On February 17, 2010 the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World at CDDRL held its inaugural seminar with Prof. Philippe C. Schmitter, Professor Emeritus, European University Institute, Florence and Visiting Scholar at CDDRL and Dr. Sean Yom, Hewlett Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL.

The seminar was titled Exploring the missing link between liberalization and democratization in the Middle East. The seminar aimed to start a public discussion on one of the routine assumptions of students of democratization, which is that there is a close, causal relationship between liberalization and democratization. The former is said to drive those who concede it toward convoking credible elections and, eventually, tolerating ruler accountability to citizens. The link between those processes of regime transformation is alleged to be the mobilization of civil society. It has been argued that the weakness or absence of this linkage is one (among many) of the conditions which make the polities of the Middle East and North Africa resistant to democratization.

In his response to this argument, Philippe Schmitter began by saying that in the work that he started on Southern Europe and Latin America, there was a distinction between democratization and liberalization. Once an autocratic regime enters a process of liberalization, it faces unexpected consequences. Thus, the most vulnerable time for a regime is when it starts to reform itself. Some of the consequences of this process are the resurrection of civil society, more freedom of expression and movement, the release of political prisoners and the freer operation of political parties. Such consequences are what liberalization means.

Schmitter argued that all autocratic regimes have tried this process, and that this process is normally triggered by divisions within the regimes or succession struggles, where regimes feel the need to open up. The kind of liberalization that takes place depends on the type of autocracy present. But the objective of liberalization, Schmitter said, is to coopt and produce a large social basis for autocracy, for example, through cultivating political parties that agree not to be too oppositional.

Schmitter added that many autocracies are under pressure from external regimes. Most of the countries in the Middle East have some kind of agreement with the EU for example, which carries clauses on issues like the rule of law. Another factor is that liberalization is selective in its inclusion, focusing on the urban middle class. It is thus "voluntary", conceded from above by the regime, and not based on any form of mobilization from below. In other words, Schmitter argued that regimes choose to liberalize and are not forced to do so. Thus, regimes are limited in their scope of liberalization (elections for example are not always genuinely free). He then presented a scale of measures of autocracy liberalization, saying that the most difficult measure in the Middle East is that of releasing political prisoners, while the easiest measure is concessions on the level of human rights.

He presented the hypothesis is that almost all efforts at democratization are preceded by liberalization. This is triggered by the resurrection of civil society, which itself is triggered when the costs of repression increase quite significantly and a regime is faced with the question of is it "better" to repress or tolerate? Often, in this case, regimes choose to tolerate the self organization of groups that are not tolerated otherwise. But mobilization of such groups, like lawyer groups, may lead to mobilization on the street. Schmitter said that although Arab regimes liberalize, this kind of process does not normally happen in the Middle East. Liberalization occurs then declines without the regimes suffering many consequences. He finished by stating that there seems to be something in the Middle East region that encourages liberalization, but that leads this liberalization to decline.

Sean Yom responded by saying that for the last 10 years, scholars of democratization literature have made ethnocentric assumptions about this issue. He argued that it is almost assumed that democracy is easy, but what actually happens at the end stage of liberalization is complex. He said that if we take a historical view of the Middle East, the literature says that regimes are durable. But countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria have all witnessed regime termination. The dictators today in the Arab world are merely the winners of the state-building process.  So why is liberalization not followed by democratization for these survivors?

Yom argued that distinctive regimes have distinctive ways through which they liberalize but not democratize. He related the lack of democratization following on from liberalization to two key questions: Why are there no elite splits in the public arena during times of crisis? And why has the middle class not staked any sacrifice to demand more of a democratic and revolutionary change?

He presented two reasons: the first is that many current regimes have well institutionalized methods of dealing with elite splits before they hit the public domain. Hegemonic ruling provide one such mechanism. The National Democratic Party in Egypt, the Neo-Destur of Tunisia, and the Baath parties in Syria and Iraq for example were able to coopt/isolate softline elites well before their conflict became rebellion.  Yom argued that in monarchical autocracies, incumbents have just as well-institutionalized mechanisms of co-optation that revolve around the palace; such networks were developed shortly after colonial rule, and were designed to effectively enshrine a certain distribution of power.

The second reason, Yom argued, lays in the nature of social opposition.  No dictator liberalizes because they want to give up power.  That is, they do not liberalize to achieve democracy; they liberalize in order to survive in the face of burgeoning social unrest.  The problem is that in the MENA context, the so-called "middle-sector"-labor, professionals, intellectuals, and other urban forces-have not staked out sacrifice to their demands for greater freedom, when push comes to shove.  One reason is that they were incorporated into ruling coalitions early on in the state-building process, and that such early coalitional bargains that traded loyalty for prosperity have proven durable even during economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s.  For instance, large-scale employment in the public sector to certain groups is a common side-payment.  Countries like Jordan and Bahrain exploit population cleavages (the Palestinians and the Shiites, respectively, being the key factors), where the regimes operate an optimal mix of loyalty and oppression/coercion.  In these cases, leaders strategically choose to incorporate different constituents into different networks of patronage.

The presentations were followed by a question and answer sessions where additional factors were discussed and others elaborated on, such as the role of Islamists; authoritarian pacts with the West especially in the cases of "countries that are too important to be politically conditioned" as Schmitter put it, or in the case of illegal Western dealings with Middle East states which makes it difficult for the West to present them with reform conditions; the absence of independent middle classes; and the issue of political prisoners, who are the hardest to coopt by any given regime, and hence tend to be kept inside prisons.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens offered the 2010 Payne Distinguished Lecture on March 4, 2010, at FSI, with a focus on Pakistan. President of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at the New Yorker, Coll formerly served as the managing editor of the Washington Post and has spent more than 20 years studying the geo-politics of Pakistan and the region.

During his talk, Coll chose to address four major issues:

• Why have Pakistan's Army, Security, and Intelligence Services chosen to support the Taliban and other groups with known terrorist ties?
• What is the changing nature of Islamist militarism inside Pakistan?
• Where is the United States headed in its efforts to change Pakistan's behavior and how does Pakistan see its own interests?
• What is the current status of Pakistan's relationship with India and what are the prospects for Indo-Pakistani reconciliation?

In a riveting and lively discussion with the audience, Coll noted that his key objective was to help create a fuller, more nuanced understanding of an exceedingly complex political, military, and cultural dynamic on the ground in Pakistan.

In his testimony before the House Oversight Committee about Toyota's massive recall efforts, Akio Toyota will learn that you can't win such an encounter. But you can lose. Shorenstein APARC Associate Director for Research Daniel C. Sneider comments on a Japanese CEO learning the lessons of American business the hard way.

The impact of global warming on food prices and hunger could be large over the next 20 years, according to a new Stanford University study. Researchers say that higher temperatures could significantly reduce yields of wheat, rice and maize - dietary staples for tens of millions of poor people who subsist on less than $1 a day. The resulting crop shortages would likely cause food prices to rise and drive many into poverty.  

But even as some people are hurt, others would be helped out of poverty, says Stanford agricultural scientist David Lobell.

Lobell discussed the results of his research on Feb 19 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Diego.

"Poverty impacts depend not only on food prices but also on the earnings of the poor," said Lobell, a center fellow at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). "Most projections assume that if prices go up, the amount of poverty in the world also will go up, because poor people spend a lot of their money on food. But poor people are pretty diverse. There are those who farm their own land and would actually benefit from higher crop prices, and there are rural wage laborers and people that live in cities who definiztely will be hurt."

Lobell and his colleagues recently conducted the first in-depth study showing how different climate scenarios could affect incomes of farmers and laborers in developing countries.

Household incomes

In the study, Lobell, former FSE researcher Marshall Burke and Purdue University agricultural economist Thomas Hertel focused on 15 developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Hertel has developed a global trade model that closely tracks the consumption and production of rice, wheat and maize on a country-by-country basis. The model was used to project the effects of climate change on agriculture within 20 years and the resulting impact on prices and poverty.

Using a range of global warming forecasts, the researchers were able to project three different crop-yield scenarios by 2030:

• "Low-yield" - crop production is toward the low end of expectations.
• "Most likely" - projected yields are consistent with expectations.
• "High-yield" - production is higher than expected.

"One of the limitations of previous forecasts is that they don't consider the full range of uncertainties - that is, the chance that things could be better or worse than we expect," Lobell said. "We provided Tom those three scenarios of what climate change could mean for agricultural productivity. Then he used the trade model to project how each scenario would affect prices and poverty over the next 20 years.

"The impacts we're talking about are mainly driven by warmer temperatures, which dry up the soil, speed up crop development and shut down biological processes, like photosynthesis, that plants rely on," he added. "Plants in general don't like it hotter, and in many climate forecasts, the temperatures projected for 2030 would be outside the range that crops prefer."

Results

The study revealed a surprising mix of winners and losers depending on the projected global temperature. The "most likely" scenario projected by the International Panel on Climate Change is that global temperatures will rise 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) by 2030. In that scenario, the trade model projected relatively little change in crop yields, food prices and poverty rates

But under the "low-yield" scenario, in which temperatures increase by 2.7 F (1.5 C), the model projects a 10 to 20 percent drop in agricultural productivity, which results in a 10 to 60 percent rise in the price of rice, wheat and maize. Because of these higher prices, the overall poverty rate in the 15 countries surveyed was expected to rise by 3 percent.

However, an analysis of individual countries revealed a far more complicated picture. In 11 of the 15 countries, poor people who owned their own land and raised their own crops actually benefited from higher food prices, according to the model. In Thailand, for example, the poverty rate for people in the non-agricultural sector was projected to rise 5 percent, while the rate for self-employed farmers dropped more than 30 percent - in part because, as food supplies dwindled, the global demand for higher-priced crops increased.

"If prices go up and you're tied to international markets, you could be lifted out of poverty quite considerably," Lobell explained. "But there are a lot of countries, like Bangladesh, where poor people are either in urban areas or in rural areas but don't own their own land. Countries like that could be hurt quite a lot. Then there are semi-arid countries - like Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi - where even if prices go up and people own land, productivity will go down so much that it can't make up for those price increases. In the 'low-yield' scenario, those countries would see higher poverty rates across all sectors."

Under the "high-yield" scenario, in which global temperatures rise just 0.9 F (0.5 C), crop productivity increased. The resulting food surplus led to a 16 percent drop in prices, which could be detrimental to farm owners. In Thailand, the poverty rate among self-employed farmers was projected to rise 60 percent, while those in the non-agriculture sector saw a slight drop in poverty. In Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi and Uganda, poverty in the non-farming sector was projected to decline as much as 5 percent.

Risk management

Lobell said that, although the likelihood of the "low-yield" or "high-yield" scenario occurring is only 5 percent, it is important for policymakers to consider the full range of possibilities if they want to help countries adapt to climate change and ultimately prevent an increase in poverty and hunger. 

"It's like any sort of risk management or insurance program," he said. "You have to have some idea of the probability of events that have a big consequence. It's also important to keep in mind that any change, no matter how extreme, will benefit some households and hurt others."

The Program on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford is an interdisciplinary research and teaching program that generates policy solutions to the persistent problems of global hunger and environmental damage from agricultural practices worldwide. The program is jointly run by Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.