Category Archives: Resource Based Economy

The project aims to help strengthen the transition to a circular economy through tracking and traceability of critical materials.

Supply chain traceability and transparency start-up, Circularise, has announced it will partner with BEC GmbH, Grundfos, Minviro, and the global Rare Earth Industry Association (REIA) to lead a three-year EIT RawMaterials funded innovation project to build a blockchain based Circular System for Assessing Rare Earth Sustainability (CSyARES).

This will set out to help companies improve transparency and sustainability of their supply chains when it comes to critical and rare earth materials.

According to Circularise, demand for rare earth metals is skyrocketing and by 2030 it is projected to reach 315,000 tonnes.

It says these rare-earth metals are irreplaceable in wind turbines, electric vehicles, mobile phones, computers and the defence industry.

As corporations and governments work toward a sustainable future, climate supply chain traceability software that leverages data and blockchain to measure environmental impact can help increase the secondary resource efficiency and accelerate transition to a circular economy

Rising demand combined with resource shortages and supply chain disruptions means there is a need for sustainably mined and processed metals.

It says the transition to a circular economy is considered crucial and governments around the world incentivise companies to uptake e-waste recycling and other sustainable practises with new regulation.

As highlighted by the European Raw Material Alliance (ERMA) Action Plan, boosting supply security through better cooperation among stakeholders is a top priority.

For rare earth metals suppliers, this means not only becoming more sustainable but also proving their compliance and quality criteria to customers and regulators.

Developing an innovative CSyARES is key in achieving these goals, Circularise says.

In this project, the partnering organisations, including Circularise, aim to:

Commenting on this announcement, Jordi de Vos, Circularises Founder, said:With CSyARES, we see a big potential in developing solutions for suppliers, brands, and industry as a whole to measure, understand and reduce the climate impact of Rare Earth Metals.

As corporations and governments work toward a sustainable future, climate supply chain traceability software that leverages data and blockchain to measure environmental impact can help increase the secondary resource efficiency and accelerate transition to a circular economy.

The project will set out to contribute to the circular economy transformation in the rare earth elements, electric and electronic equipment, automotive, and all other sectors that depend on rare earths.

It will also set out to create new business opportunities for manufacturers and recyclers and allow downstream players to ensure sustainable practises throughout their supply chains.

Circularise is a supply chain traceability and transparency start-up founded in The Netherlands in 2016.

See the rest here:

Blockchain based circular system being developed to assess rare earth sustainability - Circular Online

Utkarsh Amitabh Alumni, Oxford Hub, Network Capital

The world lost more than400 million full-time jobs due to the pandemic, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). At this point it is hard to say whether, and when, these jobs will come back. Startup hiring might improve things marginally but it cannot address the huge numbers of people looking to get back into the workforce. Governments are struggling to get economies back on track and with intense pressure on healthcare, providing stimulus to other sectors will not be easy.

The result of this systemic imbalance would be that millions are likely to be left to fend for themselves. They will have to reach out to their networks to explore new roles and find and create opportunities for themselves. Just like in previous recessions, many iconic companies will be born that will go on to create enormous financial wealth. They will become employers of choice in the coming decades, but can people wait for that to happen?

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitzpublished a reporton the future of work. One of its key findings is that the gig economy and the Uber for X model are partly making way for the passion economy, where micro-entrepreneurs monetize their individuality and creativity. A key reason for the growth of the passion economy is that it offers alternative ways of making money, innovative paths toward professional fulfilment and unprecedented career opportunities for millennials.

The gig economy resulted in massive productivity gains and huge consumer surplus. Cabs, food delivery, grocery shopping practically all aspects of day-to-day life aided by the efficiency of technology platforms and venture capital money became accessible to a large chunk of the global population. Millions of new jobs were created, innovative business models revitalized entire industries and the GDP of the internet exploded. While there were many practical benefits that accrued, new challenges came to fore. It wasnt tech utopia by any means.

For the longest time, creativity and productivity were at odds. Those who wanted to pursue creative fields found it hard to make ends meet. That is changing. Gig workers are looking for more meaningful ways to make a living. The era of the passion economy and side hustles is here.

New platforms are emerging for creators to monetize their craft and do what they love. The internet is shaping culture and transforming the way we work. Even white-collar professionals are quitting their day jobs to venture into the passion economy.

Gen Z creators, influencers and investors are making different career choices than their parents. There is a subtle shift in what they learn, how they learn and how they earn. They do not see creativity and productivity as two different things. Both are part of the new creator stack that is emerging in the third era of the internet which is often called Web 3.0, a distributed, decentralized internet.

According to aHarris Poll/LEGO survey, the career todays kids aspire to above all others is YouTuber. Being an online creator is twice as popular as being a film star, and three times as popular as being an astronaut. There might be differences in countries based on cultural and economic factors but this massive inversion of career preferences is going to be a defining characteristic of the jobs in the future.

According to the World Economic Forum, 85% of the jobs of 2030 dont exist today. With the passion economy becoming mainstream, new kinds of careers drawing upon a persons intrinsic curiosity will become the norm.0 seconds of 2 minutes, 30 secondsVolume 90%

In addition to widespread job losses, the world is also witnessing The Great Resignation, a term coined by ProfessorAnthony Klotzof Texas A&M University, that predicts a large number of people leaving their jobs during and after the pandemic because they are no longer fulfilled in their work lives.

The passion economy will result in the unbundling of work from employment. People will look to create a portfolio of passions and pursuits that also helps them make a living. In other words, they are likely to monetize their passion and build a career on their terms.

It wont be all fun and games. People need the discipline and the rigour to work hard, experiment fast and deliver consistently. Unlike regular employment, passion economy participants will need to figure out human resource, accounting and legal issues, all by themselves.

InCompany of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business, Paul Jarvis writes that today creators spend more than 50% of their time doing extraneous stuff, which is a colossal waste of income and potential. There is huge scope for improvement here.

Through my ventureNetwork Capital, I am trying to help people teach what they love. One example that explains the unbundling of work from employment is aLebanese professor of philosophy, Mahmoud Rasmiwho quit his university job to build cohort-based courses on the internet.https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/0lLlcoXN6Aa0DnahocncKo?utm_source=generator

Rasmi loved teaching philosophy but didnt find the university in his home country conducive to his career growth. Today, he creates innovative courses on philosophy anduses Network Capital to host, sell and market his offering. In a few months, he is already making thousands of dollars every month. Given the economic and political crisis in Lebanon, he is one of the very people in the country making a decent income. All thanks to the passion economy.

Another example is Vicky Bennison who read zoology in college and graduated with an MBA from the University of Bath. She then worked in international development across Siberia, South Africa and Turkmenistan. Today, she is best known as the person behindPasta Grannies, a YouTube channel that finds and films real Italian grannies nonnas making handmade pasta.

These grannies make lip-smacking pasta and tell delightful stories. What amazes me even more is how grandmas have embraced social media, learned digital marketing and emerged as media entrepreneurs across the world.

The passion economy is personal to me. Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, I quit my job at Microsoft to work full-time on Network Capital, my passion project. I loved my work at Microsoft, but the more I reflected on my core values, the kind of life I wanted to build, and the way I wanted to use my skills, the more it became clear to me that venturing into the passion economy was the way forward for me.

Voltaire said Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need. The current pandemic puts things in perspective. Work has never only been about a pay cheque but in the post-pandemic world, it is sure to alter the alchemy of relationships at scale as people will need to keep purpose and insurance constantly at the back of their minds while making professional choices.

This article was first published in World Economic Forum

Stay updated with all the insights.Navigate news, 1 email day.Subscribe to Qrius

Read the original post:

Is the 'hustle' changing the global economy? - Qrius

Advancing a competitive bioeconomy for a sustainable future

Plastic pollution, climate change and dependency on fossil raw materials are major risk factors for Europe. Atmospheric greenhouse gases continue to increase, leading to extreme weather-related threats, while products derived from fossil fuels, such as plastics from COVID-19 medical equipment, are highly polluting to the environment and present many important challenges, including resource scarcity.

Today, more than ever, we need to change the way we live, produce, and consume. Such transformation is as urgent as it is challenging. How can we enable the green transition, spur economic growth and create new jobs locally, while making a positive impact on the environment and our health? The EU is addressing these challenges in several policy documents stemming from the European Green Deal, which aims to enable Europes green recovery by supporting sustainable growth.

The priorities of the European Green Deal include mobilising industry towards a clean and circular economy, supplying clean and secure energy, preserving and restoring ecosystems and biodiversity, increasing the EUs climate ambition for 2030 and 2050, achieving the zero-pollution ambition for a toxic- free environment, and designing a fair, healthy, and environmentally friendly and sustainable food system. One of the ways to put these priorities into practice is collaborating and working with the private sector to solve specific sustainability challenges.

On 30th November 2021, the Council of the European Union established the Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU), a 2 billion partnership between the EU and the Bio-based Industries Consortium (BIC), to fund projects advancing competitive circular bio- based industries in Europe. By replacing non-renewable fossil resources with waste and sustainably sourced biomass to produce industrial and consumer goods, the bio-based industries will help Europe become the worlds first climate-neutral continent.

CBE JU is building on the success of its predecessor, the Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI JU), which has demonstrated the added value of a competitive circular bio-based economy in Europe. In particular, BBI JU has funded 13 first-of-their-kind biorefineries at an industrial scale. These biorefineries produce materials and ingredients from locally sourced biomass and plan to reduce CO2 emissions by over 800 kilotonnes per year and create about 20,000 direct and indirect jobs in rural and coastal areas.

As an example, the FIRST2RUN biorefinery based in rural Sardinia is using responsibly cultivated cardoon on marginal land to produce ingredients for bioplastics, cosmetics, fertilisers, animal feed and other sectors. The FARMNG flagship project is building the worlds first industrial biorefinery with mealworms in France to convert leftovers from agricultural processes into proteins for animal feed and organic fertilisers.

BBI JU and CBE JU are part of the EUs Bioeconomy Strategy and Circular Economy Action Plan. At the same time, they both are important contributors to other EU policies stemming from the European Green Deal.

Projects funded by BBI JU contribute to protecting soil biodiversity, an objective of the EUs New Soil Strategy. Among other goals, these projects have been developing bio-based pesticides and fertilisers that safeguard soil ecosystems, as well as aiding in the recovery of marginal lands for sustainable biomass production, thus enriching the soil. For example, the PHERA project works on commercial bio-based insect pheromones for crop protection a sustainable alternative to the current chemical-based insecticides. The GRACE project is restoring degraded soils by cultivating two crops, hemp and miscanthus, as biomass. Miscanthus, a grass variety, is enriching the soil with valuable nutrients.

The BBI JUs commitment to cutting emissions and reducing plastic pollution is in line with the EUs Zero Pollution Action Plan, which aims to reduce plastics pollution by 30% before 2030. For instance, the ENZYCLE project is researching new enzymatic processes to treat and recycle plastic residues that could not be recycled before. The projects team will select enzymes that can degrade plastics and microplastics and apply this on an industrial scale to significantly reduce plastic pollution in wastewater and landfill. Another project, EMBRACED, has built the first- of-its-kind biorefinery in Treviso, Italy, to transform used nappies into new materials, such as organic fertilisers and packaging films. The GLAUKOS project will help the textile industry become more circular by increasing the biodegradation rate of materials while boosting their durability for long-term use.

The bio-based industries contribute to the goals of the EUs Farm to Fork Strategy by using food and crop waste, increasing the shelf life of products and promoting sustainable farming practices.

In Europe, around 90 million tonnes of food and 700 million tonnes of crops are wasted every year. (1) Most BBI JU-funded projects are helping to reduce this waste by turning leftovers from agriculture and other food processes into new food and feed ingredients, bio- based materials and products. For example, the two processing plants built by the AgriMax project are transforming waste from cereals, olives, potatoes and tomatoes into food products, agricultural materials, and biodegradable pots. Such initiatives provide new business opportunities for farmers and diversify their income, and many of them aim to deliver products with nutritional value to the food and feed market.

BBI JU-funded projects also develop bio-based smart packaging to prevent food waste. The BIOSMART projects compostable and recyclable solution, for instance, is also using intelligent oxygen, CO2, and amine sensing technology to monitor the shelf life of products.

Several BBI JU-funded projects are addressing the need to reduce the EUs dependency on protein imports and provide affordable and sustainable feed production. The SYLFEED project, for example, is working on nutritional and sustainable protein production from wood residues for the fish feed market as an alternative to soybean derivatives. It will use underexploited forest and wood waste and bring a competitive source of proteins for fish manufacturers.

CBE JU will develop and expand the sustainable sourcing and conversion of biomass into bio-based products via multiscale biorefineries across sectors and regions in Europe. The partnership will support circular approaches such as the use of biological waste from agriculture, industry and cities to produce new bio-based products, goods and materials.

One of CBEs main targets will be investing in R&I across scientific disciplines that support the bioeconomy and stimulating its uptake by the industry, thus helping to deploy bio-based innovation at a regional scale with the view to revive rural and coastal regions.

Sustainability and biodiversity are placed at the heart of CBE JU. Part of the research efforts will focus on increasing the sustainability of the bio-based industrys production processes, and a robust monitoring system will be put in place to measure the environmental and socio-economic impact of CBE JU-funded projects.

(1) https://www.fao.org/state-of-food-agriculture/2019/en

Editor's Recommended Articles

Follow Open Access Government

Excerpt from:

Advancing a competitive bioeconomy for a sustainable future - Open Access Government

ISLAMABAD: Terming the 220 million population of Pakistan as the biggest human resource and asset, Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday underlined the need of bringing it into the formal economy through the use of the latest technology.

The prime minister was addressing the launching ceremony of Raast, a new State Bank of Pakistan-run instant digital payment system aimed at boosting financial inclusion and government revenue.

Merchants, businesses, individuals, fintechs, and government entities will be able to send and receive near real-time payments through the internet, mobile phones and agents.

Government payments, including salaries and pensions, will also be made through Raast, as well as payments for nationwide financial support programmes, such as the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), and the Ehsaas Emergency Cash initiative.

Developed through a multi-year collaboration between the SBP and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with support from the World Bank, the United Kingdom and the United Nations, one goal for Raast is to boost the involvement of women in the formal economy.

Several private-sector digital cash transfer systems that do not require a bank account, such as Jazz Cash operated by telecommunications company Jazz and Easypaisa operated by telecommunications company Telenor Pakistan, are already available in Pakistan, but Raast would be the first to link government entities and financial institutions.

Khan observed that unless the government utilised the technological revolution to bring the population into the loop of the formal economy, this huge asset will become a burden.

Appreciating the efforts of SBP to facilitate people over the banking system, he said the public often hesitated in visiting the banks, stressing that steps at bottom ups would bring the commoners into the formal economy by easing their modes of payments and transactions through the opening of accounts via the application.

The prime minister said the performance of the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) government will be judged in 2023 on the basis of its measures to reduce poverty.

The UNDP report placed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as the only province where the PTI government during its first term (2013-2018) successfully reduced poverty, he added.

The prime minister said due to such achievement, the people in KP voted for his party in the 2018 general elections.

He further opined it would be a great success for his government if it succeeded in lifting the people out of poverty.

The Covid-19 crisis affected the world population alike but the government in Pakistan took measures to save its people from the economic meltdown and inflation, he added.

Khan, whose government has taken steps to automate the collection of taxes on transactions and tightened rules on banking, said shifting away from a cash-based economy and tackling corruption were the chief motivations behind Raast.

Pakistan collects about the least amount of tax in the world, he said. We cannot build infrastructure, we cannot work on human development, or educate children, or improve hospitals.

The prime minister noted that saving rates and the tax-to-GDP ratio was low in Pakistan when compared with the rest of the world and it could be increased by making technological advances and by fine-tuning the formal economy.

For increasing tax revenue, he said, usage of technology was being ensured by the Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) as out of 220 million, only 2 million were paying taxes.

Khan said FBR had collected data of those people who were living a luxurious life but not paying any taxes.

Referring to 9 million Pakistan nationals living abroad as valuable assets for the country, the prime minister suggested the establishment of a cell to further facilitate them in sending their remittances home.

He said their remittances had helped in supplementing the countrys foreign reserves.

The prime minister stressed they must make efforts to ensure direct financial support to the lower segments of society through the use of modern technology and cited the rolling out of Ehsaas Ration programme in this regard.

View original post here:

Use of latest tech vital to bring population into formal economy: Imran - Pakistan Today

Outsiders need to get insiders to do their jobs better. This is the key lesson from years of aid to Africa, from which the continent has little to show. Most of the aid given has been consumed, some by the donors themselves, much of it by local governments and elites. While it may have made things less bad, it has not proven the development panacea that Western leaders, among many, once hoped.

INTRODUCTION

THE DILEMMAS OF AID

Donors have poured $1.2-trillion of development assistance into the continent in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War, a figure that could conceivably be doubled if it included unofficial charitable giving. While one might justifiably discount the value of aid before 1990, given the strategic and ideological rather than primarily developmental purpose of a Cold War rationale, since then, however, this excuse has waned. As such, the development opportunity cost and wastage are staggering.

This $1.2-trillion alone could have provided 682,000 kilometres of new, two-lane, all-weather highway. Sub-Saharan Africa has an estimated 2.8 million kilometres of road network currently, only 800,000 kilometres of which are paved. Of this, 50% is deemed to be in good condition. As an indicator of the impact of such a network, China has built 150,000 kilometres of modern multilane highway since 1980, thereby enhancing the competitiveness of Chinese businesses by reducing transport costs and travel times. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has, by comparison, just 2,500 kilometres of paved roads for a territory one-quarter of the size of China.

This money, spent wisely over these 30 years, could have created extraordinary wealth. Even one-quarter of the $40-billion spent annually on average could have provided one million university scholarships every year, representing an enormous talent pool that could be working for the continents benefit.

The $1.2-trillion could have repaved 5.5 million kilometres of African roads or revitalised the continents rail network. If we use the cost of the Ethiopian standard gauge railway as a contemporary benchmark, the same money could have bought over 200,000 kilometres of brand-new rail-line, along with rolling stock and engines. Africa currently has 68,880 kilometres of operational rail-line, less than 20% of which is standard gauge and the remainder the narrower, lower-speed and freight Cape gauge. Also, some 171 new, modern, fully equipped commercial seaports could have been constructed, or 160,000 state-of-the-art, one-stop border posts.

Currently, Africa produces 168,000 megawatts of electricity, of which over one-quarter is produced by one country, South Africa. The last 30 years of aid expenditure could have built 240 top-of-the-range, 1,000-megawatt generation plants.

Why have decades of spending had such a small impact on improving the lives of the poor?

The average per capita income of sub-Saharan Africans changed by just $352 during these 30 years, from $1,304 in 1990 (when there was a population of 500 million) to $1,656 in 2019 (1.1 billion). Donors have spent $1,111 per person over 30 years to lift the incomes of Africans by $352.

And Africas share of global income has been falling steadily since the mid-2000s. The world is getting richer at a faster rate than Africans.

As a result, prominent Africans condemn the notion of development through aid. Aid has been more of a disincentive to development in mostcases, says Olusegun Obasanjo, the former Nigerian president. No wonder people in developing countries are asking for trade and investment rather than aid. There will always be room for humanitarian assistance in cases of human and natural disasters and emergencies. But foreign aid as an instrument of development must be accepted as tried and failed.

Donors likewise have continuously scrutinised aid effectiveness. In November 2020, the British government announced its intention to deviate from its obligation to spend 0.7% of gross national income (GNI) on aid. An Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, conducted in 2020/2021, led to the merger of the United Kingdoms Department for International Development and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office into the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. France, meanwhile, established a Fund for Innovation in Development in 2021 to test and scale-up policy solutions to poverty and inequality in an attempt to transform the countrys approach to aid, most of which will go to projects in sub-Saharan Africa.

These are among the latest in a long line of attempts to improve aid inputs and outcomes.

Still, despite terrific needs and poverty, aid is consumed with little evidence of sustained development progress, in part because it is given to countries that do not possess the capacity to use it properly and develop in the first instance.

It is funnelled into a governance environment from where as much as $90-billion almost half of the annual funding gap necessary to achieve the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals is illicitly externalised every year. From 2000 to 2015, illicit capital flight from Africa totalled $836-billion, involving practices such as misinvoicing, along with corruption and theft.

Politics and economic choices matter. Aid cannot be separated from the wider political and economic context into which it is given.

There are other problems with the giving of aid, which this book examines, including the belief that it is primarily a technocratic function, that the politics matters less than the technical solutions, and that success demands a focus on state capacity. This may be entirely explicable given that official development assistance (ODA) is given by governments, although their intentions may be altruistic. By ignoring the importance of the individual over the state, this approach encourages the unchecked power of the state. As William Easterly notes, the technical problems of the poor (and the absence of technical solutions for those problems) are a symptom of poverty, not a cause of poverty. Yet, remarkably, the evidence from Western donors, in particular, is how well improvements in individual freedom have worked historically for development, and how governance goes hand in hand with liberty, equality, values and rights. Democratic competition is a powerful force for positive change in getting the basic ideas and principles right.

Strategy in this respect encompasses more than just tactical and technical capacity. It is an undertaking based on principles, values and rules, demanding a systematic approach that includes all the attributes and sources of state power: of people, institutions and processes. Success requires a combination of all these factors. There is a need to understand the local dynamics and political balances. In Afghanistan, for example, while the premise of military intervention may have been correct in order to buy time for the Afghan government to establish itself, Western leadership did not understand the place and the impact of outsiders on a delicate social and political equilibrium.

Put differently, while battles can be won through superior military capabilities and technology, wars including a war on poverty will have to be won by the application of political and economic resources rather than simply technical interventions.

This challenge of government in development should not be surprising given Africas history, where private sector growth has largely been anathema, and not just in the colonial era. As I argued in Africas Third Liberation, written with Jeffrey Herbst, the colonialists established interventionist states that actively prevented indigenous African economic enrichment, while protecting white settlers, colonial companies and monopoly capital. The combination of racism, the imperative of control and vested interests prevented Western actors from seeing an alternative to state-led economic activity as possible, one based largely on individual rights and initiative. After independence, the African successors to colonial rule were comfortable with the economic systems they inherited once stripped of racism, especially as state intervention offered many patronage opportunities. Expanding state control and intervention was one of the few levers open to them in the context of overall state weakness.

This absence of options was exaggerated by the failure of the liberators, as Morgan Tsvangirai, then Zimbabwes prime minister, lamented, to have a plan beyond redistribution and no focus on production and an environment where politics has been about personality cults, not policies. East Asian countries, by comparison, benefited from commitment by their leadership to popular welfare, to do the right thing for their people, a goodness of will that could more easily be consolidated and accelerated by outsiders than in those situations, including in Africa, where the compulsion for control forestalled the forces for economic change.

But this is not a book principally about the failings of aid. That would be too easy to write. It is rather one that examines how, with the assistance of external actors, Africa can find its way out of poverty.

This book argues that, since poverty is largely a choice made by leaders, the strengthening of individual economic and political rights and discourse is at the core of sustainable solutions to ending poverty, not simply improving the delivery of technical assistance. It contends that people, not the state, are the critical thread linking donors and development, enabling public and private sector solutions. It does not, however, claim that aid is a principal reason for African failure, even though it may have distortive effects and deliver less than promised. That argument is akin to saying: here is some money, so you are poor.

The book accepts that there are enormous problems in trying to instil terms of growth and stability from outside. As the former British aid minister Rory Stewart has argued, We have been trying to do this in northern Britain since the 1930s. It is very hard to do this in countries with a proper domestic environment and of course much more so in tricky, poor countries. It argues that there is a need for donors, as a key first principle, to not harm, a criterion that is not always upheld in external dealings with the continent, where they are shaped less by the needs of Africans than those of donors themselves.

It acknowledges that there are successes. The US Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar) initiative is one example of how things can change for the better if the right amount of strategic thinking, political will and management are present. Launched in 2003, by 2020 Pepfar had provided more than $85-billion in cumulative funding for HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention and research, and distributed antiretroviral medicine to more than 13 million Africans across 50 countries, saving an estimated 18 million lives in the process.

This book also recognises that there are different types of aid, that spending on a variety of humanitarian and other emergencies, along with military and peacekeeping assistance, has different goals from improving growth and development outcomes. It recognises the dilemma in aid-giving, the realisation that funding humanitarian causes, for example, can undermine governance in the longer term while saving lives immediately, and that support for democracy, like education, can compete with other pressing needs and clash with competing national interests. There is also the dilemma of support, as will be seen, for certain authoritarian regimes in the interests of (at least) short-term stability and recovery.

Thus, it is much more difficult to write a book on aid that outlines ways to spend money better. It is more popular populist, even to point out the folly and abuse of aid or to talk in generalities about strengthening governance and the capacity of the state.

Finally, while a huge sum has been spent on aid, it is also a relatively small amount, given the scale of Africas fast-changing needs. The need to reform traditional approaches to development is heightened by the pace of change in Africa, particularly in the delinquent way in which many of the continents governments manage their economies and the slow pace of job creation for young people. Such a business-as-usual approach is likely to end in disaster, given the scale of Africas demographic pressures and the presence of so many social fault lines.

The scale of the challenge

Two significant and frequently unheralded shifts followed the end of the Cold War: from a state- to a market-based economic system, and from authoritarian to democratic systems of government. Freedom House is an independent research and advocacy organisation dedicated to promotingdemocracy, political rights and civil liberties since its founding in 1941. It charts an increase in the number of African democracies from just two to over 10 between the 1980s and the 2000s. During this time, Africa enjoyed a sustained period of economic growth not seen since the heady immediate post-independence days of the 1960s.

In the next 30 years from now, the same amount of time since the Berlin Wall fell, Africa will undergo a seismic demographic change the continent is projected to double its population to 2.5 billion people by 2050. This has staggering implications. The numbers are startling. At current rates, Nigerias population will increase to over 400 million, while Tanzanias, currently 53 million, will grow to the same size as that of Russia at 137 million. Kenyas will more than double to 95 million, while Ugandas will balloon from 43 million to 106 million, according to the United Nations. Even before Covid-19 hit, the liberal economic and political transition in Africa had regressed somewhat.

African economic growth had slowed from its 21st-century peak of 9.2% in 2006 to -1.4% in 2018. By this time, the continent had become the site of the majority of the worlds poor, with one in three Africans 422 million people living below the global poverty line. At the same time, the number of African democracies fell to just eight in 2020, with the number of countries classified by Freedom House as partly free at 25. This occurred despite clear evidence linking economic outcomes to the quality of democracy in the continents 55 states, as will be seen in Chapter 7, and despite the preference of more than two-thirds of Africans routinely polled for a democratic system. While there might be democracy fatigue in parts of the developed world, especially among young people, given the apparent failures of the political system to deal with complex problems, Africa does not share the same lack of enthusiasm.

This preference is not surprising. No governance accountability framework remains more viable than democracy and its attributes of a free press, freedom of speech, competition, and parliamentary oversight, along with institutional checks and balances. Yet, by 2020, less than 10% of people in sub-Saharan Africa lived in free countries. Donors have been complicit in its sub-optimal performance, whether by design or neglect.

Such a combination of government and development has consequences. Africas youth are, for instance, disproportionately disadvantaged and economically marginalised, accounting for 60% of all the continents jobless, their rate of unemployment averaging more than double the adult proportion, according to the African Development Bank. As the Arab Spring reminds us, there are wider implications than just desperate images and frustrated social media posts. The World Bank shows that about 40% of those who join rebel movements are motivated by a lack of employment. With 200 million people aged between 15 and 24, Africa has the largest population of young people in the world. Without radical improvement to how Africas economies and politics are run, social and political catastrophe looms. The costs of failing to do so are immeasurable.

Migration is a particularly powerful symbol of inequality. It also perfectly illustrates the political economy that both gives rise to and sustains this flow. By the middle of 2020, for example, 24,000 refugees were stuck on Greeces Aegean islands of Samos, Chios, Leros, Kos and Lesvos, plus another 90,000 on the Greek mainland seeking a way into Europe, many sleeping rough around Athens Victoria Square, before heading for Greeces northern borders and the richer pickings of Germany and Scandinavia. Athens abandoned retail spaces had been transformed into non-governmental organisation (NGO) offices around the square, offering support services from legal representation to counselling.

The presence of so many refugees represents both failure and opportunity and not always the sort that politicians and NGOs want to be reminded of. There is much at stake in improving the giving of aid, especially on the African continent.

Aiding or abetting?

The problem with aid is that it is incomplete. It lacks an overarching political and economic rationale a strategic policy framework. Rather than looking at ways of changing behaviour in a manner that assists reforms and greater competitiveness, it tends towards selecting technical and tactical responses. As a result, aid has undermined the value of international assistance and relationships and undersold itself as a tool for development. The cost of the absence of a strategic framework is shown when donor political interests trump on-the-ground realities, thrusting the donors into a political choice that they invariably get wrong since it is made largely for short-term reasons of expediency over a principled partnership.

Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu was born just four years before President Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement came to power in Uganda in 1986. Known by his stage name, Bobi Wine, the reggae artist has produced more than 70 songs in a 15-year artistic career. Since 2017, he has also served as a member of parliament, representing the Kyadondo East constituency. He says Museveni clings to power as this was his agenda all along in milking dry the nation. Wine argues that Museveni has kept people poor so that their preoccupation is to find a daily meal and not to question why their lives are not getting better.

The singer has been constantly harassed, beaten up and arrested by the authorities. During the run-up to the January 2021 election, he was illegally detained, tortured and abducted by security forces. Clearly, Wine rattled the Ugandan authorities, who apparently viewed him as a threat to Museveni (born in 1944) on account of Wines popularity among the youth.

Uganda is one of the youngest countries in the world, with a median age of 15.9 years, the population nearly doubling since the turn of the century. Nearly half its 45 million people are 14 or under, while just 2% are aged over 65. About 700,000 young people reach working age every year a figure set to rise to one million by 2030 but only 75,000 new jobs are created for them. Wine has frequently called on Museveni to retire, saying youngpeople must prepare to take over leadership of the East African nation. Given the extent of foreign funding for the regime, Wine asks of the donor community, and of the United States in particular: Why do you fund our oppressor? Even at the height of the most egregious anti-democratic behaviour in the run-up to the January 2021 election, the international flow of funds to Musevenis regime continued. In 2020, for example, Uganda received $2-billion in aid, including $432-million from the US, while ranking eleventh on the UKs list of top aid recipients, receiving over 150-million. To these contributions have to be added Ugandas cut from the flow of regional humanitarian assistance, estimated at $348-million in 2017, along with the substantial income and diverted expenditure from the efforts of Ugandan peacekeeping troops in Somalia.

In essence, aid cannot be divorced from political considerations. This point resonates across Africa, as donors attempt to manage the tension between regime and human security between supporting those in power and those citizens disempowered while at the same time maintaining a balancing act between national interests and human rights concerns.

The donors, says Wine, should be honest and true to the values that they represent, values of human dignity, values of democracy and values of the rule of law, or else they would be partners in crime. And, secondly, they should be relating with the nation, and not with an individual. The people of Uganda are represented by their Constitution, and by their laws. He adds, They should not do things just to maintain Musevenis rule his grip on power. They should be doing things to maintain relations between their nations and our nation.

Wine argues: Our [Ugandan] military has been so funded by the United States, and yet it has been key in abusing the rights of citizens of Uganda. We want them to hold the administration in Kampala accountable. We want them to put the rule of law and respect for human rights as a precondition for cooperation.

This is a fair point, especially given the history of aid to Africa. There are tensions between the national interest, in respect of security and business, for instance, and aid as a force for good. These have to be constantly managed, not ignored.

Ugandas strategic situation explains the tensions in the relationship between donor and recipient. While the ruling party might not align with the West on democracy, this is excused by Ugandas role in South Sudan and Somalia, the role played by Uganda regionally in hosting 1.4 million refugees (the fourth-largest population worldwide after Turkey, Colombia and Pakistan), and, probably, the intelligence-sharing between Kampala and the West. At the same time, it has been in the Wests strategic interest to keep Wine and other opposition figures operating, probably cynically to keep the pretence of democracy alive, and certainly to prevent the implosion of Uganda if something was to happen to them. Similarly, Museveni has sold himself as the man standing between order and chaos in the region, the chaos that he has no small part in fomenting himself: he is adept, like warlords and mobsters elsewhere, at creating his own demand. Essentially, the War on Terror has let Museveni and others off the hook, their wiggle room widened by the advent of different donors. And yet, the leverage of aid has not been put to any obvious good on human rights. Donors have sat largely marginalised on the sidelines despite the flows of assistance.

Other country examples illustrate a similar tension between favouring short-term stability and interests over the type of democracy that produces long-term results. In the DRC, the international community preferred recognising the government of Flix Tshisekedi, which came to power in 2019 after a deal with the incumbent, Joseph Kabila, on the grounds that the country would otherwise be thrown into bloody tumult. The cost of such a circuitous, negotiated route to State House is inevitably a lack of legitimacy and credibility, making the administrations already difficult task of national consolidation and development virtually impossible. Such carelessness is evident in the financial straits in which Kinshasa continuously finds itself. It is not a decision that outsiders should be making effectively on behalf of the Congolese, no matter the justification. As Freddy Matungulu, the former Congolese finance minister, remarks, Governance has been horrible for the last 10 years and now we have to repay [loans] when we have not built capacity for debt service obligations. The lesson for donors is that the concern for stability should not become the driving force behind the provision of aid.

Such a tension between external interests and internal preferences is nothing new. During the Cold War, aid was routinely given to one superpower proxy regardless of its governance or human rights record, and only because of its support for that particular superpower. The most (in)famous of these recipients was undoubtedly Mobutu Sese Seko, who took some $12-billion off Western donors over his 32 years in power, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the fact that he had come to power via a coup, and had an abysmal human rights record. What was more important than Mobutus governance record was his loyalty. Under the terms of the War on Terror, loyalty and utility in the struggle have been at least as important a quality as human rights and the democratic condition, perhaps more so.

Another donor-recipient tension surrounds the nature of the international community itself, which is increasingly diverse and no longer governed by state-to-state interactions. In Africa, this community, such as it exists, is no longer centred around the financial activities of the West. Rather, it is a much more complex and less cohesive configuration than before. Turkey, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Iran and Russia, among others, are all players. China, especially, has proven highly transactional in its dealings, and this requires Africa to appreciate the line between risk and reward inherent in the relationship.

In 2019, ODA by the 30-member countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) totalled $152.8 billion, representing 0.3% of their combined national income. Nearly 98% of this total flowed in theform of grants, loans to sovereign entities and contributions to multilateral institutions, the remainder to private sector instruments and companies and in the form of debt relief. This was an increase of 1.4% compared to 2018. In addition, non-DAC member countries contributed a further estimated $20-billion, foremost among them China ($2.4-billion), Turkey ($8.8-billion), the UAE ($2.3-billion) and Saudi Arabia ($4.5-billion).

As will be seen in Chapter 1, to this amount can be added an even larger chunk of private aid spending, inflating the total amount of annual charity to over $500-billion.

For outsiders, there is a tension between the need for strong local leaders, of the sort that get things done, and strong institutions. Similarly, there is widespread recognition of the imperative for local ownership and the realisation that not all local ownership is good as violent events in South Sudan after its 2011 secession illustrate. Letting the locals do their thing, and fail, is hard to allow when the humanitarian bill is picked up elsewhere.

Aid continually stumbles on the translation of rhetoric into roll-out in turning visions and plans into actual projects and development. As a result, many good intentions never see the light of day, and aid is simply consumed with little tangible effect. Sound political leadership is at a premium in separating good intentions from actual results.

Ultimately, countries will not be rebuilt by donors but by locals, even if this takes hundreds of years. Can donors speed this up by avoiding their worst excesses, taking heed of their massive moral blind spots, and promoting the very means that have enabled their own countries and peoples to prosper? Can they take advantage of the global economy and Africas attractiveness as a growth frontier?

Whatever the challenges of translating aid into development of ensuring the conducive combination of people, institutions and systems African countries have more options today than in the past, despite the constraints of their changing demographic circumstances.

Todays differences with the past

The restaurant on the 16th floor of the Corinthia Hotel in Khartoum affords an incredible view of the spot where the White Nile and the Blue Nile converge. The White Nile flows from the Great Lakes of equatorial Africa, with the shorter Blue Nile, the remotest source of which is the Felege Ghion spring in the Ethiopian Highlands, contributing nearly 90% of the water carried overall by the Nile. The slow, sweeping waters through Khartoum contrast with the darting traffic at its edges; both the passage of the river and the countrys history are marked by a series of bridges from the bascule Blue Nile Road and Railway Bridge completed by the Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Company in 1909, to the modern Tuti suspension bridge opposite the hotel.

It is no coincidence that the locals translate Khartoum as the hose or elephants trunk. It may be blessed with an extraordinary water resource in the two Niles, but, in less positive ways, Sudan reflects Africas internal traits and external tendencies. With the country lying at the intersection of regional interests and geopolitical ambition, the inadequate development responses of various governments, more careless than careful, demonstrate the extent of the disconnect between elite practices and popular welfare.

The largest country by landmass in Africa until the 2011 secession of South Sudan, Sudan seems, to borrow adjectives used by The Economist in cover stories on Africa a decade apart, to be simultaneously rising and hopeless. Its natural resources and the strength of its civil society, which helped to eject long-time President Omar Hassan al-Bashir unceremoniously from office in 2019, are powerful positives. Its weaknesses lie in its insipid institutions, thin layers of expertise, self-interested external relationships, and extractive elite practices, which have seen the country squander its agricultural wealth and oil bonanza in a costly combination of war and corruption.

This did not take place in isolation. For decades, the world has engaged and interfered, pouring in aid and humanitarian resources and helping develop plans to change the regime and turn Sudan around. Why these efforts have so far failed to move the needle in Sudan and almost everywhere else in Africa is the subject of this book.

Still, todays policy environment enjoys many advantages over the past, regardless of wistful rearward glances at the Cold War years and their scope for ideological experimentation and rhetorical gaslighting.

While nearly half of Americans may see globalisation as responsible for destroying their lives, the faster and deeper global flows of people, goods and money have transformed the lives of a generation of global citizens. Globalisation might have threatened the American dream for the industrial workers of the Midwest. Still, it has been the force behind realising an Asian dream of rising incomes, improved living standards and expanded opportunities over several generations.

This transformation has been driven by a commitment of East Asias leaders to popular welfare, no matter the political system. It reminds us, too, that the states legitimacy rests on what Ashraf Ghani, the former president of Afghanistan, describes as the judgment of its people on the delivery of basic services and infrastructure. The modern era has redefined sovereignty away from its traditional preoccupations with security and defence, towards state efficiency, global connectivity and national competitiveness. The results of this (re)engagement with globalisation have been stupendous. In 1990, Chinas average per capita income was just $729; within 30 years, this had increased (in real, constant terms) more than tenfold to

$8,254, and its poverty level had fallen from 66% (of 1.1 billion people) to an astonishing 0.5% (of 1.4 billion people). Such growth has lifted more than a billion people from poverty in a single generation.

Can globalisation offer an African dream along the lines of that of East Asia?

As will be seen here, lessons learned in Africa remind us that, however imperfect democracy may be, there is no sustainable way of addressing poverty and inequality without a liberal democratic system: one that offers the prospect of a leadership change if the ideas and management of existing leaders prove not up to the task. Even so, no humanitarian or security or development challenge is ever going to be solved by simply staring at it. If we are to live without disturbing and possibly life-threatening insecurity, the world must become a more liberal place, ensuring that the poor and dispossessed gain a greater share of resources. This is especially true as Africas challenges multiply, with rapid population and urban growth, seemingly faster than the continent is able to offer solutions.

At one level, it will demand continued generosity. From those to whom much is given, reminds Mary Gates, mother of Bill, much is expected.

At another level, accelerating development will require improving policy and governance structures to ensure that money is well spent. It will also necessitate reforming legal and tax structures that facilitate inequality through fiscal dysfunction.

International aid is, however, much more limited as a development tool than some imagine. In no country in Africa does development spending amount to more than 5% of the economy, notes Erik Solheim, a former Norwegian development minister and United Nations under-secretary-general, and in none does that of the UN amount to more than 1%. So why do we tell people, he asks, that the UN is bringing development to the world, when 98.5% of the costs of education in developing countries is financed by taxpayers or mothers and fathers or relatives? Development is all about business, not about aid, as the development success of East Asia reminds us. Yet, Africa has proven a notable laggard in gaining a reasonable slice of the average annual $1.5-trillion global pie of foreign direct investment.

This suggests that better ways should be found to use aid as an enabling tool for entrepreneurship and that jobs should be created to reduce inequality and the social and political disquiet. There remains no other sustainable way, despite the attraction of rhetorical commitments to redistribution and even though capitalism contains plenty of hard edges.

The massive increase in wealth in Asia, and in China and India in particular, has reduced the difference in average incomes between regions, although it remains high for some. A recent UN study, for example, shows the average income in North America is 16 times higher than that of people in sub-Saharan Africa. But it is the extent of inequality within countries, particularly in Africa, that stands out. Of the 49 countries worldwide that recorded increased levels of inequality between 1990 and 2016, 13 were African. Ten of the 19 most unequal countries worldwide are in sub-Saharan Africa namely, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, the Central African Republic, the Comoros, Lesotho, Swaziland, Rwanda and Kenya.

Inequality can have a deleterious effect on reform and on democracy. The elites in highly unequal societies are disposed to protect a political and policy environment that favours their interests and reinforces their social and economic position.

Such disincentives for reform can threaten social stability. It is a wonder that the super-poor are not angrier with the super-rich and the circumstances perpetuating inequality of opportunity. The examples are all around us: the poor farmers in the village of Mankohokwe in Malawi, one hour north of the capital Lilongwe, who scuffle in the dust for maize pips, unable to afford livestock, the $40 to buy a bicycle or the $40 per term required to send their children to a state secondary school. Or the 100,000 who live in appallingly unhealthy conditions where malaria and typhoid are rife in the stilt houses of the Makoko community on the edge of Lagos Lagoon, a community long a centrepiece of Western poverty porn. The water is petrol black, full of faeces and much else. On the other side of Africa, examples also abound in the sweating mkokoteni pulling and pushing their barrows laden with vegetables, fruit and household commodities across Mombasas four-lane Nyali Bridge. The traffic weaves dangerously past them and the sidewalks where hawkers offer 10-shilling (US 10 cent) bags of peanuts, sliced pineapples, bananas and second-hand clothes. The same goes for the endless lines of people and bicycles traipsing along the roads of Burundi, carrying everything from women side-saddle, water, corrugated iron, wood, clumps of bananas, animal feed, beds and other furniture, bundles of thatch and building material.

The free market offers a ladder of development and progress that has brought more than a billion people out of poverty in the last quarter-century, an extraordinary and unprecedented accomplishment. Still, it is a system with hard edges and tough knocks, which leaves some behind, their fortunes often determined by lifes great lottery the circumstances into which they are born. It behoves us to do more to offer a hand-up to those left behind and a softer landing for those who have fallen down. For while capitalisms cream invariably rises, sometimes this is accomplished through less than transparent structures.

The success of aid as a tool for development depends not only on what is done, but how it is done and by whom. Local ownership is the most critical element of success, itself a product of politics and leadership. Just as power is never purely technocratic but rather about collaborative relationships, development depends on the ability of diverse interests to work together for a common goal.

As will be noted throughout this volume, there is certainly no shortage of good causes to be funded by outsiders. But there are dangers in targeting inputs as the solution, not least since when this becomes the dominant measure, less attention is invariably focused on where and how well money is spent and the outputs achieved. David Cameron made the 0.7% aid target a centrepiece of his time as British prime minister, and it was written into the Conservative Partys 2010 manifesto and later enshrined in law. Seen as a symbol of a compassionate foreign policy, the target was achieved in 2013 when expenditure reached 11.4-billion. Perhaps more than anything, this overriding focus showed how little his premiership achieved and how much it centred on public relations spin.

Politics lies behind problems of ownership and responsibility, authority and implementation. It explains why commitments to arbitrary aid expenditure benchmarks, such as that of 0.7% of GNI, are made, even though they are obviously not the answer. It is why donors grant funds directly to projects, even though they know that government budget support is the best way to build capacity and ownership. It explains, too, why donors go completely off the deep end in pursuing schemes like the Millennium Villages Project, which they know instinctively will not work but do so anyway because the people promoting them are politically influential in the donor nations at the intersection of Hollywood and Harvard (or Columbia in this case). And the need to justify the levels of expenditure and foreign policy focus is why the world loves spending on poverty alleviation targets, including the UN Millennium Development Goals and subsequent Sustainable Development Goals. While such objectives are positive in signalling an ambitious and collective agenda, they are largely top-down, technical, state-centric and bureaucratic rather than bottom-up, people-centred and organic, as they should be.

There are changes, too, in this international order, which have brought greater scope in funding and policy experimentation that so far may have helped elites more than citizens. The confrontation between China and the US has given African leaders an alternative to Western systems and conditions, as in the Cold War. As democracy has slipped backwards, encouraged no doubt in instances by the prospect of the Beijing model, the Russians and the Chinese, among others, have been happy to fill the vacuum left by the West. Their aid giving appears to be less about local development, however, or even a win-win bargain, as the Chinese government prefers to profess, than one underpinned by a mercantilist transactionalism: a focus on the immediate profit of the deal without much thought to the other partner or the longer-term relationship.

A pernicious political economy can drive aid transfers in a way that has its own logic, one less to do with solving development problems than feeding a system in both the donor and recipient nations. Getting this right is thus a challenge for both developed and developing nations.

The political economy of change

This book centres on the association between politics and economics and the policy choices that exist in the interplay between these two disciplines, summed up by the term political economy essentially the relationship between business and governance. Development is a profoundly political process, which demands an understanding of why certain policy choices are made (or not); essentially, who gets what, when and how (the core questions in the discipline of politics) in the context of scarcity (the key question in the discipline of economics). While acknowledging the existence of different frameworks for analysis in political economy notably mercantilism or economic nationalism, liberalism and Marxism this volume is less concerned with a critique of the international system per se, than working out the best ways for states to prosper within this structure. The key reform challenge in Africa centres on the political economy of change: turning the system away from what the former Nigerian minister and vice-president of the World Bank, Oby Ezekwesili, has described as the fundamental structural problem for Africa: the corrupted political class has no incentive to correct [the system of governance]. They own it, and it works for them as it is. For example, if the explanation for the growth of East Asia resides largely in policy changes, the failure of Africa to develop at comparative rates rests in such decisions not being made. The reasons behind this failure often relate to the existence of a patronage-ridden system of government, where investment and economic decisions are not made solely on economic principles but rather on the imperatives of redistribution and maintaining allegiances for the sake of political control and the maintenance of power. In such situations, the need for stability of a narrow political power base is all-important, overriding the imperative to extend growth and development beyond a tiny elite.

Understanding why things happen and dont happen and why decisions are made or not made in particular ways thus demands an understanding of the incentives that shape these outcomes. Poverty, reminds the Ugandan opposition leader Dr Kizza Besigye,remains a tool of political control in Africa.

Without addressing these aspects, reform efforts inevitably fail to take root, and money flows make only a fleeting difference. This explains why, for example, money is spent on new facilities at border posts, which lack the necessary institutional systems and policies for the smooth passage of trade, or why roads are built but lack a maintenance structure. This also explains why money is spent on the trappings of presidential convoys and expensive overseas travel while education and health systems fail. That is what happens when policies are geared towards preserving elite interests at the expense of the majority.

Changing the incentive structure that ensures reform and development is, as Ezekwesili observes, not a technical process, but a political one. There are clear and established guidelines for best practice on aid derived from years of experience and many examples of success and failure both inside and outside Africa. If donors ignore these and try to reinvent the wheel, they can do considerably more harm than good.

The threads of best practice presented here illustrate that the goals and plans of donors, for one, should match the complex on-the-ground realities, rather than attempt to meet the political needs of external players or other higher theories and ideals. Experience teaches us that donors should be patient, too, since the period of recovery and reform in states is at least as long as the period of decline. Outsiders must guard against employing metrics of expenditure and focus instead on the assessment of impact.

Sometimes doing nothing is actually a choice and thus amounts to doing something.

Donors need to be guided by local needs because local ownership is imperative. From that springs responsibility for process, policy and outcomes. While locals will seldom say no to foreign assistance, misalignment of international and internal intentions can only lead to friction, disappointment and, ultimately, failure. The devil of development lies in the delivery of the detail, while local realities need to be calculated according to strengths, not hopes. Messianic zeal should be guarded against, as should the tautology of assistance and consultants, just as the antipathy of donors towards the private sector is ultimately self-defeating to a thesis of growth, development and stability. After all, countries get rich and more stable, and their people more satisfied, when they make things (or services) and sell them.

The answers to how outsiders can play a more constructive role lie in African experiences and beyond, in Latin America, the Middle East and East, South and Central Asia. They illustrate the power of policy choice, and of agency, over geography and history. The value of these answers relies on understanding the problems not only from the perspective of the donor but also that of the recipient.

* * *

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. This saying, overused to the point of clich, has become an article of faith to donors. Many still ignore its message, however, preferring acts of charitable giving and benevolence, preferably with their label on the side. But people want to be enabled, not just fed. Charity should thus not centre on the wealthy giving money or goodies to the poor. That is too easy and, perhaps unwittingly, only reinforces the intrinsic power relationship. Development is about the transfer of more finite and valuable resources: time, expertise and means. Herein lies the rub: this form of empowerment is necessarily long term and demands engagement in understanding (and attempting to change) the incentive structure that hinders development in the first instance.

Whatever the area of aid expenditure humanitarian, governance, military, development the overall intention should be the same: to try to reach the point where aid is no longer necessary. Recognising the tautology of aid is a key step, as is how to find the means to spend it better. This requires removing spending and the metrics of effectiveness from the realm of the subjective, in which personalities, personal relationships and strategic donor preferences play a disproportionate role in deciding where the money is spent, to one where more objective criteria can be applied.

Aid agencies, ambassadors and recipients are seldom invested in changing the system. Current incentives are geared to making the best job possible of a terrible situation, where the metrics often favour spending rather than saying no. There is also always a good reason to spend money, with little reward in walking away, no matter how obviously limited the chances of success. And anyway, there are reasons for giving aid other than development, as the Ugandan example illustrates.

Yet, Africa faces formidable challenges over the next generation, driven by a huge increase in population numbers. Even before Covid-19, most African countries were struggling to lift economic growth to levels that could provide opportunities for a large increase in the number of young people. Rather than promoting the sort of governance regimes that have enabled East Asias transformation, for example, donors have not only struggled to disrupt these patterns of policy and leadership, but, in some instances, they have simply reinforced bad practices.

The following chapters explain the scale and scope of aid today, the nature of advisory services that increasingly lend structure to the business of aid, and the differences between delivering military and other forms of assistance in developing a model of best or at least better practice. The book also looks at the reasons behind the success of the Marshall Plan concept, asking if it can be repeated today. In identifying key drivers behind Africas development trajectory, it concludes with advice for both donors and recipients on getting more out of the current aid environment.

Whether aid can be a great disruptor in promoting Africas rapid development is the key question posed in this volume. Answering this relies on identifying and understanding lessons from within and without the continent, lessons which, I hope, have relevance beyond Africa. The answer to whether aid can be better used for development rests on taking a longer strategic approach with regard to people, institutions and process. DM

Expensive Poverty: Why Aid Fails and How It Can Work by Greg Mills is available at the Daily Maverick shop.

Related Articles

The rest is here:

BOOK EXTRACT & VIDEO: Expensive Poverty: Why Aid Fails and How It Can Work - Daily Maverick

Las Vegas, NV, Feb. 15, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- viaNewMediaWire --The wonder crop is in the spotlight again during the USDA Secretarys recent tour of Lincoln Universitys Dickinson Research Facility. Hemp, Inc. (OTC PINK: HEMP),one of the global leaders on the forefront of the industrial hemp industry, reports todaythat hemps role in sustainable agriculture has garnered the attention of USDA Secretary, Tom Vilsack, as he recently announced that $1 billion in grants will be offered by the federal government to support climate-friendly farming when he toured the facility that studies agriculture. According to the newssource, grants under this program are intended to engage agriculture, forestry and rural communities in the nations fight against climate change and bolster sustainable agriculture.

Whats more climate-friendly than hemp? Environmentalists believe this wonder crop has the potential to make huge strides in the regenerative agriculture movement. Lets take a look at why they believe that and how industrial hemp farming projects could see some of that $1 billion in grant money.

First, hemp can improve soil health. It can be cultivated in almost any environment across the country regardless of the climate and generate high yields with a short 120-day harvest cycle (ideal for crop rotation). As a cover crop, hemp restores degraded soil by blocking out the room for weeds reducing the need for synthetic herbicides and adding diversity to crop rotations. After harvest, hemp leaves behind biomass that can be up-cycled into added-value products or returned to the soil, feeding essential nutrients back into the ground. (Source)

Second, hemp supports bioremediation. Bioremediation is when you use living things to heal and cleanse soil after years of toxic build-up. Hemp has a deep root structure and guards against weeds, naturally preparing the soil for rotation. One can liken hemps root structure to a vacuum cleaner accumulating heavy metals and other toxins from the soil before it enters surrounding groundwater. (Source)

Third, hemp grows faster than trees and can sequester large quantities of carbon dioxide back into the ground. Hemp is a zero-carbon energy source with applications in biofuel. In fact, scientists estimate that for every ton of hemp cultivated, 1.63 tons of CO2 is removed from the atmosphere. (Source)

Overall, hemp, as the industry continues to mature, has the power to lower the ecological impacts of food, fuel and fiber production, empower small-scale farmers and create jobs in a variety of industries. But while we praise this wonder crop, we have to remember a total hemp-based economy doesnt automatically equate to a greener future. Yes, the industry is maturing but its up to the farmers to ensure that its grown in a way that heals the land, not destroy it like conventional commodity crops which erodes soil and externalizes pollution.

TheClimate 21 Project(the funding program thats part of a broader initiative) under the Biden administration outlines the steps the USDA can take to encourage farmers, ranchers and landowners to take up practices that scientists believe can help reduce atmospheric carbon. It taps the expertise of more than 150 experts with high-level government experience to deliver actionable advice for a rapid-start, whole-of-government climate response coordinated by the White House and accountable to President Biden.

Hemp projects that may be eligible to receive some of the $1 billion funding must demonstrate climate-smart production practices, activities and systems on working lands; verify the carbon and greenhouse-gas benefits associated with those practices; and work to develop markets and promote their climate-smart commodities.The grants are available to local, county, tribal and state governments, small businesses and for-profit organizations, nonprofits and universities. Applications are being accepted for projects between $5 million to $100 million through April 8th but the deadline for pilot projects up to $250,000 is May 27th.

For more information on grant specifics, the USDA is hosting a webinar on Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities on Wednesday, February 16, 2022 from 11:00am to 1:00pm EST. According to the website, this webinar will focus on the details of the funding opportunity and recordings will be available after the event. Clickhereandherefor more detailed information.

Already positioned as a go-to consultant in the industry, Hemp, Inc. can be great resource to hemp farmers and manufacturers all over the United States. With the industrial hemp market growing exponentially, resources and contacts are invaluable. The industrial hemp market is expected to reach $12.01 billion by 2028 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.2% from 2021 to 2028, per the most recent study byGrand View Research, Inc.

Hemp, Inc.s first product in its line ofCBDA and CBGA products is set to be released soon. Hemp, Inc.s sales & marketing team is currently working on large-scale orders for the companys CBDA and CBGA products. Those interested is distributing on a large-scale basis should emailsales@hempinc.comor call877-436-7564for more information. The entire product line will include water, tinctures, gummies, capsules, and edibles and will come in a variety of sizes, potencies, flavors and formulas that executives foresee being in high demand.

The currentKing of Hemp (R)product lineincludes:King of Hemp Gummies - These CBD edibles come in a variety of flavors and potencies of 25 gm, 20 gm and 10 gm. Flavors include blue raspberry, kiwi, strawberry, pineapple, guava, tropical, apple, citrus, berry tang and more. CBDFruit Rings(20 gm and 10 gm) are available in apple, peach and watermelon. King of HempSour Bearsin assorted flavors (10 gm) are in stock, too.

King of Hemp Caviar(previously called Moon Rocks)offers high CBD potency and a rich taste. The Caviar is made from high-quality Bubba Kush hemp flower, coated in a THC-free distillate and then rolled in CBG-rich kief. While Caviar can be smoked in a pipe or vaped, it should not be rolled into a cigarette.

King of Hemp Diamonds contain over 95% CBD and are derived from terpene-infused THC-free distillate. Diamonds are consumed by dabbing.

The robustly flavoredKing of Hemp Pre-Rolls are made from organic, pesticide-free Bubba Kush hemp wrapped in RAW Natural Rolling Paper. The unique wrapper is made from 100% plants with no added chalk or dyes. Pre-Rolls are sold online as singles and in a six-pack.

Fortified Pre-Rolls utilize theKing of Hemp Pre-Roll and cover it with a high-CBD distillate and hemp CBG kief. These highly potent, flavorful pre-rolls are recommended for experienced smokers.

Midnight Express, a high CBG Pre-Roll, is made from premium hemp flowers, named in honor of the 1977 book by Billy Hayes Midnight Express, which was also an award-winning feature film, written by Oliver Stone.Hemp, Inc. uses a proprietary process for its Pre-Rolls, which includes blending the best flower from numerous hemp crops.King of Hemp Pre-Rolls offer smokers a unique, consistent profile every time.

King of Hemp Tinctures are currently sold out, but new-formulated tinctures with CBDA and CBGA will be available at the King of Hemp online store and at retail locations in a few weeks.

With more than 10 years of experience in growing and processing hemp in North America,Hemp, Inc.has an established network of industry professionals in every segment of the industrial hemp industry. Hemp, Inc. has thelargest industrial multipurpose hemp processing facilityin North America, an 85,000-square foot facility in Spring Hope, N.C.Its mission of providing green solutions that help make the world a better place continues to flourish as the company advances an ever-growing portfolio of revenue- and value-generating synergistic businesses.Hemp may be the salvation in retooling America for greener, more sustainable domestic manufacturing.Vilsack was quoted during a tour of the Universitys Dickinson Research Facility, which studies agriculture, The hemp project is really interesting because it has so many different potential opportunities. He went on to say, Industrial hemp is just a tremendous crop the fact that you can have building material, you can have clothing and a variety of other things is pretty interesting.

HEMP, INC.S LAS VEGAS FACILITYIn addition to Hemp, Inc.s 85,000-square foot facility in Spring Hope, NC, the Company also has a 10,000-square foot research and development/manufacturing facility located in Las Vegas, Nevada home of some of the biggest named trade shows and conventions in the United States.Easily accessible in the heart of the valley, this facility researches, formulates, develops and produces the Companys line of products and stays abreast of the industrys scientific data and findings. Those interested in Hemp, Inc.s King of Hempproducts or those who require more information can visitwww.KingofHempUSA.com; emailsales@kingofhempusa.com; or, call 877-436-7564.

HEMP, INC.S RECENT ACQUISITIONSHemp, Inc. had its second major acquisition in less than three months. In the all-stock transaction, Hemp, Inc. acquired full ownership of American Sustainable Rubber Company, LLC (ASR). This specific acquisition will enable Hemp, Inc. to leverage ASRs proprietary intellectual property to improve its hemp grows and harvesting. The first acquisition was acquiringFerris Holding, Inc., a leading co-packer and manufacturer based in Las Vegas, Nevada. To read more on how these strategic acquisitions are positioning the Company forlong-term profitable growth, clickhere.

WHAT IS HEMP, INC.?

With a deep-rooted social and environmental mission at its core,Hemp, Inc.seeksto build a business constituency for the American small hemp farmer, the American veteran, and other groups experiencing the ever-increasing disparity between tapering income and soaring expenses. The Company is on a mission to be a powerful engine for social change and economic revival, worldwide, by providing hemp products that are eco-friendly, sustainable and healthy. Hemp, Inc. executives believe there can be tangible benefits reaped from adhering to a corporate social responsibility plan.

FORWARD-LOOKING DISCLAIMER AND DISCLOSURES

This press release may contain certain forward-looking statements and information, as defined within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and is subject to the Safe Harbor created by those sections. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires issuers to provide adequate current information. Financials for Hemp, Inc. are listed on the OTC Exchange.More information can also be found out the Hemp, Inc. website by visitingwww.hempinc.com/hemp-financial-disclosures/. Material contains statements about expected future events and/or financial results that are forward-looking in nature and subject to risks and uncertainties. Such forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties.

Contact:

Hemp, Inc.

Investor Relations: 855-436-7688

Sales:877-436-7564

ir@hempinc.com

Excerpt from:

Hemp, Inc. Reports: Industrial Hemp Farming Projects Could Tap Into $1 Billion in Grants - GlobeNewswire

"Innovation and value chain collaboration are key when driving systemic change towards circularity," says Tanja Virtanen-Lepp, Head of Sustainability Center of Excellence at Huhtamaki. "As the world's resources are limited, focusing on our part of the value chain is not enough when protecting food, people and the planet."

At Huhtamaki we see waste as a valuable secondary resource. Today, all packaging does not find its way to collection and sorting after being used to protect the product. These gaps explain why packaging is not actually recycled even when it is recyclable by composition.

In addition, we believe that collaboration can make a real difference. It is important that solutions are not one-size-fits-all but are scalable and appropriate to local conditions. To create tangible impact, we aim to find best possible value chain partners to work with.

Moreover, we use circular economy as a guiding principle when designing sustainable packaging solutions. We pay close attention to material and structure choices, help develop waste collection infrastructure and guide people in how to correctly dispose of our food packaging materials to minimize environmental impact and use of resources.

In 2021, we raised the bar across the board for our activities and elevated our sustainability ambitions via a broad approach covering the pillars of sustainability: environmental protection, social accountability and governance and ethics.

In 2022, we will continue to work with several partners to develop recycling pilots that are scalable. This way we ensure that not only are our products recyclable, but that we enable packaging waste as a resource by transforming end-of-life products into secondary raw materials, and improve packaging recycling rates. Our commitment is to support the UN Global Compact and the UN Sustainable Development Goals and to achieve carbon neutrality in our production and science-based targets by 2030.

Huhtamaki's 2021 Annual Report, to be published on March 1, 2022, contains more information on sustainability as a cornerstone of our strategy.

Disclaimer

Huhtamki Oyj published this content on 17 February 2022 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 17 February 2022 10:35:02 UTC.

See the original post:

Huhtamki Oyj : It is not enough that we manufacture recyclable products we have to improve actual recycling as well - marketscreener.com

WILMINGTON North Carolina is in a prime position to become a hub for offshore wind energy manufacturing and a major contributor to renewable power production on the East Coast, according to state officials and offshore wind energy experts.

The states potential to grab a big slice of the offshore wind manufacturing pie was highlighted last week during the inaugural meeting of the North Carolina Taskforce for Offshore Wind Economic Resource Strategies, or NC TOWERS.

Offshore wind manufacturing has the potential to bring an estimated $140 billion to the state and tens of thousands of new jobs by 2035, according to officials, who emphasized that, to make that happen, the time to act is now.

Even if there were no (wind energy) activity off the coast of North Carolina theres still a significant opportunity for North Carolina because of all the activity in all the other states, said John Hardin, executive director of the N.C. Department of Commerces Office of Science, Technology and Innovation. North Carolina is really well positioned to seize a lot of this activity and seize in a gentle, friendly sort of way and make sure we take advantage of the opportunity. North Carolina has the strongest manufacturing economy on the East Coast of the United States. It has the largest share of its GPD, gross domestic product, that comes from manufacturing of any other state.

Hardin was one of several speakers at the meeting Thursday in Wilmington, home to the states largest port, which is poised to reap some of the potential economic benefits of offshore wind energy production.

North Carolina is currently the southernmost state on the East Coast for offshore wind development.

There are two federal offshore wind lease areas the Wilmington East Wind Energy Area, or WEA, and Kitty Hawk WEA.

Development of the Kitty Hawk WEA, which could power upwards of 700,000 homes, is well underway.

The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is expected to lease the Wilmington WEA sometime this spring. This area could power more than 500,000 homes.

Both lease areas have the potential to generate upwards of 4 gigawatts of power. Thats the equivalent of four nuclear power plants.

Andy Geissbuehler, an advisory director with BVG Associates, a renewable energy strategic consulting firm based in the United Kingdom, said the state has an edge to managing a piece of future offshore leases.

Weve got approximately 20 gigawatts of projects which are active projects with lease areas, Geissbuehler said, referring to all of the lease areas on the East Coast. That is relative to a supply chain point of view. Twenty gigawatts, thats really 20 nuclear power stations, totally clean with free fuel and I think thats a fantastic opportunity.

He explained to the task force that operational maintenance is nearly half of the lifetime cost of a typical 1-gigawatt windfarm.

The lifetime of a 1-gagawatt offshore wind farm is about 25 to 30 years, he said. At the end of that lifecycle, a wind farm can be repowered to operate another 25 to 30 years.

This is a truly local business so I think this is an attractive opportunity, Geissbuehler said. Long-term jobs. Local jobs.

Those jobs cross an array of fields from information technology, control and electrical systems to supplies like secondary steel, wind turbine foundations and the components needed to install those foundations.

Offshore wind manufacturing takes place largely in Europe, limiting currently the supply chain to developers in the U.S.

Now the developers are saying, if we only had more suppliers, if we only had more ports, if we only had more shipyards, Geissbuehler said. Its never balanced. Its always a challenge. But I think for North Carolina, nows really the time to fully engage and I think your task force is the right means to do that.

NC TOWERS is a group of 30 stakeholders representing state and local governments; sectors of the fisheries, military and tourism industries; and universities that have been directed to advise Gov. Roy Cooper and state policymakers on advancing offshore wind energy projects with a focus on economic development and the creation of jobs.

The task force was established last June under Coopers Executive Order 218, which takes aim at addressing climate change through clean energy initiatives.

Cooper emphasized the offshore wind goals set forth in the order, which is to get the state to 70% reduction in carbon over 2005 levels by 2030 and to get to zero carbon emissions from the power sector by 2050.

Why clean energy? he said during the meeting. It is essential to fighting climate change. We know that. Its also essential because its going to put money in peoples pockets.

He said that more than 100,000 clean energy jobs have been created and billions of dollars of investments have been made in the state.

In December, Toyota Motor North America announced it is locating a new $1.29 billion automotive battery manufacturing plant in Greensboro, where, beginning in 2025, it will be capable of delivering enough lithium-ion batteries for 200,000 vehicles, according to the companys website.

Greensboro has also been picked as the new site of Boom Supersonics first full-scale manufacturing facility. Boom Supersonic, an aviation manufacturer that touts sustainable supersonic travel, is set to break ground at Piedmont Triad International Airport this year, with production beginning in 2024. The company has said it will add more than 2,400 local jobs by 2032.

Cooper noted that North Carolina is in the top five states in solar installed capacity.

Now we need you in this room today to help us with the next steps, the next ideas, with the next opportunities and with advocacy at the end of the day because time is of the essence when were talking about offshore wind, he said. The earlier we can get into this the more we can reap the economic benefits from it. It is astounding the amount of clean energy we can produce and the amount of money that can go in the pockets of North Carolinians.

The task force is to produce an annual report of its recommendations for policies and programs developing offshore wind energy projects; enhancing the states supply chain for offshore wind energy; creating and developing the work force to support offshore projects; and ensuring equitable access, particularly for underserved communities, to economic benefits created by offshore wind energy.

Members of the task force were asked to self-appoint themselves to one or more of four subcommittees: economic opportunity and business development; infrastructure and environmental justice and inclusion; outreach and engagement; and workforce, education and training opportunity development.

Department of Commerce Chief of Staff and NC TOWERS Chair Marqueta Welton said that money has not been allocated to the task force, but that the biggest resource of the task force is its members.

Were only limited by our imaginations because we can make some things happen, she said.

The four-hour-long meeting last week ended with a question-and-answer session, one in which some task force members touched on topics that only scratch the surface of concerns raised by residents of coastal counties closest to the offshore wind energy lease areas.

One of those questions was about where energy produced from wind farms off the North Carolina coast will be connected to land.

Its a very prudent question, Geissbuehler said. We need to look forward and see where are the hurdles ahead of us. Some of these hurdles have a very long lead time to resolve because on the grid we always talk about the interconnection, per say, to be able to connect to a substation. I think thats a well-known problem Im sure that will be resolved, but the other challenge is how do we cross the beaches? How do we get under the bridges into the load centers?

Other members of the taskforce briefly discussed how outreach will be particularly important to the fishing and tourism industries.

North Carolina Fisheries Association Executive Director Glenn Skinner touched on the concerns raised by fishermen about the potential impacts of offshore wind turbines to fish and other marine life.

Mike Blanch, an associate director with BVG Associates, said that concerns about fishery impacts are important to address, but said he is puzzled by such concerns because there is evidence from wind farms off the coast of England that suggest wind farms actually improve the environment.

They stop dredging. They stop people fishing in unsustainable ways. Theyve actually created sporting areas for certain species, he said.

Blanch emphasized a need for renewable energys impact on climate change.

Its important to realize that offshore wind is actually offering something very positive as well, he said. There is this wider issue of climate change. If you take one species like the right whale, you might be very concerned about that, but climate change is going to stress all of the species and offshore wind is one way, and there arent that many, of tackling the inherit problem of high carbon emissions and so theres a bigger picture here that I think should help temper worries.

NC TOWERS next meeting is scheduled for May 5.

Read more here:

Officials tout economic boom from offshore wind industry | Coastal Review - Coastal Review Online

Journalist, photographer, author and professor Howard W Frenchs Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, is the most recent in a long career of thoughtful and significant literary and journalistic interventions. It demands an account of modernity that reckons with Africa as central to the making of the modern world.

The books main aim, French explains early on, is to restore those key chapters which articulate Africas significance to our common narrative of modernity to their proper place of prominence.

French intricately traces, from the early 15th century through the Second World War, the encounters between African and European civilisations. These, he argues, were motivated by Europes desire to trade with West Africas rich, Black civilisations. These included the Ghanaian and Malian empires. The ancient West African region was perceived as an abundant source of both gold and slaves. French argues that it is the intertwined background of gold and slavery which would eventually birth the transatlantic slave trade of the early 16th century.

Born in Blackness sprawls approximately 600 years. It traverses geographies from the edge of Europe, across Africa and the Americas. It follows the long history of the age of European discovery beginning with Portugals early ventures into Africa and Asia in the late 1400s and early 1500s, through the Atlantic slave trades modest start in Barbados in the 1630s to the Haitian Revolution.

Then it moves to Londons abolishment of the transatlantic trafficking of humans in 1807 and the introduction of the mechanical cotton picker. This invention could do the work of fifty sharecropping Blacks, a fact not lost on the white planters of the (Mississippi Delta). Frenchs historical tracing of the crafting of the modern world through the oppression and subjugation of Black persons continues on through the Second World War and beyond.

Citing Simeon Booker, a noteworthy African-American journalist whose work concerned the American civil rights movement and the murder of Emmett Till, an African-American teenager accused of offending a white woman, French notes that in the early 1960s, Mississipi could easily rank with South Africa, Angola or Nazi Germany for brutality and hatred.

His careful weaving together of how gold and slavery became intertwined over centuries and continents makes one thing abundantly clear. Without the trade of persons belonging to African civilisations across the globe, but particularly the Atlantic, the modern world would not have been made.

As the author explains, the boom of the cotton, sugar and tobacco industries of the colonial US simply would not have happened without the trade of slaves from Africa. Without this capitalist jolt as French puts it, what we know now as the United States of America would have remained relatively obscure. It would not likely have become the superpower state it is today.

In this way Born in Blackness challenges emphatically the deliberate forgetting of European contests over control of African resources. This process of erasure, French explains, began with Europes Age of Discovery (1400s-1600s). The improperly explained rationale for this era was that European civilisations wanted to form trading ties with Asia. To do so, they reached across continents, including Africa, for territory and, later, subjects.

But French insists that the real rationale was Europes earnest desire to establish economic ties with Africa, and in particular West Africa with its resource-rich civilisations and resource-based economies.

The intervention of Born in Blackness, then, is to insist on reckoning with the role played by the brutal bond between Europe and Africa. This was forged through slavery. It is what drove the birth of a truly global capitalist economy. It hastened the processes of industrialisation and revolutionised the worlds diets by facilitating the globalisation of the consumption of sugar.

It is also important to mark, as French does, that the centrality of enslaved Africans labour extends beyond the mining of plantation crops to the very creation of the plantations themselves. It was the slaves who prepared the land for planting: they removed plants and rocks, but most importantly displaced indigenous peoples from their territories.

In marking this, Born in Blackness demonstrates how the displacement to which African persons taken as slaves is mirrored in the making of modern-day America and echoed in the displacement of first nations or indigenous Americans.

What is at stake in the intervention of the book is precisely what is gestured toward by its title: that modernity and the modern world was indeed born in Blackness. The civilisational transformations the author traces economic, spatial and most importantly cultural in their texture are a product of Blackness.

Born in Blackness, Howard W French, Liveright.

Lauren van der Rede is a Lecturer at the Stellenbosch University.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

Continued here:

Born in Blackness: This important book shows Africa was central to the making of the modern world - Scroll.in

[co-authors: Gabriel Harrison, Shawn Whites and Charles Smith]

With 2022 underway, the Biden-Harris administration is continuing to implement its whole-of-government response to climate change. In 2021, the administration focused on building public-private partnerships on clean energy, forest finance and climate-smart agriculture; developing climate adaptation and resilience plans for over 20 federal agencies; and renewing the United States international climate diplomacy.1 In early 2022, the administration already has announced new actions and funding to address methane emissionsincluding $1.15 billion for states to cap abandoned oil and gas wellswhile the Department of Interior (DOI) will hold its first offshore wind auction later this month. Going forward, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hopes to initiate new rulemakings to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from fossil fuel-based energy production and consumption, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will finalize new corporate fuel economy standards. The year ahead could also see strong and systemic moves by financial regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commissions (SEC) long-awaited proposed rule on climate-related disclosures. All told, we expect a flurry of regulatory and non-regulatory actions from the administration in 2022 aimed at achieving the United States Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) under the Paris Agreementa 50 to 52 percent reduction in economy-wide GHG emissions by 2030 en route to net-zero by 2050especially as the Democrats window narrows for passing climate legislation before the congressional midterm elections.

In this alert, we highlight ten climate and sustainability developments to watch in 2022 as the Biden-Harris administration rolls out its Year Two environmental agenda.

U.S. public companies remain on the lookout for the SECs proposed rule to enhance disclosure requirements for climate change risks and opportunities. Readers will recall SEC Chair Genslers assertion that investors increasingly want to understand public companies climate risks and are looking for consistent, comparable and decision-useful disclosures to help them invest in companies that fit their needs. Initially, the SEC signaled that the proposed rule would be out in late 2021, but it seems that drafting the rule is presenting more challenges than anticipated, and now interested stakeholders expect the SEC to act by mid-year.

In the meantime, as we enter into the Form 10-K and proxy season, U.S. public companies should be mindful of existing disclosure obligations in relation to climate change risks and opportunities faced by their companies, as well as ensuring such disclosure obligations are consistent with all other disclosures to investors (e.g., disclosures made in sustainability and earnings reports). As we described in more detail here, information regarding climate change-related risks and opportunities may be required in various disclosure items in a companys SEC filings (e.g., the description of business, legal proceedings, risk factors and managements discussion and analysis (MD&A) of financial condition and results of operations). Relatedly, companies that do not believe climate change poses any material risks to their operations or financial position should be prepared to support that position with quantitative and qualitative analyses, data and other supporting materials.

After rejoining the Paris Agreement and announcing an aggressive new NDC in 2021, President Biden committed the country to significant reductions in GHG emissions from the production and use of fossil fuel-based energy. The United States also joined a global pact at last years UN Climate Change Conference calling upon parties to accelerat[e] efforts toward the phasedown of unabated coal power, and issued an action plan to implement the United States-led Global Methane Pledge to reduce global methane emissions by 30 percent below 2020 levels by 2030.2 Accordingly, we anticipate that the administration in 2022 will continue to focus on coal, oil and natural gas and their ultimate disposition in the fuels used to power the economy.

EPA reportedly plans to adopt a coordinated series of rules to decrease emissions from coal generation. First among equals could include a replacement of the Obama administrations Clean Power Plan (CPP).3Although the Supreme Court is evaluating EPAs authority to regulate GHG emissions from existing power plants under Section 111 of the Clean Air Act4the likely statutory basis of a replacement CPPEPA has already reached into its regulatory toolkit to facilitate emissions reductions from coal plants. For example, EPA recently issued denials (and, in one case, an approval conditioned on a costly groundwater monitoring program) to coal facilities that requested extensions to comply with deadlines under the Coal Combustion Residuals Rule to close unlined coal ash impoundments. Several dozen additional of these determinations remain outstanding, and EPA is not expected to rule affirmatively on many.

Other EPA regulations, such as effluent limitation guidelines on coal plants wastewater discharges, reportedly have contributed to the closure of some plants. EPA likely will look to its broad authorities under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act to pursue future rulemaking and stricter enforcement of existing regulations and permit conditions for power plantssuch as renewed or more stringent standards to limit emissions of mercury, acids, gases and other hazardous air pollutants, and increased efforts to require plant operators to respond to groundwater quality concerns and improve monitoring in the oft-disadvantaged communities surrounding plants. This week, for example, EPA proposed to restore the legal foundation for the agency to impose emission limits on certain hazardous air pollutants from power plants (including EPAs long-contested Mercury and Air Toxics Standards). Almost certainly by design, these efforts will make it more expensive and difficult to produce coal-fired power. By years end, we expect to see momentum toward a number of new agency actions and rules that finalize the proposals discussed above or seek further restrictions on coal-fired power. Altogether, EPAs coordinated suite of regulatory actions very well may force operators to consider plant shutdowns or technology conversions in 2022 and thereafter.

Beyond efforts targeting coal, EPA likely will finalize proposed performance standards and methane and volatile organic compound (VOC) emission guidelines for the oil and natural gas sectors. EPA proposed new standards in November 2021 for both new and existing sources of air pollution in all key segments of the oil and gas industry. Those standards target a range of sources at oil and gas sites, including fugitive emissions at wells, compressor stations and storage vessels, among numerous others. New requirements range from bolstered leak detection and monitoring programs to implementing zero-emission technology directly at the emission source.

Additionally, EPA has looked downstream to fuel itself as a vehicle to achieve climate goals. After years of delays, last December it proposed Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) volumes for the 2020, 2021 and 2022 compliance years. Taking a somewhat pragmatic approach, EPA proposed to reduce the requirement for blending renewable fuel into traditional (nonrenewable) fuels for the 2021 compliance year, but proposed its intent to raise the renewable fuel volume obligations for 2022. Relatedly, EPA proposed late last year to deny all undecided and pending small refinery exemptions from RFS compliance.5

The Biden-Harris administration made historic commitments to offshore wind in its first year. That momentum continues in 2022, with DOI recently announcing a February 2022 wind auction for nearly half a million acres off the New Jersey and New York coasts. As the administration seeks to shift the countrys energy mix from fossil fuels to renewable sources, expect to see at least two more offshore wind lease sales in 2022 for areas off the California and North Carolina and South Carolina coasts.6

DOI is also pursuing climate-inspired actions aimed at fossil fuel-based energy. Although courts stymied DOIs moratorium on the issuance of new oil and gas leases on public lands and waters, DOI took several steps last year that will carry over into noteworthy actions in 2022 and beyond. This includes a November 2021 report culminating from DOIs review of the federal oil and gas leasing program, which contains numerous recommendations to correct alleged well-documented and long reported deficiencies in leasing practices. The report signals upcoming changes (as early as this year) to leases fiscal terms and remediation requirements, including minimum health, safety and environmental criteria and an increase in royalty ratesthe latter of which was inadvertently revealed this week by the administration. We also expect DOI to rethink its land use planning decisions, which may mean reducing or changing the criteria used to evaluate the public lands and water available for oil and gas leasing, imposing more cumbersome lease stipulations and permit conditions, and requiring consultation with affected communities.

One trend not likely to materialize, however, is a complete cessation in the issuance of leases and permits. Although DOI may in 2022 issue fewer leases and permits than in the past, there are no indications that it significantly will limit, restrict or stop these activities. Nor would such a drastic policy change likely survive legal scrutiny, even if environmental groups have had success as of late in challenging lease sales, including a suit that convinced the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia this week to vacate and remand the record of decision underlying one of DOIs largest ever offshore lease sales.7

During his campaign, President Biden pledged to reduce GHG emissions from transportation and develop rigorous new fuel economy standards aimed at ensuring 100% of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be electrified by 2050. This includes deploying a coordinated approach centered on more stringent regulations and efforts to promote the production and adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) and build-out of EV infrastructure.

EPA and NHTSA, the agencies charged with regulating tailpipe emissions and fuel economy, respectively, bear much responsibility for meeting this lofty pledge. In December, EPA issued a final rule that provided aggressive new standards for tailpipe GHG emissions for model year (MY) 2023 through 2026. NHTSA, meanwhile, repealed a Trump administration rule (SAFE I) that codified regulatory text and made additional pronouncements regarding the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Acts preemption of state and local laws related to fuel economy standards. This sets the stage for EPA in the coming weeks to restore the waiver for Californias zero-emission vehicles mandate and GHG emission standards within the States Advanced Clean Cars program, allowing California (and states that mirror Californias tailpipe emission standards) to adopt standards more stringent than those in place under federal law. NHTSA also will finalize new corporate average fuel economy standards for MY 2024-2026 vehicles in the near future to replace the Trump-era standards.

EPA has also committed to propose standards for subsequent MY vehicles beginning with MY 2027. Those standards are expected to contain the most stringent tailpipe emission restrictions to dateostensibly an effort from this administration to spur the widespread adoption of hybrid and zero-emission vehicles. EPA may even look beyond the traditional tailpipe emission standards (which typically apply to new vehicles) to meet its climate goals, such as targeting regulations and enhanced incentives directly at electric vehicles or older, higher emitting vehicles. As an ancillary strategy to ensure emission reductions, we expect EPA to continue its aggressive enforcement of aftermarket automobile parts manufacturers, consistent with one of the agencys ongoing National Compliance Initiatives.

The success of these strategies, of course, is dependent on the countrys ability to build infrastructure to support widespread EV charging. NHTSAs parent agency, the Department of Transportation (DOT), plans to use $7.5 billion in funding in partnership with the Department of Energy (DOE) to make that happen. Together, DOT and DOE will start in 2022 to build out a national EV charging network that can build public confidence, with a focus on filling gaps in rural, disadvantaged, and hard-to-reach locations.

This spring, we anticipate that the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (Working Group) will propose an updated schedule of costs to society from carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide pollution (the Social Costs of GHGs).8 Federal agencies use these social costs to inform cost-benefit analyses and justify rulemakings and other executive action, such as decisions over leasing public lands for fossil fuel development and production. The forthcoming Social Costs of GHGswhich likely will increase the current interim valueswill be subject to public comment and scientific peer-review, with the Working Group aiming to publish final values for agency use this summer.9

Notably, the administration may expand the influence of the Social Costs of GHGs in 2022 to government procurement. The Federal Acquisition Regulatory (FAR) Council10is considering potential amendments to federal acquisition rules that would impose new requirements to incorporate the Social Costs of GHGs into procurement decisions and giv[e] preference to bids and proposals from suppliers with a lower GHG footprint. This would mark a departure from historical uses of the Social Costs of GHGs, which largely has been limited to cost-benefit analyses in rulemakings.

The Biden-Harris administration recognizes the critical need to accelerate the build-out of new transmission infrastructureincluding interstate power lines connecting intermittent renewables to load centersto achieve its vision of a carbon-free grid by 2035. Accordingly, DOE launched the Build a Better Grid initiative in January to support the development of nationally significant transmission projects and grid upgrades by deploying over $20 billion in financing to reduce project development risk and utilizing existing statutory authorities to facilitate permitting and siting. One such authority is DOEs ability to designate National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors (NIETCs), or areas DOE determines are experiencingor expected to experiencetransmission capacity constraints or congestion that adversely impacts customers.

Meanwhile, FERC Chair Richard Glick seeks to initiate one or more rulemakings this year to update FERCs transmission planning, cost allocation and generator interconnection rules. While too early to speculate on their scope, FERC has a robust record upon which to build its proposed rules. For example, hundreds of stakeholders responded to a July 2021 advanced notice of proposed rulemaking that outlined numerous potential reforms within three areas: (i) regional transmission planning; (ii) cost responsibility for regional transmission facilities and interconnection-related grid upgrades; and (iii) oversight over the identification of and payment for new transmission facilities.

Despite consensus within the administration on the critical need for new transmission, DOEs proposal to advance transmission development in NIETCs may face reluctance at FERC. Although DOE designates NIETCs, FERC has the authority to grant transmission developers federal eminent domain authority within a NIETC. While FERCs authority was expanded through the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)e.g., by allowing FERC to override a states denial of a siting permit under applicable law11Commissioner Allison Clements recently cautioned that FERC is hesitant to use such authority to preempt state opposition. FERC has instead opted for a collaborative approach with the states on transmission development by forming a joint taskforce with the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC).

As voluntary markets for carbon offsets and other climate-related products continue to evolve, the Biden-Harris administration has shown interest in better assessing the risks and opportunities of these markets for reducing emissionsand what role, if any, the federal government should play in scaling their development.

To that end, we believe the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is likely to take a closer look this year at new financial products under development in the carbon derivatives markets to ensure integrity and transparency, while also considering the potential need for greater oversight to prevent manipulation and fraud. Last September, the CFTCs Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee (EEMAC) recommended that the CFTC form a new subcommittee to issue a report on the interplay between secondary cash markets for carbon allowances and offsets and the derivative markets for those products, with the goal of promoting uniformity across the various markets and enhancing liquidity.12 Although the CFTC has not yet adopted the EEMACs recommendation, we anticipate the CFTC will do so once it regains quorumespecially given Chairman Rostin Behnams support for increasing the CFTCs engagement in industry-led and market-driven processes in the climate and broader environmental, social and governance (ESG) space.

Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) is preparing to launch a Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry Partnership (CSAFP) program in the near future to finance the deployment of climate-smart farming and forestry practices to aid in the marketing of climate-smart agricultural commodities in voluntary carbon and ecosystem services markets. The program could kick off a series of actions from USDA in 2022 to help farmers, landowners and ranchers generate new revenues through voluntary climate actioni.e., by adopting farming and land practices resulting in measurable, verifiable GHG emission reductions or sequestrationwhich Congress may look to bolster through the Growing Solutions Climate Act. As we summarized here, the Senates billpassed last June with significant bipartisan supportdirects USDA to establish a certification program to provide transparency and informal endorsement of third-party verifiers and technical service providers that help private landowners generate carbon credits through a variety of agriculture and forestry related practices. The bill may face an uphill battle in the House, where it has since stalled.

USDA began 2022 by announcing a series of new climate-smart agricultural initiatives that build on its actions last year to combat climate change. On January 10, the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) expanded the availability of its Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) Conservation Incentive Contracts option and announced it will allow producers to immediately re-enroll in the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) following an unfunded application to renew an existing contractthereby lifting a two-year ineligibility restriction for CSP participants who failed to re-enroll during the year their contract expired. The changes will help to incentivize the implementation of conservation management practices nationwide and increase participation in both programs. NRCS further announced that it will host a sign up for agricultural producers in 11 states to combat climate change through the adoption of cover crops as part of its Cover Crop Initiative early this year.

USDA also emphasized that it will prioritize restoring forest health and reducing climate-amplified risks to forests and grasslands through a new U.S. Forest Service ten-year strategy. The strategy, launched in January, will scale forest health treatmentse.g., thinning, prescribed burning or pruningon tens of millions of acres of overgrown forests and grasslands to reduce wildfire risk.

Going forward, USDA will continue its efforts to implement the IIJA, which provides billions in funding for climate-smart infrastructure and wildland fire mitigation. In the near term, we expect USDA to announce a notice of funding availability soliciting pilot project proposals for the CSAFP program discussed above.

Climate change-related disasters and extreme weather eventssuch as hurricanes, flooding, winter storms and prolonged heat wavesdirectly impact human health and can greatly burden health care systems, particularly in the area of telemedicine. Telehealth provides an alternative to traditional in-person care by utilizing telephones, tablets, computers and remote patient monitoring devices. Telehealth can help expand access to health care, for example, where there are socioeconomic barriers related to travel or physician shortages in rural areas. Recognizing the important relationship between communications services and the provision of health care, the FCC has implemented various programs to expand telehealth in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.13

With the growth of telehealth comes increased climate-related vulnerabilities for the health care system. As HHS recognizes in its 2021 Climate Action Plan, power and internet outages caused by climate-driven events14 can disrupt the provision of health care (such as telemedicine) and health-based research activities. When health care facilities providing those services are affected, patients ultimately suffer. Consistent with the administrations commitment to developing climate resiliency in accord with principles of environmental justice, we anticipate new agency efforts that respond to the relationship between climate change-related disasters and weather events, the disruption of communications services and the provision of critical telehealth services. This could include infrastructure improvements, conducting risk assessments for major health care facilities and moving critical infrastructure to flood-resilient locations.

In November, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced the United States support for multilateral negotiations on a global agreement to combat ocean plastic pollution set to begin on February 28, 2022, at the fifth session of the UN Environment Assembly. While the United States negotiating position will become clearer as talks unfold, Secretary Blinkens statement that the agreement call on countries to develop and enforce strong national action plans to address this problem at its source hints that a whole-of-government approach to reducing plastics waste and pollution could be in the works this year. Such an approach could ultimately involve greater cradle to grave scrutiny of plastic production and plastic products.15

Momentum is building within the Biden-Harris administration for increased action on plastic pollution and waste. Last month, DOE announced $13.4 million in funding for seven next generation technologies that reduce plastic waste and cut the carbon footprint of plastic production, which currently accounts for more than 3% of total U.S. energy consumption. Going forward, we anticipate EPA to initiate efforts this year to establish a goal related to climate impacts associated with the production, use, consumption and disposal of materials, which is all but certain to include plastic. The goalnoted by EPA in its November 2021 National Recycling Strategywill be one component in EPAs broader series dedicated to building a circular economy, with the national recycling strategy serving as Part One.

1These are but a few of the Biden-Harris administrations noteworthy climate-related actions in 2021. For a comprehensive listing, see here.

2As noted earlier, the administration announced a series of new actions in January 2022 to follow-through on the Global Methane Pledge.

3In the CPP, which faced challenges in the courts and ultimately rescission during the Trump administration, EPA classified power plants as an air pollution source to justify emission guidelines spanning from heat-rate improvements to the substitution of natural gas-combined cycle units and the use of renewable energy.

442 U.S.C. 7411.

5Changes to internal EPA procedures may make it easier and faster for the agency to approve applications for biofuels intended to replace petroleum-based fuels and additives, but some industry groups advocated during EPAs recent public hearing for scaled back 2022 required volumes for conventional biofuels.

6For estimated timeframes on these potential leases and others through 2025, see the Bureau of Ocean Energy Managements offshore wind proposed leasing schedule.

7Friends of the Earth v. Haaland, No. 21-2317 (RC), slip op. (D.D.C. Jan. 27, 2022).

8While President Bidens Executive Order 13990 (EO 13990) directed the Working Group to issue the final Social Costs of GHGs no later than January 2022, the administration recently clarified that the Working Group intends to publish its proposed final estimates within the next two months. Defendants Supp. Brief at 23, Louisiana v. Biden, No. 2:21-cv-01074-JDC-KK (W.D. La. Jan. 21, 2022) (ECF No. 90) (the January 21 Supplemental Brief).

9Defendants Supp. Brief at 23, Louisiana v. Biden, No. 2:21-cv-01074-JDC-KK (W.D. La. Jan. 21, 2022) (ECF No. 90).

10The FAR Council includes representatives from the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, the Department of Defense, NASA and the General Services Administration.

11See 16 U.S.C. 824p(b). For more background on NIETCs and FERCs authority prior to the IIJA, see our post here.

12CFTC Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee, Sept. 15, 2021 Meeting Transcript at 5-6.

13For more background on FCC telehealth initiatives, see our post here.

14Hurricane Ida, for example, resulted in significant communications service disruptions in Louisiana and Mississippi, and the FCC acted quickly to provide regulatory relief for impacted consumers and communications providers.

15For example, a 2021 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommends that the United States develop a systemic strategy that focuses on identifying, implementing, and assessing equitable and effective interventions across the entire plastic life cycle to reduce the US contribution of plastic waste to the environment.

Read the rest here:

Ten Executive Branch Climate and Sustainability Developments to Watch in 2022 - JD Supra