Friday, November 19, 2010

blog pimping

yaaaaay my awesome hilarious friend and newly arrived-AYAD liz has a blog.

check this girl out.

out to the wild west

so, i think the one of the last substantive posts i did was just a lazy copying and pasting of my research proposal for this year. what that post managed to conceal, of course, is that it is the fruit of years and years of secondary-source research practice, strong analytical and verbal skills...and a tremendous ability to bullshit my way into situations in which i feel ultimately out of my depth. i certainly never concealed the fact that i have virtually nothing (ok, just nothing) in the way of field research experience. but, given my blithe confidence (and, to be fair to myself, legitimate excitement at the possibility of new data sets...god, how do i have friends), it didn't, y'know, really come up.

and now, my friends it is time to pay the piper. i leave tomorrow for humla (which, if you look back at the original proposal, is a change of plan), which is, arguably the most remote district in nepal...one of the last truly roadless places in the world....'cause that sounds like just the sort of thing i do for fun, right? i am going to be using methodologies (rapid assessment/participatory rural appraisal), with which i have only a desk-chair familiarity in a place where the language barrier will be significant, working with a translator whose english skills are about at the level of my nepali skills (if that).

basically, there is no part of this little adventure that doesn't turn me into a quivering, gelatinous pile of anxiety.

i am a jello mold of neuroses.

with that said, i had a long chat with a friend who's just spent about eight months out in humla. i don't know whether it was the sage advice or the multiple beers, but it really helped. he helped me recalibrate my expectations of myself and this trip significantly, reminding me that field work is always unpredictable, no matter how prepared you are, and that this will be a valuable experience, no matter what kind of data i get on this particular jaunt. and he said, and i believed, if only for a second, the magic words: "and that's ok".

we'll see if i still feel that way when i haven't showered or eaten anything but buckwheat pancakes for two weeks, and am trying to hitch a ride out of the district on a WFP rice 'copter before i get snowed in...but i guess we'll have the answer to that when i get back in a few weeks.

let's dance.

Girls' Education and Climate Change Mitigation

Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education just released a report called "Gender Equality and Education: A Report Card on South Asia Living and Learning for Future -The Power of Adult Learning", which ranks girls' access to education among South Asian countries. Sri Lanka comes in first, India second, with Nepal trailing at fifth, and Afghanistan last. It's not clear how many countries they're including in South Asia, but with 60% of girls without access to a secondary education, Nepal obviously has some work to do.

...especially in light of this paper by David Wheeler and Dan Hammer at the Center for Global Development. The paper suggests, based on projections that developing countries will contribute as much as 50% of global carbon emission by 2030, that the best dollar-for-dollar impact in aid programming targeting climate change mitigation is...a combination of family planning and girls' education.

Now, I think there may be some potential issues with this, although I'll admit to sort of skimming at this point. For instance, the 2030 projection is based on a definition of "developing" (from a 2007 study by Wheeler) that equates the term with the Global South, which includes China. While China ranks first in emissions, family planning isn't exactly a problem. I don't know how much this affects projections, but since China isn't really getting a royal share of foreign aid, maybe it doesn't matter. The second issue I have is that two major sources of CO2 from developing countries cited by Wheeler and Hammer and are "rapidly industrializing countries" (like India, China, and South Africa), and massive deforestation, like in Brazil. Now, I'm not going to summon the statistics to back up what I'm about to contend (just now, anyway), but I would say that we need to think about to what degree the unsustainability of those systems of production is driven by unsustainable patterns of consumption in the global North. I'm not sure Wheeler's 2007 "inconvenient truth" ("A Carbon-Intensive South Faces Environmental Disaster, No Matter What the North Does") is so true; I think we have a moral imperative to change our consumption patterns to reflect a dedication to sustainable systems of production (something I think they are ignoring in their critique of Naucler and Enkvist).

However, that said: there is an awful lot of money being thrown at climate change right now, especially in places like Nepal (and rightfully so, given that, according to ICIMOD the Himalayas are suffering temperature changes at eight times the global rate). Some of that money is going to effective mitigation and prevention programming...but then you have the motherload of climate mitigation aid: REDD. I can't necessarily speak to other countries, but in Nepal, for instance, I can't really see REDD working in practice, for a whole slew of reasons, despite a robust tradition of decentralized forest management. Despite my tentative reservations about Wheeler and Hammer's conclusions, and especially taking into account the other proven economic development outcomes of programs aimed at women's empowerment, they make a compelling argument to look at other strategies before diving headlong into REDD and other similarly expensive and expansive, yet largely unproven, systems.