The Office of Development Effectiveness has just released its evaluation of Australian aid to Timor-Leste.
The evaluation sets out to answer three questions.
1. To what extent was Australia’s country strategy for Timor-Leste appropriately developed?
2. To what extent did DFAT (then AusAID) effectively manage its assistance program?
3. What results were achieved by Australia’s program of assistance between 2006 and 2012?
The main time period of focus is 2009-14, though there is also a fair coverage of earlier assistance.
The answers appear to be:
- Pretty good. certainly better than for the previous ten years when there was no strategy. There was a strategy for 2009-14, but there should have been more selectivity, and more long-term commitments of support.
- Mixed. There was too much reliance on multilateral partners, and too many projects, though both of these problems were addressed to some extent post 2009 or 2010. Administrative resources were inadequate, though again this improved over the period.
- Mixed. The best results are ones where interventions have been sustained for a long period of time (water supply and agriculture – ACIAR’s Seeds of Life).
The summary assessments are ours. The evaluation tends to stay away from anything hinting of a bottom line, though it seems to contain a host of interesting insights. In general it is more critical of pre-2009 than post-2009 operations and approaches.
We’ve been critical ourselves of the last couple of ODE evaluations (here and here). We look forward to a discussion of this one. If anyone has the interest and time to write a review, please contact us!
I won’t attempt a review, but will make a few points about the evaluation. I thought it was a clear, thorough and balanced piece which, as you imply above, was either not supplied with punch lines or had them confiscated downstream. I was struck by a few things.
First, the evaluation picked up on something that had bothered me last year, which I raised in testimony (pdf) to the 2013 parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s relations with Timor-Leste. Australia finally got an aid strategy in place in 2009 but then before two years had passed entered into a separate ‘planning agreement’ with the government of Timor-Leste. In theory the strategic framework for Australia’s aid was, from that point forward, provided by both of these things. In practice, as the evaluation notes, the planning agreement superseded the strategy. This was unfortunate both because the planning agreement was even flimsier than the strategy but also, and more importantly, because it discarded references to some not unimportant things like gender equality, support for civil society and (not mentioned as a gap by the evaluation) anti-corruption and integrity. The result of a worthy determination to accord fully with the stated priorities of the government of Timor-Leste’s national development plan, the adoption of the planning agreement tended to discredit the prior strategy development process, including the notion that it reflected an intersection of the two government’s priorities. The evaluation, however, has nothing to say about this in its recommendations.
Second, the evaluation is damning about or, more exactly, reflects others’ damning assessments of, the performance of multilateral organisations as delivery agents for programs financed or co-financed by Australia (‘mixed but generally poor results’). The conclusion drawn from this is effectively that Australia should use such channels less. But Australia has a stake in the performance of these organisations regardless of whether it is channelling country program funds to them. Australia is involved in their governance and will also have to deal with them as increasingly important co-donors, now that Timor-Leste has now commenced borrowing on concessional terms from the multilateral development banks. One might have hoped for a recommendation that DFAT should play an active and ongoing role in monitoring and seeking to influence the performance of these organisations in this and other fragile states in our region.
And third, the evaluation gives less attention that it could have to the things that matter—it is lacking in proportionality. The Timor-Leste Police Development Program implemented by the Australian Federal Police is flagged as the single largest bilateral aid activity over the life of the program ($110 million over eight years), yet the impact assessment provided is that ‘there is some evidence that TLPDP is making a difference to technical policing skills, management and administrative competence’ (DFAT’s response?—‘Australian Government agencies are independently accountable for management of their own appropriations’). The police development program is treated in no more depth than much smaller activities. In addition, the failure of Australia’s aid program to allocate adequate resources to private sector development which, among other things, might have limited the impact of the much-lauded Seeds of Life program, is noted but neither explored nor adequately reflected in the evaluation’s recommendations, which focus only on the problem of unemployment.