[asia-apec 1214] A Critical and Strategizing Conference on the Politics of Cost-Benefit Analysis

[Li Yuk Shing Kevin]

ANNOUNCEMENT OF AND INVITATION FOR CONCERNED ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL
ACTIVISTS AND SCHOLARS 

A CRITICAL AND STRATEGIZING CONFERENCE ON THE POLITICS OF COST-BENEFIT
ANALYSIS

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT, USA, 7-10 OCTOBER 1999

SPONSORED BY THE INSTITUTION FOR SOCIAL AND POLICY STUDIES, YALE
UNIVERSITY AND CO-ORGANIZED BY THE CORNER HOUSE, UK

-----------------------------------------


THE COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS DILEMMA: 
STRATEGIES AND ALTERNATIVES
A conference at Yale University, 7-10 October 1999


Background

Recent decades have seen an increasingly unconstructive and acrimonious
pattern of social conflict emerge from the expanded use of cost-benefit
analysis (CBA) in decision-making in environment and development.
Although CBA is intended to help clarify, rationalize, and simplify
societal choices, it has often proved to be the case that the more
widely it is used, the less credibility it enjoys.

On the one hand, the technique has been enlisted by decision-makers
around the world as a way of justifying or scrutinizing choices about
whether to build dams, roads, and airports; what actions to take over
global warming, biodiversity loss, or soil erosion; what health care and
occupational safety policies to adopt; how to determine damages for oil
spills or toxic leaks; whether to undertake family planning programs;
how to regulate pesticide use or dispose of radioactive waste; whether
to modify automobile design to save lives; how to use military lands;
and so forth. Entrenched in much bureaucratic practice and
administrative "common sense" and widely used by lending institutions
such as the World Bank, CBA is likely to be applied even more widely in
the 21st century. Contributing to its prominence, environmentalists
often use it tactically as a way of securing recognition for
environmental issues within the terms of mainstream discourse.

At the same time, however, cost-benefit analysis faces growing
resistance at a variety of levels. Grassroots opponents of roads and
hydroelectric dams around the world have persistently contested the ways
the technique values land, forests, streams, fisheries and livelihoods,
as well as its reliance on unaccountable experts, its neglect of equity
issues, and its incompatibility with many forms of reasoned negotiation;
ordinary people surveyed by cost-benefit analysts have commonly refused
to answer questions about how much money they would pay to save a
wilderness or how much they would accept to allow it to be destroyed;
Third World delegations
to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have angrily rejected a
cost-benefit analysis of policy options regarding global warming which
valued statistical lives in industrialized and non-industrialized
countries differently. In the US, the role of CBA has become, in the
words of one prominent legal scholar, "one of the most hotly disputed
issues in law and policy" following the Reagan administration's
executive orders calling for the application of CBA to all regulatory
decisions and legislative proposals. Eminent economists, philosophers,
lawyers, anthropologists,
sociologists, biologists and political scientists have meanwhile argued
that in many cases the technique does not clarify but rather obscures
rational deliberative processes involving plural values, faces
intractable difficulties regarding predictability, discount rates, and
opportunity
costs, and is based on a deeply controversial political theory. As one
scholar has concluded, "far from resolving controversy, cost-benefit
analysis generates it."

Although this dilemma is a crucial aspect of contemporary social and
environmental conflict worldwide, few systematic attempts have been made
to analyze it or to evaluate practical prospects for overcoming it.
While many CBA proponents suggest that the answer lies in a combination
of further technical refinements of CBA, greater care in its
application, and education of the public about its merits, such measures
have proved repeatedly
ineffective in overcoming resistance to the technique in more than 50
years of attempts. Indeed, the diagnosis that the CBA deadlock is rooted
in nothing more than popular misunderstandings of the technique,
incorrect application, or technical "bugs", has itself further
reinforced opposition to CBA. At the same time, however, CBA's critics
have failed to mount a concerted, comprehensive global challenge to the
technique which might be effective in, among other things, shifting
bureaucrats' and political leaders' allegiance toward less problematic
and more democratic
decision-making aids. This is for several reasons. First, critical
activists, policymakers, and policy advisers, while well-equipped to
call attention to problems with particular examples of CBA, usually have
little time to step back to evolve a more synoptic understanding of the
conflicts the technique engenders. Second, critical academics, while
often able to articulate compelling critiques of CBA, often do not
engage in much practical strategic thinking on how to promote
"alternative", less conflict-ridden decision-making practices which
states could deploy.

Finally, to a far greater degree than the fairly unitary community of
professional practitioners and partisans of CBA, the community of
critics of CBA is fragmented and scattered across a huge range of
institutions, sites of grassroots opposition, and insular academic
disciplines, creating enormous obstacles to sharing, combination and
cross-fertilization of
ideas, accumulation of practical lessons, and focused communal inquiry
into, and activism toward, alternative futures.

The Conference

On 7-10 October 1999 an interdisciplinary conference will be held at
Yale University to probe the roots of the CBA predicament and to
mobilize strategic inquiry into how it might be transcended. 

In terms of content, the conference will elicit, from a wide range of
international activists and academics of different generations who have
focused on CBA, thoughtful and sustained responses to the conference
topic.

Present will be not only activists working on issues of dams,
agriculture, roads, forests, toxics, nuclear disposal, climate, urban
and health policy, etc., but also engaged scholars in history,
sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, philosophy, law,
environmental studies, public policy, management, and geography, as well
as development agency
officials.  

In terms of process, the meeting, by bringing together individuals who
have been working in parallel directions but may have not had the chance
to benefit from each others' experience and knowledge, will itself
provide the conditions for further inquiry and action. The conference
will be a forum, for example, at which anti-dam activists may be able to
step back from day-to-day work to exchange information on biases and
trends in the use of CBA in dam projects with academics who have studied
the politics of the technique. By the same token, critics of the use of
CBA in (say) occupational health policy may have the time and space to
learn from (say) climate activists troubled by the implications of
basing global warming policy on the monetary valuation of human lives.
It is hoped that all participants, in addition, will benefit from
discussion of alternative decision-making practices. In this connection,
it is an advantage of
the conference that featured speakers are not dogmatic partisans of any
particular technique or discipline but bent on open-minded, democratic
resolutions to environmental and social conflicts.

As a way of supplementing the process of which the conference is a part,
a book edited by the conference organizers and containing contributions
of participants will also be published, helping to carry the messages of
the meeting to new audiences. Finally, and of crucial importance for
activists and policymakers, it is hoped that the interacting community
which the conference is intended to help seed will become, and become
known as, a permanent and ever-evolving resource for those around the
world seeking more equitable, democratic, less conflictual forms of
making choices about development, environment and health -- an
open-ended resource of the kind which cannot be built in any other way
than through concrete interactions of the kind the meeting will provide.

Opportunities will be provided during the conference, accordingly, for
the participants to plan future cooperation in the form of (for example)
informal consultations about particular CBAs, further meetings and
visits, and the sharing of documents, analyses and other resources.

Although both the content and the process of the conference are still in
the process of formation, and open to comment and criticism from all
participants and interested observers, current plans are that the first
two days of the conference will consist of intensive discussion of
mostly written materials some of which participants will have had a
chance to look at in advance, while the third day will be more
strategically oriented.

It is expected that a book consisting of some of the contributions to
the conference will be assembled and edited after the conference for
submission to a publisher.

Organization

The Yale University Institution for Social and Policy Studies, under
whose auspices the conference will be held, was established in 1968 to
facilitate interdisciplinary inquiries in the social sciences and
research into important public policy arenas. The Institution runs
interdisciplinary faculty seminars, research projects, postdoctoral
programs, as well as the activities of ISPS's constituent programs,
including the Program in Agrarian Studies, the Center for Race,
Inequality and Poverty, the Ethics, Politics, and Economics Program, and
the Health Policy Scholars Program. Conference organizers are James C.
Scott, Eugene Meyer Professor of
Political Science, Professor of Anthropology, Chairman of the Council on
Southeast Asia Studies and Director of the Program in Agrarian Studies
at Yale University; and Larry Lohmann of the Corner House, an
independent voluntary organization based in the UK with links to
environmental and social activists worldwide; with assistance from M.
Kay Mansfield, administrator of Yale's Program in
Agrarian Studies and Emily Harwell, a Ph. D. candidate in the School of
Forestry and Environmental Sciences.   

Participants  

Among the many participants at the conference will be:

John Adams, Professor of Geography, University College London, author of
Risk (UCL, 1995) and active participant in public debates over the use
of cost-benefit analysis in UK transport policy for more than two
decades.

Franck Amalric, Society for International Development, Rome (tentative).

Tariq Banuri, Sustainable Development Institute, Pakistan, Tellus
Institute, and Harvard University, thinker, activist and contributor to
or editor of many books on economics, development, and the politics of
knowledge, including Who Will Save the Forests? (Zed, 1993) and
Dominating Knowledge (Oxford, 1990).

Jacquelin Burgess, Professor of Geography, University College London,
author of ethnographic studies of contingent-valuation surveys as well
as of articles on alternatives to cost-benefit analysis, and organizer
of seminars for NGOs and policymakers on deliberative processes in
environmental decision-making.

Mohammed Dore, Professor of Economics, Brock University, co-editor of
Global Environmental Economics (1998).

Peter Dorman, Evergreen State College, author of Markets and Mortality:
Economics, Dangerous Work, and the Value of Human Life (1996) and former
consultant for the US Department of Labor.

Michael Dove, Professor of Social Ecology, School of Forestry and
Environmental Sciences, Yale University, and author of many
anthropological and cross-disciplinary works on forests,
forest-dwellers, forestry and foresters, including "Theories of Swidden
Agriculture and the Political Economy of Ignorance".

Aly Ercelawn, CREED, Karachi, Pakistan, NGO activist and thinker on
urban and dam issues (tentative).

Wendy Nelson Espeland, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Northwestern
University and author of The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality
and Identity in the American Southwest (1998) and articles on
commensuration.

Majid Ezzati, Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Program,
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton
University and critic of the use of cost- benefit analysis in the
assessment of household-level technology.

Stephen Gudeman, Professor of Anthropology at the University of
Minnesota and author of, among other works, Economics as Culture
(Cambridge, 1986) and Conversations in Colombia (Cambridge, 1990).

Michael Goldman, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, editor of Privatizing Nature (Pluto, 1998)
and sociologist of development knowledge and of the World Bank
community.

Shalmali Guttal, Focus on the Global South, Bangkok, an NGO which
attempts to strengthen grassroots organizations' capacity to tie their
experience to analysis of issues such as trade liberalization and
development and monetary policy.

Kamal Malhotra, United Nations Development Programme, New York
(tentative).

Aubrey Mayer, Director, Global Commons Institute, London and longtime
NGO climate activist credited with raising the profile of the issue of
equity at international climate negotiations (tentative).

Representative of Narmada Bachao Andolan, Narmada Valley, India.

Mary O'Brien, Eugene, Oregon, leading activist on US toxics issues and
thinker on risk analysis and its alternatives.

Martin O'Connor, Economics Department, University of Versailles, author
of many works on cost-benefit analysis and alternatives and participant
in debates on environment and economics in the European Union.

John O'Neill, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Lancaster and author
of Ecology, Policy and Politics: Human Well-Being and the Natural World
(Routledge, 1993) and other books and articles on political theory and
philosophy of economics.

Kumrab Phanthong, SANTI-DHAMMA, Satun, Thailand, NGO activist,
researcher and trainer in the areas of alternative agriculture, forestry
and economics.

Vijay Paranjpye, ECONET, Pune, NGO activist, economist and author of
Evaluating the Tehri Dam and many other works.

T. M. Porter, Associate Professor of History at the University of
California, Los Angeles and author of Trust in Numbers (1994).

Steve Rayner, Professor of Environment and Public Affairs, Columbia
University and co-editor of Human Choice and Climate Change (1998).

James C. Scott, Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and
Anthropology, Yale University and author of Seeing Like a State (1998),
Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Weapons of the Weak:
Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) and The Moral Economy of the
Peasant
(1976).

Peter Soderbaum, Professor of Ecological Economics, Malardalens
Hogskola, Vesteras, Sweden and author of many works on environmental
economics and alternatives to cost-benefit analysis.

Tony Tweedale, Montana Coalition for Health, Environment and Economic
Rights.

Gopi Upreti, Executive Director, National Academy for Environment,
Population and Development, Associate Professor, Tribhuvan University,
Nepal.

John Wargo, Associate Professor, School of Forestry and Environmental
Science, Yale University and author of Our Children's Toxic Legacy: How
Science and Law Fail to Protect Us from Pesticides (1996).

Robert Weissman, Multinational Monitor, Washingtonl

Daphne Wysham, Transnational Institute and Institute for Policy Studies,
Washington, and analyst and activist on energy and global warming issues
(tentative).

Many other scholars and activists from the Yale community and elsewhere
are also expected to participate.

Logistics

Participants should aim to arrive in New Haven on the evening of 7
October if possible. The conference will begin on the morning of Friday
8 October and conclude shortly after midday on Sunday 10 October.

The nearest large airports to New Haven are Kennedy and La Guardia
airports in New York City and Newark airport in New Jersey, although
there is also a smaller New Haven airport served by United Airlines.
There are regular buses from various terminals at Kennedy airport to New
Haven which cost around $40 and take about two hours in transit. New
Haven is also on the main rail line from Boston to New York, and is
served by various bus companies. Bus lines terminate at the New Haven
train station, which is a short (c. 15-minute) taxi ride from the Yale
University campus.

A limited number of rooms for participants have been reserved at the
Holiday Inn just off the Yale campus at about US$100/night/person. For
information on this and other accommodation please contact Emily Harwell
at Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, 89 Trumbull St., Box
208300, New Haven, CT 06520-8300, tel. +1 203 432 9833, fax +1 203 432
5036, email:
emily.harwell at yale.edu.



Registration

There is no fee for the conference. Deadline for registration is 15
September 1999.

The Cost-Benefit Analysis Dilemma: Strategies and Alternatives 7-10
October 1999 
New Haven, CT, USA

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Please post or email this form to Emily Harwell or M. Kay Mansfield at:
Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University, 89 Trumbull St., Box
208300, New Haven, CT 06520-8300, tel. +1 203 432 9833, fax +1 203 432
5036, email: emily.harwell at yale.edu or jscott at yale.edu, with a copy to
Larry Lohmann at Flat 4, The Pharmacy, Burton St., Marnhull, Dorset DT10
1PP, UK, email: larrylohmann at gn.apc.org.