Comments

Congratulations Steve on your retirement from the ADB. Your many years of research, analysis and insight have been invaluable, and your dedication to the Pacific has been appreciated by many. Thank you for this insightful piece - I hope you'll find time for a few more!

Hi Julian, Sorry about that, I have fixed the link. Jonathan

I think the link labelled Ben Ramalingam at ODI is wrong - when I clicked it opened a paper dated 21 January 2004 by Michael Roeskau called "Multilateralism: The International Aid Agencies, Their Owners And Competitors: Do We Need Them All?"

Readers, Our anti-spam service has been overzealous in the past week and all comments have been marked as spam. We have corrected the issue and the comments service is now working normally. We are working to retrieve the comments that have been marked as spam, and should have them available next week. Jonathan

Volunteer programs with various hosts working in different contexts in the same region often face a myriad of problems. The fact is that an array of different organisations of varying capacity and competency are engaging with an individual (obviously also unique) to engage in some form of mutual cooperation or assistance. The very nature of this relationship is obviously based on goodwill. When it comes to achieving more positive results beyond goodwill relationships I think program officers on the ground have a massive role to play. This role comes down to managing and sometimes controlling the expectations of a host organisation, while also ensuring that the actions of a volunteer are in line with facilitating an organisation to achieve its goals without stepping outside the bounds of what the organisers (AVID or otherwise) are capable of and within their directive to do. Paid individuals on the ground who are supported, active and not overworked I think are the absolute key to ensuring that issues on the ground are dealt with promptly and resolutely. Their ability to manage relationships between two hugely different parties with no doubt usually incongruent expectations is the first step to improving results beyond just goodwill. These are professional positions and should be well filled and also well paid, because if the person who does this job does it well it is work that can have widely reverberating positive effects.

I’m not entirely certain on the purpose of this commentary. It seems confused, still hoping to leverage the discussion generated in its previous iterations, yet without anything new to add to the conversation. If we’re going to continue to critique the volunteer program, let’s start by discussing what the practical options are to remove some of the barriers to its effectiveness. Move to a model whereby all volunteers are managed in country by a single contractor. Streamline the in-country management program. One In-Country Manager, the addition of junior or short-term support officer positions for volunteers who have completed assignments in country and are now at a loose end, and increase the number of country staff. Free up the money, ensure advice and support given to volunteers is consistent, assignments are designed and evaluated consistently, and continuous improvement mechanisms are able to function. Stripping back formal expectations will do little to improve the volunteer program. If anything, assignments should have more measurable, realistic and tangible objectives, and host organisations as well as volunteers should be accountable for them. Much of the problem with assignments that do not work out has less to do with a breakdown in the ‘feedback loop’, and more to do with how that assignment was created in the first place. Successful assignments are based in Host Organisations with a history of successful volunteer assignments. Not surprisingly, HOs with a history of volunteers who terminated assignments early are less likely to be able to turn this trend around. Moreover, placing young, inexperienced volunteers in generalised roles such as ‘development officer’ or ‘policy officer’ and telling them their goal is to ‘capacity build’ is going to overwhelmingly result in disappointment for all involved. In-country contractors developing and creating assignments with HOs must be accountable for the assignments they create. Does a pre-advertising evaluation of assignments created take place at the moment? And if so, how? Contractors need an incentive to be accountable for the assignments they create, and to critically evaluate the reasons assignments are not working. Why is another assignment being advertised at this HO when the 3 assignments before this have not worked? Why is an assignment with lofty and unrealistic deliverables being advertised in the first place? If we place a young, single, female in this remote location without direct access to ready support networks, what are her chances of being successful? Too often these questions are not revisited. Volunteers should be expected to meet professional and formal expectations such as KPIs. Not only is this valuable experience, but I would argue a volunteer will have even more motivation, empowerment and impetus to find solutions to struggling assignments when treated as a professional in their field, rather than a foreign ‘do-gooder’ muddling around in entry-level development work. Telling volunteers to ‘rip up assignment descriptions’ is not helpful. Volunteers need to be able to be flexible enough to re-evaluate the objectives of their assignment within the context and capacity of their host organisation once they understand it. They need to understand that most assignments do not have any traction until the 6-8 month point, when the volunteer is fully embedded in the organisation. They need to feel supported to raise any serious barriers to assignment success with their HO well before assignments reach a critical point and are terminated. Issues should be raised with HOs as a first step before they are taken back to ICMs. Volunteers should have access to proper policies outlining grievance procedures and what is expected of them. And ultimately, I think we should re-evaluate the use of the ‘volunteer’ at all. I’d much rather simply be part of the “Australians for development” program. The term ‘volunteer’ just muddies the waters.

Hey there Ash, A great post and an interesting read. It is so important to hear thoughtful reflection from people such as yourself, who have experienced these things and had time to synthesise learnings. One thing the evaluation, Stephen's blogs and yours all highlight to me is the problem caused by a neglect to define 'capacity development' in the early stages of any intervention, or in this case, volunteer placement. As you suggest, coming to shared expectations is essential. I would think this would involve arriving at a shared meaning for what capacity development means in relation to any particular intervention. I worked on a reasonably large project that actually had 'capacity building' in its title but had no in-built, articulated concept of what capacity building meant in terms of the project and what was realistic to achieve. This caused so many challenges along the way. For example, what I thought were successes in capacity development were not necessarily viewed as such by others involved in the project because they were looking at things from a different idea of capacity development. (This was particularly so because I saw the loss of some 'capacities' as a success.) So I don't think ditching capacity development is necessarily the way to go, because I think it has use as a concept and an approach. Rather, I think a useful way forward is much as you suggest - for any activity, creating a shared understanding of what capacity and its development means for the people involved (particularly the host organisation), and what change might look like. This might actually mean just having an individual fill a role for a time.

Thank you for pointing that out Terence. The paper argues in its conclusion for further development of alternative metrics due to the lack of correlation between SWB and income levels. I cited this in the posting, however, it is true that the researchers found a correlation between SWB and increases in income and other factors which they explore and which seem consistent with other studies of SWB. The main take-away from that piece, for me, was the justification for non-monetary metrics to be developed given that the SWB data collected in their research does not behave the same way it does in other parts of the world. The paper does not test our Alternative Indicators of Well-being. Best, Jamie

Hi Jamie, Thank you for sharing an interesting piece of work on alternative indicators for measuring well-being in the Pacific. When it comes to well-being concerns in the Pacific, the issues are doubly complex. Because the notion of measuring well-being in monetary terms through consumption or income is still relatively foreign. When in fact a significant share of the population in the Pacific still rely on self-produced or procured resources from land (often communal) and sea. Existence of poverty measured in monetary terms would imply the failure of the traditional networks of support that exist across the Pacific, making it a culturally sensitive topic! Not only that but current measures of poverty in the Pacific still rely on household-level data as the basis for estimating the number of people living below the poverty line. This is problematic and arguably hide rather than reveal the extent of poverty among women and men within the same household. Such measures of poverty, which focuses on income alone and on the household as a unit, ignores intra-household disparities because the ways in which women and men relate to material resources, are grounded in their different social relations and positions in communities and societies at large. There’s already some research done in this area in six countries (Angola, Fiji, Indonesia, Malawi, Mozambique and the Philippines) as part of a Australian Research Council-funded linkage research project Assessing Development: Designing Better Indices of Poverty and Gender Equity. The project website www.genderpovertymeasure.org provides a wealth of information about the research including the people and organisations involved, methodology, data analysis, and country reports. The project has concluded with a first trial of a newly developed gender-sensitive measure of poverty in the Philippines. But further trialling of the gender sensitive poverty measure is needed in different contexts of the Pacific to provide comparable data across the region and refine measures of well-being taking into consideration such studies like the Vanuatu one to the point where it can be readily integrated into national and regional systems of social valuation. Thanks Priya

Re-posting this comment as wordpress swallowed my last effort. Hi Jamie, Thank you for a very interesting blog post. In it you write that: "A number of academic papers have referenced the report since its launch. One notable example of academic testing and application of the alternative indicators can be found in a recent paper by Simon Feeny, Lachlan McDonald and Alberto Posso of the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT University. The paper explored the relationship between poverty and happiness using data from Solomon Islands and Vanuatu that revealed a critical shortcoming of traditional monetary poverty indicators. Contrary to what is found to be true in Western developed countries, the level of income does not explain variation in happiness in either of these Melanesian countries, leading the authors to conclude that “the quest for alternative indicators of well-being in the region is therefore well justified". However, the abstract of the paper you link to states that: "The focus is on whether those living in poverty are less happy. Findings indicate that wealth, increases in income, relative income, and living on communally owned land are all positively associated with happiness. Household size and food insecurity have a negative association. There is also strong support for poor households being less happy." I haven't read the whole paper yet (although I will, thank you for linking to it). However, your statement and the abstract's claims seem very hard to reconcile. Cheers Terence

A significant point not highlighted here but which I have seen referenced elsewhere is the importance of investing in undertaking this type of assessment at all stages by the aid agency. There are two aspects to this. One is that the aid agency should be investing in this in order to maximise value for money and to be able to collect information to feed into future decisions about how and where allocations should or should not be made. Another aspect is that aid agencies must take care not to shift the burden of this type of assessment onto businesses. This is of particular importance in the Pacific island region, where businesses are small with limited capacity - in some cases the senior management team comprises one or two people. Agency staff need to have the requisite skills to be able to use reports that the business generates for internal purposes as the basis of assessment of additionality (and other things) rather than creating new and burdensome processes.

This piece from Bomai D Witne provides an interesting addition to this discussion in terms of how money politics plays out in communities and strategies employed by (aspirant) candidates and electors in order to participate to (perceived) best effect: http://asopa.typepad.com/asopa_people/2014/05/the-wiles-guiles-of-national-election-campaigns-in-png.html