 Okay good afternoon the last panel of the the conference. So I'm going to be talking about the addressing group based inequalities project at UNU wider. So we'll shift gears a little bit from some of the other presentations. So the starting point for the work is really that inequality matters. It matters of course because we care about inequality in and of itself. We care about equality. We care about justice. We care about fairness and it also matters consequently because we think inequality has impacts on other things that we care about and in particular ethnic inequalities are concerning and by ethnic inequalities I mean inequalities of opportunity and outcome linked not to anything an individual does but to their situation at birth and the descriptive social categories into which they might be classified. So I'm thinking of race, language, indigeneity, religion, nationality, caste, culture. So this is a broad sort of umbrella definition umbrella usage of the term ethnic and there's a large and growing body of research that looks at the negative implications of ethnic inequalities of this type for peace for governance and for economic performance and indeed some of this work Baldwin Huber work by Alicina and colleagues suggests that ethnic inequalities perhaps even more than vertical inequalities or than ethnic divisions alone may have concerning implications for these things. So the question we asked then is how do ethnic inequalities change what in particular is the role of policy and what factors influence policy adoption and implementation. So I should mention this is sort of phase two in a two-part project. The first part focuses focused much more on data and sort of mapping measurement mapping patterns and trends across countries and within countries with with the best available data such as they are and then also on the implications it sort of fed into that body of work on the implications of ethnic inequalities. So this part of work focuses much more on change and it has four core components. I'll be talking more about the first two components here. So the first workstream, the first component is a set of work on experiences of reform and this is mainly a case study based set of work. It includes an edited book, two of the chapter authors are in the audience today. We presented, we had a panel earlier today discussing those chapters. There was a call for research proposal so we had a more disparate set of cases case studies examined. Then there's a couple of freestanding pieces of work there. The second core component looks at affirmative action around the world and it includes an effort to build a cross country database on affirmative action policies across countries review of the literature including systematic review of the quantitative literature on the impact of affirmative action policies. Then we have another set of work on horizontal inequality as an outcome. Some freestanding articles there but also a collection of work looking, focusing in particular on inequalities between migrants and non-migrants and the factors that influence that. And then finally we continue to do a bit of work on the data and building the cross national data. So I'm going to make three points. The first point is that we need better understanding of how and why policies to address inequality are adopted and implemented. So this table is not mine. This comes from a book, a recent book by Olivier Blanchard and Danny Rodrick that came out of a conference on inequality and the role of government in addressing inequality. And so this is sort of their typology of the tools to address inequality. One question is what is the stage of the economy at which policy intervenes? A second question is what kind of inequality do we care about? So I'm not going to go through it in depth but the key point here is that there are nine cells in their approach to mapping the policy options and they highlight that each of these cells is filled with some policy and each of these policies has a pretty strong evidence base behind it. So they spotlight in the first chapter of their book. We have the tools to reverse the rise in inequality. So the question is, as I think the moderator pointed out last night in the policy panel, we have the tools why isn't inequality sort of fixed? And I think this is a puzzle if we think about policy making on inequality or policy making to address inequality in the way that we often talk about it in development discussions. I shouldn't have said economists, but in the way that we talk about it at least. So I think in our discussions we often we seem to have in mind sort of two simple models of policy making. And one is this sort of benevolent social planner or very linear policy making process where government adopts the policy that's in society's best interests and the policies with the strongest evidence base are adopted. I don't think any of us really believe that this is how policy works, but it's certainly the way that we often kind of frame the policy conclusions in our papers. And it's the way that a lot of our discussions go. And if you think about policy that way, and we know that inequality is a problem, we have broad consensus that it's a problem, and it really is a puzzle why it's not addressed if we do have the tools. A second way that I think we think about policy making is or that we have kind of in the back of our discussions is a sort of rational economic voting model that voters decide whether redistribution will be adopted, redistributive policies will be adopted. And when inequality is high, there'll be strong support for redistributive policies, the median voter will favor redistribution. But you know, this doesn't seem to be working out for us either. And I think Jose Antonio Campo summarized it very well in the policy discussion last night, he said the challenge first of all is politics. So how do we think about politics? So here are some alternative, I'll just touch on them briefly some alternative ways of thinking about the policy making process. So we can think about these sort of formal political economy models, for instance, Romer's nice article, why the poor do not expropriate the rich, right. So he suggests basically that voters, they don't only vote on the basis of their economic interests, they also vote on the basis of other sorts of non economic interests and identities. And then maybe they would vote for redistribution, but they're sort of distracted by religion or by culture by other things. Another approach we could take is to think about political ideology. So Sherry Berman advances this argument in this collection by Lanshardt and Roderick. The idea that politicians and parties and political elites shape the interests and identities that dominate political life and that that dominate our policies, the policies that are adopted. I think another thing that hasn't gotten enough attention is sort of the public policy literature on policy making. So we can think in particular about, or for instance about Kingdon's multiple streams approach to policy making. So he suggests or he has this nice framework that it's sort of the convergence of three streams is when you'll see policies change. So one stream is the policy stream. This is sort of the what we've been talking about in the conference, all the different policy options and and what and what's the evidence base for different policy options. Can we can we really beef up the policy, the these policy options. There's also a problem stream. What what issues are sort of issues that should be on the national agenda? Advocates often work in this the policy stream. And then there's the politics stream. So most of us are not working in the politics stream. This is legislative discussion and and and political debate and political processes. And so if we think about policy making in in Kingdon's terms, when these three streams come together, that's when you see some sort of policy change. And it's often around some sort of window of opportunity that often involves the sort of efforts of political entrepreneurs to bring these three streams together to get policy change. So let's think shift gears a little bit and think about the policy options. So the second point I'd like to highlight is that we have a good toolkit, I think for addressing vertical inequality, but we need to think more about the toolkit for addressing ethnic horizontal inequality. So just to pick on Blanchard and Roderick's framework. Again, I know there's other frameworks, but I think, you know, this is a good starting point for the discussion. And in one sense, if we're thinking about a country where with very high ethnic inequality, where the the wealthy primarily come from one group and the poor much more from another group, then of course, addressing vertical inequality will have some impact on horizontal inequality. So in one sense, it applies broadly. We can also think about targeting some of the specific policies within their framework at groups rather than in individuals. But the framework, obviously, I think misses a lot of the sorts of policies we would think about when we when we talk about addressing ethnic inequality. So there's nothing about it's not really clear how things like like anti discrimination legislation fit in or affirmative action policies. So in order to kind of map the forest, if you want to use Santiago Levi's terms from from last night, I think we need to sort of think about some different typologies. So the broad framework that we kind of use in the project is summarized here along sort of two dimensions. So one question is, is the policy targeted and how? So is it directly targeted to the disadvantaged ethnic group? Or is it indirectly, is it a more indirect targeting or are not targeting? When we think about ethnic inequalities, very often they overlap with other types of groups. So you could think of you could think of policies directly targeted on an ethnic basis or you could think of policies targeted on an income basis or class basis, but they still would have some impact on ethnic inequality. And then finally you can think of more universally framed policies that would have impact on ethnic inequality. And I think Marta's group at UNDESA has done a huge amount of work, especially highlighting the sort of possibilities around these universally framed type policies. So I guess this the second question or the second dimension we can think about is what's the extent of institutional change? Are we talking about major systemic institutional change like the revision of the constitution, the multi-ethnic revision of the constitution as we saw for instance in Bolivia? Are we talking about something that involves little change in major institutions beyond the establishment of the particular policy or program? Like the sort of setup of a new targeted social transfer program. So this could be a targeted to ethnic groups or it could be something that's maybe a universally framed policy as well. And then we can think about things in the middle that involve some institutional adjustment but not the sort of major systemic changes as sort of setting up new constitutions or new federal arrangements. So how am I doing on time? So the third policy or the third point I'd like to highlight is that inclusion policies of whatever type they imply redistribution across ethnic groups and this is the challenge right? And so I think that in building understanding of how and why inclusion policies are adopted and implemented it's useful to consider the structure and the relative power of different ethnic groups and how this influences the adoption and implementation of inclusion policies. So this is what we try to do in the stream of work on experiences of reform and I'm going to highlight especially the work in the edited book collection. So we include in that part of the work eight in-depth case studies and they're selected to vary the sort of the structure of groups in particular the size of the main disadvantaged ethnic group and the type of inclusion policy that's adopted. So can we kind of use them to build new theories or build new insights into how these policies are adopted? What's the politics behind the adoption and implementation of the policies? I'm a political scientist we spend a lot of time thinking about case studies and how you can use case studies and in testing things and building theory and so anybody else in the room who has spent any time thinking about this will know right away that this is not the way that you select cases if you want to do theory testing this is the way that you select cases only to do theory building because I'm selecting on the IV the independent variable and the dependent variable and this is sort of purposeful. The other thing that jumps out I think if you're familiar with any of these cases or with some of these cases anyway is that some of them clearly are not success cases they might have actually made things worse for the disadvantaged group and the other point to highlight is that not all of them are talking explicitly about ethnicity certainly Bolsa Familia is not an explicitly you don't see explicit discussion of ethnicity in Bolsa Familia but they're all policies that have some impact or could have some potential impact on ethnic inequality. The studies are diverse they adopt different frameworks they make different arguments but they sort of speak to a common framework that was shared with the contributors at the start and they ask from that framework a common set of questions so in particular they're asking what are the key factors in understanding the politics of policymaking and implementation to address ethnic inequality. So we can very very simply think about that process of policymaking in this this way so we start with with thinking about the structure of groups and inequality in society and then there's some sort of shock maybe it's an external shock maybe it's an internally generated shock through through through activism through the sort of efforts of political entrepreneurs then you see ethnic identity identity sorry ethnic inequality identified as a political problem for national attention and then in the next stage there's possibly some political mobilization and conflict whether it's through routine forms of politics or or more violent conflict external outside of the system conflict to figure out how to address this this national problem and then in the next stage there's some sort of resolution in the in terms of the policy choice which is again influenced by the the relative power of different groups and finally the policy is implemented and or sustained or not again influenced by the structure of groups so this is sort of a very simple framework in which we can compare across the cases but we can also push it a little bit further so we can think about how the size of the the about how the power of different groups the relative power of different groups and in particular the political size or the size of the socioeconomically disadvantaged group might relate to the sort of inclusion policy outcomes that we see in terms of targeting here so just very simply I would expect to see the cases in these green shaded boxes and I kind of put the cases where I see them actually falling so a bunch of them fall where I would have expected to see them but they don't all and so part of the work of the kind of comparative analysis is figuring out why they fall where they fall and and which ones why the ones that don't fall where I would expect them to fall there we can also push it by thinking about how the the political size of the main disadvantaged group relates to the the scale of the policy that's adopted whether it's a state systemic change or some at the other end of the spectrum just a more discrete benefits type of approach and again the green shaded boxes are where I would expect to see the cases and and we can kind of think about where the different cases fall just very briefly I can talk a little bit just to introduce the the work that we're doing on affirmative action which kind of helps to put these selected case studies in a broader context so I'm working with Simone Shota who just gave a presentation in the previous session on a policy database to try to map affirmative action policies across countries around the world and hopefully well we will we will have a first version of the database out later this year and we'll keep working to expand the country coverage and deepen the coding on different countries as well so just some concluding points then first leave no one behind is a political challenge more than a technical one and I think this political challenge can be especially intense when who is left behind and who is ahead overlaps with ethnic divisions and I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that inequality between ethnic groups perhaps more than inequality between individuals or between other types of groups may be especially threatening to good governance and to democratic governance certainly there's classic work in political science on democracy and democratic transition that highlights the role of national unity and the challenges of cultural pluralism in in democracy and in democratic transition indeed Dancott Rustow goes so far as to argue that national unity is the single precondition for successful democratic transition I don't think that's quite right but I think certainly that that ethnic divisions play a unique role in in in governance and so unsurprisingly discussions around addressing ethnic inequality are really often central to the national project and national political debates and they're closely linked with national identity and with with nationalism and they're linked to often national development plans and discussions around national development plans inclusion policies are diverse I think one useful way to map them is in terms of the scale and the targeting and we often think first about ethnically targeted policies like affirmative action these sorts of policies receive a lot of attention when we think about how to address ethnic inequality and certainly there's evidence that these policies have positive impact but the generalizability of the findings from existing work is is not so clear and there are also risks of these sorts of ethnically targeted policies which I think is precisely why Marta's group at UN Dessa has been has been arguing and discussing about the value of thinking in more universal terms and thinking about universal social protection as a way to address ethnic inequality I agree with that to a large extent but I think that we could also make a case that the extent of intergenerational inequality the extent of horizontal inequality in some cases means that sort of providing equal opportunity isn't enough to correct to correct these very long running systemic inequalities within some sort of reasonable amount of time so I think it doesn't fully get us away from from thinking about more targeted policies but you know basically a priority in all of this work I think is better understanding of the diversity of inclusion policies the forest not so much the trees and the factors that influence why we might adopt one policy rather than another thanks