UNDP embracing resilience. Making development vulnerable?
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Paper Master of Cultures and Development Studies (CADES) at KU Leuven Belgium – Copyright Stefaan Anrys, 2014 – unpublished
Stefaan Anrys UNDP embracing resilience. Making development vulnerable? This paper examines how the 2014 Human Development Report “Sustaining Human Progress: Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience” (UNDP 2014a) considers resilience and what could be the consequences of this. Our paper is based mainly on literature review and document analysis and interviews with staff having served or still serving with the United Nations and the UNDP in particular. We aim not to review the most recent literature on the notion of resilience, nor will we undertake a discursive analysis of this year’s Human Development Report. We will rather try to assess the politico-‐ economical reasons behind the adoption of resilience by a reputable development organization; it’s reframing in light of the existent controversies around resilience as well as the contribution the articulation of resilience in the HDR2014 may have for development as a whole. This last section of the paper will contain more personal reflections on the challenges and risks the use of resilience as a guiding paradigm poses to development. Keywords: resilience, vulnerability, human development
Introduction Although the concept of resilience has been around for some years now, it is interesting to examine when, how and why it entered UNDP's development discourse. While resilience has appealing aspects, it indeed has important downsides, not in the least it’s fuzziness possibly leading to misunderstandings. In public discourse resilience is sometimes reduced to a capability endowed upon individuals, which could lay the burden of any development problem whatsoever on the individual rather than on the group, the community, the society or the make-‐up of global relations (Reid 2013). This has lead critics of resilience to assume it has been co-‐opted by neoliberal thinking, in line with the growing self-‐help paradigm in development. “Today's discourse is one of ‘personal responsibility’ opposed to a dependency-‐enhancing paternalism. Elements of this discourse are now to be found even in the position of NGOs which are critical of policies which direct fewer and fewer resources to poverty alleviation: the poor need to be given the resources they need ‘to help themselves out of poverty’” (Gledhill 1996: 4). UNDP, as a multilateral development organisation, has always tried to balance the overtly neoliberal institutions based in Washington, such as the World Bank and the IMF. These have since much longer "incorporated strategies of 'resilience' into their logistics of crisis management, financial (de)regulation and development economics" (Walker & Cooper 2011: 144). Could it be that UNDP by adopting resilience has given in to a more neo-‐liberal doctrine? It seems not, since strangely enough, a cursory reading of this year’s report shows that the actual formulation and linking of strategies with the notion of resilience is rather ambivalent and very different from the World Bank’s approach. Might resilience work as a bridging concept between different development discourses? The 2014 Human Development Report (HDR) throws up challenging questions about the pros and cons of resilience in development and of development buzzwords in general.
Paper Master of Cultures and Development Studies (CADES) at KU Leuven Belgium – Copyright Stefaan Anrys, 2014 – unpublished
The rise of resilience The concept of ‘resilience’ has become ubiquitous in development policy in recent years. Many development actors define resilience as the “ability of an individual, a household, a community, a country or a region to withstand, cope, adapt, and quickly recover from stresses and shocks (…) without compromising long-‐term development” (European Commission 2014). These shocks most often relate to natural disasters or conflicts. The EU approach comprises initiatives firstly in disaster risk reduction or DRR –in 2013, over 20% of the European Commission’s humanitarian funding went to Disaster Risk Reduction– but also climate change adaptation, social protection, nutrition and food security. While putting a larger stress on the developmental and transformational focus of resilience, often considered as the “missing” link between relief and development, amongst others, the OECD admits it proves very difficult to put the concept to good use in practice. “Resilience remains a (largely) political agenda, aimed at bringing different programming silos together, but often without clear technical guidance for programming on the ground. As a result, field staff are cynical about the added value of resilience, and are confused about what resilience actually means” (Mitchell 2013: i). The HDR clearly reflects an awareness of the controversy surrounding the notion of resilience. The summary of the 2014 report states that “there is much debate about the meaning of resilience” (UNDP 2014b: 2). Immediately afterwards, the text ads its own definition: “ensuring that people’s choices are robust, now and in the future, and enabling people to cope and adjust to adverse events” (UNDP 2014b: 2). Unsurprisingly the HDR’s definition adds the adjective human to resilience, as if to recall the UNDP’s unique selling position towards other multilateral institutions such as the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Reading further through the summary, our surprise is big when stumbling upon China, Rwanda and Vietnam, reportedly being exemplary cases of underdeveloped nations that were nevertheless able to have implemented programmes for universal health services for its population -‐ one of the policies put forward to achieve "human" resilience. When reading about “decent jobs for all”, “full employment”, grants and pensions as some of the policy options, our surprise only grows bigger. It seems as if the 2014 Report conforms to the traditional UNDP-‐recipes. Only the subtitle of the document –if we are to believe scholars as Reid (2013) who claims resilience is co-‐opted by neoliberalism– seems to come falling from the sky.
The impact of the UNDP
Today the UNDP focuses on four main areas: poverty reduction and achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs); democratic governance; crisis prevention and recovery; and environment and energy for sustainable development. Its headquarters are in New York, but it also has regional bureaus overseeing Africa, Arab States, Asia and the Pacific, Europe and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Latin America and the Caribbean. The UNDP was established in 1966 as a merger of existing UN institutions and is one of the few UN organisations focussing solely on development. It has representatives in more than 170 countries and territories.1 Based in New York, it began to challenge the “Washington Consensus”, coined by John Williamson (Broad 2004: 129), with its yearly Human Development Report, first published in 1990. The Human Development Index—a composite measure of income, education and health—was presented in 1990 as an alternative to GDP (UNDP 2014a: 27). New indices would be added in the following years, introducing a multidimensional alternative to the mainly neoliberal growth-‐paradigm that had prevailed thanks to the efforts of the World Bank and the IMF.
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http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/operations/about_us/ (Accessed August 17, 2014)
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Paper Master of Cultures and Development Studies (CADES) at KU Leuven Belgium – Copyright Stefaan Anrys, 2014 – unpublished
Today the report uses a Gender Development Index (GDI), the Human Development Index (HDI), the Inequality-‐adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI), Gender Inequality Index (GII) and the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI).2 The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development3 and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were created after World War II to help build a new (economic) world order, much less to uplift the southern hemisphere out of poverty. Their explicit aim was to foster trade, capital flows, growth and economic development (Brautigam 2009: 26). Only later they would become major actors in development cooperation, in particular with the publication of the World Bank’s World Development Reports. When it comes to development, within the UN family, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) thus clearly rivals the World Bank. The human development approach has all along been concerned with global reform and in particular the UN system in relation to the Bretton Woods institutions (Pieterse 2001: 153). UNDP’s New York Consensus has heavily influenced the Post-‐Washington consensus that arose after the 1990’s. With the Comprehensive Development Framework (CDF) the WB, for example, “explicitly came out in favour of poverty reduction, reducing inequalities and improving opportunities for the poor” (Develtere 2012: 65).
Why and when did the UNDP adopt resilience? Crisis prevention and recovery is part of UNDP’s mandate.4 “Through its crisis prevention and recovery activities, UNDP helps build resilience, reduce the impact of disasters, and accelerate recovery from shocks”, it says on the website5. As seen above, the notion of resilience is often used in the context of humanitarian aid disaster preparedness and disaster risk reduction. Seen its worldwide success as the new development buzzword, it is logical to see it re-‐used here. It neither comes as a surprise that UNDP adopted resilience, a notion oft claimed to depoliticize development problems and ignoring unequal power relations (Reid 2013, Levine et al. 2012). By definition, the UN programmes and agencies have to find a consensus between their members and thus predominantly look for neutral often-‐technical solutions to underlying political problems. Still, the fact that UN funds and programmes mainly depend on voluntary contributions from donor countries make them less neutral than they appear to be. This system give donors, willing to fund and preferably even earmark their aid beforehand, much leverage and jeopardizes the neutrality of UN institutions. Multilateral relations tend also to become more “bilateralised” then ever. UN organisations are pushed to adapt their programmes to national donor’s priorities and the UNDP in particular has become increasingly dependent on a small group of countries: the Scandinavian countries, Canada and the Netherlands (Develtere 2012: 133). Jan Vandemoortele (2014), whom I interviewed and who served in various capacities with the United Nations for 30 years,6 argues that the organisation may have adopted the notion in order to please London and maybe secure future funding. “London and not Washington is the epicentre of resilience today. In this I see the hand of DFID and think tanks that depend on it, such as ODI, the Overseas Development Institute” (Vandemoortele 2014, personal communication). Is it farfetched to believe one donor country could push this trough? Not necessarily. When looking into UNDP’s most recent list of top donors, based on total income received for regular and other resources in 2013, the importance the United Kingdom is obvious indeed. Today it is UNDP’s third biggest donor
http://hdr.undp.org/en/faq-‐page (Accessed August 17, 2014) The IBRD, together with the IDA or International Development Association, is the main agency within the group that was later on to be called the World Bank. 4 Available at http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home.html (Accessed August 17, 2014) 5 Availabe at http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/librarypage/crisis-‐prevention-‐and-‐recovery/2012-‐annual-‐report-‐ crisis-‐prevention-‐-‐-‐recovery/ (Accessed August 17, 2014) 6 http://diplomatie.belgium.be/fr/binaries/res_vandemoortele_tcm313-‐99273.pdf (Accessed August 23, 2014) 2 3
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country, after Japan and Norway.7 And the British DFID seems to be indeed a big fan of resilience, having committed already in 2011 to embed resilience building in all its country programmes (DFID 2011: 11). “Resilience’s hidden agenda is neoliberal in my view. It comes down to saying you needn’t government anymore to do development. People have to help themselves. In this way resilience fits well in DFID’s value for money and in David Cameron’s neoliberalism” (Vandemoortele 2014, personal communication). In principle this is true that the UNDP operates on the basis of ‘one-‐country one-‐vote’, and although consensus is the norm in the Executive Board of UNDP – responsible for its major decisions – “it is hard to imagine that the consensus that emerges from discussion is unrelated to each Board member’s financial contribution both to the UN at large and UNDP in particular” (Boas & McNeill 2004: 211). Moreover due to the financial crisis of 2008, the competition for public funds given by donor countries to multilateral organisations has increased a lot. UN organisations see their lifelines threatened. In 2012-‐ 2013 the UN galaxy faced a 260-‐million-‐dollar cut in its budget8. The UNDP in particular faces currently major layoffs, also among its top-‐level staff.9 Under Helen Clark’s presidency at least 30 % of the jobs will be cut at the New York headquarters.10 In this light, it might well be that the organisation is re-‐aligning its policy or at least pays lip service to important funders. Nonetheless, things might be more complicated. If it is true that resilience has taken a hold with important contributors to the UNDP, the drafting of the Human Development Report is much more complex than the above suggest. The preparation of the global Human Development Report is guided by a special resolution of the General Assembly (A/RES/57/264)11 stating it is “the result of an independent intellectual exercise” and affirming that the policies governing the operational activities are decided upon by the member States. This also means the Human Development Report Office has editorial independence. In other words the UNDP Executive Board –i.e. representatives of 36 Member States– does not decide upon the content nor can be held accountable for it. Every Report, also the 2014 Report, mentions explicitly that it is published for the United Nations Development Programme, not by the UNDP (UNDP 2014a: iii). The drafting of the Human Development Report is based on a series of background papers commissioned from leading experts on the subject matter and the report also benefits from external and internal advisory panels. But before all that, the overarching theme has to be fixed. This process usually happens through a series of consultations with policymakers, and development practitioners, including United Nations Resident Coordinators (UN 2012: 3). The HDR Office (HDRO) considers two or three potential topics and reviews them with the UNDP executive group, which is the UNDP internal managerial body. “For the 2014 report, we came up with resilience and vulnerabilities and another theme looking into the Post 2015 agenda” (Jespersen 2014, deputy director of the HDRO, personal communication). UNDP-‐administrator Helen Clark, who is part of the UNDP executive group, has spoken at several occasions on resilience and had no doubt a big role in the final selection of the theme. The adoption of resilience by the UNDP as a whole has in fact predated the 2014 HDR and happened under Clark’s leadership. Helen Clark is a former prime minister from New Zealand. On 27 April 2009 she became the
http://open.undp.org/#top-‐donors/regular (Accessed August 23, 2014) Facing Budget Cuts, U.N. Readies for Austerity in 2012-‐13, IPS, January 3, 2014, available at http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/01/facing-‐budget-‐cuts-‐un-‐readies-‐for-‐austerity-‐in-‐2012-‐13/ (Accessed August 23, 2014) 9 U.N. Development Programme Plans Lay-‐Offs, Salary Cuts and Demotions, IPS, May 30, 2014, available at http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/05/undp-‐plans-‐lay-‐offs-‐salary-‐cuts-‐and-‐demotions/ (Accessed August 23, 2014) 10 Critics say that the restructuration is not only because of falling contributions, but was in fact long “overdue”, seen the UNDP’s bad track record in effectiveness and performance. In an article published in 2011, the UNDP was said to spend more on administrative costs than on aid disbursements (129%) and reportedly had one of the highest salary/aid ratio’s (100%) (Easterly & Williamson 2011: 1935). We should note though that one of the authors of this article, William Easterly, a professor in Economics, served between 1985-‐2001 as a senior advisor and economist at the World Bank, the (intellectual) competitor of UNDP. 11 Available at http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/57/264&Lang=E (Accessed August 27, 2014) 7 8
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Paper Master of Cultures and Development Studies (CADES) at KU Leuven Belgium – Copyright Stefaan Anrys, 2014 – unpublished
first woman ever to lead UNDP 12 and in 2011 she rebranded the UNDP. “Empowered lives. Resilient nations” became the new tagline.13 Clark also chairs the United Nations Development Group, a committee consisting of the heads of all UN funds, programmes and departments working on development issues.14 Great Britain strongly supported Clark’s candidacy for the UNDP’s top job15 and she has been mentioned more than once as the potential successor of UN secretary-‐general Ban Ki-‐Moon, when he will retire in 2016.16 Since 2006 Forbes ranks her among “The World’s 100 Most Powerful Women”. She thus has the leverage and the position within the UNDP to push through new ideas and policies. When asked to explain why resilience had also become the subtitle of this year’s HDR, Eva Jespersen refers to Helen Clark’s predilection for the topic and her view on the notion, as made public during lectures at Cambridge and Oxford. Whatever the exact reasons for the adoption of resilience within the UNDP have been, Clark has been instrumental in this. And it bears no doubt that the UNDP is desperately looking for a new breath and renewed legitimacy. The tagline Empowered lives, resilient nations is just one way to do so. Whether this choice will prove instrumental in securing future donor contributions –if this has been the goal in the first place– remains to be seen.
How does the UNDP reframe resilience?
As we saw above, the introduction of resilience into the UNDP-‐vocabulary predates the 2014 Human Development Report. On April 16, 2012 and on February 11, 2013 UNDP-‐Administrator Helen Clark has given two lectures on resilience within the UNDP at Cambridge (UK) and Oxford (UK) respectively. The first lecture was entitled “Putting Resilience at the Heart of the Development Agenda”.17 During the second lecture, “Conflict and Development: Inclusive Governance, Resilient Societies”, Clark gave the following definition. “UNDP sees building resilience as a transformative process which draws on the innate strength of individuals, communities, and institutions to prevent, mitigate the impacts of, and learn from the experience of different types of shocks – whether they be internal or external; natural or man-‐made; economic, political, social, or other”.18 Whereas most definitions of resilience depart from the ability of absorbing shocks and bouncing back, Clark puts transformation first. In doing so she explicitly avoids the trap of framing the resilient subject as someone “who must permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world” instead of “a political subject that can conceive of changing the world” (Reid 2013: 355). The UNDP seems thus to take power into account, even politics in the broad sense and does this also in other ways. Before even dropping the word resilience in her speech, Clark first mentions the notion of vulnerability. The 2014 Human Development Report is also subtitled Reducing Vulnerabilities and Building Resilience, thus comprising both terms. According to Béné et al. (2012) reframing development within the “guiding paradigm” of resilience only would be damaging for development as a whole. Bringing vulnerability back in, together with resilience, might make up for the potential loss, since vulnerability has “a far wider range of concepts and tools to deal with people, power and politics” (Béné et al. 2012: 17). Large parts of this years’ HDR address the reasons why people are vulnerable, rather than how to build resilience. In doing so, the authors seem to
http://content.undp.org/go/newsroom/2009/april/helen-‐clark-‐sworn-‐in-‐as-‐undp-‐administrator.en (Accessed August 24, 2014) UNDP Brand manual, available at http://www.ba.undp.org/content/dam/bosnia_and_herzegovina/docs/UNDP%20logos/UNDP%20Brand%20Manual.pdf (Accessed August 23, 2014) 14 http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/operations/leadership/administrator.html (Accessed August 18, 2014) 15 http://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/govt-‐supports-‐helen-‐clark-‐united-‐nations-‐role (Accessed August 23, 2014) 16 http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jan/27/will-‐helen-‐clark-‐be-‐first-‐woman-‐to-‐run-‐united-‐nations (Accessed August 23, 2014) 17 Available at http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/presscenter/speeches/2012/04/16/helen-‐clark-‐putting-‐resilience-‐ at-‐the-‐heart-‐of-‐the-‐development-‐agenda/ (Accessed August 18, 2014) 18 Available at http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/presscenter/speeches/2013/02/11/helen-‐clark-‐conflict-‐and-‐ development-‐inclusive-‐governance-‐resilient-‐societies/ (Accessed August 18, 2014) 12 13
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have taken at heart the academics’ advice, warning that “vulnerability needs to be front and central in any resilience paradigm” (Béné et al. 2012: 17). What the exact link is between both “sibling concepts” is unclear, also to academics (Manyena 2006, Béné et al. 2012). “A useful way to view this relationship is as going ‘from vulnerability to resilience’”, reads the report but this obvious link is not really expanded on (UNDP 2014a: 17). The other important problem with resilience –being vague, not measurable-‐ is not really countered and applies besides also to the much older concept of vulnerability. In a box at the beginning of its report, the HDR reviews the work done on measuring vulnerability and concludes by saying not one measurement described seems to be capable of assessing the “broad systemic vulnerability” the Report focuses on. In 2010 the Human Development Report introduced the Multidimensional Poverty Index and the Inequality-‐ adjusted HDI, on top of the already existing HDR-‐indices.19 Surprisingly or not, this years’ report does not come up with a new index for resilience nor vulnerability. Instead of introducing again another index or measure, it prefers “instead to focus on embedding vulnerability firmly within the human development approach”, thereby reaffirming the validity of its past work on poverty and inequality and implicitly acquiescing that neither resilience, nor vulnerability add much to the development practice in terms of measurable outputs (UNDP 2014a: 28). This paper does not pretend to dissect the intricacies of UNDP’s use of resilience, but hints at some important criticisms brought up by literature and tackled or not in this year’s report framing of resilience. A criticism that HDR rightly counters, is the fact that policy makers and the broad audience using the notion put too much stress on adaptability, and too little on stability. The title of the article in TIME Magazine claiming resilience was going to be the 2013 buzzword, is illustrative for this distortion: “Adapt or die: why the environmental buzzword of 2013 will be resilience?”20. But one is oft inventive out of necessity. As soon as humans have the chance, they predominantly try to consolidate the little stability they have gained (housing, salary, health...). This human need has been well taken into account by many resilient theorists, stressing stability as a pre-‐requisite for building up adaptive and/or transformative capacity. Still this protective component of resilience is often negated by policymakers in favour of the “preventative, promotional and transformational measures” (Béné et al. 2012: 42). Not so by the HDR, that stresses “horizontal inequalities” as major source of vulnerability and repeats the importance of “comprehensive social protection”. “Helping vulnerable groups and reducing inequality are essential to sustaining development both now and across generations” (Malik 2014). Besides the fact that the 2014 HDR tackles important criticisms scholars usually have, it is interesting to see which policies the HDR puts forward, since this nuances Reid’s claim (2013), who contends resilience is co-‐opted by neoliberal governance. In his speech at the launch of the Report, lead author Khalid Malik stressed that not only individual capabilities (health, education, income, personal security), social position but also “inadequate policies and poor social institutions” account for vulnerabilities (Malik 2014). In his view, the two principles underlying human development are “putting people first” –the traditional adagio of the UNDP-‐ and “universalism”. Instead of using resilience to out-‐manoeuvre public entities, UNDP defends state-‐led policies to guarantee everyone’s rights to “education, health care and other basic services” (Malik 2014). The report hails the importance of social welfare systems, redistribution policies, full employment, “decent jobs for all” and demands a more fair international governance, to secure public goods (including universal social protection and an effective climate regime) (UNDP 2014a: 111-‐112). The report adds further on that “markets are ill-‐equipped to provide” these public goods (UNDP 2014a: 115). Whether the subtitle has been merely a PR-‐operation to please donors, while the report itself remains faithful to UNDP’s traditional developmental discourse, is up to discussion. At any rate the content of the 2014 HDR is a clear denial of resilience being only co-‐opted by neoliberalism.
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http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-‐development-‐index-‐hdi (Accessed August 18, 2014)
20 http://science.time.com/2013/01/08/adapt-‐or-‐die-‐why-‐the-‐environmental-‐buzzword-‐of-‐2013-‐will-‐be-‐resilience/
(Accessed August 18, 2014)
Paper Master of Cultures and Development Studies (CADES) at KU Leuven Belgium – Copyright Stefaan Anrys, 2014 – unpublished
What is the impact of the 2014 Human Development Report? We have seen above how the HDR seeks to consider how resilience can be viewed and applied through a human development lens. We will now try to assess what might be the impact of this reframing on the broader development community. It is too early and it is not the scope of this paper to examine in detail how UNDP’s reading of resilience might impact the development community as a whole. That would require much more thorough analysis, not in the least inter-‐textual discourse analysis. The impact of the UN development agencies and the office responsible for writing the HDR in particular is surely far from negligible. It might suffice here to refer to the UNDP report to the Executive Board on the development of the 2011 Human Development Report. This document shows the efforts undertaken “to systematically engage with policymakers, leading academics and other opinion leaders in Member States”, via high-‐level panels, meetings, events, conferences and consultations as well as media coverage. The 2011 Report generated for example some 2,000 news articles online (UN 2012). By definition, development cooperation is a largely multilateral affair and national development actors are always heavily influenced by what is said and done in other countries and by leading players. True, in comparison to official bilateral cooperation, representing two-‐thirds of all aid flows, multilateral aid is relatively small (Develtere 2012: 97). Moreover, in terms of money, the European development community is much bigger than the UN multilateral organisations. “While Europe has been expanding its aid, the United Nations system has been slimmed down. In 2007, UN agencies provided less than four percent of total ODA. IDA, other multilateral development banks and the IMF through its Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility provided an additional ten percent. That compares with 1985, when UN organizations and the development banks represented just under one quarter of total ODA” (Kharas 2007: 4). Still, the UN galaxy is more than hard cash. The UNDP also provide technical assistance, policy advice to national governments or institutions and helps to build consensus, e.g. around the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). UNDP’s total staff is estimated around 6,400 (with over 1,100 in New York and about 5,300 in field operations).21 From the start the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has been regarded, together with UNICEF, the World Bank group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the main specialists in development (Develtere 2012: 33). As mentioned at the beginning of this paper, the yearly Human Development Report has had and still seems to have a relatively big impact. Although all statistics collected by UN agencies mandated to do so originate ultimately in the countries’ institutions themselves, the compilation and use of the stats in the yearly report, for example, are awaited with anxiety by the respective countries. Jan Vandemoortele recalls how, while being UNDP’s country representative in Pakistan, he was summoned by the prime minister after the publication of the 2005 report. “Pakistan dropped one place in the HDI ranking. That was just half of the story. Worse, India had risen one place. The prime minister was not pleased at all, as he made very clear that our data were completely wrong” (Vandemoortele 2014). This rather negative example illustrates the weight countries attribute to the publication of the UNDP-‐ report. Eva Jespersen gives other arguments for not discarding it as a paper without power. It urges actors worldwide to adopt a human development lens when looking at development. Moreover the global report has given rise to hundreds of national and sub-‐nationals spinoffs. “There have been around 700 reports state and sub state level reports since 1992. These are not done in New York or by the regional UNDP-‐ offices, but in the countries themselves, often steered by the governments although with guidance and collaboration of UNDP country offices. A Turkish human development report some years ago on youth is associated with the government set up a youth advisory council. Some of these reports really have caught the national, you can call it, imagination or interest” (Jespersen 2014, personal communication).
21 U.N. Development Programme Plans Lay-‐Offs, Salary Cuts and Demotions, IPS, 30 May 2014. Available at http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/05/undp-‐plans-‐lay-‐offs-‐salary-‐cuts-‐and-‐demotions/ (Accessed August 14, 2014)
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The pros of UNDP’s resilience If we are to assume that the adoption and reframing of resilience as presented in the Human Development Report has an influence on the development community, does one need to worry or rather welcome again another take on resilience? What strikes in this report is the nearly complete absence of the Millennium Development Goals or the Sustainable Development Goals, supposed to be the successor at the turn of 2015-‐2016. This seems a pity. The Millennium Development Goals have the advantage to be comprehensible, accessible and measurable, while resilience is often vilified for being too vague, not measurable or if measured, neglecting important factors of risk and vulnerability (Levine 2012). In other words, donors cannot be held accountable for their efforts in improving resilience, if at least resilience can be built up in the first place. We argue that one should not be overly critical about the vagueness of resilience nor overestimate the value of measurability in development cooperation. In contrast to the SDGs that are being drafted now, who by their sheer number22 might garner little public support, the MDGs had indeed the benefit of being simple, limited in number, understandable and measurable. Still, most of them have not been met and will most likely not be achieved in 2015. We will not expand on the reasons why – this is not the scope of this paper– but we would like to question the use of measurability and stress the potential of vague buzzwords, likely to act as brokers. Let us illustrate this ex negativo by referring to the use of logical frameworks. Exactly as logframes in development projects might become lock frames (Gasper 2000: 21) when they are too rigidly handled, measurable goals that are put on paper and serve as a yardstick for action, without sufficient debate about them, are often doomed to fail or can work contra-‐productively. Resilience in our view has a bigger potential as a bridging concept, as “an idea that could draw together apparently distinct policy domains, and unite very different interests behind a common agenda” (Meadowcroft 2000: 371). Discussing less syncretised and more general buzzwords, helps to open discussion about common goals, the aims, and the daily workings within the development community and also leaves the possibility to fund domains that can be boxed with difficulty within e.g. logframes. In the same line, the notion of resilience breaks through the traditional development paradigm, which implies an asymmetrical relationship between developed and developing countries. Development cooperation still departs from one-‐way-‐aid relationship, even if the term international cooperation has been increasingly replacing it since the 1990’s. In our view, building resilience, much more than development cooperation, allows to see linkages between citizens worldwide and foster some kind of global citizenship. Citizens might then more easily recognize similar and even global challenges to resilience – crawling social welfares systems, to name just one, or climate change. Whereas this global kinship does not per se lead to a fight for global justice, in some areas we see this happening still. The food sovereignty movement –in a way building on the earlier dependency theory (Pieterse 2001: 151)– is a good example. The movement contends that public ownership of food systems makes them and citizens worldwide more resilient. “The emerging food sovereignty movement is piecing together common ground among diverse groups, tapping into the needs and concerns of small-‐scale farmers, anti-‐hunger activists, peasant federations and middle-‐class consumers worried about health and food quality” (Miller et al. 2006: 8). Consumers and small farmers worldwide link up to fight for the cause of food sovereignty, because they see the resilience of their food and the crops they’re fed on reduced. Vandana Shiva, a well-‐ known Indian environmental activist, is one of them. Her seminal work Law of the Seed explicitly uses the notion of resilience: “While farmers breed for diversity, corporations breed for uniformity. While farmers breed for resilience, corporations breed vulnerability” (Navdanya International 2013: 6). This is just one example of how potentially powerful alliances might arise using resilience as a rallying cry, whereas this might be more difficult when one puts forward measurable “developmental” goals.
22 http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/4438mgscompilationowg13.pdf (Accessed August 27, 2014)
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Paper Master of Cultures and Development Studies (CADES) at KU Leuven Belgium – Copyright Stefaan Anrys, 2014 – unpublished
Some dangers of the buzzword resilience Whereas the above mentioned example and the 2014 Human Development Report itself proves the notion of resilience can be a bridging concept for all creeds of development actors, this fuzziness has also a flipside, not in the least because of the high visibility of the HDR. This risk is not typical of resilience. Development discourse is full of buzzwords, that change, come and go: “participation”, “empowerment”, “poverty reduction” are some of them. A buzzword has performative effects, shapes policy and practice, but is also lacking a clear definition. It clouds meanings and often restricts the boundaries of thought (Cornwall & Brock 2005, Cornwall & Eade 2010). One of the dangers of resilience is more in particular that the sophistication of the technical definition is obliterated by the policy and most certainly by the public discourse around the notion. This is normal for any jargon, but in this case the risk is much higher, since everybody has a more or less intuitive understanding of the concept. “In particular when resilience enters public policy debates it has all sorts of connotations from its more everyday meaning and usage – of rigidity, stoicism, self-‐sacrifices-‐ that many resilience theorists would argue are not what is capture in the technical concept of resilience” (Béné et al. 2012: 45). In other words resilience appeals also to notions and attitudes that rather reduce than foster (global) solidarity. Resilience theory is a recognition of our ignorance: "Not the assumption that future events are expected, but that they will be unexpected" (Walker & Cooper 2011: 146). Assuming everything is unpredictable might impede action and attempts to better lives globally. By stressing the need for resilience amongst the poor, we might not only fall into the “vulnerability-‐resilience paradox” (Adger 2006 in Coulthard 2012),23 but also give up the ambition to really plan, direct the development of our planet. We would not go as far as saying that resilience means the end of development, tacitly recognizing “that ‘development’ for the post-‐colonial poor now consists not in achieving First World standards of urban affluence but in surviving” (Walker & Cooper 2011: 155). But we do think that when facing budget austerity, resilience might serve as an excuse to de-‐invest in development or re-‐align funds differently. This brings us to the possible abuse of the notion by politicians, when having to decide on the allocation of public money. One could wonder whether these ideological discussions are that important. The aid sector excels in diversity and lack of coordination, notwithstanding the genuine efforts that have been made, as the Paris Declaration. If so, many actors with a broad range of organisational forms, approaches, practices and ideas wander through aid land, will a concept as resilience make any big difference on the ground? They might take upon the new buzzword to please donors, constituencies, or supporters. But would their way of working, their do’s and don’ts change overnight. Are humans not in the end pretty resilient or even resistant to change? We would argue that even if the link between discourse and the actual development practice is much more complex and the result of negotiations at different levels, discourse no doubt plays an important role. We stress that the more vague the terms used, the more manoeuvre politicians have to fill in the concept of development as they think fit. Robin Broad’s account of the knowledge management of the World Bank clearly demonstrates how buzzwords are used to make “truth” fit a particular worldview (Cornwall & Eade 2010: 293-‐303). Another example of how a buzzword helped to shape policy and clouded political choices comes from the United States, when after 9/11 security became a top priority (Lancaster 2008). Since 9/11 and the raising awareness about climate change, new programmes have gained much more attention, such as crisis prevention, conflict transformation, security and even prevention of terrorism. The Bush administration increasingly integrated the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) into the State Department, to align development with Condoleezza Rice’s approach of “transformational diplomacy” and the Pentagon started financing large parts of U.S. foreign aid (Lancaster 2008: viii). The security-‐paradigm in other words allowed the US to increasingly channel development funds to the military and to goals that were not commonly assumed to be developmental. While this realignment met with protests, the framing of the then geopolitical context in terms of security and prevention made it possible.
23 This paradox asserts that high vulnerability can sometimes accompany greater resilience.
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Paper Master of Cultures and Development Studies (CADES) at KU Leuven Belgium – Copyright Stefaan Anrys, 2014 – unpublished
Having said this, development cooperation has always been a tool of foreign policy and is as much inspired by ideals of helping one another, as by strategic, geopolitical, economical and other motivations. In China’s view, aid is just one tool out of a big box destined to foster economic expansion and development (Taylor 2009, Brautigam 2009). In its wake, Western donors have lost some shame to admit so, hereby aided by the aid fatigue and aid effectiveness in discussions that have been rife in the last ten years. But buzzwords only make the democratic deficit worse and further the lack of accountability towards cabinet, parliament, public opinion or even the sector. The fuzziness of the term resilience gives much manoeuvre to realign aid funds in ways they were originally not meant and thus deconstruct the traditional “development” aid.
Conclusions The UNDP has done a laudable effort in fighting the fuzziness of the buzzword resilience, in stating that resilience ultimately originates, in social welfare systems, in healthy citizens nourished sufficiently at a young age, in public goods secured by global governance. In reframing the debate, the 2014 Human Development Report invites the development community to centre the debate on concrete policies, one can be held accountable for. This year’s report also shows resilience does not have to play into neoliberalism. Still, we fear that the content of this report and the public statements made by Helen Clark might fade way. Tomorrow anyone could invoke UNDP’s authority and even without this stamp of approval for the notion of resilience, the mere fact that again another report has used the notion, adds weight to it. The same happened with the first Millennium Development Goal, which once tabled, notwithstanding much outrage, made it into the final list. Ashwani Saith described in detail how the idea of eradicating poverty was for the first time brought up at the social summit in Copenhagen and met with much discontent. The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) nevertheless picked it up again in 1996. Meanwhile civil society organisations amongst others kept on protesting, Reduce extreme poverty by half made it as one of the eight MDGs (Saith 2006: 1170). Like a snowball rolling from the hills, notwithstanding some pines in its way, the idea had grown so big that it went unquestioned in the end. It is not unthinkable that resilience will gain so much credibility that it will be used and abused by elites in power, going unquestioned and without much regard to the fairly broad and multidimensional definitions we found in the 2014 Human Development Report.
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Paper Master of Cultures and Development Studies (CADES) at KU Leuven Belgium – Copyright Stefaan Anrys, 2014 – unpublished
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