Comments

Thanks Satish, I agree with you that we need to think about the problems of planning, and the poor quality of data. I'd add that these two issues go hand in hand. If the planning process builds in and encourages better feedback from stakeholders, as Paul suggests, then this can help planners to verify and improve data. Part of this is for the government to make information and data more readily available. Government collects large amounts of MIS and survey data--very little of which ever sees the light of day. Making data publicly available is a necessary step to enable stakeholders to help government to identify errors and improve data collection processes. Similarly, stakeholder feedback is essential for the design of policies to tackle complex issues. Yet key reports, such as the evaluation of the MTDS, the DSP and MTDP, are not yet readily available and this impedes public discussion. Publication of these reports on the <a href="http://www.planning.gov.pg/" rel="nofollow">Planning website</a> would help raise awareness of the government's thinking and encourage valuable feedback--e.g. from NRI, INA and CIMC--that would help planners and policy-makers.

Paul's critique of the DSP is on two fronts. It would help to think of these as, (i) on the problems of planning itself, and (ii) on the poor data used in the models to generate forecasts. On the first, plans have moved from tallying outputs to the creation of incentives as part of economic reforms geared at raising production and productivity. As one example, lower transportation/communication costs and security to property and person raises returns to investment and effort. The DSP tries to quantify the impact of these changes on production and income. On the second, poor data is a perennial problem in all developing countries. Addressing this deficiency requires investments into data collection, and finetuning of the parameters used in the plan. So let us be clear on which of the above deserves attention.

Thanks Claudia - an excellent comment. The other thing I think worth noting is that, in in many countries, most aid from government aid agencies flows through the partner government. To my mind the main reason for wanting information on this type of aid flow to be pubicised is that it helps citizens in aid recipient countries hold their own governments to account. (Which is a type of feedback but perhaps a little different from what we think about when we talk about aid project feedback). What would be interesting would be to see how resistant (or not) aid recipient governments might be to this type of transparency. They quite probably would be (at least in more poorly governed countries) which could be a potential hurdle. But as no one really seems to have pushed this yet, we don't know. And it at least seems worth a try.

Thanks Peter, In a range of areas, thus far I think the Minister's main achievements to date have been to do the exact opposite of what he's stated he was going to do. So, while he's spoken boldly of reducing overheads, they've actually gone up. Similarly, he scrapped the Koha fund in the name of transparency and efficiency, and replaced it with a fund that currently can't get money out of the door and is now to be overseen by three political appointees.

Thank you Terence for your post! I feel very much "at home" with this discussion. You are right, why on earth is aid transparency at project level, accountability towards beneficiaries not done? Take the example of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). The whole process is very encouraging on the one hand - donors agree an international standard to publish more detailed and timely information. But the standard is far from providing "full disclosure" at project level. It does not demand information, that would allow citizens at project level to know what exactly is going on in a project. Even this transparency standard is a big challenge for donors. At the outset of IATI there was a workstream on accessibility, which was supposed to assure that information published according to the IATI standard would actually reach citizens in partner countries. There has not been much progress in this workstream - partly because donors see their responsibility limited to providing the data. I think transparency at beneficiary level involves two major challenges. 1) For transparency to be relevant and useful at beneficiary level and to encourage feedback it would have to be far more comprehensive than e.g. IATI. So transparency at this level is more difficult and demands more courage for openness. For donors, tax payers in donor countries and researchers general information about a project may suffice. For citizens at project level details matter. 2) If detailed information at project level were given, citizens could provide detailed feedback. But how can such feedback be incorporated into existing project procedures? What if feedback challenges the project policy - is a project manager willing and able to change a project policy? What would happen to scheduled disbursements? Critical feedback may upset a smooth running system and cause a lot of additional work and hazzle. Aid transparency at beneficiary level is only the first step in creating a new culture of accountability. If donors are not willing to change the way they work and to allow citizens' feedback to have an impact on their processes, it is understandable why they are not keen on doing the first step.

Thanks Terence. I think the 'myth' if myth it be has grown out of the notion in the public mind that when they give money for aid causes any part od the dollar that does not go to the needy is being ripped off along the way. This notion, which most people would agree is nonsensical if they thought about it, is fostered by media stories that dwell on the point. From there it's a simple step to demand that government aid agencies should keep their administrative costs low - as point outed, unrealistically low at times. The recent hike in the administrative costs for the International Development Group, formerly NZAID, from an average of 7.5% of program costs to over 12% is extraordinary. It is presumably the product of MFAT re-jigging the funding formula, which allows the Ministry to take another $20m-plus from the aid program itself at the expense of partners. How could administrative expenses have risen so much when staff numbers and therefore the salary budget and corporate overheads are declining? If the new formula is accurate, why were the Ministry and the Treasury, and Parliament, comfortable with the previous Shared Services Agreement. If the Ministry's corporate overheads are so high, what was the case for re-amalgamation of the aid agency built on?

Hi Ryan, Thanks for the link: I've found developmentprogress.org to be a great resource. The other tool that's been an effective counter to pessimism is the CGD's Millions Saved project: http://www.cgdev.org/section/initiatives/_active/millionssaved Hi Peter, Thank you for your comment and the historical perspective you offer. I agree, progress has been slow and there are still many strategic objectives out there to distract from the optimal focus for aid. At least now though the 'good aid space' has increased somewhat, which I think is a very good thing.

In the 1970s the debates on population focused on one issue -- the population explosion. Today population occupies very different positions in discussions of environmental challenge, climate change, health care, aging, industrialization, and social justice. It is increasingly difficult to predict how population will be characterized in the traditional left-right clashes of ideologies. More disturbingly it is increasingly rare to find discussion of population informed by good demographic analysis. The population debates in Australian policy circles tend to be parochial -- What is the optimum population for Australia? How should international migration be controlled? Are support measures bribes for childbearing or supplements for child raising? Seldom are the discussions of Australian population linked with the bigger more complex problems of population across the Asia-Pacific band of countries where Australia collaborates to promote development. Why has population fallen off the development studies agenda?

Interesting comparison of the alleged area of land "grabbed" (sic) in PNG with total area of Costa Rica: <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6190378/Screen%20shot%202011-04-11%20at%2012.02.36%20PM.png" alt="" /> Despite its much smaller area and smaller population, Costa Rica's total exports per capita 1.7 larger than PNG's, and 14.34 times larger per square kilometre, and its coffee exports were larger in total than PNG's from a fraction of PNG's. The country's have similar locations and topographies, both are in the tropics and are well suited to coffee. The main difference is that unlike PNG, Costa Rica is not imprisoned by an absurdly out of date land tenure system.

Why has aid improved since the end of the Cold War? For a start, financial transfers could no longer be justified as a means of supporting allies in the Cold War. As a former diplomat with postings in devdeloping countries, I can recall being told not to highlight aid wastages that could jeopardise transfers that were buying continued support from governing elites or, even worse, were financing their armies to fight proxy wars. Most of all, the need to retain friends meant that the quality of recipient country governance could never ever be mentioned. In fact, seriously bad governance was often defended as "necessary" for stability or as part of a transition to democracy - which never came. So, with the end of the Cold War and the need to respond to positions such as that of Senator Jesse Helms who had described aid as "money down a rathole", more attention had to be given to what made aid effective. Progress has been slow - other national interests still distort aid (e.g. when there is a Security Council seat to be bought), incentives for aid officials are skewed away from progress in meeting the needs of the poorest and, although we now know that good governance is important, we can't agree on just what is "good". For a long time, we thought it was the Washington Consensus. Some people still think it is...

You'll find ODI's Development Progress Stories interesting (www.developmentprogress.org). While not specifically aid focussed, the stories what has worked in development and why. Also, Charles Kenny talking about his book at ODI can be found <a href="http://www.odi.org.uk/events/details.asp?id=2560&title=development-progress-future-challenges" rel="nofollow">here</a>.

From Glen Mola's note on maternal mortality: <blockquote>‘...the relative risk of dying from pregnancy-related issues is 500 times more likely in PNG than it is in Australia.’ The MMR in Australia has been less than 10/100,000 for the past several decades... The MMR for Indigenous Australians usually runs at about two to three times that for non-Indigenous Australians, therefore 20/100,000. In 1996, a demographic health survey (DHS) calculated the MMR in PNG to be 370 and the latest DHS (2006) has found it to have increased to 733.</blockquote>