Comments

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.

Thanks Marianne, I have to say I thought the US boss a bit one dimensional too. But like you I could see the type he was a vessel for. Terence

Terence, great review, thanks. I've almost finished this book having seen it reviewed on a couple of North American aid blogs - it seems to be doing the rounds. I nearly didn't make it through the first couple of chapters because the narrator seemed so out of breath, something you observed too. But I developed sympathy for Mary-Anne and Jon in particular, and then was hooked. I find the author's sermons highly instructive - this is surprising because I can't imagine this device working in any other genre. It is clunky but what he has to say is insightful and, well, true. So I think the cynical tone of the narrator is to some extent softened by the heart evident in most of the characters. The Yankee boss is a bit stereotyped I think and yet gives us a neat picture of how aid and ego are often chained to each other. I think the book offers an important insight into the experience of the development/aid worker trying to reconcile priorities that are often competing and even contradictory. That stuff is really hard and in my view under-examined, despite the bearing it has on the effectiveness of aid. Nice to see this review on the Devpolicy Blog.

Nice post, Stephen. I agree with your points. It seems to me that some aspects of the GPI are not really directly relevant for current well-being. For example, most of the damage from CO2 emissions is likely to occur in the future, so it is hard to see how this affects current well-being. (CO2 emissions are more relevant for a measure of "sustainability".) If the (cumulative) cost of CO2 emissions is excluded from the US GPI calculation, US GPI per capita has actually increased rapidly.