This Week from Washington

Friday, September 4, 2009

This week, how the Millennium Challenge Corporation's compact grants
help create good governance, and the World Climate Conference discusses
the creation of a framework for climate services.(click here to listen)

Transcript

Narrator:
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During her recent trip to Africa, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton identified lack of good governance as a major obstacle to development. But she also highlighted a global solution currently in use throughout the continent and South America, Asia and Europe: the compacts of the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation, or MCC.

In Cape Verde, the last stop in her August 4–14, seven-nation trip to sub-Saharan Africa, Clinton pointed to progress the island nation’s government was making toward greater accountability and transparency. The country’s economic progress is due, in part, she said, to “its successful implementation of the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact.”

The MCC is an independent U.S. development agency created by Congress in 2004. It helps lead the fight against global poverty with innovative infrastructure projects. The compacts are five-year grants that finance these projects.

The MCC partners only with countries that can show measurable support for a free and open political system with access to open markets. Only countries with proven track records in anti-corruption, civil liberties and the rule of law may partner with the MCC in crafting a development program unique to their local conditions.

For countries that do not yet meet the MCC’s criteria for open political systems and markets, they can still work through the MCC’s “threshold” process. This process involves forming partnerships to improve good governance programs, civil society participation, judicial reform and anti-corruption efforts.

Since 2005, the MCC has signed threshold agreements worth $117 million to combat corruption and strengthen government institutions in Albania, Malawi, Moldova, Paraguay and the Philippines.

Liberia is one country where a threshold agreement is in place. After years of civil war, Liberia is also not in a position to be a full MCC compact partner, but it’s threshold assistance program is aimed at improving its civil and governing institutions.

Some critics claim that the MCC’s good-governance requirements are too harsh and that slows down the grant process. Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf disagrees.

Africa’s first woman head of state recently said that the MCC has had a transformative effect across the developing world. Responsible, reform-minded governments have accelerated the pace of reform while empowering governments to make decisions on development and the direction of their countries.

In Geneva, Switzerland, at the third World Climate Conference, 1,500 policymakers and resource managers from more than 150 countries joined with scientific experts to discuss the practical impact of the latest scientific findings on climate change.

The discussions center around what end users of the information – policymakers, resource managers, city planners, and others – most need to make the best decisions in the face of a warming climate. The World Meteorological Organization and its international partners organized the conference to define “climate services”. The focus will be on climate predictions on time scales that range from days to 50 years in the future for adapting to climate variability and change.

The head of the U.S. delegation, Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Jane Lubchenco, said it’s not enough for scientists to think what users need. It’s very important for the users to help define what they need and how they need it.

The World Climate Conference is an important gathering. The first conference held in Geneva in 1979, resulted in the formation in 1988 of the Nobel-Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which convenes scientists from around the world every five years or six years to assess the state of the climate. The second conference in 1990 led to the creation of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international environmental treaty created in 1992, and the Global Climate Observing System, a network of climate and related observations.

Now, expected outcomes include a better understanding of the scientific and practical issues involved in developing climate services, and agreement on a way to create a new global framework for climate services. Such a framework would include improving networks of satellites, buoys and other Earth-observation devices that monitor conditions in the oceans and atmosphere. It would also promote the open availability of climate data to anyone who wants it.

The framework will also seek to build capacity in developing countries that will be hardest hit by climate change. The sectors that climate change most seriously affects – water, agriculture, health, transportation, tourism and energy, could benefit greatly from improved application of climate data. A new World Climate Services System could support these efforts and find more unified ways to build capacity in developing countries and around the world.

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