Oxfam and Research

Tanveer talked about what you can do if you have the ear and the budget of government. And you can do a lot, as we have seen. But what if you do not have the budget or the ear of government? That is more like the position that Oxfam finds itself in. I will talk a little bit about how we try to influence policies, what role research plays in that, and what we mean by research.

First of all, our research and our advocacy work trying to influence government was not historically a part of what Oxfam did. Oxfam was set up about 50 years ago as an agency doing long-term grass roots development and relief in emergencies. When a tsunami hits, for example, that is a big business for Oxfam. We go into a number of countries and try to help people rebuild after a disaster. But what we found, over the course of the 1980s especially, was that we were creating nice little development projects and all around us public policies were inflicting terrible consequences in many countries, in the form of badly designed structural adjustment programmes and the debt-crisis, for example. We thought we could not just carry on with our little projects while all around us there was mayhem; we actually had to start speaking out and trying to influence public policy. The anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the various struggles in central America, the whole role of structural adjustment and the debt-crisis and the role of the World Bank and the IMF, became areas where we started to look up from our projects and look more globally, and that led to us doing a lot more advocacy, campaigning and research. Even today, the bulk of our work is still that combination of grass-roots development and emergency relief, but we now have around 10% of our work directed towards this policy work.

Within the work of policy and campaigns, research has a role, but I have to say it is a not a dominant one. If we look at the number of people working on research in Oxfam, compared to the number of people working on campaigns and media, research is still a small part of the overall pot. But research has various benefits for an international NGO that is trying to influence policy: it gives us credibility with decision-makers. They may not read these great big reports, but the fact that you have one and can wave it at them means that you get through the door, so it certainly helps with a basic sort of credibility. The journalists who read things that are longer than press releases are also very important to us.

You need good research, but actually, what you do not need is bad research. One mistake or one piece of shoddy research can mean that your reputation takes years to recover, so we do a lot of vetting and risk management to try to ensure we do not say things that are clearly untrue. This is an important function of the researchers because sometimes the campaigners are less rigorous about these things.

The other thing that research provides is a coherent narrative. To be honest, I think our research team would be better termed the 'narration team', because what it creates is a development narrative around different issues which politicians and decision-makers can understand and keep with them. I think that is one of the advantages that NGOs have over typical academic institutions: we are actually better at telling stories that a non-specialist can understand and keep. We also generate the 'ask'. There is no point in doing a big report if at the end of it people simply say, "that was interesting." The report must say, "and this must happen." Research can benefit this too, in terms of creating a credible 'ask'. There is no point in asking for things that are completely impossible; we have to fashion things in a way that people can use.

The other area in which I think research is important is for our own campaigners and the people out there marching on the streets. They may not read these things either, but the fact that someone in the organisation can do all that technical stuff is a source of confidence to them and makes them feel more powerful when they go out and demand change.

What do we mean by research? To be honest, we do a limited amount of primary research. We recently went to Sierra Leone and carried out some survey research on the provision of safe water, but that is the exception rather than the rule, especially at a global level. Save the Children Fund does some very good household survey work on the impact of the government imposition of user-fees on education and health, but mainly we do this work of narrative.

I think in these situations, the NGOs are a kind of half-way point between intelligent journalism and popular academics. There is a gap in the market there, and that is where we locate a lot of our research work. A typical piece of research from an international NGO would include: a decent literature review written in English; case studies, especially ones from our own experience because that lends them a credibility which may otherwise be missing; and recommendations -there has to be a page at the end which says what decision-makers need to do. But I think a key ingredient is the 'killer fact' (that is what we call it in Oxfam). It is no good having a well-argued paper on an issue if you cannot provide a politician with a 'killer fact' for their speech. The best 'killer fact' I was ever involved with was the calculation that the average European cow gets two dollars a day in subsidies from the European Union. I can see lots of people nodding - you remember the 'killer facts' right? It took about two hours to calculate and it had more impact than anything else I have ever written on the Common Agricultural Policy, partly because it goes in all the speeches but also because it symbolises a wider point, which is that Europe has got its priorities wrong: it gives more money to its cows than the people of half the world earn. So this is a classic killer fact; it is a juxtaposition which shows something unjust and gets people angry. Actually, I think that 'killer facts' are probably 90% of our value in terms of the wider debate, so we always try to concentrate on them. The final thing a piece of research needs is an executive summary. Noone important ever reads anything that is not written in two pages. If you want to communicate with decision-makers, you have to have a short executive summary that summarises the narrative and gets rid of all the difficult stuff and it has to have the 'killer facts' in there. The executive summary is the bit that matters because it is the bit that gets read. The rest is almost like a passport to get in through the door.

One thing that I think Oxfam is really good at is media work. When we launch a report we have stunts. We did a report just recently on the arms trade and we put a tank in Grosvenor Square in the centre of London, with the names of all the different countries whose parts go into making that tank, to demonstrate the point of the report, which was that people can circumvent national arms controls by pulling off different bits from different producing countries into a single piece of armament. That report has been very effective, not least in getting the UN last week to approve moves towards an international convention on the arms trade. A piece of good research is a lot more powerful if you have a photo to go with it and a lot of media hype. Whenever we are doing a report, we go and sit down with the main journalists who are interested and talk through it. If one of them shows particular interest, we give it to them as an exclusive so they have it a day before all their rivals, they get credit in their newspaper and we get a bigger splash by saying that they can have it as an exclusive if it goes on the front page. For example, we did a piece of research recently on what Starbucks has been doing in Ethiopia with coffee and we gave it to the Guardian on the condition that the Guardian put it on the front page. It is just a question of knowing how to use the media.

The research that I am talking about is basically the research we do to back up our campaigns. Campaigning is distressingly mechanical because what you need for a good campaign is a villain, a problem and a solution. Heroes are nice but they are optional. To take a typical example of an Oxfam campaign, the intellectual property rights legislation was preventing people from getting access to cheap medicines. We have a problem - people dying, a solution - override the TRIPS legislation, and a villain, in the form of both TRIPS and the big pharmaceutical companies. Just as we were launching our campaign, big pharmaceutical companies did us the huge favour of taking up those court cases in South Africa trying to prevent people from getting access to medicine. That was a perfect campaign and we won it. There has been a big improvement in access to medicines.

Who are the villains of choice? This is slightly tongue in cheek, but our favourite villains are northern governments, international financial institutions and the World Trade Organisation, and big bad corporations. All that is all fine, and I am sure they all deserve it, but it does mean that we give an easy ride to some of the other people who need to change, including domestic businesses in developing countries. Sometimes we ignore these too much and they can be worse employers than some of the big multinationals. Developing country governments also sometimes get too easy a ride, at least in our global campaigning, though we give them a hard time at a national level. And, of course, we never attack NGOs. Plenty of other people do that, so we leave it to them.

The issues we campaign on include Make Poverty History and Jubilee 2000. These are the big global campaigns on what the north can do to help. We campaign about international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the IMF and regional development banks. With the UN, as I mentioned, we have been doing a lot of work on the arms trade. We also campaign about transnational corporations, pharmaceuticals, labour standards in garment companies and that kind of thing. In 1995, the international community handily created a target in the shape of the WTO, so that everyone who was unhappy about globalisation had something to target. We all went off to the World Trade Organisation to campaign to improve the quality of international trade rules. This has been ongoing in our campaigns for the last five years, but is currently getting rather stuck as the international trade negotiations have run into the sand.

I am talking about campaigning because it gives you an idea of what kind of research we need to do for this and how we fashion our message. There is a combination of outsider and insider work. This is not as 'insider' as the work that Tanveer Naim does, but we go in and sit with ministers and special advisers and discuss what the problems are and what the solutions are. There is no point in simply talking about the problems; we have to take in the solutions. We do the research with the killer facts, but one of the reasons that ministers will have meetings with us is because they know that, outside, there will be big petitions and big demonstrations and a lot of people will be mobilised - and not all of them students. If you can mobilise old age pensioners, you will find that one old age pensioner is worth ten students in terms of their impact on decision-makers. Decision-makers know that OAPs will keep writing. They will not go and get a job and forget about the activism; they are there for the long haul.

A range of public pressure is very good. We also do a lot of work with celebrities. We took Colin Firth, who is a very good-looking actor, to the World Trade Organisation Headquarters and it paralysed the WTO, because every woman in the headquarters of the WTO left her position and came to look at Colin Firth. So that was a piece of good celebrity-based activism. We do very broad but superficial ideas. For example, last year we sold something like three million of those white bands that said we want to 'make poverty history'. The statement is inane on one level because of course we want to make poverty history, the question is how, but actually, it meant that people recognised those three words in a number of countries as something that was possible and that helps to change the underpinning attitudes and beliefs behind what we do. I think that most research is far too top-of-the-head, detailed, policy-based, technical stuff and not enough work goes on on these big attitudes and beliefs, and you can influence those with the right combination.

Why do they listen to us? A long time ago I was a physicist, but I never got beyond my first degree. We have three economists but we are not the World Bank; we do not have a massive academic body of knowledge and, compared to the ODI, we are academic beginners. So why do people listen? It is down to this ability to tell a story, to tell something that politicians can then relate and use in a speech, and it is the narrative, which I keep coming back to, that is the crucial thing we do. We also try to work out what decisions they will be making, what the timetable is for a piece of legislation and the best time to come in with a piece of research. The ODI is good at this, but a number of academic institutions see this as beneath them. There is the idea that either something is true or it is not and if it is true, you publish your research when you have done it and politicians should pick this up; you should not have to adapt yourself to the timetables of politicians.

We mobilise the public. Churches and NGOs were particularly good on the debt-crisis and that is something that gets people going. In 1998, the G8 met in Birmingham. We wanted the debt issue to be on the G8 agenda and we had 70,000 people, mainly OAPs and church-goers, surrounding the centre. It was all completely peaceful and it put such pressure on politicians that they had to put debt onto the agenda. The outcome was the HIPC (Highly-Indebted Poor Countries) initiative on debt-relief, so that was a situation where we saw that public pressure can move mountains. I worked in the UK Department for International Development (DFID) for a year and whenever something was in the Financial Times about DFID, or about an issue related to debt or aid, someone would come down from the minister's office and asked about it. If it was in The Guardian, we did not hear about it but if it was in The Financial Times, someone would come down and ask. We are good at getting things in The Financial Times and in The Guardian. Media really matters for influencing ministers. A good op-ed or a good comment piece will get to ministers. They are not going to read an academic paper but they will read what is in The Financial Times, so particular media and particular forums matter.

Another thing that I think NGOs are quite good at - and again, ODI is an honourable exception amongst academic institutions - is being policy entrepreneurs and spotting a new idea. One of the best examples was a group of NGOs setting up something called 'publish what you pay', which suggested to oil companies that they published how much they paid to governments in royalties, so that local organisations could start asking their governments what they had done with all that money. The idea was to use transparency to put pressure on corruption. This was such a good idea that Tony Blair stole it and turned it into something with a much more boring name: the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, but it is the same idea and it is working really well. When a government steals what you do, that is success; you can feel good about that.

This is a bit of a grotesque generalisation about the problems of some academics - and I am talking about UK academics in particular here - but I think that the incentive structure in academia in the UK is wrong in that there is a big emphasis on not making mistakes. If you get caught making a mistake, everyone remembers because they are all quite nasty and bitchy in academia and they like remembering those things, so that makes academics very risk-averse. Every economist is two-handed: on the one hand and then on the other. This means that they do not give a minister a story, they give them a mess and the minister calls 'next'. There is a real problem with that. Postmodernism has a lot to answer for; nothing makes any sense any more to anyone. If it is not that, it is regressions and economics and again this habit of talking a sort of priestly language that does not communicate very much. There is a real problem with language.

Another thing, in terms of incentive structures, is the question of who academics are trying to impress. The answer is obviously other academics. They are not actually that bothered about politicians or decision-makers, so there is a real problem with that whole incentive structure. They are very lofty. They ignore the timetables. I remember going to Cambridge to give a talk about a sort of government 'big think' paper on development in 2000 and the economists in Cambridge, who are the top guys, asked why the government had not asked them. It never occurred to them to go and find out and ask the government. They were waiting to be asked for their views on development and of course, no one ever came. Again, academics basically just think too much of themselves and do not get involved. They think like lecturers not lobbyists. A lecturer says, "I need to convey this message. I will do it in this way, I will set out the evidence, and they should applaud at the end." A lobbyist thinks, "what is going on in that person's mind? Will they believe me or another politician or a journalist? Let's think how we influence them." It is a completely different mindset and academics are bad at thinking like lobbyists. They seem to be better in the US than the UK, so I think it varies depending on academic incentive structures.

What is the result of all this? From my experience of working on trade at DFID, DFID has a lot of money (it spends around £100 million on research every year), but it talks to about ten people on trade, all of whom are in the UK, many of whom work at ODI, and it is a very restricted gene pool. Actually, many of the people it talks to are ex-DFID themselves, so it becomes sort of incestuous. People tell you what you want to hear. And the classic civil service thing on this is that they need a paper on this in two weeks and most academics will say that they cannot possibly do that. ODI will say, "£800 per day, no problem". I have had the microphone cut, I am sorry. What this means is that the government gets very narrow advice from a group of undoubtedly eminent and brilliant thinkers, but it could be even better.

In order to get through the door and talk to decision-makers, you have to do a lot of self-censorship; you have to speak within the framework that government adopts. Growth is good, obviously; trade is good, obviously, and by the time you have finished saying all those things to get through the door, you have narrowed down what you are able to talk about. I think it is a kind of 'sensibilism' - a question of whether you are a sensible person, because if you are not, you will not get the appointment. The problem there is that somebody is constructing that framework of 'sensibilism' and it is basically the World Bank. I talk to academics who say that they agree with me, but they cannot say that because their consultancies will disappear. There is a huge financial and intellectual pressure to work within that framework. I have a particular bug-bear with mathematical economics, because historical economics is so much more interesting. If we could get away from people doing these regressions and this modelling and actually go and look outside and see how Korea did it, how Malaysia did it, or how Vietnam did it, suddenly economics becomes much richer and more useful. The mathematicians win all the Nobel prizes and they have a kind of arm-lock on the discipline, so there is a real problem there.

There is also a basic point, which is that governments may not actually be interested in evidence-based policy and in reality, there is a fair amount of policy-based evidence made. I have seen that in operation in DFID. For example, if they want to get cotton subsidies down, they commission some research to justify why that should be done. That happens all the time. So let's not be too naïve about this, government is not an academic faculty; it has its own aims and it uses research and we need to work within that.

What needs to change? From our point of view, I think we have done far too much globally. I think we need to do build up our capacity building to do research at national levels, and the same goes for other NGOs. Civil society generally needs to use research and have more influence and skills and that is the general direction we are moving in. We have just done a really good report on basic services in South Asia, for example, and when we did the launch in Afghanistan, ministers came to listen. That has an impact that we cannot replicate at a global level, so we need more good national research staff.

We need to get away from some of the obsession with economics and think more about the political economy, how change happens, why this happened and this did not happen and that kind of thing. I also think that we need to promote intellectual pluralism. There is a Harvard economist called Danny Rodrik who has a great idea, which is that you take the policy arm of the World Bank, divide it into six, put it in six developing countries and then let them compete for business from developing countries. Then the World Bank would have to give developing country governments and others the information they want and they would be competing with each other, so it would be healthy. That would completely change the nature of the mainstream advice that governments and others get. So those are some things that I think need to change.