bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2010) — Spring 2010 // Printemps 2010, pp. 28–30
David Malone, recently Canada’s High Commissioner in India, and a former ambassador at the UN, became President of International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in July 2008. He is a graduate of Hautes Etudes commerciales (Montreal), the American University in Cairo, Harvard and Oxford. He is the author of eight books and has two more on the way, one of which, Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy, was recently previewed in The Economist. We interviewed him in January 2010.
bout: As a long-time Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) type, how did you wind up at IDRC?
DM: Actually, it all started when I spotted an advertisement in The Economist for the position. I had been aware for some time that my terrific predecessor, Maureen O’Neil, who served for I years, was thinking of moving on — she today leads an exciting private foundation in the health research field.
My career, a very happy one, has involved more coming and going from DFAIT than most do. I joined as a very young guy, after a singularly undistinguished university career but with a strong interest in international affairs and an active past in student politics. Within a few years, I felt an inexplicable pull back towards academic work and, when I returned to it on leave from the government, I worked hard and enjoyed myself a lot. And, with support from colleagues in External Affairs (as it then was), and considerable encouragement from several of my supervisors, I kept going back to school, taking a sabbatical from External every seven years or so, to do some studying, writing or teaching, sometimes all three. I only earned my doctorate when I was 43, having understood that in the academic world a Ph.D. is like union membership —- a requirement for admission into certain functions.
As an occasional scholar I was well aware of IDRC. I knew of its very significant impact in research and policy circles of the developing world, but never got to know it well. IDRC in 2000 co-published one of my books, Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (edited with my friend Mats Berdal), achieving for it much wider distribution in the developing world than any other publisher could have. Incidentally, the book resulted from a policy-oriented research effort co-sponsored by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London and DFAIT in Ottawa put together in 1998 by Michael Small, then a director in the Global Issues Bureau, that came to involve many of the leading scholars in the field (including Paul Collier).
And so, I applied cold, rather than seeking a grace and favour appointment (that, in any event, would have eluded me), in a process involving headhunters, a search committee of the IDRC Board, serious reference checks and so forth. I had to fly back from India twice for interviews. And still, even when the Board had made its choice, the government’s endorsement was required through an Order in Council appointment, as the head of IDRC is a “Deputy Head” in Ottawa parlance, leading a Crown Corporation. In sum, nearly as much process as a diplomatic Head of Mission appointment!
My only regret was leaving India, where I loved my time unreservedly, earlier than planned. New Delhi has to be one of our three or four most interesting assignments and one very relevant to global interests today. But, in order to manage an interesting career, all of us need to make compromises. And my experience in India (like my earlier postings in the Middle East and at the UN) is useful to my work at IDRC, and today also lies at the heart of my personal research life.
bout: How has IDRC changed over the years?
DM: In 2010 we celebrate our 40th anniversary. Like all institutions, IDRC has had its ups and downs, although its reputation for excellence has never faltered. It suffered severe budget cuts in the mid-1990s, like all federally funded institutions, and it took some years to recover from the trauma. Under Maureen O’Neil, particularly as of 2000, IDRC experienced a “golden age”. Its overriding commitment to capacity-building in the developing world for evidence-based policy-making came to be more widely shared. And its reputation for tight management conjoined with great ambition for its grantees yielded a view elsewhere, most clearly expressed in a review for the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) of the development research community, that it is a uniquely compelling international actor — and a great foreign and development policy instrument for Canada.
The result is twofold. On the one hand, the Canadian government has prompted Parliament to devote greater resources to it, most recently through the government’s Development Innovation Fund (DIF) — announced in the budget of February 2008 — which IDRC is overseeing. On the other, IDRC can now engage in financially very significant partnerships with some of the strongest funders in the development field, including DfID, the Gates and Hewlett Foundations, and, of course, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) itself.
In 2010-11, our budget is likely to hover around $250 million, and in 2011-12, when the DIF kicks in fully, around $300 million. While this is small compared to CIDA’s resources (well over $3 billion), it is very meaningful in the development research world, where IDRC is one of the largest actors globally.
Our most exciting new program, the Think Tank Initiative, an idea of the Hewlett Foundation, has made waves in the funding world. Hewlett was prepared to make available very large sums (US$40 million in the first instance) to provide core (as opposed to project-related) support to promising policy-relevant social science research institutions in the developing world. Late in the day, the Gates Foundation, with which we have partnered quite a bit on a range of issues (and will again on the DIF), joined in with an equal amount. IDRC put in about CDN$12 million of its own, and is implementing the initiative which is rolling out in 11 African, 7 Latin American and 5 South Asian countries. It now looks as if the initiative will attract one or two further funders before we close out its first fund-raising phase. (Implementation has four years left to run.) A second phase of the initiative seems likely.
bout: What substantive areas does IDRC focus on?
DM: IDRC works to a five-year programming cycle governed by a strategic framework set by our Board. The Board, currently chaired with great flair by Barbara McDougall, has nearly as many international members as Canadian ones, all of them appointed by Order in Council. It is frankly both more reliable and in that sense easier to work to a Board than to satisfy short-term bureaucratic impulses and often misunderstood or opaque political guidance in a line department. But from another angle, it can be very exacting given that our highly knowledgeable Board members have many questions (and their own ideas) on our future directions. Our Finance and Audit Committee is chaired by former Auditor General of Canada Denis Desautels, who is very demanding — as he should be on planning, budgeting and accountability — but also highly supportive of IDRC’s goals. I am once again greatly enjoying working for a Board, and learning from it, as I did during my years leading the International Peace Academy in New York from 1998-2004.
The Board recently approved a strategic framework for 2010-15 after a year-long process of consultation within Canada and abroad. It is supportive of the priorities for Canadian Official Development Assistance (ODA) set out by Minister Oda last year. And we also strike out in a few modest directions of our own, notably on science and technology innovation. Beyond this, we will focus on agricultural and environmental research (building on a large partnership we have with DfID in Africa, on adaptation to climate change), with perhaps some energy projects thrown in; support for health systems and (through the DIF) funding of medical research involving developing country scientists; and, as always, economic and social policy writ large (including programming in such sub-fields as trade, competition policy, administrative law, gender, peace and conflict). Information technologies for development, in which IDRC has blazed quite a trail over the past 10 years, will now be integrated throughout the Centre’s programming.
We don’t have countries of concentration, rather being guided by where research is most likely to bear fruit and most needed. Also, we don’t fund multilateral institutions (although we maintain a useful funding partnership with International Fund for Agricultural Development). We do, however, within the developing world, fund networks of individual researchers and research institutions within countries, across regions and globally, which often yield very fine collaborations and results. And we continue to engage very energetically with the major emerging economies as they offer new models of success for other developing countries.
bout: What about a Canadian angle?
DM: We have a terrific new pattern of promoting the engagement of Canadian researchers with those of the developing world. IDRC funds the developing country end, and the major Canadian granting agencies (NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR) increasingly agree to take on funding of the Canadian end. Further, we have a new partnership with CIDA, on food security and agricultural research, that will operate rather similarly, in linking Canadian research teams (which have so much to offer in this field) with counterparts in the developing world. These transcontinental partnerships are very popular with politicians in Canada who appreciate how important it is for our country to link up with innovation and ground-breaking research globally.
bout: Is there a DFAIT angle?
DM: Very much so. IDRC reports to Parliament through Minister Cannon. Len Edwards is our “portfolio Deputy” and has been very helpful to us. And we liaise often with others in DFAIT. In the field, our six regional offices (Montevideo, Dakar, Nairobi, Cairo, Delhi and Singapore) aim to keep in touch with our Heads of Mission (HOMs) and their colleagues throughout the developing world. We encourage newly appointed HOMs to visit IDRC to establish what we have going on in their countries of accreditation — often quite a lot. And with CIDA concentrating on fewer countries, IDRC is often the sole Canadian official development actor still engaged in many countries. But, depressingly, not everyone is interested. HOM training recently has focused so overwhelmingly on management requirements that some of our colleagues barely seem to know what it is they are meant to be managing. When I visit the field, I make myself available to our diplomatic missions for whatever political and other activities are of use to them. Many are tremendously creative and impressive in drawing on my time.
bout: Does coming from DFAIT make a difference?
DM: Not really. Serious attention to management, genuine respect for the guidance of the Board and total commitment to our grantees are what matters. Once we have decided to back an individual or a research team, we hold them to very high standards of accountability, but we also support them (for example on methodology, grant administration and result dissemination) much more than most donors.
It helps to have been a researcher and thus a former grantee — so often at the mercy of funders. My personal models of good donorship are the Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller and Hewlett Foundations, as well as DfID. Alas, I have dealt with some other funders who verged on the irrational and neurotically self-absorbed, serving as donors because they had to rather than because they believed in what they were doing. Thus, I have good models to fall back on, and some very bad ones to remind me of what to avoid. (The great Canadian public international law scholar, Tom Franck, used to comment: “Nobody need be completely useless — one can always serve as a bad example.”)
IDRC was exceptionally well managed when I got here. My colleagues are outstanding. All of this was recognized in one of the best strategic reviews Ottawa has seen in recent years. But the challenge for us all here is to fight complacency and the joy is to glory in the privilege of serving both Canada and our wonderful, ever-evolving community of grantees.
bout: Thank you, David.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2010) — Spring 2010 // Printemps 2010, pp. 28–30. Read the rest of this issue →
