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Why does AU contunue to ignore that a Vanuatu private sector led initiative is already building a cable to SI without aid support? VU has awarded the cable supply contract to a USA supplier (not China). The enormous AU cable grant to SI and PNG is distorting the market.

Very well written, thank you. Self-awareness is one of the most important skills for an aid worker.

Excellent article!

I’ve been waiting for an article like this! Thank you especially for your explication of the immorality of non participatory development and for noting that the NGO sector repeatedly called sex workers in Haiti ‘prostitutes’. You are right, we weren’t shocked by Haiti but I was genuinely shocked by the sector’s representation of the women being ‘used’ by their staff. It was highly offensive and extremely disappointing from a feminist perspective.

To add to Peter's aid 'success' examples, microfinance has over more than 3 decades, developed into a widely used method for moving people out of poverty. By making small collateral free loans available to even the poorest people, families are given a dignified self-employment opportunity. It has been shown over the years that microfinance clients – mostly women - improve their living standards, educate their children and become respected members of their community. With persistent encouragement by NGOs, Australian aid has supported microfinance programs. I wonder if it still does?

Can I suggest a somewhat different slant to that question, which I do suggest should alternatively read: "when will the Australian public believe in the merits of Australia's aid" ? The big picture surely is the excuse given by the very Minister in charge of the aid budget - no increase, because the Australian people don't believe in it. Thus abrogating her role to argue in favour of her responsibilities. There does seem somewhat of a disconnect between the people who believe in aid and those who decide the aid budget, with the unbelievers seemingly in between. Result is - the aid budget keeps being cut, despite the appropriateness of your original question. There is rarely good news about successes in the outcomes from our aid budget - either from the Foreign Minister or her junior. Much less from the NGOs actually in the field spending money from Australia's aid budget. And by "good news", I mean publicly - in the media and other places where the voter can be informed. Not quietly circulating in NGO offices or DFAT cabinets. I once helped fund an AusAID program in Afghanistan - training women to be paralegals and act as defence counsel in domestic violence cases. I appreciate the security situation affecting civilians in that country, but that is just one example of what I would call success. At the time of the World Summit for Children in 1990, 40,000 children were dying each day from preventable causes. In 2016, UNICEF estimated that figure to be 15,000 https://www.unicef.org.au/about-us/media/october-2017/7-000-newborns-die-every-day-worldwide-despite-st Still preventable, but that does represent progress and results, by aid donors and aid recipients - over a long time. That's what's lacking in your comments above - bringing about changes for the better among the people of our world.

Thank you Julie and Nicola for helping us. Personally, being part of the process of this partnership initiative two years ago has helped me to understand my new environment now in a regional program that face the same situation like we had in 2015-2016. best

Will I craft a fine essay to say how vast numbers of Papua New Guineans (not just Engan judges) construct an imaginary PNG in the image of the own village, I wonder? Narokobi certainly did so ('Take a typical village, let's say Wautogig …'). I met a Roro person in a far flung corner of PNG who asked me if the work of anthropologists was not simply to talk with 'tribal chiefs' (Roro is well known for having four kinds of chiefs - let Roros say if it is 3 or 5)? The Eastern Highlands Governor, Julie Soso, came to ANU and in her speech said that all mainland PNGeans were patrilineal (like Goroka) and the islands region people were all matrilineal (sorry ye Trans-Fly dual-organised 'mipela i gat tupela kanu' people, ye Owen Stanley optional bilaterals, ye Hela multilaterals …). Cue outrage … I'd love to but what's the point. I have done enough social mapping to learn that no matter how brilliantly you design the process, the only people who know you've nailed local custom and satisfied local aspiration are (some) locals - and since their leaders take over at Forum time, and have their own agendas, you cannot look to them to say so. As Colin says, knowing what the social mapping says - if one is lucky enough to get that far - is one thing and translating it into Forum outcomes is another. His Gobe experience in 1994/2016 is particularly instructive as its timeline more or less mirrors mine at Hidden Valley 1995-2001 and as picked up again 2010-2012. When the Hidden Valley mine gained its approvals in 2005, the mine landowners were a 100% known quantity. They had previously said their social systems were far too complicated for any outsider to understand, and that they would draw up their own genealogies so as to make it possible to figure out exactly who was who. They did this and were then good enough to share it with me. It took six years to finish this process, capturing how the communities wanted to represent themselves in a database. I printed out the results on big charts, we checked them, and I put the charts on map hangers in a safe map cabinet in the community relations office in 2001. At their 2004-2005 Mining Forum, the Hidden Valley landowner executives negotiated an MOA for the general terms of who was entitled to what and for a 'Consultative Forum' to decide more precise on eligibility lists. A construction manager, fresh off the boat from another country, came to construct the mine and now asked who could be employed to do this. No-one - neither the leaders playing their own games, nor the new under-managers (they were under him, but they also under managed …), thought to mention the six years of toil the communities had put into creating a pretty decent representation of themselves. This important boss now worked with the four key executives (men only) to draw up a new list of who could be employed, starting with primary ('Tier 1') landowners. The result was a 39 page document produced in 2009, signed at the bottom of each page by the boss and the four executives. The preamble stated: "I would now ask Nakuwi executives to review the list and sign off below to attest to the following points: * The list is an accurate and complete record of all landowner Tier 1 … candidates to be considered for employment at Hidden Valley in accordance with the MOA. * That the allocation of Tier 1 … status is accurate … * That this list is now final and will not be subject to further modification, without written consent of the full Nakuwi Executive to add further Nominees as a result of Marriage or attainment of employment age." Brilliant! Except that in 2012 I found that 50% of those whose status was given as Tier 1 landowners were nowhere to be found on the charts/database made up previously, and were unknown to the longest serving community relations staff. Worse, of the five landowner villages endorsed by the Department of Mining in the 1990s, two had almost no-one employed at all. The strong suspicion is that the executives solicited payments under the table from willing non-landowners to be put on the master list. Pointing this out to the mining company made me few friends. Colin says of Gobe: "I doubt that my report would have made much difference to the resolution of this particular dispute. But the point of interest here is that PNG's judges* do not even recognise the possibility that anthropologists or other social scientists might produce evidence relevant to the resolution of disputes about the identity of the 'true landowners' of any piece of customary land." * or anyone else, including all commentators. This is repeated over and over at PNG mining and oil & gas projects. In addition to the fact that the elders who really hold the knowledge have a habit of growing old and dying before the project really get going, it is sad to say that, of my best social mapping collaborators over the years, at least three have died of preventable illnesses, one was lost at sea, and two were murdered between 2012 and 2017. In sum, perhaps we can say we have now proven the existence of the following Immutable Laws of Social Mapping: (1) The regard that decision-makers have to social mapping exercises is in inverse proportion to the product of the time spent on them and their intrinsic accuracy. (2) The probability of local social mapping experts coming to a sticky end before they can denounce the poor outcomes achieved by their leaders is in proportion to the degree of expertise they can bring to bear during social mapping exercises. (3) Gresham's Law always applies (quod vide). I cannot see that the production of full-scale SMLI reports / a database of landowners for the PNG LNG project would have posed too much of a problem if both the developer and the state had committed to the process in the Feasibility Study period 2006-2009. It is true that the project's footprint was larger than seen previously, but it is not larger that the combination of the 10,000 Porgerans, 17,000 Lihirians, 12,500 Hidden Valley area people, 17,000 Torres Strait Islanders, 8000 Kokoda Track people and others for whom I have been invited to do social mapping and, in Australia, for whom I have written Connection Reports over the years. But the developer and the state were not committed to such a process, as Colin has explained, because the possibility of it is completely invisible to them.

Great article! Thanks so much for making all these points.

Hi Lindsay Hope you got your misunderstanding right by our champion -BK again. You can learn more from BK than your keyboard.

Both ‘Vailala’ and Bryant Allen address the relationship between the problems of landowner identification, landowner representation, and the distribution of landowner benefits. Both seem to think that the question of how to distribute the benefits derived from a large-scale resource project can be resolved by mediation or by custom without the need for an answer to the question of who counts as a landowner in the first place or how the people identified as landowners ought to be represented in the negotiation of a benefit-sharing agreement. The implication would seem to be that benefits can be distributed to everyone’s satisfaction while people continue to contest the question of entitlement through the Land Courts or the Land Titles Commission. These matters were debated at great length by the members of the ‘Action Team’ that framed the relevant provisions of the Oil and Gas Act in 1998. The argument put forward by the operators of the Juni power station (then BP) was that the best way to make a cash payment to local landowners was to call a meeting of all those who thought they were entitled to receive a share and then hand over the money, in cash, to the ‘big men’ who emerged from the crowd. The crowd would then follow the leaders around until everyone had received a share of the money that was somehow accepted as a customary reflection of their relative degree of entitlement. This was the method of payment preferred by the former colonial officials (kiaps) who had been trained in the practice of ‘land investigation’ (to solve the problem of landowner identification) and the appointment of ‘clan agents’ (to solve the problem of landowner representation) during the late colonial period. Some of these men had since been recruited by mining and petroleum companies to deal with such issues. Those working in the petroleum sector had already begun to realize that the problems of identification and representation might have no practical solution in areas as large as the rectangles that constitute petroleum licence areas, let alone in areas occupied by Huli people who simply love to argue, inside or outside of the courts, about who owns what and who represents whom. But how could such knowledge be inscribed in legislation? From a strictly logical point of view, the landowners in each licence area have to be identified before a decision can be made about how they should be organized for the purpose of negotiation with the government or the developers, and that question has to be resolved before a decision can be made about the distribution of landowner benefits. The Oil and Gas Act clearly reflects this logic. But how are landowners to be identified when it is not feasible to undertake the kind of land investigation that might determine who has what customary rights over every square metre of land in a licence area covering 81 square kilometres? The Action Team did not think that ‘social mapping’ could provide an answer to this question. The primary aim of a social mapping study is to identify the customary principles and procedures that would be most appropriate to the resolution of all three problems (identification, representation and distribution) in each specific licence area, recognizing that such customs vary widely between different parts of PNG. The lawyers who actually drafted the legislation added the task of landowner identification because they thought that the primary aim of an SMLI report was to help the Minister decide who should be invited to represent the landowners at the ‘development forum’ where benefit-sharing agreements are negotiated. The legislation reflects a general agreement that the developers should fund the production of SMLI reports on the basis of the ‘user pays principle’ that also applies to the production of environmental and social impact studies under the terms of the Environment Act. If the government were responsible for funding the studies, they would not be done properly or not be done at all. However, this does not mean that the developers (or their consultants) have been given the right or the responsibility to solve the problems; they only have an obligation to provide relevant information to the government. The Action Team had to consider the extent to which the problems could be solved in the terms of the legislation itself. Some members of the team thought that all three problems could be partially solved by a requirement for landowners to be members of incorporated land groups (ILGs) whose executives would then become the negotiators of agreements and the primary recipients of the landowner benefits that they would then distribute to other groups members in accordance with ‘local custom’. But other members of the team (including the anthropologists) were already aware that ILG formation had created as many problems as it had solved around the Kutubu project, and was turning out be even more problematic in areas occupied by Huli landowners because of the peculiar nature of their customary social organization. That is why the Oil and Gas Act allows for alternative forms of landowner representation. In 2006, officials in the Department of Petroleum and Energy decided that land group incorporation might not be the best solution after all, and proposed that landowner benefits should be distributed equally between all the individuals identified as genuine landowners. But since lists of individual landowners had not been provided in the SMLI reports for the prospective LNG project licence areas, this meant that another round of studies would have to be undertaken, and these would be very expensive and time-consuming because they would begin to approximate the kind of land investigation that had previously been ruled out. In this case, the developer was not prepared to pay for them to be undertaken and the government was not prepared to force their hand. One might be tempted to suggest that the problems could have been solved if the government had already produced a regulation that required the identification of individual landowners in each SMLI report. But that would miss the point made by both of the commentators on my original post. The real problem lies with the institution of the development forum. As matters stand, this is an institution that only produces an agreement about the size and shape of the total package of benefits to be allocated to landowners; it does not produce an agreement about how the benefits should be divided between them. From this point of view, the belated intervention of the courts is a remedial measure that is unlikely to produce a lasting remedy. Nor is it realistic to expect existing legal institutions to produce a solution to the problem of distribution before a development forum is convened and a development licence is granted. They simply do not have the mandate or the capacity for this task. The only feasible solution is to expand the scope of the development forum itself or create a sort of parallel forum to deal with the distributional issue. Only then can the government make more sensible decisions (and regulations) about the type of information that needs to be provided in SMLI reports.

Hi Lindsay and thank you for sharing you view on this issue. It is certainly an interesting view taking into account the decision to step in to seek a stay was after I was approached by Provincial Paediatrician for Madang General Hospital, who explained that some 600 rural health officers that he communicates with on regular basis, providing life saving health information to treat critically sick children and mothers having child birth complications. As to your question how I would rather spend my time? Hmmm roads and infrastructure or the welfare of sick children and mothers facing birth complications ??? How a learned person, who has been afforded a tertiary education and yet appear so morally confused on such an issue is a question I'm more intrigued about?