The international politics of the environment

New Year is one of the sweetest moments in Kenya, the climax of Christmas festivities that gather family from distant ends of the country for two weeks of laughter, sunshine, hugs, food, and drink. But in 2007, the dawn of a new year echoed with drums of war. A political contest for the country’s presidency went awfully wrong and in a span of hours, long buried tribal animosities seared to the surface, turning husband against wife and neighbor against neighbor.

Machetes clunked against innocent skulls, women were raped, children bludgeoned and the old and infirm violated and murdered in an orgy of violence that lasted weeks and shocked the world. This is a journalist’s account of the blood and tears that destroyed families and stained a nation. Only the politicians won.

Our founding fathers worked hard to ensure that a small group of wealthy people would never dominate this country—they’d had enough of aristocracy. They put government to work to ensure a thriving middle class. When the middle class took a hit, beginning in the post-Civil War Gilded Age and culminating in the Great Depression, democracy-loving leaders like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower revitalized it through initiatives like antitrust regulations, fair labor laws, the minimum wage, Social Security, and Medicare.

So what happened? Air America Radio host Thom Hartmann shows that over the last twenty-five years, we’ve witnessed an undeclared war against the middle class. The so-called conservatives waging this war are only interested in conserving—and steadily increasing—their own wealth and power. Hartmann shows how, under the guise of “freeing” the market, they’ve systematically dismantled the programs set up by both Republicans and Democrats to protect the middle class and have replaced them with policies that favor the only the privileged few.

But the middle class is the very thing that makes America great. Thomas Jefferson himself believed that our very democracy depends upon our ability to play referee to the game of business, protecting labor and the public good. It is both our right and our responsibility, Jefferson wrote, to control “overgrown wealth” from becoming “dangerous to the state.”

We must not stand by while our democracy becomes a corporatocracy, serving an elite group of billionaire CEOs. There is another way. Thomas Jefferson knew how to build a middle class. Franklin Roosevelt knew how. We’ve done it before and we can do it, again. Following Hartmann’s commonsense proposals, we can recreate a prospering middle class that will ensure that our public institutions are not turned into private fiefdoms, meet people’s basic needs—for education, health care, a living wage—and keep America strong,

Substantiating cause and effect is one of the great conundrums for those aiming to have a social impact, be they an NGO, social impact investment fund, or multinational corporation. All face the same quandary: how do you know whether, or how, you contributed to an observed social change? A wide range of impact evaluation methodologies exist to address this need, ranging from informal feedback loops to highly elaborate surveys. But generating useful and credible information in a timely and cost-effective way remains an elusive goal, particularly for organizations working in complex, rapidly evolving and diverse contexts. Attributing Development Impact brings together responses to this challenge using an innovative impact evaluation approach called the Qualitative Impact Protocol (QuIP). This is a transparent, flexible and relatively simple set of guidelines for collecting, analysing and sharing feedback from intended beneficiaries about significant drivers of change in their lives. Innovative features include the use of ‘blindfolded’ interviewing to mitigate pro-project bias, and the application of a flexible coding system to make analysis and reporting faster and more transparent. The QuIP has now been used in seven countries (Ethiopia, India, Malawi, Mexico, Tanzania, Uganda and UK) with activities to promote food security, rural livelihoods, factory working conditions, medical training, community empowerment and microcredit for house improvement. This book includes comprehensive ‘how to’ QuIP guidelines and practical insights based on case studies from these countries into how to address the numerous methodological challenges thrown up by impact evaluation. Essential reading for evaluation specialists within NGOs, governments and donor agencies; social impact investors; community development practitioners; and researchers and students interested in evaluation methodologies.