5

Earthscan–Panos: Favourite son, via
cuckoo-in-the-nest, to friendly rival

JON TINKER

In 1974, Maurice Strong, IIED Board member, was head of the newly formed UN Environment Programme (UNEP). He concluded that though public awareness was a key element in UNEP's mandate, it was almost impossible to produce accurate and forceful information from within the UN. His ingenious solution was for UNEP to fund an independent organization to produce what UNEP could not publish itself – and for which governments could then not hold UNEP politically responsible. Strong invited IIED to examine this idea; its report somewhat predictably concluded that Strong's concept was a splendid one, and requested a year's UNEP funding to test it out.

Late in 1974, Richard Sandbrook and David Runnalls asked me to head this new global information unit. I had been the UK's first full-time environment journalist, and New Scientist's environment and development editor for some years, creating a certain reputation for digging up unlikely stories. IIED's invitation intrigued me, and I accepted it. The result was Earthscan, which later morphed into Panos.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EARTHSCAN WITHIN IIED

From Earthscan's start in 1974, I insisted that this new component of IIED should have its own name, and that its complete editorial independence, both of its parent IIED and of its funder UNEP, be placed on its letterhead. Our initial staff team was four people: John Austin, Caryl Panman, Kath Adams and myself. Caryl left after a few years, but John and Kath were to be mainstays of Earthscan for well over a decade. We occupied one-and-a-half rooms and a magical roof garden, in IIED's small central London office.

Our initial information work was based on three principles. First, we would target only the two or three most influential media in each country. Second, we would work on only a few global issues. Third, we would not be propagandist; while we would identify and critique policy options, we would leave journalists and media outlets to draw their own conclusions.

We chose Earthscan's core issues carefully. Each issue had to be: globally and not just regionally important; neglected by the media; and one where we could envisage imaginative information activities, where we could make the issue sexy. There were always more subjects than we could cover, and our key decisions were on what issues not to adopt, for our strength was a relatively narrow subject focus.

By 1980, Earthscan subjects had included urbanization, law of the sea, desertification, primary health care, marine pollution, generic drugs, climate change, drinking water and renewable energy. Our areas were sometimes ones where IIED had significant in-house strength: David Satterthwaite and Jorge Hardoy on human settlements, Gerry Leach on energy, Barbara Mitchell on Antarctica, John Beddington on fisheries. All these IIED specialists were generous with their advice, as were Richard Sandbrook, David Runnalls and Brian Johnson.

Barbara Ward's great skill was to allow me, and IIED's other half dozen key staff, the freedom to follow our instincts. There was internal discussion and argument, of course, sometimes ferocious, and we often talked one another out of our wilder plans. But I remember no occasion when I or anyone else was ultimately over-ruled.

Within a few years, Earthscan had grown to around half the size of IIED as a whole. This duality became one of IIED's greatest strengths, and both its information and its policy research components began to refer to it as IIED-Earthscan. The dichotomy was in fact more apparent than real, for IIED then prided itself on effective and timely delivery of its policy research to decision-makers, and Earthscan's information was prepared only after detailed research.

I had many fruitful conversations with Barbara about Earthscan's philosophy and activities, for she understood instinctively our goal of factual, non-propagandistic information. Her own books had an uncanny ability to present new ideas in a commonsense way. Her readers responded with ‘Yes, that's just right. It's exactly what I think.’ Barbara had worked for so long in the international arena, and knew so many of the Kennedy generation who then dominated it, that in almost any field she had a personal friendship with the key players, and she was generous with her introductions.

Earthscan's first basic product was the press-briefing document: a 50-page photocopied dossier giving facts, policy options and opinions on a chosen subject. In all, we published around 50, most of which I edited, and sometimes rewrote. They were mailed to a network of about 1000 specialist journalists worldwide. In Earthscan's early days I also edited all of our features, of which we distributed about 70 a year to over 100 subscribing newspapers; many in the Third World reprinted nearly every one. Our third main activity was the press-briefing seminar, where about 30 journalists spent an intensive day listening to and debating with four speakers, deliberately selected to have conflicting views.

Within a couple of years, Earthscan's outputs had developed an international reputation for quality and independence. They were widely reported. Natural Disasters: Acts of God or Acts of Man?, for example, was used by over 200 media outlets; we did not employ a clippings service, so the total use must have been far higher. It had a significant policy impact, accelerating the early evolution among agencies from disaster-relief to disaster-prevention.

In 1977 Earthscan initiated a new type of briefing document, for the UN Conference on Desertification in Nairobi. As at most UN meetings, the total documentation made a stack about two metres high. Some were worthy but boring; some were rubbish; a few were excellent. I read every one, and prepared a brief summary of each, together with a Guide Michelin rating: five stars for ‘essential reading’, down to one star for ‘can be missed’.

In Nairobi, although some countries and agencies whose texts we had savaged made ritual protests, most welcomed Earthscan's objectivity. Originally aimed at journalists trying to cover an unfamiliar subject, our document proved to be the main tool for delegations themselves to find their way through the paperwork, and the conference secretariat paid for an emergency reprint.

Earthscan was fun. Our press seminars were enjoyable as well as useful, which helped to attract journalists. We held them in interesting locations – Bali, Ashkhabad, Costa Rica, Khartoum, Oslo on midsummer's eve–and they always involved a good party (which we soberly called a press reception). Our first seminar on Antarctica, for example, opened with drinks at dusk on board Scott of the Antarctic's Discovery, then moored on the River Thames. Our seminar was held on the next day in the New Zealand High Commission, on the eve of an Antarctic Treaty meeting in London.

The British Foreign Office considered this unhelpful, preferring to sort out Antarctic policy quietly, away from the vulgar gaze of the media. So, with consummate skill, the UK mandarins arranged for the Australians to pressure New Zealand to withdraw their invitation to Earthscan. This was about as intelligent as the Americans asking the British to persuade the Irish not to do something. I asked a senior New Zealand official what their reaction had been. ‘What do you think, mate?’, he replied, with an evil grin.

Our second Antarctic seminar was in Washington DC, and its Earthscan press reception, well-attended by Antarctic Treaty diplomats, was just winding down when some Soviets burst out of a cab, having driven straight from the airport. As the Russian scientists and diplomats reeled round the room, one emptied a large bottle of vodka into our vast silver tureen of krill soup (krill, a planktonic shrimp, is the centre of the Antarctic food web). That was another good party.

The flavour of those early days was exciting, with a heady and partly justified feeling that we were helping to change the world. Earthscanners often worked late into the night; we usually lunched together, and developed our best ideas in the pub. But if Earthscan was fun, it was also hard work; if we were a young, boisterous and happy family, we also imposed on one another accountability, editorial quality and deadlines. I recall once having to cross-question a colleague's failure to perform. It ended with him storming out of my office with a resounding door-slam. Half an hour later, I told him that shouting at me was inappropriate behaviour. I have never forgotten my chagrin at his reply: ‘Jon, you were yelling at me without even raising your voice.’

Earthscan's activities steadily expanded, as we learned the art of fundraising and broadened our donor base way beyond UNEP. Since our duplicated briefing documents soon became dog-eared and many users kept them for years, we started reprinting them as booklets and later as paperbacks, the start of the Earthscan book imprint. We soon had a respectable bookshop sale. Since NGOs as well as journalists used our feature service, we started the Earthscan Bulletin; soon, Earthscan was targeting NGOs as much as the media, as effective information multipliers. Some of our one-day seminars expanded into week-long field trips, and we started a radio tape service and a photo-library.

By the beginning of the 1980s we were producing nearly all our material in French and Spanish as well as English, with some in German and a couple of forays into Arabic. By 1981 we had 9 staff, on a budget of $460,000; by 1986 we had 20 staff, and a budget of $760,000. Earthscan's finances, after paying an overhead, were essentially independent of IIED's; like many NGOs dependent on project funds without any core support, we were often balanced on a knife-edge. Each year, we started a few new projects on donor promises, long before contracts were signed. If sometimes we were in deficit as a result, enough of our gambles paid off for us to remain ahead of the game.

At first, Earthscan's aim was greater public awareness. But we began to articulate a more specific vision. In 1981, I was in Indonesia, planning a journalists’ workshop with Soedjatmoko, then Rector of the UN University. ‘We can tell these journalists some of the answers to development problems’, said one Indonesian excitedly. ‘No’, replied Soedjatmoko slowly, ‘we don't know the answers ourselves. But if we can help them ask the right questions ...’

Earthscan started to talk about public understanding rather than public awareness; our goal was redefined as identifying solutions as much as exposing problems. We were increasingly coming to realize that Earthscan materials had most impact at second-hand. When Southern journalists and NGOs used our briefing documents to write their own materials, they were both more likely to find a receptive audience than was a Northern agency like Earthscan, and more likely to propose policies which were appropriate to national needs. To use a phrase which later became the watchword of the Panos AIDS programme: ‘Trust the messenger: trust the message’.

In 1980 we developed a scheme to establish independent media units (IMUs): a mini-Earthscan for each subcontinent. But donors were never more than politely interested. It was not until the early 1990s that they backed our wish to move control of our programmes southwards. However, we did start fellowships for Southern journalists and NGO writers, and ‘co-publication’ of our briefing documents, whereby Southern partners adapted and re-published national editions of Earthscan papers.

In 1982 the Nordic Council published MiljÖ och Bistånd, a report which shifted Nordic aid to a sustainable development track. It also rightly argued that sustainable development could not be imposed on the South, and that long-term success depended on greater awareness within Southern societies. Earthscan used this report to justify a scheme which we sold to the four Nordic governments and to the Dutch. We called this the Focal Country Programme (FCP), for it focused on six countries in East Africa and South Asia, states which were both major recipients of Nordic and Dutch aid, and contained many Earthscan partners. There we would concentrate (though not confine) our activities, and through joint programmes with media and NGOs try to reinforce NGO and media capacities and have a more sustained public and policy impact. The highly successful FCP started in 1984, and was later expanded to the Sahel, the Caribbean, Southern Africa and the Horn of Africa.

Co-syndication was a typical FCP technique. First, we would set up a deal with a national NGO or media group to translate Earthscan features into indigenous languages, and to distribute them; then this partner would edit our features to adapt them to national readers; then they would commission features of their own, some of which were re-used in London in our international service. By 1984 there were five such services in nine Third World tongues; under Panos this grew to around 20.

The funding of the FCP marked another significant development in Earthscan: a widening of our donor base, as well as our first three-year grants. In 1984 we had an income of nearly $700,000 from 15 funders, plus nearly $60,000 from our own sales.

I cannot mention all those whose skills and personalities helped to shape Earthscan, and the following selection is hopelessly arbitrary. There was Lloyd Timberlake, a suave Georgia boy from Reuters who became editorial director and whose juggling skills were legendary; Anil Agarwal, who alternated Tiers Mondiste advocacy with obsessive one-finger pounding on a portable typewriter; Barbara Cheney, who handled our production headaches from endless retyping before photocopying, through our first noisy daisy-wheel printer in a cubicle known as the Black Hole, into the glorious freedom of computer-typeset books; and Gerry Foley, our energy guru, whose deprecating Irish humour always oiled our internal wheels.

There was also: the gentle Sumi Chauhan, whose World Water Decade skills enabled Earthscan to outgun the information budgets of WHO, UNICEF and the World Bank combined; John Austin, whose hissing indrawn breath, whenever I proposed spending money we didn't yet have, kept Earthscan just on the right side of insolvency; Jacquie Craw, who proof-read impeccably in English, French, German and Spanish; Dominique Side, who combined a passion for Tibetan culture with a Parisian relish for hard-headed negotiation; Don de Silva, an experienced Sri Lankan who oversaw the expansion of the FCP; and Rosemarie Philips, whose quiet assurance underpinned our growing Washington operations.

Lest this account of Earthscan is sounding too self-servingly successful, I must mention two cases where events proved me resoundingly wrong. Mark Edwards, whose superb development photos we had used in Earthscan for years, proposed that we become part of a new photo agency he was planning. I helpfully told him that he didn't have enough business ability. Mark and his photos left us, and the organization he started, Still Pictures, thrives today. And when Rob Lamb, one of our editorial team, suggested we establish a TV unit with him in charge, I foolishly told him he didn't have enough experience. Soon after, Rob left us to establish the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE), which still plays a leading international role in brokering environmental programmes (see Box 5.1).

But TVE, like the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) which Anil Agarwal founded in Delhi when his productive period with Earthscan ended, are both organizations in which much of the IIED–Earthscan ethos is clearly recognizable. Similar information-based NGOs, loosely or closely modelled on Earthscan, were established by associates in Kenya, Nepal, Indonesia and elsewhere. All these groups are in a very real sense the progeny of the early IIED.

SEPARATION OF EARTHSCAN AND IIED

In 1980, Barbara Ward became ill, with the cancer that was to kill her. IIED had raised funds for her to write a book on the tenth anniversary of the Stockholm Conference, which it soon became clear she would not be able to do. I persuaded my friend Erik Eckholm to come to London for a year to ‘co-author’ it; we all knew this was a euphemism.

My last sight of Barbara was in her sickbed at her beloved country home in Sussex, discussing the book's theme with Erik. Her face was white as the finest porcelain, so translucent that one could almost see the skull beneath. But through pain and exhaustion the old fire still sparkled. I taped our conversation, and from these fragments concocted a coherent foreword which later appeared under her name as the introduction to Erik's book, Down to Earth.

Barbara had decided that she should be succeeded by William Clark, an erudite and urbane man who had just retired as a World Bank vice-president. Sadly, he too was soon to die of cancer. William at first found IIED somewhat bewildering, and never quite understood how Richard Sandbrook, David Runnalls and myself could have such furious arguments while retaining our friendship and mutual respect. Though, like Barbara, he moved sure-footedly among both the British and the international development establishments (both still somewhat exclusive in the mid-1980s), he was in many ways very different, and his camp humour was not always appreciated by some of IIED's more intense researchers.

Through William's interregnum at IIED, little changed on the surface. Like Barbara, he was a part-time president, content to orchestrate IIED's many prima donnas in what Richard loved to call a ‘collegiate’ structure and Barbara's presence outlived her. Two or three years after her death, IIED arguments could still be effectively closed when someone said: ‘Barbara would never have agreed to that!’

We didn't realize it at the time, but William Clark's 1985 memorial service in St James’, Piccadilly, marked the end of an era. Like the requiem mass for Barbara in Westminster Cathedral some months earlier, the service was packed with the great and the good, those whom both Barbara and William had seen as IIED's natural allies. But IIED's golden years were over.

My last few years at the Institute started with IIED-Earthscan as amicable if occasionally squabbling Siamese twins, and was to end with their forcible severance. First in tandem, and then separately, each was to make some painful transitions.

In 1985, IIED's Board, a somewhat disparate group of Barbara's friends, chose a former head of Oxfam, Brian Walker, to take over from William. Within a year, IIED had changed radically; and Panos had been born from Earthscan's ashes. But before touching on this melancholy if melodramatic denouement, I need to explain some of the underlying tensions which had been brewing long before Brian arrived.

Since Barbara's final illness started, she had played little active part in IIED, though her influence was rarely absent. IIED was already beginning to change, from Barbara's institutional persona into a coherent professional organization. But this evolution was not easy, and IIED's Washington office began to follow so many US nonprofits, towards federal contract work. This made many of us in London uneasy: we were happier with independent policy research. The diarchy of David Runnalls and Richard Sandbrook was no longer close, and David moved to run IIED's Washington office, later leaving the staff for good.

At the same time, tensions were growing between Earthscan and the rest of IIED. These were more based on style than on substance, but proved corrosive none the less. Some saw Earthscan as a state-within-a-state, separately funded and with dangerously cordial donor-relations, growing faster in budget and staff than its parent. We had a clear sense of what we were, and where we were going, while the rest of IIED was still struggling to articulate a post-Barbara identity.

In those days, IIED (like most UK organizations) had a blatant class structure. There were the senior staff, researchers and administrators, who apart from Barbara were virtually all men, and there were the support staff, who were all women. That some had degrees was not seen as relevant: they had been hired as secretaries, and secretaries they remained. There was no way through this glass ceiling, for IIED had no posts which straddled the professional–secretarial divide.

In Earthscan, by contrast, two of our first four staff were women, and both gender-balance and promotion were easier since we were steadily expanding and had many functions in the grey area between professional and non-professional: media and NGO liaison, design and production, book sales, translation, etc. Just as we managed to hire staff from the Third World and from ethnic minorities in the UK, so we were determined to have gender parity. In 1985/86, for example, Earthscan's Paris and Washington offices were both headed by women, and there were twelve women to eight men on the payroll.

Moreover, through nearly 20 years of Earthscan–Panos, we held a Monday-morning meeting at which each staffer outlined his/her coming week's work. These could occasionally be an ordeal for shyer staff members, but at their best they were stimulating tutorials on sustainable development, playing a crucial part in engaging everyone in policy discussion.

Such differences in style caused some problems, with younger IIED staff sometimes feeling under-valued and with few prospects, comparing themselves with Earthscanners with their greater equality, upward mobility and esprit de corps. Unsurprisingly, some in IIED began to see Earthscan as an insubordinate cuckoo-in-the-nest, expanding at its parent's expense.

It was against this background that Brian Walker arrived in 1985. His was a full-time post, and he expected to run IIED, not chair it. His time at IIED was patently unhappy, both for him and for the Institute. His personality never gelled with our contumacious way of reaching decisions, and he was puzzled by our lack of any comprehensible management structure. He never understood why Earthscan should be editorially independent of IIED, and made little secret of his wish for greater integration.

Brian's Quaker background brought some useful ethical clarity to our work: he insisted that development was something you did with people, not to or for them. But he had an inflexible internal sense of what was right, which sat uneasily with IIED's pragmatism. While Brian was in fact an acute listener, he tended to take on a glazed expression in the process. I remember a fruitless argument on whether Lloyd Timberlake's award-winning and highly influential book, Africa in Crisis, should be published in-house by Earthscan or given to a commercial company like Penguin. I was concerned with which route would be fast and effective; Brian seemed to want to identify which would be morally correct.

Our mutual suspicions grew until finally, exasperated at spending more time on IIED politics than on running Earthscan, I wrote a somewhat inflammatory and angst-ridden memo to the IIED Board, suggesting that Earthscan's semi-autonomous status be formally recognized. This triggered a Greek tragedy in which we all played our appointed roles, and all seemed unable to avert what may have been an inevitable outcome. Richard Sandbrook was in his element, devising ever-more ingenious schemes for rapprochement. But to no avail.

The basic moves are simply told. First, Brian proposed that Earthscan should leave IIED, and pay it $100,000 a year for ten years for the use of the name Earthscan. The Earthscan team agreed to this idea, because we believed donors would later insist on it being abandoned. But the IIED Board saw the same flaw, and rejected it. Then a special Board committee proposed that Earthscan remain in IIED, with both Brian and myself reporting directly to the Board. We accepted this formula, but it was rejected by Brian, presumably because by formalizing Earthscan's autonomy it would have removed half of his institute from his control. So Brian Walker asked the Board to approve my dismissal. Despite of some opposition – one director telexed that the move would gravely damage IIED in the South –the majority backed the man it had recently appointed. As requested, I left the IIED offices on the same day, in May 1986.

THE BIRTH AND DEVELOPMENT OF PANOS

Within Earthscan, we had for some weeks considered the possibility of this endgame, and had discussed setting up a new organization. Within a couple of days, using the six months’ salary IIED had to pay me to break my contract, we had established a one-room office less than a kilometre from IIED. Within a week we had registered our new NGO, issued a prospectus, and notified our partners. Month by month, we re-started most Earthscan activities: features, briefing documents, press seminars, NGO magazine.

I urged all Earthscan staff to stay in their jobs, at least for the moment, for I had no way of paying 20 salaries. Gradually, as funds started to flow, some resigned to work with me, some initially without pay and often at considerable personal cost. Some obtained other jobs, and the remainder were eventually made redundant by IIED and joined Panos. Only one, Lloyd Timberlake, accepted a new position at IIED, and although a year later he and I twice discussed his joining Panos, this sadly never proved possible.

The nascent Panos could not legitimately claim to be Earthscan, for IIED insisted that Earthscan still existed. But we could and did say that Panos was ‘founded by the former staff of Earthscan’. By late 1997, virtually all Earthscan's old donors were funding Panos, and IIED had quietly abandoned its initial claim that Earthscan was still alive. Happily, IIED maintained the name Earthscan as its in-house publishing imprint, and later sold the name to a commercial publisher. So ‘Earthscan’ still appears on book-covers, some of them on publications originating from IIED.

Inevitably, perhaps, Earthscan's rebirth as Panos left a legacy of bitterness. A few weeks after my departure from IIED, I was at an international conference in Ottawa, where many of our donors and partners were easily accessible. In Ottawa, too, was an IIED delegation. At the opening reception, Maurice Strong told me bluntly that while he wished me all the best personally, he had heard that I was planning to recreate Earthscan under another name, and if so would do everything in his power to destroy it. It was not until 1991, when Maurice was preparing the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, that I decided we must bury this hatchet, and met him in Geneva.

Maurice, I discovered, had been told that while still employed by IIED I had asked donors to fund a breakaway group. I remarked that while he might consider me sufficiently unethical to do this, did he think me sufficiently stupid? If I had indeed approached donors in this way, I argued, word would rapidly have got back to IIED, killing the idea stone dead. Maurice saw the point, and I was happy to have our interrupted friendship restored.

At that same Ottawa conference, a Canadian NGO was due to present Earthscan with an award, and in order not to take sides between Panos and IIED it insisted that David Runnalls, Richard Sandbrook and myself jointly accept the trophy. All three of us trooped onto the stage – although not exactly hand-in-hand. I was grinning broadly; Dave looked thunderous; and Richard collapsed in laughter at the absurdity of it all.

Dave's lack of amusement was understandable, for IIED was going through a difficult post-Earthscan transition. It had suddenly lost half of its staff and income, and throughout 1987 I knew from my own visits to donors that Brian was working hard to finance new programmes as well as arguing that Earthscan still existed and should be re-funded as part of IIED.

Through these tense months, Richard provided continuity and stability, and eventually took over in 1989 as Executive Director. Panos–IIED relations then slowly began to thaw, and in the mid-90s Richard ensured that the institute's 25th anniversary booklet included a generous account of Earthscan. Today, hardly anyone in either organization remembers the traumatic quarrels of 1986. Only David Satterthwaite remains on the IIED staff from Earthscan days, and James Deane and Marty Radlett are the only former Earthscanners still working for Panos.

So how did we manage to recreate Earthscan? We said from the start that we would recommence all Earthscan's former activities, and we did. But we also determined on some key changes. First, we needed a new name, as Earthscan was the property of IIED. ‘Earthscan’ had been a great title, but when we chose it (I think it was Dave Runnalls’ idea) we never considered its non-English pronunciation. Francophone tongues found the five consecutive consonants unmanageable, so we looked for a new name that had some but not too much meaning, and that would work in any language: rather as a transnational company chooses a name for a new car.

Finally, Gerry Foley proposed ‘panos’, a classical Greek dialect word derived from Pharos, the island with the famous lighthouse. The syllable ‘pan’ in Greek means universal; its Latin root is the basis of the word for bread in most Romance languages; and in Hindi ‘pani’ means water. That in Finnish slang the word has sexual connotations, and that Pan had been the Roman god of debauchery and chaos, we found amusing.

The Earthscan bureaux in Paris and Washington had always been seen locally as branch offices of a British organization. The second major change in forming Panos was that we were determined to establish totally autonomous Panos institutes in these cities, with the status of French and US NGOs respectively. I served as their common president, but their boards and staff were drawn from the francophone and pan-American cultures. In the longer term, I hoped that one day we could have similarly autonomous Panos institutes in the South.

The third change was the conscious increase in the Southern content of our information materials. Analysis and policies on sustainable development which are formulated within a society are both more likely to be believed, and more likely to be socially sustainable, than those suggested or imposed from outside.

NGOs are by nature fissiparous, and there have been many instances of disaffected staff leaving to form breakaway organizations. Nearly all disappear without trace. How did Panos succeed where so many others have failed? The biggest reason was the extraordinary determination, mutual loyalty and sense of outrage of the former Earthscan staff. If IIED had taken our ball away, we would damned well start a new game next door.

We received a similar commitment from our Third World partners, and many friends proved willing to join the boards of an unproven trio of new NGOs. It is impossible to mention all those who played a key role as Panos directors, but they included Andras BÍrÓ, Bill Carmichael, Halle Jørn Hanssen, Brad Morse, Vicente Sanchez, Kristian Sørensen and Tarzie Vittachi; many other influential friends, such as Sonny Ramphal, helped us in other ways.

Our ultimate success was heavily underwritten by two chance events: a decision of the Swedish government to examine its aid programme openly, and the early growth of the AIDS pandemic. A new international NGO needs a high-profile event to make it visible, and a major issue to make its own. Panos, by great good fortune, found both.

In summer 1986, Johan Holmberg of the Swedish government development agency, Sida told me that Sweden was to host a Nordic conference, opened by the four prime ministers, to examine the sustainability of their aid programmes. Could Panos write some project evaluations? Sure, I replied, provided you let us commission them from journalists in the recipient country. Johan was excited at this approach, and sold it to his bosses. By autumn 1986, Panos was hard at work on fourteen 10,000-word studies: development projects from the consumer's viewpoint. And we had our funding from all four Nordic aid agencies. By mid-1987, Panos had built a solid reputation, unusual when development ‘experts’ normally jetted in from outside, for providing authentic Southern voices on Southern issues. Many other Panos studies and books later reinforced this tradition.

Our second stroke of luck, if such an evil development can be called fortunate, was that 1986 was in the early days of AIDS. Renée Sabatier, an inspired and painstaking young Quebecker who had joined Earthscan's editorial team, moved with most of the rest of us to Panos and started studying this new disease.

I was of course aware of AIDS, even though the deaths of so many close friends were still to come. (These were to include two well-loved colleagues in Panos-Washington: director Richard Horovitz, and fundraiser Steve Lembesis.) But what had AIDS to do with development, I asked Renée? I had an institute to create and finance: don't bother me with issues I don't need to know about!

Renée took me to lunch with Dr Richard Tedder at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, whose unpublished figures on the high incidence of HIV among prostitutes in Africa, combined with the long symptom-less incubation period before HIV infection showed itself, persuaded me that AIDS was a development disaster in the making.

Through autumn 1986, Renée worked on the first Panos dossier, AIDS and the Third World. Meanwhile, I sounded alarm bells among development aid agencies. AIDS was not, we argued, just a growing problem for gay men in Europe and North America, nor even just one more disease for the health divisions of aid agencies. It was an issue which would come to dominate development, and demanded a top-level strategic rethink.

These treks through the chancelleries of Europe began to have a double purpose: funds for Panos, and talking AIDS to anyone who would listen. Responses varied. Some got the point quickly, but said they had no budgets. Others simply disbelieved our data. One young high-flyer in a Nordic foreign ministry cross-questioned me closely about the incidence of HIV among East African prostitutes a few years previously. His concern, I later realized, was motivated less by development than by recollections of his own past sexual encounters in Nairobi.

We had two more lucky breaks. First, Renée put me in touch with Calle Almedal at the Norwegian Red Cross (Norcross), who became a firm friend. Norcross quickly and repeatedly helped fund our AIDS work, and when our dossier was published in November 1986 it had the Red Cross emblem on the cover, giving it crucial respectability –much to the initial rage of many national Red Cross societies, who felt that the subject was not quite nice.

Second, I happened to arrive for a meeting at the World Health Organization (WHO) on the same day that Dr Jonathan Mann took up his post as WHO's AIDS coordinator. No one at WHO was ready to talk to him, so we spent the morning having coffee in the chilly Geneva sunshine. Jon Mann was to prove another long-standing friend of Panos, privately advising on virtually all our AIDS publications, and with a shrewd political sense of what an international NGO could usefully say that WHO could not.

AIDS and the Third World was probably the most influential publication that Earthscan or Panos ever produced. Jon Mann later told me he had visited more than 100 countries for WHO, and in only a handful was he not shown a copy, or a dog-eared copy of a copy, of the Panos report, and told that it had been crucial in stimulating action.

‘Our picture of the AIDS epidemic is a grim one’, I wrote in AIDS and the Third World’s foreword. ‘In the US, the worst-hit city so far is New York, where one in 15 people is now thought to carry the virus. But in some Central African capitals, up to one person in five is infected. Most of them are in their twenties and thirties, as many women as men. These are their nation's breadwinners, many of them educated professionals. The impact of their gathering death march will scar Africa for a generation.’

Events have since justified this gloomy rhetoric. But being prematurely right is not always prudent. To many in government, Panos was irresponsibly alarmist. We decided to convene a meeting of heads of Western development agencies. Norcross and WHO backed us, and our Washington board member Beth Kummerfeld wrote out a personal cheque.

With Halfdan Mahler and Jim Grant, the respective bosses of WHO and UNICEF, giving opening statements, the Talloires Consultation was held in spring 1987, in a restored medieval monastery in the French alps. I asked Maggie Cattley-Carlson, President of the Canadian government development agency CIDA, to chair the meeting. ‘Sure,’ she replied, ‘but don't think I share your agenda.’ She had been advised that our analysis was exaggerated, and she intended to make this clear. Her scepticism worked well for us, as by the end of the meeting she was fully persuaded, and said so.

Talloires was to prove an important turning point in the AIDS policies of many agencies and governments, and the Panos strategy in convening it was classic IIED, recalling the high-level symposia with which Barbara Ward preceded several UN conferences of the late 1970s. Renée Sabatier, together with Martin Foreman and Marty Radlett, brought out half a dozen more important AIDS publications for Panos; Martin now has an international reputation in this field. Renée, sadly, left Panos, and later died while working on AIDS in Zimbabwe. Jon Mann was tragically killed in a plane crash.

PANOS AND IIED TODAY

This chapter is not a history of Panos, and having described how we survived our separation from IIED I shall say little more. It is unfair to single anyone out, but once again I can't resist a few names, quite arbitrarily selected: Geoff Barnard, whose nose for a bargain located Panos-London's two successive offices, orchestrated our increasing computerization and oversaw our finances and administration for years; Liz Carlile, who hard-headedly ran Panos Books; Nigel Twose, who became director of Panos-London, bringing better management and a sharp political nose; Nigel Cross, who took London through a difficult period of retrenchment, established a decentralized Panos programme in South Asian and East and Southern Africa, and laid the groundwork for current success; Patricia Ardila, a US-Colombian who delighted in the Star Trek implications of her US identity card headed ‘resident alien’; Aida Opoku-Mensah and Carmen Miranda, who skilfully developed our work in Southern Africa and South Asia respectively; Robert Walgate and Benjie Pogrund, two superb writers and editors; Charles Condamines, Diana Senghor and Francoise Havelange who brilliantly ran our work in Paris and the Sahel; James Deane, whose sure-footed sense of direction underlies the present growth of Panos in the South. Throughout Earthscan and Panos, one of my joys was watching previously hidden talents bloom, as so many of my colleagues grew far beyond their initial roles.

By 1993, I had been running Earthscan and then Panos for nearly 20 years. It was still fun – but not as much as it had been. In the early 1990s Panos had become highly regarded in the development world, with a staff of about 50 (of 20 nationalities) in three offices, and an annual budget which in 1990 reached $3.5 million. I decided that enough was enough, and moved to Canada. There, I joined the Sustainable Development Research Institute (SDRI) at the University of British Columbia, and work as a consultant and writer.

Of Panos since 1993, I want to make only one point. There are now Panos institutes, autonomous or on the way to becoming so, in Washington DC, Haiti, Dakar, Lusaka, Kampala, London, Paris and Kathmandu, as well as offices in other locations. There are other links, too: Panos Pictures has been spun off into an independent profit-making company, under its shrewd manager Adrian Evans; and the highly regarded Gemini News has merged into Panos-London.

The inheritors of Barbara Ward's IIED are now to be found on four continents. It is a measure of the parallel paths which Panos and IIED now follow that while former Earthscanner James Deane heads Panos-London, former Panos-London director Nigel Cross now runs IIED.

As IIED enters its fourth decade, and Panos celebrates its 15th birthday, the two have evolved distinctly different personalities. But they share some strong common strands: a sometimes pedantic resolve to get things right; an instinct for pragmatism over theory; a neither-fish-nor-fowl identity somewhere between research and activism; a liking for influencing the levers of power, perhaps at the risk of elitism; an understanding of Brian Walker's dictum that development is with people, not for or to them; some of Barbara Ward's humane Catholicism, and her sense of moral outrage; an echo, perhaps, of the Kennedy generation which saw the world as it might be, and asked ‘Why not?’; the belief, with Soedjatmoko, that you can help people ask the right questions, but that they must find their own answers.

In Earthscan's first few brochures, we quoted Barbara Ward: ‘The chief environmental insight is that everything interconnects. But if everything connects, where are the threads through the maze?’ Earthscan-IIED provided some of those guiding threads.

Thirty years on, this need is as acute as it was at the time of Stockholm. The Internet gives access to vast banks of information (for those on-line at least, which excludes most of the South). But where are the threads through today's cyber-maze? The signal-to-noise ratio is far lower than it was then, and the Web provides as many opportunities for delusion as it does for enlightenment. Consider the cost in human misery of South African President Mbeki's view, gleaned from the Internet and imposed on his country's public health system, that AIDS is not caused by HIV.

If it can afford a satellite phone, the remotest community can now choke itself on information. But there is today an even more urgent development need for evaluated and critiqued information, that helps others ask the right questions without manipulating them into accepting the answers and values of the webmasters, most of whom accept the predominant global consumerist ideology.

Connecting with the World, a 1996 report to the Canadian government from a task force headed by Maurice Strong, argued that the Internet is central to development, and Canada's IISD, now headed by David Runnalls, has played a pioneering role in this field. It is perhaps no coincidence that both people were for many years closely associated with IIED and Earthscan.

IIED and Panos have historically shared a commitment to creating and disseminating timely, sharp, policy-relevant information, with the specific goal of shifting public policy. As we move nearer to Rio+10, we should perhaps be asking ourselves whether, and how effectively, we are still reaching this goal.

Today, hundreds of NGOs and academic bodies work on policy analysis. The Pollyanna belief that good policies, like good science, will eventually drive out the bad, is appropriate for scholars and may be enough for research institutes. But the Bush administration's decision that climate change is not a US priority, and the pathetic post-Kyoto record of Canada, the UK and other major states, shows how sterile this approach can be. Competent policy studies are of little value unless they are adopted. ‘Give me a lever and I will shift the world’, said Archimedes. Barbara Ward was never satisfied with creating the lever: she wanted to pull it as well.

I am currently working on a book that takes a new look at sustainable development, and argues that, far from our environmental and social goals being in conflict with economic goals, the three are reconcilable. Humankind can design its own futures, and then go there. A single human brain, with its billions of interconnected cells, is capable of the insights of Gandhi, Michaelangelo or Einstein. The potential of billions of human brains, if they could be effectively interconnected, is one resource that is infinitely sustainable. Only connect. But how?

Those two redoubtable grandes dames Barbara Ward and Margaret Mead did not always work easily together. But the many institutions which are descended from Ward's IIED underline one of Mead's favourite remarks. ‘Never underestimate two or three people coming together and talking about changing the world. That's the only way the world ever is changed.’

I am grateful to James Deane and Gerry Foley for their careful critique of this text. But any remaining errors are mine, and memory is fickle. I deeply regret that lack of space makes it impossible to mention the invaluable contributions of so many former colleagues, who each helped build a remarkable clutch of organizations.