From Poverty to Power: a blogger’s story
Duncan Green, Chapter for ‘Popular Representations of Development’
From Poverty to Power (FP2P) began life in 2008 as a ‘weblog’ (blog) to promote the launch of the Oxfam book of the same name. It rapidly took on a life of its own, becoming one of the most widely read blogs on international development. This chapter explores the evolution of FP2P, how blogging compares with other representations of development, and the challenges of blogging within a large bureaucratic institution. It draws possible lessons for both academic and NGO blogging.
The weblog (blog) FP2P went live in July 2008, as part of the promotion for my new book, From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States can Change the World (Oxfam/Practical Action Publishing, 2008).
FP2P went live at a time of dynamic explosion in web-based communication. As Ryan Manning wrote in the first edition of this book:
‘Recent years have seen an explosion of Internet-based communication and publishing forums, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to more traditional websites. These have dramatically lowered the barriers to producing and distributing content, and people can now easily share information, experiences, perspectives, artwork, and almost anything else with their fellow Internet users around the world. Some decry this proliferation of online publishing as chaotic, overwhelming, rife with minutiae, and lacking in standards. Others claim it heralds the emergence of a more democratic, inclusive world of free speech, public debate, open exchange of knowledge, and global collaboration.’[1]
As an erstwhile journalist and wordsmith, I took to the blogging format immediately, and early posts show that the blog rapidly settled down into a format which more or less continues to this day: comments on events (this being 2008, ‘How will the meltdown affect development?’[2]); reviews of new publications (‘Does Grassroots Activism Work? Two new collections of case studies’[3]); curtain raisers for important events (‘It’s G8 time again’[4]) tips for NGO activists (Killer Facts: a User’s Guide’[5]) and discussions of ‘big ideas’(‘Will we ever be able to talk about limits to growth?[6]’).
I have found that writing and curating a blog has created something akin to an international community with shared interests and values, engaging in conversations on a daily basis. The exchanges are often intense, and both intellectual and emotional – bumping into regular participants in the flesh at conferences or on field trips can resemble an encounter with an old friend. It is both more democratic than many more conventional NGO and academic fora, and yet not democratic enough – a point discussed later in this chapter – but it has become one of the most rewarding parts of my current role at Oxfam.
Over time, FP2P has made greater use of guest posts, with my role often being as much that of editor/curator, as of sole author. The blog has also run some 50 reader polls[7]. In 2012, I added an active twitter account, which both promotes and feeds off the blog. At the time of writing @fp2p has about 34,000 twitter followers, high by the standards of the aid industry. I have also experimented with vlogging[8] (short video blogs) and debates between high profile protagonists on controversial issues such as the role of evidence[9], or private education[10] (see box X).
Rising visibility ensured that what had initially been a short-term promotional exercise was recognized as a useful part of my day job (as Head of Research, and subsequently as Oxfam’s Strategic Adviser), accounting for approximately 10 paid hours per week (plus a few unpaid ones). Since 2012, relevant FP2P posts have been cross posted on the World Bank’s governance blog[11] with other crossposts on various LSE-hosted blogs and elsewhere.
According to Wordpress, the platform on which FP2P appears, at the time of writing (September 2017), FP2P had hosted over 2,000 posts, with a cumulative total of over 1.5 million words. Reader comments averaged 5 per post.
Who Reads the Blog?
Data on readership is available from Google Analytics, which measures the numbers of direct hits on the site (though not reposts, excerpts etc). After a slow start (less than 14,000 ‘unique visitors’[12] in its first six months), traffic increased steadily for the first four years, and since late 2012, has fluctuated around an average of 30,000 UVs per month.
Google Analytics also provides some information on the location of readers. The most recent summary on FP2P (of data for 2016)[13] shows that just under half of its 320,000 UVs were based in UK and US, with no other country exceeding 5% of readership.
Those used to academic download numbers will probably see these figures as high, while anyone from traditional print media outlets such as newspapers and magazines will find them strikingly low. The truth (at least in the case of FP2P) is that the blog has provided a platform for a specialist conversation with a relatively narrow, but global, readership.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most read post over the 9 years of FP2P is a ‘funny’. Published in 2011, ‘What Brits Say v What They Mean’[14] circulated widely on social media, attracting 36,000 direct hits on the FP2P page. As is often the way with such viral memes, the original source is unknown. The other most-read FP2P posts give a good sense of the breadth and randomness of the internet. They include the country specific, (a post on climate change in South Africa[15]), the practical/self-help advice post (‘How to get a PhD in a year (without giving up the day job)’[16]), the controversial (how much should charity bosses be paid?[17]) and the campaign polemic (comparing country GDPs to the turnovers of the largest global corporations[18]).
Readers arrive at the blog through a number of channels. 7,000 people receive email notifications of new posts, while some 3,000 have signed up via the popular Feedly RSS feed[19]. Feedly also offers a crude yardstick to compare readership with other development blogs. Chris Blattman[20] has 6,000 followers, The Guardian’sdevelopment site[21]2,000, the Center for Global Development[22] 1,000 and the Overseas Development Institute[23] 700.
The most recent survey of readers conducted by FP2P comes from 2012[24]. Based on 352 responses to an online survey, over two fifths (44%) of the readers worked for NGOs (a third of them for Oxfam). A further 19% were academics and students and 15% from government or multilateral organizations, suggesting a fairly specialised development sector audience.
Readership is, of course, not the same as impact (on discourse, policy or practice), and here the evidence is much more patchy. It is hard to pick out any one post as having had more influence than others. Instead the impact appears to be cumulative, based on multiple posts exploring a range of themes that have evolved with my own interests and in response to external events. Threads of posts in the early years concentrated on the developmental impact of the global financial crisis, subsequently moving on to inequality and, most recently, governance and theories of change. It is these extended conversations that appear to have most resonance.
As far as the author knows, the only independent evidence that goes beyond the anecdotal is from a 2012 report on attitudes among ‘influentials’ in US, UK, China, France and Germany. ‘Building Support for International Development’[25], by Intermedia Europe (a research organization) involved a survey of 3,984 Interested Citizens in the UK, France, Germany, China, U.S, along with In-depth interviews of 88 ‘Influentials’ across the China, France, Germany, U.K., U.S. and 40 Government Decision-Makers in the UK, France, Germany, U.S.
The study identified FP2P as among the five most influential blogs on international development among ‘influentials’ in UK, France and Germany (though not US and China), and among government officials in UK.
Interestingly, Intermediadrew a distinction between ‘institutional’ bloggers linked to a recognized organization (such as FP2P/Oxfam) and unaffiliated individual bloggers, finding ‘Blogs sponsored by recognized institutions are popular, including those run by recognized development NGOs (e.g. Oxfam) and multilateral funders/agencies (e.g. the World Bank)..... Among new generation influentials, institutional bloggers appear to have much stronger links to government decision-makers than independent bloggers’ (pages 8, 28).
Swimming Pool-Gate and bringing internal aid debates to life
The ‘Nairobi Swimming Pool’ post[26] of January 2012 has become somewhat notorious in the aid sector, providing a case study for books such as ‘International Aid and the Making of a Better World’ (Eyben, Routledge, 2014). Its popularity lay in laying bare the kind of difficult decisions and dilemmas that are a regular occurrence in aid work, but which are seldom discussed in public.
‘Nairobi is a major NGO hub, currently the epicentre of the drought relief effort, and Oxfam's regional office realized some years ago that we could save a pile of money if we ran our own guesthouse, rather than park the numerous visitors in over-priced hotels. It's nothing fancy, definitely wouldn't get many stars, but it's much more relaxed than a hotel.
But there's a problem. As a large converted house in a nice part of town, and like most such houses in Nairobi, it has a swimming pool. But the swimmingpool is covered over and closed, even though it would be cheap to keep it open. Why? Reputational risk - back in the UK, where swimming pools are luxury items, Oxfam's big cheeses saw a tabloid scandal in the making and closed it. It didn't help when some bright spark decided to advertise for a swimming pool attendant on the Oxfam website......
On my recent stay at the guesthouse, I asked everyone I met there and whether African orexpat, they all said it makes sense to open the pool. Exhausted aid workers arrive hot and dusty from remote areas of East Africa for some R&R, but there's no chance of a refreshing swim. I need my exercise so had to go running instead - the combination of altitude, hills and choking traffic fumes nearly killed me.
On the other hand there's no denying that most of our supporters back in the UK, let alone the people we are working to help, are not likely to have access to a pool in their back yard, so why should aid workers get special treatment?
So what do you think? Should Oxfam open the pool and take any bad publicity on the chin, or should we stop whining? It would probably cost about $200-300 a month to keep the pool open - if we could find a way to do it without creating an accounting nightmare, we could probably raise that from contributions from guests, and even have money to spare to plough back into Oxfam programmes.’
The post sparked record numbers of comments (89 to date) and votes. Of 800 people who took part in the poll, 75% urged Oxfam to re-open the pool, while only 7% argued for keeping it shut.
However the post itself became part of the problem, when it was picked up by anti-aid journalist Ian Birrell in an article in The Spectator[27], which argued that ‘Mr Green’s blog highlighted the contortions of a thriving industry that would go out of business if it succeeded in its stated aims.’ In the middle of a famine response in East Africa, Oxfam press officers were forced to handle enquiries from journalists about the Great Swimming Pool Debate. I had to apologise to them, and the pool remained closed.
Encouraging Debate
Individually authored posts may receive comments from readers, but the power imbalance is decidedly asymmetric: the author gets more space, a privileged position (original posts are seen as more weighty than comments) and (if the author is also the blog curator) has the option of the last word. Debates betweendifferent authors are more horizontal, and often attract considerable interest. Two of the most successful debates on FP2P covered the role of evidence and results, and private v public provision of education.
On evidence and results, two senior DFID figures, Chris Whitty (Director of Research and Evidence) and Stefan Dercon (Chief Economist) took on two prominent academic critics of the ‘results agenda’, Chris Roche (Latrobe University) and Rosalind Eyben (IDS). Both sides came out roughly equal in a subsequent reader poll. I summarized the debate and reader reactions with some difficulty, as my sympathies were with the critics, but I had to acknowledge that the supporters of the results agenda had had the best of the argument.[28]
Writing the summary also highlighted the additional contribution made by the numerous comments (75 in all, many substantial), which among other things, emphasized the gulf between the debates and what those incharge of gathering results in aid agencies actually face – highly constrained resources, crazy time pressure, and the need to deliver results to feed the aid machine.
On public v private education provision, Kevin Watkins of ODI took on Justin Sandefur of the Center for Global Development through two rounds of erudite and occasionally bruising exchanges[29] (one participant commented ruefully ‘I hadn’t realized blogging was such a blood sport’), generating 56 comments from a range of practitioners and academics.
Multi-author debates are time consuming to organize, and to participate in – they work best when contributors respond to each other swiftly, and to comments from readers, which requires freeing up a considerable amount of time. Experts are often reluctant to be pigeon-holed as ‘for’ or ‘against’ a particular point of view. There is a tendency for antagonists to caricature their opponents’ arguments (straw men) and to use cheap debating shots to score points, as well as more dispassionate argument.
But done well, debates attract readers and can be excellent at highlighting and comparing the different arguments around an issue.
Some of the most searching discussions take place around book reviews, which are usually popular on FP2P (although I fear that is because they save people from having to read the actual book). Recent (September 2017) back-to-back reviews of books on developmental success in China[30] and Bangladesh[31] triggered a third post[32] comparing the two, and a debate involving both authors, and readers, on the nature of development in those countries and the lessons for others. This kind of exchange shows the value of blogging in turning reading books from a passive to an active process.
Blogging v other representations of development
Over the years, I have been involved in a range of different roles in aid and development – as an activist, journalist, thinktank writer, scholar, civil servant, NGO researcher and advocate. Each has involved talking and writing about development in different ways to different audiences through different media.
Of all these, blogging stands out as a form of continuous engagement with a specialist audience, in which ideas and arguments can evolve and be sharpened over time. The conversation can be searching and bad ideas can be easily shot down, as I found when I road tested a 2x2 matrix on fragility and conflict in the final stages of writing a book, How Change Happens (OUP, 2016)[33]. The 2x2 never made it into the final text.
Writing How Change Happens also revealed other weaknesses of blogging. I initially thought that a book could emerge from the blog in an organic way, pulling together the archive on particular issues and polishing it into a chapter form. But the arguments in blog posts proved simply too superficial to provide the deeper conceptual basis for a book, and I was forced to go back to a more traditional research and writing approach. I did, however, publish the draft text on the blog[34], and got some useful commentary (as well as advance publicity).
Blog conversation is undeniably asymmetric – in this field, the blogger presents themselves as an ‘expert’, or else no-one will click through. It also reflects the broader distribution of power and influence in both society and academia: most international development bloggers are ‘pale, male and stale’ (white, male and old), although national-level blogging is much more diverse. Efforts to diversify the contributors to FP2P have come up against a scarcity of resources and time (for example to work with authors or transcribe interviews). I am currently discussing possible funding with a foundation that could help address this.
Despite such flaws, blogging is often relatively less asymmetric than journalism, film or book-writing, or even academic exchange with students who can be cowed by the power hierarchies within universities.
Public debate is more horizontal, but also more rancorous and often less informed. I am always struck by how little aggression emerges on FP2P, compared to other parts of the internet (I have only ever had one reader you might call a troll, and even he was merely on a nerdy mission to critique Oxfam’s education policy at every opportunity).
Blogging also allows me to build bridges with other representations of development. One of the early posts was entitled ‘I just read four novels in a row’[35]. The informal, personal nature of blogging makes it much easier to introduce other disciplines and forms, recognize the multifaceted nature of readers’ lives and at the same time, have a little fun with the often rather solemn discourse of development in more formal channels. FP2P has used a Bob Marley lyric as an executive summary for an IMF report on food prices[36] and Tolstoy’s War and Peace as an introduction to systems thinking.[37]