Comments

Hi Tobias and Terence. It was an interesting challenge for me to read something so technical like that piece and then to try and relate to what I know on the ground. Still pondering but thank you both for the valuable insights and robust discussions. I am sorry if I miss the point with this piece Tobias, but I then wondered if this review into the types of expenditure more (prone?) to patronage considered the scholarships directly managed by MPs. As well as the infrastructure sector (not only the shipping grants but also the build contracts). Both not at-first-glance CDF type expenditure lines but with parallel substantial injections through grants/pooled funding or direct budget support, this could be more about more money freed up to divert elsewhere? Again, sorry if I am missing the point.

Interesting that the commercial/media operators also failed. For example, the <a href="https://datastudio.google.com/reporting/0B9zl4N1mvPiJZUpRLXBZNWxxSTA/page/CjMG" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">LoopPNG system</a> is still stuck at 79 of the 111 seats - at least the Electoral Commission got to 85! EMTV's YourVote 2017 also struggled. Of course, the issue in this election is not the gadget but the actual processes which led to a fraudulent election for so many seats - from biased appointment of Returning Offices, manipulation of the Electoral Roll (many more ghost voters in PNC electorates especially in the Highlands), late movements in the electoral roll, selective distribution of ballot papers, disenfranchisement of voters, mathematical impossibilities in the count, selective counting of some ballot boxes with inconsistent application of EC directives, lack of transparency leading to the resignation of the independent Electoral Advisory Committee, manipulation of the final declaration process by some ROs with accusations of bribes etc. In supporting democracy in the region, I hope Australia puts in something more than a woeful $8m into the next election (especially given it is happy to put $100m into the much less important APEC meeting in Port Moresby next year). Cheers. Paul.

2012 election had something similar but not too fancy as this, however information were updated regularly on a daily basis. This gadget was way off course.

Thanks Terence - and sorry for the misspelling in my last. I'd agree with your take. My pretty simple point is that this wasn't a case of all available resources being diverted to patronage, as we seem to agree. Perhaps also worth noting that Solomons spends a relatively large share of the budget on health and education relative to other countries at similar levels of income (or at least did so back in 2014 when I last looked closely). I guess this also speaks to donor influence, and arguably against any complete dominance of patronage.

Thanks Tobias, excellent comment. I think your second to last paragraph is particularly useful. I take the point about actors being potential actors at a range of scales. Nevertheless, I still think it useful to think about actors with respect to different arenas and to think about why different actors might find different scales more or less empowering. On public expenditure, the World Bank resource is great, thank you for pointing it out, and thanks for a more detailed answer to my questions about education and health spending. I have modified the spreadsheet somewhat interested readers can download my modified version <a href="https://waylaiddialectic.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/world-bank-solomon-islands-budget-database-29-8-17.xlsx" rel="nofollow">here</a>. You correctly point out that in absolute terms expenditure on health and education have increased (I'm not sure the increases actually warrant the term 'exponential' but I won't be a bore). However, we are talking about a government recovering from a catastrophic shock. Much of its spending has increased. This means what we're interested in is relative increases. If we look at SIG funded health spending as a share of total SIG government spending over the period for which there are data it has remained constant at about 12%. If we look at education spending in the same way we find it to stayed constant from 2006 to 2012 (about 23% to 22%). It lurches up to 32% in 2013. This is a result (as best I can tell) of increased funding going to training (including overseas training), a questionable budget line. You stated in your review that "Public expenditure, overall, seems to have been better aligned with international development goals than the sustainment of national patronage networks." I think public expenditure patterns are a product of (a) a degree of path dependency (b) MPs' seeking funding for patronage (c) contestation between donors and SIG over spending priorities, and (d) some national orientation on behalf of some MPs and many civil servants. I'd be interested to know what aspects of my take you disagree with?

Hi Terrence I have to say I admire your willingness to engage in robust discussion even before reading the case study ; ) Firstly, on public expenditure. Check out the government expenditure database available from the World Bank open data portal. Yes, I'm sure that government non-grant expenditure on health and education increased exponentially over the post RAMSI period. Health expenditure increased from around SBD90 million in 2006 to around SBD290 million in 2014. Education spending increased from SBD174 million to SBD695 million – a huge increase even excluding scholarships (which accounted for about 25% of education spending in 2016). Overall patterns of public spending are fairly well-aligned with MDG-type outcomes, and were especially so prior to the recent explosive growth of scholarships and CDFs since around 2012. If ‘national elites’ are only interested in ‘strengthening the national scale’ why were they so responsive to donor priorities in setting expenditure allocations? Please take another look at my review: I don’t think anyone who has worked on Solomon Islands in the past decade could fail to understand how CDFs function as patronage tools, and I wasn’t questioning that. I was trying to point out that if national level MPs are only interested in distributing patronage, then it is difficult to explain the radical expansion of non-CDF expenditure aligned with international goals. If we explain the radical expansion of MDG-type expenditure on the (incorrect) assumption that all government expenditure can be used to distribute patronage and therefore supports the ‘primacy of the national’, then there is no particular need for CDFs. You can’t have it both ways. I am also very confused by what value this framework brings to discussions of decentralization. As I tried to point out, the big-picture constitutional review process has fizzled, but national MPs quite explicitly provided additional resources to provincial governments through increasing provincial grants (both in nominal terms and as a share of the budget) and through co-financing capital grants under the PGSP. Again with this example, MPs acted to protect the ‘primacy of the national scale’ - except when they didn’t! As for electoral commissions - do we need a ‘politics of scale’ framing to understand that it’s easier to monitor centralized functions and agencies than decentralized/deconcentrated ones? This is a consistent finding from the decades-old literature on public administration reform. Check out Nick Manning’s review of the Machinery of Government Program in Sols for a discussion of this. 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? He might be connected to Chinese businessmen or Malaysian loggers – so presumably he also cares about security at the local scale where they do business? He might have business interests in the expat rental market or a water supply business in Honiara, in which case he will have an interest in the presence of donors, presumably linking him to the international scale, and giving him an interest in the quality of the local business environment. He might even be seeking to build credibility with the international development community to mobilize aid resources, in which case he presumably has an interest in achieving the global goals and targets that we are allegedly fixated upon. He could be in a coalition with or seeking to undermine any number of other MPs who have various configurations of these interests. This just all seems to suggest we are better off mapping real elite coalitions and interests, including trying to understand specific patronage networks, rather than relying on the categories provided by the scale framing. To me, all work in this area is valuable and welcome. I have no problem with ‘politics of scale’ as a way of kicking up some new ideas. But I’m not at all convinced by the authors’ claim that it is superior to other frameworks of analysis (whether measured in terms of either predictive or explanatory power).

Hi Tobias, Thanks for the review. As someone who's reading the book it's useful to encounter other people's takes while reading. As someone who works on Solomons it's great to know I can weigh up the authors' take, my take, and your take on that particular case study. I haven't gotten to the Solomons chapter yet; perhaps when I do, your take will make more sense to me. However, as a conceptual insight the idea that different actors gain competitive advantage from shifting the scale of contestation strikes me as very useful. For example, it helps highlight potential problems with decentralisation (and not just in developing countries.) This an improvement given decentralisation is still often sold as an efficient technical fix. To give another example, aid actor's who were cognisant of the scale of different power dynamics might have been considerable more alarmed about the decentralisation of (some) electoral powers to provinces in the lead up to the 2017 elections in PNG. Donors, unless they want to invest very heavily in placing their staff on the ground, have much less ability to work as a countervailing power against electoral subversion at a provincial level than they do when dealing with a single national electoral commission. On the other hand, powerful local actors will probably find it much easier to capture provincial electoral commissions than they will the national body. Decentralisation was only partial in the lead up to the 2017 election, and we are yet to fully diagnose the problems that occurred, but the dynamics of scale ought to be brought to bear as actors undertake diagnosis and look to future proposals. To give another example, scale does a good job of explaining why federal models of governance are often talked about in Solomons and PNG, but are unlikely to ever be legislated for by national MPs, unless regional political blocks develop or perhaps during crises of succession. Why would actors at a national-level give resources and power to actors at the provincial level? Scale seems useful to me. Briefly, on empirical matters, you write: <em>"Government expenditure on basic public services (including health and education) grew exponentially over the RAMSI period, with such expenditures consistently accounting for a large share of the annual budget, and a much larger share than CDFs."</em> With respect to government expenditure I think the most appropriate baseline is pre-state collapse. Even setting this aside, are you sure that *non-aid-funded* government expenditure in health and education has grown exponentially? Also, in education's case, it's worth noting that much of the growth that did occur was in scholarships, which are a tool of patronage plain and simple. Also, you write, <em>"Further, if we are to accept the argument that all public expenditure provides patronage channels for national elites, then why did national elites go to the trouble of establishing and resourcing CDFs in the first place?"</em> There's an obvious answer to this question. CDFs provide MPs with funds that are more electorally useful than central resources. The state has very little reach into rural areas in Solomons. And most Solomon Islanders are not going to be employed by the state. Therefore it is hard, notwithstanding the special case of scholarships, for MPs to put conventional state tools to work to their electoral benefit. As a result, it's difficult for MPs to win votes through these state-based avenues of patronage. On the other hand, cash for solar panels, tin roofs, and OBMs is very useful. It can be targeted and it's easy to deliver. No mystery. Finally, now in the realms of outer nerd land, I want my regressions to have "predictive power", but I'm not so sure that this is a necessary demand of an initial theory based on case studies. I'll be happy if--when I read the book--I find that the idea of scale adds additional <em>explanatory power</em> to the cases vis a vis the counterfactual of conventional political economy analysis. On the basis of the authors' talk last week, I'm hopeful.

Thanks for the comments on ducks - was news to me at least. Interesting - would be keen to hear if others in Solomon Islands have similar, or other, success stories. But I still fear in many areas infestation is just so high that comprehensive approaches to control are needed.

Paper by Sam Koim is very important for every policy practitioners to adhere to because it reveals a fundament universal law: a sick cannot help another sick; a good person does not need a physician but only the sick. I am so interested to hear how Sam will expound that principle, but of anything, we need a Physician who is not sick to help the sick. Who is that Physician? Think about it.

As commendable as it is to see further attention being paid to the appalling state of child nutrition in PNG, understanding of its causes might be assisted by providing some historical depth to the current research. A 1947 Nutrition Survey of the indigenous population by the Australian colonial administration stated : `When the intake of foods is expressed as nutrients it is seen that the calorie intake is slightly lower, and the protein intake much lower than amounts recommended as desirable to ensure adequate nutrition amongst people of Caucasian origin.' Eleven years later, legendary colonial official Dr John Gunther, formerly Director of the Department of Public Health and now Assistant Administrator pointed out that even after all the efforts at post-war reconstruction: `The population is not healthy: the expectation of life is half of what it should be; the infant mortality rate twice to ten times what it should be...These indigenous people of the Territory are only 80 per cent well...This [is] the physical condition of the people which has to be improved so that their country may progress, for they are the only labour force available to achieve development'. (Source for quotes: see my Securing Village Life Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2013, pp.48-53 ). Perhaps something else is required than targeted interventions. Maybe the `crisis' isn't all that new and is largely a continuity?

Interesting piece, thank you Nilima. In answer to 'what should be done', I think the role of civil society in donor countries is an important part of the solution. Donor's domestic politics may have a greater impact upon their government's actions than global standards. Or at least the two can work in tandem more powerfully than either alone. Domestic NGOs were active policy influencers in my research into ODA policy change in New Zealand, and Svant Ivanyi and Lightfoot (2015) found similarly in their study of the Czech Republic (and other new European donors).

Great job Dr Hukula, this is sister Thecla. This is late reading for me as some of us are way back in latest tech. Loved reading the perspectives presented. See you around pom city.