Rules of the game

March 8, 2010 – 5:11 pm

I experienced an intriguing juxtaposition of meetings last Wednesday that revealed much about the challenges facing us if we are truly to embed sustainability within the decision-making mindsets of the powerful.

The first meeting comprised a lunchtime seminar organised by Consumer Focus. Drawing on a recently published paper, the seminar had been convened to discuss a radical proposition for the delivery of community-level heating and energy systems. I had been invited, I think, because of my long-standing interest in the subject, that interest itself driven by two perspectives:

  • an economic view that distributed energy systems offer the most resilient and cost-effective long term solution to our energy crisis; and
  • a social view that community ownership of energy assets offers a powerful and important alternative to present arrangements, an alternative that has the potential to ‘reconnect’ citizens with their resource base, something that is vital if long term sustainability is to become an immanent feature of society.

I found some of the discussions at the meeting both distressing and disappointing. The majority of the twenty or so attendees were representatives of the very vested interests that might at first sight appear threatened by the idea on offer. They were well versed in the exclusive technological vernacular of their trade – fully living up to the critique presented by the South American academic Ivan Illich in his book ‘Disabling Professions’ – and, amid their intermittent in-jokes, rudely dismissive of perspectives other than their own. One of my remarks, for example, was referred to as ‘preliminary’, as having been thought of earlier in the development of the paper but redundant once the full complexities of the situation had become apparent. Another remark (citing examples of inspiring community-level projects with which I had become familiar through Brook Lyndhurst’s work on NESTA’s Big Green Challenge) was called ‘romantic’.

I’m thick skinned enough to withstand such slings and arrows, but many of the people at the seminar were not so much responding to the radical kernel of the paper as allowing it close enough to be able to absorb its modest momentum and render it emasculated. Do you not understand the complex regulatory/financial/technological barriers, young man? It’s a lovely idea, but let me explain…

Many things are complex – including sustainability – but complexity should not be used as a tool to bamboozle and disable the outsider, nor as an excuse for inaction.

Meeting number two took place in the evening. A client and friend at Quintain had a spare slot and wondered if I would like to watch England play Egypt at Wembley. Though I rarely accept corporate hospitality, I enjoyed an evening in the company of masters of the universe, various brokers and investors and other representatives of the financial services industry about which we have all been vexing so much of late. I don’t meet these kinds of people often, and in many respects they might be thought similar to the individuals with whom I’d spent my lunchtime: exclusive, protected by a cloak of self-assembled complexity, resistant to the full breadth and implications of the sustainability agenda.

It may simply have been the more convivial setting, of course, but an intriguing difference was that they were not quite so rude in their dismissiveness. They still, by and large, thought that sustainability was tosh (or similar), but they did so in a much more candid fashion. In fact, what seemed to be the case was that, potentially at least, sustainability is for them a perfectly viable candidate for consideration in their universe, so long as it makes sense within their existing frame of reference, or what Wittgenstein called their language game.

So, I reflected as I joined the merry throng departing Wembley, there seem to be at least two challenges: challenge one, you have to get in, you have to get past the gates, past the cynicism, past the protective walls with which professionals and established cliques maintain their mystique, their power and their incomes; challenge two, if you can manage that (without becoming emasculated in the process) you have to be able to speak their language once inside, otherwise they will simply smile and, even if they agree with you, move on.

The alternative, I suppose, would be to play another game entirely and wait for them to come to you.

By dfell | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

The A-B-C of CBA

February 25, 2010 – 12:20 pm

Cost-benefit analysis [CBA] techniques currently have a central place in policy evaluation in the UK. CBA assesses projects and policies by assigning monetary values to the costs and benefits expected from them. These values are then summed, allowing policy makers to make judgements about whether those initiatives with higher net benefits should be prioritised over those with lower net benefits.

Reducing assessment to a financial equation is appealing on two grounds. First, by reducing an array of complex variables to a single measure it may make it possible to make fairer comparisons between alternatives. Second, CBA acts as a decision-making shortcut.

Academics have been warning for years that the merits of including environmental and social considerations in a cost-based assessment mechanism may not be all that high, particularly as, when there is no market for a particular benefit, economists will - as Frank Ackerman puts it – ‘often resort to implausible, circuitous methods of inferring and inventing the missing prices….’

While CBA does at least mean social and environmental issues can actually be accounted for, the value placed on their less easily quantifiable attributes depends to a large degree on the choice and measurement of ‘benefits’ by the valuer. This in turn means that a process which interprets intangibles as concrete financial values is inherently subjective, with the relative weights attached to social wins and losses determined by those tasked with evaluation.

Attaching financial values to the social and environmental impacts of a given policy or project is often seen as a necessary if imperfect way of ensuring they are taken into account. However, the entire approach is based on the continuing assumption that economic gains are the best yardstick of social benefit and social progress - despite an ever growing body of evidence to the contrary. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the financial benefits of a policy or project were instead put onto a social scale. Would they always measure up?

By mtong | Posted in economics | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

The Daily Mail and the value of evaluation

February 22, 2010 – 4:11 pm

We generally don’t bother commenting on misleading reporting of environmental issues. Journalists (and I speak as someone who used to be one) have been putting a sensationalist spin on stories (and non-stories) since newspapers began. Moreover, anecdotal evidence from discussion groups we’ve run suggests that much of the sceptical coverage on environmental issues has very little traction with the public. Just as climate change fatigue presents a challenge in keeping people engaged on environmental issues, so scepticism fatigue protects consumers from the negative stories. Another article about dodgy scientists or sun spots… and turn the page. On this occasion though, we feel justified in making an exception.

Last Thursday, the Daily Mail published this article on DECC’s Climate Challenge Fund on the back of a memo published by the Taxpayers’ Alliance. We carried out an evaluation of the Fund in 2008 and our report is quoted in the article. Without getting all huffy, I think a few points are worth noting.

First, far from describing the projects supported by the fund as having ‘failed’, we repeatedly stated in our report that we were “unable to take a view on the overall success or otherwise of CCF projects in raising awareness and generating positive attitudinal change”. This was not because we found that the projects’ attempts to engage with the public had been a waste of time and money, but simply because the data that was available on their impact was of insufficient quality to be able to judge this one way or the other. Many of the lessons learned about effective data collection have since been applied to other programmes supporting pro-environmental behaviour change, including DECC’s own Low Carbon Communities Challenge.

Second, and in many ways more importantly, the article wrongly portrays our report as a judgement on the performance of specific projects. The evaluation was only ever intended to assess the performance of the CCF against its own policy objectives, rather than meting out commendation or castigation to individual initiatives. Almost all of our evaluation work, whether for DECC or others, relies on open dialogue with supported projects in order to explore not only what works, but what doesn’t. It helps no-one to pretend that every aspect of every environmental fund is an unbridled success. Encouraging those who receive grants to speak honestly about their experiences ensures that future programmes are designed in a way that maximises value and impact. It also helps the projects themselves to make their activities more effective.

This openness and transparency is jeopardised if evaluation is framed simply as a mechanism for passing down judgement from above. The danger is not that articles like the one published last week will cause the British public to suddenly decide that climate change is a con, but rather that the very projects that are seeking to tackle climate change will feel reticent about contributing fully to similar evaluations, making it far harder to ensure that lessons can be learned for the future.

Last, the CCF evaluation highlighted a number of ways in which the Fund had been effective, not least in creating millions of opportunities for engaging individual consumers around climate change issues. If all this sounds much more interesting (and positive) than the Daily Mail article might suggest, you can find out more in the full report, published here on the DECC website.

By jfletcher | Posted in Communities, Uncategorized, evaluation | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Nudge or shove?

February 4, 2010 – 12:24 am

I spoke yesterday morning at ‘Food for thought’, a breakfast event examining ‘food choices and what they mean for health, wealth and the environment’ organised by our friends at the London Sustainability Exchange.  Against the background set by the government’s new food strategy, Food Vision 2030, and alongside fellow speakers Dame Fiona Reynolds (director general of the National Trust) and the Rt Hon Oliver Letwin MP (chairman of the Conservative Party’s Policy Review and of the Conservative Research Department) I talked about the way in which the UK food system has evolved over the past fifty years, some of the challenges arising from that evolution, and some of the possible means of tackling those challenges.

The discussion took place under the Chatham House rule – which enables attendees to report what was said, but not to attribute remarks to any particular source.  This means I am able to report that issues of behaviour change and, in particular, the impetus provided by Richard Thaler and Carl Sunstein’s ‘Nudge’ formed a significant part of the discussion, but I am not allowed to say who made actual reference to Nudge.  Quite separately, of course, I am able (no super injunction on the matter being, to my knowledge, in force) to remind you that in last week’s Guardian Richard Thaler co-authored an article with George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, in which they explained that, “A Conservative government will require all public bodies that want to launch marketing campaigns to state precisely what behaviour change the advertising is designed to bring about, and an element of the advertising agency fee will be made contingent on achieving the desired outcome”.

Brook Lyndhurst has done a great deal of work on behaviour change, so we are very excited about this and keen to see what transpires.  At breakfast yesterday morning, however, I felt compelled to remind the audience that, important though behaviour change undoubtedly is, it is unlikely to be enough.

“We can’t just rely on nudge,” I suggested: “In some cases, we’re going to have to shove.”

Details of who and what might need shoving will appear in due course.

By dfell | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Wind energy - megaWHATs?

January 20, 2010 – 12:31 pm

Wind power numbers are easy to find, but do not always make immediate sense. This month we heard that 32 GW of offshore wind generating capacity has been granted permission to go ahead in the UK. This seems like a lot. As of October 2009 the British Wind Energy Association reported 2,332 MW onshore and 598 MW offshore in operation. A new 125 MW farm announced in the news? Is this good? Is wind power doing well? Frustratingly, the figures generally require some conversion before the implications become clear.

In an attempt to de-obfuscate all of this, I thought the piece of paper by the computer covered with scribbled equations and statistics needed an upgrade. The result of this exercise is a wind energy calculator, available here for download. If you struggle to get a grip on the numbers, or if you once got your head round the matter but have since forgotten, this may help. Hopefully you’ll find it extremely simple to use and with just enough information to orientate and provide a bit of context, but not too much to bury you in data and lose the message.

I’ve included links at the bottom of the worksheet to all the data sources if you need them. If you have any comments, suggestions or, worst of all, spot any glaring glitches, do let me know - you can get in touch here.

Download the wind energy calculator - Excel 2007 file (.xlsx)

Download the wind energy calculator - Excel 97-2003 file (.xls)

By ohughes | Posted in Uncategorized, Wind power, energy | Tagged , , | Comments (3)