Comments

Thanks Annabel!

What an enjoyable blog post to read - examining some important questions!

Interesting piece. One thing I have often wondered about is the objective evaluation of any innovation lab's long run ability to pick winners when using competitive processes, particularly 'dragons' den' style pitching which risk rewarding 'sexy' and 'hype'. Ideally this would include a comparison of the success of those funded vs. those not funded. Do you know of such research?

Thank you Paul and Nik, Good interesting comments. Sorry, I'm travelling so can't engage more right now. Nik, one thing I'll note though, is that, particularly for humanitarian work, some NGO funding for Pacific work does come from donations. The phenomenon you describe is real, but is not the whole story. Terence

Haha, thanks Julian. Love the Yes Minister reference. That didn't explicitly come up in our research, but I am sure that might be a key part of the story of some labs.

Thanks, Peter. Strengthening the approach to and use of evaluations is certainly a prerequisite to making DFAT a "world class development agency".

Excellent and amusing reminder of how the dev-set works. You miss the obvious reason for the rise and fall: it was intended. Senior civil servants in national or international organisations often manage people with ideas or the ideas themselves by enthusiastically (fake) setting up a special zone for them. Sometimes, the people are the ministers or member states. It is a technique well known to all 'Sir Humphreys'.

Once again, Mike, a valuable contribution, and the sort of information researchers should be building up, and policy makers and extension workers (where they exist) should be aware of. There remains a good case for crop diversity, including sustaining traditional tree crops, particularly where farmers have enough land, partly because of the price volatility, especially of the more minor crops (with relatively small demand), as well as reducing risks from losses to pests/diseases etc. Then there's the whole issues of yields, quality and prices. Most tree crop farmers are operating on a very low input-output model, which tends also to pose higher risks from some prevalent pest/diseases. Much higher yields and returns to land can be gained, but clearly requires larger inputs of labour and other costs, which may be justified in response to increased need from growing households, costs and aspirations, but also if higher quality translates to higher prices and market access) and improved farming practices substantially reduce disease and other wastage.

This is an important issue for analysis and discussion, not only for Australia and the beneficiaries of its development assistance, but also across the world, as the 'development suport' industry is substantial, entailing large numbers of government, multilateral, NGO participants and employees, but many commercial, or semi-commercial management contractors, academics and others, ie it's big business, and includes participants (firms and individuals) on substantial packages, as well as volunteers and local staff on hugely contrasted conditions in the developing countries. There are huge overheads, entailing often duplicative responsibilities in Departments, such as DFAT, and the managing contractors and the Multilateral and international NGOs, and some private managing contractors, like UN agencies, can be seen as operating in an increasingly uncompetitive global environment, as bigger firms buys out big ones. There is also a considerable variation in the relevance as well as the performance of projects and programs managed by development partners and agencies, not just between agencies, but also within their own portfolios. At the moment in PNG we're in the midst of a self-belief exercise by many agencies, including DFAT,UN, but also World bank and others. There's a tendency of staff to be somewhat self-commending, or at least uncritical, but it's good to see some current reviews being somewhat more analytical. Hopefully, such hard reflection and discussion will result in meaningful change, better focus, trimmed costs,more coordination and cooperation, and less duplication, learning lessons from each other's mistakes, and not just one's own. The old days in PNG when nearly all public sector work was conducted by respective PNG Govt agencies, even where development partners cofounded, whether GoA, through Budget aid until about 1990, as well as WB and other financing, was much more cost effective, with far less of the project and administrative costs, and tax exempt conditions. There was also much greater use of professional international volunteers, rather than consultants. Unfortunately, as GoPNG institutions were increasingly politicised, subject to crony appointments and largest ( in the form of constituency funds etc) it became harder for development partners to justify funding being channelled through such vehicles. Nevertheless, restoring more cost effective local institutions, both governmental and non-governmental ( including services delivered by FBOs) should be an objective, including in supporting demand driven mechanisms, which in the end enable more accountable and sustainable local public financing. Engaging reinforcing local non government organisations, which are have their strengths as well as weaknesses, is also critical, and they're certainly more cost-effective than both the multilateral and international NGOs, but too often ignored or gaining only the crumbs from the high table...

Indeed, the lack of precision in terms of how ODA is discussed within the Pacific is somewhat depressing. It is as pointless to aggregate all multilaterals as it is to aggregate all INGOs or indeed all NGOs and CSOs. There is a strong case by case argument for the abject failure of many of the IFI interventions in the region as there is for many INGO interventions. However, INGOs are a relatively recent addition to the Pacific ODA scene for most countries and hence there are not as many examples of total intervention failure due only to the fact that they have not really been around that long. In the Pacific the issue is made more complex because almost all INGOs are essentially Managing Contractors i.e. their income is derived from bidding for projects as opposed to charitable donations. So technically they are not actually even INGOs but rather Not For Profit Private Sector Entities. This is important to understand from a regulatory point of view – so for example their performance should be measured against other MCs as opposed to CSO's for most cases.

The PNG government has to have a different level of governmental arm, made up of by senior public servants. They can solely be responsible for implementing the government's decision. Let the legislatures do their role as law makers.

I agree with Scott, even if Cameron has shown too ably that it was deplorable "international best practice" to roll countries' separate aid agencies back into the "Foreign Affairs" agency. What would be a very good start would be for DFAT comprehensively, very demonstrably and consistently to apply its own "Development Evaluation Policy": https://www.dfat.gov.au/development/performance-assessment/development-evaluation/development-evaluation-policy. A Guide was apparently considered important enough to be reviewed and re-issued in December 2022 - https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/aid-programming-guide.pdf. This establishes that "The Aid Programming Guide sets out DFAT’s systems for ensuring the development program aligns with Government policy and can demonstrate results and value for money." It would be even a better start to label the evaluations that have been conducted in the order of their year. Carefully indexed only by country, (https://www.dfat.gov.au/development/performance-assessment/development-evaluation/program-evaluations), it becomes tedious attempting to analyse the 17 Reports that are listed for Papua New Guinea (for example). They are then strangely indexed by the first initial of the first name of the title. For example: "Independent Evaluation of DFAT’s Multilateral Partnerships in the Health Sector of PNG and management response". Eight self-evident words before the core program on health becomes apparent. This does not reflect well on publicly highlighting the outcomes of our PNG aid efforts, currently totalling $602 million. Especially as S.39 of the "Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013", requires Annual Performance Statements, where: "(2) The annual performance statements must: (a) provide information about the entity’s performance in achieving its purposes;"