Comments

Gee it would be great to see the private sector get behind the Campaign for Australian Aid! Strangely, while it is a non partisan campaign open to all organisations, a quick look at the campaign homepage and organisations belonging to it reveals the private sector is conspicuous in their absence. And yet they have so much to offer in the joint effort to rebuild Australia’s aid. As my mum taught me, maturity is about sharing the load. Applications that enable companies to join the campaign can be found <a href="http://www.australianaid.org" rel="nofollow">here</a>.

Yes, one of the saddest phases of projects is finalisation when so many enthusiastic people ask where continuing support, of even the most limited technical kind, will come from. Donors and governments alike are generally unwilling or unable to provide access to continuing help of this kind. Short term and one-off training is one of the most ineffective ways to bring about sustainable change.

Thanks Simon. Yes, I agree it is an issue that has not been given enough thought. Neglect might be a more accurate description. Your question goes to the heart of the problem with sustainability. As your observations imply, it is a complex matter and I remain to be convinced that the idea of sustainability is necessarily the most helpful concept here, particularly when the word seems to be used increasingly as a 'feel good' slogan in so many contexts now. Maybe continuing benefit or continuing impact? The central idea of sustainability in projects of all kinds has been the continuation of benefits which, in the ideal situation, will be clearly and realistically defined in the project design. I wonder if they are, especially in education. The behavioural change you refer to in education should, ideally, be strong enough to survive most of the unpredictable influences and support continuing change and improvement and not be limited to the implementation of (say) one unchanging teaching method or one specific management tool. Unlike bridges, an additional complication in education is that many projects operate at several interlocking levels and, further, can also include physical infrastructure such as school buildings. All this leads to the difficult matter of how you measure sustainability. We certainly need to do much better than a lot of past practice which has been little more than a quick judgement resulting from a very limited sample of cases (districts, schools, teachers) that have received assistance. Another curiosity is the contrast between the attention given to evaluating sustainability, which has been very limited, with the attention given to impact evaluation. As you correctly observe, it seems we have not yet grasped how to think about the issues properly. Curious!

I enjoyed reading your comment Ai, and thanks for making the points on strengths and supporting local people. I'd love to hear your thoughts when the Summit is over - to see if you feel like the outcome document achieves what the Summit is hoping for and incorporates the dominant ideas from the online discussions.

Hi Paul and Jo, thank you for very interesting posts! I had been the one whom rescued by the humanitarian organizations in the past, and now work as a healthcare professional. I think I have a somewhat different views from yours. I have been participating WHS online forums and discussions from the beginning, and its agenda ( Prevent and end conflicts, respect rules of war, leave no one behind, working differently to end need, invest in humanity) is fair. I don't think WHS is ignoring the existing issues... Paul mentioned that WHS is failing by only aiming to " preserve and retain emergency capacity, instead of boosting the emergency capacity ( Please correct if I am wrong). There are other things that certainly need to be discussed at the Summit ( I am NOT saying that emergency response is less important) to mobilize and empower the local knowledge and power ( particularly in Global South) to prevent dependency on external actors/ aids/ organizations ( this was one of the most frequently discussed topics during the online regional consultations). Like Jo says, voice of voiceless needs to be heard, and I cant agree more with this remark. I believe, overall, what WHS is trying to achieve is to build the stronger resilience within the local communities ( The conflict stricken areas or disaster prone regions) by shifting the mode of working, from top-down to bottom up, or deficit focused to strengths focused.

Bob, thanks for a thought provoking post. It makes me wonder if we have really grasped how to even think about this issue properly. Just as environmental sustainability has a specific meaning other types of projects and programs may need to adopt different concepts of sustainability. The author contrasts the evident sustainability of a bridge project with the harder to demonstrate and lower reported levels of sustainability of education projects. But couldn’t this be because we are again talking about different types of sustainability? In one sense sustainability is intrinsic to a bridge. It fulfils its purpose by not falling down. Once built a bridge should continue to be a bridge for at least a minimum projected lifetime and we should regard it as a failure if it were not to do so long past the aid project that built it. On the other hand, many aid projects, including the education projects you mention, are about engendering some kind of behavioural change. Surely we cannot expect behavioural change to have the same sort of sustainability as a bridge particularly as we are dealing with human beings and the myriad of unpredictable influences that impinge on their lives. Surely this kind of sustainability, if it is legitimate to seek it, is of a different order and needs different tools to understand and measure it.

Bob, Thank you for raising this important issue. I think all the points you raise are worthy of consideration for future development assistance for education. In my experience one of the ways to improve sustainability is to provide direct technical assistance to those who need to produce something. This often means sitting with the persons responsible for a product over relatively long periods of time introducing more effective and efficient tools that allows them to perform a required task. The skills the counterparts receive through this technical assistance methodology become well ingrained and longer lasting and thus more sustainable compared with one off training.

Thanks to both Paul and Darren for these stimulating posts on an important issue. I have been a supporter of the idea to look at ways to bridge development and humanitarian work, with the ultimate focus of trying to provide for people in the most efficient and effective ways. I do think there is value in this discussion and there are areas where greater linkages/streamlining could improve our ability to help people. Yet, if the aim at the WHS is to subsume humanitarianism under the SDGs, and development more broadly, I think absolutism is unhelpful. What worries me more is Paul's comment that to speak at the Summit you had to agree. This seems almost repressive. We need different perspectives and disagreement to advance our thinking. And to deliberately limit potential opportunities to speak out against States' rule violations is a concern. Hopefully rule-abiding States will be vocal on this at the Summit. Reading across the two blogs, it seems to me that progress requires two things. We need people at the Summit who will do their best while there to: hold States to account and get other States to do so, too; and advance thinking about how to expand and improve humanitarian action, and forge sensible links with development work. But progress also needs organisations like MSF who will use their power in a different way to communicate crucial information. When the system appears to be rigged against allowing a voice for the voiceless, then somebody needs to stand outside the system and yell.

Stewart, Thank you for the excellent article, and sorry to have missed your talk (I was overseas). Australia's failure to condemn the worsening situation in Nauru, although not surprising, has been disappointing. The whole affair has served to damage Australia's reputation in the region, and that damage extends to the aid program. There is a photo of Mathew Batsiua being arrested (for his peaceful protest) that shows him being bundled into a police car emblazoned with the "Australian Aid" logo, red kangaroo and all. It's an image that will not go unnoticed in a region where Australia portrays itself as promoting 'good governance'.

Michael, I don't think your assessment of education aid as universally ineffective stands up to scrutiny. Also why did you not mention the halving of child and maternal deaths since 1990, or the turning around of the HIV epidemic? Are these also examples of aid ineffectiveness in your eyes?

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