Satya Development International

There are a number of critical voices forewarning about how impovershed communities in developing countries may stand to lose from speculative activities associated with the carving our of carbon rights in forests that are customarily, oftentimes collectively owned, by community level groups, as opposed to the state or private sector. For a myriad of reasons ranging from endemic corruption in many of these developing countries, to contradictory or ambiguous legal rights to forest based resources, at present it is not clear how in practice poor people may stand to benefit from the evolution of a market for resources that the latter have traditionally believed was theirs. If as many of the critiques cited in sources such as REDD Monitor or the incisive reports of Rights and Resources  Group are correct, the world’s already pooorest peoples could stand to get a whole lot poorer unless care is paid.

The fears are well founded, as there are few to any precedents to offer optimism for grand projects that seeks to address climate change via the marketplace, in contexts where corruption and impunity predominate, where transparency is limited, and where international institutions who may take the lead in these activities – be they intergovernmental organizations, states, the private sector, or NGOs – have a strong history of guaranteeing that safeguards are in place so the poor are not hurt by activities (or preferably,, are in reality helped).

But helping the poor  who ultimately must be the principal stewards for forest, carbon and other natural resource based stewardship in these very remote places of the globe, will require a different mindset and approach than even those professionals whose professed business is to help the poor – international aid agencies and NGOs – have proven the ability to achieve.

Addressing corruption in practice (versus in white papers or in theory), developing methods for achieving what in recent conservation and development terminology is referred to as free prior and informed consent of local peoples in remote places where social capital and skills levels are weak, and of course guaranteeing that mechanisms for decision making and benefit sharing from any REDD actions work, and are not fictional, is a good place to begin.

This blog will address these issues over time, and welcomes comments from interested parties with insights as to how this can be achieved.

I actually do believe that there could be common ground for “stakeholders” to REDD, where so called win-win scenarios (versus zero sum scenarios) can be achieved. But……this is going to require a very different strategic and operational approach to REDD than  currently appears to be on the planning horizon promoted by most donors, NGOs, and those involved from the private sector. Let’s hope that there is a rethinking of what really will be required for REDD to work in remote areas of Africa or Papua New Guinea where challenges likely remain greatest in the short-term.

What Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts May Share in Common

There is an opportunity for Haiti despite the sadness and horror of the situation the country and people find themselves in, to attempt a start on a development pathway that will get the country out of the vicious negative spirals it has been on for decades, some would say almost 200 years. Without revisiting that history here, my first suggestion would be that if this were to occur, it is high time for the donor community to support Haitian engagement in oversight of how the billions of dollars that will be flowing into the country for national and local development are to be spent. Haitians have little condience in government institutions historically. The track record for transparency and accountability is poor.

Wouldn’t this be an appropriate time to try and build confidence by empowering people to participate in grassroots oversight of how government will be functioning with absorption of hundreds of millions – billions of dollars in kind and cash?

There is one model I am aware of that perhaps could be adapted to the Haitian situation. It is premised on creating a multi-stakeholder oversight platform that brings all interest groups together to categorize and analyze the sources of corruption, perpetrators of corrupt practices, and oversight over time of illicit behaviorsw, and their reporting to public administration and competent elected officials. The model comes from five years of work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and has most recently been described in a paper posted on the World Bank Institue Anti-corruption portal at: http://info.worldbank.org/etools/antic/docs/Case%20Studies/Anti-Corruption%20Winners/Practitioners/Satya%20Development%20International%20LLC.pdf. If in a country with similar degrees of historical burden and lethargic citizen involvement, stakeholders can band together to demand accountability of elected leaders and public administrators, couldn’t this happen in Haiti?

Hey, some seem to be arguing that the people of my home state of Massachusetts were themselves demanding greater accountability from government the other day when they elected Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy. Whatever the reasons behind Scott’s quite remarkable election, and whatever one’s politics, it is a reminder that people can participate in civic life if they choose to. Even in much of the U.S. this is often a forgotten fact.

So perhaps with just a bit of facilitation, Haitians could begin to participate in a facet of public life they rarely have been afforded the opportunity – oversight of planning and budgetary process of new monies flowing in to Haiti post-earthquake. If this were to happen, one may hypothesize that Haiti could perhaps turn the corner, and escape from another 100 years of business as usual with the donor community never sussing out the root causes for failure. As I would argue that a more transparent public process in Haiti will probably enable bettter planning, more efficiencies and less corruption, the country would quite simply benefit in ways that it will not if the transparency and corruption issue is avoided.

No doubt there are other models than the one cited above. But that is one place to start, if donors were serious about addressing one of principal root causes of enduring poverty in Haiti.