Comments

Thanks for highlighting this important issue and it is good to note Julie Bishop's response. For the record, the Family Planning Guidelines still exist - they were just rewritten.

It looks fabulous, well done

This is a very naive post. Belinda has never worked with India or China as they deliver their "aid." She have not experienced the way a developing country needs to deal with these two big players first hand, versus the much, much easier to work with EU, Australia. There are heavy consequences for not working with China the way they wish, and they replace local labor with foreigners, so bad things happen.

Wow. DfID's 'Development Tracker' is very impressive. That level of transparency (project documents, business cases, logical frameworks) for each project being publicly available is great to see. And relatively easy to navigate. Hope this spurs others to do the same. Wonder if USAID is close behind... haha...

Hi Ian, thanks for raising awareness about some important points. As Jo pointed out however, we need to be careful to refer to the evidence base, and not make assumptions that can lead to poor public policy and aid policy. You may have a point about urban slums and the growth of obesity (though the evidence on this isn't clear), but your suggestion that 'The rich are eating too much to the detriment of their health, while poor children are missing out' is concerning, as is 'high-income countries certainly have the highest prevalence'. The Pacific Islands have the highest levels of obesity of any region in the world (75% in some countries, with accompanying diabetes levels as high as 40+%), and it's certainly not due to them being 'rich.' It's due to a host of factors including trade (like the importing of cheap, poor quality food), education (a lack of knowledge/effective health promotion about healthy eating and exercise), culture (the perception that big is healthier and better), a lack of infrastructure/good urban planning to foster incidental exercise and participation in sport, and a lack of readily and inexpensively available fresh fruit, vegetables and fish. <a href="https://theconversation.com/obesity-poverty-and-inequality-weighty-problems-for-all-of-us-7833" rel="nofollow">This article</a> by Kate Taylor talks about the common misconception that wealth = obesity. In fact, 'within a country, the wealthy are typically less likely to be overweight than other poorer segments of the population.' And the greater the level of inequality within a society, the greater level of health and social problems (including obesity). And <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3257829/" rel="nofollow">this article</a> gives a pretty comprehensive overview of obesity in developing countries, including of the evidence regarding urban-rural prevalence differences; and the sorts of responses that can be helpful.

Hi Peter, Thank you for your comment and your added insights. It seems it is always a challenge to reconcile the often vastly different priorities of politics and policy -- especially when domestic issues/interests are of a higher priority to the majority of voters and hence MPs. Ashlee

Hi Joel -- thank you for your comment. Those figures really are quite staggering aren't they? I agree, this is absolutely something where momentum has to be stopped here in Australia. The challenges the US is facing in reforming food aid show that once these types of policies gain traction they are very hard to reverse.

A comment from PNG to bring to your attention that there is another difference between the West and the East that is related to aid. Western aid does not come with an assault on the ability of Pngians to enter the low levels of our business sector. Small and large stores, container tuckerboxes and fast foods are blanketed by Asians. Laissez faire economics does not work well for the benefit of the PNG people. They need assistance to enter the S.M.E.business economy; positive discrimination is needed to assist them to catch up with people who have had so much more exposure to the pressures and benefits of developed economies. Tony Flynn

Ashlee, I cannot thank you enough for your terrific critique of SWEDOW aid. The requirement for the Australian aid program to buy and ship millions of tonnes of Australian grain over 40+ years (up to 2007) was hugely costly and distortionary - both for the program and for development. AusAID made the best of a bad job by channelling increasing proportions of this commitment through WFP, but assistance in the form of food sourced from Australia was rarely the best option in humanitarian situations (because of the distance, time and cost involved), and it was always costly and distorted local markets and incentives when delivered as development assistance - even in food-for-work or school feeding programs. Alas, AusAID has had to ward off many hare-brained cases of SWEDOW, often pushed by MPs and not just confined to food. Your critique is timely. Peter

Maree Thanks for this great tribute to Helen. She was a force of nature and a passionate development advocate, both qualities you have captured well. I worked as an editor in her early days at NCDS and I well remember her reaction to a concern I raised about an article for publication that described a particular country's situation as hopeless. She said we won't publish, we don't shy away from robust analysis and criticism but we will always be constructive. Her tendency to over-statement in her later years sometimes seemed to go against this precept, but she also loved a good argument so I'm sure she enjoyed many of the public stoushes she provoked. Vale Helen Hughes.

Yes, I've done the same I entirely concur - AVI was a much better provider.

I think Chris has made a very salient point about the ongoing relevance of ‘top-down’ pressure to broad-based service delivery (thanks Chris for the excellent link). In 2013 it’s no longer a secret that the Waigani-centric approach of the last generation has failed more than it has succeeded. And doing more of the same would seem most likely to amplify the current status quo of service delivery, rather than altering the current trajectory. There’s a widespread consensus, from ordinary citizens to MPs to Ministers and donors, that we need to change course if we want service delivery to get better. The current political executive at the national level in PNG <a href="http://www.thenational.com.pg/?q=node/51487" rel="nofollow">appears to be pinning</a> most of its service delivery aspirations to by-passing Waigani and its public servants. But what are the feasible alternatives? ‘Bottom-up’ models of service delivery in PNG, without ‘top-down’ pressure, seem acutely susceptible to capture by the ‘local grain’. This would work well when the local grain of politics exhibits small-scale characteristics of the developmental state – but is this the norm, or the exception? Where the local grain is profoundly anti-development then we shouldn’t expect any gains. And making judgements about resource allocation based on assessments of the local grain may be bureaucratically problematic, and essentially an intensely political act. Back & Hadenius <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0491.2007.00383.x/full" rel="nofollow">considered this issue in a paper</a> written in 2008 “Democracy and State Capacity: Exploring a J-Shaped Relationship”. They find that high levels of state capacity (a proxy for service delivery) come from a combination of top-down (centralised legitimate authority) and bottom-up (citizen auditors) pressure, e.g. Denmark. But good levels of service delivery can be found in authoritarian states that have a lot of the top-down pressure and very little of the bottom-up kind, e.g. Saudi Arabia, Cuba. States that have neither have low state capacity, e.g. PNG, Haiti. A clear vision is starting to emerge of what PNG would look like if it were able to deliver broad-based services to its citizenry. A centralised state apparatus with high levels of accountability, combined with a nation of citizen auditors, with both constantly reinforcing inclusive institutions, fuelling a virtuous circle of human development. The hard part is ‘how do we get there?’ I would hope and expect that in coming years much greater resources will be deployed in pursuit of this challenge, rather than continuing with the forlorn hope that service delivery will grow out of granting Waigani and its 'rentiers' an unaccountable monopoly over public resources.