Comments

Hi Mark, I'm used to people commenting on my blog posts without having read them carefully. But you clearly didn't even bother to read the first paragraph. Terence

Thank you Clive and Terence. Fantastic.

Hi Kurt, Thank you for the question. It's a very interesting one. It's still not exactly clear to me what in practice was decentralised vis a vis some previous elections (although some additional decentralisation did occur). Certainly, you can imagine decentralisation having an impact of the sort you describe (regardless of whether the impact was or was not intended). Terence

Typically wishy washy, platitudinous, feel-good gibberish. Next time start with the 80 election deaths (likely to be more from continuing violence), retributative rape of girls, murder of policemen by candidates and their supporters, etc etc. Then move on to blatant fixing and manipulation of EC official appointments by candidates and parties, examples of roll-fixing on a grand scale, voting-day violence, intimidation and outright fraud, the rigging of counting by EC officials and candidates, manipulation of declarations and return of writs ... I could go on but it's too depressing.

Thank you Dr Wood for this very good commentary. In my view you have correctly pointed out that the central and key cause of state incapacity in PNG is political, and the authors of this incapacity are the central political powerbrokers in PNG, many of whom are senior members of government. And they act so deliberately, because state incapacity directly benefits their personal and private interests. Following, I have one question for you - is it possible that the political decision to decentralise PNGEC administrative control over the election was made so that local subversion of formal electoral law and processes would be made easier?

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Thanks Shahar As you say, an interesting debate and I can easily get behind 'politics of scale' providing an interesting and new perspective. I just don't really see how it 'fully accounts' for variability in outcomes - especially not in a way that is substantially more useful than previous approaches. I'm interested in your statement: "For us, actors are not ‘scales’; actors make scales and associated institutions..." A very quick 'find' in Acrobat turns out 21 instances in which the term 'national elites' is used in the book, to describe a group of actors and the incentives or imperatives influencing that group. "National elites" even gets an index entry! Doesn't this indicate that actors and scales are being used interchangeably, at least in shorthand? You seem to acknowledge this yourself for Solomon Islands when you say "the overwhelming reliance of all national politicians on a system that centralises rents from extractive activities within Honiara and then redistributes some resources back to the periphery to win elections, this elite’s class interests are remarkably cohesive." I guess my claim is that these interests are not at all as cohesive as you state and that you lose more than you gain when bundling elites using a scale framing. I'm also interested in the claim that you (as above) don't intend to present a 'model'. In your text you claim to be seeking to rectify a failing in existing literature that 'agency of those targeted by intervention had previously been relatively neglected'. Through doing so you seek to 'explain diverse intervention outcomes in given contexts'. I wonder how you can do these things without a model? More specifically, I wonder what exactly can be explained through reference to 'politics of scale' and 'scalar strategies' that cannot be explained by a more traditional political economy perspective (even one that resorts to simplifying public choice assumptions)? Such analysis would equally point to the need for national MPs to raise discretionary resources for distribution through patronage networks (this is a common finding across many countries via the neo-patrimonialism literature). Great discussion. best T

Thanks, very interesting comparison. I've got to say I'm with the public on disaster relief being the most important use of aid. It's surely more likely that on average disaster relief will make a decisive difference than any other type of aid.

Excellent work, easy to read and understand from a well qualified researcher. Congratulation Dr. Hukula.

Hi Jeremy, please share the details of the model paperwork if possible. I'm just interested to know what efforts our two major cities have already done so far. Solid waste management needs a collective effort from all of us, and a vibrant awareness campaign and key messages on environmental impact at all levels is paramount at this stage. PNG needs to wake up to the effects of climate change on all fronts.

I've really enjoyed this debate so far. I think there's great value in what Tobias says in both the original piece and in the comments, though I stand by the utility of the framework for analysing the uneven outcomes of intervention. I think that some of Tobias' misconception of the framework's utility stems from a misunderstanding regarding how we approach scale, and subsequently its role in political analysis. This is clear from this comment above: 'Much more generally, I’m just not convinced that talking in such monolithic terms as “national”, “local” or “international” is very helpful. Most recent work on state-building emphasizes that ‘national elites’ have divergent and competing objectives. Is a Solomon Island MP a ‘national’ actor? And what does that mean in tangible terms?' If there's one aspect distinguishing our approach from hybridity, which does treat actors somewhat monolithically as 'national', 'international', 'local' and so on, and makes assumptions about how they behave subsequently, is that we don't focus on the scalar position of the actors themselves, but on how they construct, reshape, and contest scales and associated institutions. Hence a village chief could be instrumental in constructing a 'national scale', while an international donor could promote the construction of a 'customary' local scale. For us, actors are not 'scales'; actors make scales and associated institutions, but not under conditions they completely control. As such, scales are anything but monolithic in our approach - they may change over time, being mutually constitutive with power relations in society. To know what social groups are dominant and thus better able to produce scales that support their interests, for us, requires careful historical-sociological analysis, which we undertake in all of our case study chapters, including the Solomon Islands one. What the 'national scale' is in the Solomon Islands and what particular groups dominate it and its associated institutions has not been static, but is the dynamic product of historical processes of the kind we describe in the early part of the chapter. An international intervention invariably steps into that kind of context, shaped by uneven power relations in society and their manifestation in scalar hierarchies. What makes the politics of scale an important dynamic in the context of intervention is that international actors come in and seek to change how power and resources are produced and distributed by attempting to 'rescale' key institutions (usually of the national government, but often lower level governments or even informal, customary ones) so that they're disconnected from the political and popular pressures that have hitherto shaped them. This invites, as we say, a response from recipients that (a) is also often framed in terms of what the most appropriate scale and institutions are that key issues should be governed through; and (b) adopts or rejects particular aspects of the intervention also because of how they are seen to affect pre-existing scalar hierarchies and the social power relations embedded in these. Crucially, we don't see Solomon Islands' national politicians as base rent-seekers who are always striving to maximise pecuniary gains for themselves. This seems to be the test Tobias has in mind to prove our framework is sound: any evidence for the use of funds for anything but patronage is used against us. If anything, we set our argument against 'public choice' and similar economistic approaches that see all politics as nothing more than market calculations for benefit/cost. Some of Solomon Islands' politicians I'm sure would prefer to do things differently, but struggle against the structural constraints they face. We see them as political actors operating in a socio-political context, which has developed over decades, whereby for them to be elected, for governments to form and for the national scale not to collapse under the constant pressures for devolution, even dissolution, they must adopt scalar strategies that promote sufficient access to discretionary funds for local redistribution. Granted, there are still important differences between more personally decent and venal politicians, which we didn't discuss much in the chapter (you can't include everything...). For instance, we know that some MPs use CDFs relatively well to genuinely promote local development; others do not. Some may be more concerned about deploying budgets towards real improvements in services (as long as this doesn't undermine the scalar hierarchy discussed above); others do not. Some are happier to fund provincial governments (again as long as they remain dominated from the centre); others do not. And so on. In summary, we're not offering a politics of scale 'model' here. We're offering an approach that explains important aspects of international intervention and its outcomes by drawing attention to the scalar aspect of social and political conflict and power relations, but which requires careful context-specific historical-sociological analysis to operationalise. As we make clear in the book, the approach explicitly links up with, and seeks to add to, existing political economy approaches in this area. It hasn't emerged in a theoretical vacuum. It does, however, we think, deal with some of the blindsides of these approaches.

Hi Atenasi, Thank you for your comment. You make a really good point. I imagine Tobias would agree with you. I certainly do. It's hard in Solomons to accurately quantify the amount of funding that is directly available for patronage spending by MPs because it comes in so many different forms including -- as you mention -- scholarships, and shipping grants and the like. I think in your final paragraph you're suggesting that aid money, in effect, frees up SIG revenue for patronage spending? This, I think, is more complicated. The argument you make is often made by economists (who talk about it as a form of fungibility). It's very plausible in theory and must be true to an extent in Solomons. At the same time, however, donors do push against the money their spending frees up simply being used in unproductive ways by the government. As a result, fungibility is probably less than it might initially seem. I think one of the strengths of the book (at least based on what I've read thus far) is that the concept of scale makes explicit the fact that any nation's political economy involves contestation at many levels including between international and domestic actors. Thank you for sharing your on the ground perspective. Terence