Comments

....although to be fair to Nastios, one of the hard jobs of a civil servant is to do as your are told and offer explanations for it so, as you suggest, he might have been simply wearing it for his political masters.

Thanks Joel, The paper Marc links to is a very interesting read but I think a reasonable critique would be that Natsios is too confident of what aid can achieve and of what aid agencies are capable of. So it's, perhaps, fitting that he can be found elsewhere saying things that were spectacularly wrong.

Mark, You are right. There are lots of other cuts, including to regional programs for Asia and the Pacific and, as you mention, for governance. It is hard to know what to make of them all, without more detail, which, as Joel says, we don't have. I imagine that a lot of the cuts were about what was possible, and what was possible without too much political cost. Julie Bishop did mention aid for trade in her statement (http://foreignminister.gov.au/releases/2014/jb_mr_140118.html) but only to say, as before, that it would be important. There really wasn't anything new in the statement concerning the overall approach to aid, though I guess that the statement that aid will increase with CPI makes it less likely that there will be further cuts in the next budget.

As most of the Africa program is an NGO one then it will be hard to avoid NGO cuts. Her statement about NGO funding was the subsidy scheme which is the 2.5-2.7% she referred to, but the NGO funding is much more than that.

Just a quick comment regarding Natsios. Maybe he did some good as USAID Administrator but his legacy is forever darkened by some of the most <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/11/opinion/in-america-refusing-to-save-africans.html" rel="nofollow">damaging and ignorant comments</a> on anti-retroviral treatment ever uttered (by anyone let alone a senior development leader). Stating that the US couldn't give medication to Africans because Africans don't have watches and can't tell time. Studies show that adherence to treatment rates in Africa are higher than in the US (even without said Rolexes). I hope he didn't believe what he was saying and was just providing a lame excuse for inaction prior to PEPFAR being announced a year or two later.

Thank you Helen. I definitely agree with you on context. I think you're right on evaluations too. I'm a fan of RCTs and other impact evaluations, but definitely agree they need to be coupled with careful study of process. It's all well and good knowing whether something has worked or not, but more important still to know why...

After many years working in development and feeling increasingly despondent at the disconnect between aspiration and money on one hand, and engagement and sustainable help on the other, reading your message was refreshing. I entirely agree on the need for more time - more time to learn about the country and its culture and history, and more time to engage with people there. Otherwise we don't know the starting point or what is likely to work. Country leaders and also consultants often like to appear at the cutting edge, and the consequent helicoptering in of models such as NPM - that depend on an institutional environment which isn't actually there - has been damaging. Evaluation is of course a good idea, even essential, but it can often deteriorate into putting excessive time and focus on specification in advance of objectives and final impact with little regard to what happens in between. Process is crucial. Not to mention the problems of measurement and attribution that performance evaluation often bypasses.

Thanks Marc, Interesting comment. I was unaware Natsios was a religious conservative (not that it matters either way of course -- but interesting.) The paper you mention is fascinating too. I side with Nastios up to a point. A crude approach to trying to quantify everything (and to M&E more generally) means enhanced admin burden while at the same time generating relatively little learning. OTOH -- there is still a lot to learn in aid, and so coupling work with much more genuine learning-inducing M&E and research is what I'd advocate, as well as giving aid staff time to do it properly, and to learn from it. Cheers Terence

Hi Terence, this is a great post and I definitely get behind the value of "small ideas and accumulated learning." I recently took a class with the former Director of the USAID programme under G.W. Bush, Andrew Natsios. He confirmed your suspicion that conservatives would seek more measurement of aid. In fact Republican politicians pushed so much for numbers that Natsios himself turned on this ideology to try and give aid workers some room to do their work. I think Natsios' essay is at least an valuable contribution to the ongoing debate on quantifying development: http://international.cgdev.org/publication/clash-counter-bureaucracy-and-development Religious conservatives in the US (Natsios included) do tend to give a decent amount of fiscal support for the charity of foreign aid. In contrast, conservatives here in NZ and now in Australia have become ironically isolationist in their crusade for fiscal discipline. As an agnostic perhaps I'm not the best to judge the place of religion in foreign aid, but Christian values certainly shaped the way Professor Natsios approached issues in USAID's work. A book he assigned, 'The Central Liberal Truth' by Larry Harrison is essentially a veiled attempt to promote the Protestant work ethic in the developing world. Some may see sense in it... I call it cultural imperialism. I was impressed by Natsios' genuine desire to run as effective of an aid programme as he could. To him this meant serious spending priorities. This brings us full circle to your point Terence, where conservative priorities are squarely fixed on areas where we know aid works. This is why Natsios' budget favoured public health, even when we know that there are far more areas that need attention for development to be sustained.

Thanks Stephen. At least we know now where the cuts will come from in terms of regions. But not sure we all have the detail as to which exact programs will be cut and by how much. I guess that will trickle out. Even as a strong supporter of the Africa program, an effort to streamline and focus the African engagement to fewer countries and fewer sectors would be welcome. And this was the direction that the program was moving in anyway (well, fewer countries, but not less money). The environment cuts reek of ideology over anything to do with aid effectiveness.

Stephen what is your take on the almost halving of spending for governance as a cross regional item? Also, the Minister made no mention in her release on aid-for-trade? What's your view on the significance of that, giver her numerous previous statements about the importance of aid-for-trade?

Thanks guys. Political philosophy is complicated!