Development Policy Centre Podcast

International peace and statebuilding interventions have become ubiquitous since the 1990s. Their frequent failures, however, have prompted some researchers and practitioners to move beyond focusing on interveners’ ideas and approaches to analysing how their interactions with recipients shape outcomes. The recently published book by Shahar Hameiri, Caroline Hughes and Fabio Scarpello, International Interventions and Local Politics: Fragmented States and the Politics of Scale (Cambridge University Press, 2017), critically evaluates these analyses, advancing an innovative approach, placing the politics of scale at the core of the conflicts and compromises shaping the outcomes of international interventions. Different scales — e.g. local, national and international — privilege different interests, unevenly allocating power, resources and political opportunities. In this podcast of a panel discussion, two of the book’s authors will discuss their approaches, demonstrating their utility with a case study of the Ace

The Australian aid program faces a fundamental dilemma: how, in the absence of deep popular support, should it generate the political legitimacy required to safeguard its budget and administering institutions? A new book by Jack Corbett entitled 'Australia’s Foreign Aid Dilemma: Humanitarian Aspirations Confront Democratic Legitimacy', tells the story of the actors who have grappled with this question over 40 years. It draws on extensive interviews and archival material to uncover how ‘court politics’ shapes both aid policy and administration. The lesson for scholars and practitioners is that any holistic understanding of the development enterprise must account for the complex relationship between the aid program of individual governments and the domestic political and bureaucratic contexts in which it is embedded. If the way funding is administered shapes development outcomes, then understanding the ‘court politics’ of aid matters. In this podcast and subsequent Q&A of the Canberra book launch, author Ja

Speaker: Alice Albright, Chief Executive Officer, Global Partnership for Education (GPE). Investing in equitable, quality education systems has a powerful positive impact on economies and societies, and in turn drives progress across the range of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Educating and empowering girls and women in particular helps to strengthen economic prosperity, and improves stability and health outcomes. However, the education sector is chronically underfunded. Until recently, the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) has relied largely on financing from traditional donors. Over the past year, GPE has developed a new comprehensive financing and funding framework to mobilise additional, more diverse and better financing for education, and to more efficiently deploy its funding ahead of its next replenishment to be held in early 2018. For Australia, the replenishment and new financing and funding framework provide opportunities to emphasise the education challenges faced by the Asia-Pacific re

Speakers: Staff from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Cardno, and The Australian National University. This forum, which was jointly organised by the Development Policy Centre and the Office of Development Effectiveness (ODE) and held on 11 August 2017, was the latest in a series on the evaluation of Australian aid. It focused on two recent evaluations. The second evaluation, discussed in this podcast, focused on pandemics and emerging infectious diseases, with the view of contributing to the evidence base on strengthening health systems in the Asia-Pacific region to prevent, detect and respond. The evaluation informed decision-making about future Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) investments and policy engagement on regional health security, and approaches for future DFAT responses to disease outbreaks. The evaluation also contributed to the literature on lessons learned from previous outbreak responses, with a focus on impact on human and animal health systems and community engagemen

Speakers: Staff from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Cardno, and The Australian National University. This forum, which was jointly organised by the Development Policy Centre and the Office of Development Effectiveness (ODE) and held on 11 August 2017, was the latest in a series on the evaluation of Australian aid. It focused on two recent evaluations. The first part, discussed in this podcast, was an end of program review for the Basic Education Assistance for Muslim Mindanao (BEAM-ARMM) program, which involved four implementing partners working across four distinct components in the conflict-affected Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. It’s objective was to contribute to poverty alleviation and sustainable peace, through increasing access and quality of basic education, and training for Out of School Youth. The review highlighted some of the challenges and lessons for evaluating and achieving improved educational outcomes in complex, high-risk environments.

Over the last decade, international development policies, most notably in the UK, have advanced ‘political settlements’ as a framing concept to guide statebuilding practice in fragile and conflict-affected states. Such policies have encouraged efforts towards achieving an inclusive, or inclusive enough, political settlement as a bulwark against instability. The empirical research underpinning the policy dictum, however, is surprisingly thin. This podcast of Sue's presentation will probe the relationship between the character of a post-conflict political settlement and subsequent trajectories of stability or instability through two case studies: Timor-Leste and Bougainville. While there is a headline correlation between an inclusive settlement and stability, and an exclusionary settlement and instability, the processes at work are more nuanced. In these two case studies the proximate drivers of instability, which may be the product of an exclusionary settlement, are serious elite splits and rent restriction. C

In global health circles, Dr Eric Goosby’s reputation precedes him. A physician by training, he has been a leader in the development and implementation of HIV/AIDS policy for 30 years and is perhaps best known for his role as the US Global AIDS Coordinator (2009-2013). In 2015, Dr Goosby accepted an appointment as the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Tuberculosis (TB), and it was in this capacity that he visited Canberra in late May 2017, during which Camilla Burkot interviewed him at the Development Policy Centre about Australia's role in the global fight against TB.

In 1938 three Australian patrol officers – Jim Taylor, John Black and Pat Walsh – set off on an epic journey into the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Their purpose: to make contact with highland tribes who until then, had no contact with the outside world, and to explain to them that their lives were about to undergo incredible change. Fifty years later, Jim’s daughter Meg retraced her father’s steps and met people who remembered the day the patrol arrived. Meg’s observations are combined with excerpts from her father’s journal to provide a personal and poetic narrative about an extraordinary meeting of cultures. [extract from In My Father’s Footsteps] Dame Meg Taylor is a Papua New Guinean lawyer and diplomat. She studied at the University of PNG, received her LLB from Melbourne University and her LLM from Harvard University. She practiced law with the Office of the Public Solicitor and in the private sector, and served as a member of the Law Reform Commission of PNG. She was Ambassador of Papua New Guinea to

PNG was severely impacted by the 2015-16 El Niño drought and, at some very high altitude locations, a series of destructive frosts. The drought and frosts impacted many rural villagers between mid-2015 and late 2016, with some people still severely impacted in early 2017. Impacts included: widespread shortages of drinking water; shortages of subsistence food in many places; negative effect on villagers’ health; partial or complete closure of schools; and the Fly River not being suitable for shipping for some months. The impact on food supply was greatest in four sub-regions: very high altitude places in parts of Enga, Hela and Western Highlands; much of inland lowland Western Province; several locations on the edge of the central highlands; and some island and mainland locations in Milne Bay Province. The five speakers were closely involved in the assessment of food shortages and coordination of food distribution. Presentations will cover: a national overview of the impacts; more detailed reports on impacts a

Tropical forests are an undervalued asset in meeting the greatest global challenges of our time—averting climate change and promoting sustainable development. Despite their importance, tropical forests and their ecosystems are being destroyed at a high and even increasing rate in most forest-rich countries. The good news is that the science, economics, and politics are aligned to support a major international effort to reverse tropical deforestation. Why Forests? Why Now? a new book by Frances Seymour and Jonah Busch, synthesizes the latest research on the importance of tropical forests in a way that is accessible to anyone interested in climate change and development and to readers already familiar with the problem of deforestation. It makes the case to decision-makers in rich countries that rewarding developing countries for protecting their forests is urgent, affordable, and achievable. This event was co-hosted by the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics, the ANU Indonesia Project and the Development Polic

This year is the first after three years of cuts in which the aid budget is slated to increase – by $84 million. While only enough to keep the aid budget growing with inflation, how will this new money be spent? Health funding has been almost halved in real terms over the last four years. Will the government release information on its long-awaited health security initiative? At this year’s aid budget breakfast, we will also review the 2016 Performance of Australian Aid report and the 2015-16 Aid Program Performance Reports. Join the morning after the budget for the fifth annual aid budget breakfast to learn what the 2017-18 budget means for the future of Australian aid. Speakers are included Professor Stephen Howes, Director of the Development Policy Centre, Crawford School, ANU; Jacqui De Lacy, Vice President of Global Strategy, Abt Associates; and Dr Anthony Swan, Research Fellow at the Development Policy Centre, Crawford School, ANU. Livestream available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zdUnYvoH2c

In this talk Professor Fforde will discuss how risk and uncertainty are best coped with in development practice. In doing this, he will examine the theories of change that underpin aid practitioners’ use of tools such as the logical framework approach. He will contend that in many situations we should explore methods of devising policy and organising practice that formally assume context is unpredictable and unsuited to tools like the logical framework approach. He will argue that aid work can often benefit from reconsidering the theories of change it draws upon. Professor Adam Fforde is Professorial Fellow, Victoria Institute of Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University. He has a long career in development practice and research. His forthcoming book is Reinventing ‘development’ – the sceptical change agent.

Co-hosted by the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute and the Development Policy Centre. As Governments expanded their activities over the years, pushing spending from around 10 per cent of GDP at the beginning of the last century to the current levels of 30 to 50 per cent of GDP, while increasing intervention through regulations, they tended to lose much of their ability to monitor well what they did. This led to problems of corruption, inefficiency, rent seeking, cronyism, and generally less equitable results in terms of economic results and income distribution. Professor Vito Tanzi will present and discuss the challenge of complexity in governments and markets in terms of tax, spending and regulation. Vito Tanzi obtained his PhD in Economics from Harvard University and was subsequently a Professor at American University before becoming head of Tax Policy in the International Monetary Fund(IMF) from 1974 to 1981, and Director of the IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department from 1981 to 2000. He was State Secretary for

This talk provides a survey of recent economic developments in Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) since the end of the resource boom in 2014. The specific focus of the discussion will be on the country’s exchange rate policy. Theory suggests that the real exchange rate (RER) should depreciate following the observed fall in commodity prices. In practice, however, the imposition of foreign exchange controls has led to a large backlog in foreign currency orders suggesting that the kina is significantly overvalued. A related paper estimating the extent to which PNG’s RER is currently misaligned will be discussed. The results of the paper suggest that the kina should depreciate by about 20 per cent. Otherwise PNG is likely to pay high economic costs as real overvaluation sustained through foreign exchange restrictions led to resource misallocation, lower economic growth, black markets, and ultimately a balance of payments crisis in many other developing countries in the past.

Africa has a rich history; old and diverse cultures; and abundant and varied natural resources. Yet, a large majority of Africans remain poor, disenfranchised and oppressed. For five and half centuries, the trajectory of Africa’s autonomous development was distorted by the intervention of nascent Europe: the slave trade, the colonial venture and the Cold War. A legacy of the colonial system, the prototype independent African state has failed to deliver freedom, democracy and prosperity, giving rise to a crisis of legitimacy and relevance. Against this backdrop, this lecture will discuss the basic causes of the democratic deficit in Africa today and its prospects. The discourse will focus on the concept of self-determination as a political right of: one, a nation to independence; two, a people to a government of their choice; and three, diverse groups to autonomy in the management of their day-to-day affairs. Ambassador Andebrhan Welde Giorgis is President of Eri-Platform, an international civic association pr

In this podcast, you'll hear a discussion forum, jointly organised by the Development Policy Centre and the Office of Development Effectiveness (ODE), which is the latest in a series on the evaluation of Australian aid. The event focuses on the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's (DFAT)new aid evaluation policy and two recent evaluations. Recently, DFAT has overhauled its approach to evaluation, with a new Aid Evaluation Policy and, for the first time, an Annual Aid Evaluation Plan - both available on the ODE website. The Head of ODE will explain what these mean, and what difference they will make. The $336 million, ten-year Eastern Indonesia Roads Improvement Program was one of Australia's largest ever aid projects, and one of the most successful. This recent ODE evaluation assesses its results, and draws out the lessons for aid-funded infrastructure programs elsewhere. Remote service delivery in PNG is always a challenge. But a recent evaluation of remote health patrols run by Australian Doctors Inter

Robin Davies, Associate Director of the Development Policy Centre, interviews German economist Inge Kaul, a leading thinker on global public goods. This interview forms the basis for a blog post (https://exit.sc/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdevpolicy.org%2Fpublic-enemies-global-public-goods-in-aid-policy-narratives-20170407%2F and Discussion Paper (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2941164) on the issue of aid policy and global public goods. This is part 2 of the interview, you can find part 1 here: https://soundcloud.com/devpolicy/robin-davies-interviews-inge-kaul-pt-1

Robin Davies, Associate Director of the Development Policy Centre, interviews German economist Inge Kaul, a leading thinker on global public goods. This interview forms the basis for a blog post (http://devpolicy.org/public-enemies-global-public-goods-in-aid-policy-narratives-20170407/) and Discussion Paper (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2941164) on the issue of aid policy and global public goods.

Human society is full of would-be ‘change agents’. A restless mix of campaigners, lobbyists, and officials, both individuals and organisations, are set on transforming the world. They want to improve public services, reform laws and regulations, guarantee human rights, get a fairer deal for those on the sharp end, achieve greater recognition for any number of issues, or simply be treated with respect. Scholarly discussions of change are fragmented with few conversations crossing disciplinary boundaries, rarely making it onto the radars of those actively seeking change. Duncan Green’s new book 'How Change Happens', bridges the gap between academia and practice. It brings together the best research from a range of academic disciplines and the evolving practical understanding of activists to explore the topic of social and political change. Drawing on many first-hand examples from the global experience of Oxfam, as well as the author’s insights from studying and working on international development, it tests ide

Development aid from donor countries amounts to more than US $130 billion annually. More than half of that amount comes from European Union nations. However, sustainable development cannot be achieved through aid alone. The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development have underlined the importance of domestic resource mobilisation and investments – both public and private – for sustainable social, environmental, and economic development efforts to take hold. The paradigm has changed and the European Union’s development policy will be adapted within the framework of the European Union Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy in the light of the 2030 Agenda and new global challenges and also taking into consideration the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The Director-General discusses European Union development policy in light of these developments, paying particular attention to the Pacific region. This event was co-presented by the Development Policy Cent