Development Policy Centre Podcast

During times of disaster, people naturally want to help. Unfortunately, they sometimes choose to do so in ways that do more harm and create more chaos: like emptying their medicine cabinets of expired goods and shipping them off overseas. Pharmacist Phillip Passmore has helped swamped local health systems deal with dodgy or unneeded drugs in post-tsunami Aceh and much, much more during his fascinating career. Read our Aid Profile on Phillip here: http://devpolicy.org/aidprofiles/2016/11/07/phillip-passmore-not-your-ordinary-pharmacist/

Disaster risk reduction, and its interface with climate risk management and adaptation, is a topic of increasing interest in international development, particularly for those working in the Pacific. Robert Glasser is the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction in the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, otherwise known as UNISDR. Camilla Burkot spoke with Robert about developments in disaster risk reduction globally and in the Pacific, links between disaster and climate risk, and the role that UNISDR plays.

Speaker: Mr Kyle Peters, Interim Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President, Operations, The World Bank. The global community is facing extraordinary challenges which call for a new approach to ensuring the poorest and most vulnerable are protected. At the same time, the international community has significantly raised and accelerated its ambitions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, fight climate change, and better manage collective risks. As part of his inaugural visit to Australia in November 2016, World Bank Interim Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President, Operations, Kyle Peters shared insights on current global development issues, and the future direction the World Bank is taking to address them.

In a keynote address at the 2016 PNG Update (held at the University of Papua New Guinea, November 3-4), Professor Betty Lovai, Dean of the UPNG School of Humanities and Social Science, discussed the challenges and barriers facing Papua New Guinean women leaders. You can find a transcript of Prof Lovai's presentation, and more information about the conference, here: https://devpolicy.crawford.anu.edu.au/png-and-pacific-updates/png-update

Dr Muhammad Musa is the Executive Director of BRAC, the Bangladesh-based international NGO that has grown to become the world’s largest NGO (by number of employees). During a recent trip to Australia sponsored by DFAT, Dr Musa met with Camilla Burkot to share some insights from BRAC’s experience of pursuing financial self-sustainability, developing and scaling-up evidence-based programs, and the changing nature of NGO partnerships.

Gender inequality and violence against women are major development challenges facing the Asia-Pacific region. In a wide-ranging conversation hosted by UN Women National Committee Australia and the United Nations Association of Australia (UNAA) in Canberra on 11 October 2016, Anna-Karin Jatfors (Deputy Director, UN Women Asia and the Pacific) and Melissa Alvarado (Ending Violence Against Women Program Coordinator, UN Women Asia and the Pacific) discussed some of their organisation’s work. The conversation was facilitated by Janelle Weissman (Executive Director, UN Women National Committee Australia).

To help mark the Asian Development Bank’s half-century, a panel of eminent speakers shared their insights on Asia-Pacific development over the past 50 years and the relevance of the institution in current times. Speakers: Professor Ron Duncan, ANU; Mr Stephen Groff, Vice President, Asian Development Bank; Professor Hal Hill, ANU; Ms Annmaree O’Keeffe AM, Lowy Institute and Dr Matthew Dornan (chair), Deputy Director, Development Policy Centre, ANU.

The World Bank, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT), and Overseas Development Institute (ODI) recently released a report that makes the case for adopting a problem-driven approach to public financial management reform in Pacific Island countries. The report, which includes the results of detailed case studies of reform experience in Kiribati and Tonga, examines how well reform programs have focused on the key challenges that Pacific Island countries face in managing fiscal policy and financing delivery of public services. On October 31, one of the authors of the report, Richard Bontjer from DFAT, presented its key findings, and a panel of experts from the World Bank, DFAT, and the Nossal Institute for Global Health discussed the implications of the report’s recommendations for delivery of health services in the Pacific.

In this podcast, Devpolicy welcomes John Ma’o Kali, CMG, OBE, Secretary, Department of Personnel Management, Papua New Guinea Government. The Papua New Guinea’s Department of Personnel Management plays a critical role as a central agency in the Government’s policy initiatives and implementation of the Public Sector Reforms. You will hear Mr John Ma’o Kali, Secretary of Papua New Guinea’s Department of Personnel Management, examine the size and shape of the PNG’s public service, the successes and challenges of the PNG’s public sector, and identify areas of priority and reform in public sector management. Mr Kali also discusses the Pacific Leadership and Governance Precinct, a new initiative between the governments of Papua New Guinea and Australia that aims to strengthen leadership, governance and public sector capacity in PNG. This seminar was presented as part of the Development Policy Centre’s PNG Project, with funding from the Australian Aid Program through the Pacific Governance and Leadership Precinct.

Robin Davies interviews Helen Evans for our Aid Profiles series, discussing her stellar career in global health. Read the full aid profile here: http://devpolicy.org/aidprofiles/2016/10/19/helen-evans-a-decade-on-the-frontiers-of-global-health/

When asked by then Immigration Minister Tony Burke to provide services to asylum seeker children on Nauru in 2013, Save the Children Australia was faced with a clear dilemma. The Government’s policy was a clear breach of international law, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child. If Save the Children provided services, there was a risk that it may be considered complicit in that breach. On the other hand, Save the Children had significant experience working with refugees and asylum seekers in camps around the world and was confident it could mitigate some of the immediate humanitarian need and have a positive influence on the conditions on Nauru. From August 2013 to October 2015, Save the Children was contracted by the Australian Government to provide welfare, education and recreation services to asylum seekers in Nauru. In this public seminar, Paul Ronalds, CEO of Save the Children Australia, discussed how Save the Children sought to negotiate the dilemmas it faced to ensure it was always acting

In the second week of August this year, Papua New Guinea’s national newspapers reported that the customary landowners of the Hides gas field, the primary source of raw material for PNG’s Liquified Natural Gas project, were protesting and threatening to ‘turn off the taps’. This was because they had still not not received significant amounts of the money that was owing to them under a series of development agreements negotiated in 2009, despite the fact that the project has already been operational for two years. Government spokesmen sought to assure the landowner representatives that the money was safely accumulating in a government trust account pending the results of what was described as an ‘outstanding [meaning unfinished] landowner identification process’. While some observers would treat this as a simple case of policy failure on the part of the national government, Dr Filer argues that it is the outcome of a protracted contest between three distinct visions of what the Oil and Gas Act 1998 calls ‘socia

The Office of Development Effectiveness (ODE) is an operationally independent unit within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) that measures and reports on the effectiveness of the Australian aid program. This forum, which was jointly organised by the Development Policy Centre and ODE, was the latest in a series with the aim of profiling and discussing ODE evaluations and reports. This event focused on ODE’s recent report on teacher training and its latest review of operational evaluations. 'Investing in Teachers' analyses DFAT’s experience with and identifies lessons for improving teacher development policies and programs. 'Review of Operational Evaluations Completed in 2014' examines the quality of 35 DFAT aid evaluations. ODE staff presented the reports, DFAT staff responded, and speakers from the Development Policy Centre offered an independent perspective. This podcast, part 2 of 2, focuses on the review of operational evaluations.

The Office of Development Effectiveness (ODE) is an operationally independent unit within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) that measures and reports on the effectiveness of the Australian aid program. This forum, which was jointly organised by the Development Policy Centre and ODE, was the latest in a series with the aim of profiling and discussing ODE evaluations and reports. This event focused on ODE’s recent report on teacher training and its latest review of operational evaluations. 'Investing in Teachers' analyses DFAT’s experience with and identifies lessons for improving teacher development policies and programs. 'Review of Operational Evaluations Completed in 2014' examines the quality of 35 DFAT aid evaluations. ODE staff presented the reports, DFAT staff responded, and speakers from the Development Policy Centre offered an independent perspective. This podcast, part 1 of 2, focuses on teacher evaluations.

Dalsie Baniala is the first ni-Vanuatu to hold the position of Telecommunications and Radiocommunications Regulator (TRR). She sat down with Tess Newton Cain to discuss the work of her office and the challenges she and her team are facing, as part of the Pacific Conversations series. Read a summary of their conversation here: http://devpolicy.org/telecommunications-regulation-in-vanuatu-in-conversation-with-dalsie-baniala-20160809 A full transcript of the podcast can be found here: http://devpolicy.org/pdf/blog/Transcript_Pacific-Conversations-Dalsie-Baniala-Jul2016.pdf

Labour mobility is increasingly recognized as critical for the Pacific island region. But opportunities to migrate are unevenly distributed across the Pacific, which includes both some of the most integrated and some of the most isolated countries in the world. What could be possible by 2040 if the potential of labour mobility were to be fully realized? What actions can sending and receiving countries take to make this a reality? The new joint ANU-World Bank report Pacific Possible: Labour Mobility answers these questions. It sets out pathways to expand Pacific labour mobility, detailing policy options and requirements for both sending and receiving countries. And it quantifies the massive gains that these reforms would bring about for sending countries. This podcast summarizes a report written by Richard Curtain, Matthew Dornan and Stephen Howes of the Development Policy Centre, and Jesse Doyle of the World Bank, with input from Manjula Luthria. The report is part of the Pacific Possible series – researching

This seminar will discuss some of the compounded challenges of implementing a donor-driven reform and water resources management in Lebanon, a paradigmatic fragile, politically and socially divided, aid dependent country. Despite a major water sector reform started over a decade ago, and substantial donor pressure to promote it, water resources management remains a core sustainable development challenge for Lebanon. The conditional, generic, and prescriptive approach of the donors in driving the reform was confronted with a fragmented socio-political landscape and weak institutions. This resulted in an ambiguous formulation of the reform, a slow and uncertain implementation, further loss of institutional coherence, and at best no improvement in social, environmental or economic sustainability. The talk will shed some light on the various stages of this reform and what lessons may inform future aid initiatives in Lebanon and other fragmented post-war states such as Iraq or Syria. Rim El Kadi is currently Assis

Climate finance and in particular adaptation finance has never been higher on the climate change agenda. The Paris Agreement in December 2015 confirmed the goal of providing US$100 billion each year by 2020 for climate action in developing countries, with balanced allocation between adaptation and mitigation, and agreed to set a new, longer-term collective goal by 2025. Adaptation finance is of particular relevance for Pacific island countries, which are among the states in the world most vulnerable to climate change. Australia is one of the main providers of assistance for climate change adaptation in the region. Other forms of finance in response to climate change impacts are also increasingly advocated, including finance for loss and damage. The regional strategy for climate change and disaster resilient development is still to be finalized. This panel brings together experts on international climate change policy and climate finance in the Pacific. Presenters will discuss the extent and nature of climate

That politics has a defining influence over development prospects is now broadly accepted amongst leading development theorists and agencies alike. However, there is less agreement over which forms of politics matter most, how these can be conceptualised and what kinds of policy implications flow from thinking politically about development. This seminar addresses these questions by presenting the key findings of a five-year comparative investigation into the politics of development in Africa and Asia. Employing a version of the ‘political settlements’ framework that has gained popularity amongst development agencies of late, this work examined how power and politics shape inclusive development in a range of policy domains, including economic growth, natural resource governance, social provisioning and women’s empowerment. In conceptual terms, the analysis emphasises the interplay between political settlements and the politics of specific policy domains, the power of ideas as well as incentives, and of the nee

In this public lecture delivered on 2 June 2016, Professor Richard Bedford takes a long-term perspective, looking both backwards and forwards, at Pacific migration and the approach of Australia and New Zealand to it. Between 2007 and 2010 the late Graeme Hugo and Dr Richard Bedford met several times with the Australia New Zealand Immigration Forum, an annual meeting of senior officials from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and the Department of Labour (NZ), to discuss population movement in the Pacific. An outcome of this interaction was a report entitled Population movement in the Pacific: a perspective on future prospects in which it was argued that greater convergence of policy relating to labour migration of Pacific peoples could make a significant contribution to development in the region. Four years later, after protracted negotiations over the Parliament and Civic Education Rebate plus trade and associated mobility agreements, a more coherent ANZ approach to Pacific labour migration is eme