Comments

Just a quick comment from outside looking back in. I was previously employed by AusAID when the charter was first talked about. Interestingly in your results, Vanuatu comes out with the most impressive record. This is not surprising given that it was one of the three priority countries to pilot the information roll-out (in addition to Philippines and another I can't remember). To give AusAID a little credit, it is not easy to simply collect and dump materials online. The government has posting protocols (disability requirements) and materials have to be prepared. There is no doubt that the process was slow and cumbersome, but the intention and policy was good and the three pilot countries had pretty impressive information available. I am not sure where this will go given recent changes, but I hope it is not dropped as I continue to use Australian aid materials in my work and was happy to champion the transparency charter amongst colleagues here in Washington. I think this kind of analysis is great, but I also think understanding 'process' can shine a light on the legitimacy of the data. I am also pretty sure that discussing this is the kind of conversation that public servants are still allowed to have with researchers - as it certainly was in my day! Keep up the good work. (Chris Nelson - World Bank DC)

I was interested to read about the work you've been doing on checking document availability. This complements our work at Publish What You Fund on assessing the transparency of the world's largest donors, including Australia. Our annual Aid Transparency Index includes an overall score, analysis and recommendations for each donor assessed based on what current information items we can find, both for the organisation in general but also for individual projects. In 2013, Australia scored 43%, ranking 24th out of 69, placing it towards the bottom of the 'fair' category. The analysis and recommendations are available <a href="http://ati.publishwhatyoufund.org/donor/australia/" rel="nofollow">here</a>. We're interested to see if Australia's score will improve this year (we'll be assessing DFAT for the first time, rather than AusAID). We're looking for researchers to help us with assessing the data we collect so please get in touch if you're interested.

Do you know more about the pharmaceuticals that were removed from the funding list? Was this a matter of drugs issued without regulation?

Thank you for examining this very important issue of transparency. I think your summary effectively shows that the Australian aid program is only around half the way to meeting its transparency charter. However I would not characterise it as a "a one-off rather than a sustained effort". In addition to the web pages that you reviewed, AusAID reestablished the Statistical Summary (Green Book), provided this information in Excel form, and was, at least in my experience, much more open to meeting information requests. In addition AusAID uploaded detailed activity level data to the IATI database - the last upload was in April 2013. Certainly not the comprehensive quarterly upload required, and provided by some other donors, but more than a one-off effort. The Australian aid program has come a long way in the last few years in improving transparency but it clearly has further to go. Hopefully the Government's concern about greater accountability will expedite this effort.

Mark Dreyfus has <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-07/an-australia2c-nz-urged-to-put-pressure-on-nauru-during-joint-/5244596?section=australianetworknews" rel="nofollow">exhorted</a> the governments of Australia and NZ to work together to call for a return to legal normality in Nauru. All well and good but what about the Pacific Islands Forum? The situation in Nauru almost certainly renders it in breach of the Biketawa declaration and there are a number of options open to the Forum as to actions that can be taken in this type of circumstance. So...

Certainly the reallocation will have been constrained by some lock-ins. However, official aid contracts and agreements (including most of those with multilateral organisations) generally contain rather powerful escape clauses, and it's hard to imagine that aid to Africa, in particular, could be reduced by the amount indicated without disturbing commitments that various partners might have imagined to be unshakeable. The Africa cuts were clearly large for policy reasons, not because commitments were softer there. In short, lock-ins would have played a part in determining the allocation of the cuts, but policy considerations would also have been important in many cases.

If you don't have time to read the book the author recently participated in an hour long interview with econtalk that is an excellent summary of her work. You can listen to it <a href="http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/01/nina_munk_on_po.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+econtalk/xmOW+(Econ+Talk) rel="nofollow">here</a>.

Yesterday Bruce Hill <a href="http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/program/pacific-beat/australia-says-no-megaphone-diplomacy-over-nauru-legal-sitiation/1259910" rel="nofollow">spoke with</a> Senator Brett Mason who said there would be no recourse to 'megaphone diplomacy' in relation to the Nauru situation. But the senator did not really seem to appreciate the lack of capacity within the legal sector of Nauru and how that was affecting all legal processes, not just those associated with asylum claims.

If Sachs and Easterly are still going at it, maybe they need an intervention, or a referee. When the debate has come up, I've often referenced this article by Amartya Sen from Foreign Affairs in 2006: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61525/amartya-sen/the-man-without-a-plan

Thanks Robin You note: "Generally their allocations are reduced by no more than 10 per cent and in some cases allocations have increased where, on development grounds, there was no evident need. Indonesia, for example, grows by 10 per cent (compared to Labor’s planned 22 per cent) and Fiji grows by 25 per cent (compared to Labor’s 35 per cent)." I suspect (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that these figures probably represent forward commitments such as already agreed bilateral programs or expenditure under existing contracts programmed earlier in the cycle when growth was expected. Therefore one can't derive too much information about future strategy from the 2013-14 final allocations, and the countries that suffered the biggest cuts are probably those with more projects in the pipeline or design stage.

Jiesheng, Unlikely, I think. You'll recall the Treasurer said of the aid program just before the 2013 election, "You’ll see a focus more on support for non-government organisations than investment in multilaterals". And that the Coalition's foreign affairs policy, released the same day, said "The Coalition supports multilateral institutions that serve a clear national purpose. We support the G20 ..., the established regional Asia Pacific bodies, the Commonwealth of Nations, and various organisations of the United Nations, including the World Trade Organisation." (Never mind that the WTO is not in fact part of the UN system, and that the Commonwealth serves a very unclear "national purpose".) Thus the message was one of greater selectivity and less money overall. I think what we are seeing in practice is a realisation that the case for funding the largest recipients of multilateral funding is in fact very strong, that cutting the other recipients won't save much, and that the gain involved in cutting even the poorest performers isn't actually worth the procedural and diplomatic pain. I suspect in the end that the government might point to its reversal of two Labor decisions -- to join the African Development Bank and to rejoin the International Fund for Agricultural Development -- as giving effect to its pre-election commitments, even though the related savings are only savings relative to forward estimates that by now are a fading memory.

You say that "Aside from Devpolicy’s in-brief article on the day of the announcement, there has been little other analysis." That may be the case in Australia, but there's certainly been a lot of attention paid in the Pacific, which has seen significant cuts, even though the islands region is a core area for Australian policy. The old meme about "deputy sheriff" has already been <a href="http://www.islandsbusiness.com/2014/1/cover-story/new-sheriff-in-town/" rel="nofollow">revived in the Pacific media</a>. You highlight that "the smallest and most vulnerable states do badly. The smaller Pacific island countries are collectively cut by 22 per cent" - pity that they don't have a booming LNG industry like Papua New Guinea, with plenty of opportunities for infrastructure projects!