Comments

Hi Patrick, So, as best I understand your argument, you are claiming that: because the NGOs in question are less heavily dependent on DFAT for the salaries of their Australian staff, and are only actually heavily dependent on DFAT funding for their work in the field (more heavily than my initial numbers would suggest), there is no reason to anticipate them being wary of doing stuff that might displease the government? I'm sure there is a good reason for why the pattern we identified does not conform with theoretical expectations. But I'm equally sure the explanation you've just provided is not it. Enjoy the rest of your week.

How fabulous Tom - great contribution to the narratives about development dilemmas. Theatre and other art forms really under-utlised in development interventions and M&E. Ironic really given the power and place of art and culture in many of the countries we all work in.

Terence even thought the number is large (>50%) it may not impact running costs as these DFAT funds are required to be quarantined (contract wise) so the impact may not be as much as if it is general revenue. Thus the problem of drawing too much from these aggregate type analyses..

Thanks Patrick, I know of the book, but wasn't clear if it was the work you were referring to or not. I look forwards to reading chapter 8. With respect to how much money NGOs get from DFAT. From 2014 data (the data used in our study): Of the top 50 ACFID members (recall our study looked at the largest NGOs), looking at DFAT funding/total revenue for international development work, the mean NGO received 24% of its funding from DFAT. The median 26%. More than 20% of NGOs receive over 50%. Such significant shares of revenue aren't pocket change. I would have thought that losing such a large share of revenue (or money spent in the field) would cause pause for thought. Intriguingly, within the constraints of our study, it does not appear to have.

Sorry Terence I thought you were aware of it. The reference is Kilby, P. 2015. NGOs and Political Change; a History of the Australian Council for International Development. Canberra. ANU Press. The key chapter on this is chapter 8 and p.157 has the case I refer to. The dependency argument has been peddled for over twenty years now with little evidence of it having much effect at all. The fall in numbers of accredited agencies points to Government funding being a nice bonus for many (mostly small) agencies but not enough for them to change practice to meet accreditation criteria. Most DFAT contracts are time bound and so agencies do lay off staff etc when they come to an end. Nowadays most agencies are careful not to risk a sharp drop in income hence they keep the level of government funding at lower level than it was in the 1980s, when they were more trusting and got their fingers burnt.

Hi Patrick, Thanks for the comment. As I said to Garth, I think combining qualitative with quantitative work is ultimately the best way to undertake this sort of study, so I am interested to hear of the book (which book? the history of ACFID?). I think anyone seeking to take this work further would benefit from case histories. No disagreement there. What we've done with our work is something not done to date: contribute to the quantitative component of potential work in this area. Learning about specific cases tells you one very useful thing; learning about overall patterns reveals another. Also, you wrote: "One is scale and that is the larger NGOs can afford to devote resources to awareness raising and they coincedently get a more of the government pie for obvious reasons." Indeed, if you read our original blog post you will see: "In each regression we included two control variables (whether an NGO was religious or not, and the NGO’s size in terms of revenue), alongside the main independent variable of interest..." We controlled for NGO size in our regressions. Then, you wrote, "A statistical association does not necessarily suggest causation." We're quite aware of that. Reverse causality is not likely to be an issue, but omitted variable bias may be. Which is why we wrote in our blog post that, "Ideally, we would have been able to add more control variables into the equation..." Having said that it is hard to think of obvious confounding factors that aren't in the existing regression model. Also, you wrote, "The other issue is the focus on internet campaigns, may not be the full picture. The church agencies in particular use church based campaigns for example, and these can be on quite a big scale." We, control for religious or not in our regression, which ought to address this specific trait. However, as we mention in our blog post, "The relationship might plausibly have been different had we studied other media. Because of these caveats..." So once again: we are aware of the boundaries of our investigation. We wrote about them in the blog post. Nevertheless, we think the media terrain we did cover is a very important one for NGOs. And you wrote, "The use of the term ‘dependency’ here is loose. Either one is dependent or one is not (like pregnancy). One cannot be a little bit dependent." I disagree entirely. As an NGO changes from getting 5 to 25 to 45 to 65 to 85 per cent of its funding from the government, the costs of it losing government funding for the work it cares become incrementally more severe. There may be a point where the costs of withdrawal of government funding become particularly severe (i.e. end of NGO), but long before that there will be sufficiently major costs -- programmes closed and staff laid off -- to change the nature of the relationship in theory. Also you wrote, "I refer in Ch 8 to when the governemnt suggested gag clauses about 10 years ago and the big agencies simply said in response they would withdraw from the funding scheme, thus ending that discussion." This is interesting to know about. Thank you.

Ashlee, it is more about staple foods than just rice. People don't like trading regimes when it is about staples or strategic assets (even electricity suppliers c.f China v Australia). Australia has sought to be self reliant in all its staples including the (originally) heavily subsidised and environmentally disastrous rice growing. In many countries bread is price controlled. At the end of the day if one depends on others for food then one is vulnerable. Free trade regimes may be fine but ultimately they are not well trusted c.f Europe and it gas markets. Trade sanctions now are the most common form of economic warfare. One suspects PNG's look westward (rather than south) is no accident; moving from an Australian monopoly to an Indonesian one.

The facts are here right in front of every Papua New Guinean up to the leaders . My question is are the hearts and minds of those in authority AND SMOKERS & BUAI CHEWERS being hardened to a level beyond compression.?? I visit the Angau hospital daily at the moment with my son it's un believable the number of young people who are affected especially with some forms of TB meningitis. HOW SOON BEFORE THE GOVERNMENT ACT TO OUTLAW BUAI CHEWING AND SMOKING IN PLUBLIC PLACES INCLUDING THE PMVS THE CHILDREN TRAVEL IN DAILY TO SCHOOL. PLEASE HELP THE PNG VERSION OF HOLOCAUST.

Terence I actually wrote a book on this and tracked it over time (in particular see ch.8). There are a few factors that come into play. One is scale and that is the larger NGOs can afford to devote resources to awareness raising and they coincedently get a more of the government pie for obvious reasons. A statistical association does not necessarily suggest causation. The use of the term 'dependency' here is loose. Either one is dependent or one is not (like pregnancy). One cannot be a little bit dependent. Given the low level of government funding there are few if any Australian NGOs that would fold if the government funding stopped. Over the last 50 years there is less than a handful, perhaps one or two that have folded allegedly becuse of a stop in government funding but even then government funding was only part of their story. The number of accredited NGOs has dropped quite a bit over the last twenty years but none of those no longer accredited have folded. If there was more agencies dependent then gag clauses would work more. I refer in Ch 8 to when the governemnt suggested gag clauses about 10 years ago and the big agencies simply said in response they would withdraw from the funding scheme, thus ending that discussion. You see dependency cuts both ways. The other issue is the focus on internet campaigns, may not be the full picture. The church agencies in particular use church based campaigns for example, and these can be on quite a big scale.

There is government subsidies and protectionism in all economies of the world. This is an acknowledged fact. The United States Government grants subsidies and tax exemptions to most of their conglomerates in nearly every industry that, there is. This is done deliberately through their federal budgets. Need I name some of these conglomerates? The list is extensive and is in the public domain for researchers of all shades. Australia is no exception, especially in its agri-industry business. They have foreign investment control boards that play the gate-keeping role, filtering what investment to allow and what to decline, operating in lockstep with their meticulous immigration and foreign visa policy. Now, they have may have a different name and tag lines to eschew public perception, but flip the pages and their very DNA is plastered with what protectionism tastes, smells and looks like. Some Papua New Guineans have covered themselves with the dry excuse of us not having the required skill-sets, capital exposure, credit-worthiness, attitude to work and an endless inferiority-infused-others-list. Such fallacious notions lends themselves to the scale of capital flight the country has been awashed in, in our almost 41 years of statehood. Whose lecture notes indicates that a gas-station (fuel depot) is a complex undertaking? How does one cultivate experience and know-how when the citizens are continually tagged as incapable?Are none of our children, sons and daughters yet to sit in the same lecture rooms that some of "so-called foreign direct investor's children" have sat and learned the fundamentals of business? This SME Policy document has had wide consultations across the length of breath of PNG. It is crafted to capture the aspirations and frustrations experienced by many a budding SMEPreneurs in the country. There is diffusion of knowledge,capital and willing investors available everywhere for the right kind of investors but not every so-called foreign direct investment. The fears expressed in this article are not a novelty. They have been the usual discourse for eons against such courageous ambitions as this. I say, you can judge us in ten to fifteen years. For now, the train has already left the station. Thinking and astute observers of world events understand fully that, such scaremongering crowd that; surreptitiously guards over industries and manipulates public media to paint local entrepreneurs as really "not-up-to-their-scale". The labeling of native citizens as poor and needing handouts, whilst fencing off opportunities to their own ilk is a documented reality. That is a global trend. We know it. Let's talk about something else.

This should be an obvious investment given: - the impact of these 3 diseases on people's lives and economies - the increased costs of insufficient investment - the proven track record of the Global Fund in saving lives and building improved health services and greater local funding - the positive influence Australia has on other countries by stepping up and doing our part, and - the relatively small amount involved - less than 3% of Australia's aid budget.

Thanks Garth, Great comment. I don't really disagree with what you say, except that I think that activities under Take Action may be mild (there weren't any "Chain yourselves to gateposts" buttons), nevertheless they--almost by definition--involve some degree of opposition to government policy (aid cuts, asylum seekers, climate change), so I think it fair to argue such activities aren't wholly risk free in theory. All the more so because my guess is that NGOs' orientation (towards activism or donations) is fairly path dependent (doesn't change much over time), which would mean that even if the current government is fine with what they're saying, one would think that from time to time they will pay the price for rankling politicians' or bureaucrats' feathers, and therefore at least be a little more wary of government money. At least, that's one reason why I expected the relationship to be in the other direction. That said, the relationship we observed isn't the expected one, and your explanations might explain why. The point about individual and corporate donors being more easily offended strikes me as very interesting. One area I do disagree, or at least one area where the two sides of the Tasman must differ a lot if you're right, is to do with who NGOs would be afraid of offending (politicians or bureaucrats). In NZ it would definitely be politicians, at least at present. As an aside, in terms of methodology, in an email yesterday an academic made a great point that this sort of quantitative work really needs to be complemented by good qualitative work. If there are any interested aspiring PhD students out there...