Comments

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>

Thanks Chris, I definitely agree with you here. Better information flows are only necessary and not sufficient for improved accountability. And much more work also needs to be done in the areas that you suggest. Thanks for providing links to what sound like a range of very interesting activities and organisations. The particular frustration I have, which provoked this post, is that providing better information on aid to recipients is both a sina qua non for accountability (which everyone is supposedly into these days); and something that ought to be very easy for government aid agencies to do. And yet it remains way down the list of priorities of most government aid agencies. For the life of me I can't figure out why this is the case...

Another good reason to be concerned with high levels of inequality is that they seem to lead to worse economic performance (economic underdevelopment). Or, at least, that's the conclusion of a pretty good empirical study by William Easterly: http://tinyurl.com/427r23l (the link's to a PDF of the paper on Easterly's website).

If anyone's interested the Centre for Global Development has a good podcast where Pritchett is interviewed on on the topic: http://tinyurl.com/3nl8v66

Thanks for this post Terence. I think the challenge is to join the formal more top down processes and the informal process more bottom up and emergent processes which are already working on this issue. There is some great work going on for example in Kenya of NGOs supporting ongoing monitoring of MDGs (see http://www.devex.com/en/articles/5-months-after-mdg-summit-citizen-tracking-mechanism-is-launched-in-kenya) in this case supported by the UN Millenium Campaign. Civil society groups like Twaweza (http://twaweza.org/) are playing a key intermediary role in supporting 'citizen agency' by providing people with information between communities and official agenceies and in so doing enhancing their ability to hold governments to account. In PNG the National Economic and Fiscal Commission (http://www.nefc.gov.pg/) is doing a great job in providing the public with information on provincial income and what it would cost for provinces to provide basic health & education services - and the discrepancy between the two. Australian NGOs have been also trying to share learning about how they are trying to encourage feedback from the communities they seek to benefit (see http://www.acfid.asn.au/resources/promoting-voice-and-choice), and how they might do this better. As you suggest the challenge is to make the join between transparently reported aid provided by aid agencies - directly or through governments - with community based feedback systems which provide some assessment of whether that aid is leading to more drugs in clinics, more books in schools and better provision of services. Some of the pieces of the jigsaw are already in place at different levels, we now need some imagination and creativity in putting those pieces together. The general push to improve feedback to aid agencies (see http://ngoperformance.org/related-initiatives/feedback-examples/ or http://www.owen.org/blog/4018 or http://www.keystoneaccountability.org/services/feedbacksystems) is an important part of this agenda. So yes lets get all donors - including NGOs - to be more transparent but lets also support at the same time those processes that are already in place to provide that information to those that aid agencies seek to benefit, as well as strengthening their voice in assessing how effective that aid is. Chris

I am a citizen of this country and I really feel bad when our so call leaders in the Government are not really complying with the country's constituation. The Constituation really talks about the security of the Indigenous people and their land be the rigthful property of the owner and what ever happens the benefits be shared fairly equal without leaving out any indigenous of the share. But as I see,even though the constituation is there right in front of them as a GUIDE to these leaders,they turned to be BLIND or we could say these leaders do not really understand what ROLE they should play while they are there in that DECISSION making HOUSE. These PUPPETS will be dealt with in our way as their are our people and they knew our way too well. This Special Agriculture Business Lease (SABL) are being proposed by Foreigners and are imposed on the Puppets in our Government who then without any awareness or consultations with Rightful Land/Resource owners which our Constituation Recognised, went ahead and start buldozzing the intention on the Peoples Land, as if it were their's, what a shame that is if they come to their right mind. We are not blind and I believe the World is watching too. These Foreigners I refer to, we do know you and we want you out of our Land. We want you to know that we are not POOR as you are and struggling every inch to convince our people to buy into your idea. Look at you how many homeless you have that go without food. We ask you go back and help feed your people and comfort them if you are RICH enough. We eat every day we sleep in good shalter we don't need your AID. We would kindly ask you to take whatever your AID are go home and start getting your back yard up to the STANDARD you require please.