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Short of supporting the Solomon Islands Green Party which will soon be registered the best way for donors to support change would be to fund awareness programs on governance and democracy at village level.

I work in the Solomon Islands and recognise this is the #1 issue preventing sustainable development. To cange there needs to be major awareness campaigns in the villages. The SI government through the way it distributes the Rural Development Fund and MP termination oayments supports tbe status quo.

Thanks for this good article. This is a point I make a lot regarding politics in PNG. Sadly I think for many areas of PNG there is a downward spiral of fatalism. Many people I know believe most or all politicians will be corrupt and so they vote for their own tribesmen or whoever promises the most to their tribe (including money for voting). They often do this while openly admitting that the person they vote for will not be a good leader, but again since they believe there are few or no truly good leaders they want whoever will help them specifically the most. In fact as each group of corrupt or inept leaders continue to make the country worse in terms of economy and service provision it further drives people's desperation to benefit in some way making them ardent supporters of whoever promises them the most directly.... hence the downward spiral continues.

Nice piece, Terence. I’m interested in your views as to prospects for escaping clientelism. I would say that nearly every country initially suffered from clientelist politics. This seems the rule rather than the exception. While you posit bottom up social movements as the driver of change, lots of the most interesting recent literature has been about developmental clientelism (in which clientelism persists, but still leads to efficiency enhancing reallocations of social resources because patronage is productively used) and the role of elite pacts (stable elite pacts allow for the institutionalization of inter-elite bargains in ways that eventually lead to the emergence of an independent state and different types of electoral accountability - best exposition of this would be North, Wallis, Weingast). Do you think we need bottom up social movements or just lots more time and stable elite pacts? How compelling is the evidence on bottom up social movements relative to the elite pact arguments? Or are they somehow compatible? (Dan Slater argues that the threat of violence from bottom up movements actually forced East Asian elites into tighter elite bargains, therefore supporting greater state effectiveness - but a channel between social movements and state effectiveness quite different from the one you suggest). Interested in your thoughts.

Thank you for this succinct and insightful article. Ironically, Sir Nagora Bogan, the PNG University of Technology Chancellor, and candidate for Lae in Morobe province depicted in the picture, was cheated out of a seat by a lack of clientelism. Someone outside Morobe province paid a thug to burn the ballots where he was bound to get most votes, the PNG University of Technology voting station. They also interfered with the ballot boxes in his village, and the Lae voting station was occupied by armed men for several hours. He lost by a few hundred votes. If the clients' votes would have been counted, he would have won. Aid can help create conditions for more inclusive and democratic institutions, rather than extractive institutions benefiting the few. The last elections in PNG in 2017 where a shambles. Aid should have helped to create a proper ID card and voter registration system and a strong electoral commisison, but the PNG government did not want this. This would significantly reduce the opportunities to manipulate the results. Australia lacked the nerve to insist.

This is a very useful piece, especially its data presentation. The second graph, entitled “Aid and defence spending ($ billion, 2018 prices)“ highlights the aid bubble of the Rudd years, which has since receded as the aid budget has been slashed. This bubble was the topic of my critique which Stephen cites, but it was not just about the aid/military spending ratio. My concern was also that the huge upscaling of aid in this bubble period meant that some of it was being spent unwisely, a concern shared by at least some of the bureaucrats who were tasked with finding new ways to push the money out the door. The irony is that in many ways Defence has now supplanted AusAid as a funding source for all manner of tangential projects, including in academic centres, think tanks and research grant. And just as the aid bubble was driven by arbitrary targets to spend eg 0.5% of GDP, now Defence is struggling to hit its 2.0%. We would however have to spend much more than that if Trump’s nativist agenda sees a turn towards military isolationism from the US. I think Stephen is a bit too sanguine about that.

And that's just defence spending. The picture is even more extreme when domestic "security" expenditure is included.

Hi Glenn and Martyn. Excellent article - thanks. Three comments. First, the input-tax credit impact is possibly more significant than you indicate. ITCs totaled K901.2m from 2013 to 2016 according to p88 of the 2018 PNG Budget. Oil Search was by far the major user (abuser?) of this scheme, accounting for 56.5% of expenditure for ITC projects from 2013 to 2016 - p89 of 2018 Budget). On top of this, Oil Search is constructing APEC Haus through a K170m ITC arrangement (p90 of 2018 Budget) without any tendering process or other usual public procurement arrangements to protect the use of scarce PNG taxpayer funds. Second, the current SWF has a very major flaw in that Kumul Petroleum can divert any dividend revenues into its own operations - this is a major risk to good use of government funds as well as the SWF's counter-cyclical objectives and should be corrected before the fund is operationalised. Third, on low revenues, there is also the possibility of at least active tax minimisation activities by the major companies - it is hard to describe Exxon-Mobil's PNG activities being owned through a complex chain of companies extending through well known low tax countries other than in the context of this possibility (see Jubilee Australia report on the PNG LNG project). Expansion of PNG Internal Revenue Commission's large taxpayer office is a welcome development. Thanks again. Paul.

Very interesting, thanks.

Thanks Dinuk, That's a really good comment. It's important to be aware that RCTs -- like everything in development, and all research methods -- can fail. Thanks for highlighting this. If RCTs are to be done they should be done well, and used only when appropriate. As you say, other methods may be more appropriate in particular circumstances. On point I'll make in favour of RCTs is that their problems are somewhat more transparent than those of some other methods. For example, it's easy to see if an RCT is under-powered. And some other analytical flaws are easy enough to spot. For me at least, the ways that a complex regression using panel data can be tweaked are basically opaque. Similarly, it may be impossible to tell who's voices are excluded from a qualitative piece of work and why. Or what community dynamics might skew a participatory evaluation. I'm don't want to make this a binary. I'm not claiming RCTs are perfectly transparent and all other methods complete opaque. Obviously, this isn't the case. Much can still be insufficiently illuminated in an RCT's methods section. But as I thought about your comment over the weekend, I decided it was still fair to say that RCTs have something of a methodological visibility advantage over at least some of the other methods in the tool kit. None of this changes my agreement with your main point though: they can still fail. Terence

Nice share Amanda, you have covered the problems faced by people in data collection & also various solutions for it. The other means of collecting data in such area could be possible by using mobile forms that function seamlessly on tablets & smartphones, an app like Brew Survey uses offline mobile forms feature to collect data even when the device has no internet connection.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I think another thing to consider is that some RCTs do fail. One reason is insufficient buy-in from stakeholders. Given that RCTs in social sciences, generally (although not always), take at least one to two years to complete, it is important to ensure buy-in from all stakeholders. One RCT we attempted failed because a new team leader didn’t believe in RCTs while another failed because we weren’t able to sufficiently incentive people in the control and treatment groups to participate in follow-up interviews. A lack of buy-in at implementation level has also led to contamination. In one RCT we were undertaking, a certain government official believed anyone who wanted the intervention should be offered it. While we wanted to know if it worked, the government official believed it did work. Afterwards, when I asked why he went against our protocol, he stated that he would be doing a disservice to his people by not providing the intervention. This clearly relates to the ethical argument against RCTs and I certainly understood his perspective. There are many other reasons for failure – eg: insufficient statistical power (possibly due to small sample sizes), insufficient resources, changing priorities – to name a few. That all being said, I am certainly not anti-RCT. I would say I’m pro-RCT, just as I’m pro-Quasi-Experiment or pro-Participatory Evaluation … it all depends on what is most appropriate under the circumstances (which can also be subjective!). Thanks again for your post.