April 2008

There is a lot of attention paid to Freedom of Information (FOI) Acts. The World Bank outlined some of the issues related to the subject both in a World Development Report in 2002, with a chapter on media and also in the book, The Right To Tell. Active research also went on afterwards to identify countries that had an FOI regime and those that did not.  There are clearly many benefits to the public in countries that have enacted FOI laws.

A few weeks ago I wrote that “many perceive NT2 to be a World Bank hydropower project. From my perspective, that’s inaccurate in every respect. More on that in a future posting.” Following intense pressure from my reading public (thanks, Nanda), it’s time to explain what I meant.

First, while the World Bank is a strong proponent of NT2, it doesn’t own or implement the project. NT2 is a project of the Government of Lao PDR, involving an innovative public-private partnership of three key private sector companies and a Lao state-owned enterprise. Together, these four partners own the Nam Theun 2 Power Company (NTPC), which has a contract with the Government to build, own, operate and transfer the NT2 hydroelectric power scheme for the next 25 years or so. The project is being financed with around $1.3 billion of largely private sector money: the World Bank Group is providing risk guarantees that helped establish the private sector confidence to put together this large financing package, as well as a $20 million IDA credit to finance part of the Government’s equity stake in NTPC (which is in turn used to finance some of the social and environmental programs). There are also several other international financial institutions involved in the financing (click on the chart for a larger view).

Before I joined the World Bank about a year and half ago, I worked for DFID, the British Government's development ministry. DFID is part of the British Civil Service. That means I was a civil servant. And I attended a variety of training courses at the Civil Service College. And the experience taught me a thing or two about the sources of pressures for accountability faced by ordinary civil servants. And here I refer to pressures for accountability emanating from outside the civil service itself. I want to discuss the three leading sources of pressure.

The World Bank's EdStats (Education Statistics) collects worldwide data on education from national statistical reports, statistical annexes of new publications, and other data sources. The database has just been updated and its Query tool offers preliminary education indicators for the 2006 school year (with new imput from 93 countries) and the 2007 school year (nine countries).

Check out the interactive Query tool to customize reports by country (or group of countries), choosing from more than 100 indicators over many years. And put your results in a chart or map that you can export to use in your own documents and reports.

Priests and vicars have long demonstrated a penchant for biodiversity. There have been missionaries in remote places who have built up and preserved beautiful collections of butterflies, plants etc. which eventually found their way into the great natural history museums of the world.  The Rev. Gilbert White (1720-93) was the classic 18th century English clergyman-naturalist. Over many years he made observations of the plants and creatures he saw and he pulled the strands together in a widely-read book, 'The Natural History of Selborne'.  In a reflective letter to a colleague in 1768 he wrote, "It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: All nature is so full that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined". 

It is in this context that I read the news earlier this month that a small frog, Barbourula kalimantanensis, from Indonesian Borneo, previously known from just a few specimens, had been found to have no lungs.  It is the first frog known to respire solely through its skin but not the first amphibian.  This is a great discovery but maybe not so surprising.  To paraphrase Rev. White, 'the more you look the more you find'.  Nature is so rich, so varied, so surprising, that the existence such an animal would not be totally unexpected. 

Today is World Malaria Day, a few articles have caught my eye lately on the subject. The disease is one of the most deadly in the world, claiming the lives of over one million people annually. In Africa, a child dies every 30 seconds from malaria.

The American professional soccer league, MLS, has partnered with “Nothing But Nets,” a UN Foundation campaign to fight malaria. MLS followed the path of the NBA and other organizations that have joined the campaign. Anyone can donate and with each $10 Nothing But Nets is able to provided one anti-malarial insecticide-treated net.

In another piece of news, Novartis decided cut the price of its anti-malarial drug Coartem by 20 percent starting today. The company said the price reduction was made possible through efficiency gains after expanding its operations - makes one wonder how long Novartis has been waiting for Malaria Day.

To learn more about the disease and even to take quiz on the subject you can visit the World Bank’s Web site on malaria.

Nicholas Negroponte’s longtime MIT colleague Walter Bender has recently left the One Laptop per Child program. Bender was responsible for software and content for "XO" laptops including its innovative Sugar operating system. This all happened amidst OLPC’s move to change its open-source approach as it welcomes Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Bender will now try to further the development of the XOs' Sugar, and get it to run on Linux computers other than XOs.

Bender's departure is the second big executive loss to be added to OLPC's setbacks and reportedly Negroponte wants OLPC to operate more efficiently. An executive-search firm has been trying to hire a chief executive for the group for more than a year – anyone needs a job?

If you’ve read any of the posts in my blog so far, you’ll notice that I’ve mentioned multiple times how much information there is on Nam Theun 2. One of the cornerstones (pdf) for the World Bank’s involvement on NT2 was that the project would be handled in a transparent manner, and that’s why all of the key reports on NT2 are publicly available. The aim of being transparent means that key documentation related to the project as it was being developed and now implemented is public, that the Bank proactively keeps people informed about what is happening (ahem, the blog for one), and that there would be continuous outreach to stakeholders including local and international consultations.

Assessment of impacts to fisheries, resettlement plans, environmental mitigation measures, economic studies, the famous Concession Agreement, independent assessments, semi-annual progress reports from the World Bank… they are all available on the web (see more below). Moreover open channels of communications are ongoing, meaning that -- for example from the World Bank side -- if you, reader, whoever you are, write to me with a question or comment, I will make sure to answer and point you to the relevant information, or put you in touch with one of my colleagues, or arrange a field visit if necessary.

To celebrate Earth Day some people join protest rallies, some others disappear into the wild, but here is a list of more conventional ideas. Feel free to send your own.

• Calculate your carbon footprint (and preferably try to reduce it).
• Plant a three to offset 730kg of carbon emissions (if not one cuts it down).
• Bike to and from work.
• Recycle (even if no one is looking).
• Avoid plastic bags.

In my last post, I discussed one of the supreme values undergirding the democratic public sphere: the public use of reason, that is, a commitment to reason, to argumentation, and the possibility of agreement. I discussed the threat posed to that value and the possibilities of the public sphere if claims are based on the supposed demands of a Deity. But irrationality in the public sphere comes from another source as well: the loud and insistent claims of ethnic champions in complex, multiethnic polities.

Now, it is well-known that the problem of politicized ethnicity bedevils quite a few developing countries. Less well known is the peculiar challenge that this problem poses for governance reform. I will use an example that I know well but disguise the name of the country.

There's been a lot of buzz about prediction markets recently:

• A McKinsey & Co. report on prediction markets quotes James Surowiecki: "I wouldn’t be surprised to see prediction markets used in many more companies than today, not least as a tool to forecast sales. Consumer-facing companies should be particularly interested."
• Knowledge Management gurus Tom Davenport and Dave Snowden jumped into the fray to cool easy enthusiasm.
• An article in the New York Times introduces the concept of futarchy. According to Robin D. Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and a fan of alternative institutions, futarchy is "a form of government enhanced by prediction markets. Voters would decide broad goals of national welfare, but betting in speculative markets would determine the policy steps to achieve those goals."

Is "futarchy" a viable option for enhancing bottom-up participation in setting development policies? So, far, to my knowledge, Globalgiving has been the only entity to experiment with decision markets in a development context. I look forward to learn about the results of its pilot.

PS: After this post was published the Financial Times  published an article with a number of intersting examples of applications of predictions market to the non-profit sector.