This is our last blog for the year.
The editorial team of Robin Davies, Amita Monterola, Anne Moorhead and Sadhana Sen would like to thank you everyone who has written for, read, commented on, promoted and supported the Devpolicy Blog in 2023.
We hope you are able to enjoy some rest over the holiday period until we resume on Monday 15 January 2024.
Here are suggestions for your summer reading and a recap of the year with some of our favourite and most popular blogs.
Summer reads
Gordon Peake’s book Unsung Land, Aspiring Nation (free to download) is based on the four years he spent in Bougainville as an Australian aid-funded adviser. Stephen Howes recommends reading it for enjoyment, for understanding, and for better aid policy.
Donating to NGOs that deliver development assistance might be morally desirable if it helps, but what if it doesn’t actually help – what if it causes harm? These are the questions that Terence Wood reflects on in a two-part review of Larry Temkin’s latest book, Being Good in a World of Need.
Prema Clarke launched her new book Education Reform and the Learning Crisis in Developing Countries at the 2023 Australasian AID Conference. Robert Cannon praises her frank, personal account of growing up in India which offers rich insights into the challenges faced in educational development.
And if you have time, there’s plenty more good reading among the Devpolicy reviews.
Australian aid
Devpolicy series on Australia’s new International Development Policy
Local leadership in donor-funded programs
A shot at the title: why DFAT should change its name
Questions about Australian aid to fund the Pacific Games
Why are two in five Australian aid investments rated unsatisfactory on completion?
Is Australian public support for aid on the wane?
Global development
Global aid 2022: Australia risks becoming a minnow on development
If Malpass had to go, will Banga offer a brighter future for the World Bank?
Climate finance from the World Bank: pluses and minuses
The flickering light: Australia’s governance credentials damaged
Aid localisation amidst revolution in Myanmar
Trump 2.0? Potential implications for global aid
Pacific politics and geopolitics
To the (Micronesian) victors go the spoils
Small is (sometimes) beautiful: perceptions of corruption in seven small Pacific Island countries
Basic but essential: Vanuatu’s proposed political integrity legislation
The Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union: Tuvaluan values or Australian interests?
Using aid to shift power paradigms in the Pacific
Sea of Western flags in Oceania?
China’s shifting Pacific engagement – loud and brash to “small but beautiful”
Papua New Guinea
PNG as resource dependent as Saudi Arabia
Doubling of PNG MP funds a bad move
Timber barons v carbon brokers: the Kamula Doso forest area in PNG
Ministries, parties and PNG politics
Reversing rural decline in PNG: the 11th Henry Kila Memorial Address
The local “resource curse”: missed opportunities in Porgera
How to address escalating violence in PNG
Australia should listen to PNG not the IMF
Pacific migration and labour mobility
Devpolicy series on the Pacific Labour Mobility Survey
Australia’s NZ migration reforms: Pacific implications
Three-part series: We want the forest but fear the spirits: labour mobility predicaments in Samoa
Pacific labour mobility over the last year: continued growth
Why the Catholic Archbishop of Fiji is wrong to condemn seasonal work
Pacific paternalism keeping families apart
Pacific Engagement Visa legislation finally through
Can PNG really supply 8,000 people to work overseas?
Australia in the Blue Pacific: a political and development shift for the century
Personal stories
Trepidations of a female student in Port Moresby
My education journey from Jiwaka to UPNG
Farewells
Vale Sir Leonard Wilson Kamit, CBE
Tributes to Sir Rabbie Namaliu by Bart Philemon and Charles Lepani
Jim Ingram: a great Australian internationalist
Meraia Taufa Vakatale: anti-nuclear activist and feminist trailblazer
Aid as a two-way street: Bill Hayden on aid, development and PNG
