Comments

Thank you Garth, Claire and Robert for your comments. Garth - just to reiterate: I'm not an aid worker and I travel by bus. The bike idea is interesting, could I suggest you broach it with your colleagues. I can think of potential reasons why it might be problematic but it is your colleagues who you ultimately need to convince. And who might also be able to convince you that in some circumstances bikes might not be that advantageous. Also, you wrote: "On the broader issue, perhaps spending on foreign aid workers wouldn’t be so problematic if the share of total aid funding going to them was much less than the amount getting to local people and if there was stronger evidence that most consultants had a positive sustainable impact." When I used to work at NZAID overheads were less than 10% of total aid spend. This included staff costs and some of the consultant costs. Even if you added in the additional consultant costs, at least in the NZ aid programme, the cost of aid workers was still much less than the total amount of aid given to developing country partners. cheers Terence

I support Clare's view that you have written an interesting and balanced article. Being mindful of the disparities and the impact on both work and on accompanying families is very important. Achieving the best balance can challenging with the added complexity of spouses and children to be considered in some cases. Some of the worst cases I have experienced in Indonesia have (I hope!) now disappeared. One that was prevalent in the 80s was for advisers travelling to the field with national colleagues staying in upmarket hotels, including the Hyatt, while their partners stayed in cheapest small hotels. Today, for longer-term consultants living in the larger cities in Indonesia, the disparities are steadily reducing as the local middle class expands and living conditions become more comparable. Which raises the broader question, 'what are we doing there?' I write this from my comfortable hotel room in Ramallah .... Hmmm. Thank you again for an excellent article.

Thank you Terence Wood for your very balanced article. I have thought many times of writing something similar as I see ' that lucrative lifestyle' sometimes taken for granted (and absolutely expected) by some Australian Aid workers here in Fiji. I have worked in the area of Aid and Development for almost 10 years, the 1st five of which I worked with AVI (as a PACTAM paid health adviser). Not at all a lucrative salary compared to most but it still allowed me to live a comfortable safe existence in Fiji, where I still reside and have a 'middle class' lifestyle by Fiji standards. Thanks again for your interesting insights and hopefully it will create at least some 'reflection' among the thousands of Aid workers around the world, as it did for me. Clare

Terence, Maybe you and many other aid workers would benefit from a bike. They have these great electric assisted ones now that make hills easy, you can relate to the people around you and you can get about 40 of them for the cost of one Landcruiser. On the broader issue, perhaps spending on foreign aid workers wouldn't be so problematic if the share of total aid funding going to them was much less than the amount getting to local people and if there was stronger evidence that most consultants had a positive sustainable impact.

While the situation in Canadian aid looks pretty dire perhaps some of the negative effects can be reduced by working to focus ODA more on those types of aid and locations that have the most impact on reducing poverty and on getting the Canadian Government to make non-aid pro-development actions related to trade, access to essential drugs, intellectual property, sovereign bankruptcy, democratic international institutions and illicit financial flows.

Just last week I drove up the National Highlands Highway from Madang to Banz in the newly created Jiwaka Province (formerly Western Highlands Province). I visited several feeder roads to the remote villages in parts of Simbu Province and Eastern Highlands Province (EHP). My observation is in agreement with Andrew that the past ten years of high economic growth at the macro level has not trickled down to the micro level. Many rural villages and some urban dwellers in PNG are struggling at the fringes of deteriorating infrastructures. The state of the national Highlands Highway which is the main economic lifeline of two- thirds of the nations populations is deplorable. Some section of the roads are virtually impassable. It makes me wonder: what has happened to all the economic growth trumpeted in ADB, ANZ and BPNG reports? Alas, the 10 million Kina District Support Grant given to each MP each year for five years. Some MPs like the Speaker of Parliament Hon. Jeffery Nape have been MPs for 2 consecutive terms (10 years).

Interesting article. I wonder whether committing to providing migrants with "pastoral care" is asking too much.

What a depressingly narrow and robotic, if stylistically predictable analysis, there's more to life than rational underlying imperatives, just ask those you love. Good attempt at deconstructing even lazier analysis though!

Thanks to Erik and Stephen for their considered reflections on my reply. I’ll leave it to others who have had closer contact with KFCP more recently to comment further on how it has fared relative to the opportunities and constraints it has faced. I’ll limit my comments here to a few further reflections on the policy context in which demonstration activities are operating. On the fundamental issue of whether large-scale REDD+ funds are too distant and uncertain, I assume that the authors’ concern about the $100 billion a year pledge is that it is too far into the future to provide the basis for a national REDD+ initiative, rather than that Indonesia’s share of $100 billion would be too small to be considered ‘large-scale’ (bear in mind that a prominent review of REDD financing estimated that halving deforestation globally by 2030 would cost around $17-$33 billion a year). While a target for 2020 may seem distant, negotiations about scaling up current pledges of finance in the intervening years are anything but remote. This year in the UN climate negotiations wealthy countries will be under considerable pressure to pledge funds for the period 2013-15 at levels significantly higher than current pledges of around $10 billion a year. It is notable that in a context where the real value of aid has fallen in 2011, wealthy countries have continued to stand by their short-term and long-term climate finance pledges, even if the allocation of pledged funds to specific projects has been slower than expected. Moreover, several recently established multilateral REDD+ funds (including the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and the Forest Investment Program) are now reaching the point where they can disburse more substantial resources. Nor is market-based REDD+ finance before 2020 altogether out of the picture. For example, work is underway on rules that could allow REDD+ credits to be admitted under California’s cap-and-trade scheme from 2015. Whether REDD+ will be able to compete successfully with other climate-related funding for energy and adaptation remains dependent on both the success of demonstration activities and larger-scale policy initiatives such as the Indonesian moratorium. Reported abuses of the moratorium such as the Tripa peat swamp in Aceh are certainly serious (note that a new criminal investigation into that case has just been launched), but such cases also need to be put into a broader perspective. A 2012 report by the World Resources Institute, while likewise acknowledging that enforcement will remain a major challenge, assessed that violations of the moratorium in its initial phase have been ‘rare’ (rather than ‘rife’). The key issue is not whether compliance with the moratorium will be perfect (which it surely will not be) but whether there has been enough compliance to start shifting Indonesia’s forest emissions below a business as usual trajectory. Until that data is available, individual breaches will only tell us part of the story. Finally, multilateral REDD+ negotiations may be frustratingly slow, but that doesn’t mean they are leading nowhere. UNFCCC submissions are notoriously vague but there is often a considerable amount of technical work underlying them that is fed into negotiations, particularly in the UNFCCC’s subsidiary bodies. As the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has reported, the results on REDD+ from last year’s climate conference in Durban were mixed, but there was nevertheless important progress in several key areas. A senior UK lawyer on carbon markets commented, "For the private sector interested in long-term reputable investments associated with REDD+ actions, this is a very positive decision.” Each step in the negotiations may be slower than what’s needed, and there remains a real risk that the REDD+ negotiations will falter. In this sense, I certainly agree with Erik and Stephen that current REDD+ efforts are not large enough or rapid enough to match ongoing drivers of deforestation. But as in the case of demonstration activities, it doesn’t follow that the current approach needs to be abandoned altogether (rather than built upon) if what’s really needed is a greater sense of urgency coupled with a high-level commitment on the part of both developed and developing countries to make REDD+ work.

Thanks David and Paul for your comments. You both point to the fervor surrounding RCTs - it's unfortunate if institutions think them to be the be all and end all. I certainly hope (and indeed believe) that AusAID will not go down the path of funding projects that are only suitable for RCTs (and by extension platinum style evaluations which also incorporate qualitative tools). For many reasons, including the ones mentioned above, we need an array of evaluations of different rigor depending on the cost, benefit, practicalities and technical expertise available.

It has been pointed out to me that the Independent Evaluation Committee does not report to the AusAID Director General. It is responsible to the Development Effectiveness Standing Committee (DESC). This is true, see the terms of Reference of the IEC here http://www.ode.ausaid.gov.au/publications/pdf/iec-tor.pdf . However the DESC is chaired by the Director General of AusAID see the DESC terms of reference here www.ode.ausaid.gov.au/publications/pdf/desc-tor.rtf . It is notable that in the United Kingdom that the Independent Commission on Aid Impact reports to Parliament through the House of Commons International Development Committee.

Great information 🙂