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, and has also held several key positions at the World Bank, including as Managing Director.

The Mitchell Oration series, of which this is the fifth, has been created to provide a forum at which the most pressing development issues can be addressed by the best minds and most influential practitioners of our time. This podcast of Dr Okonjo-Iweala's lecture is presented by the Development Policy Centre at Crawford School of Public Policy, with generous support from the Harold Mitchell Foundation.

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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 considers cutting foreign aid by one third, he argues that the US should carefully consider whether it will cede the ‘aid race’ to its political competitor.

Dr Patrick Kilby is a political scientist with the School of Archaeology and Anthropology in the College of Arts and Social Sciences, The Australian National University (ANU), and convener of the Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development. He was an East West Center Visiting Fellow in Washington in 2017, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar in 2018.

Professor Frank Bongiorno is a professor at the School of History, College of Arts and Social Sciences, ANU. He has held lecturing positions at King’s College London (2007-11), the University of New England (2000-07) and Griffith University (1996), and also taught previously at ANU (1994).

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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 through the Pacific Governance and Leadership Precinct.

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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 Kang, Assistant Secretary, Melanesia Branch, DFAT, and former Head of Mission in Vanuatu

Matthew Harding, Director, Pacific Economic Growth Section, DFAT, and

Jonathan Gouy, Director, Development Economics Unit, DFAT and leader of the economic review (via a presentation given by Bob Warner)

Clinton Pobke, Manager and Jennifer Kalpokas Doan, Senior Program

Bob Warner, Visiting Fellow, Development Policy Centre, and member of the

This event is presented by the Development Policy Centre, a consortium partner of the Pacific Research Program (PRP). PRP is supported by the Australian aid program.

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

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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.

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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 the government may face in its term.

Nicole Haley provided an overview of the insights from electoral observers, while Terence Wood discussed election results and issues. Ron May analysed how the parties fared, who won and who lost, and why. Bal Kama explored the legal issues facing the new government and the many appeals against declared outcomes. The panel was chaired by Stephen Howes.

This forum was the second in a series on PNG after the 2017 elections, hosted by the Development Policy Centre.

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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 event was presented as part of the Development Policy Centre’s PNG Project, which receives funding from the Australian Aid Program through the Pacific Governance and Leadership Precinct.

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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 first term in 2009, this book reveals the dynamic and complex relations between the Afghan government and foreign donors in their efforts to rebuild state institutions. The work explores three key areas: how donors supported government reforms to improve the taxation system, how government reorganised the state’s fiscal management system, and how aid dependency and aid distribution outside the government budget affected interactions between state and society. Given that external revenue in the form of tribute, subsidies and aid has shaped the characteristics of the state in Afghanistan since the mid-eighteenth century, this book situates state building in a historical context.

In this podcast of a recorded event, author and Devpolicy Visiting Fellow Dr Nematullah Bizhan will speak on his findings, while Professor Mark Evans, will officially launch the book.

Nematullah Bizhan is Research Fellow at the Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the Oxford University’s Global Economic Governance Program and a Visiting Fellow at Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy and Development Policy Centre, The Australian National University. He has a PhD in Political Science and International Relations from The Australian National University and was previously a high-level participant in the post-2001 government of Afghanistan.

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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 designed a four-pronged approach to curb corruption effectively, focusing on PNG as a case study.

This seminar is co-hosted by the ANU Development Policy Centre, the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) and the State, Society and Governance in Melanesia program.

Sam Koim has been one of the most significant legal investigators and policymakers in PNG in recent years. From 2011 to April 2017 he was Chairman and Principal Legal Officer of Investigation Task-Force Sweep, a national multiagency team investigating corruption, prosecuting offenders, recovering tax and proceeds of crime, and recommending administrative disciplinary actions. Prior to his appointment to the taskforce, he was Principal Legal Officer in the Department of Justice and Attorney General, Papua New Guinea.

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