From Gary Sick, formerly with the International Affairs Program in 1982-1987.
I have recently posted a few thoughts on the Iran-Brazil-Turkey nuclear deal
on my blog at <http://garysick.tumblr.com/>
There are also a few stray items on other aspects of the US-Iran
relationship for the benefit of true aficionados.
Any comments from LAFFers would be a special treat.
gary
Richard Adams, former staff member (1994-2000) in the Asia Regional Programs office and the Human Rights and International Cooperation unit in New York has been awarded a research fellowship by the Columbia University Anthropology Department for work in Bangkok, Thailand. He will engage in field work study of the everyday life of migrant laborers who have left rural Thailand for the city. By looking at the practices of every day life of a particular group of workers at one construction site, he will be probing the disparities between various popular representations of the “countryside” and how it might contrast with how migrants see themselves, and whether “nostalgia” is actually an important consideration in the discourses on migrant labor in Thailand. This is all framed within a key moment in the history of Thailand when tensions between the “rural” and “urban” threaten to upset the very stability of the nation.
David Arnold worked at the Ford Foundation from 1984 to 1997 in Human Rights and Governance and in New Delhi.
From The New York Times
May 5, 2010
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
CAIRO — When Rafik Gindy graduated from high school, he knew he wanted to become an engineer. So he enrolled at the American University in Cairo and prepared to immerse himself in math and science.
But the university had a different idea.
Mr. Gindy knew what he wanted to be, but did not exactly know who he was. That was what the university wanted him to think about, in a class called “The Human Quest: Exploring the Big Questions.”
“I thought identity was just your name, your culture, but now I know it’s really complex,” said Mr. Gindy, a slender freshman who shook his head at that revelation.
Who am I?
What does it mean to be human?
These are the kinds of questions posed to undergraduate students entering this 90-year-old university during what the president, David D. Arnold, called a first year of “disorientation.” During disorientation, the students — 85 percent of them Egyptians — are taught to learn in ways quite at odds with the traditional method of teaching in this country, where instructors lecture, students memorize and tests are exercises in regurgitation.
“It’s different here because there is room for people to express themselves,” said Manar Mohsen, a junior majoring in political science and journalism. “It is not that simple outside, where it is more about conformity.”
Egypt, like much of the Arab world, demands conformity in many corners of life. Education is based on the concept of rote learning, and creativity in the classroom is often discouraged. Students at Cairo University say they memorize and recite, never analyze and hypothesize.
So the idea of a liberal arts education aimed at developing critical thinking skills is often new to the students. That can make for a difficult transition. Plagiarism is often a problem at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, officials here said, because the students — accustomed to rote learning — see nothing wrong with spitting back someone else’s work and have never been held to rigorous academic standards.
“For a lot of the kids here, the idea that you are supposed to have your own ideas is a novelty,” said Lisa Anderson, the university provost who is on leave from Columbia University. “There was nothing in their previous education that would have exposed them to these standards.”
American University is a private, elite school, although university officials sometimes recoil at the elite label. Yet, the school is expensive and so is generally out of reach for all but the wealthiest families and a handful of scholarship students. Tuition and fees for Egyptian students run about $19,600 a year, a princely sum in a country where about half the population lives on about $2 a day.
The campus exudes affluence. Students joke about the “Gucci corridor,” a spot where well-coiffed students gather each afternoon. There is no cafeteria, only expensive fast-food stands.
“We are all rich and spoiled,” said one student, upset that more of her classmates were not more politically aware. But in some respects, the elite label is a strength. American University plays a central role as a sort of intellectual boot camp for young people who will become leaders in government and the economy.
“If we teach the elite to be good citizens, that’s not a bad thing,” Ms. Anderson said.
Nabil Fahmy, the former longtime ambassador to the United States, said that over his nine years in Washington, at least 40 percent of the embassy staff was made up of American University graduates, as was he.
The university was founded in 1919 by a group of Presbyterian missionaries. Unlike the satellite campuses of prestigious American universities in oil-rich Persian Gulf states, it is quite homegrown and often reflects the community around it.
The university was located originally in Tahrir Square, in the center of Cairo, a hyper-urban landscape where the air is thick, the din overwhelming and the mosaic of Egyptian life on every corner. That was part of the university’s appeal.
But over the years it has grown, and now serves 5,000 undergraduates on an architecturally inspiring, if geographically isolated, $400 million, 260-acre campus in a suburb called New Cairo. Instead of urban grime the campus is surrounded by villas and developments with names like Golden Heights.
The location redefined the university just as the university was beginning to redefine itself, as a first-rate university rather than a finishing school for Egypt’s elite. But as the school has grown, so has a conflict within the university itself: can it change its mission while retaining its liberal arts core and preserving classes like the Big Questions?
Some say it needs to move away from that way of thinking.
“We are moving more and more into professional schools, like business, engineering, sciences,” said Mr. Fahmy, the former ambassador, who is the founding dean of a new school of global affairs and public policy.
“The challenge we have now is we have moved from a small college that thought it was a university, to a university that has to change its thinking from being a small college,” he said, defining a view that is anathema to some others on campus.
There are other pressures, too, coming from a society that holds engineers in such high esteem that the profession is also a courtesy title, like doctor.
“The humanities in general, and philosophy specifically, are seen as either frivolous or, at the very least, not financially prudent, by many of the very people who seek what makes A.U.C. unique,” said Nathaniel Bowditch, an assistant professor of philosophy. Dr. Bowditch argued that “learning how to think rather than what to think prepares a person for all professions,” and that without that “the academy becomes nothing more than a trade school.”
For now, the university leadership says it remains committed to its core mission, and will continue to ensure that incoming Egyptian students relearn how to learn, officials here said. “We want our students to be imaginative in their fields,” Ms. Anderson said.
So for the time being, at least, the Big Questions class remains safe, which seems to suit the students just fine.
“I took the course because my brother took it two years ago,” said Mr. Gindy, the freshman construction engineering major. “I like how it explained things we never knew, like how the world began.”
Michael Lipsky worked at the Ford Foundation in 1965 and again in 1991 to 2003 in Governance and Public Policy.
by Michael Lipsky
Twenty nine people died in the Upper Big Branch coal mine last Monday. As the story shifts from the rescue operation to settling on the cause of the fatal explosion, for the moment coal mine safety has the public’s attention. But we run the risk that it will be treated like the story of the girl who fell down the well, wedged in but for a time still alive–of great human interest but soon to pass from view as attention is absorbed by something else.
Mining is a notoriously unsafe occupation. The Upper Big Branch mine where the deaths occurred recorded 48 serious safety violations in 2009 and 10 so far this year. Since the beginning of 2009 parts of the mine have had to be evacuated 64 times.
However, it is possible to run coal mines relatively safely, while remaining economically competitive. A large mine in Utah had only one such violation over the past 15 years, and a mine in Alabama with three times as many workers underground had only two such violations.
The critical safety requirement is to monitor every part of the mine for the buildup of potentially explosive methane gas and coal dust. As a result of improved technology and productivity changes that have reduced the national mining workforce, coal mine fatalities last year declined to 18, a number smaller than the fatalities at Upper Big Branch this week.
There will never be risk-free underground mining, but there can be mining that operates consistently on the highest safety standards. No less an interested party than Cecil Roberts, President of the United Mine Workers of America, agrees:
“Mine safety laws and regulations have progressed to the point where, when followed and properly enforced, they should prevent disasters like this one at Upper Big Branch from happening.”
Coal mining is safer than it was in the past, and it is safer in union mines than in non-union mines. In union mines workers may be more willing to walk out if conditions are unsafe, and unions are prepared to invest their own resources to make sure conditions underground are acceptable. Like other industrial workforces, union mining as a proportion of all mining has declined in recent years. Massey mines–no surprise–are non-union.
There is a temptation to buy into the headlines of the moment and conceptualize the struggle for safety in the mines as a problem of the coal companies versus the miners. The Massey Company defends its safety record, and industry spokesmen remind us that we depend on coal in the United States to keep the lights on. We need to resist this simplification and recognize the current crisis as a test of our capacity as a nation to protect people who cannot be expected to protect themselves from severe risk.
Of the many places where public protections have been put into place in the last century–food production, environmental conservation, building codes, consumer products, etc.–a special place must be reserved for workplace safety. This is because workers as individuals have very little power relative to employers. People need jobs and, as long experience has shown, will work in unsafe conditions if the alternative is to be jobless. When unions are weak or under attack and cannot use collective action to force or negotiate concessions from employers, when jobs are scarce and unevenly distributed across the landscape, people are willing to put themselves in jeopardy. The world over, people one by one will not insist on workplace safety if the alternative is no livelihood.
It is a reasonably settled matter that a democratic and prosperous society can and should insist on safe working conditions. Indeed, despite impressions to the contrary reflecting the fact that so many people died in the mine this week, Americans have been engaged over the last decades to make mining safer.
In the past five years mining regulations have been strengthened and the inspection workforce has increased, although more needs to be done. The 40 year old Mine Safety and Health Administration remains weak. Stronger approaches to mine safety, as encompassed by legislation passed by the House of Representatives in 2007, would have provided greater enforcement powers. (The Bush Administration opposed the bill, which died in the Senate in that year.)
Conditions that lead to the slow death of black lung disease were substantially arrested and incidence of the condition declined substantially after Federal legislation was passed in 1969. It is again on the rise, for reasons that are debated.
In short, mine safety regulation remains contested, but American consideration of mine safety has not been dormant.
There is something cinematic about the emerging portrait of Massey Energy, the parent company of the Upper Big Branch mine. For one thing, in terms of safety the company is a bad actor. Massey has consistently ranked below average in the industry on measures of workplace safety. Three miners died at Upper Big Branch only 12 years ago. The mine has a worse than average record in recent years according the standard statistic used to measure such things–time lost on the job due to work-site accidents.
Moreover, Massey Energy fits the portrait of an enterprise that views safety regulations as strategic hurdles to overcome, rather than as signals to help insure safety on the job. Accounts have emerged that indicate the company sometimes continued to operate while remedying hazardous conditions, instead of suspending operations while the remedial work was done.
The company has challenged at least $1.3 million in penalties since 1995. It is still contesting 352 alleged violations, some dating from 2007. Contesting serious violations means that the company has a better official safety profile than would otherwise be the case. Without being able to establish on the official record a pattern of severe violations–a designation that could ‘trigger’ higher sanctions–the MSHA has declined to order the forced suspension of operations which might have saved lives.
The unapologetic face of Massey Energy, its chief executive Don Blankenship, is well-known not only for defending the company’s safety record but also for opposing public initiatives to improve mine safety. He has been a major force in West Virginia politics. He has used his resources to try to change the composition of the legislature to Republican control, and is perhaps most famous for virtually buying a seat on the state Supreme Court by successfully bankrolling a challenger to a sitting judge who was known to disagree with his views. He is outspoken in asserting that worker safety rules stifle business interests.
The way forward does not seem difficult to project. Rigorous enforcement of existing safety standards is called for, with particular attention to mines with histories of consistent violations. The standards that trigger these violations–for example, more than two percent methane concentration–are not ambiguous. With modern equipment properly placed, anyone–worker or mine operator–should be able to tell when a facility is unsafe, needs to be evacuated, and engineered to return to compliance. Consistent violators should be required to suspend operations until violations are remedied.
The failed 2007 mine safety legislation called for an ombudsman for mine safety, so that workers who worry that they are being exposed to unsafe conditions would have an outlet that did not expose them to retaliation. That idea should be revived. The office of ombudsman might develop innovative ways to inform the public about safety in the industry. For example, with proper authority it could be authorized to require public utilities to report on the safety records of the companies from which it buys coal. Certification issues abound in such a proposal, just as they do in determining ‘fair trade coffee’ and ‘organic produce.’ Nonetheless, such initiatives keep the issue of the conditions of production in front of the consumer.
In the absence of public awareness and ongoing, engaged concern, regulatory protections over time tend to be undermined, and investment in their enforcement allowed to fall short of what’s needed. This is why, ultimately, the issue comes down to whether the West Virginia miners, when all the publicity has died down, will be treated as a small segment of an unsafe industry in a backward part of the country that most people haven’t thought about since John Denver died. Or whether they will be regarded as members of a valued fragment of our American workforce who need and deserve the protections at work that are their birthright.
As a society we know how to protect people from hazards they can’t protect themselves from. We establish building codes for schools, businesses and public places. We take unsafe vehicles off the road and keep unsafe airplanes out of the sky. These and so many of our regulatory laws, often hard-won and resisted at first by business interests, involve tradeoffs between economic concerns and the needs of public safety. Miners’ advocates should be willing to embrace a debate over whether infinitesimally higher prices for electricity are an acceptable tradeoff for greater safety.
Michael Lipsky worked at the Ford Foundation in 1965 and again in 1991 to 2003 in Governance and Public Policy.
This month the Russell Sage Foundation is publishing the 30th Anniversary, expanded edition, of Street Level Bureaucracy, a book that’s been in print continuously since 1980. More information is at: http://www.russellsage.org/publications/100106.788008/view?searchterm=lipsky.
Michael Lipsky
First published in 1980, Street-Level Bureaucracy received critical acclaim for its insightful study of how public service workers, in effect, function as policy decision makers, as they wield their considerable discretion in the day-to-day implementation of public programs. Three decades later, the need to bolster the availability and effectiveness of healthcare, social services, education, and law enforcement is as urgent as ever. In this thirtieth anniversary expanded edition, Michael Lipsky revisits the territory he mapped out in the first edition to reflect on significant policy developments over the last several decades. Despite the difficulties of managing these front-line workers, he shows how street-level bureaucracies can be and regularly are brought into line with public purposes.
Street-level bureaucrats—from teachers and police officers to social workers and legal-aid lawyers—interact directly with the public and so represent the frontlines of government policy. In Street-Level Bureaucracy, Lipsky argues that these relatively low-level public service employees labor under huge caseloads, ambiguous agency goals, and inadequate resources. When combined with substantial discretionary authority and the requirement to interpret policy on a case-by-case basis, the difference between government policy in theory and policy in practice can be substantial and troubling.
The core dilemma of street-level bureaucrats is that they are supposed to help people or make decisions about them on the basis of individual cases, yet the structure of their jobs makes this impossible. Instead, they are forced to adopt practices such as rationing resources, screening applicants for qualities their organizations favor, “rubberstamping” applications, and routinizing client interactions by imposing the uniformities of mass processing on situations requiring human responsiveness. Occasionally, such strategies work out in favor of the client. But the cumulative effect of street-level decisions made on the basis of routines and simplifications about clients can reroute the intended direction of policy, undermining citizens’ expectations of evenhanded treatment.
This seminal, award-winning study tells a cautionary tale of how decisions made by overburdened workers translate into ad-hoc policy adaptations that impact peoples’ lives and life opportunities. Lipsky maintains, however, that these problems are not insurmountable. Over the years, public managers have developed ways to bring street-level performance more in line with agency goals. This expanded edition of Street-Level Bureaucracy underscores that, despite its challenging nature, street-level work can be made to conform to higher expectations of public service.
MICHAEL LIPSKY is senior program director of Demos, a non-partisan public policy research and advocacy organization, and an affiliate professor at Georgetown University.
Ray Offenheiser worked at the Ford Foundation Dhaka and Lima offices in 1986-1996.
From Foreign Policy, May 4, 2010
If you were to try to draw out a diagram of the U.S. government’s toolkit for fighting global poverty, you would quickly find yourself submerged in a spaghetti bowl of confused and conflicting responsibilities, mandates and authorities, with no clear goals, and no shared vision. This confusion on paper leads to confusion on the ground, with very real costs for U.S. foreign policy and the world’s poor.
For example, in El Salvador, the responsibility for U.S. aid is shared between 11 different government agencies, each with different agendas and sometimes conflicting priorities. In Kenya, the United States procures its own HIV/AIDS test kits and AIDS drugs at four times the cost other donors pay. In Bangladesh, the United States collects several times the amount in tariffs than it provides in development assistance, essentially taxing the very trade U.S. leaders tout as the solution to poverty. In Cambodia, government officials typically find it easier to get information on aid resources from the Chinese government than from the U.S. government. And in Afghanistan — where a “civilian surge” of humanitarian aid efforts has been promised — two separate USAID contractors recently discovered by chance they were doing virtually the same project, in the same town.
Seeking to address problems like these, U.S. President Barack Obama is expected in the coming weeks to consider a report from his National Security Council staff containing proposals for reorganizing U.S. foreign aid to make it more effective and accountable.
The fact that one-third of the planet — 2 billion people — remains trapped in poverty poses a singular challenge to the interests and values of the United States. Obama agrees, and has framed development as one of the three pillars of U.S. national security, along with defense and diplomacy. But his. government is still trying to address this 21st-century challenge with a 20th-century toolkit.
Previous attempts to reform the aid system have only complicated the situation. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 integrates 140 different goals and priorities and 400 directives, and is executed by at least 12 departments, 25 different agencies, and almost 60 government offices. Moreover, successive presidents and congresses have often chosen to work around the act, enacting more than 20 additional pieces of legislation to achieve their foreign-aid goals. As a result, the existing system’s mission has become muddled and confused, cluttered with earmarks, special coordinators, and loopholes.
The Obama administration set out to tackle this challenge by mandating a presidential review of global development policy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — a development leader in her own right — has launched the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), a State Department and USAID process aimed at revamping the department’s operating procedures. But without a clear strategy, the QDDR promises to be an operational plan written in the absence of a guiding mission.
By merely tinkering with the existing system without a clear a vision for what U.S. development efforts should achieve, the Obama administration could end up making things worse, not better. Each new plan, legislative proposal, initiative, or objective further confuses the existing system. Together, they represent a failure of leadership and strategy that hobbles U.S. efforts to fight global poverty.
The administration needs to step back and deliver a clear articulation of mission and strategy to guide reform — a National Strategy for Global Development. For those of us in the development community, such a strategy should answer a few basic questions. What are the intended outcomes of U.S. global development policy? How do we know we are investing in the right things? How do we know if development assistance efforts are successful? And how can we best help poor countries — and poor people — lead their own development?
Obama’s strategic goal should be to support those citizens and governments who are working together to achieve private-sector driven economic growth that is broad-based, equitable, and sustainable. The strategy’s scope should not be limited to foreign aid, but should reflect the impact of other global policies, such as trade and migration, on development outcomes. The strategy should link global development and humanitarian response both to American values and to U.S. national interests. Importantly, it should clarify that it is always in the U.S. interest to adhere to the principles of effective development and humanitarian response and to seek sustainable development outcomes even in those settings where the United States needs to employ development aid for diplomatic or defense purposes.
Currently, much time and effort is being invested in trying to figure out how to make sense of the organizational chart and how to get all the agencies to talk to one another. But no one is articulating any sort of logic for what they should all be doing in the first place. Issuing an “org chart” without first articulating a clear vision amounts to nothing more than stirring the spaghetti bowl. That would be a loss for both the Obama administration and millions of people living in poverty.
Imagine, instead, each agency, program, and development partner contributing its particular strengths toward one clear, shared goal of reducing global poverty. That would be a legacy. But time is running out. The government went a year without a USAID administrator, and two years could easily slip by before there’s a strategy. Now is the time for the Obama administration to step back from simply stirring the spaghetti and finally articulate a strategic vision for how the United States will fight global poverty.
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