This is a further instalment in the Pacific Family Matters series.
Look at the Australians, they’ve tried every approach to giving aid here, and nothing’s worked.
She worked for a small organisation and was new to Papua New Guinea. She was being hyperbolic — some Australian aid to PNG has worked well enough and a few projects have been very successful — but her broad point was right. Giving good aid in PNG isn’t easy. The Australian government has learnt this the hard way.
Australia has built infrastructure, only to watch it crumble when PNG’s government failed to maintain it. Australia has worked with the civil service, only to become mired in inertia. Australia has tried to improve governance, only to be thwarted by PNG’s political economy. Australia has funded civil society, a good idea in a poorly governed country, but — while there have been successes — working outside of the state has proven difficult too. More recently, Australia has returned to its post-independence practice of budget support, which used to be given as grants but now comes mostly in the form of loans. Budget support helped stave off a debt crisis during COVID, but the government of PNG hasn’t used the fiscal space well. Instead, it has pumped more and more money into District Service Improvement Program funds — which are spent inefficiently, unaccountably and largely as a form of patronage.
Australia’s not alone in its travails. The Chinese have had to watch potholes sprout from their newly-constructed roads. Their once grand plans of criss-crossing the country with highways have been shelved. Multilateral organisations have had successes, but failures too. They haven’t found any silver bullets.
Aid won’t determine the fate of PNG — much will depend on domestic factors. However, effective aid can help. The trouble is that — thanks to a dysfunctional government, and a topography that includes mountains, jungles, miasmic swamps and atolls — giving aid in PNG is difficult. But Australian aid doesn’t have to fail. The re-elected Labor government could make aid to PNG more successful if it wanted to.
First, the politicians in charge of the aid program need to be honest with themselves: Australian aid could be much better, and if the new government wants success it needs to drive change.
Part of this change should involve the creation of a specialised entity within DFAT focused on aid in PNG. You can find people in DFAT who understand PNG well, but they are transient: they will be of limited use next year when stationed in Geneva. Consolidating and stabilising country expertise will maintain ties and trust with counterparts in PNG. It will also allow DFAT to systematically build its institutional knowledge base rather than relying on hasty handovers.
Understanding aid also matters. No one confuses neurologists with orthopaedic surgeons and we don’t ask engineers to perform liposuction. All these people are experts, but they’re experts in very different things. Being an aid worker in a government aid program and being a diplomat both require expertise, but the knowledge needed is different. If you want to give aid well in a place where that’s difficult, you need the right type of experts. There are genuine Australian aid experts working on PNG, but their presence is often part accident, part design. Expertise shouldn’t be a matter of happenstance; it needs to be baked into the system.
It may seem unlikely that many DFAT staff would want to spend their lives focusing on aid in PNG. Yet if Australia was genuinely committed to giving better aid there, aid specialists would find it more appealing. And people working in the new aid entity wouldn’t have to focus on PNG forever, just longer than at present. Long enough for a coherent body of expertise to be maintained.
The new government should also free up funding to allow people working on the aid projects it funds to take time. “We are”, an exhausted Port Moresby aid worker once told me, “always running from task to task. We never get time to stop, think and learn.” This makes it hard to give aid well. It also makes it harder to meaningfully promote the participation of people from PNG in the aid process. Participatory development and localisation are easy to talk about, but difficult to do well. They take time. Increasing labour costs to pay for more aid workers would be money well spent if it gave people enough time to actually do their jobs.
Finally the new government should require honest, high-quality evaluations of the work it funds. Evalutions are often afterthoughts that struggle to extract findings from scant evidence. They are often expected to unearth good news and bury bad. It shouldn’t be this way. Spend more on evaluations, design them early, run them throughout, let evaluators be honest and act on what they tell you. With good evaluations you can learn from your mistakes. Without good evaluations, you’ll just keep repeating them.
The secret to giving aid well in PNG doesn’t involve lurching between different approaches and objectives; it involves time, understanding and learning. Learn what works and then stick with it. Learn what isn’t working and abandon it or at least change it substantially.
If setting up an entity in DFAT focused on aid in PNG, employing more staff and spending more money on evaluations sounds excessive too you, remember Australia spends nearly $650 million on aid each year in PNG. PNG is by far the largest recipient of Australian aid. It’s also a country where poverty and malnutrition are high, the economy is barely growing and governance is getting worse.
Making aid work in PNG is the right thing to do — the country’s people deserve better. It would also be in Australia’s interests. PNG is struggling. And it’s right next door. If its problems become overwhelming, they won’t stop at the border. Australia would also be helping itself if it gave better aid to PNG.
Aid to PNG must get better. The new government has political capital aplenty. The need for change is obvious. All that is needed now is political will.
This post is part of the Pacific Family Matters series which explores priorities for the re-elected Labor government’s engagement on development issues with the Pacific Islands region. The series draws on the expertise of the Pacific Research Program, a consortium led by the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University (ANU), in partnership with ANU’s Development Policy Centre and the Lowy Institute.
Thanks Terence. If you are evaluating a project that has been designed poorly and is fundamentally flawed from the outset – hedged into the impossible four year implementation cycle and crafted by inexperienced consultants – the evaluation is going to follow suit. There are few political incentives within the DFAT apparatus and Australian government to actually invest in long-term change in PNG, or elsewhere for that matter. Not much of a chance for a handover and a Facebook post when you’re involved in the long process of research and consultation to actually design a program with some chance of impact.
Thanks Theo,
It’s a good point: as well as evaluations, time needs to be made available to to design a project carefully, or at the very least, to make it adaptable if things aren’t working.
As you say, the superficial political incentives don’t seem great. Although, given the PNG’s proximity and instability, you’d think a politician not suffering from severe short-termism might want to take action.
If your comment is that “the conversation” means consulting with, and listening more to, the average person in PNG, I agree entirely.
Hello Terence and thank you for your thoughtful article which let’s be honest opens a Pandora’s box.
Where do you start? What you have intimated goes to the core of whether Australia has learned anything in seven decades, whether the institutional knowledge it has acquired over that time has informed anything of value. Whether it is serious about social and capital development or whether our efforts are really aimed at keeping certain segments of society compliant.
Your contention that knowledge and experience relevant to the development assistance needs of PNG are not nurtured sufficiently within DFAT is not something I can comment on except to say the theories for change that emerge and inform Australian development efforts are about as useful as mammary glands on a bull if basic health, education and economic indicators at end user level are the yard stick. But here is the challenge. The picture that emerges is one of great complexity and nuance that as things stand no government department can solve from an office in Canberra, Port Moresby, provincial or district headquarters.
In the end it boils down to who has agency over the issues that people want or need to be addressed. And whether the Westminster system of decision making, governance and delivery is in any way relevant to the ninety percent of the population that lives largely rural subsistence lives.
An example might clarify. A corporate entity mindful its business activities had polluted the water supply of thousands of people living along a river decided to install water tanks and rain catchments in affected communities to address the problem. They subsequently informed the communities of their plan, delivered the tanks and associated hardware with a team of tradesmen to erect and commission each installation. Within a short time, the work was completed, and each facility handed over.
In another location, no connection to the riverine communities, a small international NGO visited a community and found the local water supply had been contaminated by previous logging activities. The NGO offered to fund the installation of a rainwater tank and catchment if the community would sort out customary matters and install it themselves. In anticipation of rapid implementation, they deposited the funds into the account of a trusted community leader. In this instance what followed was nearly three years of community consultation involving every stakeholder, landowner, partial landowner, non-landowner and other social categories in the community. Meeting by meeting they worked through the traditional protocols of who would have access to the tank and where it should best be located.
Once all stakeholders were satisfied the community gathered with traditional leadership to publicly announce their collective agreement. Over the following fortnight the tank was installed, and a grand handover ceremony attended by the local member of parliament and other government dignitaries was held.
Three years after both projects were completed an inspection of the water catchment facilities in the riverine communities revealed most were in operative, tap ware stollen and corrugated iron roofing removed. By comparison the community led project worked seamlessly without a hitch. And the donors. How did they rate their success? The large corporate was able to quickly tick off the successful installation of multiple tanks by its tradesmen, signed, sealed and delivered in record time and close the books on it. By comparison as time passed the international NGO that had lodged its funds in good faith for the community project became increasingly convinced its money had been stolen. Three years post implementation which approach was successful.
This example may seem trite. But understanding the success of one and failure of the other opens a window on to a myriad of learnings, considerations and opportunities that apply to the delivery of essential health, education and community economic activities that have not been taken or acted upon since before independence.
In addition to government agencies, communities offer an untapped but enormously powerful lever to advance progress around the drivers of human development. Our failure to understand how this might be achieved in conjunction with the overarching westernised systems established by us has been a major part of the failures you describe. Like you I believe the to time to go back to the drawing board has arrived.
Thank you, Stephen and thank you for the example, which is a good example of the challenges of development work.
Thanks Terence, as always, for your insight! Very true: “people in DFAT who understand PNG well, but they are transient…Consolidating and stabilising country expertise will maintain ties and trust with counterparts in PNG”
You’re right that “Evalutions are often afterthoughts that struggle to extract findings from scant evidence”, but the reviews I’ve been a part of, of DFAT’s large economic and governance programs (both mid-term after 2 years and end-of-term reviews) in the last 6 years have yielded very good insight – and DFAT has acted, flexibly changing approaches (even certain program aspects) mid-program, and incorporating lessons in new program design.
I’ve personally found Ian Kemish to be right, it isn’t Australia’s job to ‘fix’ PNG. And you see this in spending: although aid from Australia is K1.7 billion (AUD650 million), PNG government’s own 2025 budget is K28.4 billion (5% of which is Australia budget support, but PNG has faithfully kept up with repayment of all its foreign debt even when classified as at ‘high risk of debt distress’ by the IMF). PNG has become its own driver of development, and Australia will have to further accept that its role is complementary, constantly improving on its ability to assist.
Thanks Maho,
It’s great to hear that you’ve been involved in some good evaluations. More broadly with regards to Australian aid evaluations in PNG, some evaluations are great, but I think it fair to say that the quality of the average evaluation would be improved with more planning, time and rigour.
I agree with you that it’s not Australia’s job to “fix” PNG, and that PNG’s development trajectory will, for the most part, be influenced foremost by its own domestic political economy. However, Australia should still make its aid as effective as possible. If it does that it can play a meaningful role in assisting PNG with development challenges.
Thanks again for the comment.
Thank you Terry. A very sensible paper. We can only hope that somebody in DFAT reads it and thinks about the subject for more than a few minutes.
Thank you Bryant.
The other issue is that PNG has to be part of the conversation not just at ministerial level but at day to day level where listening rather than telling (about priorities, ways of doing and how to sustain outputs to achieve outcomes) is the order of the day. Criticising someone else’s governance is certainly not the way to go. We’ve being doing it for 70 years to what effect.