Comments

Super interesting to consider - Singapore is such an interesting case, particularly the way it has codified race and language in this very bureaucratic way in order to minimise disharmony. Imagine walking into a country like PNG and going 'you are all one of four ethnic groups now and this will dictate what language you learn and what schools you will go to.' I always found it bizarre how many small island least-developed countries (I'm thinking particularly of Timor Leste) now make goals to 'become' a Singapore (or Macau). The ZEESM project in Oecusse is reportedly being done with idea of turning the enclave into a Singapore or Macau (complete with the country's only MRI machine, which will be for 'medical tourism', not the country's own people, and a casino). Speaking with friends who were there recently after many years away, there has been no consultation with the people, the big infrastructure projects don't meet their needs and are really poorly done (already falling apart before they are even finished), and it's probably just going to be a white elephant and a huge waste of resources. I think countries forget that authoritarian development is not just charging in and doing stuff but that it also still depends on having institutions underneath the leadership that can execute the plan, and not having resources vanished away by corruption or incompetence, and people actually seeing some kind of result so that the reduction of freedom seems to have some kind of conciliatory outcome. Functional quasi-authoritarian developmental states still have some kind of good governance structures underlying them right?

Thank you Gerard, those are very good questions. My hope is that reseachers from PNG can take their own knowledge of the country and combine it with the information in the database to provide answers to important questions like the ones you raise. Terence

Thank you John, That is an excellent comment. As I said in the last paragraph of the blog, there are other areas where LPV may have had an important impact. Unfortunately, there are not good data on issues such as violence. This makes it hard for a data-oriented researcher like me to make clear claims. For this reason I really appreciate your on-the-ground insights. Thank you again. Terence

Thanks Terence for this remarkable analysis In addition, the outcomes/impacts brought about in the new LPV system is also to do with socio economic impact and votes choices and these includes; • Unlike FPTP system where candidates isolated themselves and consolidated votes along ethnic, tribal linkages and family relations are now tending to work together and foster good friendship, plan to trade LPV choices of 1, 2 and 3 votes. The vibes of working together and accepting one as the winner is very much understood and accepted among the candidates. The candidates reach out to voters where they would not to that in the FPTP system. • Unlike FPTP system where candidates create adversaries among themselves during and after the election and even broke into tribal fights and damage to properties (Highlands), is no longer happening (only some isolated cases). Under the LPV system; many warring candidates and tribes accept the election outcome and no longer take it into the battlefield. • After LPV election, normalcy resumed into the socio-economic lives of the voters, free movement of village people into towns, teachers and children go back to schools and families resumes their village chores without fear. The sense of security for lives of people is guaranteed after the election. However, what has gone worse as a result of the new LPV in the last few elections includes; • Excessive votes buying by candidates with money, the conscience of free voting with a choice of 1, 2 and 3 is dictated by influence of cash handouts • Candidates are co-sponsored by other candidates with money into areas of big voting base where it seen as a threat to the sponsor. Purposely to re-distribute the base votes so that majority votes did not go to one candidate but shared among 2 or more candidates. The exercise of free votes is not there but subject to undue influence by candidates whose real intention is not to win but weaken other potential candidates’ majority votes in the area. These are points that you can actually see it at play during election times, changes as a result of the LPV system.

Thank you Terence for this wonderful tool for shaping public policy and planning etc - something I think the electoral commission Office of Political Parties can't do without. I do note your Point 5 on women participation in national election and they are spot on. While 165 women are recorded for 2017 nationally,looking at the interest rate for each provinces for 2017 Chimbu(11) EHP(13)East Sepik(11)Madang(14)Morobe(13) Central (14) Gulf(12)NDC(13) I am wondering what could be the underlying factors in these high numbers?,Could they be Education, Cultural(Matrilineal /Patrilineal) Better awareness?

Hi Paul and Harry, Thank you for the positive feedback on our paper and blogs. We agree with your comment that it is difficult to get the right balance between the (sometimes competing) sovereignty interests of the host country and the development partner when it comes to the placement of non-citizen TAs. The events in PNG in 2016 which led to the departure of some SGP advisers certainly highlighted this tension. Our model suggests PNG is the employer of the TA. It doesn’t seem appropriate or logical to us that the adviser is employed by a third party contractor when in reality they work within the PNG public service. As you point out, advisers can have access to all sorts of information about government business/interests which can often be of a confidential nature. A lot of the frustration from the PNG side in 2016 centered around the fact that there was essentially no legal relationship between the various Australian advisers embedded in the public service and their Agency head. We think the new requirement to sign a performance contract (PCA) only goes a part of the way and the best model should recognise PNG as the employer. This approach shows appropriate respect for PNGs sovereignty. Having said that, you make the very valid point that TAs are ultimately funded by the Australian taxpayer. We agree with your observation that there should be appropriate accountability back to DFAT to ensure taxpayers resources are being spent wisely. It is perfectly legitimate for Australia (or any other development partner) to have this expectation. We think a model where aid-funded TAs are employed by PNG can still have appropriate monitoring and accountability mechanisms, including via the contractor who is retained to provide the logistics and other support. We also accept this couldn't happen overnight primarily because there is no regulatory framework in PNG to accomodate it. At the very least we hoped to generate some discussion and thought through the NRI piece and the blogs. Thanks again for your comments, Michael, Joachim and Carmen

Minister McCully explained his logic nicely in a recent speech: "And slowly improving our delivery of agricultural programmes not only provides many countries in the Pacific, South East Asia and Africa with the support they most want from New Zealand, it also paves the way for our commercial agricultural interests to play the more active global role that this country will require in the future." URL: https://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/address-new-zealand-institute-international-affairs

Dear Greg, Thanks for your post - timely given the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Kokoda campaign is only a few months away. Anyone who wants to see an outstanding exemplar of a collaboration to raise awareness of the impact of WWII on Papua New Guineans (an estimated 40,000 died from 1942-45), come along tonight (26 April) to our screening of ANGELS OF WAR. 5:15pm for 5:30pm start, Weston Theatre, Crawford School ANU. More event information can be found <a href="http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/cap-events/2017-04-26/film-angels-war-1982-54mins" rel="nofollow">here</a>. This screening will be followed by a Q&A discussion with Mr Deveni Temu (whose father was drawn into the war) and Dr Keiko Tamura, who can offer Japanese perspectives on the New Guinea campaign (in which 150,000 Japanese, 9,000 Australian and 3,000 American military personnel lost their lives). Hope to see you there! Mike

Scary budget. It is good to review all this because it is public money that is at stake

i agree with Paul's comments (disclosure: he was my Team Leader for most of thr time that i worked as an adviser in PNG Treasury). here are a few additional thoughts: 1. The ODI program is an imperfect model to draw partly because it is so remarkable: I'm not aware of any other similar program that draws such a consistently high calibre of candidates. So it may be difficult to replicate. It is imperfect in other ways. It tends to place one or at most two individuals into an organisation when any chance of achieving sustainable systemic change in the organisation requires a team of advisers to help identify shortfalls in capability and support management to address them. (For example, addressing internal siloes, performance management, or recruitment.) Finally, a team of advisers helps to moderate the idiosyncrasies that any one adviser may bring to a typically challenging, diverse role. 2. I agree that there is virtue in having some in-line roles but, as Paul suggests, there is a tension here: it is very hard to achieve the same emphasis on capability development once an officer is in-line. Being constrained as an "adviser" can act as an important discipline to work through local colleagues although it can, of course, also be an unhelpful limitation. (Getting the right balance between advising and doing was something I grappled with throughout my 3 year posting and discussed further in a 2014 paper i co-authored on Capacity Development in Economic Policy Agencies.) 3. Finally, there is the very difficult question of what to do when a Departmental Secretary may be engaged in corruption (several have been subject to corruption allegations in recent years). It places the adviser (and DFAT) in an invidious position if the adviser is solely responsible to such a person. This is also a problem for advisers but the problem is not quite as acute when the person is not your boss.

Hi Joachim, Michael and Carmen Thanks for this analysis. Some interesting background and thoughts on this previously very important element of the PNG Australia relationship. Three quick thoughts. First, I agree strongly with Michael's "A Personal Account" in the NRI paper which states "I had no issue signing the new performance and Conduct Agreement and the Code of Conduct. In fact, the PCA just confirmed what was already happening in my placement. All of the other technical advisers I have spoken to were also happy to sign it, recognising that it did not change their current working arrangements (page 9)." This reflects my own experiences as a Team Leader under the Strongim Gavman Program from 2011 to 2013. Good advisors knew they were working for the PNG government and doing otherwise risked one's acceptance in any PNG team and hence overall effectiveness. Second, one of the issues for the previous aid adviser review was the issue of accountability. This includes accountability linkages to Australian taxpayers for the effective expenditure of TA advisors. A major issue with the suggested model is that there is no arrow with a clear accountability linkage back to the box marked "DFAT" which is of course the proxy for accountability on the performance of aid expenditure. This is a difficult linkage to put in place in a way that respects the sovereignty and rights of both countries. I do remember getting in trouble with DFAT under the old framework for indicating that I had examples of where advisors had worked effectively as part of a PNG team to produce major development gains for PNG - but I couldn't be specific given the requirements of PNG cabinet confidentiality. Finally, it could have been useful for the paper to use some broader background material other than the 2010 aid adviser review and PNG government comments. After 2010, there has been quite an active discussion, including on this blog, on different views about the effectiveness of technical advisers and governance in PNG - for example a 2012 effectiveness review of the SGP program (see https://devpolicy.org/strongim-gavman-program-in-png-reviewed-20121213/). There are some nuances around "in-line" positions and the lessons which moved the former ECP program towards the more capacity orientated SGP program should not be forgotten. My view is that institutional linkages programs were extremely effective (for example, see my presentation to the 2016 Aid Conference at https://devpolicy.org/2016-Australasian-aid-conference/Presentations/Day-1/2b-Australia-PNG-and-Fiji_Flanagan.pdf). So I agree entirely with Bob McMullan's and Robin Davies recent blog on 21 April that an "easy piece" for addressing a gap in Australia's aid program is "Public policies and institutions, through the re-establishment of a mechanism to support Australian public sector assistance to public institutions in the developing countries of our region." PNG is losing out quite badly from the fake "spies" allegations from its Prime Minister which led to the closure of much of the SGP program. Many elements of PNG's poor economic management in recent years (at least the loss of confidence flowing from major technical errors) are probably linked to the reliance on other very well paid foreign economic advisors working directly in the Prime Minister's Office rather than a program of institutional support which has a number of in-built checks and balances. Cheers Paul Flanagan PNG Economics and former SGP adviser

Do we have any examples of bilateral or multilateral donors where this sort of approach has worked well? The most significant eg seems to be the World Bank and I don't think that is one that many would say has been a real success. Would moving aid from bilateral programs to regional/thematic/ multilateral programs also probably work against the government's focus on more closely aligning foreign policy objectives and aid program objective?