“Oil Bills: Will they erase our doubts?“ was published in the Ugandan newspaper The Daily Monitor while SIPA Professor Jenik Radon and his students were in Uganda in March doing field research for a Capstone Workshop. Professor Radon and Marie-Paule Jeansonne (MIA ‘12) are both quoted in this article, commenting on the latest draft of two petroleum bills currently being considered by the Ugandan Parliament.

Eight SIPA students have been working on a Capstone Workshop that focuses on Uganda’s “Oil Bills,” conducting research to make recommendations on ways to effectively legislate and manage newly found oil reserves. 

The team’s initial comment on the legislation, which was put together by Jeansonne and Sri Swaminathan (MPA ‘12) under the guidance of Professor Radon, has been quoted in various media outlets in Uganda, including The Daily Monitor (above) and The Independent (“Parliament to pass weak laws on oil”). 

The students and Professor Radon also presented their comments and recommendations in-person to 15 members of the Ugandan Parliament’s Natural Resource Committee. 

The team presents its recommendations to Members of Parliament in Uganda. At right, Professor Radon and Jeansonne.

According to Professor Radon, the team’s two biggest recommendations are:

1. to have a stronger system of checks and balances, with an emphasis on transparency;
2. not to concentrate decision-making in one individual

During their time in Uganda in mid-March, the team also organized meetings with individuals from government ministries, members of Parliament (governing and opposition), civil society, Ugandan citizens, international donors, foreign embassies, and international and local media.

“We tried to identify what they see as the biggest issues and problems,” said Jeansonne. “By then, we already had ideas about what our recommendations would be, so our field trip was a good chance to test them. We had to make sure our report was something that could be actionable and something Ugandans could relate to.” 

While Nithin Coca (MIA ‘12), Kazumi Kawamoto (MIA ‘12), Ida Dokk Smith (MIA ‘12) and Frithiof August Wilhelmsen (MIA ‘13) conducted interviews in the capital city Kampala, Chitra Choudhury (MIA/Journalism ‘12) and Frazer Lanier (MIA ‘12) travelled to the resource-rich “oil belt” region of Hoima, which shares a border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Choudhury and Lanier in Hoima.

“We conducted interviews with both local authorities and residents,” said Choudhury, “people who might be displaced, fishing communities that might be affected… We were trying to understand how far-removed people on the ground are from what’s going on in Parliament. It added an extra layer of understanding on the issues.”

Professor Radon added that one of the major images that has stuck in his mind from the students’ field research is that “the elephants are leaving” due to the drilling and vibrations.

“That’s something we found,” said Choudhury, “the environmental impact wasn’t being studied. The government is doing that now, with the help of NORAD [the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation].” 

“You have to consider the full impacts,” Professor Radon added. “The importance of such a trip is you discover information from the locals. For example, there is a greater influx of fishing because of roads being built and increased access to [Lake Albert]. There’s overfishing, too much to be sustainable…. So these are the unintended consequences that you can only see on the ground.”

Jeansonne emphasized that because most of the oil drilling is on land, there are “grave implications for human rights, because people will be displaced.” This raises questions about compensation, how people should be displaced, and whether they should be displaced in the first place. 

“Developing extractive industries is difficult to do in the best of circumstances,” Radon said. “So these questions need to be answered in the right way.”

- Michelle Chahine

Losses one year after a natural disaster are much greater than those estimated during the same year, particularly when it comes to decreases in income and increases in female infant mortality rates.

This is a major finding of the 2011 study, Destruction, Disinvestment, and Death: Economic and Human Losses Following Environmental Disaster,by Jesse Anttila-Hughes, a candidate for SIPA’s PhD in Sustainable Development, and Solomon M. Hsiang, an alumnus of the program and postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. 

“The paper has pretty direct policy implications - which is generally what I aim for. I think it’s very difficult to do environmental risk work without it being policy related. It directly informs disaster response policy,” said Anttila-Huges.

For example, the paper shows that, in the year after disasters, “more people die than we thought, particularly females,” he added.

By looking at data from the Philippines after typhoons, they found the increase in infant mortality is mostly attributed to the death of female infants. This is driven by economic factors, according to Anttila-Hughes. 

In addition, he explained that households with multiple children, particularly older sons, have higher rates of female infants dying. 

“The fact that a lot of environmental impacts affect females is very interesting to me. There is a lot that can be done to intervene to change that,” he said.

Anttila-Hughes has been in the PhD program since the fall of 2006, focusing on environmental risk, disasters and demography, climate impact on public health, and behavioral responses to environmental risk.

He studied physics during his undergraduate education at Harvard University, along with several languages - he is fluent in Spanish, French, Mandarin and Japanese. The relationship between his studies led him to SIPA’s doctoral program:

“Physics gave me quantitative skills that I needed… What makes the sustainable development PhD different is we’re expected to do a lot of work in the sciences. 

Foreign languages and international affairs [experience] had me thinking about the link between the two,” said Anttila-Hughes, describing the connections he began to make between science, international affairs and international development. “I found this PhD program, which is everything I wanted.”

Anttila-Hughes and Hsiang have a blog together: “Fight Entropy: The Global Environment and Economic Development.”

- Michelle Chahine