International Development CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by UK Collaborative on Development Sciences (UKCDS)

UKCDS

1. The UK Collaborative on Development Sciences (UKCDS) brings together key UK funders and stakeholders who provide support for research relevant for international development. Our 14 members include eight Government departments, five Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust.1

2. We encourage and facilitate working relationships for effective collaboration with the aim of maximising the impact of UK research funding on international development outcomes.

3. The activities of the UKCDS are supported by a Secretariat. This consultation response represents the views of the Secretariat rather than the official positions of members, although it does draw on expert input from these organisations and from other individuals.

Targets: was the MDG “target-based” approach a success? Should it be retained? How should progress be measured?

4. While there is widespread agreement that the MDGs have placed broad-based poverty reduction at the centre of the development agenda, academic analysis shows that we cannot actually be sure that the MDGs have worked in reducing poverty. Kenny and Sumner argue that “the MDGs may have played a role in increasing aid” and that “there is some evidence of faster-than-expected progress improving quality of life in developing countries since the Millennium Declaration, but the contribution of the MDGs themselves in speeding that progress is—of course—difficult to demonstrate.”2

5. Any post 2015 development goals will need much stronger and better embedded monitoring and evaluation framework than the MDGs have had, in order to optimise targeting of resources. The UK science community has pioneered a number of the analytical tools and approaches used in monitoring and evaluation and can make a valuable contribution in the run up to 2015 and throughout the life of the proposed new goals.3

6. In many countries, the capacity to define and measure the right indicators is lacking, as is baseline data. Building the capacity to do this in-country will be important to the success of the goals.

7. The Wellcome Trust, and other UK organisations, are working to build the capacity of low- and middle-income countries to measure the data integral to carry out their own monitoring and evaluation. The Wellcome Trust’s African Institutions Initiative works to build research capacity in over 50 scientific institutions from 18 African countries, and includes a significant focus on data collection capacity, much of which is relevant to the MDGs.

8. Similarly, the International Network for the Demographic Evaluation of Populations and their Health (INDEPTH) is working to establish an international platform of sites across Africa, Asia and Oceania that provide health and demographic data and research to enable developing countries to set health priorities and policies based on longitudinal evidence. It is supported by the Wellcome Trust as one of a number of funders.

9. The UKCDS works to share lessons and facilitate cooperation between UK organisations engaged in research capacity building though the coordination of a Research Capacity Strengthening Group.

“How should the “Sustainable Development Goals” be established [sic] following Rio +20 relate to the “Development Goals” being considered by the High-Level Panel?”

10. There are pros and cons to integrating Sustainable Development Goals with proposed Development Goals. Full integration might dilute the focus on poverty reduction, which has been one of the strengths of the MDGs, and diminish the likelihood of securing international agreement. However, large amounts of scientific research highlight the extent to which sustainability and poverty are interlinked, and how unsustainable some models for poverty alleviation are in an environmental sense. At the least, there should be an analysis of how the two sets of goals interrelate and attempts should be made to ensure that metrics are comparable.

The coverage of future goals: should they be for developing countries only or should progress be monitored in all countries?

11. A large corpus of scientific work strongly demonstrates the interconnection of the world’s environmental systems, and how precariously close we are to reaching planetary boundaries.4 Breaching these planetary boundaries will have severe consequences for everyone, citizens of wealthy or less wealthy countries alike. Therefore UKCDS feel strongly that any sustainability goals must be universal. If the poverty eradication and sustainability goals are fully integrated, they should also be universally applicable.

The need for evidence-based post 2015 development goals

12. Cutting across a number of the inquiry’s questions is the need for any proposed post 2015 development goals to be based on evidence of what works. The proposed post 2015 development goals are proxies for the sort of sustainable world we want to see, and should advance measures to track movement towards that point. We need to be confident that by achieving a goal (proxy) we would achieve (or move towards) genuine sustainability.5

13. Otherwise, at best, this could represent a sub-optimal use of limited resources. At worst, it could commit substantial political focus and financial commitment to a course of action that is actually harmful. With such a broad concept as sustainability—represented by what will presumably be a small number of goals (for political and practical reasons)—selection of the right goals is of utmost importance.

14. This evidence base underlying the choice of goals should clarify the link between the proposed goal and broader indicators of sustainability. For example, we need to be confident that by targeting renewable energy as a proportion of the energy mix, we are not contributing to environmental degradation in countries growing the crops used in the UK for biofuel.

UK science for development

15. At least £200 million of UK publicly-funded research each year is directly targeted at building the evidence base on what works in development.6 A substantial proportion of other research also has development relevance. Five of the seven Research Councils have joint agreements with DFID around development-focused research in the areas of sustainable agriculture, poverty alleviation and ecosystems services. Most recently, DFID, EPSRC and DECC have launched a joint call for research on sustainable energy and international development.

16. In addition, UK academics are very successful at winning research funding from philanthropic organisations. For example, over the last four years, the UK has secured $100m from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for research.7

17. This research has contributed to a substantial, if fragmented, evidence base on what works in international development, particularly through work funded by cross-Research Council/Government initiatives such as the Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) programme, or the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme.

18. This evidence base covers aspects of all three pillars of sustainability: environmental, economic and social. In environmental sustainability, a British Geological Survey study funded by DFID on African groundwater has found evidence of significant aquifer stores across the continent. This information can be used to inform national planning to support sustainable drinking water and irrigation schemes.8

19. In economic sustainability, UK research is world-leading. For example, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, or Tim Jackson’s ESRC funded research, “Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet”.

20. In social sustainability, work by UK academics has characterised the changing global patterns of poverty, highlighting that “the majority of the world’s poor, by income and multi-dimensional poverty measures, live in countries classified by the World Bank as middle-income countries… The changing distribution of global poverty away from the poorest countries, suggests an apparent “poverty paradox”—that most of the world’s extreme poor do not live in the world’s poorest countries.”9 This has direct implications for how any goals targeting poverty reduction are targeted, designed and measured.

21. Of course, the three pillars of sustainability are very much interlinked. UK research also focuses on these interactions, systems approaches and trade-offs. For example, research under the [UK] National Ecosystem Assessment has developed world-leading capacity to measure stocks and flows of assets relevant to sustainable development. The Defra Natural Capital Committee is developing methodologies around valuing nature that will have directly relevant international application.

22. Similarly, ESPA is co-funding work on the Artificial Intelligence for Ecosystem Services (AIRES) system, as part of a major research project studying the forest-agriculture interface that helps decision-makers look at the trade-offs between conservation and economic development.10 It is being trialled in Malawi and Colombia. This work is already being applied by the World Bank’s Wealth Accounting for Valuation of Ecosystem Services initiative, which is co-funded by DFID.

23. The UK is also world-leading in some areas of foresight. If the proposed post 2015 development goals run for the same period as the MDGs, they would conclude in 2030, when the world will be a very different place. Through foresight techniques we already know, (with varying levels of certainty, some elements of what the world will be like. These characteristics will pose distinct development challenges to those dominating the agenda today, and will have a serious impact on the feasibility of meeting any new development goals. GO-Science’s foresight function is a significant resource here, although it has not yet synthesised evidence directly focused around the MDGs.

The knowledge-to-policy process

24. The UK has huge amounts of expertise to contribute to developing post 2015 development goals. However, timeframes are very tight, with the UK supporting UN High Level Panel members to table high level goals in May 2013. A rapid corralling of the relevant science is required. Following agreement on these goals, there a significant opportunity for science to feed into decisions about how and where the goals are fleshed out: around exactly which indicators to track, how to embed better monitoring and evaluation, and about gathering baseline data.

25. There is strong international demand for UK science to feed into the development of post 2015 development goals, their design and future monitoring frameworks. For example, in the run up to Rio+20 the ESPA programme received specific requests from the governments of Brazil and Colombia to provide relevant knowledge derived from the full range of relevant UK research investments.

26. The ESRC have proposed a centre that will concentrate on “What works in international development?”, which could make a valuable contribution in this area.

27. As an organisation that works across the major UK research funders of science for development, UKCDS is well placed to be part of the process of feeding science into decision-making. We are happy to discuss how we could add value.

October 2012