the use of the Sustainable Development Goals, according to the statistician

A bit more than a week ago, I attended Utvecklingsforum 2015 [Development forum 2015], a yearly event arranged by the Swedish international development and cooperation agency Sida. Quite naturally, the subject of this years event was the Sustainable Development Goals. My boss, Johan Rockström, was one of the keynote speakers, and he was all fire, explaining how we’re now in a unique position to change the trajectory of where the development of Earth and its societies are going. We’re at a window of opportunity, to use some resilience terminology, and the SDGs are one tool by which this change of trajectory can be achieved.

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I’ve heard that speech before, but it’s always a joy to listen to Rockström. He’s a great speaker.

But there were plenty of other speakers, from all different kinds of areas, a minister, a director-general and experts of different kinds. It was interesting to listen to, to get the perspective on development and the SDGs from other areas of expertise than research, where I myself mostly dabble.

However, the point made that stuck to my mind the most, was a comment from a statistician from Statistics Sweden. When discussing the new SDGs, its natural to also talk about the Millennium Goals, and how well they’ve been achieved. The extent to which the MGs have actually been part of that positive development in the world is debatable. Would the improvements in health and education that we’ve seen during the last 15 years have happened anyway, as a natural course of economic development, even without the MGs? We’ll never know. But what the statistician said was that thanks to the MGs, there actually is data proving that many of the goals set up through the MGs have been, if not achieved, then very much improved. Thanks to the MGs, global, regional and national datasets have been collected regarding the state of the goals. And, as I’ve been made painfully aware in the research project that I’m currently working in, good statistical data can be very hard to come by. That countries and organizations started collecting data on the MGs has made it possible to prove that change actually has happened in these areas of human existence.

Now the SDGs have been agreed upon. And one may question their usefulness. Can a list of goals really do anything? Will not change happen anyway, regardless? I don’t know. But what I do believe is that, if defined and measured well, the SDGs can make my life as an environmental researcher a lot easier. Eight of the goals are directly or indirectly related to environmental issues, and if collection of good statistical data on these goals is started now, there will be a gold mine of datasets to work with for researchers in a decade or so. And with that, we’ll be able to take yet another step forward in our understanding of how our societies and Earth functions and everything interacts. I can’t wait!

meeting the future development professionals

Also written on that train, on Wednesday ten days ago:

Doing fieldwork is tough, especially under the circumstances when Elli and I did ours, but having gotten through it somewhat successfully can open certain very attractive doors. This is what the rest of the sessions were about: What can we do now? Do traineeships at NGOs, work at the UN, the EU and Swedish ministries, become development work consultants, volunteers or do research. We got tips on how to write CVs and how to behave at interviews, and in general how to survive in this highly competitive development industry. The qualifications required for some of the positions that were discussed were insane, and to get your foot in, so many unpaid hours are required.

And it was brought up by some of the participants by the end of the course, what a contradiction it all is. How competitive it is, how almost impossible it is to get a job in this area, when all we want to do is something good for the world. In order to be able to get in, we need to become totally fixated on ourselves and how to build the perfect CV. How sick that is, when you think about it.

And, of course, part of the problem is that there is too little money in these organizations. They can’t pay all the people who deserve to get payed, because the funding is too limited. But I also think that there is a more fundamental issue here. People who want to do good want to go into this field, because it’s in the UN or NGOs where they feel that they can achieve that. It’s the obvious place to go. However, there are other places to do good too, places that might do a much bigger difference. If you actually scrutinize the choices that the well-educated, young do-gooders have. Business investments might have a bigger impact on global development. Or different aspects of consumer power. Or national politics of rich countries, seemingly unrelated to the development of poor regions of the world. Influencing these might be a much more efficient way to make the world a better place. Or just simply to make a lot of money and donating it to good causes.

I’m questioning myself here too. The way that I am headed now, career-wise, is in a sense pointing straight into this development industry. And I’m not saying it is wrong. I just can’t say that it is right either. I can just say that many of the things that I think are wrong in the world stem from how we conduct ourselves here, in the rich part of the world. We need to change here. But that doesn’t mean that change can’t happen over there, in all the other, non-Western, less rich places too. I just don’t know who should be the instigator, facilitator and implementer of this change. And I certainly don’t know where I best fit in to all of this.

Oh, there are so many things to consider. I don’t know where to start.

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remembering fieldwork

Written in a train on Wednesday, 10 days ago:

I have spent the last couple of days in Härnösand at an MFS reunion. MFS (Minor Field Study) is the grant that Elli and I received from Sida (the Swedish international development cooperation agency) to do our fieldwork in Burkina Faso. It is a grant given to thesis-writing bachelor and master students who want to go and do fieldwork in a “developing country”. Before anyone is allowed to go out in the field, we have to take a preparatory course (which Elli and I did a year ago), and now they arranged an optional follow-up course for us MFS alumni.

It consisted of a combination of fieldwork debrief and sessions about what to do from now on, if we want to stick around in the development sector.

I found the sessions on fieldwork debrief oddly unsettling and came out of them with a feeling of wanting to cry. I had forgotten how tough mine and Elli’s particular fieldwork experience had been, what with coup d’état and Elli’s malaria and how certain relationships with our local contacts developed, partly due to culture clashes. Hearing of other’s both tough and exuberantly positive experiences made me feel ill at ease when trying to relate those to my own. Maybe I haven’t had time to properly deal with what I went through, emotionally.

(Another indicator of this is how distracted I got when the news came of the brief military coup that took place in Burkina a couple of weeks ago. It’s natural to get worried and frustrated when news of that sort reaches you, of course, but the way I emotionally responded to the news, with problems concentrating and general despair, makes me think I probably had some kind of coup d’état flashbacks from last October.)

Doing fieldwork is though. I think it is rare that anyone returns home from a three month fieldwork experience only bringing back the collected data. I had hundreds of GPS coordinates, photographs and notes, but I also brought home a whole new person. Me, changed. I might not have had time to fully understand the traces left in me by Burkina Faso yet.

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journeying

Sunday, two weeks ago:

I’m on a train between Stockholm and Härnösand.

And I am reminded: It is possible that this is the time of year when Sweden is at its most beautiful. The aspen and birch bright yellow, the spruce and pine a heavy contrast. The grass around the small lakes and marshes has turned light and brittle. And the blueberry shrubs on the forest floor have acquired a deep red. I never noticed before, what a passionate shade October gives to the blueberries’ leaves.

The combination of colors outside the train windows, the greens and yellows and reds and browns. The sky a soft blue, and the setting sun glittering behind the trees. It makes my head spin.

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***

Later, the Härnösand skyline. Water can make most places beautiful.

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the diary of a bicyclist

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Waking up to a world covered in crystals and mist. The air first turning my lungs into frost, before my heart has had the chance to get properly started.

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And then going home under a sky that turns from orange to purple, through the smells of brackish sea, yellow leaves and decaying apples under old trees.

On those days, it doesn’t matter much if the time in between is a labyrinth I can’t seem to find my way out of, the data isn’t making sense and conceptual frameworks to abstract to grasp. I have my wheels, and that is enough for today.

where I come from

I come from a land of forests and lakes. Small fields and small conglomerates of civilization like satellites among all the green and the blue. It’s never as obvious, as when I return home, flying in over the Mälardalen landscape. The odd grove of deciduous trees have started getting yellow and red edges, on the precipice of decay.

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This is the land I come from. A land of water and woods. How could I ever, truly, understand the consequences of parched soil?

readings on the beach

Our last afternoon in Lisbon, dad and I took the train out to the beach, to spend some time by the Atlantic with sand between our toes. It was really nice, lying there in the still summer-hot sun, reading, and taking short swims in the chilly Atlantic waves. A last pinch of summer, before we returned to the cold, darkening autumn of Stockholm.

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I was reading “The Poisonwood Bible” by Barbara Kingsolver. It is a tale about an American missionary family’s destruction and slow recovery in and out of the deep Congo, from the late 1950s and onward. In a brutal and honest story, the modern history of DR Congo is told through the eyes of the mother and four daughters of the family. But within that, other stories are also told. A story of a war-traumatized, overly-dominant father and what that can do to a family. A story about sisterly and motherly love. A story about being white in Sub-Saharan Africa. A story of colonialism.

It is a good book. An important book. Especially the way she captures the complexities that arises Africa and the West meet. And just like Leah, one of the sisters, I wonder if the way this complexity has been dealt with thus far, on both sides, is even the tiniest bit constructive. That maybe we, the West and development workers in particular, are way too rigid in our definition of what development is. Maybe a step back is what is needed. A rebooting of both systems, in order for us to maybe better understand the similarities and differences between us. What should be changed, and what is good as it is.

It doesn’t give any answers, the book. But it is an interesting story. Kingsolver puts words to thoughts that I myself haven’t been able to verbalize, but still have felt for a long time. And she writes beautifully, with a language that sprawls, just like her characters.