experts. But if you want to do bilateral program design, which requires your development knowledge, you do program operations too. It goes with the job.

When do you start work? The first day. No shipping you off for months of training. Nope, you start pretty much immediately. But unlike FAC where you identify as an CANADIAN FSO, most people at CIDA have a different identity path. They see themselves as part of a global development network. They are aid workers, development officers, humanitarian assistance providers. That is their primary identity card. After that, it varies somewhat. I’ve joked that many of the CIDAites conveniently forget they work for the Government of Canada, but it isn’t untrue either. Many of them like to believe that they work for the largest NGO in Canada, just with better pay and benefits yet fewer chances to “see or do” real development on the ground. Just as some junior FSOs are rudely awakened to the reality that their life won’t be one long diplomatic reception but rather a series of interminable meetings and report writing interspersed with interesting events, many Development Officers (DOs) at CIDA start work there thinking they are going to be “doing” development without realizing that like most government Gs&Cs programs, they will be “funding” others to do the work, not doing it themselves.

The real work of CIDA though is in setting up those funding arrangements. Not the “funding” itself, those are just cheques, but in the development of projects, sequencing of work items, what any other department would call “program and project design”. Working with countries and NGO partners to come up with funding priorities and a “country strategy” that can guide the programming…in short, identifying needs and finding ways together to meet them. It isn’t the short-term and somewhat transient relations of DFAIT, but hopefully deep partnerships on concrete projects that will “do” something, make a change in someone’s life.

How does it work? Pretty dang well, but it’s hard to tell because unlike DFAIT, CIDA has almost no clue how to tell the right stories to toot their own horn. After all, they are part of a global network so the network takes credit, not an individual program or project. But CIDA doesn’t think “corporately” as DFAIT does. Instead, it tends to be flatter in behaviour, yet surprisingly siloed. They share information on best practices by sector — such as horizontal info sharing on education projects — but generally speaking, country programs work in isolation from other country programs. If someone goes on a trip, the only one who cares about the report on Bangladesh is the Bangladesh division. Nobody else is likely even to be copied, certainly not their Policy Branch. Unless there is a para on education projects, that might get forwarded to the education people. But while someone might think of themselves as part of the “Asia” group, there is no sense that they are all part of an Asia branch strategy, working together on a common goal for Asia. The goals are alleviating poverty and facilitating development, not waving a flag. So, going back to the identity thing, they are not CANADIAN DOs, they are GLOBAL AID WORKERS who work for the Canadian government. Some feel patriotic about it, some don’t.

Simple examples

As an example of how things differ between departments, look at Junior Advisor positions at the UN for the yearly General Assembly. At DFAIT, it is an annual bloody battle to be chosen as one of the JAs going to New York for three months. It is DFAIT HR at its worst — old boys networks making calls, pressure from Ambassadors on the decision-makers, backstabbing amongst competitors. And it is not unwarranted bloodsport. There are few temporary duty assignments for political FSOs before their first posting; UNGA is one of them. So everyone wants it. And those who get it have a leg up in their first posting competition — after all, if you have a bunch of indistinguishable widgets, and one of them has good work experience that the others don’t, you might hire them for the best first postings. They come back with better experience than the person who took a tier 3 quality posting, so they get better jobs when they reintegrate. Which snowballs. End result? A disproportionate number of EXs at DFAIT who are former UNGA junior advisors.

Hop over to CIDA. The Agency STOPPED sending people to UNGA for awhile because (a) nobody was interested and (b) it was expensive. DFAIT asked for help a few years later, they reinstated the JA position for a CIDAite, and so the Multilateral Branch chose someone the first year. No real competition, there was only one person in the Branch interested. Year 2, it was me…there might have been other candidates, but I worked in the UN division, so I was an automatic lock (at DFAIT, being in the UN division actually hurt some people in some years competitions!). We ran it the next year as an open competition, mainly at my urging, and we had about 8 candidates apply. Other years it was one or two, some years it went to fifteen, some years it was someone who worked in the right division. No battles, no political process. Relatively open and transparent, and heavily reliant on people from previous years talking up the experience. Not something most people at CIDA would want to do — policy, multilateral, relations work. If it ain’t on the ground, they’re not interested.

Same story for Cabinet Affairs jobs. People at DFAIT have been known to be somewhat, umm, aggressive in seeking those positions; at CIDA, they ran the notices several times trying to solicit interest and finally had to advertise openly across Government. Not a priority for Development Officers.

For me, it was heaven. I love corporate stuff, I love policy work, I think more multilaterally than bilaterally, and I tend to think organizationally anyway. I had lots of opportunity to move up informally while waiting for my substantive level to catch up, and it was great. I even got to work in the DM’s office without a lot of competition to get there at the time. But it’s also really hard doing corporate work in an Agency that does not think corporately. On a good day, you’re pushing string; on a bad day, you’re wondering how the heck someone can work for a government department and think it is okay to go to Quebec City and protest their government’s international policies. On a bus paid for by their union. There is something called a “duty of loyalty” and it is attached to that paycheque they cashed. Not to mention they were partially protesting policies that their own coworkers at CIDA had been part of developing. At DFAIT, you’d be fired, on the spot. At CIDA, nobody batted an eye. Cuz their passion comes from their identity as global aid workers and it goes with the job.

But it doesn’t change the fact that the DOs are a highly professional group with a strong skill set and extensive knowledge in their area. Just not in the way DFAIT expects to see it or operates.

So, what now, Brown Cow?

You have FSOs who are really good at one particular form of strategic policy and generic priority-setting (high on corporate coordination, low on evidence-based analysis). And you have DOs who are really strong and knowledgable about program design and project operations (high on process and results monitoring, low on corporate coordination). For some departments, that would sound like a match made in heaven — a good handoff point. But the problem is they are experts in two different types of internationalism, have two completely different corporate identities and cultures, and require two completely different ways of working.

If DFATD goes for a full integration model, the crap is going to hit the fan as soon as the first competition comes along for an EX job. By standard practices, anyone at the EX minus 1 level would be eligible to compete. Let’s look though at the various components of an EX position:

• Size of workforce managed — neither group manages large groups of people, too many people reporting only to the Director, so mixed outcome;
• Complexity of file — relations are usually considered more complex than managing Gs&Cs, so DFAIT gets the edge;
• Size of budgets — CIDA has smaller operating budgets perhaps but the programming budget of some divisions dwarfs entire branches of DFAIT, so CIDA gets the edge;
• Visibility of files — Mixed, depends on country files, but DFAIT probably gets the edge since most Canadians can’t spell “development”;

You will have people with very different skill sets all competing for the same EX jobs. Worse still if it is a more senior EX job like an ADM-level position. Whichever way the competition is run, and what weighting is given, neither side is going to be happy.

At the working level, they do have two things in common though, and neither are good from an HR perspective. First, the working level for FSOs is FS2 and 3; for DOs, it is PM5 and 6. Which means if they don’t get an EX position, the likelihood is they could go their entire careers with only one promotion. Sure, they get lateral positions and postings, but no promotions. Second, both groups are represented by what are, for all intents and purposes, extremely dysfunctional unions (PAFSO and PSAC) who have a hard time articulating what the majority of their membership actually wants (both unions have a history of recommending against contracts that they claim are not what their members want, only to have those same members ratify them, plus many of the members view any union as suspicious as they don’t think “professionals” should have or need unions).

Potentially unhappy professional groups, with possibly little chance for promotion, and potentially poor labour representation. What could possibly go wrong?

Which in a nutshell is why I think the long-term challenges for DFATD are enormous. How do you get two such disparate cultures to work together? I live for structural issues, corporate problems, and HR challenges, and I confess, I haven’t got a freakin’ clue where to even start. All I can say is good luck.

Happy reading,

PolyWogg

Take for example two very different articles about government and laws in today’s New York Times. The first, about Latvia of all places, reflects the decision that government works best when it is “by the people”. Political engagement at the grassroots level. In Latvia, because they had low political engagement by its citizens, they launched a rule — if a citizen gets 10K signatures on a proposal for legislators, their Parliament will look at it and consider it. Think of it as the deep deep deep deep backbencher option for a private member’s bill.

The plight of local dogs left tied up alone outdoors has long bothered Mr. Grunte, a soft-spoken father of two and a translator of technical documents. So in January he went online and, using ManaBalss.lv, a Latvian Web site whose name translates to “My Voice,” created a parliamentary bill to make the practice illegal in Latvia. “I’ve never done anything political before,” he said. “But this was very easy.”

With the help of ManaBalss, he has a chance to see his proposal enacted into law by the Latvian Parliament. Thanks to a parliamentary rule passed shortly after the opening of the ManaBalss site in 2011, initiatives that gather 10,000 signatures from citizens 16 or older must be taken up by Parliament. Signatures can be gathered online, where they are verified using the same transaction codes that Latvians use for online banking.

Two more ManaBalss initiatives, one about traffic law and another about who should pay for hepatitis C treatment, are under consideration in Parliament..

via A Web Site Where Latvians’ Ideas Can Become Law – NYTimes.com.

When I read an article like this, my mind starts raising in a bunch of different directions:

1. Low citizen engagement, a lack of trust in government, so they need to find new ways to engage. I get it.
2. It took an entrepreneur to set up and run the website? Doesn’t that strike anyone not only as ripe for abuse but also just reinforcing the lack of trust in government?
3. It’s only 10K signatures to get Parliament to look at it, and e-signatures count? Maybe it’s because Latvia has only 2.5m people, but that seems like a pretty low threshold to tie up Parliament’s time with potentially ill-advised, ill-conceived, poorly-designed proposals;
4. EC, Finland and Iceland are experimenting with doing the same…none of which are “western-style” democracies with similar views of the role of government as Canadians and Americans have, I wonder how portable it is; and,
5. It’s hard to argue with results — frivolous ideas fall by the wayside pretty quick, but the support for the e-signature petitions has already passed Parliament as well as transparency regarding off-shore holdings, with consideration pending for how to and who should pay for Hep C treatments and revisions to traffic laws.

I’m doubtful it would work in Canada very well, unless it was equally scalable — perhaps 100K+ signatures, and as with Latvia, verified e-signatures not simply sign up with fake email addresses and home addresses. Wouldn’t be hard to do with Elections Canada or CRA data.

Then I read an article that takes a Western-style democracy and tosses the goals of due process and fair elections out the window, despite lots of legal protections in place. Meet Nelson L. Castro, NY assemblyman and informer on corruption in government. And, oh, yeah, he’s guilty too:

Since 2009, just nine months after he was elected to the Assembly, he had led a double life: simultaneously representing the West Bronx in the Legislature, and informing on his colleagues to state and federal prosecutors investigating public corruption.On Thursday, Mr. Castro abruptly said he would resign under a deal to avoid prosecution himself, after the United States attorney in Manhattan announced that his cooperation had led to bribery charges against Assemblyman Eric A. Stevenson, a fellow Democrat whose district adjoins that of Mr. Castro, as well as four other men.

<snip>

Lawmakers are transfixed — and, in some corners, alarmed — by a situation that seems more Hollywood than Albany: a legislator working for years as a law enforcement mole, all the while introducing bills and casting votes like any other legislator.

<snip>

Mr. Castro, 41, agreed to work with prosecutors after he was secretly indicted on three counts of perjury in the summer of 2009; the government claimed that in 2008, before he was elected, he lied during testimony he gave under oath during a lawsuit brought by a political rival who had accused him of election law violations. Almost immediately after he was notified of the sealed indictment, in August 2009, he began cooperating with the Bronx district attorney’s office; in 2011 he began working with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

<snip>

Mr. Castro’s cooperation was apparently valuable enough that prosecutors kept from the public the fact that he had been indicted, allowing him twice to successfully run for re-election, in 2010 and 2012.

via Assemblyman and Informer, Nelson L. Castro Led Double Life – NYTimes.com.

It is that last paragraph that bothers me horrendously. I get that corruption in government undermines the very fabric of the society that has been created. I get that it is an evil that comes as close to a form of treason as you can without actually endangering the national security of your country. But to combat that corruption by withholding information from the electorate (i.e. that he was indicted on perjury charges) which goes to the very credibility of the candidate for whom that electorate is casting votes, and to do it not only once, but twice? As Machiavelli said, one must always look to the means, and while I admire their end goal, the means in this case do almost as much harm.

But that’s just me apparently.

Happy reading,

PolyWogg

In the past, you had authors who produced content as a raw product, agents who marketed those raw materials to publisher after publisher, or editor by editor at each publisher, and publishers who took the raw product, massaged it, processed it, turned it into a final product, and took the sellable version to market. And there were huge barriers to entry into the market — agents wouldn’t take just anyone, publishers often wanted only agent-repped products, stores and libraries would mainly take books only from the Big Six publishers or their subsidiaries. Breaking into those areas would give you huge leverage, but they were jealously guarded corridors of power.

However, in recent years, the whole business model has been disrupted end to end…authors can get their books on Amazon and in ebook form without an agent or a publisher. They can get their own ISBN numbers, they can form small publishers to hide their “self” status if they want. They can hire copy editors, substantive editors, cover artists, publicists, anybody that the Big Six used to hire for big names. And, shhh, don’t tell anyone, but a lot of those editors and artists and publicists are the same ones the Big Six use, just selling their wares as freelance.

It’s a fascinating time for disruptions in the industry, so I was excited to see what the Guardian published on “Ten Ways Self-Publishing Has Changed the Books World”:

After a boom year in self-publishing the headlines are getting a little predictable. Most feature a doughty author who quickly builds demand for her work and is rewarded with a large contract from the traditional industry.

<snip>

1. There is now a wider understanding of what publishing is…

<snip>

5. The role of the author is changing…

<snip>

7. New business models and opportunities are springing up,

via Ten ways self-publishing has changed the books world | Books | guardian.co.uk.

I don’t agree with most of the conclusions of the author of the article, or at least not the nuances, but I do agree with the general trend. I was surprised though that they didn’t hammer home more on the issue of “time to market”. Overall, that is the largest single change that is disrupting the industry. Within days of the selection of the new Pope, authors were putting up books on Amazon. Some of them quite substantial and high-quality. In traditional publishing, the window would have been 18-24 months normally or super high rush could do it in 6 perhaps. I think too that Indie bookstores who are excited about getting in on Kobo sales should look instead at the POD market — there are printers that you can have in your shop, giant photo copier/printers essentially, that can print and blue-bind a book with a glossy cover in about an hour. Any book, any time, hard copy. That’s disruption.

Ironically, the person who called and left me a message on my home phone did so first and said, apparently, “Great, tablet’s fixed, come get it”. However, they had a backup number for me at work, and the message there was, “Hi, I left a message on the other phone number but just realized that information was wrong. So let me tell you on this message that your tablet couldn’t be fixed, and you should come in for our exchange program.”

I’ll ignore the fact that if I got the first message she left, I would have been rather rudely surprised to get to the store only to be told it WASN’T fixed, but nevertheless, I knew, and prepared accordingly.

I read the F/S exchange clause which is as bad as you might think. The salesmen tell you it is either “full money back” or “replacement”. Well, no, it’s not. You see, the Toshiba Thrive that has gone to its eternal home of rest has no brethren available to exchange for it — F/S can’t give me a new one. So the warranty allows them to give me a refurbished one. Nope, also not available. So plan C says “equivalent tablet”.

Ruh-roh. I’ve read absolute horror stories about stores saying a much lesser model was the equivalent and people having to fight tooth and nail to get anything remotely comparable. Not to mention avoiding a crappy refurbished throw-back. So I figured, okay, let’s look at the specs of my tablet that were relatively unique, that I paid more for, and that other tablets probably won’t have, making it difficult to find a perfect equivalent. Made some notes and off to store.

For my Thrive, they found an equivalent Asus model pretty fast and I was immediately suspicious. But it was the same size. With same basic processor, dual core, same speed. Dang. Same resolution of screen. Version of android was actually even better. Shoot. I read an online review and it said basically, “Same as the Thrive” — yep even the review sites said it was the same. Crap. Cuz the Asus is $100 less than what I paid 18 months ago.

So I pull out my specs…SD card slot — yep. Shoot. Ah-hah, the full USB port? Yep, that too. So I’m figuring I’m screwed. Because although I know they have none in stock at this point, they’re going to give me that dollar value as the store credit.

But as I’m reading the review, I noticed something. The new Asus model has only one camera, mine had two. I never used either one, but that’s not my goal in noticing. Hmm…so I wandered back over and suggested casually to the customer service person that I would like to talk to the techie again, not threatening or pushy, just casually as I’m not sure it really is the equivalent model since it doesn’t have the second back-facing camera.

She noted though that since it is going to be a store credit anyway, I should talk to the manager instead, so I said sure. He wanders over, I was polite and casual, and said I was happy to take the store credit, just wasn’t convinced this was the right “equivalent model” since it didn’t have the camera. I was hoping for another $30-50 in credit out of it, but he agreed with me, said there wasn’t really another model to suggest, and therefore said they’d just do the store credit. For the full price I paid 16 months ago.

I said, “Well, okay, if you’re sure that’s the best way to handle it” while inwardly saying “Start the car!”.

I won’t forget the crappy treatment, I won’t forget the stress, I won’t forget that I’ve been without the tablet for last six weeks (something Jacob kept asking me about until he got his own recently). But the manager did the right thing, the simple thing, and it was no big deal for him either. Just an obvious solution for something that was only $100 difference.

Now, on my cynical side, I know that it isn’t really costing them anything as the bill goes to the insurance company that provides their warranty business. F/S doesn’t really care. And it’s store credit anyway, so they’ll get the money back meaning they gave me a store credit for something that has 40% markup and they’ll still have that profit later when I buy whatever I buy with that credit. And sure, I’m out some other money — the price of the warranty, a screen shield, molded case for the tablet, and an extra power bar that only fits the Thrive.

But I got exactly what I wanted out of the transaction — my money back and an open option to buy whatever dang tablet I want at this point, not just a short list from them.So I have to say F/S didn’t screw me. Stay tuned for more on my newly launched tablet search. And that groan you just heard? That was Andrea anticipating buyer’s angst driving me to want to talk to her about my options.

The simplest way to explain the first option is to start by focusing first on what a “grant” is. It doesn’t mean, as many CIDAites would interpret it, as the difference between “grant”, “contributions”, and “contracts”. No, it means what it means in plain speak — I give this to you, you don’t have to pay me back. For a domestically-focused person, think of it as a gift. You are at university, you’re at the end of your third year, you are struggling to get the money together for fourth year, and your rich uncle Roger says, “No problem, here’s 10K.” All yours, no need to pay it back. That’s a grant.

Almost all development projects as CIDA does them, and most by all donors, are grants. Sure, there might be shared contributions, but it is CIDA / Canada paying. It isn’t a loan — so whether it is a contribution agreement or a grant or a contract, it’s the same — you do this, we will pay you, and you don’t “owe us” anything back. That’s 100% grant — there’s no payback.

As such, all CIDA projects (assuming they met the previous 4 criteria) are all ODA-eligible, can be counted as ODA, and therefore comes out of the Canadian aid budget. If you use the above education example, you got “10K” and your uncle (if the OECD/DAC was keeping track) would say he gave $10K in “official personal education assistance (OPEA)”.

But wait. Option 2 is for loans. What if your rich uncle says, “Well, Timmy, I’ll give you the $10K but you have to pay me some of it back.” If you only have to pay back 75% or less, then at least 25% of it was “grant”, and it is therefore OPEA-eligible. So, if you get $10K, and can keep $5K as gift/grant (50%), you would pay back $5K. But, here’s the kicker, your uncle would still be able to claim $10K in OPEA. He gave you 10K, and made sure at least 25% or more was grant, so it *all* counts as OPEA. Yep, even if he only really gave you $5K, he claims it all. Because it was an actual flow of resources, it came from an eligible “organization” (family members with too extra money), you were on the approved list of recipients, it was primarily for your benefit, the activity is allowed under the list of activities, and at least 25% or more was grant. Yep, definitely OPEA — therefore you count the whole project as OPEA. Of course, if Roger wants it all back, then there’s no real benefit to you i.e. no grant benefit at least, and he couldn’t claim squat as OPEA.

In development circles, this type of loan can happen, but they don’t occur much anymore after all the focus on HIPC and debt relief. And if they do happen, they tend to operate a lot more like a third category of project — the large-scale government-as-backer investment-like project.

Let’s pick a lovely country like, I don’t know, Japan. And let’s say they want to do a bunch of projects in, oh, I don’t know, let’s say telecomms. In Asia. And Asian countries are lining up to get their help. But suppose Japan doesn’t want to just hand over the money — after all, the recipient country is going to reap economic benefits from this and it is more like an investment than an aid project. So they say, “Okay, let’s work out an eight-year business plan whereby I give you money in years 1,2,3,4 to get things going, you’ll hire Japanese companies, and you pay me back in years 5,6,7,8″. The Philippines (picking randomly) says, “Wait, why would I borrow from you? I can do it myself and hire whoever I want.” So Japan says, “Sure, but commercial rates are 8% for this level of risk, but we’ll back the cost and the upfront stuff, and in exchange for you using Japanese companies, we’ll only charge you 4%”. (I know those aren’t the exact rates, but I’m using simple exaggerated ones to show why the Philippines might say yes). The Philippines says, “Great, let’s go!”. So project launches, etc.

But look at what Japan is doing — they are giving money to the Philippines (a flow), they are the govt (official donor), the Philippines are on the list of recipients, and infrastructure development is clearly for the primary benefit of the developing country. Four out of five criteria are met. Can it meet the fifth? People think, “Hell no, they have to pay it back”. But wait a second, the Philippines are getting a pretty good deal. They are getting $100M a year for four years at 4% when commercially Japan could charge 8%. That looks a LOT like a 4% benefit per year being given to the Philippines, plus compounding from years 2-8. Could it amount to a 25% “grant” portion over 8 years?

An apology is due here to non-economists as this paragraph and the two that follow are not really for you, you don’t need them, but true economists right now are sputtering at me, calling me nasty names, because that’s not how the calculation really works. I know, and explaining discount rates is really painful to everyone but export credit types, but here goes. To know if the Philippines gets an 25% benefit, you have to estimate the rate of return on the spending. Not the rate that Japan gets (4%), not the rate commercially (8%), but the rate the Philippines would get from the project. What’s their “benefit” rate, essentially, but it’s called the internal rate of return in normal business parlance and the social rate of return in development circles.

You know what the Philippines actually has to pay (4%, 8 years, etc.) but you have to know the benefit to their society from the project. There’s a lot of complicated math you can do if you’re a business type, but in the end, it’ll be an estimate. If you estimate large, everything looks like a huge gift. If you estimate low, nothing does. No one really knows until the project happens. But aid budgets are set going forward, not reporting backwards. So Japan has to know if it could be an aid project or not BEFORE we know what the real rate of return will be. And way back when interest rates were high, the DAC discussed this issue and said, “Well, we don’t really know what the real social rate of return is, but we think it’s probably 10% on development projects”. They had to choose a rate, and they chose 10%.

So, the technical way is to take the payments Japan makes, find their net present value at the lending rate (4%); then you take the payments that the Philippines has to make (based on the 4%) and discount them at the social rate set by the DAC (10%) to get the Net Present Value today.

With a big welcome back to the non-economists, let’s figure out what to do with the numbers. Given that you discounted Japan at 4% and discounted the Philippines at 10%, you know that the Philippines number is going to be smaller. In other words, rich Uncle Roger isn’t getting the full $10K back from little Timmy. If the Philippines payback number is only 75% or less of the Japanese investment number, then Japan gave them at least a 25% grant in the project.

Guess what? Japan just met the fifth criteria.

So they can count the project as ODA. The WHOLE project.

Is that significant? Absolutely. Unbelievably significant. Because it also means they can PAY FOR IT OUT OF THEIR DEVELOPMENT BUDGET. If you’re wearing your Birkenstocks, you’re sputtering, “No, wait, go back, how did THAT happen?????”. Go back, read the five elements. You’ll see.

Does it matter to Canada? On a development side, not really, we couldn’t afford those projects ourselves. But Japan can, one of the few who can/could. And so they did things like infrastructure. But who does it matter too? Western telecomms companies who would love to bid on those projects. If the projects had been done by the Japanese government through another mechanism, they would have had to comply with the WTO and had international competitive bidding. But as part of their development program, it can be exempted from WTO rules, and hence only Japanese companies could bid. Which is how Japan could get domestic support for it in the first place.

The really fun part of the conversation though for trade types is that the 10% number the OECD uses is meaningless. It might be 2, it might be 20, it might be 200, nobody knows. It’s a theoretical construct. But it was established by consensus and it would require consensus to change. And one country in particular i.e. Japan has had a very strong vested interest at different times in NOT changing it.

Separately though, what would you change it to? Some argue it should be down at 5% or 3%. Something low, more akin to traditional investment rates of return (i.e. your best alternative return). Some think it should be even higher. But here’s the kicker — because 10% has such an impact on repayment compared to actual interest rates, pretty much anything with a timeline longer than three or four years is probably going to qualify as concessional. It’s just the way the compounding works.

Why all of this isn’t the big issues everybody thinks it is, not even me

I hate the pundits treatment of “development” as a holy grail that everyone can define and agree upon. I hate them talking about “aid levels” like everyone should understand what they mean, and implying that it is simple or obvious.

But while all the pundits are going crazy about the possible implications of “trade” on “aid”, I’m not sure this is as big as an issue as people think it will be. We already have to make decisions on which countries we’re going to help, how we’re going to fund it, and whether it counts as development at all. This discussion has been ongoing for 40+ years, it’s just most CIDA types and NGOs didn’t see it so openly referred to…But for CIDA, FAC and ITC, it’s always been present.

For some governments, it has been “we help everyone everywhere” and often with small drops in the bucket for each country. For other governments, it has been “who has the greatest need”. For others, it has been “where can we make our biggest contribution”.

But saying that “pure development” will be compromised is dancing on the head of a rhetorical pin. The projects still have to match what the OECD says is development (however wobbly that definition is), but since official development assistance can include apples, oranges and a few truck parts, I think we first need to decide what “pure development” means and which part we are talking about, and then let’s talk about whether it’s “now” compromised.

After all, if we’re going to have the conversation, can we at least talk about the same thing?

Except it says “primarily” for developing countries. It doesn’t say it can’t benefit Canada too, it just can’t be the primary benefit. I’m sure that doesn’t worry you at all, but you can bet FAC loves the thought. To use my old metaphor from a previous post, it is not only that oatmeal is the right thing to do, it’s a tasty way to do it too. Like, for example, potentially doing development more in countries where we have strong commercial interests. Win-win. Not, as Maurice Strong suggested, making commercialism the primary goal, but giving some weight to it when deciding which of the 48 least developed countries should get the money.

No worries, though, too about the commercialism as the OECD has already decided “what is development” by establishing a very long list of “DAC Codes” (8 or 10 digits long, can’t remember now) that says what qualifies as “development activities”. Whew. Finally, a definitive answer.

Except it’s a HUGE list that covers just about everything imaginable. As long as the proposed programming is in the list, it’s development, or to be precise, it’s ODA-eligible. And that’s how the DAC decides whose benefit the activity was for — if it is one of these activities, and done in a developing country, it’s assumed to be eligible. Let’s look at health care.

• Would paying a DOCTOR to administer to AIDS patients count as ODA? Yes.
• Would paying for the DRUGS the doctor uses count? Yes.
• Could you pay a company to TRANSPORT the drugs to the country? Ummm…probably. Great, FedEX just got aid dollars.
• Could you pay a company to develop the drugs? No. Too commercial, not obviously primarily for the benefit of a developing country.

For a lot of people, that is the ultimate in hypocrisy — the company won’t make enough money to justify the research, but the donors can’t pay for it. So a disease that might affect more poor people than the entire population of the Western world could go unfunded. Of course, the aid community says, “We didn’t say you couldn’t pay for it, not at all. We just said you couldn’t use aid budgets to pay for it.”

And suddenly our neat little answer isn’t neat anymore. How could we say that something was “development” (like developing a vaccine) but not “ODA-eligible”? Isn’t it “development or no development:”? Like a game show hosted by Howie Mandel except the players are donors?

Worse still, a government (oh, look, like Canada!) sets up a budget to do development. And then can’t do just “anything developmental” with that budget but rather only those things that are “ODA-eligible”. So, how could Canada pay for that vaccine development? Sure doesn’t sound like a Foreign Affairs budget item. Nor Trade. Nor Defence. Nor a lot of domestic work. Maybe we’ll say it’s primarily a health issue, so Health Canada should pay for it. Great idea! We just have to tell Canadians that while we’re not paying for research for the issues that affect them, we are willing to subsidize a company (Canadian or otherwise) to solve the health problems of others.

Wait, no, we don’t have to do that. The UN WHO can do it, right? We’ll just give them the money. What money? Oh, we’ll take it from the aid budget. But it’s not aid. No, the WHO qualifies, therefore they can do it. Wait a minute, something’s wrong. Weren’t we talking about whether something was for the benefit of developing countries, not who (no pun intended) did it?

Right, so not eligible. Except donors get around that all the time by using organizations, like the WHO or the FAO, to do things that normally wouldn’t qualify as “development” necessarily but because it is through a clearly focused multilateral organization that (supposedly) avoids crass commercialism, it can come from the aid budget. Great. Problem solved.

No, not really, because now people are asking, “Why did you spend that money on the drug that we don’t know will work and costs a LOT OF MONEY when we could have spent it on basic education? Or other health care risks?” Because as soon as you spend money on something, you’ve said something very important — it was a priority. Resources are not infinite, so you spend them on priorities.

Here’s the kicker that drives me nuts when the lay public says we should spend more money on X, Y or Z. Great, tell me first why and then tell me where it should come from. Those are the first two rules of government — you need to give us a rationale and we have to shift resources.

But if I put 1000 development “experts” in the same room and ask them which projects are the highest priority or which sectors or which methods or even which countries, they will give me at least 500 different answers. All with good rationales even. Education is better than trade, for example.

Sounds good to me, but let me ask you this as devil’s advocate — how do you pay for education on an ongoing sustainable basis? Without trade, the best you can hope for is economic entropy within a country — just moving money around within a closed system. To grow, and hence to reduce poverty levels, a country needs to find a way of attracting more money into the system. And the only three ways to do that are investment (which wants a return), donations (unsustainable), or trade (generating “profit” on things that are exported, i.e. getting more money into the system than it cost to produce the item that was exported).

Again, I digress. Choosing what “activities” ends up being political in nature because it is about making choices — there is no one size that fits all or even an agreed international hierarchy of development steps that have to be taken.

At the start of this section, it was easy because the DAC codes are supposed to tell you what “is” development and what “is not”. But they are bendable really easily.

Could you pay for a triage unit? Could you pay for a mobile triage unit? Could it be in an ambulance? Could you pay for the ambulance? Could you pay for an air ambulance in the country? Great, maybe we can get someone like Bombardier to build it. Oh, wait a minute. That’s not development, is it? If the country wanted help with health care and mobile health care in particular, does it count? Probably. Even though it might generate some jobs in Canada. Shhh….don’t tell anyone. Just like no one should tell the world that Japan uses their aid program to build telecomms infrastructure all over Asia and uses their aid budget to do it.

I used these little examples, not to be definitive, but to simply present some issues of how murky the “purity” gets pretty fast. The best example though is peace. Every single development expert on the planet, perhaps even every citizen, can tell you that there can be no sustainable development without peace and stability. Some will even go so far as to say it is a “prerequisite” for development.

Yet most peacekeeping and military aid of any kind (equipment or services) cannot ever count as development aid. Terrorism may be the “big” threat at the start of the new millennium to many fragile states, but you can’t pay for anti-terrorism activities with aid. Why? Because the OECD said no.

During the late 90s and 00s, this was a huge issue. As donors got more and more involved in war-torn and fragile states, the need for “additional help” was clear. Sometimes it was humanitarian supply lines (yep, that’s eligible, but not training the soldiers to actually do that job), sometimes it was fighting back insurgents. And the conversations drove Foreign Affairs types nuts all over the globe — how could a development person tell them that peace was essential to development, terrorism was a serious threat to peace, but anti-terrorism training or support wasn’t “development”? Again, the OECD said the same thing — “Yep, it’s important, go ahead and do it, but you can’t pay for it out of aid money.”

Like I said, it drove FAC-types nuts. But it was entirely accurate — they were telling countries like Canada, go ahead and do it. Fund it separately. Just don’t raid the development piggy bank to do it. Why? Because it’s really dang expensive and it is ripe for abuse — we don’t want everyone suddenly expanding military expenditures and saying, “Great news, developing countries — we’re sending you all our soldiers, which must be for your benefit because we’re using the money we used to spend on health and education programming to do it!”.

So I ask again, are you still comfortable that you know what development is? Great, because now I’m going to give you a practical test. Your aid program is to help a South American country. One of the poorest towns is suffering from a lot of violence in the area, mostly drug traffickers. And everybody comes along and says, “Our time for peace is now!”. You help mobilize them, and they elect a new sheriff! Based on the consultations, he wants new police, highly trained, a strong force to protect the population and to bring a new era of peace to the city (casting for the movie version probably starts next week, but I digress). The citizens tell you this is their first priority. What can you pay for?

Can you pay for the salaries of extra police officers? Hmm…how about training instead? Great idea, let’s do training. Can I train them in basic police duties? Umm, sure. That sounds fine. Can I give them special diversity training? Great! Can I train them in human rights? Yes! Can I give them special weapons training? Hmmm…oh, and maybe special tactical training? Ummm.  Oh, oh, oh, and they have to go against some pretty heavily armed people who are well-trained, almost like a militia, can they get training on how to deal with military style combat? Ummm….let’s back up. How about another consultation with locals instead? We can pay for that.

Now you may think I’m making that up, but in development circles, it’s happened before. And guess what? The donors DID pay for the training. And promptly helped the sheriff become the best trained thug in the region, complete with his own troop carriers that he repurposed from the construction equipment the town received from donors too. It wasn’t Canadian money, but it wasn’t pretty. So the OECD is very leery not only about what is paid for but what is done in the name of “development”.

For some CIDAites, the solution to all of this is clear. We’ll just ban all military spending, we won’t do infrastructure, and everything is golden. Great, so we’ll also ban all human rights training for existing militia and/or police officers. It is, after all, spending on the military, right?

But I don’t need an answer to that question, I can start with something much simpler — the confusion of development assistance with humanitarian assistance.

When NGOs, particularly the advocacy groups, talk about development, they wrap it in a flag of humanitarian assistance. They have always done this because pictures of starving children are easy for citizens to comprehend and garner funds more easily when fund-raising. Heck, CIDA publications often did the same thing up until the early 1990s. It was how development was sold globally — helping the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, etc. Loaves and fishes to feed the starving children, for those with a religious bent.

But humanitarian assistance is about the short-term, it always has been. It is what you do when you can’t do development. While it is an emotionally painful metaphor, it’s not unlike a trauma doctor figuring out how to stabilize the patient NOW, regardless of any underlying long-term health concerns. The worst part is that there are thousands of people dying everyday from various diseases (natural and man-made physical and social ills) who get no “rallying cry” issued for them, but if they were a victim of an earthquake, we’d be there tomorrow. Worst still is that the news cycle demands it — if it bleeds, it leads, and if there are more than a 1000 dead somewhere from a natural disaster, humanitarian assistance organizations start mobilizing. Less than a 1000? That’s a local problem, nothing to see here.

Development assistance, i.e. the longer-term work that donor agencies such as CIDA were created to do, is not picture-worthy. It’s pretty hard to take a picture of human rights capacity development, where it looks like a bunch of people sitting in a room talking. Internationally and domestically, the explanation of how difficult development can be is not well-received. You can’t say it in a sound bite, you can’t put it in a talking point. We like to use the “teach a man to fish” argument, but what we are REALLY talking about is “teach a person to engage in sustainable fisheries management as part of a gender-neutral, economically positive, environmentally friendly, socially conscious, and equitable country-wide strategy”. I’m going to share three little anecdotes as I think they are good examples of how difficult it is to explain the true nature of development, or at times, even understand it.

One of my favorite examples is road construction. From an economic perspective, road construction is a backbone activity for economic growth and prosperity — creating the physical infrastructure for the free movement of goods, interconnecting markets, and the actual costs of building the road itself can create huge multipliers that can drive growth. Separate from the potential for manifest destiny side effects, it is the economic equivalent to building railroads in North America. Canadian industry, citizens, the people on the street — this makes perfect sense to them. Of course we should do that, right?

So roads were built in Africa. And a curious thing happened. AIDS transmission followed the road. Because the prostitutes were following the labourers working on the roads. And when the road reached a town, or a bridge connected two previously separated villages, AIDS rates between the groups suddenly went to the highest common rate. Economic theory didn’t allow for the health variables, and those lovely citizens on the street who thought road-building was a no-brainer option just crashed their SimAfrica app.

A second example came from the FAO looking at dam building with impacts on local standard of living (SoL). A dam was built, and they hired local labourers who all lost their traditional subsistence livelihood to the new flooding patterns but made money on the building projects, so there would be a bump in economic SoL in the area. Then, the dam was finished and there was no more work. And the SoL would go down again. So a lot of the male labourers would head off to the cities, find work, and send money back, driving the SoL back up. But after being away for a few years, the money home would start slowing down as family cohesion fell apart. And the SoL would go back down. Time for some of the women to head off to the cities, where a lot would end up as prostitutes. But they would send money home, so the SoL would go back up for awhile. Then, a few years later, the women came home — now infected with AIDS, they returned to die. Again, we don’t have an app to explain that model.

A third example comes from a leader in the Caribbean. At one of the Financing for Development Conferences, he decided to speak candidly. While I am paraphrasing, he basically said. “We want to develop, like you did. But we will do it without destroying the environment. We will do it without displacing indigenous populations. We will avoid exploiting women, children and minorities through unfair labour practices. We will refrain from growth through conquering other nations or establishing new colonies. We’ll do it without massive inequality. And each of these things, on which much of your own growth was based, will be avoided. Plus, we’re going to do it all, with our hands tied behind our backs, in 10-20 years instead of 200 or more. But we’ll need a lot of financing to do it.” Eloquent, impactful even in my paraphrasing, but how do you make the average Canadian understand all of that when you only have a soundbite to get your point across?

The short answer is that most communicators don’t. So the editorials and articles talk about how we are compromising “development” when in fact they don’t explain how extraordinarily complex it is, the definitions of what counts and what doesn’t aren’t as easy as people think, and just for fun, they then use examples of humanitarian assistance instead of complex development. Even without addressing any of the other four elements, we really should at least be able to not mix humanitarian assistance with development when we’re talking.

Particularly as HA probably won’t be affected by the merger, since FAC and CIDA have worked on humanitarian stuff for years. Not to mention DND and RCMP contributions when it was an unsafe location on the ground. Yep, the departments already work together on this stuff. Sometimes, and this isn’t always popular, some of the people working on humanitarian assistance have more to do with the FAC people than they do with the CIDA country programs already on the ground at the beginning. Because even after the patient is stabilized, it is a long time before you can return to “traditional” programming (if ever in some countries), and even transitional programming is relatively unique.

I’d like to say this is an uniquely Canadian problem but it isn’t. Lots of donors have problems with “educating their taxpayers” about what REAL development is. Not to mention educating the stupid idiots who think it’s a great idea to donate junk from their garage to be shipped thousands of miles to “help out”.

But if the experts who write the op-eds and articles can’t separate out HA principles from development, and tell you that that what “is” or is “not” development is easy, where does the real conversation start?

On to part 5…

Soooo, what’s a developing country? Is it self-identification? Do they have to be recognized by the U.N.? Do they have to be democratic? Do they have to have clear borders? Is it an analytical tool by level of poverty?

Don’t worry, the UN and the OECD have done the heavy lifting for you, of course, to create a list of eligible countries. I’m sure it gives you great comfort to know that the DAC List of approved recipients includes the World Bank’s low and middle-income countries based on GNI per capita and all the Least Developed Countries from the UN’s list. It also excludes G8 members (whew!), EU members (umm, shouldn’t some of them reconsider?) and any country with a firm date for entry into the EU. In other words, G8 members can take care of themselves and the EU should look after itself or future members. After that, it should be gravy, right?

Let’s see — 48 LDCs, 6 other (really) low-income countries, 40 more low income countries, and 54 upper middle income countries for a grand total of 148 possible recipients. Doesn’t narrow it down very much, does it? No problem, we’ll just wipe out all the upper middle income countries and we’ll be down to 94. Hmmm…not a lot better, is it? But you did get rid of China and Brazil, and if you go one more category, you can drop India too. Great, down to 54. Feeling pretty good about yourself. After all, you’re focusing resources on those who “need it most” as Maurice Strong said should be done in his recent editorial.

Except India, China and Brazil have large internal disparity issues. Their overall GNI is good, but they have huge populations living below the poverty line. In fact, the combined three populations who are living below the poverty line are more than the total population of the next 54 countries as a group. Are you still helping those who need it most?

Hmm…okay, let’s say we only go with the list of 54. Or forget the six “others”, we’ll go with the LDC list from the UN. Totally defensible. We’ll concentrate our aid on those 48 and everything should be development.

Next part of the question — should each and every donor help each and every one of the 48? Well, of course not. That will just drive up costs…we should divvy them up somehow, all of us taking our fair share. Global donor coordination, efficiency, effectiveness, economies of scale. Great, sounds good.

So, which of the 48 should we take? The worst of the worst? A mix? Maybe bilingual ones because we too are bilingual,  ones where we might have a common heritage that we can share and build upon. Or perhaps ones where we already have long ties and a history of working together. Like perhaps, just asking, the ones where we established political, immigration, and trade ties? Or that are members of the Commonwealth or La Francophonie even? Or have ties to our immigrant population?

The reason for choosing one country or another seems easy when it is about categories of countries like going from middle-income down to low-income. It gets more difficult when you start mixing and matching between them. Development best practices do show aid does tend to work better when donors and recipients have a common history, shared language(s), and a history of strong partnerships. All of which FAC says should be given priority in the future (i.e. where we have strong commercial and political interests), but which development purists say is “foul” argumentation.

Regardless of how you slice and dice, unless we’re going to bankrupt Canada, someone somewhere has to choose which countries and no matter how you set criteria, you are talking about politics … why one country deserves aid more than another. To use a medical metaphor, you play “development triage” to pick which countries to help. Some you can help and keep going, others are long-term investments, others might be better left to other countries or other “doctors” with better expertise to help that patient.

The argument applies equally to using multilateral development institutions as your yardstick. Let’s say, as the OECD does, that every $1 you give to UNICEF counts as ODA. Great, right? UNICEF is, after all, arguably the most well-known and well-respected amongst UN funds and programs.

Hmm…but UNICEF’s head office is in Manhattan, not exactly the hotbed of development. Does every dollar spent on their overhead count? What about publications? Public relations? Lights? Pens? Yep, all ODA. Good news though, if you give to an org like FAO, only a certain percentage is counted as ODA (used to be 53%, I’m sure that has changed) because some of what the FAO does is for developed countries (like the Codex Alimentarus). No wasting “development” money on that other stuff. Clear as mud, right?

Again though, it doesn’t mean you couldn’t give more money to the FAO or even France if you wanted to…it just means you can’t count it as ODA. It’s not a ODA-eligible recipient.

At this point, you’re still comfortable you know what development is, I’m sure. I’ve muddied the waters about what a flow looks like or how you define or choose a developing country, but we are still comfortable that we know what “development” looks like on the ground.

On to part 4…

Some political people in the U.S. hate this rule because they want to claim the contributions of all the US-based charities who do development work. From a pure policy perspective, I find some resonance with that argument. The Nordics have a model that is very “government-led” and hence their ODA levels are high; by contrast, Canada and the U.S. have a different balance on the role of government and individuals, partly by history, partly by philosophy, and partly by what it means to reach a consensus with large diverse populations, and hence some of the role is left to the private sector and the public. If the policy intent is to capture resource flows (element 1), shouldn’t you be interested in TOTAL resource flows from a country, whether they come directly from citizens or NGOs or indirect through their government? The UK tax forms also included an option whereby people could donate their tax refunds to development spending — but the OECD wouldn’t let the UK count that as development money either since it wasn’t a “UK budget” item. Don’t even get development policy people started on whether or not they should be able to count immigrant remittances back home too.

But when the pundits of any stripe talk about development, they talk about official ODA levels, not what the country did as a whole. Just look at the recent humanitarian crises — matching funds set up by the government. Money given by individuals didn’t count as “aid”, only the “matched” total. So we know that the conversation is probably wrong before we even start — we should likely talk about total flows, not just official development flows.

Even with just these first two elements, how comfortable are you that you know what “development” is? You probably feel pretty good — because it looks like I’m only talking about “levels” and “reporting”. Certainly not about what we do or with whom, right?

On to part 3…