Sunday Links. Including, Of Course, Development Debates

A week of development debates, large and small, most of which seem to feature agent provocateur William Easterly.  (A Collier-Easterly rumble in the academic jungle! An Easterly-Blattman thriller in, well, cyberspace!)

Without further ado:

- The Boston Review has a fascinating series on Development in Dangerous Places - Paul Collier starts the debate by arguing without security, the bottom billion will remain in a Hobbsian state of nature; he then suggests that the international community should provide such security.

To that end, he lays out a range of policy options, from increased funding for UN peacekeeping operations to a promise by wealthier nations to protect democratically-elected governments in the developing world from coups.

A wide range of development thinkers (for lack of a better term) then respond to Collier's idea. The participants inlcude Stephen Krasner, William Easterly, Larry Diamond, Edward Miguel, Mike McGovern, and Nancy Birdsall - the responses range from respectful (Birdsall) to derisive (Easterly), with the rest scattered somewhere in-between.

- Continuing with the Bill Easterly theme - Easterly and Chris Blattman debate the use of randomized control trials in development.

- Finally, Easterly and John Boonstra at UN Dispatch recently wrangled over whether the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a failure.  Daniel Esser - an old friend from Afghanistan days who started a fascinating blog on the politics of international development - recently waded into the debate, looking at the MDGs as fiction.

[Photo of William Easterly by www.clintrogersonline.com]