Comments

Hi Paul, Thanks for your comment. I'm a snowed under PhD student at present and while I've been meaning to reply to your original comment, I've struggled to find the time. The other comments were easier replies for me - not because they were esoteric or nebulous - but rather because it was clear to me from a quick read how I might respond to the comment. This wasn't the case with your comment, which I've been mulling over ever since. Speaking as a former bureaucrat I don't think it is completely true to say that bureaucrats are unaccountable to their political masters. This certainly wasn't my experience in New Zealand. In Western Melanesia on the other hand there is a problem to do with the interface between the political realm and the bureaucratic. It's not quite so simple as 0 accountability though, although in instances it may be close. This is what I was getting at with my dislocated incentives. There are feedback loops in the aid world: specifically monitoring and evaluation processes. They are imperfect, however. Often, not necessarily for anyone's fault, they tend to provide somewhat ambiguous messages -- and clearly can't tell us that much about sustainability into the future. Some aid agencies do quite a good job of publishing these evaluations too, which suggests to me that the problem of people in the aid 'game' wanting to avoid the spotlight is not true everywhere all of the time, although it can be true in instances. Rather, I think perhaps problems with the way aid agencies approach civil service reform stem from two key areas: 1. This is hard work with no clear solutions. and 2. We're still learning as we go along. This doesn't mean we can't do better. But I do think there are often reasonable excuses for less than perfect progress to date. Thank you for a thought provoking comment. Terence

‘Perhaps to make bureaucracies work better we need reform of the way we do public sector reform in the Pacific, more than we need another public sector reform program in the Pacific?’ Marcus P. I agree with you Marcus P. and the real problem is encapsulated in your statement above. To quote the aphorism constantly circulating the internet at the moment, ‘The real definition of insanity is to keep doing that which doesn’t work.’ I note that my recent previous comments on this subject have elicited a thundering silence whereas other far more esoteric and nebulous motherhood suggestions seem to be endlessly debated. Can it be that the simplistic enunciation of the problem doesn’t resonate with the accepted view that often appears to be; ‘If you keep hitting a square peg hard enough, it’s eventually going to fit a round hole.’ Billions of aid dollars have been wasted by continuing to pour funds into the ‘black holes’ of overseas government services in so called developing countries due to the wonderful rosy glow it appears to give those who feel they are achieving practical results without anything tangible and long lasting ever actually happening in practice. Government bureaucracies are by their very nature, not held accountable by those who themselves are not able to be held accountable. The CEO’s of these bureaucracies are appointed by governments and ministers who have their own agendas and know the voters neither have the ability nor opportunity to hold them and their appointed minions responsible and accountable. The essence of the debate should be simply one of logic. No aid program should be funded without first ensuring there is a practical and operational feedback loop to ensure the predicted objectives and achievement benchmarks are being met and maintained. Progress payments and a policy of ‘No results, no money’ might ensure we see ‘bang for our buck’. Reams of subsequently glowing reports of platitudes, motherhood statements and hyperbole are just a waste of paper. Understandably however, such a ‘results based policy’ might also reduce and restrict the operations of those in the overseas aid game who presumably don’t wish to have an objective spotlight turned on their own endeavors. Husat ilaik toktok nauya? (Anyone care to comment?)

Ross Garnaut is well-respected in both countries. He should be thankful that PNG has helped him build his profile and put him where he is now – one of Australia’s most influential individuals. However, among the many hats that he has been wearing, Climate Change and Mining are two challenging, yet hypocritical. Has the good Prof. become a sacrificial lamb for the gigantic MNC’s or has he misled himself in his career path and academic discourse mixing up his values, if he had some? Of course, losing a Chairman’s job won’t make him go starving in the new year since he is already rich given his prominence and wealth his many ‘top jobs’ may have given him over the many decades of his frolific life – yes check out Forbes! His real loss now is the “saga” created by the O’Neill-BHP Biliton connection – let alone the Chinese connection. O'Neill has definitely won the confidence of many citizens who want to end any form of Neo-colonialist connotations in today's vocabulary. However, any sober person (PNG citizens like myself, Australians with PNG connections and the Fly River landowners), would nod with Garnaut on his critical comments about mining taxes being misused by PNG politicians and bureaucrats. Since when has aid money or mining revenues and taxes been sustainably managed and used in PNG? Speaking on sustainability, is Garnaut “the person” to head a mining company when he has written immensely about Climate Change issues? On the other hand, is O’Neill “the person” to shut-off technical people/advisors and in this case, for a very “small” but honest comment by Garnaut that many see no major fault with it? Is O’Neill trying to do a cover up or is he doing a poilitical witch-hunt? All we know, for sure, is that PNGSDP has not delivered to expectations and Garnaut can take the blame for that. On the other hand, we must also know that O’Neill, as a person, CANNOT decide for the thousands of Fly River people nor for PNGuineans. His job as the PM does not give him all the rights to proclaim decisions that go beyond mining and development in PNG. However, that is how funny politicians respond in PNG politics – scolding at and rebuking critics while keep dipping their fingers into what they are seemingly there for. That is what defines their ego. Hence, are we seeing two hypocritical figures at play here; a Garnaut whose values and qualifications imply anti-mining and promotion of environmental sustainability and an O’Neill who plans to make 2013 a year to fight corruption. Although, Garnaut’s comments have been perceived by many as honest and somewhat “insensitive” to a government that is headed by a PM who is defensive and has taken unilateral action on someone who has been immensely attached to PNG. It is therefore, humble for O’Neill to swallow his government’s pride, accept criticisms and bring back Prof. Garnaut to continue what he is supposed to be doing – this time Garnaut should serve PNGSDP and the people of Fly River with honesty, dedication and some values of humanity. Thus, the critics that PNGSDP has not done much for the people should be the issue to tackle, not characters

Thanks Terence for another thought-provoking blog. Perhaps a suitable analogy that helps us understand why public sector capacity building in the Pacific performs sub-optimally is the Soviet tractor gearbox factory? This factory produces tractor gearboxes of a type and number because it had been planned in Moscow to happen this way, many years ago. As it has occurred, the factory ends up with more gearboxes than it can dispose of, yet the workers are so badly paid that they cannot survive. So they trade gearboxes on the black market for milk and bread from the state dairy producer and state bakery. The state wheat farm that gets the tractors that use the gearboxes is grossly inefficient because the gearboxes are not the right type for the farm, and they break down regularly anyway due to poor quality assurance in the factory. And the bread queue for ordinary citizens in Moscow gets longer and longer every day. In short, the incentives for individuals working within the system are poorly aligned with outcomes for ordinary people who depend on the system to work. The intellectual framework that supports a different, nuanced, flexible and demand-driven approach in the public sector reform business model of donors, now largely exists. However there is a great deal of institutional inertia at an operational level that resists the operational implications of the adoption of these principles. This inertia is based around norms and incentives - precisely what is discussed in this blog. Tobias rightly points out (in this blog and his paper) that capacity constraints in the Pacific are often closely linked with a small population base. But most efforts in the past to regionalise, outsource or externalise capacity have hit walls built of passive and sometimes outright resistance. It is difficult to escape the proposition put forth by Acemoglu & Robinson (http://whynationsfail.com/) last year that endemic capacity challenges are a political problem, and not a technical problem. I don't think this means that donors can't do anything about public sector capacity in developing countries. For example, in Solomon Islands, Australia has about A$240 million of influence to play with through its agencies. That's a fair degree of influence in Honiara. But how it is allocated is far more important than how much is allocated. If we think the Solomon Islands Ministry of Health has the right conditions and incentives to deliver public goods, then directing many more tens of millions into that organisation will nurture and support the dominant paradigm within that organisation, and deliver exponentially more of what is already being delivered. Or alternatively if it is riddled with malfeasance and maladministration, and delivers very little in the way of public goods, then we should expect that we will further nurture that culture by directing more funds in that direction. Consequently donors need a far greater and nuanced understanding of how institutions change, and more importantly they need to follow up with the will to alter how they allocate resources, if they are to play a positive role in making bureaucracies work better in the Pacific. Perhaps to make bureaucracies work better we need reform of the way we do public sector reform in the Pacific, more than we need another public sector reform program in the Pacific?

This is a great report on these lectures. Duflo's methods are so important to ensuring that aid assumptions are challenged. Her work on the important influence grandmothers can have on their granddaughters' health with just a small cash transfer is still in circulation, 13 years later: http://economics.mit.edu/files/732

The Garnaut imbroglio poses something of a dilemma for the Federal government. There’s a plausible (and ethical) argument to propose that Bob Carr’s foreign policy approach to PNG should maintain a balance between building the relationship and making it clear it does not condone bad policy (although the diplomatic nuances of such a posture are complex). But real politik within Australia would dictate that the government steer well clear of the tangled issue of Garnaut, the Sustainable Development Program and Peter O’Neill’s sensitivities. In an election year, Gillard and Carr certainly wouldn’t want to do anything that might stimulate greater controversy around the Manus refugee camps than already exists (and O’Neill is already encountering resistance to the initiative from Belden Namah). But most of all they wouldn’t want to jeopardise the newly strengthened and energised friendship with the PNG government, with Peter O’Neill being central to this. Papua New Guinea’s strategic importance in the China-Pacific era has dawned on our politicians and the need for a stable, friendly PNG has become a paramount goal. Bob Carr learned last year than intervening, even rhetorically, in PNG government actions is a dangerous place to be. One can perhaps criticise the PNG government in its approach to the Ok Tedi issue, but it seems a pity that Ross Garnaut didn’t handle the matter a little more sensitively himself.

Thanks Stephen for this. Without giving away anything of what will appear tomorrow(!) I would add 2 further items here. One is how PNG and Fiji will position themselves both within the MSG and the region more widely. On the one hand, there are indications that PNG is moving to leverage off its economic strength to gain greater diplomatic influence and on the other there are instances of these 2 collaborating yet more closely (possible investment in bemobile from Fiji is an example). And the Australia-PNG relationship whilst very warm at the moment will have a number of hotspots to negotiate including (but not limited to) pressure from elsewhere in relation to decolonisation issues, especially in relation to West Papua which then adds Indonesia into the mix.

Thanks MJ, I sort of agree with the direction of your comment, but wouldn't necessarily take it so far. I agree that it can be hard for donors to tackle malpractice or corruption head on, because this jeopardises relationships with partner governments. Yet at the same time there's reasonably good evidence to show that well intended aid reduces corruption, so it's not as if we get nothing for our buck here. I suspect though that most of this reduction, along with many of the improvements that we do sometimes see as a result of aid funded public service strengthening only occurs as a result of aid functioning as a countervailing force pulling against the destructive forces of local politics, which has a positive impact while it's there, but little by means of a positive legacy (with rare exceptions) after it is gone. I also agree that there are times when donors really do need to abandon efforts to 'strengthen partner systems' and try alternate mechanisms of service delivery, and that we don't do this enough. On the other hand I'd want to add to that statement that such alternatives are always second best: in the medium to long run there's no alternative to having the state provide health and education services and *if* we can use aid to achieve this, even if it's painfully slow an inefficient in the short term it's still a long term win. Whereas alternate delivery mechanisms are only really band aids. That being said, when you're bleeding a band aid is a very helpful thing. And in circumstances where we're achieving nothing or next to nothing through our strengthening partner system work then I'm all for abandoning this and then doing our best to make sure our aid delivers welfare benefits to the poor by finding alternate means of delivery. Thanks again for an interesting comment.

Nice typology. I would add two points to the general analysis. Firstly, in my experience developing country bureaucracies love to highlight the lack of capacity because they can then get lots of perks along side the capacity building that follows, and, moreover, because it implicitly gets them off the hook for corruption and apathy. Since in the development industry we spend a lot of time having to cooperate with the bureaucracies we often go along with this. It is one of the great euphemisms of international development, and one of the most unhelpful. Secondly all the big donors operate primarily through the local government as the implementing agency. So with huge dollops of cash to spend they throw a lot of money at the one thing that (almost) everyone can agree is a problem, without considering whether it is the primary constraint to improvements. At least some donor representatives around here recognise this problem, but any attempt to introduce competition in service delivery through the private sector or NGOs rarely gets anywhere for all the obvious reasons. And without local government agreement their hands are tied by head office's rules. Better not to spend the money, then, imho, but with domestic constituencies focused myopically on 0.7% GDP etc the tap stays open, pouring cash into the least effective pipe of them all.

Hi Tobias, Thanks for a very good comment. I agree that capacity is a significant problem in many cases, and I certainly wouldn't want to be seen to be downplaying it. And yet at the same time I think that if there are also serious problems with the incentive structure that trickles down from the political sphere improving capacity still won't change things that much, at least if we're not doing what we can to improve the incentive environment at the same time too. Surely if capacity building was a magic bullet would would have seen better sustained results from our work in this area? On the case of structures - excellent point. I wrote a post on Andrews and Pritchett's paper on this a couple of years ago: https://devpolicy.org/isomorphic-mimicry/ And I agree entirely with: "One approach that might help avoid both capacity problems and some political economy issues is ensuring that bureaucratic reform is informed by what can work to achieve the relevant outcome within constraints, rather then attempting to impose hugely ambitious imported models (accompanied by endless capacity-building programs) regardless of their appropriateness." Thanks for adding considerably to my original post.

The International Donors and Clients Community (especially in Africa) must deployed ICT and provide the appropriate Training, and used ICT like the business community has, to be able to have Return On Investments -ROIs. Gadema K. Quoquoi

You are absolutely right Terence - it is very hard for aid agencies, advisers, NGOs etc to do not least because it does not fit easily if at all into project design and delivery plans and it is also very hard to quantify. If and when it does happen it is almost always because the stars have somehow self-aligned rather than having been project-managed into it. I guess it is about remembering the importance and value of this and then having your (individual and institutional) antennae attuned in order to be able to contribute when the time is right.