Comments

Thanks for your comment Marcus -- it's certainly an interesting question! I don't know if I'm quite game enough to weigh into that debate on Tony Abbott, but perhaps some other commenters on the blog will! Deni's 'project manager' thesis was very interesting indeed -- we will hopefully have full video of the Pacific & PNG Update presentations uploaded shortly and I'll be sure to put the link here for those who are interested in watching his excellent presentation.

This is obviously a complicated and important topic and it can't be easily summarized with one-liners like: "1978 was the best year ever" or "global society has got a lot better off over the last 30 years." I encourage you all to read the <a href="http://www.idakub.com/CV/publications/2013_Kubiszewski_GlobalGPI.pdf?attredirects=0" rel="nofollow">full paper</a>, which compares a range of indicators for the 17 countries for which GPI has been estimated. Certainly some things have improved, like the ones Steve mentions, but GDP misses most of those too along with other positive things like volunteer and household work and leaves out major environmental and social costs. The HDI also leaves out social and environmental costs and benefits, although there are efforts now underway to fold some of them in. Anyway, listing only the positives without also accounting for the negatives (as GDP tends to do) is a major accounting problem. Can you imagine running a business that only looked at gross receipts? There is growing recognition that focusing too much on GDP as a policy goal is a major mistake. See, for example, this recent book by Nobel prize winners Joe Stiglitz and Amarta Sen: Stiglitz, J. E., A. Sen and J. P. Fitoussi (2010). <em>Mismeasuring our lives: Why GDP doesn't add up</em>. New York, The New Press We certainly don't claim that GPI is the perfect indicator, but it does try to account for some of the more important negatives and it shows no NET gain globally since 1978 (while some countries and regions are still improving and others declining on net). This is a compelling result, because it contradicts the general perception that Steve has voiced. GDP was never designed to measure social well-being and its time we stopped using it as a proxy for that. GPI is a step in the right direction, but certainly just one small step and hopefully not the last step.

Thanks Susana, I'm definitely in favour of cooperating to end suffering and death. The trouble is, we don't have that good an idea of what works best in doing this. Aid isn't guaranteed to work, and aid work has as many failures to its name as it does successes. This is why I think we should look for evidence. For the record I think the MVP was an inspired idea and definitely worth doing, but also worth testing thoroughly. We do know that things have gotten better in MVP villages, but in the case of at least some of the villages -- and this is the heart of of the Clemens critique -- we also know that things have improved significantly in surrounding areas as well. So it is very hard to say for certain that the MVP interventions caused the improvements. That is an evidential weakness. To the credit of the people behind MVP they are, as I understand it, working to develop better impact evaluations. Which is great. Progress in the direction of evidence based practice -- something that I'm celebrating in this post. Thanks again for your comment.

It would appear from <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-16/australia-trade-minister-visits-png/4823396" rel="nofollow">this</a> interview with Richard Marles that the topic of a sovereign wealth fund was indeed canvassed in the talks between the PMs so let's hope this is a positive sign of things to come. In terms of 'challenging conversations', I would like to see more oxygen given to the poor performance of Australian banks, the AFP and Austrac in exercising appropriate vigilance regarding funds being spirited out of PNG into Cairns, Sydney, the Gold Coast, etc.

It strikes me as odd that the "battle of ideas" and the call for evidence in the development industry/academia seems to take priority over cooperation and collaboration in order to end the suffering and deaths of millions in extreme poverty. Reducing poverty, after all, is our key motivation, right?????? It's also interesting to hear from critics of MVP who have never traveled to the MVP sites. If they had, they would have found that prior to the MVP, it was living hell. This was extreme poverty at its worst with no sanitation, no access to clean water, people dying daily of disease and malnutrition, hunger. After the MVP, one finds an entirely different world, people moving around, working, going to school....in essence, living. So when I hear "where's the evidence?" from development critics, I find it ludicrous.

I agree with Shahar about the way RAMSI has conducted operations in that it left the way open for more foreign investments in the way of logging equipment to be brought in. There will be an awful collapse in revenue once the logs are cut out. Years ago Australian forest officers were sent to advise the authorities on a more sustainable forest policy but the advice was not acceptable to those MPs who were raking in the timber money from their personal involvement so the officers were sent packing. Will there be an uncontrolled onslaught on the fish stocks? Already there are agreements for a Korean company to set up a plant at Doma. Just hope the Pacific Fisheries Bureau can keep a lid on the catch total.

Thanks Ashlee for your blog. As far as the use of the word 'action' and the phrase 'action man', I noticed the same thing observing the 2013 elections in Jiwaka and Simbu. Deni ToKunai's 'project manager' thesis makes sense to me, and fits with my observations and discussions during that time. A few months later I was driving down the main road of Honiara, and noticed a man sitting in the back of a flatbed truck, surrounded by other men wearing traditional attire, wearing a t-shirt saying, "Stand up for Warringah. Stand up for Real Action. Vote 1. Tony Abbott." I've uploaded the photo I took <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/85657242/stand%20up%20for%20warringah%2C%20solomon%20islands.JPG" rel="nofollow">here</a>. How does this fit in with the thesis? Is Tony Abbott the Australian version of the Melanesian bigman? Perhaps Devpolicy bloggers can assist?

Thanks Stephanie, It's interesting, I think, that in the battle of ideas, the strength of belief it takes to propel one's particular idea to the top is almost inevitably at odds with the sort of self-doubt that leads one to be more likely to want to test and measure and check. One One Lap Top Per Child, you may have already seen it but the Boston Review had a great discussion of ITC for development (including OLTPC) a couple of years ago: http://www.bostonreview.net/forum/can-technology-end-poverty Terence

This is a fascinating debate and one I've been following over a number of years. One Laptop Per Child is the other big anti-poverty campaign being run by high-profile academics that, like the MVP, refuse to countenance any form of robust assessment. Instead, in each case we have senior academics and public figures somehow convincing themselves that the burden of proof they would expect from anyone else doesn't apply to themselves, because they are doing "good works" - the path to (development) hell being paved, as we know, with good intentions. It would have been interesting to look at the big-bang intervention concept properly too see if it works. It has some logic to it - after all, a company can't grow if it doesn't attract sufficient capital, so it seems likely that a village won't either. Unfortunately Sachs never let his ideas be put to a rigorous test - which does suggest that perhaps he doubted they would stand up it.

Dear Bob, I'll reiterate the same point I made before. My post was aiming to explain why RAMSI has been so successful at fostering stability in Solomon Islands (because it has not at all challenged the elites benefiting from logging - in fact it has unwittingly provided conditions suitable for rapid expansion in logging), and therefore why this stability could prove very temporary indeed. This is a point often missed by those who focus on 'capacity building' etc, as if state capacity exists in the abstract, outside of concrete social and political relations. Regards, Shahar

Thanks Bob -- that's a good recommendation. As you say, not fiction, but a very enjoyable read. Terence

Also not fiction, but Robert Klitgaard's 'Tropical Gangsters' gives a good insight into the challenges of being a project manager, policy adviser and surfer in Equatorial Guinea.