Devpolicy Talks

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 Susta...

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.e...

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 c...

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 Prog...

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...

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 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 Departmen...

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/ Devpolicy Talks is the podcast of the Australian National University's Development Policy Centre.  Read and subscribe to our daily blogs at devpolicy....

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...

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 dev...

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. Th...

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. Th...

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-convers...

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 count...

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 cha...

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 pa...

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...

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 De...

Australia currently holds or has contracted other countries to hold 3,052 people in immigration detention, including 50 children in Nauru (data from end March 2016). Most are from developing countries, including Iran, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, China and Afghanistan. The Global Detention Project is a Geneva-based non-government organisation formed in 2014 to investigate the use of immigration detention a...

Speakers: Anna Solomon, Secretary, Department for Community Development and Religion, PNG; Denga Ilave, Operations Manager for Femili PNG; Kymberley Kepore, Chief Executive Officer of the Oil Search Foundation. Chaired by Sally Moyle, DFAT. Rates of family and sexual violence in Papua New Guinea are among the highest in the world, with some estimating that 70 per cent of women experience physical...

Speaker: Dr Albert Schram, Vice-Chancellor of Papua New Guinea’s University of Technology. Despite its age, the PNG university system is not yet mature. The challenges regarding the quantity and reliability of its funding, and recent legislative changes have not made things better. Efforts to create a solid governance structure, and develop the PNG University of Technology despite its financial co...

This discussion focused on the recent Department of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) Office of Development Effectiveness (ODE) evaluation report, Building Women’s Leadership: the contribution of Australia Awards Scholarships. This was the second part of our April 2016 aid evaluations forum. Speakers: Dr Karen Ovington, Assistant Director, ODE, DFAT; Ms Cheryl Johnson, Assistant Secretary, Scholarships and A...

This recording is the first part of our aid evaluations forum held in April 2016. It looks at The Performance of Australian Aid report, which is the government’s own annual report card on the aid program. Speakers: Mr Scott Dawson, First Assistant Secretary, Contracting and Aid Management Division, DFAT; Professor Stephen Howes, Director, Development Policy Centre, ANU Devpolicy Talks is the podca...

At our fourth annual aid budget breakfast the morning after the 2016-17 budget a panel of experts discussed what the 2016-17 budget means for the future of Australian aid. Speakers: Stephen Howes, Director, Development Policy Centre, Crawford School, ANU; Jacqui De Lacy General Manaager, Global Strategy, Abt JTA; and Anthony Swan, Research Fellow, Development Policy Centre.   https://crawford.anu....

This is the recording of the launch of the 2015 New Zealand Stakeholder Survey in Wellington, NZ, in March 2016. Devpolicy's Terence Wood outlines the key findings of the survey, with discussion from Dr Wren Green, Director of NZ’s Council for International Development. More details on the survey here: https://crawford.anu.edu.au/devpolicy/stakeholder-survey Devpolicy Talks is the podcast of the A...