Showing posts from category From the Wilson Center.
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Royal Society Launches ‘People and the Planet’ Study
›“This is a time of rapid and multifaceted change in both population and the planet,” said Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue, a member of the U.K. Royal Society’s People and the Planet working group and contributing author to the report of the same name launched at the Wilson Center on June 4. “The question that the report is trying to address is whether we can actually envision a world in which we can sustainably and equitably meet the consumption needs of seven billion people, and the more to come.” [Video Below]
The Royal Society is a self-governing fellowship of scientists that fosters research to address pressing social issues and better inform policy on a global scale. Eloundou-Enyegue, also an associate professor of development sociology at Cornell University, was joined by fellow working group member and African Institute for Development Policy Director and Founder Eliya Msiyaphazi Zulu to discuss their assessment of growing population and consumption pressures on global wellbeing.
Current Trends Are Unsustainable
“The current trends of global population growth and material consumption and the concomitant changes in the environment are unsustainable,” said Zulu.
On the population side, “you have changes that are affecting not just the size, the growth of the population, but also changes in family structure, in the population distribution, [and] population movement,” said Eloundou-Enyegue.
On the consumption side, “beyond the increase in consumption itself, there’s also a dramatic rise in aspiration,” he continued. “People are in greater contact and this tends to encourage…an increasing aspiration to mimic or to emulate the consumption standard of the more industrialized countries.”
Limits to Equitable Growth
When measuring consumption, which itself tends to be a misplaced barometer of wellbeing, according to Eloundou-Enyegue, there is a “disproportionate focus on GDP.”
Using GDP growth as a measure of consumption and wellbeing both “misses a lot of the economic production that’s not mediated through the market,” and “counts as positive things that are damaging to the planet,” he said.
The People and the Planet report marks a departure from the traditional consumption framework by asking “about the relevance of growth – is growth what we ought to be after?”
“The report tried to make a distinction between two types of consumption – the consumption of material resources and the consumption of goods and services – that are all relevant to wellbeing but have different implications for the environment,” Eloundou-Enyegue said. “So there is a need to think about how to shift or to favor consumption that is less damaging to the environment.”
Not an “Either-Or” Proposition
There is “a tendency to look at population and consumption when you’re addressing the impact of the environment in an either-or format, as if you had to choose either population as being the main culprit or consumption,” said Eloundou-Enyegue. “The reality is that they all have to be integrated and considered jointly.”
At the same time, there is “a tendency to shy away from population issues when you set development goals because they tend to be controversial,” he said. And yet, said Zulu, “there’s no question about it, the global population growth needs to be slowed down and ultimately stabilized for both people and the planet to flourish.”
The vast majority of future population growth is expected to come from Africa. Based on the United Nation’s medium variant projection, 70 percent of global population growth over the rest of the century will come from the continent.
That projection, however, belies a big assumption: “that the high fertility countries now will follow the same pattern in decline in fertility as the countries that have [already] achieved lower fertility had [in the past],” said Zulu, which “may actually not be the case.”
“You might actually find a situation where fertility might stabilize around three to four children in some of the…least developed countries,” he said, “and if that happens, it means that actually we stand a much, much bigger chance of getting to the high variant [of 15.8 billion by 2100] than we often tend to assume.”
In spite of that dire warning, however, Zulu said that “we should recognize that demography is not destiny, that through…appropriate socioeconomic and health policies and investment, we can actually slow down population growth.”
The report concludes that voluntary and non-coercive “reproductive health and family planning programs are urgently required,” said Zulu. “There is also a need for strong political leadership and financial commitment to make sure that these programs and services reach out to all women around the world who need them.”
Have We Missed the Boat Again?
Part of the urgency from the working group is because, so far, commitments to reproductive health appear to be falling short. It is the international community’s responsibility “to make sure that women have the contraceptives that they need in order to achieve their fertility aspirations,” said Zulu, but some of the most important agenda-setting events in global development over the past 20 years have sidelined population, reproductive health, and family planning.
The Millennium Development Goals, for instance, “tried to stay clear of population,” said Eloundou-Enyegue, even though “all the indicators that I see are either intrinsically demographic or have a strong demographic component.”
“If you think about stratification and the reproduction of inequality and poverty across generations and the role that differential fertility and reproduction plays, there’s no way you can sidestep population,” he continued. “If you’re talking about maternal mortality and child mortality…it doesn’t make sense to set population aside.”
Now, as the international community prepares for the upcoming Rio+20 summit, “there’s been a big struggle to get…consideration of population issues” on the agenda, said Zulu.
“Population is at the peripheral of all those discussions,” said Zulu. When in Nairobi for a preparatory conference earlier this year, Zulu said UNFPA Executive Director Babatunde Osotimehin “told me that he was quite alarmed that there was hardly any mention of population in all those discussions. And he asked me the question, ‘have we missed the boat again?’”
That concern reinforces the main argument of People and the Planet, said Zulu: there is an “urgent need to reduce material consumption of the richest, and increase consumption and healthcare for the poorest 1.3 billion people.”
“We’re talking about having the majority of people in the world being able to flourish, being able to lead decent lives.”
Event Resources:Photo Credit: “Market_Kampala, Uganda,” courtesy of the Hewlett Foundation. -
Africa on the Move: The Role of Political Will and Commitment in Improving Access to Family Planning
›Excerpted below is the adapted abstract, by lead authors Eliya Msiyaphazi Zulu and Violet Murunga. The full report is available for download from the Wilson Center’s Africa Program.
Despite commitments to the program of action for the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development and Millennium Development Goal 5 (focused on maternal and reproductive health), little progress has been made in improving access to family planning and slowing rapid population growth in Africa. Lack of political will has been highlighted among the key factors behind the lackluster performance in addressing these sensitive development issues. However, the situation is changing with some African governments embracing family planning as a key tool for improving child and maternal health, slowing population growth, preserving the environment, and enhancing broader efforts to alleviate poverty.
This study examines factors that have propelled the change in attitudes of some political leaders to champion family planning, assesses how such political will has manifested in different contexts, and explores how political will affects the policy and program environment. Mixed policy analysis methods were employed, including desk review of policy and program documents and stakeholder interviews conducted in Ethiopia, Malawi, and Rwanda – three countries that have made phenomenal progress in increasing contraceptive use in the recent past.
Lessons from this study will help galvanize efforts to improve access to reproductive health services in countries where little progress is being made. The results provide useful insights on the dawn of a new Africa where strategic political leadership is playing an increasingly valuable role in overcoming the continent’s longstanding development shackles. The study shows that political will is mainly changing due to increased availability of evidence showing that high population growth undermines efforts to alleviate poverty and hunger as well as investments in the quality human capital that least development countries desperately need in order to transform their economies.
The high sensitivity about childbearing and suspicions regarding the intentions of western development partners in promoting family planning in order to slow population growth are dissipating as more Africans are opting to have fewer children and demanding family planning. This study points to the need for global development partners to be much more cognizant of the drivers of Africa’s emerging success and focus their development assistance on enhancing, nurturing, and highlighting local leadership traits, capacities, and systems that are producing positive results, as well as support governments that have embraced family planning to ensure that no woman has an unwanted pregnancy due to lack of family planning.
Download the full report from the Wilson Center. -
Family Planning and Results-Based Financing Initiatives
›“Family planning means healthier moms and kids – and it’s good for development too,” said Lindsay Morgan, a senior health analyst at Broad Branch Associates, a healthcare advocacy group. But any number of hurdles can keep women from accessing family planning services. Morgan spoke at a May 21 discussion about results-based financing (RBF) programs, which aim to address hurdles on both the supply and demand sides of the equation in developing countries by incentivizing the provision of a variety of quality services while removing barriers to access for women in need of those services.
Removing Barriers to Providing and Using Family Planning Services
Incentives in RBF programs can come in a variety of forms – like subsidies or fees paid to clinics or vouchers sold to women, said Morgan. In Burundi, for example, under a pilot program rolled out across three provinces in 2006, health facilities receive payments for each patient that uses a modern method of contraception. In 2009, the government and international partners began scaling up the program to a nationwide level. In addition to expanding the program’s geographic reach, the scale-up incorporated new payment criteria to better incentivize quality of care (as opposed to just quantity) and longer-lasting methods of contraception.
Since the RBF pilot began, maternal and child health indicators have improved. The number of children being fully immunized is up, as is contraceptive prevalence, said Morgan. Additionally, those immediate results can lead to a slew of additional benefits down the line. For instance, improving modern contraceptive prevalence is one of the most cost-effective interventions available for reducing maternal death, she said.
In nearby Kenya, the health ministry leads a voucher system across four districts and two Nairobi slums to help some of the country’s poorest women afford maternal healthcare, family planning, and gender-based violence services.
The program is “written into large policy documents [and] strategic pieces,” including Vision 2030, a long-term government-wide strategy document “unveiled in 2008 as a way to reach middle-income country status by 2030,” said Ben Bellows, a reproductive health associate at Population Council Kenya. The government’s emphasis on the voucher program as more than just a health initiative is an acknowledgment of the downstream impact that improved maternal and reproductive health can have on the country’s development, he said.
“An Equity Gap in Family Planning”
However, the fact that the voucher program is needed at all is evidence of “an equity gap in family planning,” Bellows said. Access to family planning services can be significantly skewed depending on a woman’s income level, he said, pointing to a recent article in The Lancet assessing health inequalities in 12 different maternal and child health services across 54 priority Millennium Development Goal countries.
The equity gap reflects “an interesting problem with development,” said Bellows: Though low-income countries are converging with higher income countries, in terms of economic growth rates and income levels “the benefits of growth aren’t being evenly distributed.” The Africa Progress Panel’s annual report, released last month, echoes that point, he said.
“Governments are failing to convert the rising tide of wealth into opportunities for their most marginalized citizens,” the report concludes, and “unequal access to health, education, water and sanitation is reinforcing wider inequalities.”
Kenya’s voucher system is designed to help shrink that gap. Among the poorest of the poor – those benefitting from the system – inequalities are dropping, even if on a broader scale, inequity still exists between poor and wealthy Kenyans. “We’re seeing lower inequalities of service in areas exposed to the voucher,” said Bellows.
“RBF supports progress on a path towards universal health coverage,” said Beverly Johnston, the senior policy advisor at USAID’s Office of Population and Reproductive Health. And within the context of family planning “the whole idea is to level the playing field” so that all contraceptive methods are equally readily available to the women seeking them.
“A Catalyst for Change” in Family Planning
In addition to addressing equal access concerns, RBF programs can serve as “a catalyst for change…to stimulate quality of care and quality of family planning counseling in particular,” said Johnston.
A commonly cited hurdle to better family planning access is social norms that support large family sizes or otherwise limit a woman’s ability to space or limit her pregnancies. Given community health workers’ unique roles within their communities – “often on the front lines…where many of these social taboos and barriers exist,” as Morgan described – simply strengthening their training, and in turn improving the quality of care that women receive, can help counter norms that might otherwise prohibit access to family planning.
As more women receive higher quality care, norms dissipate even further, said Morgan. “There is evidence that [quality of care] is strongly associated with a woman’s decision to choose a method to use, to continue to use it, and to recommend it to others.”
“Rights Are Tantamount”
One trap RBF programs need to be aware of is over-incentivizing expansion of coverage to the detriment of quality or individual women’s concerns about what makes sense for them, said Johnston.
“Rights are tantamount,” she said. In order to ensure that rights are upheld, programs must reflect and be sensitive to local histories and local needs – particularly given the fact that some countries have had “a history of coercive programs and policies.”
Ultimately, “we really look at RBF as just one tool,” said Johnston. “RBF is not for every place and every context,” and neither is family planning’s place in RBF programming.
As one tool of many, RBF programs are gaining prominence as a way to meet MDGs related to maternal and child health. Bellows sees RBF’s importance lasting long past that 2015 deadline, though.
“The high inequity that we witness across many low-income countries, and the ability of targeted mechanisms [like Kenya’s voucher program] to address that, suggest that this may be a kind of generalized solution,” he said. “Obviously it will be context specific in the way in which it is rolled out, but the strategy of incentivizing clients and providers suggests that there’s some sort of globalized solution that could be considered for this widespread challenge.”
Event Resources
Photo Credit: Sean Peoples/Wilson Center. -
Comparing Urban Governance and Citizen Rights in China and India
›Today, according to Xuefei Ren, 129 cities in China and 45 in India have populations of over a million people. Such large-scale urbanization has created major governance challenges. Speaking at a May 23 Asia Program event co-sponsored with the Kissinger Institute on China, United States Studies, and the Comparative Urban Studies Project, Ren, a Wilson Center Fellow, examined two case studies of urbanization-driven governance in China and India and their effect on citizen rights.
Her first case study involved housing demolitions and urban re-development in Shanghai and Mumbai. In Shanghai, nearly a million households were relocated between 1995 and 2008 to make way for hotels, airports, and luxury apartments. City regulations in 1991 and 2001 legalized forced demolitions, and no prior consent from residents was needed.
However, Ren noted that displaced residents “are not quite powerless.” She highlighted the case of a woman who sued the city government after being relocated and was eventually granted the compensation she had requested. In 2003, China’s central government ordered a freeze on large-scale demolitions. Several years later, it passed a “landmark” property rights law.
Meanwhile, in Mumbai, local officials in the early 2000s had their own re-development plans. The Indian city is rife with overcrowded, low-income housing; slums are populated by seven million citizens (40 percent of the city’s total population), and comprise up to 10 percent of Mumbai’s total land area.
In 2004, aware that most of the slums were located in desirable areas – near airports or in central business districts – city planners recognized a major development opportunity. Over the next two years, officials launched a demolition campaign that left 400,000 people homeless. According to Ren, certain categories of residents were theoretically entitled to compensation, but with “legal protections carrying little weight,” most of them received nothing.
Yet, as in Shanghai, Mumbai’s city dwellers successfully fought back. Housing activists staged acts of “direct agitation,” including a series of street protests and road blockages. Such tactics, said Ren, were “disruptive but effective.” The Mumbai courts sided against the activists in 2006, but India’s Supreme Court later issued a ruling in their favor.
Fighting Land Acquisitions: A Comparison
Ren’s second case study compared land acquisition efforts outside the slums.
Last year, residents in Wukan, a village along China’s southeast coast in the province of Guangdong, launched a protest movement against land seizures. They alleged that government officials had sold their land to developers and failed to provide residents with appropriate compensation. The protestors made two demands: the return of their land and the holding of local elections.
Notably, Ren said, protestors in Wukan affirmed their support for the Communist Party, and never framed their movement as an anti-government effort. In March 2012, local elections were in fact held, with two leaders of the protest movement voted into office (one as village chief, the other as his deputy).
Ren also discussed an attempt by India’s Tata Motors corporation to acquire land in Singur, a village about 100 miles from Calcutta in the state of West Bengal. The company wanted to use this land to construct a factory for the Nano, a small, cheap car marketed to India’s urban middle class. In 2005, the West Bengal government, which had been controlled by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) for nearly 30 years, actively wooed the firm. State authorities “went overboard” in offering Tata Motors subsidies and highly fertile land, said Ren. Small landowners were obliged to surrender their plots at low prices, and in 2006 the corporation formally took over the land (nearly 1,000 acres altogether), despite heavy opposition from peasants.
However, violent protests continued and after several months, Tata Motors was forced to pull out of West Bengal. Then, in a state election in May 2011, the Trinomool Congress Party, led by the populist leader Mamata Banerjee, swept the CPI-M from power. Banerjee had run her campaign on a promise to restore the land to Singur’s farmers.
Just weeks after the new government assumed power, West Bengal passed a law that would allow for about 400 acres from the Tata Motors project to be returned to farmers who had refused government compensation for their land.
Ren acknowledged that in both countries, citizenship rights are not enjoyed by all and tend to be unevenly distributed across social groups. Still, she concluded, Chinese and Indian cities “have become strategic sites for reassembling citizen rights.” By asserting their land and housing rights, city denizens “are becoming active citizens.”
Michael Kugelman is a program associate with the Wilson Center’s Asia Program. He can be reached at michael.kugelman@wilsoncenter.org and on Twitter @michaelkugelman.
Photo Credit: Mumbai pipes, courtesy of flickr user lenskap. -
The Global Water Security Assessment and U.S. National Security Implications
›“Water security is about much more than access to H2O,” said Jane Harman, director, president, and CEO of the Wilson Center at the May 9 meeting, “Global Water Security: The Intelligence Community Assessment.” The event – part of the Wilson Center’s National Conversation Series – brought together a number of experts to discuss a recently released intelligence community assessment of global water security. [Video Below]
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“Afghanistan, Against the Odds: A Demographic Surprise” Launches ECSP Report 14
›A few months ago, Elizabeth Leahy Madsen broke down Afghanistan’s first-ever nationally representative survey of demographic and health issues in a two-part series here on the blog. Now, we’ve published her analysis in a rich new policy brief format. It is the first issue of Environmental Change and Security Program Report 14, the latest volume of ECSP’s flagship publication.
In “Afghanistan, Against the Odds,” Madsen examines the surprising results of this fall’s demographic survey and how the country’s statistics compare to neighboring Pakistan.
“Just as Afghanistan and Pakistan’s political circumstances have become more entwined,” writes Madsen, “their demographic paths are more closely parallel than we might have expected. For Afghanistan, given its myriad socioeconomic, political, cultural, and geographic challenges, this is good news. But for Pakistan, where efforts to meet family planning needs have fallen short of capacity, it is not.”
The publication of this brief marks the re-launch of ECSP Report as an online-only volume, with individual issues scheduled to be released throughout the year. Forthcoming ECSP Report 14 briefs will address the demographic roots of the Arab Spring; the links between population dynamics and environmental resources like water, biodiversity, and food; and the potential impact of climate change mitigation efforts on conflict.
Published since 1996 in hard copy and online, the new ECSP Report will now be available on the Wilson Center website, New Security Beat, and Issuu. You can read the previous 13 volumes of the ECSP Report on the Wilson Center website.
Download ECSP Report 14: “Afghanistan, Against the Odds” from the Wilson Center. -
Sex and World Peace: How the Treatment of Women Affects Development and Security
›“What we have discovered is that the very best predictor of how insecure and unstable a nation is not its level of democracy, it’s not its level of wealth, it’s not what ‘Huntington civilization’ it belongs to, but is in fact best predicted by the level of violence against women in the society,” said Valerie Hudson, co-author of Sex and World Peace, at an April 26 book launch at the Wilson Center. [Video Below]
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Nigeria Beyond the Headlines: Environment and Security [Part Two]
›In the coming years, Nigeria’s cohort of unemployed youth has equal potential to “be converted into either a religious or a regional clash, as certain youths get opportunities and other youths do not,” said Pauline Baker, President Emeritus of the Fund for Peace, during the day-long “Nigeria Behind the Headlines” event at the Wilson Center on the April 25 (read part one here). [Video Below]
