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Can Deliberative Democracy Cure the Resource Curse? – Justin Sandefur
00:16:16
How can poor countries beat the resource curse? CGD research fellow Justin Sandefur returns to the Podcast hotseat to update us on a project that posed this question to ordinary people in Tanzania. CGD teamed up with REPOA to bring hundreds of...
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Foreign.
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Hello, I'm Rajesh Merchandani, and thanks for joining me for this edition of the CGD podcast. Today, we're going to be bringing you up to date on a project that we first talked about several months ago. It's the question of how to beat the resource curse. Now, nearly every African country is thinking right about now about how to exploit natural resources in in their territory and what they might do with the money that could yield. Tanzania is sitting on natural gas deposits that could alter the course of its development. And we've been running a project that for the first time asks ordinary Tanzanians what they think their country's priorities should be for that money if and when it comes on stream. Justin Sandifer and Mujobo Moyo are the lead researchers for cgd, and Justin joins me here in the studio to give us an update on the project. But first, Justin, before you reveal some of the results of your findings, let's recap what this project entailed.
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Right. So back in the beginning of 2015, we decided to ask Tanzanians what they thought Tanzania should do with this big natural gas discovery. Potentially a lot of money coming on board. The government's going to get, in an optimistic scenario, as much revenue as the average Tanzanian household earns per annum every year from natural gas. So it could be a lot of money. What do Tanzanians think ought to be done with that? We decided to conduct a nationwide poll. We took a nationally representative sample of 2,000 Tanzanians. We sent teams out around the country through the countryside to villages and towns and knocking on doors, and asked people, should the gas be extracted at all? Should it be left in the ground? Should it be sold internationally? Should you subsidize fuel? Should you spend it on health and education or on roads? And who should be in charge of these decisions? And collated all the answers. Tanzania is roughly 80% rural. And so our sample reflects that. There's some people in Dar es Salaam and other major cities, but most of our sample are going to be rural, relatively poor people.
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So from that sample of 2,000, then what did you do?
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Okay, so this is not new. Civil society organizations in Dar, like Taweza have been doing national polling, mobile phone polling in particular, and asking people about lots of things, including about the natural gas. So that's not new. But what we wanted to do was take another step and say, look, a lot of Tanzanians don't know anything about the natural gas. In fact, when you ask that question point blank, what have you heard about the natural gas discovery. The most common answer is nothing big news for the economy. Most people don't know anything about it. So we wanted to go to the next step and actually educate people and give people a chance to process this information, think and talk and debate deliberate, as political scientists would say, about the natural gas and the natural gas policy options and then see what they would want to do with the natural gas resources.
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So this is where we get the term deliberative polling, which is what you want to do. You poll people first, then you inform them of the choices, and then you poll them again. So the polling again took place in this. What I've described to you before is this crazy festival in Dar es Salaam. Tell us about this.
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Right, so, yes, this concept of deliberative polling, and this comes from somebody who's collaborated with us on the project, his name is Jim Fishkin, he's a professor at Stanford who's done similar setups on different topics in different countries. This idea of polling people, giving them information, letting them debate, and then coming back and asking them again, the difficult part is the bringing people together to let them debate and process the information. We had a nationally representative sample spread out over a huge country. So we took 400 people of our original 2000 respondents, randomly selected so from villages all over the country, and in a huge logistical chaotic effort, brought them in buses all to Dar es Salaam for a two day extravaganza of debating natural gas policy. We had them in a hotel ballroom, essentially in a relatively modest hotel on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. And so these 400 people, many of whom had never been in a hotel before, certainly never debated policy issues before, were broken up into small groups and they kind of went at it. We posed specific questions. Should the gas be extracted, should it be sold? They had a briefing video to kind of introduce them to the topic and a moderator to help them along. And. And they spent these two hour sessions really arguing with one another about what should Tanzania do with this money.
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And they really got into it as well, didn't they?
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They really did. The discussions got quite heated and it was really nice to see people really processing the issues, really forming opinions. And a representative cross section of the country from young women nursing as they talked to old men who had just made it on the bus, all speaking up and taking part in the discussion.
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And then you got more results out of that exercise. And that is what you're letting us know now. So the results of this deliberative polling exercise, what did you find.
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So people went home at the end of two days of processing all these issues. They went home, went back to their villages, back to their towns. And we did the follow up surveying by phone, called back all 2,000 people, the 400 people who'd come to Dar es Salaam and the other people who had not participated at all to ask them what do they think now? And you know, really interesting results across a range of issues. People, I think to summarize it very briefly, people are eager to see the natural gas extracted. They are eager to see it sold. They are eager to see that money used to spend on social service programs. And they are surprisingly supportive of transparency and oversight that the government. This has been a topic in the news in Tanzania recent months, that all of these contracts between the government and oil companies should be published, put in the public domain, that there should be some independent oversight of the process. One of the, I think concerns when you talk to many economists about polling the public on something like natural gas is that there's going to be this populist tendency that people just want to extract it, get the money, spend quickly, not save anything, maybe subsidize fuel, do things that have questionable economic rationale are going to be kind of imprudent over the long term.
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Questionable economic rationale for economists? For economists, not for citizens.
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Exactly. And we do see some of that on the polling. Like I said, people are eager to see the gas extracted, sold and spent. When you ask people point blank, should the money be spent now or saved for the future, people lean towards spend it now.
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So they don't want a Tanzanian sovereign wealth fund.
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They're interested in seeing this spent on health and education in the short term.
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What about payments to themselves like they do in Alaska, Alaska oil dividends.
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So this has been a long standing interest for the center for Global Development, the idea of trying to overcome some of the governance failures of the resource curse by giving money directly to citizens, letting them decide how it's used. If the government needs revenue, it can tax back that money. People are overwhelmingly supportive of the idea of direct distribution of natural gas revenues. When you ask them in principle, do you like the idea of cash transfers to the poor, to the needy and so on? Yes, yes, strong support. When you put a point blank trade off to people, would you support cash transfers to households or spending this on government programs? A narrow majority is going to choose spending on government programs. And what was interesting for us is that when you put people together to debate and process the issues, those 400 people who came to Dar es Salaam to really think this through. They moved more in the direction of, of spending this money on government programs a lot more to a statistically significant margin. It was a meaningful change, not a huge swing, but there was already a majority, remember, in favor of spending on government programs. And the more they deliberated, the more they moved in that direction.
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So from the point of view of the deliberative polling exercise, what did this tell you about deliberative polling in this instance?
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Yeah, I mean, I think a quick, really short summary would be that for the most part, deliberation and receiving all this information moved people somewhat closer in line with the economists in favor of commercializing and selling the gas and not necessarily subsidizing energy or using it to produce electricity directly in Tanzania, in favor of independent oversight and transparency measures and so on. So for the most part, people got what I would call more prudential the more they thought about this. But there's really limits to that. They did not change their mind about saving versus spending. People remain really eager to spend the money and they remain really in favor of social services spending programs as opposed to longer term investments in infrastructure and roads.
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So what's your analysis this, what's your reaction to that? Did you think that they would change their minds more? Did the priorities that they expressed surprise you or disappoint you?
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I didn't have, you know, strong judgments ahead of time in terms of what I wanted people to say as a result of this. So I wouldn't say that anything disappoints me.
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Very good research.
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Very good research. There you go. Open minded all the way. Yeah, it's, there's, like I said, there's this worry about whether citizens in a democracy like Tanzania, which is a low income country with a fairly uneducated population, whether ordinary people can really come together and process these issues. And I think the process was for the most part, really heartening in that respect to see people grappling with the issues. And that's something you kind of. It's hard to get out of the data and the results directly. You kind of have to watch the video and see people grappling with the issues, to see that people really process the questions. And then the fact that there were some meaningful movements in public opinion kind of reflects that same actual grappling with the issues. So it was encouraging in that respect to see even in such a low income, low literacy environment, people able to wrestle with kinds of complex questions that if you ask many economists, they would say no, no, no, that's something that needs to be kind of under technocratic control and we need to insulate this from too much political interference. I think that's sort of short sighted. At the end of the day, you know, Tanzania is a democracy and these choices are going to be governed by, you know, the democratic choices of the Tanzanian electorate. Tanzanian electorate needs to understand these issues and wrestle with them and, and hopefully that will ensure in the long term better governance of these resources.
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And the project's not over. The next phase of it is that you are taking the results of the citizen polling to a group of Tanzanian policymakers. Tell us about that.
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Right. So many Tanzanian policymakers, without naming names, were a bit skeptical when we said we're going to go ask ordinary Tanzanians what they think they were was, well, they'll never understand. So we've gone and done that and now we want to come back and.
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Show that they did understand, they did.
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Understand, or at least show what their opinions were. So we're holding an event in Dar es Salaam where we invite the great and the good policymakers, members of parliament, people who work in the ministries, people who work in civil society organizations, even aid donors and embassy staff to come and hold what's a more typical policy workshop where experts and very educated people wrestle with these issues. But instead of just discussing the technical merits of different GAS policy options, we're going to have that discussion on the technical merits, but then also show people on each of these topics. What do ordinary Tanzanians think and what did ordinary Tanzanians come up with? Where did they come down, rather, when they wrestled with the same questions, what did they think after they deliberated? We're going to also take that opportunity. Never stop researching. We're going to take that opportunity to poll the policymakers so then we can hold up these results next to each other. Here's what ordinary Tanzanians think, here's what sort of policy elites think, and here were the movements. One question would be, when people get more educated and deliberate, do they move in the direction of their policymakers or in a different direction? So we want to hold up these different results next to each other. At the end of the day, how.
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Much interest are Tanzanian policymakers taking in this exercise? Especially given that there is an election.
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Looming, there is a big election and a highly contested election looming later this year for president in Tanzania. And so that we've got to be careful, we don't want to get, you know, too political with this. There is a lot of interest. I think among political leaders in this question of natural gas, obviously it's potentially transformational for Tanzania's economy. So everybody has a stance. There are members of both government and various ministries as well as opposition parties who have been a part of the CGD study group to help oversee and plan the project. So cgd, together with repoa, which is a think tank in Dar es Salaam, have brought together this group of both academics, but also these political leaders to discuss these issues. So we've had good buy in from both the opposition and government. Lots of interest and lots of it's been a productive and I think fairly healthy debate that hasn't gotten really acrimonious. It's nice to see, actually, and just.
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Take it back to kind of say CGD's core mission, our core principles. What is the learning here? What are the lessons, do you think, from. For development?
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Sure. So stepping back from Tanzania to this broader issue of I would say the broader issue is low income democracies that face this stock of natural resource wealth and the prospect of the resource curse. What can they do to capitalize on these extractive resource earnings and avoid this pitfall of government's failures? Tanzania is a really interesting case with a strong and stable democracy, with this history of peace, but still governance challenges and still really poor. It relates, I think, to CGD's mission about global development in that a lot of the work in development and a lot of the development agencies we often interact with, like the World bank or aid agencies, were kind of born out of a mentality that rich countries need to finance development in poor countries. And this is really about financial flows from rich countries to poor countries. But we're in a situation where many poor countries are now sitting on huge stocks of wealth. There's huge finance available within Tanzania now to potentially finance development. So it becomes really less about aid flows and financing from abroad and more a question about how is Tanzania as a democracy going to govern these new resources?
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And that is the kind of principle that can relate to many other countries facing the same dilemma at the moment.
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Absolutely. Uganda's in the same situation. Kenya increasingly. Mozambique right next door has natural gas. Ghana has been wrestling with this. It's a widespread issue in the region.
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Okay, really interesting stuff. Justin Sandifer, thanks very much for joining us on the CGD podcast.
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Thanks for having me.
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Look out on our website for plenty more information and video from these events in Dar es Salaam. Www.cgdev.org and of course, join me. Rajesh Merchandani for the next edition of the CGT podc.