Comments

And thank you Thomas. As mentioned in my reply to Darian, I added a note and hopefully this would clear up doubts. It is very hard to go through the contracts to check if similar funding structures apply. Aid contracting market is an important topic. I do hope that as the new government places more emphasis on transparency, we will see more information and data being made public.

Hi Darian. Thank you. That's an important point. I've double-checked with my colleague Cameron Hill. And I've added the following note to the table "Note that contract value also includes funds transferred to NGOs through contractors. For example, Alinea transferred a large amount of funds to NGOs under the Australian Humanitarian Partnership (AHP) and its AHP contracts have a total value of 191.8 million AUD in 2021-22." Thank you for the comment. We'll consider that as we go further into the analysis.

Touche and bravo Ofa! Speaking truth to power in the development, humanitarian 'industries' is critically important.

Thank you Ashlee for your information. That's another transparency issue, again. There's very limited information on the contractor selection criteria. I wonder how much weight it put onto national interest, localisation and inclusion of experts. It would be interesting to see how the adjustments in selection criteria affect project outcomes. I agree that a comparison between the Pacific and S&SE Asia could provide some useful insights. I haven't done that yet as there is a lot of manual work required to find out the location of contract implementation. I updated AECOM to AECOM (now DT Global) and Scope Global to Scope Global (now Palladium). Thank you for pointing that out. Cardno and DT Global are treated as separate because we think they are still competing with each other for the contracts before the acquisition. Same rule applies to other companies.

Very interesting article and research. Thank you for sharing. I believe there is room to grow and also ways to understand Pacific based local consultant firms to improve the ways of working and ensuring aid trickles down to the needy and meaningful partnerships.

Hello Marita. Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective. Knowing this is very helpful. It is disappointing to see that some valuable local partnerships through subcontracting have even failed to realise their underlying values. This provides more reasons for DFAT to rethink its approach to localisation.

Thank you Alison. At the moment we don't have access to subcontracting data. DFAT does claim that Australia has transferred benefits to the recipient countries through subcontracting, but there is no evidence to quantify the scale yet. Hopefully DFAT can make their data available to the public soon.

kia ora Huiyuen Thank you for sharing this, very interesting. Would be interesting to know how many of these also sub-contract local consultancies based in the Pacific (I say this having done several sub-contracts for these larger companies) - so yes they may get the contracts, but they also sub-contract some of that work to local companies as well....

Thank you so much Huiyuan Liu for this incredibly valuable piece. Lots of opportunities to dive deeper. As a small consulting firm in Fiji (Talanoa Consulting) with almost of all of our team and subcontractor network being Pacific Island experts, we have experience of both being supported by some of these larger firms through subcontracting models and have felt as though we have been included, tokenistically, to demonstrate that they have partnerships in the Pacific. Part of the power of the larger firms is their ability to 'be in the Canberra bubble', to know what is coming and position themselves accordingly. Procurement rules, as contracts have got larger, also favour firms with business development teams who are experts in tenders, something smaller firms in the Pacific don't have the resources to support. It would be great to delve deeper to find out how much each of these giants subcontract locally to other firms, rather than just growing their own offices and staff in partner countries. Would love to have a future talanoa about this! Thanks so much for pulling this together.

Those figures absolutely include grant funds we administer. Each is listed as a separate contract on Austender, but we don't receive any portion of those grants. That possibly skews some of the other figures too, but hard to know without going into each contract. I can certainly say we wouldn't be on that top 10 list (or close to) once they are excluded. Really interesting article, and the lack of movement in the top tier firms. It would also be fascinating to see what portion of work funding is sub-contracted to local companies. While this data isn't readily available, DFAT has more data on value-chain trends from PERFORMS, which will hopefully be visible in the future.

Hi Sharon, this is great and very interesting analysis. A couple of other things that could contribute to the high % of Australian companies winning - tenders have a requirement for demonstrating the benefit of their proposal to the national interest, as well as an Indigenous Participation Plan. International companies can struggle on these elements compared to Australian companies. The new emphasis on localisation and requirement for localisation statements/plans in tenders also supports companies that have an existing footprint in key Indo-Pacific countries. Australian companies have also been stronger at capturing some of the expertise that has left AusAID/DFAT, so can put named personnel on their bids that already have a strong/known reputation among those assessing proposals, and significant regional experience. International companies in general don't have the same level of Pacific expertise. It would be interesting to see if there's a difference between contracts awarded in the Pacific, and S&SE Asia, for example? On a hunch I feel like there'd be more diversity of suppliers in S&SE Asia, but the contract values smaller on the whole. But I think the big reasons you've identified are more significant, these are just a couple of smaller elements that might contribute. Also a note for your table on changes/acquisitions, AECOM became DT Global in 2019, then DT Global acquired Cardno in 2022, at the end of the financial year. I'm guessing in the 2021-22 figures you've combined Cardno and DT Global? Might be worth clarifying. And as Darian pointed out, Scope now part of Palladium.

Hi - thanks and important analysis. Note that Scope Global was integrated into Palladium effective from 1 March 2022, so you may need to update the 2021-22 column to combine the two entities, and perhaps clarify in the body of the article? Separately, it may be worth clarifying that the Alinea contract volume reflects the pass-through of a large amount of funding to NGOs under the Australian Humanitarian Partnership? A final comment: it would be interesting to examine the various ownership structures of these for-profit aid contractors to understand where and how financial benefits flow. Most are not publicly listed companies and are private shareholder vehicles.