Comments

Many thanks for the comments. Interestingly I got very similar comments on the PiPP facebook site where we also posted the blog and also to me personally so clearly there are many who think the emperor may be rather scantily clad. I think Robert has it correct when he says that there are too many "objectives". I think you all touch on this issue about being clear about what we intend to achieve and then focusing on just that. I think one problem has been that it is all too easy to criticize aid. Why are we helping starving Ethiopians when if we had solved the water problem ..... the problem with this type of argument is then you end up by designing "all inclusive" plans that are "holistic" and "sustainable". These are words to win the argument but lose the debate as ultimately nothing is ever sustainable or holistic. We (in the aid industry) should try and avoid the easy route - we are not going to "heal the world" a-la Michael Jackson. We are going to identify a problem on the ground and try and fix it. Donors should try and avoid the easy explanation of what they do - we will not eradicate poverty, we will help people in need where we can identify what their need is and have the resources to help them. This sort of covers the point raised above about simply asking people what they want. On the facebook site I mention that had I not written this piece I would have written a mock blog about what would have happened in 1960 if JFK had told the donors he wanted to go to the moon? I suspect a team of consultants would have come to first define what he meant by "go to" and "moon". More consultants would have come to devise a medium term strategic plan that would have eradicated communism, hunger and taken us to the moon in a holistic and sustainable way for the whole world (forget swap this is glop - global policy !!) - this would have taken three years to complete due to arguments - then we would have to design a medium term fiscal framework which would take another three years. The project would then be reviewed and the priorities changed to going to mars. We would fill in project completion forms about the impact of the work on HIV, gender and disability. An audit would be done which would take another year, exhaust everybody's patience and in the end find we accidentally bought red paint. Since we have a zero tolerance policy for commies the whole program would have been outsourced to GRM etc etc etc and we would never have got the moon and I would not be able to use the internet. Finally, whoever said the problem is more acute in the Pacific is kind of correct - it occurs everywhere but it is more visible and has more impact in our tiny region. Anybody want to help me write the mock blog? I think it needs to be written.

Hi Wesley. Some good suggestions. I'd maybe add the need to hold people, firms and donors accountable for development programmes or initiatives, and the requirement to revise ideas if things go wrong. The problem is that donors could pay lip-service to these proposals without any practical change. Somehow these need to be programmed into the approach via institutions and even theory. I actually don't think adherents to the Washington Consensus paid any attention to context. John Williamson, who coined the phrase in a 1989 article, called it 'akin to proof the earth is not flat', listing 10 policy points (inflation targeting, privatisation, current-account liberalisation, etc.) which he thought would always lead to development. There's been a bit of softening with the so-called 'post-WC' over the last decade, but it's still univeralist and largely context-insensitive. There's no need to resort to extreme relativism, where we end up with analytical paralysis. We're nowhere near that end of the spectrum at the moment. In my book Reflexivity and Development Economics (sorry for the plug) I discuss at length the need to strive for a position between full postmodern 'anything goes' approaches and the kind of mechanical one-size-fits-all universalism of the Washington Consensus. There's lots of room between these two extremes. Matthew, you're right that there can be different levels of context-sensitivity. Not everything requires deep-rooted attention to context and consultation, otherwise not much would get done. It's good that the discussions happening at all; that the debate has switched toward the importance of context, because we've just come out of three decades of one-fits-fits-all policymaking which had limited success. I do think that more attention needs to be paid to the whole underlying methodology of conventional economics, which very strongly influences development policy. The global crisis has prompted a rethink. This is happening at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, for example. Some of the more prominent economists are beginning to revise their views, and previously peripheralised economists are being heard (like Steve Keen). Cheers, Dan

One area which is often overlooked is what Australia can do to help reduce the trauma and economic impacts of road crashes associated with the increased motorisation in developing countries. This time last year Australia supported the launch of the UN Decade of Action on Road Safety, a program aimed at saving at least 5 million lives from road crashes by 2020. Richard Marles on behalf of Kevin Rudd announced an increase in Australia’s commitment to the the World Bank Global Road Safety fund to $2m pa over 3 years. see http://www.acrs.org.au/decadeofaction/ Australia has a good record in saving lives from reducing crashes and protecting those who crash from death and injury. 90,000 Australians are alive today because the rising road toll trend was reversed in the 70′s. So we have comparative advantage in road safety management, a key focus promoted by Andrew Leigh and also Simon McKeon ; but we don’t tell enough people about it. The Government’s action last year was a good small step in the right direction. Many simple, low cost solutions are available. On May 11 the Australian College of Road Safety together with others will host a rountable at Old Parliament House to review the first year's progress in the UN Decade of Action. On Friday May 11 there will be a Canberra-based roundtable jointly organised by Australasian College of Road Safety and the Australian Road Research Board (ARRB), which will bring together key agencies and individuals who are making a difference to road safety in the international, national and local spheres, with a particular emphasis on relating achievements throughout the first year of the Decade of Action & NRSS. Speakers will include the Hon. Catherine King, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure and Transport and Dr Soames Job, Executive Director of the National Road Safety Council. There is no charge for participation and details are available from Claire Howe at the College. (claire.howe@acrs.org.au) Lauchlan McIntosh

The research should not have been publicised in the public domain if it is preliminary. In any case current is more valid and should be published in public domain for the information of the public especially development agencies. The danger here is that such publicity give wrong informaiton to people who don't know the realities of Western Province. Lydia

Wesley/Dan Yes, context is important. I think even the most hardened Washington Consensus ideologue would agree, or at least pay lip service, to such a statement. That said, I think we need to be careful with how far we take the argument. At its extreme, we end up with what Brian Levy calls “analytical defeatism” (see this excellent <a href="http://blogs.worldbank.org/governance/getting-beyond-the-every-country-is-unique-mantra" rel="nofollow">blog of his</a>). That is, the idea that theory is completely useless in development because every context is different. I think a more useful approach is one that recognises that context is important, but that its importance differs according to context (!). So for example, context is likely to be very important for land administration in Vanuatu. It will be less important for determining the appropriate electricity tariff charged by UNELCO, where the best approach will closely resemble that used in other countries. Lastly, I couldn’t agree more about the problems of high turnover among donors and its adverse implications for aid in the region. Wesley’s four points are spot on.

I was initially moved to comment on this research because of media coverage that lacked the many caveats and qualifications provided by Mark in his response. I’d like to thank Mark for acknowledging the preliminary nature of his research and carefully elucidating the range of issues that will need to be addressed to arrive at a better HDI measure. It is certainly unfortunate that findings that “will undoubtedly be revised heavily before being used for further analysis” have received so much media attention. In addition to the coverage in the Australian media, the <a href="http://www.deakin.edu.au/news/2012/23042012PNGMarkIndexresults.php " rel="nofollow">press release</a> that was issued by Deakin University has been reprinted in both of the national newspapers in Papua New Guinea and has aroused significant comment in the press and online forums. The reporting has focused on the apparent low levels of development in Western Province. As such I think it’s entirely appropriate to discuss other studies that have used similar data and have found far higher levels of development in Western Province. Notwithstanding the technical differences between the indices that were correctly identified by Mark, I maintain that it is of interest that the low level of access to National Roads in Western Province appears to be one of the main factors causing its low HDI score. In due course new data and improved methodologies should help to give a far clearer picture of the progress in human development across PNG. In the meantime, I would politely suggest that Mark McGillivray can’t have his cake and eat it. If, as he says, “it is premature to compare the HDI scores presented at the conference with the work of the NEFC in 2004 or for that matter any other indicators of development levels in PNG”, then surely it is also premature to compare the preliminary HDI scores he computed with the values published for other countries by the UNDP? I would like to end my comment by echoing the thanks from Matt. This is an important topic and the debate and public interest in measuring development that Mark has stimulated is very timely.

I'm in furious agreement with your sentiment Dan - 'Why not just ask people what they want?' Context is so important! Yet it often seems that importing the latest prescriptions for development and economic growth (as developed elsewhere) is easier than a 'ground-up' approach that builds on the social, cultural, economic and geographic circumstances of Pacific island countries themselves. This seems an inevitable outcome of the claims to unversality made by some brands of economic theory... Who needs to listen to people, or even take into account obvious geographic factors like massive oceans and small land masses, when you can listen to development economists (who have universal answers)? I think you're right that donors need to listen if they are to 'get back in touch with reality'. But (importantly) they need to be capable of listening. I imagine this requires change at an institutional level. I guess we could draw some recommendations out of this discussion: - Employ more locals in positions of responsibility - Encourage open, and collaborative, policy discussions - Focus on building 'institutional memory' (including by listening to sour old spanner monkeys) - Admit mistakes (and learn from them) Any others?

Thank Mark, You have stimulated an interesting debate and obviously there are methodological issues. But isn't the key issue that your conclusions drawn on Western Province's level of development are misleading because they are based on old data? I think what David is trying to show using more recent data, albeit not with directly comparable methodologies, is that the situation in Western Province may not be as bad as the headlines from your report. The solution is to a) note that the headlines on Western Provinces relative level of development are based on old and perhaps weak data, b) look at more recent data to see if HDI is likely to have got better in the last decade, and c) to get NSO (and their donors) to publish better data to enable more rigorous analysis. Matt

The issue of human development achievements in PNG and the disparities they reveal is an issue of fundamental importance. To this extent it is pleasing that David Freedman picks up on this in his comment, which is based on a powerpoint file used during a 15 minute presentation at the Deakin conference. Yet the comment reflects some key misunderstandings of the research in question, and misrepresents its purpose. I will quickly outline the grounds on which I make this statement. As was made clear at the Deakin conference the research is a first attempt to derive internationally comparable sub-national HDI scores for PNG provinces and districts. These scores will be the subject of significant scrutiny and will undoubtedly be revised heavily before being used for further analysis. The estimates of income per capita, which are currently extremely crude, will be the subject of significant further work. It is obvious that there are determinants of income per capita in addition to roads, and that for some parts of PNG roads might not be especially important in this regard. The main point I make here is that given the very preliminary nature of the research in question, it is premature to compare the HDI scores presented at the conference with the work of the NEFC in 2004 or for that matter any other indicators of development levels in PNG. David Freedman notes that the research is based on data that are mostly more than 10 years old, labeling this as unfortunate. The HDI scores presented at the conference will, after the further scrutiny mentioned above, serve as baseline for monitoring. They are in no way intended to show today’s realities, to the extent that quantitative measures can do this. (This point was made to David prior to the submission of his comment, but he has ignored it). The intent is to update these scores using those calculated using more recent information (including that mentioned by David in his comment), and then compare these newer scores with the baseline information. David Freedman’s comparison of the HDI scores presented at the Deakin conference (putting aside that this is a misuse of these scores) with the NEFC’s District Development Index is reflects two key errors or misunderstandings. First, the HDI scores are intended to be internationally comparable, so that achievements in human development in PNG can be compared with those in other developing countries. What this in effect involves is comparing the PNG sub-national HDI scores with those published in the UNDP Human Development Report. The latter use estimates of income per capita, not poverty incidence, which is a very different measure. In this context, the question of whether it is better to use the poverty incidence or an estimate of income per capita simply does not arise, and to ask it is quite misleading. Second, the NEFC’s District Development Index and the HDI index presented at the Deakin conference use different methodologies. The former is formed by taking the arithmetic mean of achievements in health, education and poverty, the latter by taking the geometric mean of achievements in health, education and income. In other words, the former is calculated by adding together these achievements, and the latter by multiplying them by each other. Each index also uses different ways of normalizing these achievements. The HDI index presented at the Deakin conference is consistent with current UNDP HDI methodology, while the NEFC’s index follows an older methodology. This means that even if I used exactly the same achievements as the NEFC to form the index presented at the Deakin conference, the resulting indices would yield different rankings. David’s comparison of these rankings totally misses this point, and that his reasoning for the difference in rankings is flawed. Of course the difference will be due to one index using poverty incidence and the other using an estimate of per capita income, but it is also due to their different statistical properties. I will end one a more positive note. David Freedman is totally correct in pointing to the need for good quality data. The NSO clearly requires more support to produce such data.

Thanks for your comments Ashley, and Richard. There was no specific estimate of the impact that second hand smoke had on under five mortality in the reports. However the WHO report cited in the blog did estimate that an additional 600,000 people died each year from second hand smoke globally, over and above the 5 million premature deaths that occurs amongst smokers. I agree, Ashley, that an increased excise tax would have a higher impact on the poor than the rich (ie is regressive) assuming those people are addicted and find it hard to quit. But raising the real price of tobacco through excise taxes is a particularly powerful way of discouraging uptake of tobacco use in the first place, especially amongst the young and the poor. Combined with other measures (banning tobacco advertising etc) an increase in the price of tobacco is a smart and cost-effective way of reducing tobacco use before it becomes addictive. Thanks again for your thoughtful observations. Ian

Nik, you sour and grumpy old man! 😉 No, I reckon you're quite right. First, government isn't business. Incentives are different, the processes aren't the same and the objectives are far more difficult to quantify. 'Managerialism' -- the endless focus on targets, indicators and evaluation -- has come under criticism in developed country governments. I don't see why developing countries should be any different. All that management mumbo-jumbo just gets in the way of doing things. School pupils or the sick aren't 'customers'. They're people. And I think Wesley hits on an important area, too. As a person with experience in several Pacific islands myself, one thing that didn't happen half as often as it should was true consultation. I don't mean the occasional Powerpoint presentation at a workshop, but carefully-designed procedures to work out what people actually want, or even – shock-horror – actually putting locals in positions of responsibility. Too often a short-term outside technical assistant would come and do what 'economic theory' or textbooks said. As we all know, in consensual, non-conflicting cultures, where people often communicate verbally rather than in writing, it can be difficult to confront the view of outsiders. Unsurprisingly, people in many of the Pacific island countries don't make their views known in quite the same way as urban Australians. There are few incentives for the deliverers of aid to actually listen to people want; either to design consultations procedures well enough to reflect people's views, or to actually do what people say on the few occasions that their views do get heard. To repeat, why not just ask people what they want? One of the culprits for both this and the wider problem that you discuss -- the influx of starry-eyed idealogues -- is the universalism of economic theory. Mainstream, neoclassical economics underlies a lot of aid intervention. This sort of economics imagines that people are self-interested, individualistic utility-maximisers who respond primarily only to material incentives. Economists, particularly academic ones, tend to imagine that on this basis they've broadly solved many of the problems of development, and all that needs to be done is to drop in to developing countries and tell governments what to do. But in much of the world, and especially the Pacific, this type of economics couldn't be more inappropriate. People tend to be communally-minded and social and often to do things for intrinsic reasons rather than material gain. The economic answers haven't been found (and the global crisis proves that the ‘answers’ don’t even work in the rich world); they depend on context. And knowledge comes in many forms, some of it tacit and non-formal. What works in Washington may not work in South Tarawa. And in the end, yes, we need to listen very hard to the experienced people who've been 'in the field' (I don't much like that expression as it suggests that the field is different to normal reality). Spanner monkeys like you probably know much more than the grand academic theorists. It also means that we should listen much more to what local people actually want. As you imply, there’s probably no need for fancy big ideas. There’s definitely a big need to get back in touch with reality.

Hi Nic. Interesting blog. I would suggest that the phenomenon Robert also refers to, of development workers as 'highly qualified dreamers who have no interest in understanding or in building on experience' may be more prevalent in the Pacific than elsewhere. I would be interested to see what others think, but perhaps it is due to a relative dearth of 'institutional memory' ... While there may be some 'soured and grumpy older men and women from the field' their valuable experience in addressing development challenges is often hard to tap into. It seems to me further that 'the Pacific' is a wildly complicated region, with divergent cultures, experiences of colonialism, resource endowments, political structures, trading histories etc. And each Pacific island country faces wholly unique domestic challenges. I think this complexity is often glossed over. To understand the key policy challenges of countries of the region takes a considerable investment of time and energy. Yet, many aid workers are transient. New advisers/consultants/volunteers have a high rate of turnover, and each new aid worker needs to learn the issues anew (and are surely more susceptible to the latest 'fad'...). Perhaps the challenge is building more 'institutional memory', and better linking those 'sour and grumpy men and women in the field' to new, would-be, dreamers. Open, and collaborative, policy discussions seem a great place to start.