Editor's Note: This is the second part of a two piece series on internal displacement that originally appeared online in TerraNullius. The first part is available here.
 
This post continues our discussion of the study entitled "From Responsibility to Response: Assessing National Response to Internal Displacement" recently released by the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement.

Addressing housing, land, and property (HLP) issues is a key component of national responsibility. Principle 29 of the non-binding but widely accepted Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement emphasizes that competent authorities have a duty to assist IDPs to recover their property and possessions or, when recovery is not possible, to obtain appropriate compensation or another form of just reparation.

The 2005 Framework for National Responsibility – which set the benchmarks we applied in our current study – reaffirms this responsibility (in Benchmark 10, “support durable solutions”) and flags a number of the challenges that often arise, such as IDPs’ lack of formal title or other documentary evidence of land and property ownership; the destruction of any such records due to conflict or natural disaster; and discrimination against women in laws and customs regulating property ownership and inheritance. The Framework for National Responsibility stresses that, “Government authorities should anticipate these problems and address them in line with international human rights standards and in an equitable and non-discriminatory manner.”

The extent to which a government has safeguarded HLP rights, including by assisting IDPs to recover their housing, land, and property thus was among the indicators by which we evaluated the efforts of each of the 15 governments examined in our study. Our findings emphasized the importance of both an adequate legal and policy framework for addressing displacement related HLP issues and the role that bodies charged with adjudication and monitoring can play in ensuring implementation.

HLP Law and Policy Frameworks

One of the most encouraging signs of governments taking seriously their responsibility to address internal displacement has been the development, adoption and implementation in all regions of the world of specific laws and policies that respect the rights of IDPs. Some of the countries surveyed have developed laws, decrees, orders, and policies that protect IDPs’ HLP rights, but these measures are also not without their limits and challenges. A few examples are presented below.

In Colombia, while Law 387 on Internal Displacement (1997) stipulates the right of IDPs to compensation and restitution (Article 10), the government has been hard-pressed to establish measures enabling them to realize that right (see further, below). In Colombia, the constitutional complaint process – the acción de tutela petition procedure – has made the government accountable to IDPs and has influenced government policy toward IDPs, including the policy of allocation of government assistance such as housing subsidies.

In Georgia, the legal framework for IDP protection includes a property restitution law for IDPs from South Ossetia, adopted in 2007, which provided for the establishment of a Commission on Restitution and Compensation; however, this body never became operational and the status of the law is unclear following the August 2008 conflict. The State Strategy on IDPs, also adopted in 2007, protects IDPs against “arbitrary/illegitimate eviction” and sets out a large-scale program for improving the living conditions of IDPs in their place of displacement, all the while reaffirming their right to property restitution.[1]

Displaced families whose homes were destroyed or damaged during the August 2008 received $15,000 from the government to rebuild their homes, although many IDPs have held off reconstruction efforts due to concerns about insecurity. The RSG on IDPs recommended in 2009 the established of a comprehensive mechanism for resolving HLP claims for both the South Ossetia and Abkhazia conflicts. In addition, in 2010, Georgia adopted procedures for vacating and reallocating IDP housing, which, among other things, addresses those cases in which removal of IDPs from a collective center is ordered by the government and may require an eviction, and spells out safeguards for guaranteeing the right of IDPs.[2]

Iraq’s 2005 Constitution protects Iraqis against forced displacement (Article 44(2)). Through its Property Claims Commission, formerly the Commission on the Resolution of Real Property Disputes established by Order No. 2 (2006), Iraq has sought to recover property seized between 1968 and 2003, although significant gaps and challenges remain. For those internally displaced between 2006 and 2008, Prime Ministerial Order 101 (2008) sets out a framework for providing property restitution for registered IDPs with a view to encouraging and facilitating their return to Baghdad governorate, the origin of the majority of post-2006 IDPs and the location of the majority of post-2006 returnees. However, there have been few claims; many IDPs lack the necessary documentation, do not trust government institutions, fear retribution or cannot afford the requisite costs.[3]

In Afghanistan, where national authorities have not yet defined “internally displaced persons,” property and land rights of IDPs are either specifically addressed or generally implicated in substantive and procedural provisions found in a series of executive acts that have been issued since 2001, including the most IDP-specific of them, Presidential Decree No. 104 on Land Distribution for Settlement to Eligible Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons (2005). This decree sets forth a basic framework for distributing government land to both IDPs and returnees as a means of addressing their housing needs. However, IDPs seeking access to land are required to provide their national identity cards (tazkera) and documentation proving their internal displacement status—documentation which they may have lost. Moreover, the decree does not recognize other fundamental rights or needs of the internally displaced; it is valid only in areas of origin; and its implementation has been marred by inefficiency and corruption within the very weak ministry that is tasked with its implementation.

Although the 2006 peace agreement in Nepal  included a commitment to return occupied land and property and to allow for the return of displaced persons, four years after the peace agreement (and three years after the adoption of a national policy), between 50,000 and 70,000 people remained displaced.  Nearly half of the returnees interviewed by the Nepal IDP Working Group reported serious land, housing and property problems.  Of the more than 10,000 claims for compensation for property filed in 2007 only 2,000 families had received support to reconstruct or repair their houses by 2009.  It is widely reported that IDPs with non-Maoist political affiliations have been the least likely to recover land and property.

In Turkey, the government has yet to take full responsibility for displacement caused by its security forces against a largely Kurdish population. In its Law 5233 on Compensation of Damages That Occurred Due to Terror and the Fight against Terror (27 July 2004) and its Return to Village and Rehabilitation Program, displacement is defined in terms of “terrorism” or the “fight” against it. This law does not specifically focus on internal displacement, but it does benefit IDPs among other affected populations. Law 5233 and its related amendments and regulations compensate for “material damages suffered by persons due to terrorist acts or activities undertaken during the fight against terror” between 1987 and 2004. Compensation is provided for three types of damage: loss of property; physical injuries, disabilities, medical treatment, death and funerals; and inability to access property due to measures taken during “the fight against terrorism.”

According to the law, compensation is to be determined by damage assessment commissions (DACs) at the provincial level, with funding provided by the Ministry of the Interior. From 2004 to August 2009, the commissions received just over 360,000 applications. Of those, over 190,000 claims were decided: 120,000 were approved and the claimants awarded compensation; the remaining 70,000 were denied. Around $1.4 billion in compensation was awarded, of which close to $1.1 billion has been paid.[4] The existing legal and policy framework do not adequately address the obstacles to return, including the village guard system, insecurity and the presence of landmines and unexploded ordnance.

In Kenya, the government’s promotion of return included a National Humanitarian Emergency Fund for Mitigation and Resettlement of Victims of 2007 Post-Election Violence which was to meet the full costs of resettlement of IDPs, including reconstruction of basic housing, replacement of household effects and rehabilitation of infrastructure. But in practice, the government has been criticized for promoting return before conditions were safe. The government has also tended to focus on IDPs who own land and to attach durable solutions to land; there is no clear strategy for dealing with landless IDPs, such as squatters and non-farmers.

Awareness among IDPs as to their housing, land, and property rights under existing law – where there is law addressing those rights – is inadequate in many instances. For example, in Turkey, about half of IDPs surveyed in 2006 were not aware of their entitlements under the Return to Village and Rehabilitation Program or the Law on Compensation. [5]

National Human Rights Institutions and Constitutional Courts

In some cases, national human rights institutions (NHRIs) and constitutional courts have a critically important role to play in supporting as well as in holding governments accountable to guarantee the rights of IDPs. In a number of the countries our study examined, the work of NHRIs on internal displacement has included a focus on HLP issues.

In Georgia, for example, the Public Defender has been actively monitoring and reporting on the country-wide housing program begun in 2009 and has raised concerns about evictions of IDPs and the quality of housing in relocation sites. The Public Defender’s office also has undertaken a study on the conditions of the hidden majority of IDPs living in private accommodation rather than in collective centers.

The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission has reported on and raised concerns about the large number of IDPs living in urban slums and informal settlements and about the fact that many IDPs were unable to return to their homes due to disputes over land and property.

Constitutional courts have in some instances played a role in strengthening the national legal framework for protecting the property rights of IDPs. Notably, Colombia’s activist Constitutional Court, in its Decision T-821 in October 2007, ordered the government to ensure respect for IDPs’ right to reparation and property restitution. In January 2009, the Constitutional Court ordered the government to comprehensively address land rights issues and to establish mechanisms to prevent future violations.

Subsequently, the government has sought to ensure these rights by adopting in 2011 the historic and ambitious Law 1448, known as the Victims and Land Restitution Law. In this law, government acknowledges for the first time ever the existence of an internal armed conflict in Colombia, and recognizes as “victims” those individuals or communities whose rights were violated under international humanitarian law or international human rights law. The law regulates reparations for all victims of the armed conflict since 1985 – numbering over 5 million – including through land restitution or compensation for IDPs which is to occur over the next decade.

However, restitution of land does not guarantee returnees’ security and may even endanger people given that land disputes and seizures remain a driving force of displacement. Aiming to prevent further victimization of returnees as a result of insecurity and violence, the government established a new security body, the Integrated Center of Intelligence for Land Restitution (Centro Integrado de Inteligencia para la Restitución de Tierras, also known as CI2-RT) within the Ministry of Defense. Additional participants include the Office of the Vice President, the Ministry of Justice and Interior, the Department of Administrative Security (DAS), Social Action (Acción Social), Incoder, and organizations representing victims of violence. Time will tell how successful the implementation of this ambitious law will be.

In Georgia, the Constitutional Court has also played an important role by recognizing the rights of IDPs to purchase property without losing their IDP status or in any way jeopardizing their right to return.

Conclusion

Securing HLP rights for IDPs is, of course, a key component of finding durable solutions to displacement. The study found that land and property disputes are almost always sources or manifestations of lingering conflict and often an obstacle to IDPs’ free exercise of their right to return.  While some governments have made efforts to provide mechanisms for property restitution or compensation, those mechanisms have rarely been adequate to deal—at least in a timely manner—with the scale and complexity of the problem. National human rights institutions and constitutional courts can play a key role in holding governments accountable for HLP and other rights and freedoms of IDPs.

[1] Government of Georgia, State Strategy for Internally Displaced Persons–Persecuted Persons, Chapter V.

[2] The Standard Operating Procedures for Vacation and Reallocation of IDPs for Durable Housing Solutions (2010) (www.mra.gov.ge)

[3] IDMC, Iraq: Little New Displacement but around 2.8 Million Iraqis Remain Internally Displaced: A Profile of the Internal Displacement Situation, 4 March, 2010, p. 240 (www.internal-displacement.org)

[4] IDMC, Turkey: Need for Continued Improvement in Response to Protracted Displacement: A Profile of the Internal Displacement Situation, 26 October 2009, p. 12, citing correspondence with the government of Turkey, 17 September 2009 (www.internal-displacement.org)

[5] Hacettepe University, Institute of Population Studies, "Findings of the Turkey Migration and Internally Displaced Population Survey," press release, 6 December 2006, cited in IDMC, Turkey: Need for Continued Improvement in Response to Protracted Displacement: A Profile of the Internal Displacement Situation, 26 October 2009, p. 11 (www.internal-displacement.org)

This speech focuses on the issue of affordable housing. It is a tough issue that is misunderstood and often maligned. It doesn't receive the kind of national or even local attention that it deserves. It is rarely discussed in a metropolitan context, even though many people realize that housing markets are metropolitan not local.

And it is not just about shelter or social justice. It is about economic competitiveness. It is about quality neighborhoods. It is about rewarding work and building wealth. And it is about community cohesion and continuity.

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Renewable energy is an important source to tackle against climate change, as the latest IPCC report has pointed out. However, due to the existence of multiple market failures such as negative externalities of fossil fuels and knowledge spillovers of new technology, government subsidies are still needed to develop renewable energy, such as solar photovoltaic (PV) cells. In the United States, there have been various forms of subsidies for PV, varying from the federal level to the state level, and from the city level to the utility level. California, as the pioneer of solar PV development, has put forward the biggest state-level subsidy program for PV, the California Solar Initiative (CSI). The CSI has planned to spend around $2.2 Billion in 2007–2016 to install roughly 2 GW PV capacity, with the average subsidy level as high as $1.1/W. How to evaluate the cost-effectiveness and incentive pass-through of this program are the two major research questions we are pursing.

Our cost-effectiveness analysis is based on a constrained optimization model that we developed, where the objective is to install as much PV capacity as possible under a fixed budget constraint. Both the analytical and computational results suggest that due to a strong peer effect and the learning-by-doing effect, one can shift subsides from later periods to early periods so that the final PV installed capacity can be increased by 8.1% (or 32 MW). However, if the decision-maker has other policy objectives or constraints in mind, such as maintaining the policy certainty, then, the optimally calculated subsidy policy would look like the CSI.

As to the incentive pass-through question, we took a structural approach and in addition used the method of regression discontinuity (RD). While in general, the incentive pass-through rate depends on the curvature of the demand and supply curve and the level of market competition, our two estimations indicate that the incentive pass-through for the CSI program is almost complete. In other words, almost all of the incentive has been enjoyed by the customer, and the PV installers did not retain much. Based on the RD design, we observe that PV installers tend to consider the CSI incentive as exogenous to their pricing decision.

The relative good performance of the CSI in terms of both the cost-effectiveness and the incentive pass-through aspect are tightly related to its policy design and program management. International speaking, the biggest challenge for the design of any PV subsidy program is the quick running out of the budget, and in the end, it looks like customers are rushing for the subsidy. Such rushing behavior is a clear indication of higher-than-needed incentive levels. Due to the policy rigidity and rapid PV technological change, the PV subsidy policy may lag behind the PV cost decline; and as a result, rational customers could rush for any unnecessarily high subsidy.

Due to the high uncertainty and unpredictability of future PV costs, the CSI put forward a new design that links the incentive level change and the installed capacity goal fulfillment. Specifically, the CSI has designed nine steps to achieve its policy goal; at each step, there is a PV capacity goal that corresponds to an incentive level. Once the capacity goal is finished, the incentive level will decrease to the next lower level. Furthermore, to maintain the policy certainty, the CSI regulated that every step-wise change in the incentive level should not be higher than $0.45/W, nor smaller than $0.05/W, together with other three constraints.

A good subsidy policy not only requires flexible policy design to respond to fast-changing environment, but also demands an efficient program management system, digitalized if possible. For the CSI, the authority has contracted out a third-party to maintain a good database system for the program. Specifically, the database has documented in detail every PV system that customers requested. Key data fields include 22 important dates during the PV installation process, customers’ zip code, city, utility and county information, and various characteristics of the PV system such as price, system size, incentive, PV module and installer. All information is publicly available, which to some extent fills in the information gap held by customers and fosters the market competition among PV installers. For customers to receive the incentive, their PV systems have to pass the inspection of the local government, and also to be interconnected to the grid. On the supply side, the CSI has also certified and created a list of PV installers that every customer can choose from.

Although the CSI has ended in 2014 due to fast PV cost reduction starting from 2009, its experience has been transferred to other areas in the United States and in Europe. It is highly possible that other similar new technologies and products (e.g. the electric car and the battery) can adopt the CSI policy design, too. In summary, a good and successful policy may need to be simply, clear, credible, foreseeable, flexible, end-able, and incentive-compatible. The PV subsidy policy in China still has a long way to go when compared to the CSI.

The consequences of the global financial crisis still ripple through the international system after the initial surge in global economic cooperation and governance immediately following the crisis. The ultimate effects have been that, while some elements of the international system of institutions have gotten stronger, the system as a whole is now seen as weaker, fractured, and driven more by geopolitical conflict than by institutional norms and frameworks.

The issue is how to move the global policy agenda forward in such a way that substantive progress induces institutional strengthening. The next two years offer new opportunities for creating a positive symbiosis between policy advance and systemic improvements.

I. The U.N. global agenda

The United Nations global agenda has three tracks that relate to each other and provide opportunities to pull the world together around an integrated, comprehensive strategic vision for the world’s people and strengthen the international system in the process.

The first track is the elaboration of a sustainable development agenda for each and all countries, not just developing countries, but advanced industrial economies and emerging market countries too. This effort is already well underway and will result in a summit of global leaders in September 2015 at the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) in New York. This process entails a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 to be developed and affirmed by and for all countries, and which succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that culminate in 2015 and applied only to developing countries. This post-2015 goal-setting process will provide the substantive, cross-cutting, multidimensional agenda for the next 15 years. It is simultaneously a social, economic, and environmental agenda that relates goals to each other in functional terms requiring coordination among public and private sectors, ministries, civil society groups, and international institutions.

The second track is the financing for development (FFD) track, which goes well beyond reliance conceptually and practically on foreign aid or official development assistance as in the past. FFD for the SDGs includes a focus, first and foremost, on domestic sources of finance beyond government revenues. FFD is engaged in searches for innovative sources of finance, private sector mobilization of resources, creative market incentives and mechanisms, initiatives by civil society organizations, and development of entrepreneurial and small- and medium-size business opportunities that address global issues. This effort resulted in a global leaders meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in July of 2015 that reached agreement on the major thrusts for mobilizing resources for the post-2015 agenda (Kharas and MacArthur (2014)).

The third track is the global climate change negotiations currently under way to achieve a global agreement on the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC), which will result in a global summit in Paris in December of 2015. While these detailed negotiations on climate are a separate track, it is clear that the sustainable human development trajectories being put forward in the post-2015 agenda impact and are crucially affected by the efficacy of the climate change arrangements worked out in the UNFCCC agreements in 2015.

Whereas these three tracks operationally are going forward separately, the substantive aspects of each track affect and are affected by the content of the other two. The ultimate convergence of these three streams of activities and actions will have to occur in the beginning of 2016 at the global, regional, and national levels if the implementation phase is to be successful. A business-as-usual approach will not be satisfactory if at the global level, for example, the international institutions are unable to coordinate their work, or if at the national level ministries remain within their “silos” of sectoral expertise and responsibility.

Synergies exist between goal areas that cannot be realized without coordination across sectors and institutions, impacting goal achievement (see OECD 2014 PCD). A systemic approach is necessary at all levels to address the global challenges identified in the post-2015 agenda.

II. The G-20 summits for 2015 and 2016

A major opportunity presents itself in terms of providing impetus, momentum, and leadership for these large work streams and their convergence by linking the G-20 presidency of Turkey for 2015 with the G-20 leadership of China in 2016. Turkey and China working together in tandem within the G-20 Troika over the next two years to explain, support, and sustain the mobilization effort toward the post-2015 agenda could be a major contribution to it but also strengthen the global system of international institutions in the process. For the Turkish G-20 summit, scheduled to take place in November 2015 in Antalya, between UNGA in New York in September and the UNFCCC in Paris in December, Turkey could use part of its G-20 summit to have the leaders of the world’s largest advanced and emerging market economies explain to the world the nature, importance, and relevance of the SDGs to domestic concerns and priorities of ordinary people.

A weakness of G-20 summits thus far has been that G-20 leaders have become trapped by finance ministers’ issues and discourse and have failed to connect with their publics on larger issues of direct concern to people everywhere. The post-2015 agenda provides an opportunity for G-20 leaders to lead their people in understanding how global efforts relate to domestic conditions and why dealing only domestically with issues will not suffice to advance the human agenda where the global interface is extremely palpable. G-20 leaders, under Turkey’s leadership, could step out beyond the technical jargon of finance ministries and central banks, as important as those issues continue to be, and directly address the longer-term, fundamental conditions that affect the lives and livelihoods of all people. They would thereby strengthen their own leadership profile internally by explaining the global dimensions of domestic issues as means of creating public support for the sustainability issues in the post-2015 agenda.

Past experience with the International Development Goals (IDGs) of the 1990s and the Millennium Development Goals since the early 2000s  demonstrates that linking the goal-setting effort to the implementation phase yields powerful results by capturing the political momentum of the goal setting phase and carrying that energy forward directly into implementation efforts. If Turkey and China were to work together in 2015 and 2016, thereby bridging the goal-setting year in 2015 to the beginning of the implementation phase in 2016, they could provide the catalytic leadership and continuity that would maximize the staying power of the momentum from one phase to the next.

China, for its G-20 summit preparations in 2016, could focus on developing a road map, in concert with the other countries and international organizations and especially with the United Nations, that would explicitly keep alive the activities, groups, and initiatives manifested in the goal-setting phase into the next phase of implementation beginning in 2016. These combined efforts by Turkey and China could jump-start societies focusing on accelerating efforts to transform their societies by mobilizing policies and resources for highly related goal areas of direct benefit to their people.

The immediate effects of coordinated sequential efforts by Turkey and China in their respective G-20 years to advance the post-2015 agenda would be to strengthen the relationship between the G-20 and the United Nations on the agenda itself and to strengthen the G-20 summits by having leaders lead on issues of central concern to their people, strengthening the G-20 as a leadership forum in the process. For these results to occur, Turkey and China would need to begin to work together now to develop concordance in their individual efforts and initiate activities that would benefit greatly by beginning now and running through 2016 and beyond.

Accelerating implementation: Several initiatives could be undertaken now that would set up the dynamics for accelerated implementation in 2016 and beyond.

• National strategies for achieving the SDGs: Encourage countries to adapt and adopt the SDGs to their respective priorities and social, political, and cultural contexts through deliberate decision processes and wide societal engagement.
• The role of parliaments: Bring parliamentarians and parliaments into the goal-setting process so that they are aware of the legislative, regulatory, and budgetary implications of the post-2015 agenda.
• The role of domestic ministries: Bring finance ministers and other domestic ministries and agencies together with foreign ministers in the goal-setting year to set in motion mutually involved functional relationships and operational guidelines to enhance implementation across sectors.
• The G-20 as broker and mobilizer: The G-20 could act as a broker between the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and regional development banks and the U.N. and its agencies to assure not just coordination but more intensive interactions that would be designed to accelerate the mobilization of resources and as well as policies and private sector activities that would enhance implementation.
• The policy role of the OECD: The strong, substantive role of the OECD in G-20 summits on issues high on the G-20 agenda—such as structural reform, tax base erosion, development, environment, energy, employment, and social issues—position the OECD to continue to provide important substantive inputs to the G-20 in 2015 and 2016. The OECD would enhance the relationship of its 34 members with G-20 emerging market economies by OECD involvement in both the G-20 and the U.N. post-2015 agenda.
• Financial stability and the SDGs: Encouraged by the G-20 summits, the IMF, the Financial Stability Board, and the OECD could work together to integrate the financial regulatory reform agenda into the post-2015 U.N. process by clarifying the linkages between financial stability, regulatory reform, and incentives for long-term private investment in infrastructure (crucial to all the SDGs) and in productive activities which generate greater employment and growth.
• Multi-stakeholder participation in implementation: G-20 summits can facilitate multi-stakeholder processes for engaging civil society, labor, private sector, religious, academic, and expert communities not only in the G-20 summits, as is the current practice, but also in the post-2015 agenda and its implementation, connecting societal leaders with the SDG agenda.

III. The overarching importance of a single global agenda

If these efforts to bring together a wide cross-section of domestic and international agencies, public and private sector leaders, stakeholders, and civil society actors are to translate into actions that are meaningful to the lives and livelihoods of people, a single set of goals is essential. The lesson learned from the IDG-MDG experience was that the tendency to differentiate roles by identifying different institutions with different sets of goals was real. The United Nations had inadvertently put forward the Millennium Declaration at the September 2000 U.N. General Assembly that had “millennium targets” which were similar but not identical to the International Development Goals (IDGs). The IDGs had been developed in the mid-1990s by OECD development ministers and subsequently were endorsed by the World Bank, the IMF, the U.N. and the OECD. In fact, in 2000, for the first time ever, the heads of those four institutions signed, and the institutions themselves published, a joint report, A Better World For All: Progress towards the International Development Goals.

Despite the appearance of unity and in part because there was a lack of concordance between the Millennium Declaration Targets (MDTs) and the IDGs, there was a moment in March 2001 when it looked like there might be a decisive divergence between the U.N. and the Bretton Woods institutions, with the U.N. taking the lead on the MDTs and the World Bank and IMF taking the lead on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Process (PRSPs), leaving the IDGs marginalized altogether. This potential division of labor was thwarted by a decision to reconcile the differences between the MDTs and the IDGs by forging the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which embodied the principal elements of both. The MDGs surfaced and were endorsed by the Monterrey Summit on Financing for Development in March of 2002, keeping the major global institutions on the same page with bilateral donors and the same path moving toward achieving the MDGs in 2015.

Most people who know about the MDGs think their origins began at the U.N. in the year 2000. It is an often overlooked fact that the MDGs only came forward in 2002 to bridge the potential divide between the Bretton Woods institutions and the United Nations. If that divide had occurred, it would have been disastrous from a goal setting-goal implementation point-of-view. This history is quite important to bring forward into public light now because it illustrates divisive dangers that currently lurk under the surface threatening unity if not squarely addressed.

From the perspective of prioritizing implementation, the truth is that multiple sets of goals blur the strategic vision, fail to communicate direction, weaken effective leadership, and encourage special pleading for differentiated interests instead focusing on the common, public interest. The U.N. has the lead role in global goal setting and has strengthened its own role in the global system in recent years. However, looking forward now to the SDG implementation phase, a danger might be that the Post-2015 agenda could be seen as the creature and captive of the United Nations, whereas it must be fully endorsed and internalized within the global system of international institutions as a whole. For that to happen, it would be necessary to move now, during the goal-setting year, to include all the relevant international and domestic actors that are crucial to the implementation phase of the post-2015 agenda.

The implications of including the post-2015 agenda in the G-20 summits in 2015 and 2016:

• It would make clear to relevant publics and actors that this set of global goals is universal, applicable to advanced countries, emerging market economies, and developing countries; it is not a “development agenda” but a “sustainability agenda,” which is broader, more strategic, and higher on the policy agenda of most countries.
• It would make clear the inextricable dynamics between domestic priorities and global goals; the SDGs are not foreign policy objectives or aid targets for development; they are domestic priorities affected by global impacts and generating global spillovers that need to be managed, not neglected.
• It would make the incorporation of finance ministers and domestic ministers with foreign ministers, along with international institutions, an imperative, rather than a utopian, ideal.
• It would make obvious the need to have a wide range of international institutions dealing with health, labor, education, women, climate, and the environment on the same page with the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions working together toward the SDGs.
• It would link the need for multi-stakeholder participation in goal setting to the goal implementation phase to mobilize support, policies, and resources but also to reveal and work on the interconnectedness of the goals themselves taken as a whole. 

Hence, the critical imperative is that there be a single narrative, a single set of goals, for all the domestic and global players to relate to, affirm, and implement. Otherwise, a fractured global order will produce lower-yield outcomes, and competition among priorities, sectors, and actors will result in poorer goal performance than would be possible with an integrated, concerted approach where all actors are working toward the same ends.

IV. Possible G-20 Actions by Turkey and China

Turkey has developed a process for the G-20 summit scheduled for November 14-15, 2015 in Antalya. Implementation, inclusion, and investment—the three “I’s”—are the overarching themes already established. The three “I’s” ties are tightly tied to the Australian G-20 outcomes—implementing action plans to achieve the incremental growth target of an additional 2 percentage points of GDP by 2018; including lower-income people in growth and lower-income countries in the global economy; and investing in infrastructure.

Each of these priorities is supportive of and compatible with the post-2015 agenda, even though they are not yet directly addressed to it. A decision by Turkey to include the post-2015 agenda in the 2015 G-20 would be easily achieved by cross-walking the SDGs over to and into the three “I’s” and vice versa. The central priority of the post-2015 agenda is, after all, “implementation.” The overarching meaning of the six elements of the post-2015 agenda (dignity, prosperity, justice, partnership, planet, and people (U.N. SG Synthesis Report December 2014)) is their impact on “inclusion.” And “investment” in infrastructure is crucial to all of the 17 SDGs.

The three pillars for Turkey’s 2015 agenda are: (i) strengthening the global recovery and lifting potential growth (the 2 percent target); (ii) enhancing resilience (financial regulatory reform]; and (iii) buttressing sustainability. Clearly, the third pillar on sustainability opens the door for the incorporation of the post-2015 agenda into the Turkey G-20, if Turkey wishes to do so. And the other two pillars fully support the sustainability agenda and are linked to it, or need to be.

For China, the post-2015 agenda presents a unique opportunity for the Chinese government to seize on a global agenda that has specific, strong, and visible links to the domestic concerns of the Chinese people. China could use the 2016 G-20 summit both to provide international leadership for global cooperation and to demonstrate the connection of global issues to domestic conditions through their impact and spillover effects. Because the post-2015 agenda is a universal agenda, by prioritizing it in its G-20 summit, China would be embracing the multiplicity of its own identity as a developing country but also as a dynamic emerging market economy that is destined to eventually play a global leadership role equivalent to advanced countries.

Furthermore, China seems intent on being a competitive nation in various spheres while at the same time being cooperative in others. The G-20 summit presidency for China in 2016 provides China with an opportunity to strengthen its role in international cooperation by being ambitious in the reach of its agenda for the G-20 in 2016, by its conduct as a member of the G-20 Troika for the next three years, and as the host government for the G-20 in 2016. By choosing to support Turkey in its consideration of incorporating the post-2015 agenda in the G-20 summit in 2015 and by China itself addressing the implementation issues in 2016, China would be reaping the demonstrably higher-yield gains generated by linking the SDG goal-setting phase in 2015 to the implementation phase in 2016.

Integrating the three tracks of SDG goal setting, financing for development, and progress on climate change actions is complementary but complex. While challenging, China has sufficiently high stakes in the outcomes of all three of these tracks to have a national interest in leading a global effort over the next three years to energize the convergence of agendas and institutional mandates necessary to generate bigger outcomes for people everywhere, including in China.

V. Results: Strengthening global governance and leadership

What follows from the analysis here is that the decision to include the post-2015 agenda in the Turkey and China G-20 summits would be a choice about the substance but also about the process of global economic governance, in which the G-20 has a leadership role. To do so in the way outlined here, would:

• Strengthen the global system of international institutions by bringing them together around a single comprehensive, integrated sustainability agenda;
• Create synergies between the United Nations and the other international institutions rather than identifying the post-2015 agenda with the U.N. alone and relying unnecessarily on the U.N. for its implementation;
• Connect G-20 leaders with a broader human and planetary agenda beyond economics and finance, which in turn would connect G-20 leaders with their publics as they visibly address the domestic concerns of their people in their global context; and
• Strengthen the role of the G-20 in global economic governance by putting the G-20 out in front as a broker among stakeholders, a catalytic coordinator of relevant domestic and international actors, and a leader on behalf of the concerns, lives, and livelihoods of people.

Selected References

Colin I. Bradford (2002), “Toward 2015: From Consensus Formation to Implementation of the Millennium Development Goals. Issues for the Future: The Implementation Phase”, Development Economics Department (DEC), The World Bank, December 2002.

Colin I. Bradford (2014), “The Changing World Economy and Global Economic Governance”, power point presentation at the Korean Delegation seminar “The OECD and Global Governance”, OECD, Paris, December 11, 2014.

Colin I. Bradford (2014), “Global Economic Governance and the Role of International Institutions”, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance:  Scoping Papers, UNDP Beijing China, 22 October 2014.

Colin I. Bradford (2015), “Governance Innovations for Implementing the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda: Conference Report”,  Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., March 30, 2015.  http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Events/2015/03/30-post-2015-sustainable-development-agenda/330-PostReportFinal.pdf?la=en   

Ye Yu, Xue Lei and Zha Xiaogang (2014), “The Role of Developing Countries in Global Economic Governance---with a Special Analysis on China’s Role”, Second High-level Policy Forum on Global Governance:  Scoping Papers, UNDP Beijing China, 22 October 2014. Authors are from the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies.

Homi Kharas and John McArthur (2014), “Nine Priority Commitments to be Made at the UN’s July 2015 Financing for Development Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,” October 2014. http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2015/02/united-nations-financing-for-development-kharas-mcarthur

OECD (2014), “Policy Coherence for Development and the Sustainable Development Goals”, Paris: OECD, 10 December 2014, prepared for the 8^th Meeting of the National Focal Points for Policy Coherence for Development (PCD) held at the OECD on 17-18 December 2014. 

The confluence of the agreement on 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, or Global Goals) in 2015, and the increased attention being paid to the role of non-traditional actors in contributing to shared prosperity, provide a unique opportunity to focus attention on attempts to identify promising new solutions to the barriers that impede the full development of the world’s youngest citizens. Current estimates indicate that 200 million children globally under the age of 5 are at risk of not reaching their development potential. With these goals, the global community has a tremendous opportunity to change the course of history. There is evidence that certain early childhood development (ECD) interventions—spanning the nutrition, health, water and sanitation, education, social protection, and governance sectors from conception to age 5—have high potential to help to achieve the SDGs related to child development. Furthermore, early childhood interventions have been found to improve adult health and education levels, reduce crime, and raise employment rates, which will be paramount to achieving global economic, climate, and physical security.

Impact bonds have the potential to address some of the main financing and delivery constraints faced in ECD. By providing upfront private capital, impact bonds could help to address service provider liquidity constraints and leverage public capital by allowing the government to connect preventive programs with future benefits to individuals, society, and the economy. Impact bonds also have the potential to drive performance management, support monitoring and evaluation, and create accountability, which all help to address quality and capacity constraints. By fostering innovation, experimentation and adaptive learning in service delivery, cost-effective solutions could be identified through impact bonds. By producing evidence of outcome achievement, impact bonds could shift the focus toward effective ECD programs. Finally, collaboration across stakeholders—a necessary component of impact bonds—has the potential to allow for alignment of interests and a win-win situation for investors, outcome funders, and program beneficiaries alike.

The high participation of non-state actors and potentially significant returns in ECD make it a promising sector for impact bonds. Unlike other services that may have entrenched interests, the multitude of agencies and non-state entities financing and providing ECD services potentially allows for more experimentation. The preventive nature of ECD programs also fits well with the core feature of SIBs, which is that preventive investments will result in valuable short- and potentially long-term outcomes. There is evidence that ECD interventions can have immense effects on later-life outcomes. For example, a longitudinal study of a program in Jamaica, in which participants received weekly visits from community health workers over a 2-year period, was found to increase the earnings of participants by 25 percent, 20 years later.

There may, however, be some particular challenges associated with applying impact bonds in the ECD sector. Impact bonds (and other Payment by Results mechanisms tied to outcomes) require meaningful outcomes that are measureable within a timeframe that is reasonable to the outcome funder (and investors in the case of an impact bond). Meaningful outcomes are outcomes that are intrinsically or extrinsically valuable. Intrinsically valuable outcomes that are measureable within a reasonable timeframe could be extrinsically valuable if they are proxies for long-term benefits to individuals, society, or the economy. The delay between ECD interventions and later-life results may prove an impediment in some cases. By identifying appropriate interim measures such as language development, socioemotional development, and schooling outcomes that may proxy for desirable longer-term outcomes, the issue of delay could be mitigated. For example, there is evidence that early stimulation and health programs can have statistically significant effects on schooling outcomes in the short-run. An increase in focus on the intrinsic value of short-term outcomes that result from ECD interventions, such as child survival, is also important.

As the global community moves beyond the Millennium Development Goals to a set of Global Goals and associated targets linked to measurable outcomes, there is an opportunity to demonstrate a commitment to invest in future generations. Leveraging upfront funding, focusing on outcomes through adaptive learning and testing new ways to deliver early childhood interventions more effectively are all means of achieving the ECD-related goals. Despite the hype around all of the new financing mechanisms, the keys to creating high-quality, locally appropriate programs remains simple—real-time collection of outcome data, the freedom to fail, and the flexibility to course-adjust. In some circumstances social service provision based on outcomes and adaptive learning may require mechanisms like impact bonds or other Payment by Results mechanisms. In other circumstances it may not. As this very nascent field continues to grow, more research will be needed to capture lessons learned, contextualize them within the larger landscape of ECD financing and service provision, and apply them to real-world social challenges with the world’s youngest and most disadvantaged populations at the forefront of the conversation. 

Read the previous report on the landscape of impact bonds across sectors and geography »

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Financial Data as Driving Force Behind Improved Learning

During the past decade, school enrollments have increased dramatically, mostly thanks to UNESCO’s Education for All (EFA) movement and the UN Millennium Development Goals. From 1999 to 2008, an additional 52 million children around the world enrolled in primary schools, and the number of out-of-school children fell by 39 million. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, enrollment rates rose by one-third during that time, even with large population increases in school-age children.

Yet enrollment is not the only indicator of success in education, and does not necessarily translate into learning. Even with these impressive gains in enrollment, many parts of the world, and particularly the poorest areas, now face a severe learning crisis. The latest data in the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2011 reveal poor literacy and numeracy skills for millions of students around the world. In Malawi and Zambia, more than one-third of sixth-grade students had not achieved the most basic literacy skills. In El Salvador, just 13 percent of third-grade students passed an international mathematics exam. Even in middle-income countries such as South Africa and Morocco, the majority of students had not acquired basic reading skills after four years of primary education. Although the focus on children out of school is fully justified, given that they certainly lack learning opportunities, the failure to focus on learning also does a disservice to the more than 600 million children in the developing world who are already in school but fail to learn very basic skills.

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Analysis of dozens of publicly created redistricting plans shows that map-making technology can improve political representation and detect a gerrymander.  In 2012, President Obama won the vote in Ohio by three percentage points, while Republicans held a 13-to-5 majority in Ohio’s delegation to the U.S. House. After redistricting in 2013, Republicans held 12 of Ohio’s House seats while Democrats held four. As is typical in these races, few were competitive; the average margin of victory was 32 points. Is this simply a result of demography, the need to create a majority-minority district, and the constraints traditional redistricting principles impose on election lines—or did the legislature intend to create a gerrymander?

Crowd-Sourced Redistricting Maps

In the Ohio elections, we have a new source of information that opens a window into the legislature’s choice: Large numbers of publicly created redistricting plans.

During the last round of redistricting, across the country thousands of people in over a dozen states created hundreds of legal redistricting plans. Advances in information technology and the engagement of grassroots reform groups made these changes possible. To promote these efforts we created the DistrictBuilder open redistricting platform and many of these groups used this tool to create their plans.

Over the last several years, we have used the trove of information produced by public redistricting to gain insight into the politics of representation. In previous work that analyzed public redistricting in Virginia^[1], and in Florida^[2], we discovered that members of the public are capable of creating legal redistricting plans that outperform those maps created by legislatures in a number of ways.

Public redistricting in Ohio shows something new—the likely motives of the legislature. This can be seen through using information visualization methods to show the ways in which redistricting goals can be balanced (or traded-off) in Ohio , revealing the particular trade-offs made by the legislature.

The figure below, from our new research paper^[3], shows 21 plots—each of which compares legislative and publicly-created plans using a pair of scores—altogether covering seven different traditional and representational criteria. A tiny ‘A’ shows the adopted plan. The top-right corner of each mini-plot shows the best theoretically possible score. When examined by itself, the legislative plan meets a few criteria: it minimizes population deviation, creates an expected majority-minority seat, and creates a substantial majority of districts that would theoretically be competitive in an open-seat race in which the statewide vote was evenly split.

Figure 1: Pairwise Congressional Score Comparisons (Scatterplots) - Standardized Scores

In previous rounds of redistricting, empirical analysis would stop here—unless experts were called in to draw alternative plans in litigation. However, the large number of public plans now available allows us to see other options, plans the legislature could readily have created had it desired to do so. Comparison of the adopted plans and public plans reveal the weakness of the legislature’s choice. Members of the public were able to find plans that soundly beat the legislative plan on almost every pair of criteria, including competitive districts.

So why was the adopted plan chosen? Information visualization can help here, as well, but we need to add another criterion—partisan advantage:

Pareto Frontier: Standard Criteria vs. Democratic Surplus

When we visualize the number of expected Democratic seats that was likely to result from each plan, and compare this to the other score, we can see that the adopted plan is the best at something— producing Republican seats.

Was Ohio gerrymandered? Applying our proposed gerrymandering detection method, the adopted plans stands in high contrast to the public sample of plans, even if the overall competition scoring formula is slightly biased towards the Democrats, as strongly biased towards the Republicans on any measure of partisan fairness. Moreover analyzing the tradeoffs among redistricting criteria illuminate empirically demonstrates what is often suspected, but is typically impossible to demonstrate—that had the legislature desired to improve any good-government criterion—it could have done so, simply by sacrificing some partisan advantage. In light of this new body of evidence, the political intent of the legislature is clearly displayed.

However, when politics and technology mix, beware of Kranzberg’s first law: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”^[4] Indeed there is an unexpected and hopeful lesson on reform revealed by the public participation that was enabled by new technology. The public plans show that, in Ohio, it is possible to improve the expected competitiveness, and to improve compliance with traditional districting principles such as county integrity, without threatening majority-minority districts simply by reducing partisan advantage—this is a tradeoff we should gladly accept.