Photo: Merkur Berqiri

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of having my awareness raised. It seems every other paper, report or project proposal I pick up is invoking “awareness raising” as rationale, output, outcome or impact and sometimes all four at the same time. Can awareness raising really be all those things, or is it just another buzz term that sounds good?

Consider these examples from published papers I found in 20 minutes of searching websites:

1. Research agencies should team up with interested public and private stakeholders in order to redress the observed lack of knowledge and awareness on ecosystem services. Communication and information flow on the benefits of ES has to be directed at the general public, rice producers and the other main actors involved in the rice market chain in the Central Plain. See the source here.

2. FAN provided conventional written materials on community forestry and sought to increase community leaders’ awareness about the Forests Bill 2004 Bill. See the source here.

3. There is a need for cheap, affordable, and rapid systems to detect maize with aflatoxin levels above the legal limit and to build awareness among stakeholders on the causes and effects of aflatoxin contamination. See the source here.

These statements are a bit like the sign on the coconut tree in the photo above. The sign tells me what I should be aware of but not why or what to do. That sign struck me as slightly humorous until I did a bit of research. What the sign does not say is that coconut palms may reach a height of 24 to 35 meters and an unhusked coconut may weigh 1 to 4 kg. Blows to the head of a force exceeding 1 metric ton are possible. Not so humorous anymore and probably not a good idea to sit in the shade of a coconut tree to read a book or take a nap.

A definition
The term “awareness raising” has a specific meaning. According to Wikipedia:

…awareness raising is a term that advocacy groups commonly use when promoting a particular issue, organization, or event. It refers to alerting the general public that a certain issue exists and should be approached the way the group desires (emphasis mine). Common subjects include certain diseases like breast cancer or AIDS, civil or social conflicts, movements (e.g. Occupy Wall Street) and issues (e.g. global warming, obesity).

Since informing people about a particular concern is considered the first step in changing how people and institutions deal with it, awareness raising is often the first activity an advocacy group takes up. Notice that bit about “the first step”.  Awareness raising is not (repeat not) an objective or goal, nor is it rationale, output, outcome or impact. It is always and never anything other than an activity. Among others, corporate marketing consultant Duane Hollock agrees on this point Here is a working definition of awareness raising:

To raise awareness is to inform and educate people about a topic or issue with the intention of influencing their attitudes, behaviors and beliefs towards the achievement of a defined purpose or goal.

The examples above are missing some or all of the requirements of this definition. But they sound good. Unfortunately, these examples are not anomalies; they are typical of statements you can find throughout most literatures and project proposals. 

Apply rigor
If you are going to invoke “awareness raising” in your research or project proposal, do it with scientific rigor. Consider each of the points below:

What is the goal? What is it you want people to do or believe?
Example: We want fertilizer manufacturers to provide local language translations of Instructions for Use on their websites. We want retailers to download those instructions and include a printed copy with every sale. We want smallholder farmers to read and follow those instructions.

Identify the audience. Who exactly are you informing or educating? Be specific. “The public” is not specific. “Decision makers” is not specific. “Urban consumers who purchase live fowl in city markets” is specific. “Middle and senior managers (Grade C5-C9) in government ministries, departments and bureaus with a mandate for any aspect of water management” is specific.

Specify the attitudes, behaviors or beliefs you want to influence. Example: We want city residents to see urban wetlands not as “waste areas” but as valuable ecosystems that provide useful services (clean water, flood mitigation) and need to be protected.

Provide supporting evidence for your claims. Example: In a survey of 231 city residents, 73 percent chose the terms “swamp” or “wasteland” from a list of descriptors for the That Luang Marsh. Five percent chose “urban wetland”.

Describe how you are going to monitor evaluate the outcomes of your activity. Like any good monitoring and evaluation program, you need to think in about what you can measure, how you will measure it and what it will cost to measure.

How, for example, can I know that farmers are reading and following local language instructions for using pesticides? I might conduct interviews, make observations in the field, try to get reports from local hospitals on cases of pesticide poisoning, and measure pesticide levels in runoff and groundwater. Which measures are practical and at what cost?
 

Are we aware of what is possible?
In agricultural and natural resources management research and development, we tend to see communications as a public information exercise rather than using communications as a tool to effect attitudinal and behavioral change (Michael Victor, personal communication). There is much we could learn from other sectors, particularly public health.

There is a huge literature on awareness raising. You will find most of it under “behavior change communication” and “social marketing”. Both these disciplines are widely applied in public health but largely unknown or ignored in agriculture and natural resources management. For those who would like to raise their awareness, here are some starting points.

Public Communication Campaign Evaluation: An Environmental Scan of Challenges, Criticisms, Practice, and Opportunities. Prepared for the Communications Consortium Media Center, By Julia Coffman, Harvard Family Research Project, May 2002

What is Social Marketing? by Nedra Kline Weinreich (Although I strongly object to the notion of  “selling ideas”. See Why marketing is the wrong metaphor for development communications).

To engage or not to engage? Why the buzz about social media? By Michael Victor, Challenge Programme on Water and Food.

Overcoming the introvert factor: Communicating climate change in an age of uncertainty by Michael Victor,  Challenge Programme on Water and Food.

Copyright

You may use this article for non-commercial purposes provided you cite the source and when possible link back to this page. Thank you.

Terry Clayton is Managing Director and Senior Science Writer at Red Plough International. Red Plough works mainly with development professionals in health, agricultural and natural resources management and offers writing and editing services and Workshops for Writers. Visit the Red Plough International website for more information and articles on development communications.

The more connected you are, the less you are connecting.

I am at a conference. I am so busy rephrasing what the speakers are saying into 144 characters that I am not really listening to what they say. If I’m not Tweeting, I’m checking my email because of course there is a wireless Internet connection. My mobile phone is in Silent mode but I can SMS. I’m really connected. In actual fact, I am not fully connected to the time and place and the people around me.

I am on a trip. I am so preoccupied with taking pictures to upload to my Facebook page that I am missing the experience. When I’m not taking pictures, I’m composing captions for them. In actual fact, I am not fully connected to the time and place and the people around me.

I am tending my Yammar account. I am so busy looking at reports and video clips people think I should find interesting and relevant that I don’t have time to read them let alone do my work. If I do, the digital articles are so littered with sidebars and links to other interesting things to read that I end up skipping through cyberspace like a flat rock on a smooth pond. Here is a small sample of what I found the last time I ‘connected’:

• A National Geographic article: Africans Must Adapt to Drought in Warming World: Report (2 pages, with a video)
• A list of really interesting blogs and resources on research communication I should look at (17 posts, average word length 200 words, each with a ‘continue reading’ link)
• A Human Development report on women (98 pages)
• An article I should read on Documenting change: An introduction to process documentation (41 pages)
• An article by The Global Horticulture Initiative about the use of video for knowledge sharing and training in the field (47 pages)

Just this small selection gives me at least 200 pages of reading material. Yes, I know it’s my choice, but I respect my colleagues. If someone thinks something is interesting or relevant, I take their word for it. It seems rude not to look at what they have sent. Reading two hundred pages and viewing videos is a good day’s work. Make that a day and a half because I have to spend time finding and posting things that I think my colleagues should find interesting and relevant and Tweet the world that I’m having a coffee break and post photos of the conference to my Facebook page. If I don’t, I will not be “participating”.

I stop and reflect: Who am I actually connecting with and what is the nature of my ‘connection’?

Does it matter who I am actually connecting with and the nature of our connection? Not really. Within the world of social media there is little discussion but lots of “reporting”. As long as I am receiving and offering comment I have a presence, I exist as a cyberperson. I create the image of that person. Substance is no currency here. The currency is ‘connecting’. The “medium is the message”.
Some readers will recognize that phrase, a few will know it was coined by Marshall McLuhan, a few will know the book “Understanding Media” published in 1964. In McLuhan’s own words, “the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs…. The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.”

Social media have expanded the scale of my work and accelerated the pace. I am now expected to be available at all times to all people. I am in no one place and time but in all places at all times. I effectively give my employer permission to exploit me by being always available. I think I am “multitasking” but in reality I am giving my life over to work and becoming increasingly inefficient in the process.

I fear we are allowing under the spell of the more technological connotations of ‘connect’.  Connecting used to give me an intellectual buzz. Some years ago I attended a lecture by Paolo Friere and another by Edward de Bono. Both knew how to connect with an audience. Someone would ask Friere a question and he would say, “Let me come back to that point.” Fifteen minutes later he would turn and point to the person and say, “Now, that question you asked earlier….”. De Bono sat on a bar stool and doodled on an overhead projector the whole time he spoke and he was riveting. I was riveted because neither speaker was using PowerPoint and there was no wireless Internet or mobile phones and I didn’t have anything to distract me from what they were saying. I was fully connected to the time and place and the people around me.

In his recent book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr refers to the Internet as “a technology of distraction”. The subtitle of the book is “How the Internet is changing the way we read, think and remember”. Carr looks at a large body of past and current research in neuroscience, cognition and social psychology and draws this conclusion: 

 “…the net is literally rewiring our brains, inducing only superficial understanding. As a consequence, there are profound changes in the way we live and communicate, remember and socialize–even in our very conception of ourselves. By moving from the depths of thought to the shallows of distraction, the web, it seems, is actually fostering ignorance.”

Yes, there is LOTS of interesting stuff out there. It’s great that other people are finding interesting things relevant to their work. But not everything is interesting to me or relevant to my work. Yes, I am interested in what some other people are reading and watching, but I am more interested in what they think about what it. The price of being constantly connected may well be not only ignorance but indifference and alienation.

<a href=”http://www.robcottingham.ca/cartoon/archive/2009-04-11-conversation/”><img src=”http://www.robcottingham.ca/cartoon/wp-content/webcomic/noise-to-signal/2009-04-11-conversation.gif” width=”450″ height=”476″ alt=”(woman using laptop, to man) I can’t talk to you right now. I’m catching up on your tweets.” title=”"></a><br><a href=”http://www.robcottingham.ca/cartoon”>Noise to Signal Cartoon</a>

How the act of searching for a bus to Chiang Mai collapses the waveform and causes a bus to exist.

We had two young Swedish women come to visit us at the farm. Josephine was the girlfriend of the son of a good friend of mine, and Linda her travelling companion. They had both been working on a farm in Sweden so they were actually quite keen to try their hand at harvesting rice. They picked up the technique pretty quickly and were a great help. The heat knocked them out a bit but they rallied. The next day I had them doing some light yard work, a bit of weeding and in the late afternoon we went and collected the rice we had cut and trucked it to a storage shed for thrashing. Two tall, young, attractive white girls in a rice field tend to attract some attention here. The men in the village wanted to know if I could help them get Swedish labor too. I said I would look into it.

It was fun having a couple of young Europeans to talk to. Josephine is a weaver and Linda a photographer. She does portraits. I asked her to show me her website, expecting to the see some nice snapshots. What I saw was more along the lines of Annie Liebowitz. They didn’t seem to be much bothered about the Euro debt crisis, they employment prospects on returning to Sweden or climate change. When I was their age I wasn’t much worried about the Cold War or the prospect of nuclear Armageddon. The future isn’t much of a worry when you’re young.

During their stay, the girls decided they would spend a week in Chiang Mai before heading off to Laos. Tuesday afternoon we drove them to Udon to catch a bus. First we went the ‘new’ bus terminal in the center of Udon where we told the Chiang Mai buses leave from the ‘old’ terminal on the western ring road. Drive to the old terminal, go to the VIP bus service office. ‘VIP’ means slightly bigger seats, colder air conditioning and marginally safer driving. The woman at the desk informs us there were no more VIP buses today and directs me to government bus counter across the way.

Go to the government bus counter. The man says no more buses to Chiang Mai today, and directs me to another private bus service in that vague, arm-flapping manner of people who are happy they don’t have to deal with your problem. By now my two young Swedish maidens dressed for Swedish summer, have started to attract a bit of male attention. A gaggle of ever-helpful tuk-tuk drivers express interest in our plight. They all assure me there are no more buses to Chiang Mai today. I tend to trust information from tuk-tuk and motorcycle drivers when it comes to local knowledge on transport issues.

I decide we should go back to the VIP bus office and see about booking a ticket for tomorrow. The woman asks me if I checked at the other office. I still think she’s talking about the government bus service, but she persists and points me to another private bus company about five shop houses up the row. Walk up the row five shop houses. I see the sign that says “Udon to Chiang Mai”. A surly old broad with her face in a bowl of noodles confesses that ‘yes’ she can sell us a ticket to Chiang Mai and ‘yes’ there is a bus tonight at 7 PM. And there it is, right behind me. All shiny and primed to go.

According to Erwin Schrödinger, the bus was simultaneously there and not there. It was our act of seeking a ticket for the bus that collapsed the wave form one way or the other. It just so happened that it collapsed in our favor. This only happens when you travel without your nose stuck in a copy of Lonely Planet. Now that the girls are off on further adventures, I’m thinking of writing up our bus experience for a physics journal as evidence for the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics.

There is ample evidence to convince many that climate change is well underway. Reducing greenhouse gases remains important, but we had best start thinking harder about how we will adapt to the coming changes.

Published in Issues magazine: Issues 94: March 2011, Climate Change Adaptation.http://issues.control.com.au/Issues2011/bi94.shtml

 Public awareness of adaptation, as opposed to mitigation, is only just beginning to dawn. There are at least two reasons for this. For the last twenty years, the discourse has been about greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the leading global body on climate change, actively resisted any discussion of adaptation for fear that this would distract people from the more important task of mitigation. Following their lead, the media has focused almost exclusively on emissions related issues. Mitigation has been so popular a topic that a former US Vice President won a Noble prize for a PowerPoint presentation on the subject. Failure to reach any kind of agreement at the global climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009 (COP15) dashed hopes of capping carbon emissions anytime soon. At the meeting in Cancun in 2010 (COP16), the UNFCCC grudgingly opened the door a crack to admit the many special interest groups who have been advocating for more action on adaptation for some time now. The second reason adaptation hasn’t  been picked up by the media in a big way is that we have been doing it so long and so well that they don’t yet see it as newsworthy. They will.

Our species is the new kid on the block and we have done remarkably well at adapting to our environment. It’s taken us a mere seven million years to walk upright and adapt to life on open savannahs, in tropical rain forests, dry deserts, hot deserts, on shorelines, mountain tops, the depths of the ocean and the space beyond our own atmosphere. Humans just keep expanding into new niches. We even invent new niches in the form of virtual worlds defined by language and abstract symbolic systems we call cultures. Cultures, with their social norms, political systems and economies, have allowed us to expand our numbers far beyond the carrying capacity of natural ecosystems. Zooplankton and insects aside, there are few species that number in the billions. The recent rise of cities can be seen as an adaptation, in a non-biological sense, to our growing numbers. In “Green Metropolis”, David Owen argues that people in cities individually consume less oil, electricity and water than their rural cousins. There is no reason we can’t go on like this indefinitely, provided we can meet the next big challenge posed by climate change.

 Up until recently, our climate has been a constant we haven’t had to think much about. So constant has our climate been over the last 10,000 years that generations of agriculturalists learned to determine planting and harvesting times from the behavior of birds, insects and natural phenomena. Andean potato farmers used climb to the top of a nearby mountain at each winter solstice to observe the constellation of stars known as the Pleiades or, in some locals, the Seven Sisters. If the stars were big and bright, they would plant at their usual time. If they were dim, they expected late, sparse rains and delayed planting. Today we call this accumulated encoding of observation folk wisdom or indigenous knowledge. Scientists are inordinately proud of themselves when they finally figure out that the perceived brightness of the Pleiades are a function of the relationship between El Nino and high cloud cover using billions of dollars worth of satellites and high speed computers.  It’s a pity that the more privileged discourses on adaptation don’t include more potato farmers.

 Meanwhile, this 10000-year interlude of climate stability geologists call the ‘interglacial’ gave us free rein to experiment with our virtual worlds. Over the course of our very short history, we have invented tribes, kingdoms, empires and nation states as forms of governance. To facilitate our exchanges we have gone from barter to metal coins, paper money and finally strings of ones and zeros that we encode on plastic cards and transmit through the air. Over the past several centuries, so many of our species have so completely inhabited various virtual worlds that we have forgotten our ties to nature. We see nature as something external, something to be subdued, controlled and most of all used to satisfy mostly artificial needs and wants. Climate change is here to remind us that we are part of nature and there are planetary boundaries we cannot ignore no matter how stubbornly we might deny them. A framework of these planetary boundaries within which humanity can operate safely has been outlined by Johan Rockstrom, Executive Director of the Stockholm Environment Institute, along with colleagues from 30 institutions worldwide. Whether or not we choose to respect these boundaries will be decided over the course of the next 100 years. The most well known limit, the one most literate people are aware of and take a position on, is the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

 The fact that carbon is what keeps our atmosphere warm has been known for 100 years. Only recently have we realized that it can also cause our atmosphere to be warmer than is good for us. While the global discourse of mitigation has certainly increased awareness of this fact, it has done little to decrease the level of carbon emissions or to bring governments to any consensus on action. Despite the dire warnings and hand wringing of scientists and environmental activists, it looks as if we will continue pumping carbon into the air until some clever guys in a garage somewhere invent cold fusion in a bucket of tap water. We are currently at 385 ppm and rising. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) think it is quite probable we will see 450 ppm or more by 2050.

 Others think the IPCC forecast is conservative. NYU professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who has a remarkably successful record of predicting political outcomes for the CIA and other serious clients, has forecast continued heavy carbon emissions by developing countries.  The underlying logic is easy enough to understand. Rich countries can afford to reduce carbon emissions by investing in ‘green’ technologies. Developing countries have no affordable alternatives to fossil fuels and very powerful incentives to do whatever it takes to improve the quality of life of the people they govern or, in many places, try to keep under control. As Bueno de Mesquita points out, “Sacrificing self-interest for the greater good just doesn’t happen very often. Governments don’t throw themselves on hand grenades.”

 Alternative energies? In “Power Hungry: The myths of “green” energy and the real fuels of the future”, author Robert Bryce argues that coal and oil will continue to be the cheapest sources of energy available for a long time to come. Using the concept of ‘power density’ and working with publically available data, he illustrates how much power a technology can produce per unit of area. A nuclear fission reactor facility producing 2,700 megawatts of power takes up 19 square miles of land, which translates into 300 horsepower per acre or 56 watts per square meter. A wind farm that covers 869 square miles produces 6.4 horsepower per acre, or 1.2 watts per square meter. The wind farm also uses 10 times the amount of steel and concrete needed to build the nuclear power plant and tends to mince up migratory birds and endangered species. To be sure, coal is nasty stuff, but it has an power density ranging from 100 W/m² to 1,000 W/m² and there are an estimated 6.4 billion tons in the top five producing countries. In 2006, 41 percent of the world’s electricity was produced by burning coal. By 2030, that figure is estimated to rise to 44 percent.

 Even if we could put the brake on carbon emissions today, there is enough evidence to convince most thinking people that it would be prudent to expect some changes in climate. Just looking at the data on polar ice and Himalayan glacier melt should be enough to persuade most people that something unusual is happening. So, what do we do while the UNFCCC gabbles on about mitigation and tinkers with their new bureaucracy for a global adaptation fund? Should representatives from developing nation governments go hat-in-hand to endless COP sessions begging for/demanding money? Mr. Lumumba Di-Aping, then Chair of the G77, tried that at the COP15 in 2009. He asked if developed nations were prepared to spend as much on saving the planet as they spent saving their own banks. The recent billions spent on bailouts and bankers’ bonuses on both sides of the Atlantic would seem to indicate that ‘no’ they are not, or at least not in a hurry. The G77 estimated that it would take something in the order of 400 billion dollars annually to prepare developing countries for climate change (four times the current UNFCCC estimate). When asked how that money should be spent, Mr Di-Aping could not say and became rather angry at the implied suggestion that he ought to. But even if the UNFCCC isn’t the only game in town, is it a game worth playing?

 For game-changing ideas, read Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo, an Oxford-educated Zambian economist. Moyo argues rather convincingly that development aid both weakens governance and further impoverishes people in poor countries. African governments, she claims, could find money for development through financial markets, both international and domestic. Although Moyo doesn’t specifically address funding for adaptation, there is something appealing about the idea of countries bootstrapping themselves out of poverty. The idea is doubly appealing because many of the things we need to do to alleviate poverty would also make communities more sustainable and resilient to external shocks, including climate change. At least it appeals to me, because I don’t think we are going to get the “coordinated” or “concerted” action that UN bureaucrats and development gurus keep calling for. People just don’t work that way. People and societies actually work more like ant hills, termite colonies, food chains and electrical grids.

 What those very different things all have in common can be explained with complexity theory. There is no boss in an ant colony. All the queen does is lay eggs. Individual ants work out for themselves what it is they should be doing by interacting with other ants using no more than a dozen chemical and tactile signals. From these interactions, a higher level of organization emerges and the colony is more organized than its individual constituents. Sociologist Jane Jacobs showed that cities exhibit similar behaviour. No one planned the Internet, it grew all on its own but it exhibits the classic features of a small world network, like the neurons in our brains and relationships in ecological food webs.

 I suspect something similar is happening with the thousands of adaptation initiatives currently under way all over the world. Let 10,000 projects bloom and see what emerges. It’s already happening and we should embrace it.  All the big international NGOs have ambitious plans for saving the planet. In addition to lobbying for reductions in greenhouse gases and general awareness raising, they do get involved helping people in mostly poor and marginalized communities plant trees, diversify crops, prepare for floods and droughts and save species from extinction. This is all good work and a great many people are better off for it. Like many of the public and private Western funding agencies that work with them, they see development, poverty alleviation and adaptation as part of the same problem. This makes good sense and we have lots of good models to work with. Some will work, others will not. Let’s give the NGOs, the private foundations, scientists and anyone else who thinks they have a good idea the money they need and see what they do. Let the people most affected decide what works.

 There is ample evidence that people in the private sector, not just the NGOs, are taking climate change seriously. Big multi-national companies have 25 and 30 year strategic plans because they plan to be in business for a long time to come. Climate change is seen both as a risk and an opportunity. The risk is that climate change threatens reliable supplies of raw materials and markets.  NGOs and environmentalists by and large remain skeptical of the good intentions of the private sector and take great joy in shaming companies they feel are trashing the environment for profit (rightfully so), but business does have a stake in safeguarding water supplies, mitigating desertification and protecting biodiversity. An influential McKinsey report published in 2009 warns business that, “Huge value is at stake.

The winners will be companies that reposition themselves to seize the opportunities of a low-carbon future.” The Barilla Group, The Coca-Cola Company, The International Finance Corporation, McKinsey & Company, Nestlé S.A., New Holland Agriculture, SABMiller plc, Standard Chartered Bank, and Syngenta AG formed the 2030 Water Resources Group to “contribute new insights to the increasingly critical issue of water resource scarcity.” The Group sought inputs from more than 300 experts and practitioners of leading scientific, multinational and nonprofit institutions including experts from the International Water Management Institute (a CGIAR center), WWF and the FAO. One of their main conclusions is that the way government institutions perform is at the heart of water sector reform. At present, too many are performing as isolated sectors or for the benefit of their political masters. The role of the private sector is to make financial investments that act as levers for change, such as economic incentives that reward efficient use of water and by investing in technology hubs, research and education to unlock innovation. Water is a wise choice of topic. If mitigation is about greenhouse gases, adaptation is about how we use water.

 Australia provides many good example of what governments can to do to move people towards adaptive behaviour. To start, there are few cities in Australia that don’t have a comprehensive water conservation program. Many cities, like Melbourne, go beyond simple restrictions by encouraging citizens to take part in water surveys to learn about their water consumption and then receive tips accordingly to save more water. In Victoria, when schools sign up for the Water Efficiency Program, an evaluator comes to that school and does an analysis of how well the teachers and students are addressing water conservation opportunities then gives a report with suggestions to help improve their scores. Cities and towns are also including water and energy savings measures into local building codes and many municipalities now offer rebates for homeowners who install rainwater harvesting tanks.

 Changes in water availability as a result of climate change will have a significant impact on how water is managed at the regional level as well. Based on forecasts from climate model, scientists anticipate a significant reduction in water availability the Murray-Darling Basin. Their plans for the ‘equitable’ allocation of water, including water for environmental services, may be rational and scientifically sound, but hard to sell. A survey by the Victorian Department of Primary Industries asked 1500 farmers about climate change. One in five don’t think it is a serious problem. A better strategy than beating people over the head with facts they don’t want to hear is offering carrots in the form of economic incentives. In May, 2010, Tony Burke, then Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry announced an innovative drought reform program for Western Australia. The government will help farmers resettle if their land is too arid, with an ‘exit package’ of up to $170,000. If they choose to stay, the government will help them prepare for the future through Farm Business Adaption Grants of up to $40,000 for activities that will help farm businesses to manage and prepare for the impacts of drought, reduced water availability and a changing climate.

Anywhere you care to look, you will find good news and bad on climate change; cause for alarm an d bright spots of hope. Of one thing I am sure: humans will adapt to new climatic conditions however harsh, not because the world came together to implement international treaties on emissions, not because the United Nations forged a global strategy on adaptation, and not because somebody at the top got everyone coordinated. Humankind will adapt because that’s what we do. The best, if not the most elegant strategy, would be to let 10,000 adaptation projects bloom and get behind the ones you think will work.

 Terry Clayton is a freelance science writer. His chosen adaptation strategy is to live in a small farming community in Northeastern Thailand. You can send comments to clayton@redplough.com

Summary

The widespread use of the marketing metaphor in development communication may be limiting the impact of research for development. It reflects a deficit model of communication that denies agency to the people with whom we wish to communicate; it contributes to the further commodification of science and the further undermining of public trust; and it denies exploration of potentially more useful and productive metaphors. Development communicators need to seriously examine the assumptions underlying the marketing metaphor aAnd consider alternative metaphors more in line with recent developments in social networking and complexity theory.

Development communication
 
 The term ‘development communication’ was first coined in 1972 by Nora C. Quebral, who defined it as: “the art and science of human communication linked to a society’s planned transformation from a state of poverty to one of dynamic socio-economic growth that makes for greater equity and the larger unfolding of individual potential.”  Today, thousands of communications professionals work full or part-time for international development agencies, international NGOs, foundations and large “research for development” institutions. All of them are working hard to “get their message out there”; many of them using the discourse of marketing without fully appreciating the implications.

The magic of marketing

 For many development communicators there is something inherently appealing about the idea of ‘marketing’ their work. All around us we see compelling evidence of how effectively ideas can be marketed. The qualitative difference between one pair of running shoes and another may be marginal, but people will pay hundreds of dollars for a pair of Nike runners, Calvin Klein jeans, or a Gucci handbag. In our modern world, the signifier (the brand) has come to have more meaning and value than the thing it represents. Surely, if development communicators can apply the same principles to ‘selling ideas‘ they must reap similar rewards in terms of ‘brand recognition’ for their project, NGO or research institution.

 For development communicators, the discourse of marketing functions as an effective metaphor. On a practical day-to-day level, the language of marketing seems to work in terms of describing what development communicators do (e.g. selling ideas) and how they go about achieving their goals (e.g. defining target audiences). There is also a certain élan to be had in adopting the discourse of marketing. To speak with knowing ease of key messages, media channels and audience segmentation gives the craft and its practitioners a patina of legitimacy and business acumen.

 In terms of how we think and act, our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. A metaphor is a comparison. We routinely compare one entity to another to convey meaning more effectively. We refer to “the father of modern biology (ideas are people); we say “science has many branches” (ideas are plants); “an astounding rate of new ideas” (ideas are products); “it’s important how you package your ideas” (ideas are commodities). 

 Metaphor structures both our mental life and our behavior. Consider this well known metaphor for education: “The mind is a candle to be lit, not a vessel to be filled.” An educator with a metaphorical concept of mind as ‘candle to be lit’ will develop a curriculum and employ teaching and testing methods much different than one who sees the mind as ‘vessel to be filled’. Because metaphor is so much a part of how we think and act, because it has such power, we are well advised to reflect on the metaphors we use. “A metaphor not only explains by making the abstract concrete and familiar, it also enlivens by engaging the imagination through a relationship between things seemingly alien to each other.” 

 Development communicators may usefully employ the concepts and tools of marketing and revel in the glamour of the discourse, but there is great danger in confusing or conflating communication about science or development with the selling of products and services. So bold and striking is metaphor that it is sometimes taken literally rather than as a comparison. Development communicators may be confusing the marketing map for the scientific territory. 

Needs, wants and deficits

The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines ‘marketing’ as: “the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customers’ requirements profitably.” Does a publically funded research institution or an environmental NGO with stated goals of poverty alleviation, the creation of international public goods, and the conservation of endangered species have ‘customers’ in the same way a multinational food company has customers? The short answer would be ‘no’, but development communicators need a name for the people they are trying to engage with, and a term like “target audience” facilitates internal planning and action. However, what we name a thing matters a great deal. Are we “selling ideas to investors”, or are we “in dialog with partners”? To paraphrase Confucius, “if names are not correct, thought and action will not be in accordance with the truth of things.”

 Inherent in all definitions of marketing is the concept of deficit. Companies selling goods and services believe they have something that customers need or want. In today’s global economy, a good deal of marketing research is directed as much towards the creation of needs and wants as to the discovery of what needs and wants were already there. Either way, customers are in a state of deficit: they lack whatever it is the company can supply. The concept of deficit is also at the core of modernization theory, which is the cornerstone of development communications.

 Modernization theory emerged from post-WWII concerns of mainly US economists and policy makers about unrest in newly emancipated nations and the threat of Soviet expansionism. Theorists first created a category of nations known as ‘Third World’ or ‘developing’, made a diagnosis of the underlying causes for why they were not yet ‘developed’, and proposed a simple remedy: changes in ideas will result in transformations in behavior:

“…cultural and information deficits lie underneath development problems, and therefore could not be resolved only through economic assistance (a la the Marshall Plan in post-war Europe). Instead, the difficulties in Third World countries were at least partially related to the existence of a traditional culture that inhibited development. Third World countries lacked the necessary culture to move into a modern stage. Based on this diagnosis, development communication proposed that changes in ideas would result in transformations in behavior” (Waisbord, 2000). 

 Development communicators embarked on a decades-long mission to “transmit” information and “modern values” through mass media to modify behaviors according to development objectives. Beginning in the 1960s, development communicators started borrowing ideas from the new field of social marketing. Social marketing derived from political and social forces that put pressure on large corporations in the United States to be more socially relevant and socially responsible. It was a marriage of considerable convenience.

 Social marketing is the application of commercial marketing techniques to promote certain social behaviors deemed to be ‘good’ (if the aims are deemed to be ‘bad’, it’s generally called propaganda). The tools of social marketing have been used with great success to influence changes in thinking and behavior related to a range of health and safety issues in both developed and developing countries (smoking, seat belt use, drug and alcohol use, safe sex, birth control, etc.). Its appeal to development communicators was and remains its affinity with underlying assumptions about deficits and the role of information in changing minds and behaviour.

 Deficit thinking is much in evidence in development communication still. Researchers and development communicators who claim to speak for them insist that it is their duty to “influence” policy makers by providing them with the information they lack. When policy makers stubbornly refuse to be influenced, they may concede that their information wasn’t “packaged” appropriately, but the underlying deficit assumption is seldom challenged, i.e. researchers have superior or new ideas without which policy-makers will be able to make the right decisions.

 The concept of deficit plays a role in the process of commodification as well. Commodification is the transformation of [social] goods and services, or things that may not normally be regarded as goods or services, into commodities with a money value. Scientific information is increasingly deemed to be a good. Baskaren and Boden (2006) argue that:

 Knowledge is a major commodity in rapidly expanding global “free market” economies. Such knowledge includes that derived from the social activities that we in the West call “science”. The processes of globalisation and commercialisation have prompted a paradigmatic shift in the organisation, funding and nature of Western science during the past two decades or so. Western science has been transformed from an activity that took place in the “Independent Republic of Science”  to one that is corporatised, marketised and commodified, whether it takes place in the public or the private sector. Previously, scientists were conceived of as the producers of open, codifiable knowledge (often at public expense) for the public good. This knowledge production work was undertaken in return for public standing and recognition. In contrast, science is now usually an activity undertaken to produce knowledge that furthers the private commercial aims of globalised corporate actors.

 The commodificiation debate is nothing new. The tensions between the market, the community and the individuality is as old as civilization. Adam Smith advocated free trade because he believed it would put an end to the religious wars that had plagued Europe for 400 years. Others, like Justus Moser, Hegel and Marx, believed that the ‘capitalist market’ destroys local community structures and social cohesion . The debate continues today in the context of the globalization of knowledge once considered public goods. The pressure on research-for-development organizations to demonstrate ‘impact’ in terms of value for money can be seen as a reflection of the commodification of knowledge.

How discourse colonizes thought and action

 To illustrate some of the points discussed above, I examined a corpus of publically available documents published by the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and several of the research institutes that work under the CG umbrella. I chose the CG system because  a) at the time I wrote this article I was employed by the corporate communications unit of one of these centers, which gave me the status of participant observer; b) the CGIAR and its member institutes see their work as research-for-development, i.e. their research is measured in terms of how much impact it has on agricultural productivity and poverty alleviation; and c) the CGIAR system is in the midst of a major reorganization and hence an examination of the basic assumptions underlying their communications strategies is timely and potentially useful. The corpus comprises mainly documents on communications strategies and strategic plans available on the Internet. Not all the centers are represented in the corpus and there is no assurance that what was available is the most up-to-date version.

 In the table below, the first column shows excerpts containing marketing terms taken from documents produced by six of the 15 CG centers. The second column is an interpretation of what those excerpts reveal about basic assumptions in terms of marketing models and theories of communication. Center designations have been concealed in the interests of anonymity.

 Across the board, these excerpts reflect a conventional business marketing model, one in which communicators are “identifying, anticipating and satisfying customers’ requirements profitably.” As the CG system launches its new “mega-programs” approach, it would be worth asking if this the most effective approach to communicating research.

 The current CGIAR change management initiative is the second attempt at ‘rebranding’ the CG system in light of donor demands and a changing external environment. The first such exercise attempted in the late 1990s was to rebrand the CG system as “Future Harvest”. These efforts were to come to naught when, in the early 2000s, “Future Harvest began to go awry a few years later, as implementation of CGIAR governance reforms got under way. New CGIAR leadership and some donors opposed the Future Harvest brand and approach.”

 I would suggest that what “went awry” can be traced back to the adoption of the marketing metaphor as the basis for communication. The CG established a Public Awareness Association (PAA) in 1988 to help science communicators deal with a spat of negative publicity and raise the profile of the CG system. The PAA was initially chaired by a donor representative and also Vice President of Communications at the Rockefeller Foundation. The CGIAR’s longstanding partnership with Burness Communications, a US-based public
relations firm, dates back to this time. Its president at the time was a close
associate of Rockefeller’s VP Communications.  In the early 1990s, an influential Australian science journalist explicitly emphasized the need for the CGIAR to adopt a new and more appealing brand.

 With or without the influence of vice presidents of communications and public relations firms, the marketing metaphor in agriculture is close at hand. Agriculture is much entwined in market processes. It does little good to increase production of livestock and crops if smallholder farmers cannot be linked to market chains, and smallholder famers are themselves acutely sensitive to market forces. It does not follow, however, that development communicators should take a marketing approach to communicating research work on agriculture.

Alternative metaphors and models

 Fortunately, development communicators seeking alternative metaphors and models for communications are not limited to marketing. The tree of communication theory bears varied fruits. Theories of Human Communication, a standard text by Littlejohn and Foss (2007)  lists seven main types of theories: structural, functional, cognitive, behavioral, interactionist, interpretive and critical. Each employs different metaphors and it is instructive to see how a different metaphor leads to different outcomes. Two examples are given below.

 Erving Goffman, one of the best known sociologists of the 20th  Century, analyzed human behavior through the lens of a theatrical metaphor. For Goffman, all communication is a form of performance. “All the world is a stage.”

I am suggesting that often what talkers undertake to do is not to provide information to a recipient but to present dramas to an audience. Indeed, it seems that we spend most of our time not engaged in giving information but in giving shows.

 We have all sat through enough PowerPoint presentations to appreciate the difference between someone who provides information (too often more than we can handle in one sitting) and someone who makes a good performance. Goffman’s theory belongs to a category known as interactionist, in which communication is decidedly social in nature. Meaning is created and sustained by interaction in the social group, not transmitted from a sender to a receiver as per the cliché mechanical model of communication. It is the interaction itself that establishes, maintains and changes conventions, roles, norms, rules and meanings within a social group. Farmers don’t adopt a new agricultural practice because they received appropriately packaged information or attended a training workshop. If they change, they do so because a new way of doing things makes sense in the various contexts that frame their lives. Only through genuine interaction can we understand these ‘frames of context’ and only then can we engage meaningfully and communicate effectively. 

 One more example will suffice to illustrate how a different metaphor can provide a potentially productive model for “doing communication”. What if an idea is a virus?

 One of the main concerns of epidemiologists is modeling the spread of diseases. Recently, they have been applying social networking theory with considerable success. Social network analysis (related to mathematical network theory, not Facebook or Twitter) has emerged as a key technique in modern sociology and gained a significant following in anthropology, biology, communication studies, economics, geography, information science, organizational studies, social psychology, and sociolinguistics. A social network is a social structure made up of individuals (or organizations) called nodes, which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, common interest, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige. Epidemiologists use it to help understand how patterns of human contact aid or inhibit the spread of diseases in a population.

 The notion that ideas behave in a similar way is not new. A field of study called memetics arose in the 1990s to explore the concepts and transmission of memes in terms of an evolutionary model.  A meme is an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. While genes transmit biological information, memes are said to transmit ideas. Perhaps it would be useful for development communicators to think in terms of constructing and tracking memes rather than ‘transmitting messages’.

Conclusion

 Any metaphor development communicators adopt comes with a set of underlying assumptions about how people communicate with one another that will have practical consequences for development communication. If, for example, development communicators decided to adopt either the framing metaphor or “idea as virus” metaphor, development communicators would still have a useful a discourse to work with.

 Too many development communicators who use the language of marketing have never had any formal training in marketing or any real world experience in the private sector. Nor do most realize they are clinging to an outdated paradigm of marketing. In the “old” marketing paradigm, value is embedded in products. A brand is a means of validating the quality of a product (XYZ shampoo is pure and made of the best ingredients). The new marketing paradigm recognizes the increasing fragmentation of market segments and actively interprets brands to appeal to sometimes tiny market segements. Google already presents different content and ads to users based on their ‘click’ history. Finally, corporations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing. Marketing is a central element of the company’s strategic planning process. Research institutes spend a small fraction of their budget on ‘communications’, and communications units are peripheral to strategic decision making.

 Ultimately, it is a question of choice. Do we want to treat ideas as commodities? Do we want to compete for a larger share in a marketplace of ideas? Could we instead choose to see a world in which there is no longer an audience we must communicate to, because everyone is participating in the co-creation of knowledge and an evolutionary learning process that determines which ideas are best fitted to their environment?

Terry Clayton

September 2011

References

Dawkins, Richard (1989), “11. Memes: the new replicators”, The Selfish Gene (2nd ed., new ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 368, ISBN 0192177737

Lakoff, G. and Mark Johnson. 1981. 2nd edition 2003. Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.

Littlejohn, S.W. and Karen A. Foss. 2007. Theories of Human Communication, Ninth Edition. Wadsworth Publishing.

Muller, J.Z. 2002. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. Knopf, Borzoi Books, Random House, New York.

Quebral, Nora C. (1973/72). What Do We Mean by ‘Development Communication’. International Development Review 15 (2): 25–28. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_communication

Russell, N. and Ruth Raymon. Collective Communications in the CGIAR: A Short History of a Longstanding Endeavor. http://www.cgiar.org/pdf/scw_HistoryofCollective%20Communications.pdf Accessed 10 August, 2011.

Waisbord, Silvio. 2000. Family Tree of Theories, Methodologies and Strategies in Development Communication, New York: Rockefeller Foundation.

If Writers Were Cars

Everyone knows how to rent a car. You start with why you need one. In town for a couple of days on business? You probably want something small and easy to park. Taking the family to the beach for the weekend? A station wagon or SUV will do nicely. Cleaning out the garage? A pickup truck. Writers are like cars in that you also need to think about the job. What is it you want a writer to do? Unlike cars, writers can transform themselves. A good writer can be a pickup truck today and a Porsche 911 tomorrow. The trick is, you have to tell the writer what kind of car you need.

What kind of writer do you need?

Chevrolet Express Van

The 2010 Chevrolet Express is a willing work partner, but buyers shouldn’t expect much more. A no-frills, low maintenance vehicle that doesn’t attract attention to itself. It’s practical and reliable. When you step on the gas pedal you know it’s not going to zoom off in some unpredictable direction. Always there when you need it and never complains. The Chevy Express has space for 10 passengers. That’s that average number of people who need to “comment” on any given publication. Excellent mileage on frequent, short back-and-forth trips.

Best for these jobs: Corporate communications as in press releases, brochures, flyers, posters, the annual report, slogans, photo captions, letters and messages from the big boss. Also good for contributed articles in local media, UN and donor agency publications.

Toyota Highlander Hybrid

More affordable than the Lexus RX450h and more powerful than Ford’s hybrid SUVs. Top choice for 7-seat hybrid. Options include: JBL® AM/FM 6-disc CD changer with MP3/WMA playback capability, nine speakers including subwoofer, XM® Radio and USB port with iPod® connectivity, CD text display function, auto sound leveling, hands-free phone capability and music streaming via Bluetooth® wireless technology.   

Best for these jobs: Writing copy for electronic media: Twitter, Facebook, You Tube video clips, websites.
 

Ford F-150

Critics hail the 2010 Ford F-150 for its muscle, towing prowess, good crash-test scores and reliability, as well as for its solid combination of comfort, functionality and an exceedingly well-appointed interior. Exactly what you need for those heavy lifting jobs.

Best for these jobs: Planning, outlining, drafting: research reports, proposals, journal articles, book chapters. Structural editing and rewriting; stylistic editing, clarifying meaning, eliminating jargon and unnecessary repetition; ‘smoothing’ language, and other non-mechanical line-by-line editing; creating or recasting tables and or figures.

Porsche 911

You’ll be dazzled by the 2011 Porsche 911′s unending driving joy, and maybe stunned by its passenger comfort and even its fuel economy. Fast, highly maneuverable, high performance vehicle that attracts lots of attention.

Best for these jobs: Commissioned articles from high profile newspapers and magazines. Also good for television and radio scripts and podcasts.

BMW 3 Series Sedan
All of the high-quality control elements are ergonomically positioned for a perfect fit as soon as you take a seat. Embodies decades of engineering experience.

Best for these jobs: Advising on or directing communications strategy. Providing advice and direction for producing or restyling information products. Reviewing copy produced by other writers and suggests or makes revisions to content, structure and style.

Chrysler ME Four-Twelve Concept
A concept vehicle is a prototype made to showcase a concept, new styling or new technology. Concept cars are usually radical in design.

Best for these jobs: Writers have (or should have) a license to walk around and talk to people anywhere in the organization. This often provides useful insights and ‘birds-eye’ views that can challenge long-held assumptions and stimulate thinking in new directions.

Go ahead, add more cars.

Pick any topic. It could be as broad as “conservation” or as specific as the reproductive cycle of Viverricula indica. Chances are good that at the next meeting or workshop you attend or in the next report you read, you will hear or read a claim that “we have insufficient information” on the subject and “there is, therefore, a need for more research.” This always sounds like a reasonable claim, partly because everybody at these meetings likes doing research and so—if a little is good, more is better. The problem is that every time I hear this, my mind’s eye flashes up images of thousands of studies and reports I have seen gathering dust on library shelves throughout the region and elsewhere. I always want to stand up and say, “Don’t you mean perhaps that we simply don’t know of or don’t have convenient access to many of the studies that do exist?” I don’t though. It would be like asking Barack Obama to give tax cuts to the rich.

Do researchers make sufficient use of the information we already have? I suspect that in some fields, particularly the “hard” and life sciences, they may. I know that in social sciences and “development” research, there is room for improvement. Why should this be so? Perhaps the first reason is the one I already mentioned. The people who attend the kind of meetings where people present research tend to be the kind of people who like doing research. For one thing, you can get money for doing research. You don’t get money for doing literature searches.

Searching the literature has no sex appeal. Research, however, is A Noble Calling. When people ask, “What do you do?” an exciting and impressive response is, “I’m conducting a biodiversity survey in Southern Laos” or “I’m measuring sediment loads in tributaries of the Mekong.” A not exciting and unimpressive response is, “I’m searching libraries for previous studies on sediment loads.” It’s the difference between, “I drive a Lexus” and “I drive a Nissan Sunny.”

Doing research is taking action. That action might be long hours in a lab, long days knee deep in marshes and swamps, or long weeks trekking around the backwaters of poor developing countries. Action means “doing something about the problem,” whatever the problem is. Poring through old research reports is tedious and boring and hard to reconcile with “doing something about the problem.”

Then there is the relevance issue. I have yet to attend a conference of experts when I don’t hear half a dozen speakers proclaim that their research is vital to decision makers or urgently needed to influence policy. I’m not convinced this is true. Most of the researchers I know would not recognize a “policy maker” if one bit them on the ankle. Researchers seldom have to make any of the big decisions. As a researcher, my job is done when I hand in my report. If somebody acts on the results, I can bask in the reflected glory. If they don’t, I get the satisfaction that comes from complaining about the stupidity of people who don’t see the importance of my research.

I am not against research. I am against uninformed researchers. Uninformed researchers write up fat project proposals and go rushing off, gathering data, and having a great old time and have absolutely no interest in what anybody has done before them because that might spoil the fun. Let me give an example.

A regional river basin organization I know of wrote up a project that required hiring lots of very expensive international consultants to come and travel around four countries and talk to lots of people and conduct lots of expensive national and regional workshops and write up guidelines for conducting environmental impact assessments in tropical climates. The rationale was that the existing guidelines applied to temperate climates and new relevant guidelines were necessary to inform decision makers and influence policy. I happened to be working for this organization at the time in the same unit. Since I had more time on my hands than things to do, I thought to myself, “I wonder if anyone has done anything along these lines before?” Over the course of a few days, I did a quick and dirty search of the available literature and this is what I found:

• a book published by the same river basin organization in 1989: Environmental Impact Assessment in Tropical Ecosystems
• reports on several workshops with lists of participants’ names, many who were still working for the same ministries but in higher positions
• a list of names of people on a national environmental group in one of the four countries, all now in more senior positions.

I handed my little bibliography over to the lead consultant and got a mumbled “thanks very much, this will be very useful” and never heard a word about it again. Nor did I see any reference to it in their final report. They already had their work plan and their travel plan and probably had the guidelines half written as well. I might as well have handed them a closet full of skeletons.

My point is this: Before investing scarce resources in yet more surveys and studies on any particular topic, it would be prudent to stop and conduct a comprehensive search of the existing literature, including the gray literature in languages other than English. A literature search helps clarify where the existing gaps in our knowledge actually lie so we can target our efforts and resources more effectively. It also helps bring to light other dimensions of the problem.

That a gap exists is not a sufficient rationale for filling it. Too many development research projects are driven by the personal interests of the researchers. Resources for research and information gathering are limited and the agents driving development are not going to put their plans on hold while advocates of sustainable development conduct more surveys and impact studies. Time, effort, and money need to be directed towards activities that have the most chance of achieving the development goals of a project. If a research study or a habitat survey seems the most effective way of achieving a particular goal, then it should be done. If those same resources would have more impact helping villagers learn to engage more effectively with district and provincial authorities or learn new livelihood skills, those surveys may be a waste of time and effort.

Funding agencies need to take more responsibility by insisting that proposals include a review of the relevant literature. Agencies are demanding more evidence of impact, but they should not forget the “front end” and ask for a review of what impact has already been achieved. Teaching faculty and thesis and dissertation advisors at universities need to put more emphasis on the literature review. Most of the “reviews” I have seen are nothing more than a cut-and-paste catalog: “I read Jones (2005) and he said [cut-and-paste]; I read Smith et al. (2006) and they said [cut-and-paste].”

With more people doing more research than ever before, the task of searching for relevant work can be overwhelming, but we also have more sophisticated tools to help us. With the enormity and complexity of the problems facing our world, we can no longer afford the luxury of redundant research. In the meantime, I am waiting to hear some presenter at a conference say, “I have searched all the available literature I could find and we don’t have sufficient information on…”

Notes on this article: Article first published in the August 2009 issue of Chemistry in Australia; Volume 76, Issue 7; Aug 2009; 19–21, and subsequently in Chemistry International Vol. 32 No. 1, January-February 2010.

The problem with climate change is we can’t see it. So says Heidi Cullen, author of The Weather of the Future. Cullen suggests that by starting with the weather, a subject on which you and I are experts, we can persuade people that first, things are changing; and second, we can take action that will help us avoid the worst scenarios and adapt to the changes that will take place as a result of what we have done to the atmosphere so far. The weather forecast for the coming weekend is something I can relate to. The climate forecast for 2030 is just too abstract and too far distant to wrap my head around. Cullen believes that by linking the two in peoples’ minds, we may be able to move forward with useful mitigation and adaptation actions.

Cullen’s chapter on Seeing Climate Change in Our Past offers a refreshing perspective. The good news is planet Earth will be just fine thank you. This won’t be the first climatic upheaval and probably not as dramatic as the catastrophic increase in the levels of atmospheric oxygen two billion years ago. That climate change wiped out millions of species and opened the door to more adaptive organisms like us.

The chapter on the science of prediction is simply one of the simplest, most informative things I have read to date on the science of climate modeling. Most of us are unaware that the science of weather forecasting that we so take for granted began on the battlefields of WW I with a young Quaker ambulance drive, Lewis Fry Richardson a mere 80 years ago. Even now, with all our supercomputers, weather forecasts are only valid for about three days into the future. Climate modeling, which began in earnest in the 1970s, has progressed further faster. How accurate are they? Using a technique called ‘hindcasting’, climate scientists compare the data from a past climactic event with lots of reliable data to the outputs of their models. Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines erupted in 1991 spewing 20 million tons of sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere creating a global haze that cooled the Earth by about 1 degree Celsius. Jim Hansen and his team at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies added the Pinatubo eruption as a ‘forcing’ to their climate model and got almost exactly the same figure.

Part II looks at some specific cases of weather/climate change around the globe. There is some good news in the Sahel, a region not a country, that stretches across the African continent from Mauritania to Ethiopia. Archeologists think this is where our first human ancestors began the great adventure of human civilization. The Sahel is generally considered one of the most vulnerable regions on the planet. Obviously, a lot of small farmers in Niger didn’t get the memo. Over the last couple of decades they have replanted 12.4 million acres of trees and shrubs on the edge of the Sahara Desert. So far it’s an adaptation strategy that works.

Bad news for coral reefs though. Most will be gone by 2040. The ocean absorbs carbon but becomes more acidic in the process. The Smithsonian has set up a Global Coral Vault against the day when ocean acidity subsides. Somewhere around the end of this century if we can get a handle on carbon emissions in the next generation or two. On the other hand, Cullen sees places like Greenland and Nunavut in the Arctic emerging as the new American Dream with fashionable cities fueled by burning methane hydrates. Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, millions are displaced by rising sea levels by 2026, and the groundwater situation in India reaches crisis proportions a decade after that. By 2050, South Asia is hell on Earth. The rich countries fare better. New York, for example, builds storm surge barriers and seawalls and life goes relatively undisturbed. Cullen ends the book on a weak note with a non-committal summary of what the UNFCCC and the IPCC are doing. I much prefer her more daring speculative science fiction predictions that appear at the end of each of her chapters in Part II.

We have missed the boat on mitigation, not that we can’t make up some lost time, and we need to start focusing more on adaption. Cullen, still much preoccupied with carbon, gives some tantalizing hints to what some of those adaptations might be. Perhaps one of the clearest messages is the quote from Darwin at the head of her chapter on past climate change. “It is not the strongest nor the most intelligent of the species that survive; it is the one most adaptable to change.” With that in mind, I might just check out real estate in Nunavut.

With all the clamor of dams on the Mekong and expert panels advising the Basin Development Program, I thought it appropriate to review a good book on energy. I am a firm believer that that true seekers of knowledge (that’s you dear readers) are not afraid to examine information that might challenge their existing beliefs. Power Hungry most certainly challenges a lot of what the greens take as gospel. Therefore, I begin by establishing Bryce’s credentials.

Bryce is an author and journalist who has been covering the energy beat for decades. His work appears in dozens of publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Counterpunch and Atlantic Monthly. Up until September of this year he was the editor of Energy Tribune, a new aggregator, and continues to hold a senior fellowship at Manhattan Institute’s Center for Energy Policy and the Environment. You may not agree with Bryce, but at least he’s credible.

The basic thesis of Power Hungry is that oil and coal are not going anywhere until there is a cheap alternative. Coal currently supplies nearly half the world’s energy and will do so until those guys in the garage invent cold fusion in a bucket of tap water. The ‘myths’ of clean, green energy persist because most people are too numerically challenged to do the arithmetic that makes this so, at least in the United States where 27% of eighth-graders could not correctly shade 1/3 of a rectangle and 71% of adults can’t calculate miles per gallon on a trip. Bryce maintains that if people are going to discuss energy policy they should know a joule from a watt and the difference between power and energy (power = energy/time). Hence the ‘power and energy for idiots’ in Chapter 3. Do not skip this chapter. The key to understanding why most of the green energies are not viable is the concept of the power density of fuels. How much power can a technology produce per unit of area? A nuclear fission reactor facility producing 2,700 megawatts of power takes up 19 square miles of land, which translates into 300 horsepower per acre or 56 watts per square meter. A wind farm that covers 869 square miles produces 6.4 horsepower per acre, or 1.2 watts per square meter. The wind farm also uses 10 times the amount of steel and concrete needed to build the nuclear power plant and tends to mince up migratory birds and endangered species.

If you think the power density concept is some kind of trick, consider the whole corn ethanol thing. Millions of hectares of prime agricultural land in the US have been given over to growing corn to produce fuel. Never mind that the fuel it produces contains two-thirds the heat content of gasoline, the farm lobbies love it and will push the government to mandate its use. (For more on the evils of corn read Michael Pollen’s Omnivore’s Dilemma.) Corn ethanol has a power density of .05 watts per square meter, the lowest of any fuel next to biomass.

Bryce deconstructs the rest of our favorite green energy myths not with polemic but with simple arithmetic, established facts and clear logic. It’s a bit of shock to learn that a company called Detroit Electric introduced an electric car in 1919. If you think peak oil or oil dependency are problems, consider that the world’s known supplies of lithium are in Afghanistan, Bolivia and Tibet and that lithium mining is every bit as destructive as coal mining.

Having lifted the veil on our illusions of the superior morality of wind, electric and solar power, Bryce offers up his own solutions: natural gas and nuclear. Natural gas has its share of problems, but its abundant and the cleanest of the hydrocarbons. Which leaves nuclear. Oh, I can feel those knees jerking from here. Not least my own. I remember crouching under my desk in 5^th grade as part of the curriculum on preparation for nuclear attack. But the future of nuclear power may be ready to overcome its past. Green heroes no less than James Lovelock and Stuart Brand (founder of The Whole Earth Catalog) are advocating nuclear along with Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore. The biggest issues are, of course, safety and waste. The waste problem could be solved through a process of ‘transmutation’. Sounds like alchemy, but it’s the use of high-energy neutrons to burn nuclear waste. The burning process would of course produce enough heat to produce yet more electricity. Still a ways to go on that but clearly a possible solution. Bryce doesn’t go into safety issues, which is a weakness.

Nor, strangely, does Bryce touch on dams. Perhaps M-Power should get in touch.

If you are looking for a comprehensive, informative and lucid snapshot of the state of groundwater governance in South Asia today, you have found the right book. Shah starts off with a chapter on The Hydraulic Past in which he traces the history of irrigation in South Asia with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From Moghul India through British colonization and the Green Revolution, Shah brings us to the current era of ‘atomistic irrigation’ of modern India. This is enlightening and necessary reading to understand the central argument of the book: “that to be effective, irrigation policies in South Asia must address the unique socioecological characteristics of the region and its people.” Good advice no matter what region readers might be working in. Chapter two examines the phenomenal groundwater boom in India that had its origin in the North China Plain in the 1970s. The ‘typology of groundwater socioecologies’ in tablular form is one for your wall.

Chapter three shows how gravity-flow irrigation is shrinking despite the hundreds of millions of dollars that donors are forcing on governments the world over. Shah pulls no punches here on this ‘cosmic disconnect’, an impetus that comes from, “the promise of improved welfare and more from a political economy run by a minority lenders, politicians, technocrats and contractors  and tolerated by an apathetic majority of farmers uncertain about their gains from a debt they not be called upon to redeem.”

Chapters four and five review the benefits the atomistic groundwater socioecology has created for South Asia’s agrarian poor, and the already apparent impending disaster. Understanding South Asia’s ‘energy-irrigation nexus’ is the key to a solution that Shah sets out against the ‘political gaming’ that characterizes formal governance and argues that we must put more effort into understanding how users behave in an atomistic groundwater economy. How users relate to aquifer development, how they respond as individuals and groups in sharing this resource and how they choose to compete or cooperate are taken up in chapter six. In its conclusion Shah presents an incisive analysis of the difference between formal hydrology – how scientists and the policy makers they like to inform would like things to be; and informal hydrology – what people actually want. His section on instruments of water governance and their relevance to South Asia is both comprehensive and insightful.

In the penultimate chapter, Shah asks, “Can the anarchy be tamed?” By examining the experiences of other countries on several continents, he concludes that the answer is a clear ‘yes’. The proviso is that “nascent efforts at demand management in South Asia are driven to chart their own distinctive course”, a course set out in chapter eight.

Thriving in Anarchy is the real meat of the book, the one you should read if you have limited time. It is almost guaranteed, though, that after reading it you will go back and dig deeper. Shah is optimistic. He believes that not only can the ‘anarchy’ of the atomistic groundwater economy be tamed, but that this is the wave of the future. Scientists, policy makers and water managers can join the train or be left behind. Shah is optimistic because he believes it is possible, indeed inevitable, that development practitioners and big donors can be weaned off their ‘development narratives’ that lock them into nineteenth century mindsets, and because there are practical actions we can take now. He debunks the underlying assumptions of integrated water management and lays out 12 propositions that comprise an ‘environmental scan’ of the current situation that include succinct analyses of the major changes now under way. Taken as a whole, they comprise a realistic plan of action.

Perhaps one of his most exciting topics is an argument for focusing on ‘indirect strategies’ that act outside the typical development narrative of ‘water resources management’ to produce an impact within it. How this works in practice he outlined in previous chapters on the ways Indian states have handled the energy-irrigation nexus. Scientists often comment on the sectoralization of water and even sometimes acknowledge that more bridges ought to be built with other sectors, but nowhere else have I seen a lucid explanation of how this works in practice. Shah says, “Ironically, devising indirect approaches requires taking a far more integral view of the operating system of a country’s water economy than does the IWMRM thinking, which is preoccupied with direct instruments within the water economy. It requires discovering ways of solving problems without directly touching their cause. It involves exploring the true nature of the water economy and its driving forces, and understanding the backward and forward linkages that connect the water economy with the large socioeconomic and political fabric. Such exploration may yield ideas for indirect strategies to move from intolerable to tolerable disorder.”

If you find Tushaar Shah’s thinking refreshing, his writing style is equally so. I skimmed this book in a day, reading the first and last chapters in their entirety, then the first few pages and the conclusion of each of the middle chapters, gradually going back and filling in the rest. This is a book I plan to keep on my shelf.

Tushaar Shah is currently a Senior Fellow with IWMI. He is based in Gujarat and can be reached at t.shah@cgiar.org