Comments

Thanks Shaun, An interesting comment and a useful chance to elaborate. I'm a utilitarian (or, at least, I think that's the least-worst political philosophy). MacAskill is not (see endnote page 215), but he is very close, meaning our views are almost identical in principal. The issue is to do with practice. Here, the question, when concerned with consequences, is how does one make choices given uncertainty both about probability (of success, or risk of occurrence etc) and magnitude of effect. As I state in the review, MacAskill is aware how hard this can make decision making (i.e "this is not exactly physics" p. 180). However, he does not seem to understand that this issue is as true for aid-NGO work as it is for many of the other issues he covers in the book. This, in turn, has him coming up with lists of recommended NGOs, whilst effectively dismissing the work of Oxfam, UNICEF and World Vision (presumably the UK versions of these NGOs). The certainty in pages 120 and 121 is striking and my read of these pages is that MacAskill is very confident he knows how priorities should be set in aid. I differ. As a Leap of Faith Utilitarian (I like your term, thanks) I believe that we should gather as much evidence as possible ("we should always try to gather evidence";"Randomised control trials are great"), and should not make decisions on blind faith (unless perhaps in crisis circumstances). However, there are many types of work an aid NGO could do, which clearly have value if they work, but which cannot be RCT'd. In the case of my examples. I think they are important, not because I had a whim after my second coffee last Friday, but on the basis of evidence: 1. Climate change (why worry: because the best available scientific models suggest there is a chance it will be utterly catastrophic). 2. Economic inequality (why worry: because it is high (good evidence) and it is growing (good evidence); there is also tonnes of evidence of diminishing marginal utility, meaning unnecessary inequality is welfare inefficient; meanwhile there is little evidence that quite significant increases in equality would harm growth in many countries). 3. Poor government aid (why worry: because the history of aid giving is festooned with examples of poor government aid and government aid is much larger than private aid in most countries.) To do aid work in the way MacAskill wants would mean aid-NGOs avoiding these areas. To do aid work in the way I want would mean tolerating some uncertainty of efficacy in exchange for allowing ourselves to tackle very important issues. Thanks again. Terence

Thanks CDH, that is a good point. They do RCTs where they can, and at times couple them with interesting methodologies such as process-tracing and where they can't they still evaluate their work. For a large NGO working across a range of types of work, this seems pretty much gold star.

Since you mention OxfamGB, worth noting that they openly publish impact evaluations of mature projects as well as other effectiveness reports <a href="http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/our-approach/monitoring-evaluation/effectiveness-reviews" rel="nofollow">here</a>. They're not necessarily RCTs but as you say, not everything is going amenable to that

You accuse the author of failing to think carefully, yet the nub of your argument seems to be that his requirement for objective evidence of good fails to support some of the activities you personally like based on your "leap of faith" thesis. You might genuinely want to consider what principled approach you are advocating here.

While I appreciated the somewhat retro colours that were used to organise documents in the old AusAID page above, my main reason for suggesting a return to this is that it makes it easy for both DFAT staff and external readers to identify the state of documentation for an activity and also easier to find a document than in the somewhat quirky ordering on the DFID site.

I appreciate the well presented information and also the comments. I suggest the People using the Facebook must register to the government in a social media act so that their identity is known. Unregistered pages shall be blocked as per the act. This will erase the abuse on social media. Filtering can be done.

Very true, At Green Fresh we sell fruit and onions that "market ladies" resell around the city. their main risk is police stealing their produce and/or money. Also the NCDC chased them off of the streets during the SP games and during any visits by high profile people. We are supposed to be encouraging small level business activity, but seems NCDC do the opposite

A new emerging threat to women economic empowerment which has become a huge deterrent for women in small markets, residential markets, is policing. Police, continue, to raid these small markets and remove items sold by women on our streets. In the pretext of searching for banned items such as buai, police, especially in NCD remove other items which women sell, often, targeting them until they are no longer able to sell, completely shutting their markets down. This issue with policing is sanctioned by NCDC, as regulator, is not providing supporting infrastructure for women to sell their food items. Police brutality may one day, put, an end to small markets run by our women folks.

Please do undertake the transparency audit. It is very important. DFAT's response is disingenuous - as your blog shows, transparency is certainly no better and almost certainly worse now than it was. They should provide a blog to attempt to prove that their transparency is the same or better - rather than tweeting that they don't accept the argument.

Also, <a href="https://twitter.com/stephenrhowes/status/742878948095201281?lang=en" rel="nofollow">on Twitter</a> DFAT has responded that "we don't accept devpolicy claim on transparency. No major difference between what was on AusAID's website and DFAT's now" Great to get a response, but this misunderstands my argument which is that the Coalition has promised but not delivered more aid transparency. We seem to more or less have stood still while other donors have moved ahead quickly. Given the interest the blog has generated, we're going to proceed with another transparency audit, similar to the one we did <a href="https://devpolicy.org/what-happened-to-aid-transparency-under-labor-20140207/">three years ago</a>. We'll put the results up as soon as we have them.

Mel, you make a very good point. Sometimes the documents are on the web, but not where most people would look for them. For example, the procurement site which you point to has the draft design document for the PNG Governance Facility from April 2015. The final design was released with the tender for this document last year. Yet neither the draft nor the final design for this facility is listed or linked to under the PNG aid for governance section - more than a year later, and even though it is such a critical change for the sector. The Transport Sector Support Program website is another interesting example of how other websites can be more or less helpful. I've now gone back to see what it looked like in 2013 (again using web.archive.org), and it is full of up-to-date annual plans and performance reports. It is a pity that that tradition has not been maintained, with the current TSSP website focused more on announceables and much less on information. Garth, I'm not so sure that we need to go back to the way in which AusAID categorized documents. We just need more and more timely documents on the web.

It would be great to also go back to the document organisation provided on the 2013 website (the four coloured headings) which was designed to show the progress of a project and its documentation.