Comments

Thanks for the interesting comments. I wasn't aware of the Indonesian school maintenance example. Ostrom et al.'s argument is clearly a simplification/abstraction of a much more complex reality. I'm of the opinion that culture and government systems will tend to reflect underlying political economy incentives. At the very least, cultural norms/govt systems cannot be against the material interests of those in power; if they are, these norms/systems will not be followed and will be changed. I see the cultural norm of maintenance neglect in the Pacific as occuring precisely because there are limited incentives for infrastructure maintenance. Were incentives to provide maintenance established, I strongly suspect "cultural" factors would quickly change. The same applies for govt systems - if leaders and senior bureaucrats had incentives to establish systems of the kind that Robert describes, I think this would occur - although I agree it isn't a simple process, and does warrant donor focus. I recently read a discussion paper on these sorts of issues, which also explores the link between material incentives and culture. I don't agree with all the arguments in the paper, but the link is here if you are interested: http://ips.cap.anu.edu.au/ssgm/papers/discussion_papers/2012_03_tobias_a_haque.pdf

While not suggesting that aid dependence is not an issue the suggested primary link to "the normal disciplines of valuing the asset and providing for its replacement in the future ..." is I think invalid. While it is aid dependence is linked I suggest the underlying drivers of decision making need to be explored in more detail and the cultural component (outside normal political posturing) needs to be developed. The position was best summarised for me by the national of a developing country when asked about the issue - his response was that it is fundamentally cultural. In a day-to-day living environment where the standard practice has never included the need to put away for the future notions such as preventative maintenance and replacement provisions have no place. Personal property in the form of homes are built and not worked on until they fail - why should the attitude to public infrastructure be any different. I would suggest that this is further exacerbated when examining a subsistence environment at the national level of a developing country. It is pretty hard to focus on setting aside funds for the future when you are preoccupied with finding enough money for school fees. How to address it? I suggest that some of the strategies being employed in PNG of combining future maintenance contracts with construction/reconstruction activities for road infrastructure is a start in the right direction. However, there are a host of associated issues to be addressed and the only certain thing is that if the answer was easy it would have been done a long time ago.

This is an important contribution to an area of focus in donor aid programs. The image Matthew creates of the white elephant in Samoa will stay with me for ever! A similar story with maintenance exists in Indonesia with school infrastructure projects. As part of an aid effectiveness review in basic education I led for the World Bank in 2008, we visited schools that had received ADB project funds and technical support for substantial school refurbishment in both Lombok and in Bali. In both locations we observed frequent examples of schools that had been refurbished in the period 2003 - 2005. Yet by late 2008, the condition of many school buildings showed heavy wear-and-tear including broken tiles, filthy windows, damaged furniture, worn paintwork and decaying ceilings. Children’s toilets were in poor condition and in some cases totally unusable. In one primary school in Bali the building rehabilitated in 2004 was being torn down and replaced by an entirely new structure to provide more suitable accommodation for children. To be fair, there were other schools that were, on the whole, neat, clean and pleasant places in which learning could occur but there was almost no visible evidence in classrooms of changes in learning and teaching practices, mainly because this was not a part of the project design at all - astonishingly, a school education project with no attention to teaching in the design, but that is another story! During an evaluation for the USAID Decentralized Basic Education Project, Package 1 (DBE1), in late 2011, some of the reasons for lack of school maintenance emerged which seem more fundamental and solvable than simply blaming such outcomes on lack of funds or on laziness, which of course can be important reasons as well. One reason is lack of technical knowledge of how to judge the condition of schools and to plan for maintenance at the level of schools and District governments. In many cases, local governments simply do not have accurate data on the stock of schools in the District nor do they know their physical condition. Accordingly, planning for school maintenance, when done at all, has been at best haphazard. This helps explain the depressing frequency with which one still reads in the Indonesian press of school roofs and walls collapsing on children leading to death and injury. However, when DBE1 developed appropriate school data gathering tools, and analytical strategies, in consultation with schools and Districts, accurate numbers, distribution, size and condition of all schools in participating District were known for the first time. Planning for maintenance could therefore be based on increasingly accurate data as data collectors and data users began to realise the importance of accurate data and its use in planning. Further, some Districts that were planning to build new schools realised their stock of schools indicated further construction was completely unnecessary. If Districts lack accurate school and school-age population data (as many and possibly most do), this raises the very real possibility that school construction projects may be adding unnecessary stock when the immediate need is for school mergers, re-locations or even closures, and for resources and technical skill in school and equipment maintenance. By way of conclusion, and to answer Matthew's question "How can such problems be addressed?", one step in addition to those he describes is to help local stakeholders collect and to use accurate data about the condition of their physical assets, to help in planning maintenance programs, and to provide access to reliable technical support for maintenance. I hope Matthew's excellent article will attract further contributions on this important theme.

I note the authors finding that Africa’s transportation costs are no higher than in other developing countries, but transport prices are much higher. The difference is the set of informal payments and profits earned by trucking companies. The authors identify the source of these high profit margins as being the set of regulations in many African countries that restrict entry of new companies, enabling incumbents to earn large profits. Reforms in the policy and regulatory arenas are required. However, such reforms will be deeply political and vested interests will resist them. The Authors are correct that the only way reform will occur is if the public is informed about the benefits - so politicians will see that it is in their interest to promote such reform. The paper is a significant step in that direction. But what about other countries in Southern Africa i.e. Namibia and Botswana? As the paper was released in 2009, a follow-up study would be most useful in informing stakeholders, especially in Southern Africa, who are about to make significant transport infrastructure investment decisions. E. John Blunt is an Institutional and Public Procurement Expert. Much of his recent work has focused on increasing the use of partner government procurement systems. He is currently on assignment with the Southern African Development Community Secretariat in Botswana. He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport.

It is not surprising that domestic drivers within Australia and New Zealand have proved the key drivers for SPARTECA (including derogations) and they will be equally if not more significant within the context of PACER plus. I agree that the rules of origin are an impediment to Pacific island manufacturers looking to export but perhaps more significant (in terms of affecting more countries) are rules relating to quarantine and it is to be hoped that this issue will also be revisited during the PACER Plus negotiations with a more beneficial outcome for Pacific island countries arising.

Richard, thanks for your comments. As far as publication is concerned, I have just been to the website and in the section on publications under Annual Performance Reports you will see almost the entire selection of reports for 2010. Any reports not there were unavailable for publication when the final vetting process was done, but the publication numbers have improved each year and the Operations section should be commended for lifting the number of reports published. I am not sure if you were looking at the country sites and this is probably a limitation of the website that cross posting is inadequate. There has also been labelling issues in the past regarding dates as the data differs from one country to the next based on when country reporting is done. Where reports are missing, I would suggest highlighting this as an inadeqaute response from the given program as external pressure will ensure country programs take reporting seriously. This has been a major problem with certain sections in the agency and thus external pressure such as this blog is very helpful. I also agree that ODE needs to be more explicit in its criticisms of the system. This is provided in feedback provided to the operations group, but more hands on analysis by ODE would make constructive improvement more immediate and realistic. In essence, I think your points are well made and helpful. Where I would like the debate to go is to the crux of how best to report on 'results'. There is a real danger that simplistic external pressure will drive programs to look for easy things to measure, rather than adequately dealing with the efficacy of our aid program. Encouraging programs to simply focus on outputs and numbers because they are easy to track will not lead to lasting impact which is a much more nuanced challange. Having a realistic debate on emergent issues in tracking development aid would be a good place to start.

Hi DJ Konz - I suspect (and I admit this is purely speculation on my part) that a big part of the reluctance to establish a Department for International Development in Australia is the desire to keep the aid program closely aligned to the foreign affairs portfolio - the Security Council agenda in particular. Elevating AusAID to a Department would move the Agency away from DFAT's influence. AusAID's ability to quickly bring 'resources' to the table (in the form of projects or programs) as nascent diplomatic relationships are formed is an extremely useful asset for DFAT. Of course this only holds as long as the pursuit of Security Council status is an overriding foreign policy objective. It remains to be seen if the new Minister for Foreign Affairs sees it as such.

It’s worth knowing more about the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) in three important areas. The first is the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). As a subsidiary body of the UNCCD, the Global Mechanism (GM - http://www.global-mechanism.org/en/About-Us/Who-we-are) supports developing countries to position land as an investment priority at the national and international levels. In addition, the GM provides countries with specialised advice on accessing finance for sustainable land management from a range of public and private sources, both domestic and international. IFAD has hosted the GM (http://www.ifad.org/partners/gm/index.htm) since its beginning in 1998. The second is IFAD’s support for microfinance – very small loans to the poorest of our world’s poor. According to the 2012 State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report, over the last 13 years, the number of very poor families with a microloan has grown more than 18-fold from 7.6 million in 1997 to 137.5 million in 2010. Assuming an average of five persons per family, these 137.5 million microloans affected more than 687 million family members, which is greater than the combined populations of the European Union and Russia. The third is IFAD in Afghanistan. Currently, IFAD has a limited presence in Afghanistan, with its “Rural Microfinance and Livestock Support Program”, which seeks to improve the livestock sector and generate income for poor rural households. IFAD has noted that poverty in Afghanistan is closely related to: • the high illiteracy rate in rural areas, where 90 per cent of women and 63 per cent of men are unable to read or write; • rural people’s dependance on livestock and agricultural activities for at least part of their income; • inadequate land ownership and access to land; • lack of irrigation infrastructure. The poorest rural people include small-scale farmers and herders, landless people and women who are heads of households. There are an estimated 1 million Afghan widows. Their average age is 35, and 90 per cent of them have an average of four or more children. Without the protection of a husband, widows suffer from social exclusion in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society. Many widows have no choice but to become beggars. Children aged five or under are the most vulnerable segment of Afghan society. As many as 50 per cent of them suffer from chronic malnutrition. A great promise remains to be fulfilled from the 1990 World Summit for Children in New York - putting children first for resources. The nations in Afghanistan must leave Afghanistan a better place for its men, women and children.

Thanks David for your comment. 1. No, tied aid and aid-for trade are not the same thing, but they are not mutually exclusive if the provision of aid is contingent on the sale of goods and services in the donor country. The controversy in Britain was that the Development Secretary suggested that aid to India was also intended to secure a trade deal - the sale of Typhoon - which is against Britain’s official policy stance. 2. Britain’s aid program to India is intended to be on poverty reduction in accordance with the government’s International Development Act 2002. As part of Britain’s new program, the largest portion of Britain’s aid to India (£341m) goes towards wealth creation, particularly ensuring women to have access to savings, credit and insurance. 3. Sumner’s argument is that most of the world’s 960 million poor live in stable, non-fragile middle-income-countries. Both Nigeria and Pakistan recently graduated from the World Bank’s low-income-country classification to a middle-income-country, although yes I agree with you that they are certainly not stable, and not part of the grouping that Sumner is referring to.

Prof Howes mentions the Aid Review's recommendation of a ministerial post for International Development, or at least the explicit appending of 'International Development' to the Foreign Affairs portfolio. A Minister for International Development is a move that many in the development community would support and indeed see as long overdue. The Government's reticence to establish such a portfolio seems to be at least in part from electoral nervousness and timidity about its commitment -ostensibly with bi-partisan support - to increasing foreign aid spending in a context of 'fiscal constraint and aid scepticism'. One observation of Kevin Rudd's time as foreign minister, was that although he was as Prof Howes rightly points out, a strong advocate for Australia's aid program, that seemed rarely to translate into sustained public (eg media) championing of Australian aid. It could be argued that the government felt politically vulnerable to a withdrawal of bipartisan support and therefore did not confidently champion Australian aid to the nation - more a 'don't mention the war!' approach. While perhaps intended to protect the aid program as an expenditure domain from too much public or political scrutiny in fiscally challenging times, it has potentially made it more vulnerable, as many Australians are'nt aware of its many achievements in recent years. There is a place for honest and transparent public discourse about the program's shortcomings, as Prof Howes makes abundantly clear. But that discourse should be within a broader acknowledgement of what is good and improving in the program - 15% fail rates means 85% of projects aren't failing. While this needs to drastically improve, and despite its legitimate criticisms, Australian aid is saving and improving lives. Sadly, few Australians understand to what extent that is the case. Perhaps there is an opportunity for Senator Carr to be a very public, if warts-and-all-honest champion and advocate for what is being achieved through Australian aid. Very public leadership of Australia's aid program, such as that seen under Gordon Brown and now Andrew Mitchell and David Cameron in the UK, can strengthen public support, and thereby create a more confident space for honest but constructive critique and development of our international development program. Hiding the light - and the dark, embarrassing bits - of Australian development assistance under a political bushel is not in the interests of the Australian people, or those assisted by our (God-willing) expanding and improving program.

I am a little ambivalent about the identification of remittance as an advantage on which to base a development strategy. First of all this will involve a paradigm shift in a few countries. The existing thinking is that development serves to lessen migration, to keep the maximum number of people in place. A remittance-based development strategy on the other hand involves the active encouragement of migration. In reality given the chance to move people do seek better economic opportunity, but from there to set up positive government policy to encourage movement is another matter. There are internal issues but also issues with the receiving countries. More likely than not the receiving countries would object or come under internal political pressure to so so, claiming strain on their own social services. So the World Bank should be careful about promoting that as a development strategy.

Three points: 1. Tied aid is not the same as aid-for-trade. Tied aid must be spent on good and services from the donor country. UK aid is not tied. 2. When you suggest that aid in India is linked to trade, do you have any evidence that it's not being spent on poverty reduction in the three target states? 3. There may be 960 million people living in middle income countries, but some of these countries are *certainly* not stable. Nigeria or Pakistan, for example.