Improving International Development Evaluation through Geospatial Data Analysis

This paper on Improving International Development Evaluation through Geospatial Data and Analysis (authors: Malte Lech, Juha Uitto, Sven Harten, Geeta Batra and Anupam Anand) was just published in the International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research.

Ordos: Not quite a ghost town

Ordos, in the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia, has been called a ‘ghost town’ (see for example Wade Shepard’s 2017 article in Forbes magazine, entitled “China’s Most Infamous ‘Ghost City’ Is Rising from the Desert”). There’s a reason for that; the city is not exactly packed with life. Still the depiction may be unfair. I spent a week there last autumn and found the place to be both intriguing and challenging. It surely is impressive, with its high rises, wide avenues, monumental squares and parks. When I landed at the shiny new airport in the middle of the night, disembarking from an Air China flight from Beijing, the entry was very smooth. There were few people at the airport and a taxi was waiting. We headed off on a road to near total darkness soon to arrive at a brightly lit toll gate with extravagant decorations shining in the night. Then off we went on a drive that felt like an eternity on an empty eight-lane highway, mostly unlit, until we hit the outskirts of the city. I was sharing the ride with an American lady whom we dropped off first at a massive Howard Johnson establishment (I didn’t know these motels came in such sizes) before driving another 5 minutes to reach my hotel, Tieniu, across a large intersection in the middle of the city. In the lobby I was met by a young man dressed in a pale blue uniform explaining the system to me: where the restaurants were, at what time meals were served, etc.; and taking me to my 9^th floor room. The room was comfortable, overlooking the intersection and a park behind it, and after a while I settled into the standard hotel bed.

Dongsheng dawn

The morning dawned beautiful. After only a few hours of sleep I woke up and looked out over the intersection and the park. The moon shone over the slowly brightening sky. It was quiet and no movement could be seen. Around 7 am the city started to wake up and loud music with a disco beat started blaring from the park. Presumably it was played to prepare the city’s denizens for another productive day; most likely there were people in the park engaging in rhythmic morning exercises but I couldn’t see it from my room.

The young man in blue from last night, I would find out, belonged to a group of hundreds of student volunteers who had been mobilized to guide the thousands of foreigners who had gathered in town for the 13^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP13) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Ordos was hosting the biannual event in its large new Convention Center, apparently one of the first such international gatherings in town. The student guides were an essential part of the success, as the locals certainly were not well equipped to deal with the invasion. While street signs were generally in three scripts – Chinese, Mongolian and Western – they would not be very helpful. Similarly, the ability of the local people to communicate in English was virtually non-existent. Even at the reception of this 4-star hotel, the staff lacked even a rudimentary knowledge of basic English words.

I walked out of the hotel and turned left on what appeared to be a commercial street. The air was dry 

Dongsheng

and the sun shone brightly. There were a few people on the street but nothing that could be described a crowd. After all it was a Saturday. I found an ATM and tried each and every one of my credit and debit cards for some cash, but to no avail. With no luck at the ATM, I wondered into a large shopping complex, walked down the stairs and entered. The shops were open but the place was virtually deserted. It seemed to me that most of the establishments sold clothes and many appeared to focus on fashionable street wear. I entered a shop that sold drinks and was met by a very friendly woman eager to help. She smiled broadly and despite the lack of a common language we managed to select something for me to drink right away as well as some interesting looking Baijiu for a later occasion. As I had no cash, she indicated credit cards would be just fine. She whipped out a credit card machine but it would not accept any of my cards. She fished out another one from a cupboard, a bulky old-fashioned item, dusted it off and plugged it into a wall outlet. Again, the result was the same. After some 10 minutes we both gave up and I walked out without my drinks while the nice lady looked distressed.

I returned to the hotel and asked the group of volunteers in their pale blue outfits about how to get to the Convention Center. A helpful young lady explained that there was a bus that would go straight there and that I wouldn’t have to pay the fare. Apparently, there was a deal that the foreign delegates would ride free; having us understand the payment system and give the right amount of money was clearly more trouble than it was worth. I would just have to walk across the street and wait for bus number 3. Crossing the road was no problem as there was virtually no traffic, so I positioned myself on the bus stop and started to wait.

There were a couple of other people who ogled me with curiosity. Soon two teenage girls approached me. One of them ventured a hesitant ‘hello’ and plenty of giggles followed when I responded in the same way. That was the extent of our mutual vocabulary, but the girls indicated that they wanted to have photographs with me. We asked the other people waiting at the bus stop to take the photos.

Soon bus number 3 arrived and I boarded it. The driver welcomed me with a smile. There was one other passenger, a middle-aged lady who was equally welcoming and said something to me in Chinese. This turned out to be a regular city bus. I placed myself next to an open window, as the day was getting warm and I could welcome the breeze. The bus moved at an extraordinarily slow pace through the vast deserted streets. At a later stop, a young man in the pale blue uniform boarded and the friendly lady beckoned him over. The volunteer confirmed that I was on the right bus and that I should just have to wait until we reached the Convention Center stop; I would not be able to miss it. Soon the bus left the city and entered an eight-lane highway, presumably the same my taxi had used last night. The highway was new and looked very impressive. There was very little traffic. Some cars cruised smoothly past us, while we encountered a few other buses and trucks. The landscape around us, now that I could see it, was open and the blue sky appeared high. Everywhere there were tree plantations with saplings in straight rows sticking out of the dry soil. The landforms were rolling hills. Afforesting the bare hills was obviously an official priority. There was a river and a reservoir with large Chinese letters in bright red inscribed on the adjacent hillside. Perhaps they declared some environmental goal but I could not be certain. The bus crept along the fancy highway at most 50 km/h. The speed limit said 100 km/h, or 80 in areas of intersections. When the road moved uphill, our speed slowed to a crawl. I was concerned that the engine would die and we would be deserted in the middle of an empty stretch with the scorching sun upon us in the merciless sky.

Reservoir between Dongsheng and Kangbashi

The highway passed through empty areas with only neat afforestation projects on both sides. In some places they were irrigated by water trucks. There were old workers in neon vests ambling around the center plantations that separated the traffic going in opposite directions. Occasionally we would see high rise developments that looked empty. Finally, we left the highway and entered another urban area: the Kangbashi New District. The city roads were wide with three lanes going in each direction. On the roadsides there were monuments of large horses – this was Inner Mongolia where horses have played a central part in the culture since the times of the Genghis Khan – and parks with fountains sparing no amount of water in this dry land. We reached the Convention Center stop and I disembarked. The bus ride had taken 70 minutes. I had enjoyed the scenery and the few people on the bus, including the driver, had been very hospitable but I decided I would invest in a taxi ride from now on for the coming week. This would cut the travel time by half.

Convention Center in Kangbashi

The Convention Center occupied large grounds and was very pleasant. The first thing a visitor saw was a display of plant art, dominated by a 7-8 meter tall horse flanked by other Mongolian items. There was a booth selling coffee and cold drinks, as well as other utility booths, before one entered the main building. On the left there was a massive tent that served as the dining area where one could purchase a large variety of Chinese, Western, vegetarian and halal foods (there are lots of Muslims in northwestern China). I spent the rest of the day – and several more to come – in the conference. We also conducted a field visit to environmental projects funded, amongst others, by the Global Environment Facility. But the evenings I would spend in Dongsheng, mostly by myself as my colleagues were all lodged in Kangbashi.

By now I had figured out how these two centers hang together (and here I rely in particular on an article by the geographer Max Woodworth published in the journal Cities in 2015). Located in the valley of the Yellow River, Ordos has historically been a poor area in China, plagued by its dry climate (with an average annual rainfall of only 341 mm) and poor agricultural land. In the early-2000s, however, the town experienced a significant boom period due to exploitation of its abundant natural resources – notably coal and gas, which also experienced high prices at that period. As a consequence, Ordos was dubbed as “China’s new coal capital”: investment poured in and people’s incomes rose rapidly. Dongsheng was the town that had previously formed the urban core of Ordos. In 2001, Ordos Municipality was founded around Dongsheng and a new center, the Kangbashi New District, was established about 25 km north of Dongsheng to form this bi-centered conglomerate. The two centers and other subcenters in between were connected by the fancy new highways that I had now traveled on.  Kangbashi was a planned center with administrative offices, cultural facilities and residential areas – and the Convention Center – popping up at a rapid succession. Kangbashi New District was inaugurated in 2006. Apart from the fine new infrastructure, there was a major greening effort that included planting 200,000 trees – I had observed this on my first trip from Dongsheng to Kangbashi.

The Ordos Performing Arts Center & Ordos Cultural Center

In the decade from 2000 to 2010, the Ordos municipality’s population increased by 39% as some

417,000 people moved in, partly lured by opportunities in the boom town, partly as part of official mass location of entire villages from the ecologically fragile semi-arid areas to the city. Then around 2011, the bubble burst, as the inflated real estate market collapsed simultaneously with a dip in coal prices. Since 2012, two-thirds of the coal mines in Ordos have scaled back or closed down. Up to 200,000 people left Ordos municipality in the next couple of years, mostly recent migrants whose hopes for a better urban life didn’t materialize, thus contributing to the image of a ghost town. While Dongsheng still has some 580,000 inhabitants, Kangbashi’s population is a modest 30,000 with a 70% vacancy rate in the residential developments.

Dongsheng by night

At nighttime, all public buildings and monuments in both Kangbashi and Dongsheng were brightly lit with colorful lights that shifted and flashed forming impressive displays of lightshows. All of the electricity would be provided by coalfired power plants implanted in the surrounding desert. From my hotel room I could see a fountain sprouting water high up in the air in different formations illuminated with spotlights constantly changing colors. The high rise next door had an entire wall decorated with red and blue lights in the pattern of flowing water. Every few minutes a car would pass on the avenues below.

When I had some free time on a Sunday, I walked over to the park. At its center was an artificial lake

The park in Dongsheng

and some children were playing in the water. There was a small temple and some people were walking leisurely around the pond. The park was a well-kept oasis surrounded by the skyscrapers of Donsheng. In fact, I noticed several municipal workers quietly toiling in the gardens and maintaining the paths.

One of the first evenings I returned to the hotel hungry and wanted to have dinner. It was about 8:45 pm and I had been informed that the restaurant would be open until 9:30. My arrival caused considerable commotion. The maître d’, an attractive woman in a black uniform with a short skirt and black stockings, literally ran to the dining room and found that all other patrons (if indeed there had been any) had already departed and the staff were busy closing shop. Luckily there would be room service available. With the help of the nice lady I was able to select a meal to be brought to my room. She didn’t speak any English but there was an English menu and I picked a familiar item: Kung Pao Chicken. She also took me to a room that served as their wine cellar where I selected a bottle of local Great Wall red wine (not bad at all). About 20 minutes later the same maître d’ showed up at my door with a waiter carrying the food and wine.

Ms. Zhang

On another night I repeated the procedure, went to the 2^nd floor restaurant reception, negotiated with the lovely maître d’ (by this time I had learned that her name was Zhang) and ordered room service. Mongolian food tends to be heavy on meat and this time my meal was diced beef with onions, leeks and asparagus. It probably was the best meal I had in Ordos. Zhang and a waiter again brought it up to my room. This time she stayed behind for a few minutes and we took selfies with each other. She also showed me some photos on her cell phone.

The selfie theme repeated itself several times during my visit, so rare was the appearance of foreign creatures in these parts. Once when I was returning to Dongsheng from the conference, the taxi driver, a middle-aged man, stopped the taxi, whipped out his cell phone and asked whether he could snap a selfie with me in the back seat. Of course, I had no objections.

One evening as I returned to the hotel I was determined to find somewhere else with a bit of life to sit and enjoy the scenery. I descended to the reception where there were five or six employees behind the counter. I tried to ask about where I could go out for a drink. This drew a blank. Not a single one of the employees understood the word. No worries, soon a young woman in pale blue ran to my rescue. Unfortunately, she was equally lost. I suggested a ‘bar’, but neither was that word familiar to her. But she did have an electronic dictionary and after consulting it for a while, she looked up to me and asked: “So you want to go to a pub?” I said that a pub was close enough and that I would indeed want to go to one. She consulted with the receptionists who still looked lost. I suggested that hotels usually had bars, especially big ones like the Tieniu, but learned that this was not the case in Ordos. We went outside and consulted with two taxi drivers and came to the conclusion that a pub did indeed exist in Dongsheng. So I jumped into the back of the taxi and off we drove into the darkness. I was having second thoughts as the taxi drove through empty avenues further and further away from what I had thought was city center. We passed another smaller hotel in front of which we had to wait as a bus let off a large group of Chinese tourists. We drove across a parking lot and turned onto a street that appeared entirely dark. Lo and behold, the taxi driver curved in front of a building where there indeed was a pub. Hospitable as everyone I had met in Ordos was, the taxi driver got out of the car, walked with me to the establishment and announced my arrival to the staff. I was warmly welcomed as the smiling taxi driver bowed deep and retreated backwards towards his waiting vehicle on the dark deserted street.

The pub

I was ushered to a table. The place had a red theme, wooden tables, and a prominent bar in the middle of the room. There were only two other customers in the establishment, a youngish Western couple chatting over beers at a nearby table. The staff consisted of a man and a woman who served as waiters and another woman on the kitchen side who appeared to be the boss. The man brought me a menu, which had some English and a few pictures. I saw there were a few foreign beers, like Allagash White, but when the waiter suggested the first item on the menu I gladly agreed. Soon I had in front of me a 1.5-liter pitcher of local beer, which would put me back by about $1. I also ordered an item from the menu having first ascertained that it was chicken (I ended up shaking my folded arms as if they were the short wings of a hen and, as that didn’t do the trick, drew a chicken on a napkin; by this time the boss had also emerged from the kitchen and she nodded vigorously in affirmation).

The evening turned very pleasant. Little by little, after 9 pm local kids started to drift into the bar. They all looked relaxed and dressed in jeans or miniskirts in a slightly punkish style. Some carried guitar cases. They ordered beer and chatted. My chicken and beer did the trick and I felt contended. On TV there was a Chinese historical fantasy drama where drop-dead-gorgeous women slashed bad guys with swords. The foreign couple got up and went to the cashier to pay, only to find that their credit cards would not be accepted and they did not have any cash. The boss emerged again from the kitchen and a negotiation ensued. With sign language, the foreigners explained that they lived in a nearby hotel and showed the hotel card. They promised to come back the following day to pay, which I am convinced they would do (they looked very decent). Luckily, I had found a Bank of China branch where I had been able to withdraw cash for the taxi rides and other minor investments, so I had no trouble paying the bill. The nice young lady who was the boss called me a taxi and the male waiter escorted me to the dark empty street when it arrived.

On the following evening after work I returned to the shopping mall next to my hotel. I found the shop where I had tried to purchase drinks on my first day. The same woman was behind the counter and her face lit up when she saw me. She welcomed me warmly like an old friend and quickly ran to fetch the bottles of local liquor I had failed to purchase the first time around. This time I had cash and we separated thanking each other profusely. Then in the basement where the food stores were located, I found a small café that sold beer. It was weak and warm but wet and it made my day.

Ordos Municipality Government offices, Kangbashi New District

On my last afternoon with all work completed I left the Convention Center in Kangbashi and walked maybe 15 minutes alongside the broad and empty avenues towards Ordos Museum. I passed the Kangbashi police headquarters, a big square building flanked by a red flag behind a bank of colorful flowers. Then the Kangbashi New District municipal offices that were housed in four large blocks with a Genghis Khan themed monument in front.

I crossed the avenue, which was not challenging despite its impressive width because of the sparse

traffic, and entered a vast park – the Genghis Khan Square. The space was wide open and the trees that were there had been planted only recently. The entrance to the park sported a statue of two huge horses standing on their hindlegs. Further in, there were equally large and fanciful statues, including a pair of gigantic Mongolian wrestlers positioned against each other across a square. All of these were very creative and entertaining. I spotted another person in the park, a Chinese man taking photographs of the features.

The park was surrounded by some of the most important buildings in Kangbashi, including the Ordos Performing Arts Center, the Ordos Cultural Center, the Ordos Library and the Ordos Museum. They all had very innovative contemporary architecture. I took a direction diagonally across the park towards the museum, passing a very nice and imaginative patch of flowers with larger than life sheep grazing in the middle.

Ordos Museum

The museum itself was definitely worth a visit. The massive building had an impressive contemporary design like a huge egg laid on a high foundation. It was designed by the Chinese architects MAD and opened in 2011. I walked around it in the relentless afternoon sunshine searching for the main entrance (it turned out that I started circling the edifice in the wrong direction and had to walk around almost all of it to land at the main doors). The moment I arrived, I was greeted by a young lady in the same pale blue uniform as those at my hotel, at the conference site and even on the bus. From now on, I would be passed on from one hostess to the next in a relay that would show me everything in the museum. We started on the first floor with some contemporary art by local artists. Very good, I thought. We then proceeded through prehistoric rooms with life-sized woolly mammoths and dioramas of primitive people engaged in daily chores accompanied by archeological finds, advancing through the history of Inner Mongolia all the way to the Communist revolution (again dioramas, this time with Red Guards guiding the local people), to collections of porcelain (that disappointingly were not from the region but were on loan from some coastal museum). At each floor, the current guide handed me over to a next one. All of them were university students with an English major who had been brought here for the duration of the conference. All were knowledgeable and very kind, but I particularly liked one – a student from Hohhot University not far from Ordos – who had a twinkle in her eye and dropped some subtle, yet very funny remarks regarding the exhibits.

Museum insides

I was genuinely impressed by the museum. Not only were the exhibits very interesting and well done, but the architecture of the building was beautiful. On the inside, sunlight pouring through strategically located windows of different shapes created stunning patterns of light and shadows. I asked the last of the ladies to allow me to wander around for a while by myself. I took the stairs down from the top floor back to the entrance admiring the architecture. On the ground floor, I was greeted by all the ladies who had escorted me and led to the museum store. We also took some photographs with ourselves.

The volunteers in the museum

On my last morning, I got up at 5:30 and had a breakfast of fried rice with egg, vegetables, steamed dumplings, tea and juice. Having finished packing, I took a taxi to the airport. The trip through mostly empty highways took some 45 minutes. The airport is truly beautiful but it, too, was virtually empty. I was the only passenger at that early hour checking into the Air China flight to Beijing. At the check-in counter, I was greeted by one of the pale blue volunteers who helped me to get my boarding pass and directed me to the beautiful lounge where a hostess in a silk uniform with a miniskirt welcomed me. I again was the only customer, until three Chinese fellow travelers entered and ended my peaceful reverie.

I felt surprisingly melancholy about leaving this place.

Back in Mizusawa

Yoko and Nowa in the old part of Mizusawa

July and we’re back in Mizusawa, as regularly as migrating birds, every summer for many years already. This is Yoko’s hometown and I’ve grown to feel it’s mine as well. Nowa has spent most of her summers and some New Year's vacations there too. 

I’ve also watched it change, both economically, socially and geographically. Mizusawa has some history, although it’s short by Japanese standards where history is measured in centuries and millennia: the town was founded in 1889 and made formally into a city in 1954. But by now, Mizusawa is no longer a city in its own right. In 2006 it was merged with the neighboring communities of Esashi, Maesawa, Isawa and Koromogawa to form the new city of Oshu. The former cities (shi) were downgraded to the status of wards (ku) in the newly formed Oshu-shi. It probably made sense in some administrative manner. Life in Mizusawa didn’t change noticeably and the old Mizusawa city hall close to our house was turned into Oshu city hall.

Our house

We are in Iwate prefecture (ken) in the middle of the Tohoku region in the northern part of the main Japanese island of Honshu. Oshu-shi is almost 500 km straight north from Tokyo. It is located in a north-south valley, with the tall mountains of Akita-ken rising to the west. A coastal mountain range separates the area from the Sanriku coast further to the east. This is very lucky as the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11^th, 2011, that destroyed many of the coastal towns, such as Rikuzentakata, Ofunato, Kamaishi and Kesennuma, killed more than 15,000 people, and caused the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, hardly affected Mizusawa’s surroundings. Sure, the massive shakes were felt here strong enough and electricity was cut off for two weeks in parts of the town, but that was the extent of the damage.

Mizusawa was a small town, at least by Japanese standards. It used to have a bit over 60,000 inhabitants when it was put together with its neighbors. It is a center of an agricultural area with expansive tracts of rice paddies, apple orchards and vegetable gardens. Consequently, many of the inhabitants are rural types and the age structure rather old. Although Iwate (like Akita) has plenty of hot springs, the main resort areas – like the famous Hanamaki Onsen – are further north from Mizusawa, in the mountains. Mizusawa did have some things going for it, though, that made it different from some of the other small rural towns. It was an administrative center for the region and it had a big hospital.

Rural outskirts

Small rivers and canals run through the old part of town. Some houses along them are old and somewhat dilapidated but new ones are appearing here and there. The waterways are generally clean and there are fish and crayfish in the main channel. Some beautiful gardens line the creeks.

Urban canals

Interestingly, the town is also host to one of the six International Latitude Observatories, which has for decades brought visiting scholars and scientists to the town from all over the world. All these observatories – in California, Ohio, Maryland, Italy, Turkmenistan and Mizusawa – are located near the 39^o08’ parallel to measure the Earth’s wobble. You can still go for days without seeing another foreigner, but at least people are quite used to seeing my kind of big blond gaijin in town. This summer, there are three American kids enrolled in the Mizusawa elementary school.

The shinkansen station

Oshu-shi lies about halfway between the two largest cities in Tohoku: Sendai (pop. 1.1 million) to the south and Morioka (pop. 297,000) to the north. The main Tohoku shinkansen bullet train track goes through Oshu-shi and makes a stop at the Mizusawa-Esashi station. Some people are surprised that the shinkansen makes a stop at the juncture of these relatively small towns, but there is a logical explanation: Ichiro Ozawa (b. 1942). The perennial opposition leader and powerful politician actually hails from Mizusawa and remains quite popular in these parts. Even we received a congratulatory message from him when we got married at the Komagata shrine here in town (this didn’t please my mother-in-law who was a regional planner in the prefectural government and no fan of Ozawa’s). In a type example of politics of patronage, Mizusawa received a shinkansen stop.

A ceremony at Komagata shrine

There’s a twist to the story, however – a twist that explains some of the later developments in the urban geography of the area. Mizusawa is also on the regular north-south railway line on which the local trains to Morioka and smaller towns in Iwate travel. Naturally, the original plan was to build the Tohoku shinkansen line so that it would take the same route and the bullet trains would stop at around the existing Mizusawa station. The station area at that time was the heart of the city, with a thriving main street containing many shops and restaurants and a couple of hotels. Apparently the chamber of commerce feared that a shinkansen station would disturb their idyll and voted against it. Instead, the shinkansen would stop some kilometers further east, in a relatively unpopulated area between the cities of Mizusawa and Esashi.

How wrong could they have been? What happened was that the area around the new shinkansen station started to develop, as many people preferred to live close to the transportation hub that would take them to Morioka, Sendai and all the way to Tokyo. The area around Mizusawa station declined and shops started closing.

Universe -- A new shopping center

In a parallel development, Mizusawa became much more car-oriented. The old center with its narrow streets was made for walking and biking. Now shopping centers with expansive parking lots were developed on the outskirts of the town. The outer roads turned into strip malls with car dealerships, pachinko parlors with slot machines, chain restaurants and other establishments. The best hotel in town is no longer the Mizusawa Grand on the main station street (where our wedding reception was held) but the MizusawaPlaza Inn to the east from the local train tracks. Full disclosure: Plaza Inn is owned and operated by one of Yoko's best friends, Mami Kikuchi; the girls went to junior high school together. The hotel is very popular as a wedding location and boasts two excellent restaurants: a traditional Japanese restaurant Kikusui; and the Western Quattre Saisons. (Typically of the modesty of the Japanese people, the successful businesswoman Mami who in addition owns other restaurants in Iwate still drives a tiny Suzuki Lapin.)

With Mami and her Lapin

As in so many Japanese towns, there is a fancy multipurpose cultural center in Oshu-shi as well. The Z Hall that contains a large concert hall and hosts a variety of events (and where my brother-in-law Jun works) was also built to the east of the tracks towards Esashi.

There was a time a decade or so ago when it was rather depressing to walk along the main street by the station, as so many of the shops were closed down and very few people would be on the street. A large number of small bars were still operating in the narrow small streets north of the main drag but the evenings tended to feel rather lonely, while younger people drove to the family restaurants in the shopping centers and strip malls. Even the classic Takatoyo fish mongers moved further out.

Jun sings at Urara while Akira tends bar

Then something seems to have happened again and the area no longer feels dead. New shops and cafés have opened around the station, as have big and shiny karaoke joints to compete with the rustic Urara, a karaoke bar run by Yoko and Jun’s aunt Eiko and her husband Akira. One reason may be the development of new housing and opening of a shopping center, Universe, not far from the old center a stone’s throw from our house. The son of the owner of a classic coffee shop, Rengaya, a couple of years ago opened a stylish yet cozy café called Jazzrise, which boasts a great collection of jazz vinyls. It has to be said, though, that the collection is no match to that in Ray Brown, a jazz bar just a couple of blocks away from our house, which Yoko’s uncle Toshikatsu, a keen jazz man, introduced me to.

The old station area has recovered somewhat

Apart from the scientists at the Observatory and a few of us big noses who have married into the Mizusawa society, new groups of foreigners have appeared in recent years. I have heard Russian spoken in the supermarkets and a few years ago noticed groups of Pinoys and other Southeast Asian women, who presumably have moved to the area to get married. In Japan like in many other developed countries, young women move to cities leaving men to farm without ready access to spouses.

Rural Japan is facing a serious problem of depopulation and aging, with planners and researchers talking about ‘ghost towns’ (my friend Brendan Barrett, a professor at Osaka University is one who has written about the unfortunate phenomenon). Apart from the obvious social problems and the declining services in rural areas, this has also serious environmental consequences as old managed agricultural landscapes disintegrate into abandonment. Somewhat counterintuitively, this even threatens biodiversity as the rice-based agricultural and water management systems developed here over millennia – known as satoyama – maintain a rich and delicate balance between natural and human systems.

The main river has clean water, fish and crayfish

Luckily, these problems are not evident here and Oshu-shi is far from a ghost town. It has a fairly stable population of some 120,000 inhabitants and, as the existence of new cafés and bars attests, there are enough of young people in the town (and many have offspring of their own, which is obvious when visiting a shopping center). The city has enough of diversity in employment – from civil service to commerce to health care to science to agriculture – to support a reasonable level of cultural amenities and good restaurants (one of the best – anywhere! – is Ermitage, a French-Russian style establishment, which has attracted visitors from far away since 1983). It is well connected to the wider world through the shinkansen, as well as the Tohoku expressway. Hanamaki airport is less than 40 km away.

The water is clean and abundant, the locally produced food superior, and the climate pleasant (especially this summer when many places in Japan have broken heat records and dozens of people have died as a consequence – the new normal with climate change, I’m afraid – the somewhat cooler and less moist air of Tohoku is a blessing).

Mizusawa still may not be a thrilling center of excitement, but it is a good place to be. And it feels like home.

Tambo (rice paddy) art on the city edge

Tips for young and emerging evaluators

This blog was originally posted at www.zendaofir.com.

Unprecedented wildfires, deadly heatwaves, extraordinary floods, storms and droughts from California to Sweden, from Greece to Japan. The northern summer of 2018 has given us a preview of what the greenhouse world will look like, as countries and governments have become increasingly divided and inward looking, struggling to find solutions to sustainable development. Scientists are now more confident than ever linking the likelihood of extreme weather events to global climate change. Already now, climate change affects all spheres of human endeavor, including economics, health, population movement, food security, and politics. It will have huge implications on development around the world and, especially, on the most vulnerable people.

Evaluation can play a major role in analyzing policies, strategies, programs and projects in light of what works, under what circumstances, and how our actions can lead to positive changes for the people and the planet. It is up to the next generation of young and emerging evaluators to rise to this challenge.

Top Tip 1. Think beyond individual interventions and their objectives. For evaluation to remain relevant, the profession must broaden its horizons beyond checking whether individual interventions are doing what they were set out to do. It must verify whether the interventions are having an impact on the problem they are addressing and whether the impact is lasting. Evaluation is not just about monitoring and indicators, nor is it about performance audit. It is about understanding and explanation of how change happens and how we can more effectively enhance positive change and minimize negative consequences.

Top Tip 2. Understand, deal with and assess choices and trade-offs made or that should have been made. What we know clearly from experiences at the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is that all interventions take place in a broader system, which is dynamic and complex. It is safe to assume that everything we do influences things beyond the immediate effects of an intervention. And virtually all interventions will have implications for the environment, either positive or negative, intended or unintended. Sometimes we face trade-offs and must make choices between maximizing certain benefits at the cost of others.

In a recent GEF evaluation on multiple benefits, we identified such cases where maximization of both environmental and economic benefits was not possible, or where there were possible conflicts between environmental benefits, e.g., in terms of reforestation and maintaining biological diversity. The evaluation brought these factors out to the open for an informed policy and strategy discussion. It is no longer possible for evaluation to focus narrowly on the internal logic of an individual intervention without paying attention to the broader context in which it is situated.

Top Tip 3. Methods should not drive evaluations. While solid methodologies for data collection and analysis are essential, evaluators should not let methods drive the scope and question setting of evaluations. It must be the other way around: choose the approaches and methods based on what questions you need answers to. In most cases, mixed methods in the context of a solid theory of change is the way to go. Quantification of impacts is an attractive goal, but there are significant limitations to experimental and quasi-experimental tools with regard to their explanatory power and external validity. They seldom allow us to understand why something happened, what motivated people, what were the unintended consequences and so forth. For this, we need subtler, often qualitative tools.

At the GEF, we normally start our evaluations with a literature review, as there often is plenty of scientific evidence around the issues that we are tackling. Such a review allows us to refine our theory of change, avoid false assumptions, and also to save time and effort. An adequate understanding of the natural system, as well as the human system, is needed to be able to identify the environmental impacts of the intervention. An individual evaluator can of course not be an expert in all fields, so it can be very useful to team up with colleagues with diverse backgrounds.

Top Tip 4. Think about our interconnected world, and implore others to do the same. These approaches go beyond how evaluations are often conducted and can be challenging. It is however necessary to broaden our vistas to make a meaningful contribution to solving the challenges for a more sustainable, inclusive and environmentally sound future. As evaluators it is incumbent upon us to also advise the users and commissioners of evaluation that they need to allow evaluation to explore the broader connections of interventions in this complex world.

After all, we all want to make a difference for the better, and done right, evaluation can be a powerful tool to inform policy and decision making for sustainable development in this rapidly changing world.

Pharoah Sanders @ DC Jazz Festival

The annual DC Jazz Festival had a fabulous start for me. It came in the shape of Pharoah Sanders and his group that performed on Saturday, June 9^th, at the City Winery. Despite having been a fan since the 1970s, I had actually never witnessed the legendary saxophonist perform live. I had invested in a prime seat at a table next to the stage and ordered a carafe of nice Sauvignon Blanc, so I was ready for the experience. And it didn’t disappoint me. In the bar waiting for the show to start I happened to sit next to a young man who drew my attention because he was reading an actual physical book while sipping a glass of Pinot Noir. Matthew had recently moved to DC for his first job after college. I was delighted to find that such a young person was a great fan of Pharoah Sanders. And not only that: the book he was reading turned out to be the Kenyan author and academic Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross. My faith in the future of humankind restored, I was in a suitable mood to receive Pharoah’s delivery of the universal language of music.

The group started with a lengthy meditative piece, a trademark of the master on which he played soothing long sounds on his tenor against a background of a bowed bass and drums played on soft mallets. The pianist ventured into a thoughtful solo while the leader sat down and listened with his eyes closed. The first piece then turned into a second, a medium-tempo modal tune with Spanish overtones. It provided a superb vehicle for all of the musicians’ solos. The piano solo reminded me of McCoy Tyner or Lonnie Liston Smith, both Sanders collaborators in the past. The drummer produced a highly musical solo against a steady rhythm provided by the bassist, his kit placed low with even the cymbals in a horizontal position. His work was complemented by that of the fierce looking percussionist wearing long-horned headgear.

Sanders at 77, his long beard now totally white, initially appeared slightly wobbly, taking short steps and sitting down frequently, but as the concert progressed he gained strength moving across the stage in tandem with the rhythms of the music. It was clear that he enjoyed the performance and listened appreciatively to his younger sidemen. He drew the audience along into a celebratory mood.

Sanders’ name is inextricably linked to that of John Coltrane. In 1964 Trane asked him to sit in with his band and, although Sanders never formally became a member of the group, he was a regular collaborator until Coltrane’s death in 1967. His own debut album as leader also came out in 1964. In those times, Sanders played unmitigated aggressive free jazz and had a raw, abrasive sound, which belied his history as a be-bop and R&B sax man. After Trane’s death, he collaborated for a while with the great man’s widow, the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane. In the 1970s, Sanders’ style softened and became distinctly more lyrical, gaining influences from Asian music without losing its edge. This was the side of him we heard at the City Winery: a tenor sound that was mostly smooth and beautiful only to be punctuated by abrupt shrieks and honks.

Then another surprise move from the master as he launched into a rendition of the classic ballad A Nightingale Sang on Berkeley Square. It was a powerful yet lyrical performance that transfixed the audience. At the end of his solo, Pharoah even briefly allowed a rare glimpse at his be-bop chops.

The superb concert ended with a joyful romp in calypso style. It inspired the old master himself to dance to the music produced by his excellent band. Needless to say, the room exploded in a standing ovation as the music ended. Unfortunately, we were not treated to an encore, but we could all go home with a satisfied mind and a smile on our faces.

The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The legend of the White City – Ciudad Blanca – has fascinated men for generations and many have gone searching for the lost city in the remote jungles of Moskitia in Honduras. One of these men is Steve Elkins, a self-described “cinematographer, a curious man, an adventurer” (p. 9) whom the author of the present book, Douglas Preston, discovers, befriends and eventually joins in the search. Preston, an accomplished writer and a veteran adventurer himself, with a history with the American Museum of Natural History and the National Geographic Society, becomes equally immersed in the effort to find and understand the disappeared city. The book is partly a real-life adventure story, but partly it gives a rather comprehensive history of the region and the archeological work surrounding it.

Following innovative use of LiDAR technology that identifies potential sites to start the search, an expedition is launched in the most inaccessible and hostile jungle valley to initiate an archeological study of the lost ‘City of the Monkey God.’ The obsessed Elkins is the driving force, but he receives backing from a variety of sources and also convinces the government of Honduras to endorse and support the effort. He puts together a mixed team that includes highly qualified archeological experts (led by Chris Fisher), as well as a film crew, photographers and others, including Preston. There is also a small band of former SAS agents providing security and survival skills to the team. Early on in the effort, a Honduras-based American fixer, Bruce Heinicke, with a dubious past in the drug trade provides his often unscrupulous services.

After a section on the history of the search for the city, the main part of the book focuses on the expedition, as it prepares for the field work and its stay on the site. This turns out to be a harrowing experience in the jungle that is infested with highly poisonous snakes and myriad insects, jaguars and other predators circling the campsite. During heavy rains the site floods and turns into mud. Despite their precautions the expedition members are soon covered in nasty bug bites.

The expedition is basically successful in its quest. However, an academic controversy rises around it when the news of the find come out and are widely advertised by the National Geographic Society. A group of American archeologists spearheaded by Christopher Begley of Transylvania University and Rosemary Joyce of UC Berkeley attack the effort on various grounds of “false claims of discovery” (their assertion is that the discovered city is much less of significance archeologically than Preston, Elkins and the National Geographic suggest) and “antiquated and offensive, ethnocentric attitudes” (in terms of dismissing local peoples’ knowledge of the area) (p. 186). Although the attacks seem exaggerated, at the very minimum – given that the expedition is fully endorsed at the highest level of Honduran authorities and is conducted very professionally under the supervision of well-respected archeologists – the controversy does not go away and the expedition continues to be accused of “B movie fantasy” resurrecting the “trope” of “the big hero explorer” (p. 188). In fact, I recently read a rather vitriolic review of the book (and another one, Jungleland by Christopher S. Stewart) written by Mark Bonta of Penn State for The AAG Review of Books (Fall 2017). In it, Bonta points to “the disconnections and conjunctions of scholars and the popular pseudoscientific imagination” (AAG p. 279).

Preston speculates for the reasons, the simplest of which might be professional jealousy, especially coming from Begley who himself has been compared to “modern day Indiana Jones” and known for traveling to Honduras with his own film crews. Another reason might be that the current Honduran president and administration came to power through a coup and replaced also the national archeological authorities that had supported Begley and the Americans. Be that as it may, many journalists picked up the controversy and had little interest in hearing both sides of the story. In the end, the site is being excavated and preserved with the full support of Honduras, including President Hernández.

Although the adventure at the heart of the book is well told and interesting, to me the most important part of the book is the last third. There has been a lot of speculation why the thriving (and controversial) City of the Monkey God suddenly disappeared five centuries ago with its inhabitants abandoning it over a short period of time. The explanation seems to hinge on brutal epidemics that devastated the old Mesoamerican (and beyond) indigenous cultures as the Spanish conquistadores arrived. The native populations who had no resistance to the Old World diseases succumbed in incredible numbers, so that even 90 percent of the populations died. This was of course an add-on to the “cruelty, slavery, rape, abuse, starvation, war and genocide” inflicted on the people by the Spanish, English and other invaders (p. 295). Preston cites the work of Jared Diamond whose famous book Collapse describes the historical collapse of many civilizations around the world through environmental overstretch, disease, invaders and other factors (I might note that Diamond, too, as a scientist prone to popularizing knowledge and using grand theories to explain change is reviled in some academic circles).

Ironically, about half of the expedition members, including Preston, catch a seemingly incurable tropical disease, leishmaniasis, during their stay in the jungle. Perhaps the scariest conclusion of the book is that these kinds of diseases that today are the daily reality of mostly poor people living in the tropics, are becoming more common also in the developed countries in the North. The main reasons for this are the increased air travel that rapidly transports people between different part of the world and, importantly, climate change that makes previously safe areas in North America, Europe and Asia (including Japan) more susceptible to tropical parasites and their hosts and vectors. This unfortunate fact raises the likelihood of a major global pandemic that could devastate societies and economies. The only positive aspect of this is that, perhaps, more investment will go to research and the development of drugs and vaccines now that people in the wealthy and powerful North are threatened.

On a personal level, the book made me think about my forthcoming trip to the Amazon rainforest next week where there is a current epidemic of yellow fever and dengue, and where the nurse in my office told me to use a double protection of insect repellent against horse flies and other biting insects. Little good did these precautions do to Preston and his mates.


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The GEF in the Changing Landscape of Environmental Finance

[Published in Earth-Eval]

We have recently completed the Sixth Comprehensive Evaluation of the GEF (known by its acronym OPS6). The Comprehensive Evaluations are conducted by the Independent Evaluation Office every four years as critical inputs to the GEF replenishment process. I presented the final draft of the OPS6 to the second replenishment meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in October 2017 and the GEF Council in November. The donors to the GEF recognized the evaluation as a foundation for determining the programmatic directions for the next, seventh, GEF replenishment period. OPS6 was a major collective effort, which kept us at the IEO occupied for the better part of two years. It brought together 29 separate evaluations and studies that focused on a wide set of issues, ranging from the results and impacts of the GEF and its various focal areas and programs, to organizational and institutional issues. In conducting the evaluation, we utilized mixed methods, both quantitative and qualitative, to ensure the best approach to answer the evaluation questions posed. Many of the approaches were innovative, such as the use of geospatial tools and methods to track impact and value for money of GEF funded programs and projects on the ground. We also applied formative approaches to evaluate progress made in the Integrated Approach Pilots that were launched during the current GEF cycle. While each of the component evaluations has its own detailed conclusions and recommendations, the Comprehensive Evaluation brings them together at a high strategic level.

Judging from the terminal evaluations of completed projects, the GEF continues to perform well at the aggregate level. Some 81% of the completed projects were judged to have satisfactory or higher outcome ratings. The GEF has also exceeded its co-financing targets raising $8.8 to each dollar invested by the GEF. More challenging is ensuring the continuation of the global environmental benefits after the projects are closed. Only 62% of the projects were judged to have outcomes that are likely to be sustained. The reasons behind this drop often appear to lie in institutional capacity and financial sustainability in the program countries. Indeed, proof of this seems to be that middle-income countries tend to perform better on sustainability than do least developed countries. Furthermore, projects in biodiversity and land degradation face bigger sustainability challenges than those in climate change, likely because of the limited alternative sources of funding and the lack of private sector involvement. These are crucial issues that we need to understand better and, consequently, the IEO has embarked on an exercise to unpack the mechanisms behind sustainability. We expect to present this study to the Council in its next meeting in June 2018, so stay tuned.

Another important development in GEF programming in the past years has been the increase in programmatic approaches, as well as the rise of multifocal area projects that address simultaneously biodiversity conservation, sustainable forest management, land degradation, and climate change and carbon sequestration. Two major evaluations focused on these, finding that projects under programs do indeed tend to perform slightly better than standalone projects, although increased complexity when programs involve multiple countries or agencies and cut across focal areas poses some challenges that need to be managed. The multifocal area projects do produce benefits on multiple fronts when trade-offs, especially between environmental and socioeconomic outcomes, are well managed. (For the findings of the formative evaluation of the Integrated Approach Pilots, see earlier blogs by Dennis Bours.)

The Comprehensive Evaluation concluded that the GEF’s main comparative advantage in the rapidly changing and expanding global environmental finance landscape lies in its ability to address a broad range of environmental issues and the synergies between them, not just climate change, and to serve multiple Conventions and multilateral environmental agreements. It is virtually the only public funding source for the biodiversity, land degradation, and chemicals conventions, and provides important support to many regional and global agreements around international waters. In the increasingly crowded field of climate finance, the GEF still plays a central role but must define its niche more clearly. The GEF also has proven strengths in working with governments to create an enabling environment in countries through legal and regulatory reforms that lay the ground for lasting improvements in environmental management. A study we conducted identified conditions, which are necessary for programming to lead to transformational change. These include a level of ambition and setting in place mechanism for sustainability from the outset.

The recommendations of OPS6 build upon the conclusions regarding the GEF’s comparative advantages regarding its strategic positioning in the broad global environmental field and the strengths of its work on transformational change. The evaluation recognizes the value of integration in programming that addresses multiple environmental issues, but also calls for caution in managing complexity. Integration should be based on the need when the environmental problems call for integrated solutions, and on GEF’s additionality. Not everything is entirely rosy either. Despite its solid performance over a quarter century, the GEF still has areas where more progress needs to be made. Its track record on engaging with the private sector is still rather patchy. Progress has been made in integrating the gender dimension and in engaging with indigenous peoples in GEF programming, but more remains to be done to ensure that the organization applies internationally recognized good practice standards.

The third replenishment meeting of the GEF will take place at the end of January in Brazil. As instructed by the GEF Council, the GEF Secretariat has taken the OPS6 recommendations and fed them into their plans for the programming directions and policy agenda for the next GEF cycle. As an evaluator, I am naturally very pleased as I see that our hard work is having a concrete real-time impact on how we approach global environmental challenges that are fundamental to the survival of humankind.