Good morning. It is seven o'clock on the West Coast and 10 o'clock on the East Coast, which is what time we said we would start so I am going to kick it off. Thank you very much for the panelists for being here. Thank you to the 35 and growing attendees. Really excited to be hosting this event. My name is Michael Bralia. I'm the director of the future of property rights at New America, which is a think tank in DC. Future property rights exists to advocate to educate and advocate for about the technologies we could be using to address property rights. Property rights is a problem, challenging problem that is only growing right now. There's a lot of trends from urbanization to climate change to just the number of people we were trying to help. And we're not necessarily always using the best solutions for that. So future property rights is trying to help the community think about technologies that we could use to do that better and faster. So we're particularly excited to be hosting this because what we're going to talk about is the narrative around property rights and what we'll hear is that everyone's got a slightly different definition and a slightly different narrative, but I don't want to get ahead of us. And I'm really excited about this because because technology was used. To my knowledge, this was the first time there was a systematic data driven analysis of the how media is talking about property rights and the use of big data natural language processing to bring us these answers. Something I'm really, really glad this work was done. I'm going to basically just mentioned who our panelists are, and then I'm going to hand it over to our presenter to talk about this work and to share some slides and tell everybody about what's been done. And before I do the intro isn't handed over for the attendees I want to point out at the bottom of your screen, you can type in any of your questions and then we will get to those questions at the end. So please enter your questions on the bottom of the screen via the Q&A. Our presenter is Emily King. She's the director of customer solutions are protagonists, which is the firm that did this work. Each of the panelists introduce themselves just so we don't spend too much time on that. And then we have an amazing panel. Julia Panfield is in the property rights investments group at the media network. I had the pleasure of working with her for a couple of years now, and she always has great insights. Caitlin Myers is a vice president of Pleistman pillar. And then matri margie is a senior program officer at the wellspring philanthropic fund. So they will offer comment after Emily presents the incredible work that they've done that protagonist and then those who still joining please enter your questions at the bottom of your screen via Q&A. Thank you very much. Great, thanks Mike. I'm going to share my screen so bear with me here for a second. And hopefully this will work. So just let me know if you can see my presentation. I'm getting some head nods from the panelists. So I think we're good. Okay, well, good morning everyone. Again, my name is Emily Kane. I work with protagonist and I'm a director of customer solutions and we have been working with the Omidyar network on a number of different projects for a number of years and started our work around the property rights narrative. I believe in 2015. So really excited to share that work with all of you this morning. But first I do want to just give a really quick background on how we think about narratives at protagonist and how we define and evaluate them as well. So we think narratives are persistent stories that hold power. We live in a world that's constantly in flux and there's a ton of information available to us. So narratives are the structured stories that people use to articulate their beliefs in order to make sense of the world. And they act as these mental models that allow us to make shortcuts, enable decisions from everything from what products we buy, who we vote for and causes that we believe in. So narratives are really critical for building a movement around a topic and strong narratives can bring an issue to life leading to social change and new laws and policies.  So understanding how to discern these underlying beliefs or these narratives that drive social movement are really imperative to help shape a discourse. So what narrative analytics does is essentially assess narratives in a systemic and data driven way that identifies, analyzes and tracks narratives that matter to a certain issue and allows organizations to better understand the dynamics of a discourse and understand opportunities available them to shape the conversation. And the way we do this is we look at online media across all different platforms. So traditional news outlets blogs, forums, social media to capture the narratives that people are expressing. We surface the corresponding narratives that that we see and then apply the suite of metrics to the narratives to derive meaning of to what people are saying. So going back specifically to property rights. We know that right now it doesn't. Sorry, I'm having a little trouble with my screen here you can still see. I'm on slide for yeah okay. So thinking about property rights and our work with our media with our media. We know that it doesn't really lack. It doesn't really have a strong narrative that some other social economic and environmental topics have like I mentioned some of the earlier ones so a media came to us and wanted to know how to change that so. But in order to make movement on that first we have to know what the current status is. So we asked the question where does the property rights narrative stands specifically. What are people talking about and how does that differ across different geographies. How has that conversation changed over time and where is this conversation taking place. So we did this analysis in two parts. We first actually started with just observing the English conversation globally. And then a media came back and said this is great. But how does that compare to the Spanish conversation and would there be any difference. So that's why you'll see here the timeframe of the data that we pulled was a little bit different. So we pulled thousands of data points into our technology platform. So 42,000 for the English conversation 20,000 articles and blogs alone the Spanish conversation. And as Mike said what our technology does is essentially use natural language processing and artificial intelligence to find patterns claims trends in the content. And what that does is it allows to actually have some of the data fall out because it's not always what we call narrative rich. So we're looking for very authentic opinions emotional language rhetorical questions, writing that takes a really strong point of view. So what this does is it allows us to filter out paid content and noisy data, take out any surface level mentions or passive mentions of property and land rights. And so we ended up with over 30,000 articles and posts in combined with the English and Spanish conversation. So that's really the narrative rich content that gives us a window into how people are talking about property rights. And this next slide shows you the 10 narratives that we found in the conversation. So this answers the first question I outlined what are people talking about. So, since we captured the English conversation first we actually weren't sure when we pulled the Spanish data if they were going to be different narratives. And what we found is actually it was the same topic sorry the same narratives. And the difference was the topics that were contributing to the narratives were different. So, if narratives are the structured stories that that people use to conceptualize and articulate their beliefs. Topics are events that can be used interchangeably and different narratives to support what we call the call to action and a call to action helps a narrative subscriber coalesce on what the potential change or solution is to have a more favorable outcome. So I wanted to spend a couple of minutes walking you through a very abbreviated version of what these narratives are. So normally when we do our research, we have an entire paragraph from the point of view of the narrative subscriber that talks about the background and the call to action. So, I'll just go over these briefly, which will help sort of set up the rest of the analysis we did in the coming slides. So the first narrative we found was land grabbing and this is all about governments preserving property rights for themselves the rich incorporations and they routinely undermine individuals and farmers rights by giving land away for industrial use or public projects. Second is property rights are human rights. This idea that property rights must be respected and guaranteed to all individuals balancing and individual and community rights. This is the discussion around a flexible system that's needed so governments can intervene and establish land policies that advance social and environmental good. The fourth narrative is importance of women's property rights, and this talks about equal property rights for women and how they are critical to promote overall economic growth and empower women. Writing historical wrongs. This is around racial inequalities and the ethnic tensions that persists today through unequal access to land and natural resources for local indigenous people. And land reform is essential to create fair societies and correct the historical injustices. This is the idea that property rights are essential to our healthy market economy and indicator of economically free and prosperous societies. So respect for land ownership instills confidence in foreign investors whose business investments stimulate national development. Property rights aren't a silver bullet. This is actually a narrative around how while property rights are an important step in helping people achieve social and economic justice. It's insufficient alone in reversing discrimination against marginalized groups. Strong laws weak enforcement. This is around weak institutions and corrupt law enforcement officers essentially render well intended laws meaningless governments must take responsibility for ensuring that property rights are upheld for all. Squatting is a crime. This was a new narrative that we found in our most recent round of research that talks about that squatters erect camps on private municipal property. When they do that they violate property rights of the property owners and taxpayers and they're a blight to communities and should be demolished. And the final narrative we found was land seizures for redistribution are harmful. So this is all around how when government sees land from property owners without a fair process it threatens economic growth by scaring off foreign investors and hurts the people that really need the most help. So land distribution redistribution it normally leads to corruption and really rarely helps the supposed beneficiaries. So these are the 10 topics we saw and derived out of this this very large data set. So the next logical question that we always ask ourselves is so how do you start to even understand when and where people are talking about this. So how important is each narrative. So we have a composite metric that we run on the data that helps us understand the relative prominence of each narrative within the overall conversation.  So one part we call it the impact score. So the first part is the volume and this captures the relative size of the audience for any of the narrative. And we calculate this by looking at not only the number of articles published but also the audience reach of the sources in which they're published. The other component of this metric is engagement. And this is how often each one of those articles posts are engaged with online through social media networks such as by sharing, liking, commenting, retweeting the article or post. So this helps us understand when people are talking about these issues how often are they talking about what's sort of the most dominant. And what you can see is that the land grabbing narrative really dominates the discussion so close to 50% of the conversation. And this is mainly driven by the highly emotional reaction in the English conversation around the Dakota access pipeline controversy or dapple. Which through its targeted social media campaigns particularly on Facebook and Twitter really helped build this opposite oppositional support. Conversely the Spanish conversation it discusses a lot of instances of corporate abuse, but none really gather this emotional response that we saw in English conversation around dapple. So this is actually from from a narrative perspective really interesting for us when we saw this graph. It's actually quite quite rare in the conversations that we've observed to see one narrative take up this much of the conversation. So normally we'll see one or two high impact narratives followed by a long tail, but it's much more evenly distributed excuse me. So this is actually a little bit unique to the property rights conversation. And so what that tells us from an issue perspective is that this land grabbing narrative really dwarfs the other ones. And indicates that this is really the only issue that's getting attention within the property broader property rights conversation. So what this says is is the conversation perhaps isn't as diverse as it as it needs to be. Another narrative that I want to point out here is the third narrative at 13% property rights are not a silver bullet. This is actually sort of the inverse of land grabbing when we're when we're looking at the the division between Spanish and English conversation. So in English this this narrative around property rights aren't a silver bullet is very policy driven, very wonky. It was very much sort of an insider baseball narrative in Spanish, however, that we had a totally different topic. The narrative was driven by coverage of collectives of small farmers protesting decreasing cost of agricultural goods and the threat this poses to their livelihoods. And so this the small landowners really occupy a meat role in Latin American history, and this narrative expresses that their property rights are threatened by global forces. And so this dichotomy of Spanish versus English really reflects the the the importance of understanding what's driving a narrative. So I'll stop there for a second. That is our main sort of workhorse metric that we use to start to understand how do we start to figure out what's most important. I want to show a couple other analysis that we did walking away from sort of the the conversation and looking actually more at where what regions really are what's coming up by region. And so we did this by looking at the most prominent narrative published in each region. And so we know from the previous slide that land grabbing dominates from an impact perspective. So you might expect that to be the most prominent narrative globally. But as you can see this is a very colorful map. And so what it indicates is there's really a diverse set of narratives prominent within different parts of the world. And so what this tells us is that where you where you live dictates the most common narrative that you'll come in contact with. It's really the regional issues that drive content, which in turn drive narratives. So as regional events become more influential, the property rights issues are becoming more fragmented. And this could have implications for practitioners, funders and policymakers because it speaks to this idea that when you're working within a certain region really obviously locality matters. The next analysis that I wanted to show you is this idea of how has the conversation shifted over time. And I have a set of two slides here. First, the Spanish conversation. We really wanted to see how over about the year, year and a half that we observed what was sort of rising to the top. So what you see here in the Spanish conversation, it was social and policy activists that really pushed narratives forward. The white spike in February 2017 is in property rights aren't a silver bullet. And this is this idea that the coverage around the small farmers could face the cost of agricultural goods going up and the scarcity of water. And that really sparked a lot of public protest and so we saw a lot of coverage there. We also saw this call to action a couple months later in importance of importance of women's property rights in the dark gray in April and this call to action around including more women activists in the property rights discussion. And then at the end of the time period you see how new economic policies announced for farmers in Mexico really amplifies this idea and this narrative around cornerstone of growth. So stepping back and sort of looking at this as a whole, one really important note here is that while individual narrative spike over time. The overall volume of the conversation is is pretty stable. That is in stark contrast to the English conversation. What we see here is a very volatile change in the discussion and this was around the land grabbing narrative in when the Dakota access pipeline was really sort of heating up and that debate was was front and center in the English conversation. And so this is actually again a very unique trend analysis in our work. I don't think we've ever really seen a trend line that so just dramatically spiked in a way that we did with with this English conversation. So that's very unique to the property rights conversation and potentially could have some implications on how you want to message around these sort of viral events. Another analysis we did was where is this conversation taking place. So we looked at all of our sources, excuse me, both in English and Spanish and qualitatively assessed the source type based on how many readers of publication has on a monthly basis. And as you can see from this pie chart the source analysis in both English and Spanish support this earlier regional analysis that local and regional events are really driving the conversations. As those are the publications that really publish the most content about property rights. International sources are the ones that have over 10 million monthly visitors, but are both actually very small. So I think the fourth smallest, sorry, the fifth smallest for English and fourth smallest for Spanish. So what that tells us is at the global scale and the broad international audience. This is not sort of top of mind in terms of what readers are seeing and ingesting. So our sort of top takeaways from this analysis that we've done will give you five I could talk about this all day, but most people just do five. So across the global English and Spanish conversations, the property rights discourse is largely occurring in traditional news outlets and blogs. So while social media channels are occasionally used to amplify and share certain narratives. They're not really conducive to in depth policy discussions and that's likely due to the character limits and other sort of idiosyncrasies of the medium. More often than not, social media reacts to content and themes that are in the headlines of traditional media rather than really driving the conversation. Publications with high readership numbers tell property rights stories that's actually decreased in the time that we've covered this topic. So our original analysis when we did this in 2015, the share of high readership publications or sort of international publications decreased from 24% to 16%. So what this tells us now is that property rights really aren't reaching a similar audience level across the two time periods. This third insight that we've already sort of discussed around local issues are spurring national and regional reporting prominent international outlet coverage really is less than 10% of all sources across the narrative conversation. But the national and regional sources account for almost 50%. The next insight is around the power of viral content. So most narratives when we looked at their impact scores had more volume than engagement, meaning there was a lot of stories published but there wasn't really any that got much republishing or social media. So this low engagement may indicate that these narratives are not triggering a highly emotional response or resonant campaigns that inspire widespread public mobilization and action. The one exception to this is the land grabbing narrative. So the strong frustration over perceived corporate misdeeds and the lack of adequate government response really drove high engagement, not only in land grabbing but also strong laws and weak enforcement. And but that's mostly due to the Dakota Access Pipeline social media campaign. And one actually analysis we did after we presented all this work to Omidyar, Yulia actually asked us to take out the Dakota Access Pipeline related content. And what we saw was, you know, what would happen to the narrative if we took out that viral content. We lost by 93%. So this really shows the power of when a land rights issue goes viral. There's some, there's really some momentum and ability to capitalize on that. So there's, that's there's some lessons to be learned there. Finally, in the Spanish conversation, globalization, particularly the liberal liberalization of agricultural and trade policies significantly drove activity in the Spanish discourse. And that's actually in really stark discord, stark contrast to the English discourse. Farmers reacting to decreasing prices. And that actually became the second most powerful narrative within Spanish conversation. Whereas in the English conversation, property rights as a silver bullet really was the seventh most impactful narrative. So there was definitely a difference we saw there. So what these insights tell us is that it's clear that the global conversation on property rights has room to grow. It needs to move beyond spot issues and take these regional issues global. And that will help give it more potential to to create strong public engagement and momentum as a social issue. So where do we go from here. Well, we've actually developed what we're calling the property rights barometer. And that measures the quality of the conversation, how it's changing and why it's changing. And so we're doing this through three different metrics on an annual basis. First, we're looking at volume. So the size and diversity of the content discussing property rights. So how much content is contributing to the narratives. What is the source diversity that we're seeing among the different publications. And where are these publications publishing. So how many countries are actually participating in the global conversation and property rights. We're also looking at engagement. So traction of the conversation through audience engagement and source quality. So we're looking at how many times content is shared and where it shared. And also the social quality. So the proportion of content that's in these high readership publications. We're also looking at this, this metric we're calling centrality. So this is the depth of conversation through topic relevance and language richness and what I mean by that is article relevance is really how central property rights is featured in the headline of content and the term frequency of property rights and associated words within the document. So is it front and center within the discussion or is it sort of a side issue or a passive mention. This idea of richness it's a it's an indicator we have that looks if an author is propagating a narrative using persuasive and judgmental language, which to us signals that it's very narrative rich, rather than stated facts unopposed to either side of the debate. So we've we've actually done this assessment with the 2016 data that we've collected and ranked the property rights conversation using these metrics at sort of a medium low quality level and we're going to do this again in sorry we did the 2017 data we're going to do it again with the 2018 19 and 20 conversation as well. So the reason right now it's medium low is the geography geographic diversity is it's not bad there's actually 110 countries. represented in the conversation and but there's there's a low proportion of highly ranked sources and we find that authors are not using a motive and persuasive language in a way that's similar on par with other conversations we've observed like human rights and climate change. So we're really excited to see where this conversation goes and there's definitely more to come and room for growth. Thank you very much. Great. You have had a question in background about the slides we the slides will be available after the webinar so if you're having trouble look if you're staring at your screen closely don't worry. You will get the slides and want to remind the participants please ask us your questions on q amp a will get them after the panel. So with that should we go over to the panelists to comment. Yulia do you want to kick us off. Sure. Hi everyone and welcome we're really excited to be presenting this work as you can see it's really fascinating and cutting edge work that puts a little bit of data behind. Looking at what the media is talking about when they talk about land and property rights who is talking where and how those conversations are being driven. So I can say a word about why Omidy our network was interested in funding this research. A large focus for us for the property rights team is around building a movement and shifting the narrative around land and property rights. But in order to shift the narrative we first need to know what the narrative is. So for us this provides an invaluable baseline. We can see which areas are under reported how the different trends are moving and it's quite valuable for some of our grantees as well who are working to move narratives in this space. So as part of our portfolio we have two independent media grantees so journalists who are covering property rights to them. I think that this sort of content is particularly useful because they can see which areas are under reported and they can also see whether they're having an impact on the narrative. At the same time for us and for other experts for think tanks for activist organizations. This narrative can alert us to issues that we aren't picking up maybe in our research but that are important locally that are being picked up by the local media. What I'd love to see going forward is a breakdown of these narratives at the country level so that when we scope for for example potential investments or interventions on a country level. We can see what the issues are more locally. Another use that I can see for this sort of work is in helping organizations structure any sort of programming that involves media because they can see which sources and which types of engagement are having residents. So for example we saw from Emily's presentation that regional sources seem to pick up land and property rights stories the most. If I were an organization working through media to spread awareness of property rights issues that would be an important input for me. A question I have going forward for a protagonist is how does this compare to the distribution of sources and other issues like human rights or climate change. Are those issues getting more pick up in international and national outlets or is the distribution similar. Just one more point that I'll pick up on before passing it along to the next discussant for me the discussion of volume versus engagement was particularly interesting because it shows resonance. It's one thing to see how many stories are being printed but it's another thing to see how much pick up each of those stories is getting and which topics are getting the most pick up. So it shows which topics are really hitting a nerve with people. For example you can see the degree of engagement on the land grabbing topic driven by Dappel and Emily gave some background on that. Another example is the human rights angle which is driving significant engagement so social media engagement in Spanish but not in English. And this seems to be driven by the coverage of the death of human rights defenders like Berta Caceras which ignited a wave of protests. So for me this is really just the beginning of an exciting ongoing kind of longitudinal analysis and can be really informative for researchers media organizations activists working in this space. A couple of things that I would love to see more of going forward. I mentioned some national level breakdowns. Also I'd like to see some comparisons against other development topics. And finally in terms of languages we were able to add Spanish language but I think that looking at these topics also in French would be particularly useful to see how they're breaking down around France some of the Pacific Islands and West Africa. Thank you. Thank you Julia. With that, Caitlin do you want to share your thoughts? Sure. Hi everybody I work with Fleishman-Hillard a communications agency that works with Omidyar network across their various portfolios of investments and in particular work with Julia and the property rights team. And so when she shared the narrative analytics report with me, it was really exciting to see that this is the start of a data driven conversation around what an organization can and should be doing regarding its external communications. From many of you on the webinar that are involved with an organization's communications, it can often seem as you'll probably agree with me, goals and outcomes related to your communications efforts can often be hard to put into a larger context. Right. Is that blog we wrote or is that off-ed we placed or that panel we participated in. Is that having an impact in the grand scheme of things and how do we know. And so what I like about this report in and of itself is that it can help start a data driven conversation around what's working and what's not regarding how you and your organization are communicating externally. And I think part of that conversation that you can have with those within your in your line of work is really getting back to kind of the 101 of communications kind of it helps you have a moment of self reflection and think. All right what are our goals as an organization, who are we trying to reach and what do we need them to think or do because of the work that we're doing. And I think looking at a tool like narrative analytics can help start to steer that conversation in the right direction. So a lot of the decisions aren't necessarily being based on kind of anecdotal experiences that you and your colleagues might have had. So as I've looked at this report, you know, I think there's two ways that people can kind of start to think about things in those moments of self reflection with your organization. And you know if you do see a narrative in this report in that list that Emily shared earlier, if one of those narratives does resonate with you and you feel like that's kind of along the lines that your community organization is communicating. I think that that's likely a good sign that you are dialing into a larger global narrative. And then the question becomes, you know, what are the right tactics to help amplify that even further. And then I think the bigger thing to keep an eye on is, if you and your organization are talking about property rights in a way that you do not see reflected in a report like this. That's really the moment of bigger self reflection to say, Okay, am are we an MI on track with the goals that except for my organization, am I truly reaching the audiences that we know are important to work that we're doing. And, and looking at kind of the results that you see in this report can help you start to think right maybe we need to be communicating in a little bit of a different way. Maybe we need to tap into a different one of these narratives to see if it can resonate better with the organ that audiences that we're working with. And if you are an organization like many that we work with through media network, an organization that might just be getting its footing might just be getting off the ground. I think a report like narrative analytics gives you a good starting point to say, Okay, how do we want to talk about the work that we're doing. And really trying to tailor it to the markets and the people that you are trying to reach. And so I think about, you know, I really like the geography slide that Emily shared earlier that breaks it down by geography. And then I also really, really like the breakdown of sources because it really helps in the world of communications where there's so many different things that any one organization could be doing. This really helps you put a laser focus on what are the kind of levers or drivers that might make the biggest impact and provide you guys with the highest ROI for the efforts that you're going to put into your communications. Overall, I think one thing that I'd be interested to hear more from Emily and the narrative analytics team is just from previous experience and I think you'll lay head on this a little bit. But from previous experience, tracking other narratives year over year, I'd love to hear kind of what were the kinds of things that made the biggest difference in changing any one narratives trajectory year over year. So if there were kind of key tactics or drivers, if you will, that seem to make a difference. I think that that's an invaluable insight that could be applied to property rights as well. Great. Thank you, Caitlin. Yeah, the sources and geography were definitely the two slides that I was probably closest to the screen. With that, Matri, if you want to share your thoughts and please just do a quick introduction. Hi, everyone. My name is my team or RG. I'm a senior program officer at Wellspring philanthropic fund, which is a private foundation based in New York, where I oversee a program specifically focusing on women's land and property rights. So I'll speak from that perspective. Thank you very much for sharing these really interesting findings that I think paint a picture of what the global discussion on property rights really looks like. I'll reflect for a few minutes on what is particularly interesting for me and then I'll share some lingering questions that come up for me, both in listening to this presentation as well as seeing some of Fort Agnes work prior to this. So first, the property rights narratives outlined on page six are interesting and I think potentially a good starting point to help guide us as we dig deeper into each one and how it plays out in a given country or region in which country is based. And certainly the map on page eight shows quite neatly how very different these discussions are in different regions. The fact that you show the top narratives in East Africa as the importance of women's rights and of property rights as a human rights issue is an interesting data point for wellspring in particular given our focus on advancing women's land and property rights within a broader human rights frame. So what questions come up for me and what do I see as opportunities in terms of next steps and I would say here that I share some of Julia's interest in terms of next steps. So first I'm struck that in your summary of narratives that there's no mention of corruption, such as government signing corrupt deals with oil or extractive companies or of local energy needs being balanced against other property rights needs, corrupt African leaders have taken so much land for themselves, their families, cronies, etc. that it impacts entire nations in terms of land available for other private individual level ownership. I'm not sure if your search terms didn't pull up those articles or if they are so localized in Africa that it didn't pop up into the top term since the volume of coverage about land issues in Africa is likely less compared to English language and news sources elsewhere in the world. So that's just a question that I have. And then I would just add that while I think this is a really interesting first step, giving us kind of a macro view of what what the language looks like out there in terms of property rights. I think the analysis would have to be conducted at the regional or country level to be more valuable in terms of helping advocates in particular that are working for change in their own countries. The questions that come up for me are, how can this data be translated from data to a tool that advocates can use in a local context? To what extent can it be translated into messages that resonate for different stakeholders that really serve as the gatekeepers to advancing property rights in the countries in which OM and other foundations are working in. And finally, this project dovetails nicely with two projects that we're in the thick of at Wellspring Philanthropic Fund. And that's a project in Kenya, which is looking to conduct research, test and develop messages on women's land and property rights specifically. And then also a second project on addressing negative social norms that hinder the realization of women's land and property rights in East Africa as well. And that's focused in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Where there are, I would just say that there's a presence of favorable laws that are seemingly in place to protect women's land and property rights, but that we're still not, we're seeing a huge gap there in terms of realization of those rights. And then I would just add that although our project is in the early stages, we'll look forward to sharing our findings with this group as we start to see insights and lessons emerging in the future. Thank you very much, Matry. Um, Emily, there were a number of questions there I don't know if you want to walk through a few of your answers and then you're probably going to keep your slides up for that but then maybe when you're done if you want to take the slides. Stop sharing over to you. Sure, I can stop sharing now actually I think. So I was taking some notes. Hopefully you can't see my screen now right. I was taking some notes. Thank you all for your remarks really. It's always great for us to hear from you who are all sort of the the subject matter experts. I like to say that we're the narrative experts so it's always good to sort of get that extra lens. So I was taking some notes on your questions and comments. So I'll just start to dive into those but please shout if I miss something so one thing Yulia I heard you ask was you know how does this compare to the the sort of other development topics and conversations and we've actually done a lot of work with other foundations around a lot of social issues, everything from climate change, early education, higher education. And we've actually looked at specifically the climate change conversation and human rights conversation as it compares to the property rights conversation to get a sense of how is property rights doing. And I started to to talk about that towards the end of the presentation and the barometer. And what I found with the sort of development conversations is there's there's a lot out there. A lot of these conversations, especially now, since we've started observing these conversations post the Trump administration, a lot of sensitivity to policy events. So that's sort of one thing that is common throughout all these conversations. Less so on the global scale, most of the work we do is just observing conversations the United States. But specifically for property rights, we found that the content doesn't have sort of this emotional and resonance that some of these other more sort of larger conversations around human rights and climate change have so there's less resonance there's less social media sharing the the content for property rights tends to be a little bit drier. And we found that when property rights really does sort of get in the spotlight, it's usually actually paired with another development issue. So this idea around gender actually. So in the in the broader conversation, the narrative that talks about women's rights and property rights. And to your point is, it's actually pretty low when we looked at the impact scores. However, that actually gets the narrative that gets the most coverage in the international sources and the highest sort of readership publications. So that's an interesting economy that we found is that when property rights is paired with another issue there tends to be a little bit more momentum there. So that's that's one thing I wanted to address. Caitlin you had a question around what are the biggest things that help change a narrative over time and. And so that's a big question. So thinking about narratives and this idea that they're they're sort of these structured stories that people use as mental models. It does take a while to sort of shift the conversation. But we do we have found that it is possible and so what we we try to do is, depending on what the conversation is, the narratives that you have in the conversation are the narratives you have. And so you want to find different ways to either attach or amplify a narrative that is favorable to you, or your, your position. And you want to avoid triggering something that potentially is is not favorable. So in this case, something like squatting is a crime. And so we actually work with what we do different analysis and work with other some of our other clients to actually look at the specific language that people are using. So one example is we we have a client working in the higher education space and they always talk about equity and realized in our observations in the conversation no one actually says equity they say fairness. And so we've helped them shift some of their outbound communications to use language that is already resonating with their target audience. So that way there's a there's a better chance that they were going to connect with a broader audience. And so what we do is we do text analysis we do emotional sentiment analysis to help sort of take the position that that a conversation and a customer has and sort of pivoted to to sort of launch for growth if that makes sense. Another question that came up or remark was around regional and country level, how this can be translated tool for advocates I think that's a great question, something that we do beyond observing different conversations. We also can observe how often a certain organization, a certain actor, a certain person is coming up. And so that can also help you understand who's influencing the conversation and how they're influencing it. So one thing we could do is use that to understand what are the sort of available, unique or trending characteristics of different people organizations that really resonate with a broader audience. So, you know, we are our capabilities right now are sort of limited to English English and Romance language with our technology. But, you know, I definitely think it is possible, assuming if we wanted to do this at a country level, we absolutely could just sort of language dependent, but that would give us even a more specific localized understanding of what the conversation is in each country. And as we saw from the regional analysis, we know it would differ based on just how colorful and diverse that map was great. You have more I have a few questions in the audience I wanted to throw it you to very yeah. So, we have one question saying that look like land grabbing wasn't high on the agenda in West Africa and that participant surprised about that. And I guess that pairs with a question I was having which is, is there any potential that this would be done with French soon to or Yeah, actually that has come up in the last couple of weeks. It's not something that we've done yet. But I do think it'd be really great to explore and, you know, based on what we saw in the Spanish conversation. I'm assuming we'd see the same 10 narratives but there'd be some significant differences in in their ordering and sort of what rises to the top from that perspective so not yet but hopefully soon. Great. Thanks. And then from human rights watch we had a couple questions there at the bottom of the list if you can see him. Do the analytic identify categories of who is sharing any way to figure out how much government officials are engaging and the second question is whether the analytics looks at documentaries multimedia or only written articles. Yeah, great questions. So the analytics we don't look at who is sharing it's just of a certain piece of content how what the sort of numbers are. We have done analysis though looking specifically at conversations that policymakers are having. So we're actually doing that in the financial inclusion space. And how policymakers globally are thinking about financial inclusion financial technology and reg tech as well so a little bit of a different spin and that's actually a little bit more tailored. So we're pulling in content that those policymakers would read. So that's, we didn't do that for this analysis but definitely something we're capable of. And the last question was, does it look at documentaries multimedia. If there's a written transcript. Yes, we will pull that into our data set. So as long as the transcript is there we've pulled in radio show content. So that's, that's definitely feasible. Great. I'm just going to throw three at you from the from the top of the list. Question about why you treated blogs as traditional media versus social media question about the sources of the narratives and can you tell who's driving them. And then the third one was why, why were we confining this work just two years of data. Sure. So, the reason we treat blogs as its own category is because anyone can kind of set up shop and write whatever they want in their corner of the internet and then actually you have the ability to share that content via social media. So, in and of itself, it's its own sort of place. So that's why we consider it not traditional media and not social media and sort of its own medium there. The second question sources of the narratives and who's driving them. Yes, so we actually. So this was actually a question we talked about a lot with the media. There was some questions around how do we know that it's not just sort of these broader, larger publications that are driving the content and we're not just capturing, you know, the New York Times, the BBC and the Guardian. So, our technology platform is source agnostic and so we will pull in any content that has this narrative content in it so in the English conversation it ranges everything I think it was over 3000 sources that we pulled in. So everything from Reuters, the Times of India, Uganda Daily Monitor Al Jazeera Huffington Post. So it really sort of runs the gamut of local to to large publications, and that just contributes to the the broader diversity of the sources so we're less concerned about who is publishing the content initially and more concerned about what what are they actually saying. And the last question you had was why are you confined to a year or two years. So what we found and the trend analysis slide sort of show this is that while the narratives don't change. They fluctuate in terms of their prominence and importance over time. And so you have something like the Dakota access pipeline really spike. And so what we want to do is normally we only try to capture the most recent years conversation to sort of get the latest and greatest and sometimes we'll go back two years but we found in order to sort of stay current it's much better to capture what's happening now then take the sort of longer historical view. Great thank you and I want to encourage the panelists if they want to chime into the questions are coming in fast and furious. So that I had the one question just caught my eye down at the bottom Emily if you're looking. You mentioned in the English content DAPL was 93% and given that that is so disproportionate was there it was. A detailed analysis that other 7% sort of pull out the nuance there that was getting drowned out. Um, no we didn't. I think it was more generalized content around these issues of land grabbing it not necessarily sort of just the the overall argument around, you know, fairness and understanding who's who has rights to that land. The, the really the point of that quick analysis we did was just to show the power of that one conversation so we didn't really dive more deeply into that commerce and into that subsequent content. But it actually will be interesting when we pull 2018 content. We're expecting there to be a very different conversation in terms of the impact score or how many where where each narrative. Land and I imagine that land grabbing will sort of be a lower impact narrative but time will tell. Okay, um, again just to just to try to get through some of these questions and I want to encourage the audience please do keep the questions coming these these are great. Um, at the bottom there was a two part or do the analytics also identify ongoing research work at a national level same participant. How are the search terms generated and what steps have been taken to overcome potential bias. Yeah. So in terms of ongoing research at the national level. If there are, we definitely pull in different reports from different organizations governments. So if that is out on the internet. We and particularly publishes part of some sort of news source and we will pull that in the question around. How are the search terms generated and what steps have. How do we overcome bias. So we have basically a Boolean search that we use to query our in our technology platform and so what we usually do is our analysts do a little bit of research on the topic and then we meet with our customers to say okay. We're going to put the parameters, you know, here and here's sort of what we're seeing does that sort of resonate with you because again, we're not the experts here you are but does this sort of resonate with you. And so we'll go back and forth and collaborate collaborate with our customers to make sure that the topics make sense and the search terms and the content that we're seeing is relevant. But from there we have the the technology actually do sort of the heavy lifting around what is considered narrative and non narrative. And then our analysts go in and look at the aggregated content they see and basically it clusters in different ways so you can see the distinct topics. So really it's it's the technology that keeps the bias. Okay. Thank you. Is this okay working just sending them to embatches here. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so from the top of the list, the question the narrative of property rights aren't a silver bullet was interesting in Spanish, can you expand on that. I wonder that there was a request from someone in the field, can we disaggregate, we get a specific disaggregation for countries maybe working for example in the Mekong region could we get just get do a deep dive. I think it double click is what I'm understanding this question. On the countries they're like about it allow Vietnam. Yeah, so we, we didn't do a deep dive on a country level. We wanted to keep it sort of higher level so I can't really speak to that specific region for property rights is our aren't a silver bullet. What we found in in the Spanish content was the volume was really driven by various reports on indigenous land rights and the battles that garnered that were sort of had there but there wasn't much social engagement. Discussions of pension reform. And it really revealed that the position land rights in a sort of broader more complex social dynamic that includes discussion of economic reform and other policies so any social policies related to property rights and discuss no, no one sort of solution was dominating the discussion. But as I mentioned in my opening comments. This narrative in Spanish was was really driven by the farmers protest and coverage of that. Whereas the English content was much more sort of policy focused and trying to find solutions so a little bit of a dichotomy there and it'd be it will be interesting to see how that evolves in the Spanish context in the in the upcoming year. Great. So we're related on the bottom of the question list there was a question the DAPL use asking really about the terminology and given that was such a phenomenon did they use land grabbing terminology or did they use other synonyms or terms in their social media strategy that that come out. So the coverage of the Dakota access pipeline. I don't know. So land grabbing specifically I'm sure there was there was probably some content that that described it that way. You know our search terms are are usually you know 40 to 60 words long so we really do want to capture sort of the depth and breadth of that. So it's it was probably in there definitely not the predominant terms. What we do is once we find what the narrative is our analysts have the ability to sort of name it and we try to keep the names sustained and sort of right to the point so that was a little bit of the humanistic view there. Staying at the bottom for a second in the barometer be used to compare the level of coverage of land rights relative to other issues and something resembling quantitative method. Yeah so that's actually how we're tracking progress when we started this barometer. Initially, you know we thought it'd be great to just see what the property rights conversation was doing. We realized a midi are we had some great conversations around. Well yes that's important but we need, you know, something else to compare it to. So, while we are focused on the property rights conversation. We're actually doing it in tandem, not as an in depth analysis but using the climate change and human rights conversations as comparison points to better understand. So, if property rights is doing better than it was last year that's great but is climate change doing even better. And so sort of observation of other conversations is really essential for the barometer to have meaning. Got it. What I mean one thing I this is my question and one thing I've gotten a lot of traction with talking about property rights and this is building off of your point that it gets more traction when it's paired with another issue is instead of talking specifically just as a problem there are major issues but also using it in the context of if you if your issue is economic empowerment if your issues is gender if your issues whatever land rights is a powerful tool to help the community or your issues in the environment you know land rights for communal rights over the forest is a powerful tool for advocating that and I'm just that's always been one of my hypotheses how would I prove that with this data. Well, I think we saw that in the the gender narrative that was, you know, rising to the top in the international publications. One thing we do when we we look at a narrative is understand what's driving the narrative and what are the topics associated with that. So, we have some narratives that are very much focused on environmental issues some that are very focused on feminist issues. But what we we want to portray in our work is that it's not just sort of one analysis that's going to to borrow a narrative title it's not it's not going to be a silver bullet. So, you need to sort of see the whole complex. How is this doing globally how is this doing specifically in your region. Who are the actors that are driving this. So, we could definitely observe from the data, how often specific topics are paired together, and that could give you an indication of if it's actually actually connecting and then is it actually resonating in the broader conversation. Thank you. And then one more question. Right, didn't emerge as much of a narrative in Spanish. It's sort of interesting given a prominent the topic is help us understand why that might be. Yeah. So actually, indigenous rights came up a lot in Spanish, however, in the framing of the rights were more of a domestic political issue and differed substantially from the English conversation so. There was in English sort of these global issues like climate change and post apartheid reconciliation in South Africa that drove sort of all of this content in the English discourse. Specifically indigenous rights in Spanish were more sort of central to broader narratives in a way that sort of didn't pop in in its own in the English conversation as well. We're coming up on time that they're supposed to end in about 10 minutes so I just want to flag for the panelists if you guys have any last thoughts we have we are down to three last questions. The first one on the list Emily if you go to the last three lines. There's a lot there's a bit of preamble there. Um, the question is how can this data be translated tool that can help us to address these multifaceted issues I think one of the panelists sort of asked that to us. How do we take this data and these insights and translate them into a drop down where you're like I'm in this country, what are the burning issues what are the, what are the flags. What would that look like. Yeah so I think Caitlin touched on this a little bit around the communications that your, your organization is is portraying and so what one thing that we want to do is take you could do is take this analysis. And look at, okay what are the narratives that are sort of most resonant in in your line of work in your region, and how are you positioning your organization's work. So, is what you're actually promoting and advocating for a line with what people are actually, which is actually resonating with people so we've actually done analysis like this so organizations will say we want to focus on this issue, but their their communications actually focus on a different narrative. So that's one sort of piece that that from a analytics perspective can be done. I think another thing is, if you're not sort of seeing the narrative pop that you want to generating that content so how do you engage as an organization internally and also sort of your partners to push a certain perspective. And so what this is supposed to do is really just act as a catalyst. This is what the media is saying, and it's, it's, you know, essentially a litmus test for what people are thinking. So this should really sort of be the start of a larger conversation and really could help future programming as as as you go forward. Great. Um, the top question on the list. How are certain methods of the logical biases EDG disproportionate number of media outlets in the north, ultra data and therefore paint a different picture than what the data might be if we if we looked qualitatively. How are we going to take that? Yeah, so this is I think a little bit similar to an earlier question that we we don't only look at Western and sources. So I think in the English data set we brought over 3000. So what we do is we rank the sources by readership to give them a little bit more weight, but we're very careful that we kind of want to observe what people are saying, we call it in the in the wild. So when we're capturing content that's on the internet that is not provoked by any sort of questions so people are freely going on it and writing this so that's sort of how we regard against bias there and then also our technology platform as well. Great. Thank you very much. So we're coming up on time I want to pass it quickly over to the panelists in case they want to say anything and then we'll wrap this up. Let's let's go in reverse order so may trade you want to come in. Yeah, I just had one lingering question on the corruption piece did that come up at all or can you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I think we saw that corruption is such a big topic and so it actually came up as a topic in several narratives, but this idea that narratives they sort of have this this called this certain structure. So a lot of the content that we saw started with this idea that there is corruption or we need to end corruption, but the the call to action was was different so we actually saw it come up in so many different ways. It wasn't its own narrative it actually was a little bit more nuanced than that. Thank you. Great. Caitlin. Yeah, absolutely. I'm Emily first and foremost thanks. I know this. I think we're having a point you made here at the end about this being a catalyst. And spot on I feel like this is, oh, are we okay. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. But yeah, I think it's, it's important to keep in mind that this battle test in and of itself will not necessarily write a communications plan for an organization but I think it can be the start of a very important discussion on if an organization is communicating in the right way to reach its goals and its target audiences so look forward to using it more and yeah, can you see where it goes from here. Yeah, it's definitely great fodder for any communications. And then Yulia, if you want to any last thoughts. Yeah, thank you. And thanks again to Emily for the great presentation. So for us from Omidyar's perspective, we already know that this content is interesting, but our next question is, is it useful and how is it useful and who is it useful. And on that end, we'd like to further engage with the broader land and property rights community on this topic and see if we can maybe even pull in a few members of the community as either part of an advisory group or some other thought group that can kind of help inform and steer this ongoing analysis because we do plan to rerun it on an annual basis as of now. So if New America will indulge me, I know that we'll be sending out Caitlin slides or sorry Emily slides after the presentation. I'll also include my email address and a short blurb and if you're interested in being part of such a thought group I really would encourage you to get in touch. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you to the, thank you, Emily for the great presentation and taking all those questions on the fly and to all of our panelists. And this, you will get an email about this and then if you're having a colleague or somebody in your communications group that wasn't here and you want them to be, don't worry, we've reported the whole thing, and it will be up on our numeric website numerica.org. So, look forward to sharing that and thank you all for joining that. Three minutes early. Okay, thank you everybody.


Still in the news, the Oshun state governor, Boyega Oyitola, has described security and welfare as the primary purpose of government and said his administration would leave no stone unturned in achieving the all-important duty. Inaugurating the state chapter of the Hantes Group of Nigeria in Oshubu, Oyitola said the hunters would work in the steps of the extant security outfits to complement the efforts of other agencies. Governor Boyega Oyitola said the new security outfit was proved in place to harness the diverse security apparatus by getting the locals who understand the terrain involved in securing lives and property. Oyitola touched them on patriotism in the discharge of the duties as they are expected to complement the activities of conventional security agencies. Speaking on behalf of the members in the state, the commander-general of the Hantes Group, Joshua Osatimein, applauded the governor's approach to security. He said it is good to know that the Oshun state has proved itself as a pace-setter in the provision and management of security. We have made the capable of arresting criminals and handed over to the Consulted Authority. So if this opportunity is be given, I believe there will be no crimes and criminality in the state of Osu and southwest at large. To the glory of God, there will be work trained by Nigeria police in different police trainees across the country. Earlier the only of the fair, Oba Adei Ogonsi and Otao Javoshugo, Oba Jimo Olanik Belkun, urged members of the Hantes Group to champion loyalty, diligence and sincerity in the discharge of their duties. They advised them to remain honest and sincere or carry out the daily activities, sustain the tide of insecurity and ensure peace across the nooks and crannies of Osu state. Hello. Hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


So let me now open up to the floor to hear your comments and questions to the panelists. We have about 20 minutes, I believe here, 25 minutes. Yeah, we'll first start in the back. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the very interesting presentations. My name is Anu Junko and I'm the executive director of Demo Finland. Political parties are Finland for democracy. So I especially enjoyed the Professor Nick Cheesman's take. Quite probably the take on the working of the democracy support. And I would like to challenge that a bit because as we know, only less than 10% of the development funding goes to democracy support, out of which, from my point of view, way too much has gone to the election support. And when you look at the political party support, it's less than a percent. And this makes up quite nicely what Verena Fritz was saying about the silo between developing economics and economics altogether, as well as democracy support, because I think the political parties have been the forgotten stakeholder. All together in the development sector as a key entity for any country's development, as well as, yes, as well as obviously working or not working towards the democracy. And this came up nicely also at the World Development Report of the World Bank. And especially, I would like to point out from that report, the work of senior researcher Philip Kiefer from the World Bank, because he went to hundreds, I think it was over 400 loans by World Bank. And according to his academic research, the key success was for the successful public sector reform was the programmatic political parties. If the country had those, the public sector reforms were more likely to be highly likely to be successful. So, I do have a question. Professor Chisholm, it would be interesting to hear, where do you see the multi-party support in this scenario? I understand that your talk was very much about the elections, but yes, it would be lovely to hear your views on that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good. Another question? I'm Joeri Kobanen from the University of Helsinki. I was quite intrigued by this idea that what is the problem now is the co-operation of democracy and governments. And that's the thing which is how we're creating the problem. I'm not really sure if they can be separated. The World Bank has made it's level best to keep these things separate, even if they haven't succeeded. I hope that you have a very strange definition of political, but the World Bank's work is not political, and certainly in their own government. In the government industry, at least this was an accountability. So, having said this, I would like to be a little bit... Let's advocate and say that perhaps we shouldn't be too worried and learn too much about the decline of democracy, or its stagnation, if only if it reflects the realization that this sort of it doesn't seem really be working, and it is something, things like democracy and governance are something which cannot be imposed from outside in no way. And certainly, it's certainly not by a wide-ranging condition. Historically, if you look at how institutions developed, they took a very long time to develop. They emerged for one reason, then they changed their function on the way. I don't think that's something that's extremely difficult or impossible for outsiders to elaborate. But this is an extent I think we shall run into problems when we try to promote democracy for democracy's sake, because it leaves out the question, who's democracy? Which democracy? Okay, thank you. Okay, we'll take these two here first. Well, it's being recorded, so we appreciate if you use the microphone. Yes, I'm going back to the two silos. I think it's a very important point here, because also going back to the first presentation, I would like to urge you, really, if we make a statement, if we urge people to promote democracy, for the sake of democracy, it's probably a very simple point. There needs to be a very clear theory of change, and you've talked about, as in some of the theories, we have many theories of change, but how do we get to democracy? There are many ways. Maybe we shouldn't invest in democracy. Maybe, as we all know, it's not a new point. Maybe we should invest in poverty reduction. Also, we should not confuse human rights and democracy. These are two very different points. In the end, we're here to talk about development, and maybe about development, maybe about democracy. In the relations to this, I also have a question to Nick. What's the current DFID theory of change? As we know, investment in engineers does not work greatly. Investment in technology is not a solution either. So what's the current DFID of this? Okay, thank you. Thank you. It seems as if that you have all concentrated on developing a way to encourage democracy, and I'm wondering why you make that separation, although it's convenient for financial reasons. Because I feel that the donors should actually be exemplary in the way they themselves practice democracy, and here I feel that they do not themselves practice democracy. You put up a statement that said donors have become complicit in fostering development in university commons without democracy, and the question was why. Now, in my opinion, the donors have institutionalized discrimination and poor democratic practices. And for this, I don't need to go far. I can pin it down to Finida, Danida, Norad and Sida, the so-called liberalized Nordic democracies. They do not practice democracy in their development assistance. Secondly, the other aspect is that we expect them to teach by example. Now, they have very little transparency in their decision-making, their discriminatory as well in their practices. So one point that arises here is why is aid given to undemocratic regimes? Why are undemocratic regimes in Africa, and for that matter even in Asia, allowed to dominate their undemocratic systems of government? And the answer to that that I can suggest is that is because international exploitation of these countries depends on having strong regimes which dictate on how they're going to sell their natural resources. And so these are basically could be construed as questions or they can be construed as just remarks. But if anyone wants me to prove what I'm saying, I'm willing to take the challenge. Okay, thank you. Okay, I think we'll first take those first four questions. I think one of those was directly addressed to Nick, and then I think the others are quite broad and raise a lot of kind of philosophical issues as well, I think about how we're looking at democracy versus development assistance. So any of the other panelists who want to address those as well. Let's first start with Nick since he had one directly addressed to him. Yes, on the party's point, yes, absolutely. I mean, I was talking more about elections because I knew that our first speaker was going to focus more on democracy fallback. So I didn't want to focus too much on the same thing, which is why I tried to take in our approach. So that wasn't intended to suggest that we should be focusing exclusively on elections or that we shouldn't be focusing on those other areas. I agree with you about parties, and we go back to Tom Cuthers' very important book on parties being the weakest link in new democracies in most parts of the world. And I think that's fundamentally true, and I think your point about the significance of more programmatic parties for a range of development outcomes is absolutely central. I think one of the things that is true key is the question of how do we do that work. And of course, many governments shy away from supporting parties because it seems to be an infringement on sovereignty. To give you an example, I was in Zimbabwe trying to design strategies that would strengthen the last Zimbabwe election. There's a serious question here. Do you try and design a program that strengthens party agents, but then you have to design a program that Zanupia will allow you to operate in a context in which you have opposition parties in very high levels of tension and competitive election? And how do you design a program that's acceptable to all of the parties? And I think one of the ways in which organizations like yours, the Westminster Foundation, NAMD and others have an advantage is to be able to do party to party work, which doesn't have the label of being state to party work and therefore the sovereignty issue is slightly softer and could be managed. But of course that means that we need to drive more money into that type of activity but also develop better mechanisms to prove that that's effective so that that's a sustainable way of doing it. But I think that question about sovereignty is one reason why we pushed for these more technocratic solutions because they're easier to deliver, they're less problematic, but it doesn't mean that they're necessarily more effective. And I think one of the things I was saying is we need to not shy away from the hard work that needs to be done to make stuff work. I was asked about DFID's theory of change. That's a very big question and I'm not an expert on DFID. So for what I would say, having done a lot of work with DFID on political economy recently, as DFID's argument would perhaps be, we don't have one theory of change. That it is inappropriate to have one theory of change. That almost all the work in political economy analysis that's been done in the last 10 years has been focusing on more adaptive models, more reflective models, models with a more context specific, models that go with the grain rather than against the grain but in very specific ways, models that are not based simply on working through institutions and saying let's build a stronger legislature simply by working with the legislature and having a theory of change around that. But let's build change by forming coalitions that allow us to overcome obstacles and veto players and generate sufficient consensus. And those coalitions for change can only be identified on the ground in a case by case, even sector by sector level. And I think that's not a very satisfying answer in the sense that there's no one size fits all model. But if we know anything from the last 20 years it's that there is no one size fits all solution. So I think in some ways what DFID is trying to do by pushing into more adaptive programming and more responsive programming is really good. I think the challenge and I think DFID would recognize this themselves is that it's easy to say that but it's very hard to implement that because actually on the ground people are still used to working in the old way and it's hard to actually introduce something that's more challenging or revolutionary. Just a very quick question on the democracy and why should we see it as being significant. My point would be if you look at the last 30 years the consistently highest growing countries in Africa are the more open political countries. They're not the authoritarian states. Authoritarian states in Africa have achieved high levels of growth for short periods of time and then crashed. That was true in the 70s and 80s and it's also looking to the countries like Ethiopia in terms of having to reconfigure the political system. So to me the lesson of history in Africa is that you can grow very quickly faster than a democracy with an authoritarian system but you cannot sustain that for 20 years. The way to sustain that is to build a more inclusive political system. Now that doesn't have to be a democracy. It might be a different form of system. It might be a more inclusive version of a one-party state. It might be something else but it has to be more inclusive. So the systems that we see right now in cases like Angola, Rwanda, Ethiopia to me do not look politically sustainable in the long term and if they're politically not sustainable the economic gains they're achieving will not be sustainable. So the Ethiopia case is really fascinating because the question is here this became a politically unsustainable system they're trying to simultaneously do now political and economic reform and I agree with you the economic strengthening will probably make that political reform easier to do but the success of that long-term economic reform will now depend on managing this political situation and I believe that Rwanda will face the same challenge in the next 10 years as well and so what that all means if we add all that up is it actually paying attention to how we generate more effective open political systems is critical to long-term economic gains so whether you care about democracy for its own sake or whether you care about it for long-term economic development I think you end up at the same place we have to get this right. So let me be really quite brief I mean there's a lot of work on this overall relationship between governance and growth and then within governance what really matters and perhaps just the one point that I would flag I agree very much with Nick that there isn't a unified theory of change I think but perhaps there may have been in the past the expectation that democracy was instrumental to growth or other developments and I think what I would perhaps propose is that improving governance in how rules are made and how things function in the economy has a benefit to democracy so if you can get functioning institutions it makes it easier to then at some point build a functioning democracy if you don't have that then it's probably very hard and that comes back to my earlier point that probably the 1990s was a very difficult moment in time to actually begin a democratization in Africa to make that successful but the challenge is that there are a number of countries where we worry so much about fragile states where governance is just overall very very poor, very chaotic, very captured and how to move out of those situations I think it's going to be a key puzzle for the next 20 years for the overall development community I think I almost want to apologize I may be I should have spent three more minutes in my presentation so to make it a little bit more clear I think I'm going to be very clear on what I mean by democracy and there are very many forms of democracy and it's going to develop over history, over time and it is a domestic issue but a democracy has two components there is contestation over power who has power, there is a competition in order to obtain power which includes freedom of association freedom to form bodies freedom to compete in elections so that's the number one the second part which is the part that gets left out especially around Europe these days is rule of law contestation is really very weak and nothing without rule of law and these two components rule of law and contestation has to be present how the composition comes about the party system how this works out that is something that cannot be designed I totally agree but this is what I mean by democracy why do I think it's important that we separate the concepts of governance from the concept of democracy first of all what I talk about rule of law that's governance of course everything you talked about that's part of rule of law but it goes back to what Nick was saying in his presentation the fact that this concept became so wide with World Bank with its legal statues not being touched anything that looks like politics that concept became so all embrace it that you could put anything into it and that is the problem because you put anything into the concept and then you blame it on democracy in the end and so I really want to back to the first commentator democracy aid is only 10% and even that a lot of it goes to securitisation and political party support is like a faction of that so that's just really important but I think it's just why that's why it's to me the world outside cannot dictate what a democracy is supposed to look is supposed to be like it has to have those two components and then countries would have to sort that out you know how the last thing I wanted to say there are so many things I wanted to say and I think I just really want to second what Rina said in her introductory comments maybe in the 1990s was the worst time of all to actually try to solve because it was at the same time that the international world was quietly dismantling states that was the big project and so and that is something we need to think about and this we may have actually sort of lost the chance when there was a very very uniform and kind of almost a strong belief for a time in democracy if we had a very bad situation to carry it out so I just think I really want to second that I think a lot of democracy support we need to separate it it should happen it should be organized differently I think donors by lateral governments should get themselves out of this because it out of the way they end up supporting the sitting government it's really hard not to that's part of diplomacy so NGO funds, party funds media funds that is a way for governments to separate themselves and it is to me a way of getting into more kind of independence semi-state institutions that can overlook this to actually sort of be able to create these watchdogs an underrated institution that I have a strong affinity for is the ombudsman that's one of the things that we can think about in the future a quick point first, support for authoritarian regimes you are right if you go back to the 90s let's take two example, France and the USA two countries in Africa Zahir for the USA and Togo for France they were not doing well at all at the time all the countries in Africa were trying to democratize but they received more help than maybe the good guys maybe not the different case but other countries that are democratizing so I think you are right second, now I think in the democratization studies you have more and more talks coming up about authoritarian resilience for example I don't know if you know Yevitzky and Westbrook or the Arab states why these Arab states continue to be supported by countries like the USA and something to do with national interests so I think you are right second, why does democracy matter I think and maybe you will go further Nick said that you can achieve some kind of economic success with the authoritarian regime but you have to find another way I think in Africa these days there is no other ways than the democratic system because if you look at the Afro-Biohematical for example surveys what you see is that the African societies are eager to democratize them they want freedom so it's very difficult for example in countries like Rwanda or Ethiopia where all the seats in the National Assembly are for the ruling party I think it's very difficult to sustain something like this at one point or another pluralism should be implemented then can democracy be imposed from outside I think yes there are two questions here if you look back to the second wave of democratization the second wave of democratization following the second world war Japan and countries like that you can but if you want democratize to be sustained and consolidated you need to look inside in consideration and sustainability in the long run is the matter of internal affairs so I think if you make this distinction maybe you can clarify a little bit the question and finally about the World Bank I don't know maybe you can correct me but it's true that the World Bank is not supposed to do politics but if you go I think it's the World Bank that issued this report in 1989 called Sub-Saharan Africa from crisis to sustainable growth where the government came governments is not only the way to manage like economic affairs but also institutions that are able to support this and when you talk about this it means pluralist institutions and then it's very difficult to separate the two so the World Bank is not supposed but in practice what some of the things they do like the idea of governments goes back to politics also I think unfortunately we do have to end it there but of course please do come and ask your questions to the panelists bilaterally I'd like to thank you for attending today and definitely to thank all our panelists for I think a really thought provoking session today Thanks


I'm playing up here to do some cleaning up of the broadcast facilities this evening. Very welcome. Garbage. Garbage. Garbage. Garbage. Garbage. Some garbage we found, tinsel crown, and also a sad hat from Cracker. It's been interesting getting into the real lives of the student body. Students are just preposterous. Look what I found over there. A coconut. That really hurt. Generally I find people's uncleanniness disgusting. So I had to kind of do something about this myself. And here I am in this job of maintenance woman in the 24-hour broadcast. And to be honest, it's not the best jobs, but I'm doing my bit for society and that's what makes me happy at the end of the day.