http://www.thebrokeronline.euen-GBSat, 12 Dec 2009 04:51:28 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Hillary-Clinton-and-Amartya-Sen-on-food-security In my last week at Columbia, I was fortunate to attend two events (and make pictures!). I heard Hillary Clinton speak about the American version of the 3-D approach, and today I had the honour of listening to Amartya Sen. Interestingly, both addressed food security. Two blogs ago I talked about the danger that the idea of crisis evokes a technocratic response to resolve food security, sidestepping its political nature. This was illustrated in the two talks. I was positively surprised thThu, 10 Dec 2009 19:19:53 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/The-secret-of-social-change-after-disaster Do people become selfish or altruist in the face of disaster? The broker online presents a very interesting contribution to this question in a review of “A Paradise Built in Hell” by Rebecca Solnit. The myth that people become selfish looters after disaster has been debunked many times. What is interesting about Solnit’s analysis is that she points to the important role of elites. Their fear of the social unrest that may follow disaster and can arouse mobilization of a crowd that acts inSun, 22 Nov 2009 23:37:12 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Silence-around-the-food-summit This week was the food summit in Rome. It has passed in almost complete silence. Even though the number of people that goes to bed hungry reaches one billion! The soaring of food prices two years ago was a wake up call to the world. After 25 years of neglect, last summer the rich countries of the G8 have pledged 20 Billion Dollar for agriculture in Africa. But the attention seems to slip away already. The food summit is generally seen as a failure. The final declaration is full of hollow phrasSat, 14 Nov 2009 10:16:45 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Sierra-Leone-s-Refugee-All-Stars Columbia offers an amazing amount of seminars, movies and events. This week I saw an ineresting documentary about the Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. This band was formed by Reuben Koroma and five other Sierra Leonean musicians who lived in a refugee camp in Guinea. They started their band to bring music and dance to their fellow refugees, and soon started to tour around other refugee camps. Film makers Zack Niles and Banker White have followed the band for three years, and turned this is Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:09:34 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Corruption-in-Afghanistan-or-the-hypocrisy-of-international-politics I have always known that politics are hypocritical, but sometimes it gets to me nonetheless. I am in New York at the moment, where I spend eight weeks of my sabbatical as guest-lecturer at Columbia University. This week, after it became clear that president Karzai of Afghanistan was going to be president for an other term, President Obama phoned him and told reporters afterwards that he told him “to move boldly and forcefully forward and take advantage of the international community’s inteSun, 11 Oct 2009 20:32:20 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/A-visit-to-Hebron-seen-it-with-my-own-eyes I was in Hebron, Palestine, this week. Despite everything that I have read and heard about the country, I was little prepared to experience for myself how direct and multiple the confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians are. The notion of a Wall evokes an image of two people neatly separated by a straight barrier. Not so. Going to Hebron means traversing several check-points that separate small areas under the control of the Palestinian Authorities from the numerous settlements that haMon, 07 Sep 2009 20:12:26 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Safety-net-programming-in-Ethiopia.-Disillusion-in-the-making The 1984 famine in Ethiopia is an important landmark of development history, remembered by many for Bob Geldof’s Bandaid (“Feed the world, let them know it’s Christmas time”). But did you know that since 1984 every year an average of 5 million people have been receiving food aid during the hunger gap, sometimes as long as 8 months a year? The government of Ethiopia and the international community have now started a safety net programme that guarantees families emergency aid for a numbeWed, 29 Jul 2009 14:18:43 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Cracks-in-the-bastion-of-the-Ministry-of-Foreign-Affairs When I was at a meeting in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs some time ago, my eye was caught by a small box in the corner of the meeting room. An all too familiar box, of which we have several in our kitchen at home. They have poisonous grains inside, and are used (usually invain) to get rid of mice. It was quite endearing to realize that the rodents manage to enter this Ministry! Not quite the inpenetrable bastion it seems to be. Two weeks ago I was again in the Ministry, this time to atteThu, 25 Jun 2009 09:32:09 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Trust-lost-and-found Last week I stupidly left my bag with my laptop and lots of other things on the train. I phoned every day to the lost and found office of the railways, but it was not reported. Despite the nightmare of life without a laptop, I stalled buying a new one, because I could not believe it was stolen. There are many more honest people than (would-be) criminals, especially on a 8.37 train packed with responsible citizens on their way to work. I therefore reckoned my bag must have been lost in the lostMon, 22 Jun 2009 12:49:48 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/civic-driven-change-in-fragile-states Crisis spurs creativity. The fatigue with development-as-usual, in the media, policy circles but most importantly with the people within development (scholars, practitioners, policy officers), leads to many new initiatives and ideas. Today I participated in a meeting on Civic Driven Change at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. We could talk for a long time whether there is something new in CDC, but no doubt there is something interesting and inspiring in the kinds of initiatives thaFri, 19 Jun 2009 10:06:39 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Disaster-IT-once-more-the-Weather-Information-for-All-Initiative Kofi Annan, after his retirement as General Secretary formed the Global Humanitarian Platform This morning, he launched one of the initiatives: Weather Information for All. It is not very different from the globalized grassroots IT innovations that I discussed yesterday, except on a vastly different scale. This is a global public-private partnership between the World Meteorology Organization, the Earth Institute of Jeffrey Sachs, the mobile phone company Ericsson and others. Building on thThu, 18 Jun 2009 13:23:45 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Grassroots-IT-solutions-to-disasters I am still at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction talking about early warning and early action. One panel presenter stated that local people are more open to IT solutions than the average intellectual. Poor people in South Asia told him they manage to respond to cyclones because their relatives in the US watch the weather forecast and send a text-message when they may expect a cyclone. A beautiful example of globalized everyday disaster response! The panel where the story was toWed, 17 Jun 2009 16:30:17 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/World-Disaster-Report-2009-A-huge-death-toll Today, I attended the launch of the World Disaster Report 2009 in Geneva during the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction. The World Disaster Report (WDR) is a thematic report that annually provides the global disaster statistics. This year’s disaster death toll amounted to 242.662. This was for 93% due to two disasters: the cyclone in Myanmar, and the earthquake in China. Few people will realize that this is only slightly less than the number of people who died in disasters in 2004, Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:47:53 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/What-s-a-donor-The-Humanitarian-Response-Index One of the phenomena of development practice today are indices. The Human Development Index of UNDP has become a highly influential policy instrument, and everybody is familiar with the index of Transparency International. One of the questions that always comes up is how solid indices are? Transparency International measures perceptions of corruption, does that really reflect the level of corruption in countries? Last week I attended a presentation by Philip Tamminga from the Spanish NGO DAMon, 25 May 2009 07:49:27 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/More-on-Rwanda-Where-is-the-debate If development cooperation is risky, as I exemplified last week about Rwanda, why not apply the basics of risk management? The primary characteristic of a risky investment is that the outcome cannot be accurately foreseen. This means that policy choices have to be made whose impact is insecure. When is this legitimate? When does this go down the slippery road of irresponsibly sticking one’s head into the sand as to the inconvenient consequences of politics? At the very minimum I think oneThu, 21 May 2009 10:53:55 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Development-risks-Education-in-Rwanda Development is becoming a risky business. Major donors, including the Netherlands, have recently shifted their focus away from stable countries to support areas that are assembled under labels such as post-conflict, unstable or fragile societies. One of the first proponents of the idea, Jan Pronk, advocated that development cooperation must stop playing safe and enter more risky ventures. One of the most risky ventures, no doubt, can be found in present day Rwanda. Rwanda is a double-faced nFri, 15 May 2009 09:03:02 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Good-dogs-don-t-bark-at-night I am spending the week in Bukavu, DRC, where I am supervising one of my PhD candidates, Patrick Milabyo. He is doing ethnographic research on and around a community-driven reconstruction programme implemented by the International Rescue Committee. Very interesting discussions about the question how close development programmes should align to people's expressed needs or whether they may develop ambitions to change attitudes or build societies? The IRC is giving community groups the chance to Fri, 08 May 2009 12:23:58 GMThttp://www.thebrokeronline.eu/regulars/blogs/Thea-Hilhorst/Welcome-to-my-blog Good day, and welcome to my new Broker Blog! When the editors of the Broker asked me to start a blog, I already started to phrase a polite, thank you for the honor, but no thanks. Academics are only interested in their academic publications, and will possibly consider a column in a dignified national newspaper, but a blog? The only reason why I know about blogs in the first place is because of my teenage kids who follow the whereabouts of their favorite pop stars. Blogs to my mind are for atte