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Time for change: IIED 1984–1990

Brian W Walker

By the mid-1980s, I had known William Clark (then President of IIED) for some years, and Barbara Ward, his predecessor, for even longer. Indeed, Barbara had been a powerful supporter of Oxfam both before and during my time as its Director General.

Ten years earlier, by one of those strange quirks of fate, IIED had arranged a conference on ‘The Exploding Cities’, in Oxford, starting on 1 April 1974. By chance this was my first day in Oxfam as ‘Director Designate’. Leslie Kirkley, from whom I was taking over, said that I'd better go down to the Ashmolean to represent Oxfam, but to be sure to introduce myself to Barbara who was to give the keynote address. She was a powerful ally in the battle against world poverty, he explained, and our paths would cross frequently. Also, The Times, sponsor of the conference, had asked me to review the book recording the main papers. So there had been something of a pre-life for me in IIED.

But, moving forward again to the mid-1980s, it was William, who by this time knew that he had terminal cancer, who rang me in Geneva one day, in 1985, to say, ‘Would you consider throwing your hat in the ring because I'm stepping down as the IIED President?’ We both knew the awful truth, for I had been a frequent visitor to William's home after his retirement from the World Bank. We used to sit after lunch, by the window, looking onto the stream which flowed below us forming the south boundary of his property, drinking coffee and solving the world's problems. He had long since explained that despite its policy potential, funding was a difficult problem for IIED. Its product wasn't ‘sexy’ enough for the donors, he explained. He didn't think he could do much on a part-time basis. A full-time president and executive director was needed.

QUESTIONS OF FUNDING AND STATUS

If, as the former Vice-President of the World Bank, William Clark had been unable to attract funding, what hope had I? William was at once bullish and somewhat evasive. The world needed IIED, he said, especially the donor governments for whom the environment was a bit of a mystery. We had many friends in high places and our time would come, and quickly at that. Everything was pointing in our direction and there were few competitors. Lots of campaigners, many evangelists, but few scientists had the ears of governments or of the multilateral agencies. Certainly, Barbara Ward and her pals had caused UNEP to be set up, but it had never commanded the interest of the key donor governments as had UNDP or UNICEF. In any case, an essential ingredient of that particular strategy was to have an international NGO – IIED – to be free to act for the environment without the strictures laid on the UN and its donor governments.

I was unhappy in Geneva, where I had been working for a year or so for the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, so I said that I would give it a try. I would start early in 1986, travelling daily from Oxford where Nancy and I had kept our house. I would do a term of five years, before moving on. The Board agreed, but said it wanted me to work at least four months a year in the USA to try to get our US funding up to scratch. Then there was the Buenos Aires (Human Settlements) Office. The Board wasn't sure of its status. Barbara Ward had set it up to give the excellent, world authority, Jorge Hardoy, a secure base. But who owned it? How was it funded? Did it contribute, or was it a permanent drain on our slim cash resources? ‘Oh, and by the way,’ said Bob Anderson our Chairman, echoed by Sir Arthur Norman his Deputy, ‘The Board is not sure either of the status and role of Earthscan IIED's information division. It has high visibility, and some people in the non-industrialized countries swear by it. It is creative and on the whole is saying the right things, but what does it really cost, and is it the natural bedfellow of the rigorous, scientific work our researchers want to do?’ There were ominous rumours of a house divided against itself.

Gradually, other questions emerged about the lease and location of our new London offices. These had been voted through without too much Board involvement. The Board itself had 16 high-powered members, but only 3 lived in the UK. It also boasted 23 Council members, most of whom were distinguished and powerful people, but only 4 of whom lived in the UK. What were they all doing? What did consultation with them cost? Were they contributing to the real needs of the Institute? Their commitment and personal support were unquestioned. They had all been good friends of Barbara but few now attended meetings and so re-structuring was essential.

Inevitably, these negatives set my immediate agenda. I couldn't have made any real contribution to their resolution without the support of Richard Sandbrook, IIED's Deputy Director, who really was IIED in those days, and who eventually succeeded me as Director – although he always swore he would never take on the Director's job. After all, he knew, he said, where all the bodies were!

RECRUITING NEW STAFF MEMBERS

We decided on a dual-track policy. On the one hand were the negatives listed above. But, on the other, were the imperative nature of our science-based message, the astonishingly high professional quality of our staff, the enthusiasm and loyalty of a handful of key Board members and the sense that the tide was turning in our direction. They recognized that nationally (in the UK and in the USA) and internationally, environmentalism was detaching itself from fringe/hippy activity to soundly-based research. It was about to become central to strategic planning by governments and to the thinking of key, multilateral agencies. Goodwill abounded and so did vision.

Despite our parlous finances (technically we were probably insolvent) we agreed to recruit some of the best natural scientists in our field of endeavour to supplement the work already being done by those in place – energy (Dr Gerry Leach and his team), human settlements (Professor Jorge Hardoy and his team), forestry (Professor Duncan Poore and his team), Antarctica (Lee Kimball), and marine resources (Dr John Beddington and his team). The able Lloyd Timberlake was our resident writer. In the fullness of time, to this formidable powerhouse were added the new experts, including Professor Gordon Conway (agriculture), Professor David Pearce (sustainable economics), Walter Arensberg (environmental planning and management – based in Washington), Dr Camilla Toulmin (drylands development) and Don Hinrichsen (World Resources Report). Each brought, or attracted, some of the best of the younger minds in the business. We followed a similar pattern in our Washington DC office under the excellent leadership of Dr David Runnalls. At the same time we tried to strengthen our administration, in terms of both personnel and systems and equipment. Because of my own ‘hands-on’ background I was anxious to ground our work more and more in the daily realities of the Third World. Experts in the practice of ‘sustainable development’ were recruited – some as Fellows, some as consultants, and others as staff members.

In the same vein, in 1987, we engaged the environmental writer, Paul Harrison, to publish a study of the successes of development in Africa, as a counter-balance to the continual drip-drip of negative stories of gloom and doom. The latter are real enough, but so were the breakthroughs and the sustainable achievements in development. Paul's The Greening of Africa was the first of its kind, welcomed by NGOs and the UN alike. I trudged dozens of miles in New York and Washington trying to raise a meagre £20,000 to fund it. I got it in the end – but what a struggle.

Early in 1987 a former colleague of mine from Oxfam – Robin Sharp – joined us, eventually to head a unit designed to pass on as much of our work and insights as possible to NGOs in developing countries, especially in Africa. The ‘Southern Networks/NGO Programme’, as it was named, was a pioneering activity. It brought southern NGOs together, and acted as a conduit from IIED and like institutions in the North to our Southern colleagues. It set up training seminars. In turn we learned greatly through the reverse flow of local knowledge and traditional wisdom.

MILESTONES IN INFLUENCING: WORLD BANK TO BAND AID

Investment in these kinds of enterprises was a high-risk policy for development agencies, which had become set in their ways and had not fully accepted the message of sustainability. But it paid off on the whole. Some of it was exciting and highly creative. At one period, in 1987/88 Richard and I were meeting with Rt Hon Chris Patten to feed ideas and IIED papers directly into the Thatcher cabinet as, gradually, Prime Minister Thatcher began to realize that environmentalists were not all hairy anarchists. This reflected the pioneering work of David Pearce and his team who had agreed to set up in University College, London an IIED team of young economists to argue out and define the true economic costs of development in terms of sustainability.

That same year we hosted a conference with the World Bank at Cumberland Lodge in Great Windsor Park. Twenty-five participants of leading institutions interested in sustainability examined the Bank's agenda and how we could help the Bank to improve underwriting of sustainability. It was a first-off. The proceedings were published internationally. We also contributed through discussions with Bank officials, principally led by our Washington Director, Dr Dave Runnalls, but supported by Richard Sandbrook and myself, to the shift in Bank policy towards listening to those of their own members, like Bob Goodland, who were researching the nature of sustainability, and pointing to the danger of dependency, the role of women in development and the value of NGOs both donor and recipient to the process of development. We were able to extend our lobbying to the African, Asian and Latin American Banks, in the process. Our low public-campaigning profile was a significant asset in this exercise.

Similarly, Lloyd Timberlake and Richard Sandbrook headed the liaison team advising Prime Minister Brundtland and her Commissioners as they produced their epoch-making report, Our Common Future, in 1987. It was not a perfect report: we were still in the days of Cold War politics and so the pivotal challenge of sustainable energy was ducked. Our key Board members – Sonny Ramphal, Maurice Strong, Emil Salim and Jim MacNeill, sat on her Commission – and I had the privilege of chairing the initial presentation of its findings, by Prime Minister Brundtland, to the world media, in London. Our Common Future was judged a triumph for IIED. It set our own agenda for years to come, in agriculture, forestry, economics and human settlements. In a way it represented the flowering of the seeds planted by IIED from Barbara Ward and her colleagues onwards to my own time.

A parallel development was the birth of the influential World Resources Report – the first issue of which was researched and written in our London office by the clever and knowledgeable Don Hinrichsen. Our partner was the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington DC. The WRI made an essential financial contribution but it was the bravery, energy and creativity of IIED, which gave birth to what was originally an annual report based on the best available research, which outshone all its international competitors. It was also unique. Two years later, however, our lack of core funds made our annual financial subvention to the project unsustainable. We sold off our holdings and our debts to the affluent WRI, which had been set up with millions of dollars by the Macarthur Foundation for just this kind of activity. WRI also agreed to take on board our now redundant staff colleagues in Washington. I continued to serve on the editorial committee for a number of years after leaving IIED and feel proud of the initiative set in motion by IIED and which became such an outstanding success by any measure.

In 1986, when wandering round the back of the IIED offices to find a café for lunch, I stumbled on the newly opened HQ of the pop star, Bob Geldof. It was a single warehouse, with a small office, opening onto the street. There I met Penny Jenden, the executive director, and we discussed Band Aid's needs and strategy over a cup of coffee. A little later I was asked to join the team on a voluntary basis to chair the ‘projects committee’. Lloyd Timberlake worked closely with Band Aid, Richard Sandbrook gave encouragement and despite all the calls on our skills and time IIED staff acted as reviewers for proposals.

We were not to know that for the next four years we would sit, twice a month, in a central London office lent to Geldof, sifting through hundreds of project proposals, and recommending which Geldof and his team should support. In all those years only one of our recommendations was rejected! I also checked all those projects rejected on first sight by the staff, to make sure that nothing worthy of support slipped by. Lloyd and I won the support of the four or five ‘experts’ from academia, who joined us in this work, insisting that the whole programme of Band Aid should be independently assessed at the end of the four-year period, and that its results should be published internationally.

While Band Aid/Live Aid undoubtedly achieved a number of successes in the field – some innovatory – its principal achievement was to introduce the issues of hunger, malnutrition and sustainable development to a new generation of young people, largely untouched by the UK development agencies. Its capture of the world media and all the associated exposure allowed the development issue to be debated publicly, not least within the UN agencies with renewed vigour.

FUNDRAISING FROM PRIVATE AND PUBLIC SOURCES

Fundraising for IIED was a high priority for me in my role as president. The corporate sector, just coming on-stream, was an obvious target, so were the Nordic governments and other EC countries like The Netherlands, as well as wealthy individuals and corporate trusts. We also secured contracts with the World Bank and the UN specialized agencies including the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Development Programme (UNDP). Inevitably, and certainly in the case of the Nordic governments, there was enthusiasm for buying into IIED's ideas as central to their own policy-making processes. Corporate trusts in the oil business, banking and manufacturing were also genuinely interested in discovering from IIED's fairly dispassionate and rigorous analysis of issues where to find best practice, and what lessons could be learned from it by corporate donors.

My biggest success here was a gift of a million dollars from our chairman, Robert O Anderson, then Chairman of Atlantic Richfield. We had many meetings and became good friends. When I asked him one day why he had given me a million dollars when he had refused most other IIED entreaties, this elicited the straight-faced reply –‘Brian, I just liked your face.’ I'm still trying to work that one out.

Another great supporter was the Chairman of the De La Rue Company, which prints most of the world's paper money, Sir Arthur (Gerry) Norman. Gerry was committed to IIED and chaired our Executive. He saw his role as one of introducing me to potential corporate donors through the simple expedient of inviting such guests to lunch in his boardroom, with me as the ‘speaker’. Six or eight corporate luminaries would assemble, and over dessert and coffee I would ‘introduce’ them to IIED. Afterwards, of course, I would have to follow up each guest individually. This process tapped a steady source of new income for the Institute, although costs were rising at the same time as interest rates moved up towards 20 per cent. It was a punishing programme. Worse, Gerry was a generous host. Week after week I returned to the office, mid-afternoon, groaning, as a consequence of the gourmet food and drink consumed – to the total disbelief of IIED's admin and secretarial staff. I still blame my extra two inches of waistline on Gerry Norman and his lunches. But we made money and received considerable support.

Another generous donor I introduced to IIED was my friend Azad Shivdasani, Chairman of Inlaks – the largest private Indian company in the world. Without his timely and generous contribution IIED would not have survived. Azad's relative youthfulness at that time, his enthusiasm and his sharp brain were a major asset for the Board. Throughout this period the Board actively encouraged corporate and private-sector fundraising, within the bounds of common sense.

Our success with governmental funding was less impressive. First, the Thatcher Government would give us nothing. This became a let-out clause for other governments seeking an excuse to do nothing. But the Scandinavians, the Dutch, the EU generally, the Canadians and the Americans were generous. I failed, however, in my personal campaign, to persuade them to alter the international rules of grant-making in order to cover core costs, which are the only costs an agency like ours must raise from ‘donations’. I tried hard – almost to the point of losing their support altogether. The ground rules, laid in the years soon after World War II, were firmly entrenched and the Thatcher/Reagan administrations were solidly behind them. They could not, or would not, admit that core costs are the essential product of a research outfit, just as projects on the ground are the ‘product’ of Oxfam or Christian Aid. A decade on, this battle is still yet to be won.

In all of this the only sad note of substance was the need to sever the ties of the successful Earthscan operation from that of the research work of IIED. By 1985 Earthscan had virtually taken over IIED in London. Certainly it was on an upward spiral of spending without control. It had many fine qualities of creativity and entrepreneurship but its lack of rigour allied to escalating costs outside budgets led to mounting opposition from our policy researchers. It also annoyed key trustees, including our chair and vice-chair, but the matter was shared eventually by all our trustees following Board discussions at which Earthscan's director was invited to put his case. Earthscan's refusal to be part of the whole team upset especially our US and Argentinian colleagues.

I had ideas for correcting these faults but was pre-empted when Jon Tinker, Director of Earthscan, declared ‘unilateral independence’ in May 1986 (with some encouragement from donors), while I was busy fundraising for the Institute in the US. The only possible Board decision, which had my full support, was then severance and for IIED and Earthscan to go their separate ways. That is precisely what happened. For once, our Board was rock-solid, with Jack Raymond (a long-time American admirer of Barbara Ward and close friend of Bob Anderson), and Sir Arthur Norman to the fore.

As to the future, four points strike me: the need to push ahead with research into discovering cheap, safe, sustainable energy; promoting the translation of sustainability into the methods and practice of accountancy, at all levels of society; to position ‘poverty’ at the heart of sustainability, a principle that Barbara Ward under stood; to tackle not least from the environmental as well as the developmental point of view, the consequences of modern war. War clearly is unsustainable in the 21st century. Its techniques and tools have evolved since 1945 to the point that war today is uncontrollable, unpredictable, and inevitably of escalating cost. In other words, war is obsolete. It cannot, by definition, achieve its objects. As such it remains the biggest threat to the sustainability of humankind. War is therefore outdated as a tool of diplomacy. Clausewitz is dead! The time is ripe for the implementation of the Hague Agenda for Peace (1999). Now there's a theme for IIED.