Author: Rebecca Cooney, Third Sector magazine

Danny Sriskandarajah tells the NCVO annual conference that Oxfam plans to ask supporters, partners and the public to help it set out its 10-year strategic vision

Oxfam needs to focus on using its resources and its platform to support and empower other organisations, the charity’s chief executive has said.

Speaking at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations’ annual conference in central London this morning, Danny Sriskandarajah said he wanted the charity to be “less supertanker, more dockyard” in its approach and revealed that the charity planned to ask supporters, partners and the public to help the charity set out its strategic vision for the next 10 years.

He also said that civil society as a whole needed to “reimagine traditional organisational structures” if it wanted to effect real change in the coming years.

“We have, I think at our peril, seen civil society primarily as a means and not as an end,” he said.

“So if we do that, we end up, for example, seeing volunteers as instrumental income generators and not paying enough attention to the fact that we are there strengthening communities. We will fail to see that a strong, vocal civil society is an inherent good in itself.

“If we see ourselves as simply a means for delivering aid, collecting money or whatever else it is, we forget sometimes at our peril how we are in this together.”

Sriskandarajah said that after the Haiti safeguarding scandal that rocked the charity last year, the charity had “a fantastic opportunity to take all that is good about Oxfam and repurpose it for the rest of the 21st century”.

He said: “In the next few weeks, we’ll be opening Oxfam up to ask our supporters, partners and the public to help us create our strategic vision for the next 10 years.”

He added that Oxfam would join a network of organisations committed to taking forward the findings of the inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, chaired by Julia Unwin, which concluded that charities needed to address issues concerning power, accountability, connection and trust.

“I also want us to acknowledge our particular responsibility as one of the bigger, better-resourced organisations in our sector,” he said.

“I am determined that Oxfam will be better, less supertanker, more dockyard, ready to use our resources and platform to empower and enable others in the sector to speak up for the people and causes they represent.”

If the sector wanted to see power redistributed in society, Sriskandarajah said, it needed to consciously model that change, not “tinker around the edges” or “trade in incremental change”.

“We need to ensure that leadership of our own organisations is open to people of different ages, ethnicities, faiths, genders, politics and sexualities,” he said.

“We need a generation of leaders who are prepared to reimagine traditional organisational structures, who can take power off its pedestal and turn it into something much more accessible, collaborative and diffuse.

“Most urgently, we need to tackle the imbalances of power that enable bullying, racism and sexual abuse, including, to be frank, that which took place in Haiti.”

Charities also needed to think about how trust in them could be repaid and returned, said Sriskandarajah.

“We need to show people, communities and other civil society groups that we trust them to provide valuable insights, to make decisions, to own and control assets, to run projects,” he said.

In order to deepen trust, the sector needed to move away from “charity for charity’s sake, and towards a world of mutuality”, he said, adding that the bits of civil society he found most exciting were “cooperative-based initiatives” which looked different from the existing big NGO structures.

“As Oxfam, our challenge is to harness the very best of these participatory models,” he said.

“If we don’t find a way to trust and embrace these new movements, we risk becoming trapped in the institutions we have built. Trust must be something we live out in the way we work and the decisions we make.”

Author: Senscot

Senscot’s most recent briefing 

Author: Press and Journal

Scores of volunteers have signed up to help ensure Aberdeenshire’s roads and pavements are safe as the wintry weather continues. 

The authority is regularly criticised during spells of severe weather for failing to clear side roads and paths. 

However roads bosses maintain they need to prioritise main roads and do not have the resources to grit and clear every single area. 

In an effort to ease frustration and deal with the problem, Aberdeenshire Council launched a snow warden scheme which gives communities access to a range of resources from grit spreaders to full protective equipment.

As of this month, there are now 27 groups operating in the region, which amounts to 72 volunteers.

But the authority has issued a fresh appeal for more wardens, with the scheme running until April. 

Applications are taken throughout the year for the initiative. 

Last year, the region endured one of the worst winters in recent memory, with the council forced to go £2million over budget to treat the roads and pavements.

Roads bosses came under fire after towns and villages were left impassable after the traditional surface treatment was left redundant by thawing conditions, rainfall and freezing temperatures overnight.

This year the authority has already used about 23,300 tonnes of salt to treat surfaces since October, with a further 15,000 tonnes in stock and more than 7,000 expected to be delivered this month.

The council has also been trialling a new app which shows people where gritters are in real time and what routes have been dealt with.

The programme is currently only available on phones and tablets as My Aberdeenshire, but is likely to be made available on their website in the future. 

There are 32 “primary routes” with 100 council drivers covering these, there have also been 120 farmers and 32 plough contractors on the roads to clear the snow in recent weeks.

For more information on the snow warden scheme visit www.aberdeenshire.gov.uk

Author: Scottish Environment Link

SCOTLAND is known worldwide for its natural environment’s breath-taking beauty and is home to globally important habitats and wildlife. We have 5% of the world’s peatlands and a third of the EU’s breeding seabirds. Our rivers and lochs contain 90% of the UK’s surface freshwater. But with one in 11 species currently at risk of extinction, we are facing very troubling times. The situation is compounded by Brexit. If and when we leave the EU, Scotland will lose the governance mechanisms provided by the European Commission and the European Court of Justice and with it as much as 80% of its environmental protections.

What’s more, there is currently no Scottish Environment Act to underpin how we treat our environment. This may come as a surprise to many people who know and love Scotland’s nature. But Scotland has until now relied on EU protections and with less than a month to go until the Brexit leaving date, losing these safeguards is a real cause for concern.

This is why 35 of Scotland’s leading environmental organisations have come together in the Fight for Scotland’s Nature campaign, to push the Scottish Government to act. In March 2018, the Scottish Parliament unanimously backed the coalition’s call for concrete proposals and a public consultation on the future of environmental protections.

Finally, after months of pushing, the government recently released its consultation, Environmental Principles and Governance in Scotland. This is a step in the right direction, but doesn’t go far enough and lacks the sense of urgency required at this late stage.

Scouring the document, there’s no explicit commitment to introducing legislation to give Scotland’s natural assets permanent protection. It also fails to show how the government intends to uphold the commitments it has made publicly around human rights, sustainable development and a healthy environment for all. And there’s nothing on how we’ll maintain international standards in the battle against climate change.

But all is not lost in our fight. Throughout history, people in Scotland have stood up and demanded to put things right.

Once again, we must join forces to tell our political representatives just how important our nature is to the people of Scotland. The Government must take heed of the dangers affecting our precious environment and create a world-class environment Act that is able to do justice to our world-class nature. Only when we have that do we have a fighting chance of preventing unprecedented levels of species decline

Author: Beyond the Horizon. Blog of Calum MacLeod

Last week was an important one for Scotland’s ongoing land reform journey. On Wednesday the Scottish Land Commission published the report of its ‘Investigation into the Issues Associated with Large Scale and Concentrated Landownership in Scotland’.  That was followed on Thursday by a land reform debate in the Scottish Parliament, initiated by the Scottish Government on the topic of ‘Land Reform in Scotland – Delivering for Now and the Future’.   Both of these developments are significant because they give strong indications of where land reform might go next in policy and practical terms.

The Scottish Land Commission was created in April 2017 as a result of the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016 with a remit to ensure that land reform does not stage one of its periodic vanishing acts from Scotland’s public policy agenda as has happened in the past.  That’s a scenario unlikely to occur anytime soon given the substance of the Commission’s report and the political reaction to it.

The report is the most substantial investigation to date into issues associated with large-scale and concentrated land ownership in Scotland.  It follows a call for evidence by the Commission in 2018 for people to share their everyday experiences of living or working in parts of rural Scotland where most of the land is owned by a small number of people.  407 people responded to the call, including landowners and land managers, community representatives and individuals.

Back in 2014 the Scottish Government-appointed Land Reform Review Group (LRRG) broadly defined land reform in its report, ‘The Land of Scotland and the Common Good’as “measures that modify or change the arrangements governing the possession and use of land in Scotland in the public interest”.   That definition is instructive because it confirms the significance of land reform as a multi-faceted issue cutting across individual public policy areas in Scotland and places public interest considerations squarely at its centre.

The Commission’s new report is equally instructive because it contradicts the jaded mantra of land reform’s opponents that it is how land is used, rather than who owns it that matters. It also confirms that Scotland’s ‘land question’ is ultimately a question of power.

The report makes a distinction between the concentration and scale of land ownership, noting that “There is no automatic link between large scale land holdings and poor rural development outcomes but there is convincing evidence that highly concentrated landownership can have a detrimental effect on rural development outcomes.  These effects arise because landowners have the power to decide who can access land, when, for what purpose and at what price.  This power is created by the current system of private property rights and is therefore directly linked to landownership”.

The detrimental effects of concentrated landed power on rural outcomes are laid bare in   evidence presented in the Commission’s report. The most frequently identified theme in the evidence relates to the influence of concentrated land ownership on local economic development opportunities.   The report finds that economies of scale – another argument for large-scale landholdings routinely trotted out by advocates of the status quo – appear to be “more theoretical than real and more likely to benefit landowners than communities”.  It also finds that the irresponsible exercise of landed power enables landowners to block business development by determining whether and on what basis land is made available for such activity.

Worryingly, the report also notes that approximately a quarter of those who submitted evidence feel that Scotland’s pattern of concentrated landownership has a negative impact on the ability to meet local housing needs.  It states, “these experiences were all connected by a common narrative in which the power of a dominant landowner to control the supply of housing was a key driver of depopulation and economic decline”.

More troublingly still, the report highlights the corrosive effect of landed power on community and social cohesion.  The evidence indicates fear of repercussions for “going against the landowner” by some respondents.  As the Commission’s report notes “this fear was rooted firmly in the concentration of power in some communities and the perceived ability of landowners to inflict consequences such as eviction or blacklisting for employment/contracts on residents should they so wish”.

Much of the evidence regarding other themes in the report also paints a dispiriting picture of the scope for concentrated landownership to skew power relationships between landowners and communities in favour of the former.  The report challenges the “weak” assertion that landscape scale environmental management requires large-scale land ownership.  It also documents the “perceived unilateral approach to decision-making adopted by some landowners (often NGOs) and perceptions of poor land management practices that can arise from this”.

Against that background, the Commission concludes that “there is an urgent need for formal mechanisms to be put in place that would enable harmful land monopolies to be identified and changes in either ownership and/or management practice to be implemented that would protect fragile rural communities from the irresponsible exercise of power”.

To that end, the Commission recommends specific statutory action including the introduction of a Public Interest Test for significant land transfers/acquisitions; requiring land holdings over a certain scale to engage on and publish a management plan; and legislating for a new Land Rights and Responsibilities review process, to take effect when there is evidence of adverse impact.  The Commission also calls for the effects of concentrated ownership to be accounted for in the implementation of the forthcoming Community Right to Buy to further sustainable development established in the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2016.   Other recommendations include promoting more diverse patterns of private land ownership to help achieve land reform objectives and local engagement in land use change.

Unsurprisingly the Commission’s report dominated last Thursday’s Land Reform debate in the Scottish Parliament.  The Scottish Conservatives expressed disappointment at both the report’s focus and content, questioning the basis of the evidence and reiterating that the focus of policy should be on land use rather than land ownership.  The Liberal Democrats were happy to support the Report’s findings but considered it premature to call on the Government to accept all of the Commission’s recommendations.

The SNP, Scottish Labour and the Scottish Greens gave the Report a more enthusiastic reception.  Together they ensured that Parliament passed a wide-ranging motion which amongst other things “urges the Scottish Government to support the recommendations of the Scottish Land Commission on how to deliver interventions in the operation of Scotland’s land markets and ownerships that will provide disincentives to the future accrual of large privately owned land holdings and help deliver a more equitable distribution in the ownership of Scotland’s land assets in the public interest”.

The dust is still settling after publication of the Scottish Land Commission’s report.  Nevertheless, important points are already coming into sharp focus. The report and its carefully crafted, evidence-based analysis of the inextricable links between concentrated land ownership, land use and the exercise of power feels like a vital staging post in the next phase of Scotland’s land reform journey.  Viewing the issues of land ownership scale and, particularly, concentration through the twin lenses of monopolistic practices and their corrosive impacts on the public interest has significant policy and practical implications.  Such a perspective underscores the potential for the Commission’s recommendations to contribute to a policy route map away from the debilitating exercise of landed power highlighted in its report and towards a more progressive, socially just and sustainable relationship between Scotland’s people and land.  Parliament has endorsed these recommendations and the Scottish Government has stated its support for them in principle.  In the coming months both will have the opportunity to transform their warm words into tangible policy action.

Author: BBC

The private company that ran CairnGorm mountain went bust in November leaving behind a broken mountain railway and a failed plan to bring millions of pounds of much-needed investment to the snowsports centre near Aviemore.

What went wrong?

From the beginning some people said what was promised at CairnGorm Mountain was too good to be true.

When Natural Retreats – a company until then most identified with running a holiday rentals company – took over, it promised a transformation. Publicity material said the aspiration was to host the X games, a world-famous extreme sports event, and produce multiple gold medals at the Winter Olympics by creating a world class training facility. 

That would have represented a major turnaround for any Scottish resort – never mind one that had struggled to overcome problems caused by the unpredictability of the weather and the need to find a revenue stream that could support a £20m mountain railway.

When the company that ran the mountain went bust last autumn much of the focus understandably was on protecting jobs and making sure there was a ski season of some sort this winter. But we wanted to try to understand what happened, whether it was preventable and what could be learned from it. 

That meant unpicking a complicated web of public bodies, private companies and unmet expectations. Even working out who owned what wasn’t simple. Natural Retreats ran the mountain until it went bust in November The infrastructure on the mountain – the lifts and railway – are in public hands. Highlands and Islands Enterprise owns them and the land.

 Until 2014 they ran the mountain through an operating company – CairnGorm Mountain Limited.

That year they announced that Natural Retreats were taking over. They were a leisure company who had started off developing holiday rentals in national parks. The operating company – along with assets like vehicles and movable infrastructure on the hill – were sold for just over £230,000.

We can see from the original tender document that financial backing was crucial to getting the contract. 

It says: “The potential operator would be required to provide capital investment to support their business model. Consequently bidders will be expected to demonstrate a credible access to finance.”

Almost immediately bloggers who were critical of the management of the mountain started digging away. They discovered that the company had in fact been sold to Natural Assets Investments Limited (NAIL) – a company with many of the same directors as Natural Retreats.

Natural Retreats had the lease to operate the mountain – but the assets had been transferred to the wider group. NAIL was also in debt. HIE has since said financial checks were done on both companies.

In a 2014 media release, HIE welcomed Natural Retreats’ decision to invest more than £6m in the mountain.

 This was the key to the deal – sell the operating company and release private capital to allow the mountain to diversify.

The hope was that there would be an investment in the ski business. 

But more than that the intention was to develop the summer business too – this would protect the mountain from the ups and downs of weather-affected skiing.

Our research has established that this £6m wasn’t quite what it seemed.

When we sat down with HIE they told us that £4m of that was to be a loan of public money from HIE to Natural Retreats. 

Two years after the handover Natural Retreats still hadn’t taken that up.

The company came to HIE and said that they wanted to change the business model which had won them the original contract.

HIE approved a new business plan but that investment didn’t happen either.

Highland and Islands Enterprise told us that Natural Retreats invested about £1m in the Day Lodge on the mountain. 

So the whole basis for the asset transfer was never realised.

As we spoke to local people who had investigated Natural Retreats’ time on the mountain it became clear the concern wasn’t simply what hadn’t been invested, it was also what had been taken out. 

Natural Assets Investment Limited and Natural Retreats share directors.

There are also other leisure companies registered at Companies House where the same names come up over and over again. 

Their accounts show a complex system of inter-company charging. This isn’t unusual or in any way wrong. The structure of an operating company and a property company that charge between each other is common in the leisure industry.

But what people wanted to know was if Natural Retreats wasn’t investing as originally planned, was it also taking money out? That’s where the Administrator’s Statement came in handy. 

It’s a document produced by those charged with realising the assets of a company that has gone into administration and settling its debts. 

It said that there was a monthly “management fee” paid from the operating company CairnGorm Mountain Limited to Natural Retreats of £40,000. 

When we asked HIE about that they confirmed that had been negotiated at the point of handover and represented an industry standard level of fee. There were other payments in the accounts that stood out. 

CairnGorm Mountain Limited was paying administration charges to the wider NAIL Group. 

These amounted to more than £2m in the period 2014 to 2017. That’s more than the management fees that were signed off by HIE as part of the asset transfer. 

What were these for? 

We asked HIE and they said they didn’t know – but were still trying to find out. Which brings us to Natural Retreats.

We had a lot of questions. In particular we wanted to know about the flow of money in and out of Cairngorm Mountain Limited. We put them all to the company – which seems to have rebadged itself as Travel Together in the past two weeks.

They were not willing to answer any of them, saying that relevant information was in the public domain. They also said that ongoing investigations into the fate of the funicular meant they were not in a position to comment.

There was other information in the administrator’s statement that raises questions about the relationship between HIE and Natural Retreats. It makes clear what happened when Natural Retreats realised that a combination of the funicular being out of operation and other factors meant administration was inevitable.

HIE entered a process where it was the sole bidder to take the operation of the mountain back over. It put in more than £150,000 of public money to cover the November wage bill.

Then it negotiated a deal to buy the assets of CairnGorm Mountain back. At this point the funicular was out of operation and HIE was the only bidder. It paid over £440,000. That’s almost twice the original price paid by NAIL. 

How would HIE explain paying double when the ski operation was struggling to cope with the loss of the funicular? 

They told us they were securing important assets for the future and that they had paid a fair price. They also said that the original sale had involved a transfer of a company with debts as well as assets and that was reflected in the price in 2014.

The agency was clear – its role was to protect the future viability of the mountain. HIE also told us that over the period Natural Retreats was in charge, HIE spent an additional £3.5m of public money on infrastructure. 

If the original intention of the handover was to bring private capital into the picture and relieve pressure on public funds then what’s detailed in the administrator’s statement, combined with what HIE told us, suggests that there was far more public cash than private cash being invested. 

There is one last potential twist.

When Cairngorm Mountain went into administration it owed more than £2m to the NAIL Group.

That makes the company by far the largest unsecured creditor. So whatever is realised by the administrators could largely be paid back to NAIL.

Over the last week or so we’ve seen winter return to our mountains with a vengeance. That holds out hope for all our ski resorts, including CairnGorm. 

As the wider impact of CairnGorm Mountain Limited going into administration becomes clear the immediate worst case scenarios have not appeared. 

Jobs have been protected, skiing is happening this winter and there are negotiations under way with community groups about the potential for a community buy-out. Nevertheless, it’s still not at all clear that the past four years represent anything other than a wasted opportunity for a business dependent on public money and crucial to the future of a community that desperately needs it to succeed.

Author: Navid Somani

At the recently concluded festival of greed and avarice in Davos, Bono—Victorian philanthropist and iPhone botherer—declared that “capitalism is not immoral” and that he was creating a new organisation to help investors “effectively understand the impact of their decisions”. The organisation, Y Analytics, is being set up in partnership with the US private equity firm TPG, financed by a $2 billion fund created to measure what’s known as “social return”. This was the most high-profile event on what’s termed “impact investing” at Davos, but the conference, at the conveniently located ski resort, was abuzz with conversations on how businesses could better measure the social (and, whispers, financial) return of their altruistic investments.

Before exploring the motivations and outcomes of these investments, it’s worth spending some time getting to know Bono’s new business partners on his journey to demonstrate the morality of capitalism. In 2009, TPG were pursued by the Australian tax office for $670M in taxes that they allege were avoided through the use of arms-length holding companies in the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg. Whilst they eventually lost the case in the face of aggressive legal action from the private equity giants, the company hit the headlines again in 2015 when Adam Levine, their former managing director of public affairs, tried to blow the whistle on alleged securities violations and investors being defrauded out of millions of dollars. After being told by TPG’s legal counsel that he’d be “gutted like a carp” if he escalated his concerns, Levine eventually settled out of court.

Putting aside Bono’s lack of due diligence, this drive to achieve a “social return” represents the latest “brand-washing” strategy designed to disguise the rampant profiteering of global capital. Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, has described this as desire for “social purpose” as the Aspen Consensus, where businesses like TPG claim to do good all the while doing everything they can to avoid commitments to do less harm. Instead of dismantling a tax-avoiding shell corporation, you build a well or set up a corporate social responsibility arm. The “do more good, not less harm” mantra revealed itself in a particularly ludicrous way when Larry Fink—billionaire CEO of the world’s largest asset firm, Blackrock—called for businesses to better demonstrate social purpose, with his words treated by the media as revolutionary insights on the future of private capital. Conversely, the same publications gave very little coverage to the “BlackRock’s Big Problem” campaign, created by environmental activists to draw attention to the company’s position as the world’s biggest owner of fossil fuel companies, and their refusal to divest from them.

A cover for new markets

But “social purpose” has become more than just a counter-measure—it has become an industry. This has manifested itself mostly with the stratospheric rise of “impact investment”, defined by the Global Impact Investing Network (GINN) as “investments made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return” (emphasis added). The impact investing arena has grown exponentially over the last ten years, with GINN estimating that in 2018, $228 billion was invested in impact, double the prior year estimate. Financial analysts looking at investment trends for 2019 have identified refugee programmes as being ripe for financial return, and a survey conducted by GINN noted that 42% of investors plan to increase their investments in the traditionally publicly-funded areas of water and sanitation.

Investments in water also produced one of the more grotesque moments from this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos. Matt Damon—actor, unwanted commentator on race and sexual harassment, and founder of Water.org—sat down for a broadcast where he enthused about turning the poor into debtors in return for access to clean water. These dim-witted celebrity outriders, as well as impoverished governments and NGOs, have made Davos the perfect opportunity for late-stage capital to push into new frontiers. The slickly-produced PR event enables companies to exaggerate their role in solving the world’s problems, whilst simultaneously erasing their role in creating them. Governments and NGOs embarrass themselves in fawning over investors, pleading with them to fund seemingly intractable issues of inequality on the promise of a financial return. All of this has helped the “Aspen Consensus” morph into the Davos Consensus, which discards the requirement to actually do more good, and instead only requires the appearance of altruism as cover for finding new markets.

In response to criticism, impact investment champions have promised better measurement of the social and financial return of their work. But initiatives like Bono’s, and the World Bank’s attempt to clarify the definition of impact investing, all evade the mounting evidence that these investments often have no impact and do little to challenge the system which produces the inequalities they are seeking to address.

Microfinance and the politics of measurement

The story of microfinance, a poverty-focussed intervention that amassed billions of dollars in support, is particularly illustrative in this regard. Microfinance was presented as the discovery of its chief pioneer Professor Muhammad Yunus, who argued that if financial services, mainly credit, were extended to the traditionally excluded poor, it would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. Understood in this way, microfinance was at the vanguard of approaches that would come to be known as “pro-poor, pro-market”—moving away from redistributive models of growth and toward a focus on market inclusion.

The International Community, believing they had spotted a gap in the market, bought into microfinance enthusiastically. By the 2000s, around £10bn per year was being ploughed in by those who believed they could make a “double-bottomed return” – i.e. both social and financial. This all culminated with Yunus being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, representing the remarkable 30-year journey microfinance had taken: from niche innovation, to dominating the poverty reduction strategies of states and INGOs.

However, just a couple of years later, microfinance’s exalted position was revealed to be built on decades of anecdotal claims that weren’t able to stand up to scrutiny. The results of two randomised control trials were published, both of which showed that microfinance had very little impact on the poverty of those who accessed it, undermining the bombastic claims made by microfinance champions. Given the stated poverty reduction objectives of those who had proselytised about microfinance, this should have been enough to deflate the bubble that had sucked in billions of dollars. However, true to form, instead of prompting an examination of the neoliberal philosophy that treats debt as an effective poverty reduction tool, the sector reacted by promising better measurement. Echoing Bono’s promise to help companies better evaluate their social impact, organisations put resources into systems and people that could do similarly, believing all that was required were financial products that better targeted the social needs of their clients. Customer satisfaction surveys were conducted; universities hired to do poverty analyses of clients; and women recruited to focus group discussions to speak on the empowering nature of debt. Predictably, all this was to no avail: in 2015, a new study, drawing on more data, concluded microfinance does not have a transformative impact on poverty.

The story of microfinance illustrates the limitations of “better measurement”. Within the world of impact investing, the obsession with measurement is often merely a desire to find results that facilitate the brand-washing process. If the microcredit sector were genuinely concerned with improving social impact, then it would have either significantly reformed itself, or been abolished altogether. Instead, it continues to attract billions of dollars in investment, and has rebranded itself as promoting the more easily achievable “financial inclusion”, simply ignoring its failures on poverty reduction. Furthermore, the sector continues to use misleading indicators that have been shown not be effective measures of social impact—like loan repayment rates, as seen in Matt Damon’s boasts about the 99% repayment rates his water loans achieve.

A Trojan horse for privatisation?

How can the sector persist if its metrics are so broken? If the goal is to make a social impact, why is the sector content with such a dull and uninspired vision of social change, operating within the confines of the current broken system?

The reason is that in impact investing, the emphasis is not on impact, but on investing. The point of Bono and TPG’s fund is not to correct mistakes in measurement that could lessen the social impact, but instead to clean up the sector as an investment opportunity. By flooding the sector with even more “evidence” that lubricates the entry of capital into new markets, they can reassure consumers of the ethical intentions of these companies. After all, as William Burckart, social purpose consultant, explains (in an unintended moment of honesty), “Without hard numbers to offer investors and their advisors, impact investing is a tougher sell”.

Veterans of the impact investing arena understand the power of hard numbers—Bill Gates went into full salesman mode at the start of Davos, tweeting an infographic showing how the world had improved dramatically on various different metrics. Jason Hickel, author of The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, carefully and thoroughly examined these claims, drawing on a wealth of evidence to show how it was inaccurate on multiple fronts. Instead of prompting an intellectual engagement with his research however, he was dismissed as a “Marxist ideologue” and “far leftist”, by Steven Pinker, the popular science author.

Despite all of this work to rebrand corporations as agents of social purpose, the core objective remains what it has always been: to replace public provision of social goods with private provision. Impact investment, social impact bonds and public private partnerships (PPP) are all on a neoliberal continuum that seeks to undermine the idea that states or communities have any role in the ownership of their public services. What is also common amongst all three approaches is the litany of failure that each leave in their wake, mostly at the expense of vulnerable people.

These failures were highlighted most recently by the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), in their paper “History RePPPeated – How public private partnerships are failing”. The paper looks at 10 projects which have leveraged private finance to support public-private partnerships in both developing and developed countries, in areas ranging from healthcare to transport. In a myriad of ways, clearly described by the authors, the entire financing model that PPPs represent is shown to lend itself to failure. For example, in one of the projects they examined, two PPP contracts were awarded to businesses in Indonesia to provide water, resulting in $18M losses for the public water utility, and a massive increase in monthly bills, unaffordable for many poor families. Despite this evidence of failure, many aid organisations still descended on Davos this year to flatter capitalists into investing in various social programmes, in a misguided effort to address what has been described as a $2.5 trillion gap in funding for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Fortunately, not all NGOs believe private capital is the only way the SDGs can be adequately financed. Standouts include Oxfam producing their now yearly inequality report in time for Davos, showing the continued hoarding of capital by the few, and Christian Aid making an even more pointed intervention in their policy paper, “Financing Injustice”. Published to time with the conclusion of the conference, they question the private-first approach to financing the SDGs, and in the accompanying press release, add:

…we believe that the global focus on private finance to support development objectives is a clear indicator that the profit motives of the rich and powerful continue to be prioritised ahead of the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable people.

These kinds of interventions by the aid sector are welcome, but sadly infrequent. Too many NGOs seem to have replaced their social justice objectives with a desire to out-compete their “rivals” for whatever money they can win from donors. At the same time, the public—bewitched by the myth of ethical consumerism—have too readily accepted the social impact claims of corporations, or been too fearful to question for fear of being labelled misanthropic.

In this environment, the left’s task is to constantly draw attention to the fundamental contradiction of capitalism, regardless of whatever disguise it chooses to wear. That contradiction is the very reason we see inequality and poverty, and so it follows that the most impactful investment capital can make is one which seeks to abolish itself completely.

Author: CommonSpace

In the north of Glasgow, a community growing project has emerged where previously there was only a ‘food desert’, providing a dignified way to tackle poverty – but can such projects also be free labour for developers to exploit regeneration for commercial value?

“BEFORE woodlands, I was in a sorry state of affairs – unemployed, depressed, not confident, and very shy and insecure. I was being hassled by the Jobcentre and the ‘system’ and this was making my life difficult. Finding Woodlands Garden was good for me as it fitted in with my interests of nature, trees, plants and growing. It was also a starting point to get out of the difficult rut that I was in, and the social isolation which came with it.

“All in all, volunteering with Woodlands has changed my life hugely. It has made me feel part of something and I feel included rather than excluded. I feel proud to be part of a group of people who all help other people.”

Jonathan Dale volunteers at Woodlands Community Garden. Located in the north of Glasgow, it opened in 2010 and has become an important feature of the local community, where, each year, around 50 households grow their own fruit and vegetables. Volunteers like Jonathan help to maintain the garden through regular gardening sessions.

Allotment waiting lists are famously long with the average reported as seven to nine years in Edinburgh and up to seven years in some parts of Glasgow. Council supply fails to meet demands.

Instead, Edinburgh City Council states that people are encouraged by The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act: “To come together and take on a piece of local Council ground (assuming that such ground exists). The City of Edinburgh Council will therefore support communities to fundraise to transform ground into an allotment site and thereafter manage the site. Management could be independent of the Council but there would be an expectation that any independent allotment site would abide by the Council’s allotment regulations.”

In recent years, community food growing initiatives or ‘urban agriculture’ has become increasingly popular. While numbers are hard to ascertain, the Social Farms and Gardens has around 250 members from growing projects and care farms in Scotland, a figure that they say has practically doubled in the past 18 months. A 2016 study found 68 community garden projects in Glasgow alone.

In Blackhill, in the north-east of Glasgow, the Blackhill Growers community garden forms part of the St Paul’s Youth Forum. Located in a ‘food desert’ in which there are no fresh fruit or vegetables available in the local shops, they grow fruit, vegetables, wheat and herbs, as well as keeping chickens. They sell the eggs and give away the vegetables to the local community. They also hold community meals and have a regular ‘veg barra’ in which they sell fresh fruit and veg from the nearby wholesalers at cost price. The project was started after young people had visited a project in Zambia and were inspired to keep their own chickens.

Speaking about the project, Mel Hall, community growing and cooking coordinator, says: “The theme from the beginning was about doing things with dignity. We aren’t a foodbank. It’s all about listening to people and people with lived experience of food poverty really shaping decision-making around the project.”

Joe Lowett, community garden workshop leader: “I think people are really proud, they are excited that you can get eggs that are local and that are theirs. With the exception of a few things like strawberries, we’re never going to produce enough to feed the people of Blackhill. It’s about education and we produce enough to pique people’s interest.”

With growing concerns around urban food insecurity and community disempowerment, urban community gardens are seen by some not only as a grassroots challenge to food scarcity, but as an opportunity to challenge hegemonic power structures and reclaim access to the local environment. They can also transform relationships between communities and food by allowing people to take control of food insecurity.

With growing pressures to relocalise the food chain highlighted by the ongoing insecurities around Brexit, community gardens are seen by some as an alternative source of food production. While the majority of them might be too small to make a big difference, there are international examples of urban agriculture on a much larger scale. 

And while food production may be the main motivation, studies found that community gardens have many additional benefits for the communities and individuals involved, often serving to address social and cultural issues faced by communities. They can help to re-energise places and create a sense of diverse communities, providing a space for people to meet.

Mel Hall from St Paul’s Youth forum says that while community gardens “have a fairly limited capacity” to provide food for Glasgow, “they’re a good place for people to come together, feel more supported and I think people get a lot of therapeutic benefits from the growing.”

She added: “So if people know that there’s a place they can go, be a valued member of their community, and have a direct impact on their surroundings, when maybe it’s not possible for them to feel like they’ve got control over some aspects of their life.. I think that’s really important.”

In an era of austerity, with record levels of food poverty, community gardens are one of the initiatives left plugging the gap created by government cuts. Citizen participation, voluntary and third sector organisations make up for the lack of welfare provision, reducing state responsibility for the crisis which saw nearly half a million emergency food parcels delivered to Scots in food poverty between April 2017 and September 2018, according to a new report by Menu for Change.

This can lead to a critique of community gardens as unconsciously aiding the neoliberal agenda by using free labour to regenerate an area, allowing developers to cash in by making property more saleable and paving the way for gentrification.

In their article examining the work of community gardens in Glasgow, Andrew Cumbers, Deirdre Shaw, John Crossan, and Robert McMaster, wrote that critics argue: “such activities can also be seen as working within the grain of punitive workfare programmes in generating more pliable working populations and reframing unpaid work. As part of more active labour market regimes, they help to recommodify labour rather than providing any sense of autonomy and empowerment.”

Speaking to CommonSpace, Professor Andrew Cumbers of the University of Glasgow Business school, who has carried out studies on the impact of community gardens, said: “There are loads of places in Glasgow where there are lots of derelict property and urban areas that have been left behind because industry closed. Without some kind of regeneration, they can be not very nice places to live and work. Unfortunately, in Glasgow, dominant policy been to redevelop in whatever way you can.

 “There is always a worry that you do up a place – often from community volunteering – that they quickly become attractive for property development. The big issue is who controls the land. If the city council has a strategy of property development without thinking of things in a more holistic way, a place can quickly become gentrified. You need a joined-up strategy which actually involves the community themselves and community ownership.”

And while paving the way for gentrification is a phenomenon that has been seen more in places like Berlin and New York, Scotland’s urban community gardens run similar risks. In one alarming example in 2015, a community garden in the Southside of Glasgow was bulldozed by developers. The project, developed by South Seeds, a community-led, sustainability-focused organisation, was left devastated after their work to transform a piece of disused land was destroyed without prior warning.

However, this story is not the norm. The majority of community gardens act as success stories that not only serve to bring a community together but increase knowledge about food and help to reduce social isolation for those involved.

In their 2017 study on ‘The motivations and experiences of community garden participants in Edinburgh’, David McVey and Robert Nash found that:  “Anxieties over land use and land reform highlighted how community gardens symbolised empowerment but also showed resistance to the hegemonic structure of local council and government. In effect, the research suggests that community gardens grow much more than just food, they grow community.”

The need for a planning system which supports the long-term building of community around the energy and self-activity of those already living there, such as groups like St Paul’s Youth Forum, rather than allowing projects to be exploited for commercial value, is plain to see.

Offering advice on setting up your own community garden, Mel Hall of St Paul’s Youth Forum, tells us: “There’s a phrase ‘bloom where you’re planted’. Our garden grew out of people wanting there to be something like this happening here and that’s what we try and encourage. You don’t have to go down the route of looking for funding and building stuff up. There are loads of projects that work from people wanting to get together and that being the primary motivation.” 

The Scottish Government’s Community Growing Fund grant scheme is currently open for applications, offering grants of up to £3,000 for practical works which support community growing activities.

Author: Rob Hopkins, originally published by Rob Hopkins blog

A while ago we met Gabriella Gomez-Mont in Mexico City who has, in effect, created a ‘Ministry of Imagination’ within the city administration. I thought that was the only such example in the world, the only example of city administration seeing the value in explicitly boosting the public imagination across a city. But then I recently came across the story of l’Ufficio Immaginazione Civica, the Civic Imagination Office in Bologna, created by the city municipality, and I was fascinated.

What follows is my conversation with Michele D’Alena, Director of the Civic Imagination Office. It is a multi-professional team working to build a creative bridge between the citizens of Bologna and the administration. Michele has worked for the municipality for the past 6 years, and for the past two years within the Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana, in charge of the Civic Imagination Office.

In Bologna, a new approach to engagement and civic action is emerging, rooted in the imagination. One driver for this shift is the realisation we are living in what Michele calls “a distrust era”, where people don’t trust public administrations, NGOs, or private businesses.  The Civic Imagination Office’s approach is towards what Michele calls ‘proximity’ working. As he puts it, “we need people to stay on the ground, to stay with the people”.

And the story that Bologna has to share with the world is, I think, vitally important. I started our chat, via Skype, by asking him how the Civic Imagination Office came to exist?  And what does it do?

Some information about Bologna…  Bologna is a strange city because in Bologna you can find a lot of students and we have got a long tradition in the field of public participation.  You can find high social, economic and cultural impact. You can find the university, you can find Bugatti, Lamborghini, the municipality, but also the Social Street movement on Facebook.  You can find a lot of collaborative spaces.  We have an incredible co-operative movement. In this city you can find a strong dialogue, a strong tension, a strong conflict, between the top-down and the bottom-up.  This is the secret of the city.  In the last four years, Bologna municipality has begun to implement up a new approach about public policy, based on a new paradigm.  The first paradigm, the first shift, is that we cannot rely on long-term investment, and now we have projects on the short and medium terms on investment.  Designing relationships and daily uses of public spaces and urban commons.

Second shift – the distrust era.  The people don’t trust us.  So through this new way to live public policy, the Bologna municipality has begun to design different instruments.  One of the most famous is the ‘regulation on public collaboration between citizens and the city for care and regeneration of urban commons’, the co-operation pact between citizen and communities.

Also through a tender, ‘Incredibol’, to share buildings and resources with the creative communities.  Also through Iperbole, the Civic network. Bologna has an incredible history about the use of the web.  It was the second town in Europe to use the net for the civic impact (Iperbole) in 1985.  So this municipality has begun to design this instrument, to recognise the incredible way to make further chances for creativity from the bottom up.

After this new way in the last two years, before this Foundation we used to use the Urban Centre Bologna.  Two years ago the Urban Centre Bologna became Fondazione per l’Innovazione Urbana, based on Bologna municipality and the University of Bologna.  The mission of this Foundation is to become an urban lab, an urban hub.  Through this foundation we have three missions:

•             Urban Centre: activities of information and promotion of the territory and urban culture

•             Civic Imagination Office: Activation of participation and co-production paths, a team to link resources and decisions with the capacity and energy and ideas of the communities, enterprises and people

•             Mapping the Present: Analysis and documentation of urban transformations, using technology to understand the city.

The city now has a strong vision, on four levels.  In Bologna we want to use a different way to understand the smart city.  We are speaking instead about ‘collaborative city’.  We want to change the way of doing public policy.  Second level, we are organising a new type of instrument.  Bologna regulation, Incredibol, Iperbole, and participatory budgeting and whatever you want.  Third, we create places where people can meet the public policy, the Neighbourhood Lab.  In two years we have organised something like 280 public meetings in Bologna, involving something like 8,000 people.  Every month we organise something like 10 public meetings to share decisions about public spaces, about libraries, about pollution, about mobility, about welfare, about a lot of things.

Fourth level, we organise the Civic Imagination Office to make this process stable.  Before this, the city organised the participation at the moment there is a problem.  There is an objective and the municipality has a budget. The municipality started the participatory process and then municipality arrived at a decision, and then the participatory process stopped until the next participatory process.

In Bologna we have decided to organise a stable participatory process.  Every year we know that we have to organise a Neighbourhood Lab.  At the beginning of every year we design the team, with the resources, and then we go to the neighbourhood to involve the community and enterprises.  We can build up social capital, we can learn new instruments, we can learn with the people how we can do better, and we know every year much more about the city.

The secret of Bologna is that – and this is why I think we have won the Bloomberg prize or the next prize – because we don’t have a platform.  We don’t have a project.  We have a process.  We are designing new instruments right now.  We know that we can design a better city with the people for the next three years.  Now I’m designing the Labs for this year with my team, and my team is a team of 10, 12 persons.  I can decide with them better projects than last year.

And you’ve worked with six different neighbourhoods in the city?  Is there a Lab in six different neighbourhoods?  Can you explain how the relationship works between the Civic Imagination Office and the six different parts of the city?

In 2015 Bologna municipality redesigned the organisation.  Historically Bologna was the first city in Italy to organise the city through neighbourhoods.  The following year the Bologna municipality redesigned the system.  We have six neighbourhoods, with six Presidents elected from the neighbourhood, with six deputies, with six councils.  All the neighbourhoods have to organise the work based on community, like an antenna of the community needs.

The neighbourhoods don’t have the capacity to provide services.  The services are about the municipality, but the neighbourhood have to organise the work on the ground.  We organise our work to support the neighbourhoods.  We are like the bridge between the municipality and the neighbourhood through the people, to the people.

I organise a team with say a Neighbourhood Manager – in close relationship with municipality and neighbourhoods – and with a Methodology Manager, with an Engagement Manager, and Public Space Manager, and a Data Collection Manager.  These four managers have to push forward the six Neighbourhood Managers, and then we got a communication and multimedia team in order to tell the story about our work.

Then those Laboratories in the neighbourhoods, they are very proactive?  They are going out and meeting people and making connections, and they use Open Space as well, did I read that somewhere, to get ideas?

Yeah, exactly.  For example, Frederico is working in the neighbourhood of San Donato – San Vitale, and he’s worked on that territory for two years.  So when he came to San Donato – San Vitale, the people, the associations, the President of that neighbourhood, recognise Frederico.  Somebody invited Frederico to take a coffee because it’s not the municipality, it’s Frederico.

Frederico sends the email to organise the Lab.  When we have to organise a meeting, Frederico know exactly when we can organise the meeting, what time, and when is better to send an email, who is the best community pusher of the neighbourhood, because Frederico has the social capital of that district.  This is our way to build up our proximity approach.

So then those laboratories in the neighbourhoods, they are very proactive?  They are going out and meeting people and making connections, and they use Open Space as well to draw out peoples’ ideas?

Absolutely.  We use all the methods that we have to use.  We use focus groups, focus based technology, questionnaires, online voting, whatever you want.  All the districts are different.  We can organise something for example in Pescarola, which is a zone with a lot of social housing and vulnerable families.  So in that zone we can’t really use Facebook.  We do use Facebook but we also have to go there on Saturday mornings.  We have to go there when the younger boys go to the school, or when the families go to the park.

If we want to speak with those people we have to change our way of working.  And Frederico can know better than me how to do this, because Frederico has spent so much time in that place.

There are many cities in the world who are doing interesting work around climate change and resilience and these kinds of things.  And there are some cities like in Barcelona, Madrid, where they are looking at more neighbourhood democracy, participatory budgeting.  But you are the only city that I ever heard of who says we need to explicitly talk about imagination, and imagination has a role to play in how we connect all of these things.  Why is imagination so important for you?  Why not just say it’s democracy, it’s climate, it’s social justice?  Why do you explicitly talk about imagination?

We need to have more resources.  At the beginning I was very sceptical about this word because I think that we have to have a very practical approach to the people’s problems and needs and capacity.  But after two years of work on the ground, I have learned that ‘imagine’ is one of the most used verbs in the Assemblies.

The people want to imagine a new way to solve problems.  ‘Imagine’ is a very simple word.  Everybody knows and understands how imagination is. It is a clever way to speak about how to solve problems in a new way. It’s a funny word also for marketing!  The secret is that beyond the word imagination is that there is a team.  A team with resources, with a strong political view, to push forward the Bologna municipality approach.

Our secret is that we have people to organise a better way to design public policy.  We can use another word, but the point is that we have a team design to link decisions with a new way to have data about needs and capacity.

If you, rather than just working in Bologna – I know politics in Italy is very complicated at the moment – but if you were the President of Italy and your job was to say we want Italy to be as imaginative as it could possibly be – we want to take this idea of imagination and have it as a national approach, so ‘Make Italy Imaginative Again’ was the slogan when you were elected, how could you take the learnings of what you have done in Bologna and do them for a whole country, do you think?

We need people and organisations that organise mediation with the people.  That use the work on the ground to understand the new needs.  All of our structures, whether welfare, mobility, or whatever you want, were based on the last century, the 19th century.  So we need flexible spaces to allow experimentation, to rethink to work around hierarchical administration.

For a way to understand behind a city with a region, or national approach, we have to open new ways to understand our work, going beyond the way to organise public policy with a team able to manage the public engagement.  This is the secret, with a stable period of work.  We don’t need six months.  We need three years.  We need fifty young managers in Emilia Romagna (the larger region Bologna sits within) to understand what we have to do for a better future.  We need people, managers of proximity and time.

Author: Crawford Beveridge

A panel of government-appointed advisers on the new planning system are close to withdrawing their support for the controversial bill currently in parliament.

In a letter to Kevin Stewart, the Planning Minister, Crawford Beveridge (pictured), Petra Biberbach and John Hamilton, say the Planning (Scotland) bill is “dangerously close to creating a system that is more complex than before.”

They say it is more remote and in danger of losing the spirit of the original review recommendations, placing “a range of additional burdens upon local authorities and the Scottish Government, as well as those working in Scotland’s private and third sectors.”

It is now estimated that the Bill adds 91 additional burdens to the current planning system (66 on Local Authorities and 25 on the Scottish Government).

Their comments follow concerns expressed by Miller Mathieson, chairman of the Scottish Property Federation (SPF), who last week called for a rethink after stating the current proposals were “unworkable”.

Derek Mackay, the Finance and Economy Secretary, admitted at the SPF conference that the bill was “not fit for purpose”.

 Dear Mr Stewart 

EFFECTIVENESS OF THE PLANNING (SCOTLAND) BILL 

As the original authors of Empowering planning to deliver great places: An independent review of the Scottish planning system we are writing to express our concern about the current condition of the Planning (Scotland) Bill which is currently making its way through the Scottish Parliament’s legislative processes.

The independent review of the Scottish planning system which was commissioned by Scottish Ministers in September 2015 tasked us with undertaking a root & branch review and encouraged us to explore game-changing ideas for radical reform of the system.

In its 2015 Programme for Government, the Scottish Government committed to a review that would look at wide-ranging issues affecting the planning system, including how planning is resourced and how we can streamline and improve our system in Scotland. One of the particular aims of the review was to increase delivery of high-quality housing developments, by delivering a quicker, more accessible and efficient process.    The panel also envisaged a planning system that would enable communities to readily and meaningfully engage in decision-making, that would rationalise a complex system and one that would be properly resourced to deliver on this. As such, the review was conducted in the spirit of delivering an efficient, inclusive and more simplified planning system.

In May 2016, the panel concluded its review and published Empowering Planning to Deliver Great Places. The report set out 48 recommendations across six themes. Public discussion at the time indicated widespread general support for the recommendations of the review.

It is now apparent that the likely impact of recent amendments introduced during Stage Two proceedings will lead to significant departures from our original recommendations and that these will place a range of additional burdens upon local authorities and the Scottish Government, as well as those working in Scotland’s private and third sectors.  Indeed, it is estimated by the RTPI that the Bill adds 91 additional burdens to the current planning system (66 on Local Authorities and 25 on the Scottish Government).    

Accordingly, despite the well-focussed objectives of the Review Panel, at its current stage in the legislative process the Planning (Scotland) Bill finds itself dangerously close to creating a system that is more complex than before, more remote and in danger of losing the spirit of the original review recommendations.

We feel that without swift intervention from the Scottish Government Scotland is at risk of being left with a planning system that operates in ways directly counter to the key principles of simplification, efficiency and effective place-making that we placed at the heart of our review’s conclusions in 2016.

Whilst we remain encouraged that several positive aspects of the Bill envisaged by our review remain on course for delivery, such as the creation of local place plans or the desire to involve young people on planning issues, there remain fundamental flaws which make it difficult for us, as members of the original independent review of planning, to support the draft legislation in the form that is now being proposed.

Notwithstanding the fact that MSPs approaching the bill at Stage Two have clearly had varying and sometimes wholly opposing views of the bill’s purpose, we are hopeful that practical steps might be taken to ensure that this vital legislation has the once-in-a-generation positive impact on our planning system that was originally foreseen.

In light of the concerns articulated in summary above, we are writing to you to request an early meeting to discuss how the Bill can be brought to a state which more closely mirrors the recommendations and outcomes advocated by the independent review of planning in 2016.

We look forward to hearing from you at your earliest convenience. 

Yours Sincerely, 

Signed:

Crawford Beveridge (Chair) 

Petra Biberbach 

John Hamilton