Development Policy Centre Podcast

This panel provided a launch for 'Inside the black box of political will', which presents key findings from the past ten years of the Developmental Leadership Program’s (DLP) work. The panel also presents highlights from DLP’s recent research on the role of politics and power in developmental change, with case studies from Myanmar and Fiji, as well as a practitioner’s perspective. Panellists: Michael Wilson, DFAT (Chair) David Hudson, DFID/University of Birmingham Tait Brimacombe, La Trobe University Anna Naupa, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia The 2018 Australasian Aid Conference was held at Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU, on 13-14 February, and was organised by the Development Policy Centre in partnership with The Asia Foundation.

Ebola, MDR-TB, malaria. Infectious diseases will continue to threaten the health and well-being of people across our region and the world. The Australian government has announced a major regional health security fund. How can Australia best support countries to prevent and respond to infectious disease? What is a health security approach in any case? What should the balance be between research and operations? And should it all be left to DFAT or should we establish a medical ACIAR? Our expert panel debated the biggest new initiative in the aid program since the Coalition came to power. Panellists: Jo Chandler, Journalist (Chair) Brendan Crabb, Burnet Institute Blair Exell, DFAT Mary Moran, Policy Cures The 2018 Australasian Aid Conference was held at Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU, on 13-14 February, and was organised by the Development Policy Centre in partnership with The Asia Foundation.

What does Australian aid and international development policy need more or less of? This panel presents the best, the most original, the most transformational, the most innovative ideas to get more bang from the $4 billion buck that is the Australian aid program. And to get some new ideas on how to do international development policy differently and better. Following the 3-Minute-Thesis format, rival advocates battled it out for audience votes. For something quick and different, don’t miss 3MAP: the Three Minute Aid Pitch. Speakers: Kate Sutton David Hudson Rosanna Duncan Klara Henderson Barry Reed John Langmore Emily Dwyer Jonathan Pryke Clay O'Brien Therese Faulkner The 2018 Australasian Aid Conference was held at Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU, on 13-14 February, and was organised by the Development Policy Centre in partnership with The Asia Foundation.

Too often there has been a gap between academic analysis seeking to explain the how and why of corruption and the reality of activists trying to address it on the ground. We need to recognise not only that corruption is complex and multi-faceted, but also that to have any real impact requires sensitivity to the specific contexts in which it takes place, and especially what is politically possible. That means working closely with colleagues who are faced with actually implementing anti-corruption measures. This panel at the 2018 Australasian Aid Conference provided an in-depth look at some of the research funded through the British Academy/DFID Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme. Panellists: Paul Heywood, British Academy/DFID Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme/University of Nottingham (Chair) Lili Mark, Central European University Hamish Nixon, Overseas Development Institute Heather Marquette, DFID/University of Birmingham Kristian Futol, DFAT The 2018 Australasian Aid Conference was held at Crawford School of

Unprecedented levels of need, biggest aid cuts ever, humanitarian catastrophe — all too familiar to hear about in the news, but does the average person care? There are more media outlets and information available than ever before, yet investment in quality international reportage has dropped off as traditional media has been destabilised. Citizen journalism, blogging and social media have stepped up in their place — but do they have the same ability to influence high level decision-making? For those of us working on aid and development issues, whether on major crises or issues that simmer away for years or decades, how do we cut through in this media environment? This conversation-based panel at the 2018 Australasian Aid Conference brought together journalists, communications practitioners and advocates to discuss the current challenges facing media coverage of aid and development issues, and to propose solutions. Panellists: Ashlee Betteridge, Development Policy Centre (Chair) Jo Chandler, Journalist Sam Bol

This panel at the 2018 Australasian Aid Conference discussed the theory and practice of adaptive programming and how we can find ways to implement flexible programming within the context of an increasingly results-driven development agenda. Panellists drew on their experiences to speak to the importance of an adaptive approach to programming, and the implications and challenges of this, from the perspective of bilateral and multilateral donors, implementers and consultants. Panellists: Alexandra Bridges, Oxford Policy Management (Chair) Ben French, Oxford Policy Management Graham Teskey, Abt Associates Sakuntala Akmeemana, DFAT Nicola Follis, Palladium The 2018 Australasian Aid Conference was held at Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU, on 13-14 February, and was organised by the Development Policy Centre in partnership with The Asia Foundation.

The role of non-state actors in Asian-led development cooperation has been little discussed. Many assume South-South cooperation is government-to-government and focused on infrastructure. However, Asian providers have vibrant civil societies that are expanding their sphere of influence and practice into development cooperation. This session at the 2018 Australasian Aid Conference discussed the role Asian NGOs have played in lobbying and influencing government policy in Asia on South-South and development cooperation, their activities, and impacts in partner countries. It also examined how Asian civil society is contributing to the governance and accountability of development cooperation nationally and internationally. The panel featured civil society representatives from Japan, Korea, China and India. Panellists: Anthea Mulakala, The Asia Foundation (Chair) Jin-kyung Kim, Korean International Cooperation Agency Supriya Roychoudhury, Independent Analyst: Indian development cooperation Takeshi Komino, Church Wo

Taxation is central to the social contract between citizens and the state. Yet little research has explored the relationship in developing countries between individual attitudes towards the social contract and perceptions of tax fairness and efficacy. This recording of a seminar draws on experimental research with informal sector workers in Mexico and a unique survey on taxation and social protection in Myanmar to help advance the debate. Focusing on individual perceptions, they show that in contexts of high informality and weak state capacity, reciprocity and individual preferences for redistribution shape tax morale. They point to the centrality of fairness, finding that tax morale is lower when individuals have stepped outside of the social contract and the welfare state through reliance on private insurance or informal reciprocity mechanisms. Furthermore, they present evidence that individuals are less willing to pay taxes when they doubt the redistributive capacity of the state or know the rich will ulti

Dr Jeni Klugman, Managing Director, Georgetown Institute for Women Peace and Security, Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government’s Women in Public Policy Program, Harvard University; Hon Dr Sharman Stone, Australian Global Ambassador for Women and Girls; Dr Anu Mundkur, ACFID Secondee to the Australian Civil-Military Centre. Countries are more peaceful and prosperous when women are accorded full and equal rights and opportunity. The new global Women, Peace and Security Index from Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security and the Peace Research Institute Oslo identifies challenges and opportunities for transformative change. The index incorporates three basic dimensions of wellbeing—inclusion (economic, social, political); justice (formal laws and informal discrimination); and security (at the family, community, and societal levels)—and captures and quantifies them through 11 indicators. It ranks 153 countries—covering more than 98 per cent of the world’s population—along these three dim

The Social Observatory (SO) is a unit in the World Bank’s Development Research Group. It has worked for seven years with a $5 billion portfolio of community-based livelihoods projects in India. This work combines rigorous impact evaluations with ethnography, process evaluations, and the development of new citizen-led data systems to transform how such projects learn and adapt. This talk reports on some aspects of this work, showing how randomised control trials (RCTs) and ethnographies can be meaningfully combined, and demonstrating new tools to deepen collective action. For more see: http://socialobservatory.worldbank.org/about Vijayendra Rao is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. His research has spanned subjects that include gender inequality, mixed-methods, culture, decentralisation, community development, and deliberative democracy. He obtained a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and taught at the University of Chicago, Michigan, and Williams College

Are our current approaches to development cooperation fit for purpose to address contemporary challenges? How should development practice evolve to reflect 21st century priorities and knowledge? And how can it bridge the traditional donor-recipient divide? Can aid donors and recipients meaningfully engage with the private sector, private philanthropy, and other new sources of financing? In the 2017 Mitchell Oration, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala draws on more than 30 years of development and financial expertise to reflect on the need for a new way forward. A development economist and former Finance Minister of Nigeria, Dr Okonjo-Iweala is uniquely placed to provide perspectives on these crucial questions. She has served as Board Chair of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, since January 2016. She has twice served as Nigeria’s Finance Minister, most recently between 2011 and 2015 – a role that encompassed the expanded portfolio of Coordinating Minister for the Economy. In 2006 she served as Nigeria’s Foreign Affairs Minister

The United States and China have followed nearly parallel paths as providers of foreign aid over the past seven decades. Although both countries’ aid programs were ostensibly aimed at development, both also leveraged their aid programs to further their own national interests, using very different strategies. The United States has largely provided foreign aid with the aim of stabilising the world order, favouring a patron-client relationship with recipient countries and using aid to promote economic and political liberalisation. China, on the other hand, has used its foreign aid program primarily to strengthen its position as a leader of the Global South, favouring a hands-off political approach and emphasising reciprocity and solidarity with aid recipients. In this recorded podcast of a Devpolicy seminar, Professor Frank Bongiorno will launch and Dr Patrick Kilby will discuss his recent monograph for the East West Center on US and Chinese aid. In times of growing authoritarianism, as the Trump administration

In this podcast of a seminar, Dr Eric Kwa discusses the agenda and approach being taken by PNG’s new government in relation to strengthening government systems and processes. Among other topics, Dr Kwa discusses the design of the proposed PNG Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC). Dr Kwa is the Secretary/CEO for the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Constitutional and Law Reform Commission and one of the country’s pre-eminent legal thinkers. A lawyer by profession with many years of experience in practice and research, Dr Kwa holds a PhD in Environmental Law from Auckland University, New Zealand. He also holds a Master of Laws with Honours (LLM (Hon)) from the University of Wollongong and a Law Degree with Honours (LLB (Hon)) from the University of Papua New Guinea. He was formerly an Associate Professor of Law and Dean of the University of Papua New Guinea Law School. This event was presented as part of the Development Policy Centre’s PNG Project, which receives funding from the Australian Aid Program throug

The Governance for Growth (GfG) program in Vanuatu has been running for ten years, and is about to move into its third phase. Considered to be quite innovative when it was first implemented, the program has supported some significant economic policy and public finance reforms. It has also survived changes to the institutional arrangements for the delivery of Australian aid, and significant shifts in the political landscape in Vanuatu. The program was recently the subject of two in-depth reviews, one led by the Overseas Development Institute, and the other by a team of Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) economists. These reviews provide an opportunity to consider the successes and failures of GfG, what elements of the model were most useful in supporting success, and whether the lessons of the last ten years have implications for other small island developing states. This podcast features a recording of a panel discussion covering these issues. The panel featured the following participants: Pablo K

Robin Davies interviews Gillian Mellsop on her career with UNICEF for the Aid Profiles series. Read the full profile at devpolicy.org/aidprofiles.

Sachini Muller interviews Muhannad Hadi, WFP Regional Director for the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and Eastern Europe, discussing humanitarian crises in the region and what we can do about them.

In this podcast, you'll hear a panel discussion on the 2017 Papua New Guinea National Elections. The elections, held in June and July, copped both criticism and praise — but mostly criticism. Ballot box mysteries, corruption allegations, electoral roll issues, unpaid striking polling workers and localised violence dominated news headlines. Despite all this, and despite the many legal challenges to results yet to be resolved, huge numbers of voters turned out to exercise their democratic right, and a government has formed under returning Prime Minister Peter O’Neill. Now that the excitement of the vote itself has passed, what are the implications for PNG’s political landscape? And what are the lessons learned to improve the running of future elections? A panel of experts (Nicole Haley, Bell School; Terence Wood, Development Policy Centre; Ronald May, College of Asia and the Pacific; Bal Kama, ANU College of Law) discussed how the vote went, the winners and losers, and the longer-run political challenges that t

Speakers: Nelson Nema, School of Business and Public Policy, University of PNG; Marcel Schröder, School of Business and Public Policy, University of PNG; Rohan Fox, Research Officer, Development Policy Centre. The colourful banners and huge campaign rallies of the 2017 Papua New Guinea National Elections held in June and July may have put policy on the backburner for some as they were swept up in the excitement of the vote. But one issue was never far from voters’ minds as they headed to the polls — the concerning state of the country’s economy, and the impact on their own lives. The returned O’Neill government faces major economic challenges. So what are the problems, and what should the Prime Minister and his new Treasurer do about them? Marcel Schröder, Rohan Fox and Nelson Nema presented their 2017 PNG Economic Survey, co-authored with their colleague, Stephen Howes, on 11 October 2017. The panel was chaired by Michelle Rooney. This was the first in a two-part series on PNG after the 2017 elections. This

Aid paradoxes in Afghanistan: building and undermining the state. The relationship between aid and state building is highly complex and the effects of aid on weak states depend on donors’ interests, aid modalities and the recipient’s pre-existing institutional and socio-political conditions. This book argues that, in the case of Afghanistan, the country inherited conditions that were not favourable for effective state building. Although some of the problems that emerged in the post-2001 state building process were predictable, the types of interventions that occurred—including an aid architecture which largely bypassed the state, the subordination of state building to the war on terror, and the short horizon policy choices of donors and the Afghan government—reduced the effectiveness of the aid and undermined effective state building. By examining how foreign aid affected state building in Afghanistan since the US militarily intervened in Afghanistan in late 2001 until the end of President Hamid Karzai’s firs

Corruption is a pernicious societal disease that has devastating consequences that can cripple a nation. Although corruption has become a global challenge, its scale and prevalence in any country depend on how it is being addressed. There are countries that are perceived to be less corrupt as graded by Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perception Index, such as Finland, Denmark and New Zealand, and there are others that were once corrupt, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, that have now become the epitome of the fight against corruption. In this seminar, Sam Koim will draw from the literature on experiences of other anti-corruption agencies, his own experience as the former head of Papua New Guinea’s anti-corruption Investigation Task-Force Sweep, and discuss how addressing police corruption is the lynchpin to combating corruption. The presentation is part of a research paper he is working on about addressing corruption in resource rich developing countries with communal social contexts. He has des