Ngaire Woods – Globalization, Governance and Large Scale Change – Skoll World Forum 2011

Dr. Ngaire Woods, professor of International Political Economy and Academic Director of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, delivers a speech on globalization, governance and large scale change at the 2011 Skoll World Forum opening plenary.

Good evening and thank you for inviting me to be here. It's a very exciting event and I'm delighted to be part of it. Now you might well wonder why someone who works on global intergovernmental organizations and someone who is now setting up a school of government, the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford, is here speaking at the Skoll forum on social entrepreneurship.

I did wonder that when Sally and Pamela and the organizers asked me to take part in this conversation. And I have to say over the last two weeks, the conversations I had with people were not reassuring. I asked my government colleagues what they thought of social entrepreneurship and some of them, I think one of them, one of the diplomats said: "Hm, subsidized business with a social conscience.

I'm not so sure were about that. Of course, what lies underneath that view that social entrepreneurship is over there and government is over there is a recognition in most governments of the world that social entrepreneurs are bringing an energy, a client and community focus, innovation and information, into areas which we used to think of as public policy and we now think of as social policy and social entrepreneurship.

And that is a really important addition to the way in which communities can serve themselves and serve others. But I suspect... my conversations with people arriving to take part in the forum, were equally disquieting. It seems to me that the admiration that government might not have for all of social entrepreneurship, is shared by the admiration that social entreneurs do not have the government and for multilateral organizations.

At first sight, I would confess most governments are not agile, competitive, and entrepreneurial. In fact, there was a story that used to be told in Brazil about twenty years ago about a lion escaping from the zoo and running into the government buildings and every day the lion would eat a government official.

Nobody noticed. Nobody noticed until after 365 days, the lion made the terrible mistake of eating the tea lady and then everybody noticed. Others would point to America's arch diplomat, John Bolton's comment that, if we removed the upper floors the entire upper half of the United Nations building.

In fact, I think in that memorable diplomatic way of his, he suggested if we blew off the top half of the United Nations building, nobody would notice the result. I think for some of us who work with passion and enthusiasm on multilateral cooperation, the disquieting thing in that , was a slight suspicion that sometimes it might be true.

But I think what I would like to talk about tonight is the way in which in fact if we peel back these hostilities from the two worlds, there is a whole lot that these two worlds can learn from each other, and I guess what I'd like to do is just to mention five ways, in which multilateral cooperation, in which the international organizations, which look so slow and tortuous to most social entrepreneurs, are in fact learning quite a lot of social entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship and making that part of the way they operate. Just before I go there though, I do want to say Third conversation I had about the forum somebody who so would I have speaking on and came up to me and said In wonderment. You don't really believe in global governance, do you ? As if it was sort of cult religion.

What do you mean by that, that's what academics always say by the way when they're asked a tricky question, but my answer to that is there is, there is no solution to some quite tricky narrow problems without global cooperation. Global cooperation is not the solution to most problems, most problems have local solutions but there are some problems, which are collective action problems, there are some problems which no individual community or government can solve without other Governments acting with them whether if their financial crisis or containment of infectious disease and its for that whether we like it or not we have to look to global governance and global cooperation.

The second point I'd like to make is that is necessarily torturous and slow. Hands up who took part in an election, to elect a government in the last ten years. Ah, so you're all active citizens. You see you didn't go through all that effort of electing your government, for your government to go off and tell international organizations to do whatever they like at any point in time.

You elected your government to serve you, and if that government is going to serve you, it's going to not let international organizations do much unless they go through a long and tortuous process of deliberations unless they protect your government's right to do as you would want your government to do?

That's why international cooperation's difficult its a protection of actually something that you probably hold quiet dear. So before we say, oh well it's all useless. We dont know who's in the cockpit and they're not acting quickly enough, we do have to recognize that trade off. But nevertheless, it is torturous and slow, but my point tonight is that a very large part of multilateral cooperation is changing very fast and not many people are noticing.

About 80% of the budgets now being spent by the world's largest international organisations... about 80% is actually discretionary , it's special budgets aimed for specific purposes and governed by those countries who are putting up the money and putting up the money in proportion to the results that they can see.

So what is it about this new multilateral-ism that I think reflects some lessons learned from social entrepreneurship? There's five things... and not all of these things are unproblematic. So let me give you the five things And just quickly, three of the problems that emerged from them, that I think are the next set of challenges for you all as social entrepreneurs.

So first, participation - we're seeing the old fashioned every government gets the seat around the table crack open, as these new initiatives that are governed by boards which include civil society organizations, sufferers of diseases or people working on literacy, people from the communities that these initiatives serve.

Think of Ghavi, think of the global fund, think of the new vertical initiatives in global governance. Second, we're seeing a task focus, a focus not on trying to resolve all systems, but solving one problem and focusing an initiative to solve that one problem. We are seeing a very demand driven approach as I said contributions end just at that one effort in multilateral cooperation.

We are seeing a new way of working with the users with a much greater user focus. So institutions were In country, more directly with those who are actually delivering results in country. And finally, we are seeing a real shift. To what I would call results based legitimacy, your legitimacy as an organization being measured against whether you are.

Our acheiving the narrow goal that has been set for that activity so these are the five way in which we're watching multilateral organizations; create initiatives which are more agile, nimble, focused which resemble a lot of the qualities that government officials, secretly without telling you all, were gazing at your social Entrepreneurship activities wishing that they could do but they not without some problems and I just like to mention three When we talk about opening up participation, bringing civil society organizations in, bringing in social entrepreneurs.

Bringing in affected community groups, bringing them to the table of governance, let's not forget that they very quickly become stake holders in the status quo. In other words, the radical entrepreneur or civil society representative very quickly becomes the most ardent defender of the organization and the board on which they now have a seat.

So beware, you might soon wish you had lions in your organization rather than the new sets of vested interests. The second concerns the task focus, and this I think is an issue for the scaling up discussion of the next three days. The vertical initiatives in global governance, the ones that say we are gonna focus all our efforts on combating HIV/AIDS for example, or in delivering treatment for HIV AIDS to communities, do pose a question of who is accountable for those mortality, do you spend it on ARV's.

When you have a government making that decision, there is a very accountability where communities can elect or throw out their governments through elections. If it's the international community or external actors bringing those priorities in, then who is accountable? Is it just the fact that one campaign hires the Best public relations firm is the world, that leads that to be the legitimate priority for a community in Zambia or do we want to rethink that and think about the social part of social entrepreneurship and ask, who is socially accountable for the priorities that we might be inadvertently setting inside communities that's an issue for the new multilateral initiatives, I think its an issue for scaled up social entrepreneurship.

And finally the paying for what you get model. The idea the great part of this is demand driven, stop forcing on people what you think you can deliver best and start want so work with it to deliver social service and other things. But the problem is that to triangulate it against public knowledge.

That's just one of the many public goods that we fund through governments, that we fund through multilateral organizations but the social entrepreneurship scales up you might want to consider in your own sector as to to how it is that you will ensure that those public goods are actually being delivered.

So in sum, I guess my message would be that as you scale up you will need to collaborate as Jell Skull said in his opening ways for you to work with them and it also shows you the way that your work can effect them. Finally of course, it shows you some of the challenges that you might find in your own organizations as you scale up.

But with that I'd like to stop and leave it to you solve these problems over the next few days. Thank you very much.
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