 to our panel today on inside the black box of political will, including the launch of the 10-year synthesis report of research by the Developmental Leadership Program, which is supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The DLP is an international research initiative founded in 2006 by the late Dr. Adrian Letwitch and Steve Hogg, who was, at that time, senior governance specialist within the Australian Agency of International Development, Ose. Not even being in this room, but I haven't seen you yet. I'm sure it will be a long later. The aim was to produce a body of research to address an important knowledge gap about the role of leaders and coalitions in the politics of development. This was quite groundbreaking stuff at the time when the aid program was largely focused on technical solutions, not just the Australian aid program, but the international aid practice in general. The earliest DLP work made the case for exploring the role of human agency in institutional change. It criticized existing political economy analysis frameworks that over-emphasized structures, interests, and incentives at the expense of power and ideas. Over the past 10 years, the DLP's focus has also evolved to increasingly address challenges of gender inclusion, corruption, and the push for donors to think and work politically. This partly reflects our changing global context, the need to deliver smarter aid and shifting research and policy agendas, and the changing politics within donor agencies themselves. As of February this year, DLP has published 114 research papers covering 44 countries, as well as many state-of-the-art conceptual papers and short guidance notes, such as the very popular one on everyday political analysis. The report being launched today is a synthesis of the findings and lessons from this impressive body of research over 10 years. Australia's proud to support the DLP through a strategic partnership between D-FAT, the University of Birmingham, University College London, and La Trobe University in Melbourne. We see it as a valuable partner, helping to grow the evidence base of how we as a donor agency can contribute to development that is locally driven and sustainable. This means deeper engagement by us with local realities in formal institutions and how decisions about power and resources are contested and resolved. We're excited about the body of work being launched today, even though we've been using much of it for many years now, and are keen to hear the insights it holds for Australian policy and practice from experienced practitioners in the audience and casual observers. So the way we will run the panel today, I will just briefly introduce panel members who are detailed in your program, but I'd like to draw some attention to others in the audience who may contribute during the question and answer session. So Heather Marquette will kick off talking about the DLP's history and accomplishments and outputs. Heather is Professor of Development Politics at the University of Birmingham and the immediate former Director of the DLP. She has also more recently become a Senior Research Fellow at the Department for International Development in the UK and is Secretary of the Thinking and Working Politically International Community of Practice, of which Brian Teske, sitting up there, is convener. Professor David Hudson is Director of the DLP and Professor of Professorial Research Fellow in Politics and Development at the University of Birmingham. Dr. Claire McLaughlin is a Research Fellow in the University of Birmingham. Claire, just stick up your hand, there she is there. Associate Professor Chris Roche, Senior Research Partner at the DLP and Director of the Institute of Human Security and Social Change at La Trobe University. Dr. Nehia Desande, Birmingham Fellow in Politics and Development at the University of Birmingham. Tate Brinicum, PhD candidate, but you may have heard her speak at the conference last year, and Anna Nalpa, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia, but a great friend and ally of DLP research work and its application in the Pacific. So I'm delighted to welcome this very distinguished panel to our discussion today, and I'll hand over to Heather to kick us off. Okay, many thanks for the introduction and kind words, Michael. It's a tremendous honor to be here today, and it has been a privilege beyond words to be part of DLP's story. So I'd like to put today's launch into a little bit of context if you'll indulge me for five minutes. As Michael said, DLP was founded over a decade ago now by Adrian Leftwich, DLP's first director of research, and Steve Hogg at what was then Aussade. Many of you here will be familiar with Adrian and his long-standing work looking at the centrality of politics for development, and it's easy to forget now that his work at the time was groundbreaking, as Michael said, but also that it was marginal to key development debates for decades. Adrian's thinking on this really came together in what we call DLP One, which is its first phase in partnership with the Australian government. Working with Steve and others in DFET, and with talented researchers and practitioners from around the world, including people in this room today, DLP One's work on politics, leadership, coalitions, and what we now call thinking and working politically, or TWP, began to change the way many of us think about development. Sadly, Adrian passed away in 2013, and what we call DLP Two began. As a team, we had the joy of building on DLP One's hard work and success, consolidating some of the work shepherded under DLP One by Adrian and Steve, and bringing in new areas of research. And as Michael said, we've been part of a group of leading thinkers and practitioners working together as part of the TWP community of practice, where we're working collectively to try to bring a better understanding of how to turn insights from the sorts of research produced by DLP, from others like ODI, the Asia Foundation, policy practice, and so on, into actionable, practical ways to rethink development practice. And you're going to hear more about this work soon, but also throughout the next couple of days. When we decided that it was time to try to synthesize DLP's research and key findings, it made sense to do it over the full decade, rather than just the last four to five years that we've been responsible for. We wouldn't actually be able to truly learn from DLP's work unless we looked at the entire back catalog, as we call it. But that's the right decision, but it was definitely not an easy one. We needed to look at the 114 papers and lots of other outputs, half of which we weren't actually responsible for. And we needed to look at it with a fresh critical eye to look at that transition from DLP one and DLP two and what that tells us about the history of the debate, to look for consistencies and inconsistencies as well over the years, and to try to think about what it all adds up to. And we needed it to guide DLP's thinking for a new phase of what we will probably call DLP three very originally. One of the most rewarding aspects of this work, but also one of the most challenging, was a growing awareness of how much DLP's earlier work has become central to many current discussions around development. And a lot of those are actually reflected in the agenda here today. And it's quite exciting thinking about two years ago, there was a panel on politics and TWP and development and we were stuck in a small room where people were sitting on the floor, out in the hallway and so on. So we've graduated to the big room now. We've seen work on coalitions, politics, thinking we're can politically feed into the World Bank's World Development Report recently. Something that for those of us who've been looking at how donors have looked at politics would have been unimaginable, even when the TWP community started in 2013. Few people would now try to claim that you can do development without thinking seriously about politics. And yet for us looking back over DLP's early research reminded us that this used to be a controversial claim that required a degree of advocacy as well as evidence. The fact that the claim that politics is central to development has recently been described as a new orthodoxy is incredibly rewarding and probably a little bit amusing to those of us who've been part of this long journey. For anyone here who has had the task of trying to synthesize the outputs from a large research program over time, you will probably understand the deep pain behind the smiles here today. We had a wonderful colleague, Cheryl Stonehouse, who's recently moved to leading communications for a UK nature charity, who painstakingly went through every single DLP output and coded, categorized, and produced reports for those of us to draw on. We had DLP's former program manager, Heather Lyndevere, who organized us all, helped us focus, kept us smiling, and continued to influence us with her own work on developmental leadership, with her papers still being the number one downloaded output from DLP. We had researchers, including several people here today, who wrote thematic reports that acted as the foundation for the overarching synthesis report that you'll hear about in a minute. We had a group of external challengers and peer reviewers and DFAT and beyond who provided rich, detailed, critical reflection and advice. Our senior research partner, Chris Roach, spent much time with us in the UK and on email and late night, early morning teleconferences at all hours, writing, guiding, and vitally, always making us come back to issues of gender and power. We had our com team, Sarah and Ed here in the room, who've been working pretty much night and day over the past few weeks, and with the designer, Stephen Dickey, to help make it all look very gorgeous and accessible. All in all, the report itself represents a year's worth of work for over 25 people. However, the really heavy lifting was done by David Hudson and Claire McLaughlin, who in the end needed to take all of this research over the last decade and pull it together in a way that guides their thinking for the way DLP's lead will progress. They have my gratitude, my admiration, and I have to say they have inspired me personally over the years, and I'm very, very thankful. So with that in mind, it is a great pleasure to hand over to DLP's new director, Professor David Hudson, to talk us through this emphasis. Gosh, thank you, Heather. Okay, so my role here is to then, if I can get the PowerPoints working, the report that covers the past 10 years of DLP's research, and as we can see, it's called Inside the Black Box of Political Will, which should become very apparent why it's called that over the next 15 to 20 minutes. And then after me, a couple of researchers take them here. We're gonna present ongoing work which directly comes out with some of these findings, and then Anna Nalfa at the end will present a practitioner's perspective from the perspective which we're extremely grateful for. As Heather's already said, this is the work of many people, and it's invidious to suggest that it's only one person who should have their name on them. Indeed, it doesn't, for precisely that reason. The report comes in two flavors. There is the full report over 30 or pages. There's also an eight-pager, because we're kind. And there's a focus on the implications. They are available on the website to download, and also there's a table outside with some hard coffee, hopefully a few left still on there if you want to grab a coffee. The main message that comes out of the report could be summarized very simply. And that is how do we explain when, where, and how change happens. And all too often, the shorthand that people use, and many people in this room will be familiar with this, is the answer of political will. But that's what we need. And the problem is often the absence of political will when key decision makers, whether they be politicians or other leaders, aren't willing to expend valuable political and social capital on pushing reforms through. Which leads to the question, well, what is political will? How does it work? And how can we support or build precisely that process? So, here's the argument in the nutshell. That first arrow that takes us up to the orange circle starts from this recognition, probably about a decade and a half ago, that politics was the crucial missing factor in explaining why reforms and institutional change fails to happen or fails to stick. And so often the interventions, the programming or the initiatives that were back behind social change were considered or were actually often politically infeasible. And, hand, they failed to try and either accommodate or overturn the vested interests that wanted to support the status quo. So, what we think is that you have to back up a little bit and then try this alternative path. And you ask the question, well, what is political will and how do we build it? So, if we unpack the logic of that argument slightly, it's a classic, what engineers and systems theorists call a black box problem. So we know that we have a set of inputs and that's efforts towards reform. And that something happens within this black box and it matters whether or not you have the presence or absence of political will. And then you get successful outcomes or failure. The problem is, with a black box, it's okay and you cannot see the inside working for them. And if you can't understand the inside workings of it, then it's very hard to try and support it, create it, et cetera. So, that's what we're trying to do here. And then, our answer is that one way of building political will, it's very important to underline that. There are many ways of building political will, but one way is through the process of developmental leadership. And we define developmental leadership as a political process, it's a collective process, and one that involves contestation. And it's composed of three key elements. And these key elements kept on coming out of the empirical research that we reviewed over the past 10 years, time and time again. It's not a linear process. It's quite a messy process. But nevertheless, they are consistent with that. So, we say it's strategic. It's strategic because it's deliberate. People might not be able to push through the reforms they intended. They might not turn out how they wanted them to, but it nevertheless, it is deliberate. And it's not individual leaders. And this goes to the point that Heather said about Heather Linder-Verse, paper that remains the most downloaded one, that looked at conceptions of leadership. And it found consistently that too often, people conceive of leadership as an individual process or evolving heroic individuals. Rather than this, this process of building collective will, whether that's through coalitions, whether that's social movements, interest groups, organizations. And it's a political process because it involves power. And it involves interests, but also ideas, and this notion of contestation, which for us is something that has always been there within DLP's work, but we've really been trying to pull out now. So contestation is the conflictual process of disagreeing, negotiating. It's not necessarily violence, and often it shouldn't be violent if it's political. But it's absolutely fundamentally necessary for the emergence of legitimate, locally appropriate, and therefore sustainable institutions. And I think this is really nice. It picks up a little bit on what Nancy Virthel was starting to talk about in terms of the emergence of the middle class and the kind of the healthy disruption, as she put it, that ensues after that. So here are the three levels of developmental leadership. As you said, it's not a linear process. It's quite messy. There are lots of feedback loops. But analytically speaking, we can disaggregate it into individuals. And development and change cannot happen without individuals who are willing to mobilize and drive change. And whether it's pushing through legal reforms, or whether it's agitating for women's rights, motivation isn't enough. It needs a combination of power, of opportunity, and skill as well. And this all happens within a context, an institutional context, that constrains, but also enables. The second element, or level, is at the collective level. And here, most of DLP's research is focused on the role of coalitions. And we have lots of lessons about how coalitions are formed, about what drives them around their strategies. Because individual leaders can't bring around change single-handedly. And there's papers on coalitions in Fiji, in the Philippines, Ponga, et cetera, within our back catalog, as Heather put it. And then we get to the third level, the societal level. And this is where the contestation really, really emerges, as coalitions engage within a battle of ideas. And it's this battle of ideas that reshape society's rules that are key. And the power and effectiveness of a coalition depends fundamentally on a coalition's ability to contest one set of ideas, and then to help legitimize an alternative set of ideas, to help build effective and sustainable institutions. So I'd just like to finish off by introducing a few examples from the DLP research papers from different case studies to illustrate these different points. So firstly, at the individual level, how do interests and ideas and values, how are they formed within institutional context? And what about the opportunity for individuals to act around critical junctures or crises? So motivation isn't something that is fixed. It's not a set of interests that are predictable. People have to arrive at their own understanding of what their interests are. And it comes from what sociologists call an internal conversation. So an interpretation of the environment, the opportunities, the values, and then a range of options are open to these individuals. So it isn't predictable, there's no mechanical logic here. And so crucially, this matters because it means that motivations, values and interests are plastic. They can be changed, they can be molded, they can be shaped through people's experiences, but also through the interventions of external actors. So for example, Sarah Phillips' paper on Yemen looks at how the president had to weigh up what was in his self-interest. And it wasn't immediately apparent whether it's better served through pushing through developmental reforms or actually defending and maintaining the rent seeking status quo. And another paper on the role of higher education within Ghana shows how education can create and shape these core values through the curriculum, both within the classroom and outside of the classroom, but also through creating networks that then leaders used as crucially reforms later and also disrupting traditional ethnic and kinship networks as they got pulled out of their home networks. As well as the paper on Ghana, there's also papers on the role of education in the Philippines, Somaliland, and Somalia and also Mauritius as well. So also individuals have to be strategic. They have to maneuver within their environments. The environment doesn't dictate what happens. So for example, there's a great paper by Andrew Rossa and colleagues looking at the politics of free public services in Indonesia. And they look at four different districts and how the role of the district leaders and their heads was quite different across those districts and led to very different outcomes based on the political strategies that they pursued. So in a couple of them, they were all predatory leadership, but in a couple of them, they decided to try and build a popular base amongst the poor. And what this did was this meant that free public services were provided because in the other districts, they were focused on consolidating patched-edge networks. So the lesson here is that there is room for maneuver for individuals within the institutional context they work in. So at the collective level in the report, we look at how coalitions are formed, the role of interests around formation of coalitions, the role of values, role of pre-existing networks, and the role of inclusion and gender as well as strategies. So we often assume that coalitions are formed around shared values and often that's true, but it's not necessarily that straightforward and I think Kate's gonna speak to this point that it requires a lot of political work to help maintain these values and maintain cohesiveness of coalitions. But also coalitions don't have to be value-based, not stored. John Seidel's paper on coalitions for change in the Philippines looking at the syntax of 2012 is a really good example of this. The coalition that allowed the syntax to pass involved the president, but also British American tobacco, also San Miguel Corporation, as well as doctors and health-related organizations. So the crucial lesson here is that reforms are not made by reformists alone. And other papers detail different strategies that coalitions pursue. So for example, interest-bundling. So trying to pull together different factions of coalitions around showing how their interests align. So for example, in a paper on the politics of climate change in China and India, showing how large Chinese companies had an interest in bringing in energy efficiency regulation, because it had actually put the smaller companies out of business and helped relieve them of the low-cost competition and increased their market share. So by bundling their interests together, it allowed the reform to be pushed through. Also framing is another strategy in Latin that keeps coming through. So for example, in Mary's Tadros's paper on Jordan, this is obviously a context that has a very conservative ruling elite, a very limited democracy in different cultural norms. And she details how the coalition had to frame the reforms around in line with the principles of Sharia, but also the suffering of children and the elderly. So this family-friendly frame allowed the reform to push through, whereas maybe a focus on women's rights and other more kind of universal gender equality goals would have led to failure. And there's an interesting comparison there with what happened in Tonga, which I think will be spoken about in the panel this afternoon. Another key lesson that comes through is the role of pragmatism. So obviously pragmatism involves a lot of compromise, but it's more than that. It's more than the willingness to compromise. Coalitions can be and often are very exclusive and they don't conform to the principles of group governance that many of us in the room or indeed many development agencies would push international norms, ideals of participation, transparency, and equality. For example, but we have to be pragmatic, although there are normative questions that that brings up, which we should also address. So the final level here, the societal level. So coalition power and effectiveness fundamentally hinges on their ability to contest and delegitimize ideas that underpin institutions. So ideas are absolutely crucial in a lot of DLP work. And in the report, there's a couple of examples that are discussed, for example in Sri Lanka. The very entrenched and accepted and legitimate idea that free education is an intrinsic birthright fundamentally constrains the ability of any government or regime to try and push back on this without facing violent dissent. But we should also remember there are multiple brains within any society. So the role is often to navigate these different brains, these different ideas of what is and isn't legitimate. And to seize opportunities as well as to create them. So Kate McLean's paper on Medellin Miracle was around how this city in Columbia went from being the most violent city on earth to become the most innovative city of the year a few years back. And about how elites started to perceive it was in their interests to stop losing out on the benefits of globalization, but also the competition that arose from new elites emerging to help address inequality and insecurity. But again, it fundamentally underlines another DLP theme which is yes, there is a critical juncture as a crisis but people need to do political work within that crisis to help push change through. And I think this very nicely comes back to where DLP started with Adrian and Steve's paper on around institutional indigenization which essentially is the process of trying to create appropriate and legitimate institutions that are embedded deeply within local politics and culture. And so this process of indigenization is relies fundamentally on the active participation and consent of local leaders, elites and coalitions. So that's how we conceptualize development leadership and we finish, as I'm sure Blair, that Excel will be pleased with, a set of invitations for donors and other external actors. And we conclude that developmental leadership can, if carefully, be supported from the outside and that change happened through jumps and critical junctures, but also very incrementally. And so there's an opportunity for strategic incrementalism by those of us who want to support the process. So aid agencies and others can encourage developmental leadership through supporting quality education at all levels, especially secondary and higher. External actors can and should work behind the scenes often quietly to try and create space. So not engineering reforms and outcomes, but creating space for local leadership to emerge and work through their own politics. And to work with this kind of politics around legitimacy to help identify norms and ideas that may be open to contestation and open to political challenge without undermining the legitimacy of the actors, the coalitions that they work with. And all of this fundamentally relies on thinking, working politically. And again, these are detailed in, more detailed within the report. And I think the place to finish is that, it's exactly that, but it's about trying to open up spaces for politics and contestation, not taking the politics out of the bay to give an alternative view on what's expressed earlier. So don't intervene to determine outcomes. Don't try and engineer the properties, but let the process of political contestation run its course. Thank you. Thank you, David. A better summary of what DLP is about, I don't think would have been possible. So thank you very much. Now I'd like to invite Nahir Desande to give us some insight on what this means in terms of a particular, a typical research program within DLP. So he will talk about contestation and consultation, the politics of Myanmar's investment law reform. Great, thank you very much. So yeah, I'm gonna talk about a piece of research that we're still doing, so it's ongoing research that I'm doing with David Hudson and Jasmine Burnley of Oxfam Myanmar. And the research, I mean it feeds directly from some of these ideas that David has talked about, that the last 10 years of DLP's work has considered. And hopefully it also kind of opens up some new areas that we'll be kind of focusing on going forward as well. So the projects about the investment law reform in Myanmar that's been taking place over the last few years. And at the heart of it is this issue of contestation. So one of the big benefits or one of the big kind of pluses of the kind of move towards politics we've seen over the last 10, 15 years has been much greater focus on contestation and bringing this into the process. So it's not about kind of designing ideal policies and just hoping that they'll then be implemented magically. It's really about thinking through how these things happen. And there's been lots of really interesting and lots of great work in that area. However, I'd say that a lot of the focus still very much seems to be, tends to be on kind of once you've got the reform that the issue of contestation is about pushback from various stakeholders within a society. So often we think of kind of elites with vested interests who are opposed to certain types of reforms. And so a lot of the thinking around politics is on how do we approach that level of contestation when there is that kind of pushback. And this, so the idea of contestation as part of the design phase of reform tends to be overlooked quite a lot. And so Merrily Grinda who's done lots of great work on looking at kind of reform processes. One of the things she talks about in her book on education reform in Latin America is actually the successful reform cases where discussion of the reform was limited to a core team until that the reform had actually been kind of nailed down. And it was only then that it started to be opened up. So there's certainly this argument that often we wanna see a closed space for policy makers to design these reforms, design laws, policies. And so the view has tended to be that contestation is something of a problem to overcome that we need to kind of think more about how we battle through with reform processes. And I'd argue that, or we'd argue that, again there's still kind of very heavy focus on interest there and the role of ideas is missing in part of that. And so the argument would be that actually good policies should come from contestation itself. There should be this kind of battle or struggle of different ideas to kind of design and then implement the best policy for that particular context. So some of the work around kind of PDIA, so Lump, Pritchett and Matt Andrews, again talks about this kind of focus on greater engagement. There's a really interesting paper, particularly when we think about kind of technocratic organizations, which is what the focus will be on. So I'm gonna talk about the World Bank's IFC. Often the kind of lack of contestation, the lack of challenge needs to the persistence of certain ideas which in different contexts don't work out, which is what I'm gonna go on to. I would say, as we've heard earlier today, from Nancy Virtele, I would say there's growing kind of recognition of the need for contestation, but often it's seen as, once there's a developing middle class, this is where we start to see these issues. So there's a lot more skepticism of contestation and challenging ideas in a context like Myanmar a few years ago, which was kind of emerging from a long legacy of military rule. And so one of the things is looking at what's happened in Myanmar and looking at a series of kind of public consultations that's been going on in the country, which most people wouldn't have expected to be particularly, to inform policy in the way it has. So the Myanmar investment law, so a few years ago, so up until about 2014, there were two separate investment laws in the country. So you had a foreign investors law and you had a domestic investors law. And so for various reasons, particularly pushed from foreign investors, but also from a number of domestic actors, there was a drive to kind of having a unified investment law for the country. So this started in 2014, I apologize for the very wordy slide, so it's just to get some of the details of the reform in there. So the IFC, so the World Bank's International Finance Corporation led this process supported by DIPA and DIPID, and its role was to kind of advise and to produce this single new law. And what we saw was actually a really, there was huge amounts of problems with the initial drafts of the laws that were produced. And so just to give you a very quick overview of some of the problems with the law that came out of the IFC with in collaboration with the Myanmar agency that deals with investment, Sadiqa. What we saw is the law was, technically it was very flawed. So there were lots of issues over the wording, over the vagueness of the law itself, which were undoubtedly gonna lead to problems. The whole emphasis of the law was very much on foreign investors, and there was almost no kind of regard for what was going on in the ground in Myanmar at the time, and how this law would relate to some of those issues. It's set up a new commission, which again, I'll speak quite briefly, but lots of issues over the incentives that were being provided to this new investment commission, which would have a huge amount of say on how investment proceed in the country. So over which areas would be liberalized, which companies would be granted access, all of those sorts of things. One of the biggest issues was around dispute settlement, and what the law tried to introduce in its initial drafts was a clause whereby an international company could take the government of Myanmar to court in any jurisdiction of its choice, or in its home jurisdiction, without going through any national processes. So this was unprecedented, well it's still unprecedented in that you don't see this in a national law in any country. You might see specific contracts that have this kind of clause, but certainly not in a legal framework. And it potentially introduced huge amounts of problems for the government of Myanmar, partly because, as I'm sure most of you are aware, the country had huge, I mean it was going for a huge transition, it still is. Huge issues over land rights, so you had kind of multiple layers of land rights kind of legislation, and as well as kind of traditional land ownership issues, you had contracts that were all awarded by the military government, which effectively wouldn't be challenged, which were at the time being challenged in the country, but this law threatened, you had issues over compliance issues, particularly around the last clause in the law, sorry, in the law, which said that the investment law would effectively prevail over any other law in the country. So you have a land rights law going through at the same time, and what you're saying is, if a company has signed a contract which says that they have access to this land, despite all of the other processes going on within the country, this is now gonna take precedence over this. So a huge amount of problems with this law. And so for various processes, which I don't have time to go into, which in itself is quite interesting, civil society managed to force through, so both international and local civil society groups in the country managed to force through a series of public consultation processes. And this was fundamental in A, getting these issues really, getting these issues heard, and B, eventually kind of transforming this law into something which isn't perfect, and certainly there's still a lot of opposition to different aspects of it, but it's certainly far more improved than what we saw at the start of this process. So in terms of the limitations, some of the issues that the consultation process addressed very quickly. So one is the ideological bias of the organization that was leading on this. So this was the IFC. So a couple of years ago in the World Bank's World Development Report, there was a whole chapter dedicated to kind of biases of development practitioners. And there was certainly, we could certainly see evidence of this with this kind of very standard. I mean, it was, some would say kind of harking back to an earlier period of the types of economic reform that they wanted to see in the country. So very much about having this free market kind of radical investment context in Myanmar. A fundamental lack of understanding of the context. So again, in some of the interviews we've got, this term blank slate comes up quite a lot. So the country is going for a transition. This was seen as an opportunity to really implement some great economic policies. So issues over land rights were not discussed prior to producing the law in the first place. Issues around conflict barely mentioned, and obviously this is a huge issue in large parts of the country, the role of the military and what that meant for investment going forward. And then finally, it was the bias towards the other actors. So in a few of the interviews that we did, one of the things that people said was, oh, we think the IFC was trying to be too political, which again kind of highlights this issue over how politics is thought of. And what they meant is effectively that they were trying to guess what the opposition would be. They had assumptions about the way the government of Myanmar would react, the way the lack of understanding from civil society. And so they were really trying to push through this law as quickly as possible. So we saw a series of consultations. I will talk a bit in the conclusion just about that. So the importance of the consultation process to wrap up. So again, it's the biases that were really important here, but actually this opened up a process to really challenge to inform those coming in about some of the issues based. But it's not to forget that there was a lack of expertise and capacity in Myanmar at the time. So there was a reason that the IFC was asked to lead on this. So this helped this kind of joint process occur. The other factor that made the consultation process so important was the speed of reforms taking place in the country. So what you had was this context of continual flux of laws and reforms. And so it meant there wasn't a lot of opposition. So we heard of when this law was finally passed and it was under Ong San Suu Kyi's leadership. The legislators were told not to debate it, just push it through. And again, in these kinds of contexts, we think the role of kind of consultation processes could be very important. So to finish, when the case is written up, hopefully it will bring about a kind of shift, not shift, but certainly push forward this thinking around contestation and consultation and what it means, particularly in uncertain context and changing context and what role it could play. One of the things that I didn't talk about, which was particularly important is actually how, like the kind of technical details over the consultation process. Is it done in English or in Burma and who gets to speak then? Issues around gender, all of these things play a really important role and actually it's gone into some of the thinking around consultation processes in the country. And I would say finally, there's a slight issue, I would say, of a tendency to go down the slightly crude kind of Machiavellian view of what thinking and working politically means. So I think it's important to recognize there's space for normative issues and not only space, but these are fundamental to any political process. So having contestation, looking at the trade-offs are crucial to thinking and working politically. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Nihia. And I'd invite now Tate Brinicum to talk to us about digital feminism in Fiji. So I'm gonna take us to a slightly kind of more micro-local focus. And I'm gonna talk to you about a project that I've been working on in collaboration with four researchers at the University of the South Pacific. And this is a project looking at this idea of kind of online activism and digital activism, particularly how it plays out with a group of members of the Young Women's Rights Movement. So our participants in this research were 22 women from this Young Women's Rights Movement who had a history of engagement through their affiliation with NGOs like the Fiji Women's Rights Movement or Femlink Pacific, but also because of their status as Emerging Leaders Forum Alumnites or ELFAs. So the Emerging Leaders Forum is a year-long training program for those aged 18 to 35, and it consists of workshops and retreats aimed at developing Young Women's ability to critically analyze issues and further develop their advocacy skills. So much like we've heard from some of the other DLP research into the importance of higher education processes, these sorts of processes in Fiji have been incredibly important for forming a network of these alumni, these ELFAs, who have these ongoing relationships and really kind of a bit of a social movement to advocate for concerns of Young Women throughout Fiji. So this project sought to understand how these people were engaging with digital technology, how they were using platforms like social media for activism and advocacy, and what, if any, were the kind of offline implications or actions from this. So why are we talking about social media in the first place? Well, Fiji's really been at the forefront of the Pacific's technological revolution and has some of the fastest-growing rates of mobile phone uptake and social media use in the region, coupled with the lowest cost for accessing and using such technology. And every time I put it beside, someone inevitably asked how can you have 133% mobile penetration, and that's because individuals have multiple SIM cards with multiple companies, which makes financial sense. So it's estimated that about 48% of Fiji's population are using the internet and accessing social media platforms, and this is from 2017, but it actually represents a 13% increase from the same time in 2016. So we're seeing that really rapid expansion in access and use. This increasing prevalence of social media in the country has had a profound impact on the kind of broader media and communications landscape. Those of you that are familiar with Fiji will know that the country's media landscape is one that's developed in accordance with the history of political instability. So even though we've seen the removal of kind of the public emergency regulations, the media industry still is heavily censored, often self-censored, out of the fear of hefty penalties associated with breaching the media decree. So there's kind of a lingering atmosphere of control and suspicion. As recently as this week, we've seen the arrest of the managing director and a journalist from Island Business in Fiji based on a news story around a high profile court case industrial dispute. So something that's still very much playing out today. In response to these restrictions on media freedom and taking into account these kind of technological advances, social media and online spaces have emerged as a really unique communication platform, a source of information, debate, and dialogue. And really a platform or a tool for expressing political dissent, lobbying, and engaging in dialogue and advocacy. So returning to our research participants and how this plays out in their lives. Digital technology and social media have enabled participants to access information and communicate in new ways and at an unprecedented scale. So as one participant noted, social media's enabled activists to gain exposure to a range of alternate narratives and perspectives on issues beyond the scope of their immediate social networks. So participants spoke a lot about having access to information around black feminism, queer feminism, post-modernism, all these sorts of dialogues that were really important in shaping their identity as activists. But one participant also noted that social media really opened you up. So she reflected how we were all sitting in a room doing a focus group together and we all knew each other. But that when you're out there on social media, you're exposed to a variety of comments and a variety of different points of view. Participants also noted how social media has the potential to transcend the physical space and into the cyber space, removing geographical barriers to communication and participation and enabling them to feel connected to regional and global movements and moments in the women's rights struggle. For participants in this study, social media enabled the creation of virtual communities of solidarity and support. So scholars like Naila Kibir have talked about the importance of these networks and spaces of solidarity and support in the women's movement. But for these participants, those spaces took a more online form rather than a physical form. But these are also spaces for kind of contestation and accountability. And again, the idea of contestation plays out in this research in terms of internal contestation among people within the movement themselves. So digital technologies have fostered kind of a virtual community of accountability and transparency for activists manifesting in two ways. So digital activists are able to first hold themselves to account and reflect on their changing perspectives by virtue of digital archives. So participants reflected a lot on the Facebook's on this day function, where you're constantly reminded of images or comments that you made months or even years ago. So this notion of digital memory really allowed participants of space to reflect on their own growth and acknowledge instances where their continued education has resulted in a change of opinion or stance on a particular topic. Secondly, activists were also able to hold each other to account for seemingly kind of contradictory social media practices, providing a window into the views and perspectives of particular people that would not have been known were it not for these platforms. So one thing that regularly comes up in my research is this idea of slactivism versus activism. So the common assertion that social media is kind of incapable of facilitating real activism and is really just fostering a generation of slactivists or armchair activists as depicted in the image here. However, research that has emerged in the last few years out of the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as kind of the Occupy movement and anti-neoliberal protests in the developed world, have demonstrated how activists can kind of successfully engage with the internet to facilitate this kind of offline protest. So for participants, social media activism was most useful for online campaigning, particularly when it comes to raising public consciousness, getting the attention of policymakers. Most participants noted a preference for using social media for disseminating statements, press releases, policy documents, because of the inability to get these things published in the mainstream media. So a number of participants reflected on one campaign in particular, which was a 2012 ELF alumni campaign called Take Back the Street. This was an initiative in response to increasing instances of street harassment, perpetrated by public service vehicle drivers in and around Suva. So activists created a Facebook group to document these instances of street harassment, a place where people could post the date, time, location, registration number, all of those sorts of things. Throughout this campaign, women's rights organizations like the Fiji Women's Rights Movement, the Fiji Women's Crisis Center were invited to conduct a series of gender sensitization trainings with the Fiji Taxi Authority, as well as the Lan Trance Law Authority. And the ELFA activists collated all the data from this Facebook group and presented it in a submission to the Lan Transport Authority as part of consultations to amend the Code of Conduct and the Lan Transport Act. So a particular interest in relation to this campaign is the notion that it challenges the assumption that online activism or engaging with social media is largely an exercise of preaching to the choir. So people often talk about how are you getting outside your own social network, your own immediate bubble on social media? However, as one participant noted in relation to this campaign, a lot of women who shared their stories were actually people that had come from far outside the Women's Rights Movement. They wanted to talk to somebody who understood a lot of people came who had never heard of feminism, never heard of women's rights. A lot of people wanted a place to vent their anger and frustration and a sympathetic audience. So this campaign was able to reach kind of far beyond the immediate alpha network and engage with a much broader constituency beyond the women's movement. And these examples of online campaigning kind of show us two main avenues for influencing policy or bringing about change. So on the one hand, you've got this idea of kind of bottom up digital activism. That's the idea of generating digital momentum, mobilizing public support, hosting public demonstrations and protests, and also for NGOs, for lobby groups to release these statements, to release press releases on a platform that's traditionally not available. But then you also see this idea of kind of top down policy influence. So through the generation of kind of, if a story gets enough traction or gains enough buzz on social media, we've seen a trend that it's then covered by the international media, like Radio Australia or Pacific Beat. And this then necessitates be these domestic media covering the story as they can no longer ignore it if it's reached international high. So we're seeing that while social media is being used in this bottom up way, it's also being used to kind of circumvent the challenges of accessing the domestic media by working outside, getting international media attention and then eventually generating enough momentum that it can no longer be ignored by the national media. I might finish there, but thanks very much. Thank you very much, Tate. I should just say as an aside, one of the great opportunities PLP has given this practice is the opportunity to access some of the younger, up and coming academic minds really across the world, but certainly in Australia and Tate in my mind is certainly one of those. I hate to think I haven't going to be in 10 years, but thank you again for another very fascinating presentation. Now I'd like to turn, save the best for last, to Anna Nalper. And we've asked Anna to give a practitioner's view of the politics of contestation, to try and take this work on research and theory to the practical level and see whether it works. Anna. Thank you and thank you to the organizers as well for giving us the space to talk about this. I think I've been really lucky actually over the last 10 years that the PLP have been around to really tap in to the knowledge and think about how it plays out in the work that I've been able to do. And so normally I love to talk about Banuatu, it's my favorite topic, and I thought this time I need to apply it to a different context. And so I've been working at the Pacific regional level for the last number of years. And so this was an opportunity to think about, well what are the politics around contestation, power and ideas in a Pacific regional sense? And particularly to think about, well how does that interact with thinking and working politically around development? I mean it sort of zoom us out a bit from the national level. And I apologize to those of you who know the region quite well, but just for those who don't, to think about the way we characterize Pacific regionalism is looking at the way in which countries interact with each other bilaterally, multilaterally, how they work together around common issues, and particularly how they also work together through a number of regional organizations, it is an intergovernmental organization. So when we're talking about Pacific regionalism, there's a lot of parts to it, but ultimately they're all about the countries coming together to work around common shared issues and often either development issues. So there's been really good examples over the last number of decades around the nuclear free specific movement and a number of other areas, which is why Pacific regionalism has been something that attracts many. And I think Australia has been a part of this, it's a part of the region, and it's been a big part of Pacific regionalism. And I think it was in the 2000s, many of you would have heard of the Pacific plan that came out as the kind of regional development plan that stated the common ambitions for the region. So this is what we'll be able to work together as countries and as our institutions and we'll get behind this plan. Now, this all started to kind of shift when we came to the mid 2000s, to the late 2000s. And part of this was the political context in the region at the time. So we just had Tape talk about Fiji and what was going on there. There was the tensions and the relationships between Fiji and other countries, particularly Australia and New Zealand and Samoa. And we were coming up to the, well, not too far off the 2015 mark, but it was coming up to 2010 and the MDGs that were being required to be reported against. So it was a good time to sort of rethink is the Pacific plan doing what we want for the region. And so there was a review done in 2013 of the Pacific plan. And it really said, the region's lost its way. We've been focusing on a technical document, but we've lost our way in terms of why we come together as a region. You know, it said it has to be, regionalism has to be more than the document. It has to really be about the systems and incentives for why we work together and how we work together. And I think this is quite, when I first heard the BLP say, it's not a technical solution, it has to be a political solution. I mean, this was exactly the kind of thinking that was coming through. So you need to shift what Pacific regionalism has been for the last 10 or so years to insist it back towards that political and system approach. So the review, which was led by Sir Nicaria Morata, former Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, he said, let's bring the politics back into this. It's been much more conscious about politics in the region, in terms of our ambition. And this is, you know, said knowing that a lot of people are now describing it as a crowded and complex region. There's a lot of actors, both political, as well as developmental. There's a lot more NGOs, which is great. There's a lot of philanthropics, there's a lot going on. So, you know, some also said, and I believe Professor Graves Fry here, the USP edited a book about it's time for a new specific diplomacy. So you need to find a new way. So how are we going to do this? This was the shift that was needed to happen. So it was essentially looking for a paradigm shift and saying we need to move from a specific plan that was very focused and had some good results, but still did not meet the full ambition for the region and how do we shift it? So of course there's another document. I'll call the framework the Pacific Regionism. But ultimately, this framework for Pacific Regionism was much more around saying, the how, how are we going to do it? So rather than the what, what is it that are our common development ambitions, it was how are we going to actually organize and mobilize around that? And, you know, development is still a priority within this, but it's no longer the sole focus. And it really is about saying we need to tackle the political dimensions much more based on. And so one of the things that the Pacific Plan Review picked up, it said, well, we really need, if we want to be genuine about this, we have to overhaul the institutions and the financing, the processes, the systems, everything around Regionism as we're going to do this to where we need to take it. But as always, there's a process of contestation. And what that meant, it meant very different things for very many different people and countries. So for some countries, they said, ooh, does that mean we're changing the regional architecture, which was traditionally centered around the Pacific Islands Forum? But because of the tensions with CG and the pathway back to democracy, there was something, and I actually just wanted to keep it small, we want to get away from Australia and Zealand, others are saying maybe we need to grow in Japan, got very excited. And so that was one view. In other words, well, actually, this is an opportunity for those of us who fund Regionism, is it an opportunity to rationalize our budgets and tighten our belts and make Regionism projects less costly. For the regional organizations, as I referred to, and these are often called the Council of Regional Organizations in the Pacific, so the COP, they thought, oh, we're going to lose our power because we're going to collapse into a single organization rather than the many that we are without a new point, a new series. And lots of people said that we can't go back, we tried this in the 2000s, didn't work, that's just, you know, not rock the boat. So in short, even though we had that agreement that we're now on the framework for Pacific Regionism, how to really fulfill it and see it played out was not something that was agreed. So just to go quickly and reflecting on some of the points that have already been raised by David and Holly, I want to focus on the building of Regionism for the reform and gauging that political window for reform. I double-checked, I just gauged correctly, but it does look funny up there. So this point about delegitimizing the status quo and really before you can shift, you have to get agreements that you need to shift. And that was, the Pacific Clan Review really helps with that actually because in the process of doing it, there was recognition that, okay, this isn't fully filling out a complete ambition for the region that some, you know, start moving forward. It also helped that in the forum itself, it changed its own leadership and that's my chapter. So, but in delegitimizing the status quo, it created a risk for the Pacific Islands Forum to actually remain relevant to whatever the new reforms to be. So that was a bit of the next sort of focus needs to be to really legitimize the Pacific Islands Forum as spearheading the reforms. And you have to capitalize on political will for that and really use that opportunity of new leadership. How can you really look forward to this as a foreign parent in 2015? And to really use that opportunity to say, okay, no, actually, we are gonna remain in the driving seat, you know, but I'm gonna use this political window where we've got back in some countries to do that. But then to build the consensus around that, that was sort of where it got slower. I think that's what often happens in reform processes. So, where it gets slower is when you come back to thinking about your framing and your narrative. So what is the reform, you know, what is it that we can settle on that will move us all together? And we had to think about, well, the framework for Pacific region said, we're gonna be inclusive. So that became the framing. We're involving everyone. We're going to overhaul the processes, the regional agenda setting. Also, it meant because of reframing and you wanted to be inclusive, you had to have different approaches to coalition building. So you had the non-state activities, the countries, the cop agencies, there's all kinds of levels of coalition building. And then having the safe space to try things out. And there wasn't a safe space at that moment in time with all the other things going on. So the forum had to basically cactus what it was hoping to reform and do it on itself as well. So it was reforming itself while also trying to reform the region. So that was another sort of layer. And in so doing, actually, it helped to build its legitimacy because then it was saying, we're trying it out, now can we broaden that into the wider reform? But just to run quickly to the last two slides, I think, you know, when you're trying to shift from contestation to legitimacy, it is there are lots of layers, lots of people have talked about. We worked with the countries and their various subgroupings around, you know, can we get that political sort of settlement around where we need to go but to work with the technical agencies because they've been so used to, I hope this is off the record, been so used to kind of leading the way rather than being in the driving seat and they were losing a little bit of that seat. And then we, through the process, we said, actually, it's a political process. We need to work with their governing councils because they're into governmental bodies. So actually we're coming back full-circuit between the countries and with the cops. So just to think about, you know, building legitimacy, it requires space, time, ongoing political analysis, all the good things with the DLP. But if you look at the L is legitimacy. But if you look at the time it took, so the framework for Pacific Regionism is probably, it's just the shortest time, which is why there was a lot of contestation to then what you would do. This is why we're four years in counting that. And then I just want to put in there that when we're thinking, say political analysis, and it's through the analysis that really thinking works politically, but that involves looking at the money as well, particularly for those in aid and development. And if we look at where the money, what funded what in the same process. So Australia was very generous in helping with the Pacific Clan review. And then when it came to rolling out the framework for Pacific Regionism, which is all part of the background, sort of had you, you know, the new leadership, the new chapter, Papua New Guinea coming in as the foreign chair, because no, we actually have to have some different current teams in there to help broaden and de-emphasize that there's a particular influence in this reform process. So that came in. And then now in the rollout, and this is part of being tied up with the internal reforms for the foreign as well as the broader reforms, now all the country will actually pay to be reformed to at least finance and kind of arrange it within the foreign. So that's really helped shift the perception of who's driving a reform and helps build the leadership in the field that it is a common reform. So I'll end on that note. You can read that cartoon. See, we were having a competition with cartoons, but I still think Kate won. But I just, you know, I think just to close off there and to zoom back out, you know, Australia's just come out with a white paper on foreign policy and it really squarely put the aid program and international development assistance smack bang in the middle of a political agenda. And so on one hand, this is really great for showing your cars and people understanding your degree and anticipating your degree how Australia might operate. But on the other hand, what then means for those of us who work in the development community and the international development community, as an extension, yourselves are funded by Australian aid and to understand the bigger picture when engaging particularly in the specific regional space as to what agenda is in these perceptions about what agenda is being to do that those are real living parts of being in the specific. And so I think doing that ongoing political analysis, being comfortable with iterations and risk in terms of trying it out and then coming back to the growing broader things that we keep doing. Thank you. Thanks very much, Anna. Now we've got some time for question and answer. There'll be two, one, roving microphone. Thank you, Robert. If I could ask people who'd like to ask a question to identify themselves and any affiliation and address your question to the panel member if you would like an answer from or if it's to the whole panel, just make that clear. And I might take a clutch maybe of three questions to start us off if people have some. If you're over here. I work for Office of Policy Management. My question, I think it first came to me in the first presentation by Dave and then it came to me again when Anna just finished off then. But it was, Dave, when you finished off saying that the process of political conversation run its course, but then we've just finished here this understanding that the Australian aid program is now firmly within the foreign policy white paper and that we do sometimes engage in issues for example, I think of climate change where there is definitely an aspect where we want to help build acceptance so that is an issue that we then think needs to be changed but often we can't just dictate what we want but we want to build that consensus where thereby engaging in these local political processes. I mean, how much do you feel comfortable about talking about that? Openly now as we open this black box, how much is it appropriate for us to engage in that level? And then, yeah, how does it square with aid practitioners working with different that and these that to get everyone happy at the same time? So I guess this is all of you to talk about and I would love to know what the BLP's general view is on that because it sounds like in the first presentation that you think that they should run their own course and then we should stand back. So yeah, just going to put that out. Thank you very much. Another? I'm quick down here at the front. I'm from the University and my question was for you here. I was really interested to see if you could talk more about this idea of public consultation as a way to institutionalize contestation. And it's sort of, you know, it's an idea of just following our own path of consultation so it can happen to the rest of us. You have one, my name is Alexander Verne, and I'm part of Development Possible to consult with you in the first place in the UK. My question is a little bit in terms of the theoretical statement that goes around the whole political view and some of the final techniques in child policing is how does this relate in terms of the theoretical thing that goes a right-based approach to development in general when it comes down to specific? And how does it relate to some of the practical issues around the right-based approach in terms of social accountability, categorization, and so forth? Okay, thanks very much. So we've got two questions, I think, to the whole panel. One to the here, in particular, maybe we'll start with that one. So on the question of public consultations as a way to institutionalize contestation. Yeah, thanks for the question. So in the Myanmar contest, it was certainly trial and error. So the first consultation process was it's looked on pretty negatively by those involved. And I mean, it led to quite a... It wasn't a particularly nice process for those. It was quite a aggressive meeting by all accounts. But I think that helped kind of then in the... Because they did two or three or even a few more, actually, afterwards with the regulation. You know, each time in credit, particularly to Daika, so the Myanmar's director of the investment. You know, they took that on board and arranged translations to be there. So there was lots of stuff around local and international, I might just say, so. So there was lots of stuff around here that were kind of big roles in the sense that... So one of the ways that things were three times better... So one of the things... So I can hear myself breathing through it. So one of the things that the... Some of the IFC folk who weren't necessarily on board at the beginning, one of the things that they tried to use to de-identify the whole process was to just say, there's international NGOs that were interfering and this is nothing to do with local actors. So which was also an interesting point and one that got taken on board by all the civil society groups involved. So I don't think there's a set framework, but I think it's one of those things that is going to depend on the context. But the nice thing is in Myanmar and I need to check up with Jasmine and Bernie Oxfam, they are trying to develop some of these protocols around what a consultation process should involve, who was included, how are they contacted, issues around language, around gender, all of those things. And the thing I don't say, I guess, about the institutionalization of contestation is, while I don't think people come away from the law thinking, oh, it's fantastic now, there is certainly a sense of at least our input is there. And I think the bigger impact of A, helping strengthen local society, I think, to kind of benefit of this. And also this feeling that there was a thorough process where we got to raise our voices about issues that we think need to be taken into account. And I think there were a few occasions where the response we got showed us that maybe we were wrong on a few issues. So I think that kind of the legitimacy aspect that Anna was with me, was really important for us there, I think. Okay, thank you. So the question about how open can our conversations be now? You didn't really agree with that to me, so it's a great relief. I mean, I would say as a public policy practitioner, they can be as open as we like. I don't think anything's off limits, but governments here and governments in our regional have their own policy frameworks and their priorities, but it is up to all of us to explain those, justify them and where there is conflict to try and reconcile that conflict in open discussion. Not only between silent corridors of government, but we've brought up stakeholders and it's probably reasonably participating conferences like this, but would anyone else like that have a shot at that? Yeah, so I took the question about being around the standing back aspect. So one of the earlier pages by Sarah Phillips on Somalia and Somali land, it painted a particularly unique view about the role of aid agencies in their external actions, in being able to create sustainable change, peace and security and so forth, et cetera. And that's a real conundrum, because yeah, if that's the case, then everyone would go ahead with this kind of thing. The idea that there's a DLP effective view, I think should probably keep you fun. I think there's plenty of contestation amongst us as well, so that's good. But I think where we've arrived at is that there is certainly possible for nudgeing from the outside and you look for the already-present cracks within norms, essentially. And some of the recent work we've done around Denver and politics and practices, Chris Broak and Helen Baster, who's up there as well, that will be presented at 3PM, actually gives some good examples about this, about looking for people, organizations, politicians that are already working in this way. They already exist, they're already doing it. The mistake external actors often make is not to start from what's already happening. So I think that would be it. The other thing that takes on to the final question from Alessandra about rights-based approaches, yeah, being explicit about your normative perspective and where you're coming in. And I don't know, in here, whether you have anything to add on this, just an example of some work around rights and, and the kind of the trade-off we're taking a focus on this conceivable issue. So, I mean, the rights-based approach, I haven't looked at that specifically in how it relates to TWP, but I think one of the issues with the kind of political approaches, I think the work that informed it, a lot of the kind of early work going back to Adrian Leth, which is work, and James Ferguson and those types of people, kind of highlighted the trade-off symbol in terms of rights and economic growth and all of those things. And I think that's been lost along the way where I think because it's been highlighted as a trade-off, there's a tendency to think, therefore, it's fine to overlook issues of rights. And I think that's a massive, I think, so from my personal perspective, it's a huge limitation of the TWP approach at the moment is that there's not enough on at least acknowledging how and when we address these issues if we're thinking about political change. Do we wait and, so in the UK context, kind of Paul Kagami is a really obvious example of, no, someone that's done some very impressive things, but a government that's done some very impressive things, but at what point does that become problematic in terms of that concentration of power? So I think it's one of the issues that should be focused on going forward. Okay, we might take another clutch of three questions. So gentlemen, go back there. And next to him, and then one over here on my right. Thank you very much. Yes. You're on. My name's Josh, I'm a worker at Oxfam on disaster preparedness in the Pacific, and I'm just starting my PhD on politics and financing disasters. My question's around how you see this frame, this frame is applied to the humanitarian context where there's less time, perhaps, for contestation. And I also work, I'll just tell you around the influence of the American community on the climate, so instead of being part of the influence of many of us, we can do that outside, but I'm wondering how do you see that influence working among the state, but also as well, what do you think you're going to be doing in the future? Practically, and also reflect on some of the, I mean, I think we now know you, what was the focus of this? I'm John Cox from La Trobe University. I just wanted to disagree with you here about rights and thinking within political, because to my eye, the DLP back catalogue has an incredible number of fantastic papers that show how you can vernacularize and create like a support, especially the gender rights. So, I've got a Tad Ross paper which is just an absolute classic on a lot of those things. So, I think it's all there, and it's a great archive to use, but yeah. Fantastic, we'll get you to write a couple of endorsements. LAUGHTER Shortly. OK, so I take that as a comment, and the listener here wants to respond, but I might take the earlier two questions first. Maybe on the influence of thinking, working politically on donors, I might ask Heather to respond first on that. Heather Marquette is the former director of the DLP, now working and worked very closely with us, obviously, but now working within BFID as well. She probably has a pretty solid perspective. Yeah, I mean, the original meeting of the TWP community of practice which was formerly the end of 2013 involved a number of... Yeah, thank you, Heather. Anna? Yes, I just want to pick up on that point through around influence of donors, and particularly because this morning there was mention of new donors, emerging donors, the Asian region, and in the Pacific at least, they're very political. Conversations already get to the starting point because it really is about a trade-off of, you do this for me and I will do this in order to bridge the conflict. So it already comes from a very political starting point, but I think more importantly as practitioners and thinking about aid and the donor-recipient relationship, I know we're meant to move on and talk about the partners, but it's about also really looking at thinking and working politically with those who are the recipients, for lack of a better word, because when you do have an environment where these new, they're not so new anymore, but we call them the new donors, are still having quite political conversations and you can't, at that moment, it's a backdoor deal sometimes and the money lands in your government budget and then you've got to do something with it. It's that point at which you need to think and you're working politically to make sure that it's used to the best way that it needs to be used for the country context. And I think there's also that element of truth with the past. Lost me. Here we are. Ah, there we are. And if we hadn't done that, if we hadn't had other members of ASEAN putting pressure on the military regime in Myanmar behind the scenes, we wouldn't have got relief to the people who needed it. So I think it can sometimes be even more important in crisis situations. And as David mentioned in his presentation, you never waste a good crisis. You know, crisis situations can be your window to sparking longer-term and broader reform and I think in that case, actually, Cyclone Nargis was. But just getting stuff to the people, we, the group of international actors who worked together on that had to think very politically and very creatively. We've probably got time just for one more question. If there's someone burning here, Nicola. With respect to the program planning and design planning and implementation, that's the really hands-on every day work that we're doing at post. And in part driven by the fact that during my time, I was really struck by how hard it is to budge the primacy of technical solutions from the way we think about programs and how we implement them in part. There's a few other things that are really hard to budge. And to me, the work of the DLP, which I have enormous respect for, is similarly to the work of the broader DDD community, adaptive management and PDIA approaches and all these sorts of things. Like many of these contemporary development discourses and approaches, they require us to make some fundamentally different starting points and ways of thinking about what we do. They're not just what, do we do something a little bit different or do we tweak something on a Monday morning at work? It's not quite that. But it's actually quite fundamental. And quite often, it's in contrast or in conflict with many of the dimensions and systems that we have in the programming cycle that we use. And I'd be really interested to whether you've got some reflections on where you've seen some of the differences in implementation approaches really take on board the implications of the work that you've done in a fundamental way and how that may have changed then the work that people have been doing, the practitioners that you've worked with. Okay, I think that's one for David. Chris might jump in too, given his proximity to the Australian experience. Yep, okay. So thank you, Nick. Oh, I think yours is working. Yeah, I mean, and I think you're absolutely right to frame it in terms of its fundamentally different starting points. And it requires a different mindset but also different systems to support that way of working. So it's a very practical element to that as well. And again, this is something that we pick up in the gender and politics research. But one thing is having a much looser sense of what you're trying to achieve right from the out and let that emerge through the process. Another thing is that you're focused on bringing people together for that to emerge rather than trying to engineer the solution and know what it is right from the beginning. Another one is the importance of, and this isn't something you can plan for, having someone to provide political cover, which I'm sure a lot of people in the room will be more than aware of, but that is key. You have to have those people that will act as the barrier between maybe the kind of centralized systems and reporting requirements and being able to provide space for program staff to be able to do, to work in the ways that they want to work in. Then also, there's the monitoring and evaluation issues as well. Both in terms of timelines, and I'm sure Chris will say something and probably say something about overcoming premature evaluation along those lines. But also collecting the right data as well. So if you're trying to build a coalition to do something, what are you trying to measure? The outcome are actually the process of building a robust and effective coalition. So there are a number of things that do come out in the DLP papers, but I'm sure there's more that Chris. Well, all I say is come and listen to Helen Derbyshire at three o'clock this afternoon. She's looked at 14, we've, through the gender and politics process research, we've looked at 14 case studies of programs that have done this and tried to tease out how they've not just what they've done, but the kind of political economy of how they've been supported or not. And I think that's the issue. And I mean, I would like to see a kind of, we had a conference, two DLP conference two years ago, which we called Positive Deviance. And I think the question is, where is this already happening and how is it happening? Because I don't think it's happening in many places really well. So, but I think it is. And some of the practices ahead of the theory, and we need to be looking at that. Okay, thank you all very much. And thank you for your interest from the audience. We're about to be kicked out of the room, so I do need to wrap it up. I'd like to thank again, David, Nihia Tate, and Anna for being on the panel, and others for chipping in. And please, please avail yourself of the synthesis report and read it. Good afternoon. IT tech person, somewhere around. We need some help with the mics, please. Two seconds of volume, please. I do what it was. Okay, I hope you can hear me. We just passed around the mic, so should we stay and try yours if not we'll use this. Good afternoon. I have to shout. Coming to this afternoon session, we are having some technology problems and my first responsibility is to apologize for the technology problems. This morning we had some difficulties in the overflow room. Apparently there was a quite a long lag and some other issues with the mics. I was going to say they've all been resolved, but I just had a problem with my lapel mic, so bear with us. I'd like to welcome you to this funnery session. My name's Anthea Molokala. Stephen introduced me briefly this morning. I'm with the Asian Foundation Director for International Development Cooperation. Our session this afternoon is going to be looking at Asian Civil Society and Asian Development Cooperation. And while there is growing publicity, scrutiny and awareness about large scale Chinese, Indian, Korean and Japanese infrastructure projects across Asia, there's less known about what Asian, CSO, Civil Society organizations or NGOs have contributed to the region's development challenges. For decades NGOs have served as principal partners in implementing traditional development assistance, but historically they've not had a significant presence in South-South Cooperation or Asian Development Cooperation. In the 21st century, however, Asian NGOs have become much more involved in development and South-South Cooperation, including in development policy. And in doing so, they have begun to redefine Asian-led approaches and practices in development cooperation. So our panel today will be discussing these friends and sharing some of their insights and their experiences. I'll just briefly introduce the panel. Hua Ming Huang, who is from China, from representing the China Global Philanthropy Institute. And he also has a very long history and involvement with Chinese Civil Society. Many decades of experience, particularly, and chiefly he's well known as vice president for a long time with Kango, which is the Chinese Association for NGO Cooperation. Supriya Roy Choudhury is an independent consultant, but she also is an expert from India on India's Development Cooperation and South-South Cooperation. Some of she used to work for Crisis Action Asia as also for Oxfam, and has focused a lot of her work and her research on civil society's engagement in multilateral processes. On my right, Takeshi Komino, who is the secretary general of CWS Japan, and also secretary general of the Asia Disaster Reduction and Response Network. And finally, Jing-Kun Kim. She is a program specialist with KUICA, Korea's Development Agency. She's in the department for Civil Society Cooperation, and she's also working on multilateral management and evaluation and PPP. She's also done her PhD research on Korean aid and the special emphasis on Korean NGOs. So just to start, as I said, there's less known about what Asian civil society is doing and contributing towards Asian Development Cooperation. So I'll ask the panelists just to give a really brief overview to share some general information about Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian CSOs working internationally in terms of activities, sectors, scale, and scope of their organization. So, Pomling, would you like to start? Try and keep your mic work. Okay, it's okay. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'm so happy to have this opportunity to be here. Before I speak, I would like to thank the Asian Foundation and the National University of Australia to invite me to come to beautiful countries, because this is my third time in the company. I think it's beautiful weather or the compare with Beijing. I'm so happy. So, for the time to short, sorry. But anyway, I would like to thank you, sir. I started talking about China NGO, how to do internationalization work. So actually China NGO just began to international work. According to Minister of Civil Affairs, until year 2014, China more than 516 NGOs do international fair work. According to China Foundation Center, up to year 2015, China has 65 foundations, involves 131 project cover 28 countries work. They do a lot of work also including like the human assistance work, like earthquake in the other countries also. Also like human health issues, medical care also in Africa also do like education, also children and the same issues. So also China up to year 2017, according to Minister of Civil Affairs, China have the 36 registered international NGO based in China. So this is very new. So I think this is a roughly introduction. Thank you so much. Thanks, Haoming. So Priya, tell us a bit about India. Yeah, so like China, Indian NGOs, their foreign international development corporation has been fairly recent. In terms of the scale of Indian civil society involvement in domestic development, as we all know, India has a very thriving civil society sector. The number is about three million plus. So it's not surprising that the vast majority of these NGOs are based looking at domestic inward issues so to speak. And they have had a long history of working with the government in sort of rebuilding the country post independence, but also taking on more confrontational roles and challenging the status quo and challenging government power as well when it's required. And again, in terms of the forms of NGOs, there's a very rich and diverse range from social movements to NGOs to trade unions, sports clubs, religious associations and so on. So it's a very wide gamut of organizations that we're looking at. In terms of their involvement in international development cooperation, we don't have the numbers on that. As I said, it's still very, very small and this is a relatively recent phenomenon. But what we do know about Indians civil society engagement in development cooperation is that they are involved across a number of sectors from property reduction to sustainable development, governance, vocational training and women's empowerment. And they're primarily engaged as service delivery providers working very much in hand in hand with government to provide these services for communities on the ground. So Indian NGOs, for example, have been partnering with the Indian government to provide vocational training assistance to warwaters in Afghanistan, for example. Another example would be the Indian government partnering with a local solar engineering institute which trains rural women in solar engineering. So these women come from Africa, Latin America, South Asia and the government in India basically funds their air travel and so on and the local Indian partners sort of delivers and implements the program on the ground. And then of course we have many Indian NGOs that are involved in humanitarian work and DRR. So again, in the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake in 2015, it was the Oxfams and many other local organizations who really coordinated efforts and led the response in many ways to that disaster. And then more recently with the Rohingya refugee crisis, we have the Red Crescent Society of India that was involved in humanitarian relief, working corpses in Bangladesh. So we have those sorts of examples as well which the government is sort of very willing to engage and cooperate with NGOs on. And over and above that, we also have Indian NGOs that work outside of the official government channels. So multilateral initiatives like the UN Democracy Fund, for example, have partnered with Indian NGOs again to implement various programs. So an example would be one Indian NGO working with that received funding support from the UN Democracy Fund to improve citizen engagement, transparency and accountability of local municipalities in India, Bangladesh and Cambodia. So we have a large number of examples and these are only beginning to very recently be documented. And as far as statistics are concerned, that's also a work in progress. So much work to be done in terms of collating the statistics on that. Thank you. That is she? Does it work? Yes. Okay. You know, sitting here is completely different from sitting on the other side. No, I know how your professors feel being here. Being here. From Japan. In Japan, we have a little more than 50,000 non-profit organizations being registered. And out of that, we have about 400 organizations who work overseas. The areas where Japanese NGOs work are the biggest area. Thematic area is about around education, job trainings, environment, agriculture, disaster relief, human rights and so on and so forth. Now, in 2011, we had a sort of unprecedented disaster in Japan of earthquake and tsunami and the nuclear power plant accident. And that has served as sort of a turning point for Japanese NGOs also. It could be similar to Australia, but many of Japanese NGOs have been serving as sort of a grand facilitating role with overseas partners. But that disaster has forced them to be the implementer themselves. So from the need assessment on the ground to analysis the planning, to implementation, monitoring, evaluation, they have to do it themselves. And now Japanese NGOs understand how tough it is. And I'm one of them. I have, before going to Japan in 2011, I've worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand in various major emergencies. But being an expat is completely different from being local. And I think experiencing that myself has made me pay tremendous respect for our local staff who are working in their respective countries as well. Overall, Japan provides about 430 billion yen, which is around four billion US dollars of ODA, for show development assistance. And out of that, only 10 billion yen is allocated to NGOs. Very small, very small. Majority of geographical area focus for Japanese NGOs is Asia. Around 70% of us work in Asia. And recently, we do experience sort of emergence of social companies, who's like a hybrid between the companies and also the NGOs. And some of them do excellent work as well. And we also have the mechanism, such as Japan platform, which is an intentional mechanism for our ministry of foreign affairs, business sector, and NGO sector to collaborate for overseas emergency assistance. So that way, we're trying to develop the capacity of our sector these days. But this is still in the development phase, I guess, yeah. Jinkung Koeka, or Korea, is the latest, most recent member of the DAT. So I think we increasingly hear a lot more about Korean aid, but not necessarily about Korean NGOs going abroad. Can you share some statistics for us? Yeah. Now in Korea, there are 300 NGOs working related to development in developing countries. And I want to start with the history of them. And in Korea, many, most of the NGOs have been created during and after the Korean War in 1950 and 50th century. And many of them were enforced from foreign religious groups. So still, 50% of Korean NGOs are affiliated with religious groups. And it was 1980s when the domestic Korean home ground and Korean native NGOs first appeared. Because it was a time when in Korea, the democratic movement was active. So since then, the Korean NGOs have been started working. But development NGOs was more recent. They were firstly, mainly after in late 1990s, they were usually merged. And after the Korean government supports and a lot of programs. So they now kind of, from in Korea, we just started the partnership program with NGOs. It was after 1995. So far, we have supported about 200 NGOs and conducted about 2,000 projects in developing countries. Since then, it was reflected in volume and numbers and values. So now, many of the projects in Korea has been implemented by the Korean NGOs and private sector. And the number is very increasing. And by sector, many they focus on education and health sector. By region, mainly about 50% is focused on Asia and 20% is in Africa. Historically, Asian Development Corporation and South-South Cooperation programs tended to be state led. That's still the case in places like India to a large extent. There was little scope historically for CSO or NGO engagement. Though some CSOs engaged more in humanitarian effort. This is changing as we've heard from the panel so far today. But I'd like to ask a little more, for a few more details about how the relationship with the state works in practice. How is it facilitated? Is it similar to the way Western NGOs work with their governments? How is it facilitated for you in terms of your work in the NGO community? How is it restrictive? And also how do CSOs in your countries influence or shape development policy in terms of your development cooperation and South-South cooperation? I'll start with you again. Okay. In terms of the partnership between government and the CSO, it is really important for the Western country also important for Chinese because according to our research, since year 2013 and 2014, that time I'm Executive Director of Congo. That time the Minister of Commerce trust Congo do big research in terms of how Chinese NGO involve the ODI program for international. At that time we gave government many kinds of suggestions in terms of how to open door for civic society involved with the ODI program. So since the last five years, Chinese government also is getting open to establish two kind of program that we call the South-South cooperation fund. The first is we call the Klamatengyan the South-South cooperation fund. Second is the South-South cooperation for the government. So according to Minister of the Commerce also ask Congo and the UNDP Beijing office to do research about the South-South cooperation development program, how to measure NGO, who can do this kind of job, who can because not like the United States, civic society is very familiar who are the ODI program for USID. But in China, just a new I think. So also I remember I come to also also they have many kind of partner between the government and the civic society organization. So China is just a new before I come in, I also ask some foundation the China Foundation for Public Elevation. They got some funding from the ODI program, working in Cambodia for the public issues, education and the community based of the work. So this is very important for Chinese NGO have this kind of opportunity to get some funding from government. I just forget to have a very important figure just talking about a year 2015, Chinese have 65 foundation, almost have the international work of funding is 540 million MVM, this is from the NGO sector, not from ODI. So ODI is just the beginning, yeah, so yeah. I think significantly as China's breadth, the scale and the scope of Chinese South-South cooperation expands, the Chinese government is very proactive and we recognize that they need to have partnerships with diverse actors. So I think the environment is much more open and conducive to civil society engagement. You're right, yeah, absolutely. How about in the Japanese context, Takeshi? You know, I think we're getting to the point that no matter who you ask in the ministry of foreign affairs, what do you think about NGOs? They always say, oh, NGOs are strategic partners. Every time, everyone would say that, which is a positive sign I think, but in Japan we have this sort of made up word called no mitigation, no meat means to drink, and then to have a communication over drinks, right? And when you have no mitigation, they're honest. They said, no, no, we don't mean it. If we don't say that you're our strategic partners, then you make a big fuss about it and we don't want that. That's why we say it, yeah? And that's the attitude, really. And there is a NGO-specific grant schemes from Ministry of Foreign Affairs as well as JAICA, and a few other schemes like Japan Platform and so on and so forth. But the amount is very limited. The scope of flexibility of these funds are very limited. It's very clear. The reflection of, you know, we don't really mean that you are strategic partners is reflected in these mechanisms as well. So that's sort of where we are fighting now, yeah? And but nevertheless, we do have coordination mechanisms between the government and NGOs. We actually have coordination meetings three times a year that we talk about the NGO schemes and cooperation and three times a year talk about the ODA policy. And at one time, with the sort of minister level, we do. All these meetings, every word is minuted. Very Japanese, right? So sometimes we can't say what we actually mean. So we do have a task force and I'm one of the members from the NGO side, which is not minuted. Any of our meetings are not minuted. But we discuss in between these meetings and we raise our voice about recently heavily on SDGs. When we ask a question to our Japanese government, how does our ODA as Japan link to SDGs? They say, everything we do is SDGs, right? It's easy to say that because SDGs cover wide areas, but from NGOs we say we have to be specific. With our commitment to SDGs, what exactly are we going to change? Our international cooperation on education, health, disaster risk reduction, how are we going to change? And that sort of initiation of these discussion is crucial and it has to be initiated from the civil society side. And I think we have to be ready to take on that role. And that's the changing sort of role that we're facing as NGOs. I think I'll stop there. Thank you. Jinkyung, in an earlier session that I participated in this morning, we heard from a representative from Kaidak about the recent review, the OECD's peer review of Korean aid. And one of the recommendations was that Korea, the Korean government should deepen its partnership in particularly with civil society. So, since you work at COICA, how is that working in practice? And do you see more engagement between NGOs and government for development cooperation? Yeah, I'm from kind of government's mind. So, we regard the CSO as a stress partner. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. All the government documents said, it starts with the CSO is our major and very important and key partners in development cooperation field. And actually, while preparing this answers, I was wondering how Koreans, yes, those will think and whether they will agree with me. Frankly, we actually, it was very stress as a partner because Korea and government wanted to join the OECD's own members. So, we started to prepare, we prepared to join the OECD's actions maybe late to year 2010. So, we actually joined in 2010. So, during the time we, Korean government has to increase ODA volume and for the public awareness. At this time, even the public was not sure why we should offer a lot of ODA because there are many poor people within Korea too. So, we have to start with the rationale of why we have to provide ODA. At this time, the NGOs, especially NGOs, many were engaged in the development project. So, we kind of, it was a strategy to work with them to increase ODA volume and also public awareness. So, since 2000, actually 1995, the volume, the PPP program volume increased, but since 2010, it rapidly increased. And the Korean government, yeah, but still we have to deepen the partnership because mostly the partners program was very limited and their cooperation, the partnership was very kind of restricted because it was, it is a partnership program but mainly implemented by CSOs and COICA usually played a role of monitoring and evaluation and they expect to increase more role of COICA and also increase the volume because one project size is not much big compared to the national program. So, the impact cannot be that much big. So, nowadays, COICA prepared to expand the partnership in volume and also more partnership with other, many new actors. So, we set the goal of like increase the volume twice within five years and work more closely with them in more enabling environments. So, it's a kind of official documents day but I don't know whether it really works. Dupriya, in the case of India, historically Indian CSOs have not featured commonly in India's official South-South cooperation, largely because India, like other Southern providers, has prioritized the state-to-state relations. So, India probably wouldn't say that they see civil society as a strategic partner in development cooperation but as India's South-South cooperation footprint grows and deepens, are we likely to see more a more prominent role for NGOs and how is civil society kind of pushing for this, trying to deal with some of the barriers so that they are more active participants? Yeah, so as I was saying earlier, Indian NGOs till now have been primarily service delivery providers. So, the Indian government receives a request from a partner country and will then often open Indian NGOs depending on the expertise that they can provide on the ground. And so, a few years ago, actually, the Ministry of External Affairs was receptive to this idea of creating an NGO directory that would basically map out the NGOs in India and their areas of expertise and this was to serve as a reference document for when they needed to turn to NGOs they knew who to call on to do the development assistance overseas. So, that document is now in place but again, we don't have a sense of whether it's being used at all by the Ministry of External Affairs but it does exist. I think what we're seeing more recently is a slightly more interesting phenomenon about the NGOs getting more involved as policy partners and not just as sort of technical service delivery partners. So, in 2013, the forum on Indian Development Corporation known as the FIDC was formulated and this is essentially a tripartite alliance between the Development Partnership Administration of India which is our aid administration. We don't call it an agency, we call it an administration. It's more of an implementing agency. The FIDC also brought together academics and members of the think tank community as well as NGOs. So, that was a landmark milestone which a lot of NGOs welcome because the Ministry of External Affairs like other foreign ministries tends to be quite insular and quite closed and the fact that they were opening themselves up to dialogue with NGOs was a really remarkable achievement and so we have on the steering committee of this forum a number of well-established Indian NGOs who are there and they sit at the table with members of the Development Partnership Administration and think tanks and so on. And the purpose of this forum is essentially to engage on policy issues around Development Corporation. So, the fact that India doesn't currently have a white paper that outlines its strategy towards its Development Corporation means that you need to have much more of this discussion and this is one of the spaces to do that. But the FIDC has also played a public education role. It often sort of conducts seminars on a monthly basis touching on different aspects of India's Development Corporation and sharing that information to different constituencies because it's still not a very well-known sort of phenomenon. It's not very well-known in India that we actually do this. Most people are unaware of the fact that we have an aid administration that we do development assistance and so on and so the purpose of this platform is to demystify and also to educate and sort of rationalize why it is that India does engage with these kinds of programs. And so within that setup, NGOs have played an important role from sort of engaging in knowledge production. So a lot of NGOs have, well, not a lot, but a few NGOs have been involved in doing impact assessments of India's Development Corporation programs, providing policy recommendations on what needs to be improved and how that could be done. And again, NGOs have also been making important policy advocacy proposals. For example, advocating for the need for the creation of such a white paper, which doesn't currently exist. And a lot of NGOs have been writing opinion pieces and putting this argument out there and what a capacity that they can to try and make that happen. They've also been involved in agenda settings. So trying to bring on board the more critical issues such as transparency and accountability, those issues are still being negotiated. And so trying to make a case for how we can be more open and make the development systems much more impactful on the ground and offering insights into that. So we see NGOs playing a whole range of policy roles and I think that we can expect that engagement to continue as the Indian government expands and deepens its outside cooperation efforts in the region for geopolitical purposes and so on. And I think we will also see the engagement by Indian NGOs that aren't necessarily a part of this sort of quasi-governmental forum. We'll see more NGOs engaging from the outside from a more critical perspective, from a rights-based perspective, especially with these new mega-connectivity initiatives that are coming up, such as the Asia Africa Growth Corridor Initiative and the NDB and so on, which may have adverse implications from a social environmental perspective. I think those are the kinds of issues that these more critical groups from the outside are likely to raise and advocate for moving forward. Thank you. I want to reflect for a minute on something that Senator Wong said this morning about the importance of Australian public opinion over Australian aid and the levels of aid and how some people are quite against more aid and more resources going outside of Australia and advocating for more of it to be spent inside. I think there's a similar situation in many of the countries we're talking about today. All four countries, either in the past or currently, have faced domestic development challenges. A few decades ago, Korea was a recipient of aid. At the same time as it was becoming a donor country, China is trying to eradicate domestic poverty by 2020. We saw some statistics this morning about the large group of struggleers in China. Japan has suffered natural disasters and India still has a 12.8% poverty rate. So for all of you in the face of these domestic challenges, how do domestic constituencies react to CSOs providing assistance to other countries? And how do these pressures affect your ability, for example, to fundraise from the public? How many? Okay. In terms of the poverty issue in China, they have many kinds of news, maybe from World Bank, also from China, also the central government also set up a strategy for year 2020. China will be able to forget all the poverty issues. But I think it's not an easy work because they have different standards. This morning, Dr. Nancy mentioned about income one day. Sometimes you send $1, $25, maybe $2, similar to $1.95, maybe $4, maybe $10. But this is difficult to answer for some like how to set up a poverty line. This is a big challenge in China. Also, China also has many debates in terms of poverty line because as you know, China is a big challenge. The unbalance between the Western and the East also between the urban and the rural area. So in this case, also in terms of the China NGO, also government do a lot of the ODA program in the world. So also local people also sometimes also have many kind of debate because the many citizens always argue the NGO if you do the other program in the epic. For example, the very famous journalist Deng Fei also do the setup program for the free rent for the African children. But many of the Chinese citizens argue that they also have many Chinese and the children unable to get very good rent, the free rent. So this means how to compare them, they are the opening in this case. So in China also have many big challenges, like the urban and the poverty issues because normally people always take care and the ruler of the poverty, but the urban poverty also is getting more popular in China. So this is another challenge. Third is I think for the Chinese government how to make a balance between the locally and the international because many kind of international NGO come to Beijing also. I also teach you many course in there. So more than 10,000 epic people come to China. So they, for example, in Guangzhou, they have the 500, maybe 30, 300, 500,000 people from epic. So this is really challenging for China how to make this kind of balance just as before we're talking about source of cooperation. So I personally view is that China, the face and the big challenge between the domestic demand and the international demand. So they also have many kinds of criticism from western country. I think this is a, I think it is generally easy to understand because it is not easy work like China issues. So Priya, I imagine this is a real challenge in India because there are, as you say, most NGOs work domestically. It must be challenging for them to try to raise money from the public for overseas work. How does that play out in the Indian context? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think like China, the domestic situation, the poverty situation is so dire that it obviously becomes problematic to then fundraise for civil society like South-South cooperation efforts overseas. We do have this challenge of just a lack of knowledge amongst the general public about the fact that India does develop in cooperation overseas, let alone the role played by civil society within that. But I think one exception to this would be the role that NGOs play in humanitarian and DRR. And again, I would refer to the example of the Nepal earthquake when that happened in 2015 and Indian NGOs went out there and coordinated a response. It was really well received by the Indian media. It's not something, developing cooperation isn't something that's picked up extensively by the Indian media, but this one, given that this was Nepal, it was happening in our backyard, and the fact that NGOs got in there very quickly and really sort of launched a rapid response, meant that they were commended by the media and this also helped drive sort of public funds towards the Nepal earthquake situation. So I think that was a rare example of information and knowledge on what kinds of assistance Indian NGOs can offer within developing cooperation. When it comes to corporate philanthropy, I mean, as we know, corporates are another sort of big constituency when it comes to domestic fundraising for NGOs. Again, I would say that there isn't very much awareness of the work that Indian NGOs are doing overseas and corporates do tend to invest in CSR efforts within their local sort of areas of operation. And so then less likely to sort of invest their profits in supporting CSR efforts undertaken by NGOs overseas. So I don't think that the corporates are going to sort of divert their profits towards sort of enabling Indian NGOs to do work overseas. And just one more point on Indian NGOs is, it's, despite what I said earlier about the fact that avenues and opportunities are opening up to engage much more in policy and so on. The fact that remains is that there are operational difficulties for NGOs to do international welfare work, even when it comes to humanitarian and DRR. So for example, you need multiple clearances from the ministries and so on. And even in the case of the Nepal earthquake, I think it took about three days for those clearances to actually come in. And that's a long time in the middle of an emergency situation. And I remember that that prompted a big conversation within the NGO community saying that if we have to get in there and act quickly in these situations of humanitarian disaster over the season, the laws around that need to enable that to happen. So I think that's another big structural sort of issue that NGOs are grappling with in India. The Japanese public, are they supportive of CSOs? What's your experience in terms of what you're looking for? Increasingly, the public, I think is becoming more supportive as we also go through our crisis, like the 1995 COVID earthquake, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. But it's true that one third of our national budget is for the social welfare. We are such an aging society. And it's going to continue. This trend is going to continue. Aging. Aging, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, many elderly people with older people. Yeah. And that has significant implication to our national budget. I also heard from the Ministry of Land Transportation people, not many public infrastructure work can go on these days because of that public financing restrictions that they have also. So given that, when we take a look at the public given to NGOs, in our country, it's very low. We're very stingy people in a way to give it out as a, in a form of donation. It's not that unique as it used to be, but it's still not really mainstream. And then when you take a look at numbers, for example, that our public giving, as compared to our GNI, sorry, the nominal GDP is 0.14%. In Korea, 0.5, right? UK, 0.5 for US, 1.4%, we're very low. So the giving for the past few years haven't changed dramatically. But there's also statistics that says long-term support for organizations by one individual, that's decreasing. So people do give toward one-time calls, like disaster calls, but not the long-term implication. So that's where we, yeah. Interesting, and it's sort of similar in Korea in terms of an aging population as well. Is public opinion focused more internally in terms of resources, or is there a willingness as Korea's ODA grows to support CSI? In Korea, the Korean government has rapidly increased the ODA volume after the OCDOC joint. Was like in 2011, it was ODA volume was 0.12% of GNI, and now it's about 0.17. And I heard it's not really common to increase the national budget in that space. But even though we missed our target, because we wanted to increase up to like about 0.25% by 2015, but due to the national and international economic downturn. But so now we set the new goal, like 0.2% by 2020, and 0.3% by 2030 was more realistic. But still it's also very challenging, I think. But the public, I guess, in 2000, the public opinion or media always talked about why we should provide ODA or why increasing that space. But now, I couldn't find such a report. Usually we talk about aid effectiveness, whether Korean aid is effective or it's working or it's sustainable in developing countries. So there are more news about aid effectiveness rather than volume itself. So also as a work, I'm involved in the management and results management and evaluation in DPP department. And I feel more pressure on the results or effectiveness of a quick aid project, including this program. So we focused on results management more than before. And also we have to provide all the reports to the central government how annually, how CRECA has been made or achieved the goals, and your goals. In the last decade or so, in the last five years even, when we talk about Chinese or Indian development corporation, there's a lot of attention given to these large transformative infrastructure programs, like the Belt and Road Initiative, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the India-Japan Asia Africa Growth Corridor, and other initiatives in the region. What we see is increased multilateralism, particularly from India and China, in terms of working in partnership with other actors and spreading their footprint that way and their impact. And while these large-scale projects that are focused on connectivity and infrastructure, promise, transformative development for countries in the region, it seems that there's limited engagement for civil society. So both Supriya and Homing, can you tell us a little bit about how is the NGO or CSO community in your country engaging on these? Because these are hugely, potentially impactful programs. Yeah. I think they have some important policy changes like Chinese government since the last five years. We set up the One Bill, One Belt initiative. So the Chinese also set up the Asian infrastructure in the bank. So they also, it is just a beginning in the world for Asian countries. So in terms of NGOs, also have this kind of dialogue, also Asian infrastructure in West Bank also welcome NGO in form of dialogue. For example, last year in the Korea, so also Jeju Island also have NGO dialogue special. So talking about some projects that people want to do, for example, for energy project, how to think about climate change issues, how to consider about the environment issues, also citizen reaction in form of the new project. So this is very new for China. So but the Chinese government also opened the institution like the mechanism in form of NGO for international work and for some like multiple corporations. For example, Minister of Commerce and Gates Foundation also have the contractor to work with Africa to advocate against HIV issues, Medicare issues. This is very important like government and NGO sector, also international NGO to work together. So this is very new for China, but I think this is through the UNDP sometimes, United Nations program, more than 30 years program in China. So I think this is really important for Chinese people, understand SDG year 2030, something like this. So this is really good opportunity for NGO and in form of this kind of work. Have there been opportunities for CSOs in China to engage with the government on the BRI that you know of or have there been any attempts by Congo or other NGO networks to bring CSOs together to input into those strategies? Oh yes, they have officially China also have one very important organization on the CPC, the international department called China Association for NGO network for international exchanges. So this is one big NGO network in China. They do a lot of coordination among the official area, but also for Congo, also Asian Foundation, also China Foundation for COVID-19, also Amity Foundation, they have worked together. So what we call the informal network. So we will share difference of the experience for example, Amity Foundation also work with Africa. So they also have some experience. Also like Uina, local NGOs also how to work in Yemma. So this is really good for Chinese NGO, to share this kind of experience lesson how to work internationally, how to localize. So this is just the beginning I think. Not like Japan maybe more than 30 years experience. Yeah, so as far as these regional connectivity schemes are concerned, I mean within India, this is very much a discussion that's taking place within the foreign policy circles. So you have a lot of geostrategic think tanks in the foreign policy bodies that are trying to make sense of what this means. And it's more often than not mediated through the China angle. So it's the Asia Africa growth corridors, many would say is almost a response to the BRI. And so there's a lot of analysis is about what does this mean for India's presence in the region and how does India countering China's various schemes and initiatives and so on. So that's primarily the lens that's being adopted when it comes to these schemes. If not that then trade. So what does this mean for trade? And again, the premise there is that economic growth will naturally result in development for all. So I think that's problematic but that's again the key sort of perspective that's being adopted within the foreign policy geostrategic communities. That being said, there are certain sort of more development focused think tanks that are trying to engage with these schemes from a development perspective. And you have NGOs that are also similarly trying to engage with these schemes from what they mean in terms of development on the ground and what it means for local communities and the local environment and so on. And this I sort of refer to maybe the new development bank. Well, that's not necessarily an India-led initiative. That's more sort of five countries coming together. But I think it's a good example of how Indian NGOs as well as NGOs from the other BRICS countries have made a real in-road into influencing policy of the new development banks. So as many of you know, this is a very recent bank that has just recently been operationalized. It's come out with its five-year strategy document and civil society groups from across the five countries analyzed that document and found it wanting in many respects. For example, just to give you a sense of some of the massive shortcomings, there weren't any references that were made to gender at all. So the entire bank is premised on this idea of sustainable development. But within that framework, there's no real engagement with gender as being a key pillar of sustainable development. So NGOs and CSOs have actually engaged with senior level decision makers of the bank. We've been meeting with the bank regularly for the last couple of years, offering policy recommendations and advice on how to actually bring some of those concerns into their thinking. So gender is just one of them. But there are also issues around information disclosure. So, again, the bank at the moment does not publish on its website what projects they're investing in. That's been a real concern for a lot of civil society groups and so on. And even the whole idea of sustainability, how are you actually going to integrate that within your operations, from project conception to implementation to monitoring the evaluation? What exactly is going to be the tool set and the framework that's going to be applied? So, again, NGOs come together to try and make a case for an index, a sustainability index, which would basically be a compilation of different indicators that would allow the bank some sort of model or tool that they could use to ensure that their investments are actually sustainable. So, this has been an ongoing sort of track of work that's been taking place over the last couple of years. It hasn't been easy. Many times it is civil society that has been pushing for these meetings. It's not as though the NDB has a dedicated budget that funds and supports institutionalized civil society engagement. We haven't gotten there yet, but that is very much what civil society groups are currently advocating for to basically institutionalize and make this engagement more structured and systemic over the next few years. But it has been uphill battle so far. When it comes to the Asia Africa growth corridor, I'd say the engagement has been next to nothing. Basically because I don't think that the channels exist at the moment for Indian civil society groups to be inputting into those processes. I don't think there's an appetite at the moment to actually seek input from civil society from what I understand from colleagues. A lot of the business communities are being consulted at the moment. But I do think that this will change because a big part of the Asia Africa growth corridor initiative, as much as its emphasis on infrastructure, there's a big people-to-people centric development component in there, which is all about investing in social infrastructure as well, so health and so on. And I think that's going to be an important space for civil society to get involved, but we haven't seen dialogue with civil society happen on that just yet. And then I think just sort of moving forward, I think this is going to have to change because I think in the past, certain forms of investment that the Indian government has been leading, for example, lines of credit, which are concessional loans that are given to partner countries, they've been getting a lot of flak for the way these have been implemented on the ground. A lot of accusations around lack of efficiency, project overruns that then results in financial delays and so on. And I think there's a sensitivity now within the government that it needs to be able to deliver much better. And I think a big part of that is also ensuring that the projects that you deliver are compatible with certain social environmental norms that's ultimately going to create the goodwill that you need to be successful in those partner countries. And I think sort of linking these development initiatives to strong diplomatic outcomes, that's a connection that I think is going to become more and more prominent and we can see, I hope that we can expect to see sort of more engagement by Indian NGOs to make that happen. Segway's nicely into sort of the last set of questions that I have. Many people talk about a world beyond aid, where traditional aid, as we've known it, is in its twilight and new partnerships and actors are emerging to tackle and saw all the world's challenges that are outlined in the SDG. In particular, what about, this implies that we should see more partnerships with the private sector. So first, Takeshi, in terms of Japanese CSO engagement in international development, is there more partnership with the private sector to address some of the challenges? It's increasing, it's increasing. For example, the platform that we have, such as the Japan platform, is that is an intentional mechanism for the business sector's involvement into the international humanitarian work. But many of that has been limited to, for example, our Japan Airlines will be saying, I'll give you free tickets to go fly to the disaster affected areas, or we'll give you this water purifier equipment that our company makes. But these days, we are increasingly in conversation with the business sector about how can we use the resources that you have and what we have in terms of NGOs have our outreach understanding of the local context problem statement. What needs to be solved? Business people cannot say that, right? In terms of people's lives, it's difficult for them to say, in this community in India, this is the vision that we're going to have for transformation. It's difficult for one company to say that. For NGOs who work on the ground, it's possible for NGOs to say, this is the issue that we would like to solve. What are the companies who can work with us? And that kind of producer type of role is what's required for NGOs. And that's increasingly the recognition. We shouldn't be asking for money or goods only, but we should be proactive in producing solutions together with the private sector. Then some of the groups are forming around this idea. So I'm quite hopeful that we will come somewhere with us. Jin Kyung, you work on PPPs, you set as part of your work. Does the CSO or does the Korean government see strategic partnerships between the private sector and NGOs as a future way forward for development cooperation? Yes, and nowadays, CRECA has to spend the engagement with not only CSOs, also business groups and more, we try to find more actors. And now CRECA encourage the partnership among them in the partnership between NGOs and academia or NGOs and business sector. So now many new projects are designed. For example, usually NGOs, they implement the development project in developing countries. And the funding usually comes from CRECA. And now in the new project, usually business groups also fund co-funds with CRECA and also they offer some technology or some special tools. For example, like in Malaria project, one Korean business group kind of developed one, some special box, and which have some technology to have appeal for the riskings, so beneficiaries. So the NGOs use the box in the program so to increase effectiveness and achieve, to better achieve the goals. Or we also launch the new partnership programs between NGOs and academia. Huaming, in most of Chinese South South cooperation is in the form of infrastructure. A lot of it is implemented through private companies along the Belt and Road or through other initiatives. Is there scope for CSO to be more, to be engaged with some of those private companies along the Belt and Road, let's say? I think in China also have some example like China Foundation for profit alleviation. They also cooperate with China Portrait Company. They also work in the Sudan, the more capital, the Katomo, Katomo, Katomo. They are also been there to visit these kind of cooperation, the NGO setup at the local hospital called China Sudan Partnership Hospital. They are the support, not also from the China government small grant, also from China Foundation for profit alleviation, also from the private company. So in China, little difference is like China Portrait, we call the state enterprise we call national. But they also have many kinds of private funds to do a lot of the projects in the neighbor country, and Nipo, also Myanmar, also Cambodia, also Laos, and Vietnam also. But this isn't just the beginning, because the company sometimes is not really trust about the NGO because they maybe do themself sometimes. But I know little about the changes because people think about the NGO more professional, NGO more effectiveness as mentioned also, like efficiency also. So second I think very important like the NGO is getting more transparency, legitimacy also, also we call the accountability. So this is the new, the new stone in China since last year China opened the charity law. So this is very important for China's NGO have think about the international standard, international practice, this is a really good example here. Thank you. I'm going to wrap it up there for now and open the floor. We have about 20 to 25 minutes for questions. So we'll take questions, just raise your hands if you have questions for our panel and then we'll briefly sum up at the end. Okay, one, two, three, four, okay, in that order, number one. Thank you very much. My name's Mark Reddard, I work at Co-Water International at Canadian Net Company. I feel a little bit, it's a bit unfortunate that the topic of the conversation, I feel like it hemmed you in a little bit. You all work, you know, you work in the NGO sector and that's great and it's very interesting to sort of hear about what NGOs are doing internationally from your respective countries. But it's the danger of that is one thing in the same way I was kind of interested that the topic of the private sector only came up after the first hour. And of course the private sector is a very dynamic place as well. So there's sort of, you know, there are good companies, there are bad companies, there are good NGOs and there are bad NGOs as well. And so I'm just curious if, you know, maybe the conversation needs to be more about how companies with the private sector can effectively engage with NGOs for mutual benefit because some of the companies that we've worked with in the past are doing excellent CSR work and they know the value of NGOs and they want to work with strong NGOs that are effective and engage with them for mutual gain. You know, a lot of companies are thinking very much about where they procure their goods and services from, they're thinking about their employees, they're thinking about their employees' families and all the supply chains in a very development-oriented fashion. So I just wonder if maybe one or two of you could comment a little bit about some of these private sector NGO alliances that might be taking place. Examples of companies that have good corporate practice where they're engaging with NGOs. That would be very interesting. We'll take all the questions and I'll come back to you. I just want to mention in response to your question briefly, our panel last year was all private sector, so. Sure, maybe a few minutes. Yes, number two was over here. Where was number two, yeah. I'm driving by a network of humanitarian NGOs. It's great, humanitarian work got picked up quite a bit in the conversation. What I would like to hear some comments on is in terms of the closeness of NGO action to government action in a disaster response or a more humanitarian sense, one of the, I guess the key drivers of humanitarian action is that we have a principled approach, which means we can sometimes say no to funding that's going to compromise those principles. How does this play out in some of these contexts where there's much more government influence on the sort of NGO as a service provider, NGO as a closely aligned to government agency. Do these principles have a future in some of the Asian led NGO action? Thank you. Thank you. That was fascinating. I'm Puli Karnara in Development Economist with App Associates, which does a lot of ODA implementation. But on a personal level, I do a lot of work with CSOs in India, DPN, trench with that. And what I see with the CSOs is that they have deep contextual knowledge, deep local politics knowledge. And that's what they bring to the table in terms of development. So I'm wondering a little bit about the comparative advantage of CSOs and doing international development because there's this, you have to have state-to-state agreements, entering a new country in a new context. Is it humanitarian support? Is it technology transfer? And if so, if it is technology transfer, particularly in the case of India, wouldn't it be better technology transfer within India, which the morning speaker Nancy described as largely poor? So just wondering about that because, you know, the biggest aid that India could do is to reduce its own poverty rate and release ODA for other countries. You know, as I say in the air safety videos that in the case of air pressure when it drops, help yourself for us and then... There was a fourth question that I... Yes, please. Hello, my name's Derrick Parral. I'm an Australian government-funded volunteer working in Myanmar, a rule-of-law center program. And something that's been put to me in Myanmar is how the CSO network in Myanmar was such an important and integral part of effective delivery of services and well-being to people over a long period. And the influx of aid from donor countries has tended to skew some of that local relevance, effectiveness and good work within the country and, in fact, lowered some of that institutional framework that has helped the country deliver services in areas, particularly remote areas of the country. I'd like some comment from the panel about that as an issue because Myanmar wouldn't be on its own in having that perception. But also, is it different for CSO cooperation? Is there less of an imperative to impose a different set of objectives on existing organisations? Is there more collaboration? And does that provide some answers for the type of cooperation that is more effective? Although, you said we don't have to respond to all the questions, but I would like to respond to the ones I can. On the private sector engagement, first of all, we have various networks in Japan, like the Japan NGO Center for International Cooperation, Japan Platform, Japan CSO Coalition for Disaster Risk Production. All have different mandates, but private sector engagement is sort of a cross-cutting issue. And what we try to do is we try to have this constant opportunity to be in dialogue with concrete issues. You know, in the World Humanitarian Summit, we said that we are in the world's humanitarian crisis since the World War II. Why? Because we haven't been able to solve enough problems, and there are so many of these unsolved problems that we are facing in the world. But I think the role of NGOs like us is to really bring these issues up for this table of dialogue, right? And say, okay, who has the bright ideas or any way of looking at this issue that we can use to think of a solution together? I think that's the first step. From our perspective, we think we don't invest enough in this initial step, and we always go for a call for proposal, we'll go for this and we'll go for that. The tools, instruments, before we actually do this homework of getting people together to share that common vision of solving the unsolved issues. And I think that investment is critically needed. And it may not be really cost-effective, but we try to emphasize on that as much as we can. Maybe one more on the influence of the government donors for Japanese NGOs is increasing, unfortunately, or unfortunately, I think. And a few examples are, for example, if you receive a funding from Japanese government, you cannot travel to certain countries where the security level is too high. For example, Afghanistan, for example, we're in the debate about South Sudan. If you don't receive a government funding, then you're free to go wherever you want, but you're responsible for your security. We also have this sort of process of NGO program applied to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs approved. After that, Ministry of Finance should approve every project. And I remember one of the emergency projects in the Afghan Return E project, people returning from Pakistan to Afghanistan, emergency, but Ministry of Finance person made a big fuss about this cash transfer method. He said, NGOs, you're not the bank, why are you doing cash? So it took about three weeks to convince that guy. So I think there are many downsides and we are feeling that over reliance to government funding will lead to these things and we need to find a solution to it. Yeah, maybe I can follow the last question in terms of Myanmar issues because China and the Myanmar is neighbor countries. So last year I have some research program supported by the safe children international. So I also go to Yunnan. They're told the one story. It's very interesting in terms of how to endure, how to work with people. So Yunnan, the civil society for the NGO, they donated the TV for the countryside with 200 units. Very interesting, the TV put there, somebody banned, no electricity. After that, we also donated another we call generation and the machine, the one TV plus generation machine, they can get the TV. But unfortunately, they have no channel. So this example is very important for NGO. They how to think about the people's demand. This is very important. Also how to consider the local situation. Even like Myanmar, very close to China. So in this case, so I also suggest the Chinese government in terms of the ODA program. Obviously in Chinese say low tang guansuo because the Chinese ODA always consider the law is a building, guan, something like an institution. So like a temple, something like a jail king. The NGO maybe can more concentrate the people's demand. This is very important. Also can concentrate on the community base, the people's and what kind of project that they want to need. So this is one example. Another example, three years before I go to Tanzania, also many of the epic peoples is really and in college to use the Chinese medicine. You know, this is like acupuncture or something like this. So this is very important. Like the NGO is how to work like people's like medical issues also like the local people. They're very basic, the infrastructure for the healthcare in the countryside. So this is my point is that the NGO maybe make a difference with government. Government maybe do big project, but for NGO maybe do small project about the little peoples. We call it the P to P, people to peoples. Not to say the people to government, the government to government. It's a big difference. This is my opinion. Thank you. Yeah, great question. So I'll just take a couple. I think the point about the private companies and the CSR and the tremendous possibilities that that opens up, absolutely. I mean, as I was referring to earlier, NGO has a company's act, 2013, according to which 2% of every company's profits are supposed to be invested in CSR. To my knowledge, that portion of their profits is currently being channeled towards local NGOs. Obviously, whether and how that can be used for CSOs operating overseas is a big question mark, but I think it opens up an interesting question. On the humanitarian NGOs and their closeness to government and whether that compromises them, I think in the case of the Nepal earthquake and the Indian NGOs that were involved there, it wasn't so much their reliance on government funding. There were fairly, at least for Oxfam and the others, their funding was not wholly derived from the government I think. I think it came from a number of sources. I think the reliance on government was primarily in reference to getting the clearances and the permissions to actually conduct the operations because they were all ready to get in there and just act and they weren't getting that. And once they got the permission, they just went in there and pretty much did everything independently and on their own. Yeah, and then I think that the last question about external interventions and how they can sometimes cue the local dynamics, I think a big part of South-South cooperation is actually to try and avoid that. The whole idea is that we're demand-driven and we pay heed and respect to what the local conditions should be, but I think, as my colleague was saying, it often, it does tend to remain, that conversation happens at a government-to-government level. So despite the principle being there about being respectful of the local conditions and the local sort of sentiments and so on, governments aren't often attuned to those concerns on the ground, which is where I think NGOs can play a big role and share that information with governments to enable that to not happen. So yeah. I want to introduce the private sector engagement in Africa. Usually the private sector, they want to have a partnership with Africa to increase their reputation in the developing country, where they usually have a trade with. And their sectors are mainly vocational education training programs. So they offer not only funding, but also some professionals and also technology they have. They can, the biggest part, I mean the biggest contribution of private sector is they can be a market itself. I mean, if we train some students, they can employ them so we can achieve the goal more easily compared to the other NGO energy programs. Thank you. I think I'll take two more questions and then I will sum up. Oh, yeah, one. Any, is there one more, if anyone's interested? No, we'll just take, okay, and one here. One, two. Why don't you go first since the month since we're closed file? Hi, my name is Brahma and I'm with Cardinal. My question is in relation to the amazing amount of knowledge that you guys have within the NGO worlds in your country, has there been any move to capture all the learnings? I mean, for everyone that's spoken, you're telling me, you know, cross sector, all these different areas that the NGOs are working in, have we done any particular research as to the collective impact per sector in relationship with in relation to the work that they do in the private sector, or, you know, recommendations that you have for how, you know, the industry can move forward? Last question in the back. I think mine's actually quite similar. Sorry, my name's Linda Kelly. I'm interested in NGO practice in Australia and in Australia there's a very wide range of international NGOs now from those who are still working in a very transactional approach, you know, raise money here, send resources there, right up to Australian NGOs who are much more focused now on working in broad partnerships and coalitions and handing power over and moving away from the sort of resource exchange model. And I guess what I'm interested in is, what are the lessons in the different settings that you're working in about the different ways that NGOs are learning to work and to be and what are you starting to see that we might learn from in Australia about some different ways to be beyond some of those more traditional models that I guess have grown up in the West? I don't think I can tell you, anyone? Okay, on documentation, and I think this is where collaboration with academia really is important. We started to collaborate with academia on how to capture the evidences, and which is useful for NGO's advocacy purpose, but also for documentation purpose. NGOs, we don't do enough of these, I think, but we should do more. One other thing, big learning that we have, and I think, I myself as well, and then my colleagues in Japan who's working on these private sector engagement, we have to be careful, I think. The more we become politics savvy and business savvy, we tend to forget why we work as NGOs. So the core value of why we do what we do, we tend to forget that. And then we talk about, there's so many things we have to talk about in this multi-sectoral collaboration. And then that core of things, what we want to transform gets a little blurred when we talk about the business models, when we talk about this resource categorization into solutions so I think that's one thing that in Japan we have started to talk about, that this is probably the thing that we must protect in this transition phase that we're in now. Thank you. We have, actually earlier I said, we have the NGO academia partnership program. It's about visual management, as you said. Nowadays the project should be implemented in Asian evidence-based, but CSO usually NGOs, some are very good and very experienced, but others are still you and newcomers. So we are always challenging to prove the evidence and also measure the impact of the project. So we invited academia to join the partnership for PPP programs and so academia collect data in developing in the field and they analyze the impact and report to government and also the public. Yeah, so in India again, a documentation of best practice and so on is a huge challenge. We do have examples of NGOs working in collaboration with academics. And the forum on Indian Development Corporation that I spoke about earlier is one such platform that is precisely doing this kind of thing, but I think there is a structural issue here around resources that at the moment there is a massive resource crunch within India and NGOs are really hard pressed. So I think that's going to be something that needs to be ironed out moving forward if that kind of comprehensive documentation is to take place. And then in terms of lessons on how what NGOs can do differently, I think you're absolutely right. I mean this sort of adopting an extractive model is not going to help. I think one thing that sort of I take away from my previous experiences is I think the importance of playing that convening role. So maybe NGOs sort of stepping back and playing up behind the scenes, convening or facilitating role where their key responsibility sort of to bring together the local actors and allow them to come up with the solutions and really give them the space and to play that sort of hand holding role rather than be the solution provider, so to speak. I think that's a bit of a conceptual shift. Again, it's part of the South-South approach towards doing things, but I think we could be doing much more. Yeah, I think in the world we didn't have many kind of international co-financial model. Actually, I've been in Australia for a year, 2013. So that time I learned a lot from Australia, also the Australia committee for NGO counselor for international cooperation. I think this is very useful for China to learning from you. So that time I remember also through the Asian Foundation support because NGO actually, I think lack of the resource, funding resource, criminal resource. So not easy to how to work the government, also how to work the company because sometimes they always get dilemma if you normally in China people say money talking. So if you do get some money from company you should be maybe how to keep you NGO become more independently. It's not easy work. So because they need to think about how to make a balance just before somebody answered like the company I would do a wonderful CS, a corporate social responsibility. But in this case, like Myanmar, the case of the Chinese company they are never learning from internationally. They always never work local committee, never work at local NGOs. So they will be get like lost maybe 100 million US dollar in there because they lost local support. So in this case, I think the balance is how to show you value and you from your organization, from the local people and the different and the state quarter. I think this is not easy work. So I hope we can have more just kind of dialogue so we can share experience so we can learn each other. Thank you. Thank you. So just one minute to summarize from me. I think what we've seen is that the increasing participation of Asian CSOs and NGOs really add new contours and possibilities to the landscape of Asian led development and South South cooperation. First we see that the traditional state led model is modulating into one that includes and shares responsibilities with non-governmental actors but as well with the private sector. But also you can see that Asian governments and states have the ability to enable or stifle national civil society organizations and NGOs to engage in international work and governments can really do more to maximize NGO partnerships by offering capacity building in project management and implementation, streamlining their institutional architecture so there's some unit that's dedicated to the coordination and support for NGOs and also to ease rather than tighten the regulatory environment so NGOs can work more effectively and lastly to really enhance policy, dialogue and knowledge sharing with CSOs on development cooperation. Second also it's really important to recognize that CSOs must become much more business minded and outward looking to maintain autonomy and also to ensure their sustainability and increasingly we're seeing that CSOs from Asia are starting to globalize in their approach. And third NGO private sector partnerships offer beyond aid answers to sustainability and scale by combining complementary resources and capabilities to address development challenges. And finally when we look at the transformational potential of Asian led South South cooperation beyond the state and beyond aid through the infrastructure investments, these mega projects like the BRI that are really looming large on the development horizon. These produce both excitement for the connectivity they promise and fear about the potential harmful social and environmental impacts. So collaborative partnerships between government, civil society and the private sector can better address and avert some of these challenges. Thank you all for participating and attending and listening and I would like to thank all our panelists for their contributions. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And we have a tea break. That's academics, practitioners or if we come very experienced, slightly different experiences, slightly different perspectives so really looking forward to it. We have Amanda on the line. I'm going to get the panel to introduce themselves briefly and what their engagement in this issue is. But we talked about how we wanted to run this and decided we really wanted it as a panel discussion more a Q&A rather than people standing up and giving their 15 minute presentation. We're going to shape the discussion around the three themes and questions we posed in the abstract. For those of you who've read the abstract, but I'll repeat those questions. And then now about 20 minutes at the end for questions from the group here. Health securities. Okay, I'm being instructed. If you couldn't hear me. Health security, I think that the... I probably don't need to say to any of you in this audience that first of all, we had SARS. We had MERS. We had Ebola and more recently Zika. There's a real wake up call about whether countries are prepared to anticipate and then to respond. And I think for this region it's particularly relevant because just a few evidence based to start it with, more than 30 new infectious agents have been detected in the last three decades in Asia and the Pacific. That's more than 30 new infections. And 75% of those were really interrupted by the audio system is that 75% of those 30 new infections in this region was done off it. And for those of you who aren't health people, that means they go from animals to humans. So very complex issue. But before we start, I'm going to ask each of the panel members just to introduce themselves very briefly and what their engagement in this topic is starting with Barbara. Well, good afternoon. My name's Barbara McPay. I'm the director of the Inoffal Institute for Global Health. And at the Inoffal Institute, we are focused on health system strengthening issues and particularly the health system strengthening issues of the Asia-Pacific region, which is, of course, almost the university now, middle-income region, that's experiencing rapid transitions of all kinds and that would have been relatively economic. And those transitions are, of course, intimately wound up in the pressures and the disruptions that are driving the threat of emerging infectious diseases, new forms of infectious diseases. So economic transition is, for example, one of the factors that is changing wetland, forest environments, for example, bringing people into contact with animals in new ways, disrupting habitats and so on. And those are the forces that are creating the pressures by which new zoos may be appearing in the region. So we're generally focused across all those issues, but health security is a very central component of that and my interest is in the health systems dimensions of that, what are the potential strategies that operate through health systems to keep the region secure? Thanks, Barbara. Robin? David? Probably an age-no introduction actually. No, I probably do. I'm Robin Davies. I've slowly deduced that I'm the bureaucrat. Right, I am now. So I'm heading the Centre for Health Security in DFAT. It's physically located in the DFAT building. We've existed since last October when the Minister launched the Health Security Initiative, more about later and longer ago I was Associate Director at the Development Policy Centre from 2013 until I took up this job in September last year. So you straddle bureaucrats and academics? Sort of. No, it's never an academic. Nick Thompson. Nick Thompson, I'm also from the Nelson Institute of Nick Robbins, the bureaucrat. I'm probably the activist. I'm probably not one operational academic at best, but I have a joint appointment at the University of Melbourne and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health at the Centre for Public Health and Human Rights. At the University of Melbourne, I run a small program called Law Enforcement of Public Health, an equally small program called Sahili, the Security and Health Executive Leadership Institute. And my main kind of enthusiasm around these types of discussions and these ideas is the role of the security sector more broadly in health security, and I'll talk about that as we come on. Thanks, Nick. And on the screen, we have Amanda McClelland and the technology seems to be working, so over to you, Amanda. I guess that leaves me as the operational person, although I'm sitting in New York in a suit today so I don't feel very operational. But my name's Amanda McClelland. I've spent the last 13 or 14 years with the Australian Red Cross and the Red Cross in general, working very much around health security at the community level. So for the last 12 to 18 months, really focused on those gaps between health systems and health security and how communities can help fill those gaps, especially around surveillance, early action, and I guess that big push post eBowler in terms of communication and community engagement. So that's really where the focus of our work has been and the push from our side in terms of how we improve health security in general. Thanks very much. I also want to acknowledge David Stevens, who's from Red Cross, who's actually put all this panel together and done all the hard work, so thank you, David. Let's turn to the first question that we posed in our abstract, which is, should the concept of health security relate only to a narrow set of measures and systems focused on pandemic or epidemic containment or a broader set in come seeing public health prevention and curative and health program systems? So I think, Robin, that's your cue to have to talk a bit about what the government's approach with this new health security approach is. So I'll talk more about the is than the ought that's implied in the question. So when you look at the way health security is framed by particularly international organizations, there are various ways of doing it. There's always the element of risk reduction. I mean, health security is really a species of disaster risk reduction in the health sector, whether it's human or animal health. But beyond that, you get various adjectives applied to the term health security, individual health security, public health security, regional or global. I think the quick way to describe what the Australian Health Security Initiative is about is to pick the adjective public. When you define health security in global terms, you immediately bring in the sort of cross border aspect. And if you look at the way the Australian initiative is framed, that aspect is there, but it's not essential. So the framing essentially talks about avoiding and containing emerging infectious disease threats or re-emerging threats that have the capacity to cause harm, social or economic harms at either a national or a regional or a global scale. We're talking about population level impacts, population level risks, so that's broadly the framing. But with that framing, and that's quite consistent with the way that the global health security agenda that came out of the G7 is framed, it's consistent mostly with what you get from, say, the World Bank or the World Health Organization. Though interestingly, the WHO framing actually emphasises that cross border aspect quite strongly. But the framing doesn't get you around various kind of tensions and trade-offs. I don't want to go through all those, but I thought in a prior discussion with the panel, I thought it would be good just to flag a few of those kind of tensions for perhaps discussion among us or with the audience. The first is really the obvious one that I've just touched on. There's a balance to be found between assisting countries to deal with disease issues that have really significant national level impacts but don't necessarily threaten countries at a regional level. So there's a national versus an international tension or balance to be found. A second area, already the question of dealing with diagnosis has been raised like twice in the very short space of time we've been here. It's a huge issue in health security, but pretty much all scary diseases are coming from exposure to wildlife essentially with the exposure of animals. Those are the reservoirs of the viruses or the bacteria or the parasites. So you have to be working both in human health and animal health. But internationally, people who work on animal health tend to come from a trade facilitation background. And internationally, a lot of the development systems funding tends to be captured by, let's say, the human health organisations, whether it's the Vertical Funds or the WHO, which in a lot of contexts makes a kind of poor cousin of organisations like the FAO, the World Organization for Animal Health, OID. So finding ways to really bridge those divides at the multilateral level, but even more so at the level of the individual partner countries is a challenge and there are tensions again to be found. And the third tension, which I have immediately forgotten and will immediately insult my notebook on, is around, I guess, the focus on endemic diseases versus emerging diseases. And though I forgot it, it's possibly the most important. I'd sort of highly commend the speech that was made by the new director of the Global Fund at the Prince Martial Awards Conference recently in Bangkok. It's just a little tour there. Where he talked about, I guess, the perversity of focusing on the high-profile diseases, the zebras, the nerves, the SARS, in an environment where the so-called traditional mainstream endemic diseases are killing millions of people each year. That's not to say that there's an obvious choice there. It's to say you need to think about it and need to look for opportunities through focusing on systems that are there to deal with endemic diseases as a way of helping countries to better prepare themselves to deal with emerging diseases. So again, there's a balance to be found between the endemic and the emerging. I might stop there. Just a few topics that I think it's worth touching. Thanks, Robin. We could spend all morning discussing just those three issues. It was interesting to have Penny Wong this morning say it needs to be shared within national interest which I don't think anyone would disagree with, but does national interest she did actually then qualify it with values because does national interest really just mean protecting ourselves or what about social and economic health and the region? I think what you've said suggests that the focus of the initiative is actually going to be more comprehensive and significant broader than just what's in Australia's national interest. But I'm going to throw it across to you, Barbara, because I think you might have a slightly broader view but let me ask for your view of what it relates to. Yeah, and I think perhaps this does get a bit into the ought rather than is as well, but I think if it's too obvious to all the countries in the region that Australia is framing an initiative that's entirely about Australia's interest, that's not going to go down very well. And I think there's really no need for that because actually the interests of everybody in this area are really quite closely aligned. But the tensions I think are about ignoring things that maybe countries would perceive as not obviously threats to Australia and trying to press for resource allocations that focus on those things that are versus those things that aren't. As you talked about endemic diseases but you're still in the space of infectious diseases where it's clearly one of the major things that is threatening the health of people in our region is non-communicable diseases. And I think for the region as a whole there's a real tension between looking at threat versus current problem, looking at projections of what the major issues are not just for human health but for economies and even for stability and security in the broader sense of social stability. If we have a world in which every family's older generation, not even talking about very elderly people but people in the top end of the red winning ages are beginning to suffer from non-communicable conditions that the health system is not responding to. That's a major set of issues people will be spending their own money out of pocket disproportionately to deal with that and if the health system is saying we're just really interested in infectious diseases and in protecting other people from your health conditions you're worrying about your own well-being and I don't think that's a social contract that can be bought. Having said that the threat is a common threat and I'll go back to the point about having interests in common. It's not just Australia that is threatened by coronaviruses or Ebola-like viruses or any of the other kind of specters in new disease context countries themselves are very threatened by those things as well so there's definitely an accommodation but I think we just need to be very careful about seeming to be only interested in our own interests and not equally concerned with the well-being of the people of the region as a whole. Thanks. So a range of tensions as to what encompasses some Nick or Amanda do you want to comment? Just on what you see. Yeah, just quickly before Amanda jumps in. I sort of think that there's, for me it's the original question, where is the security sector in health security and within that I think there are sort of three sub themes. There's the role of the security sector in disabling health security through conflict through war through the inability to eradicate the security sector. There's another sub theme of the security sector is Vectors we talk about militaries in or police or prison staff etc in sort of endemic areas whether it's malaria or tuberculosis and then there's the third thing, third sub theme which I think is a particular interest is the potential role of the security sector in health security as a partner and as a collaborative partner in health security with traditional health actors and I think this is where it gets particularly interesting and particularly broad as well so if we talk about militaries police customs, border, military intelligence, public security more generally the architecture of security particularly in the Asia-Pacific region and particularly in the great of Mekong is enormous their influence is enormous they're pretty much either in government or running government in the majority of particularly Southeast Asian countries so my premise is how can we kind of work around that and the answer is we can't so how do we therefore find ways to collaborate with a really broad and big sector that traditionally health doesn't necessarily engage with that said we understand the capacities of militaries particularly US military or Australian military or US military in terms of medical research, in terms of disaster response fine we kind of we kind of get that but what about the broader security sector customs officials on the Thai Cambodian border you know looking at ducks flying across or walking across looking at fraudulent medicines coming across I mean at some point there's a need to engage with that architecture which kind of speaks to the recommendations of the national health regulations and also the joint external evaluations of the global health security agenda which talks about promoting dialogue and open platforms of dialogue between these public security actors and public health and I think just by having the dialogue we would begin to understand the potential capacities of those different agencies and therefore being in a position to target our interventions whether they be a DFAT intervention or a US intervention or a national intervention but without kind of engaging in the dialogue I think we're missing a significant part of a potential workforce Thanks Amanda do you want to add anything at this time? You still there? Hello Amanda? Alright but we might just move on at this point and then if you swap would you want to come and sit here David? I think you should get it back No Okay So if we move to the second sort of theme which builds on this is framing what are the parameters of health security The second theme or question we posed was how should health security investments be shaped to strengthen public health systems given the importance of public health systems for surveillance timely response and management of infectious diseases more generally there was a subset about is the private sector likely to make an important contribution and below that what's the role of the health security agenda in increasing universal health coverage Now I'm going to put that one to Barbara but I did want to say based on my experience there is a challenge in that health ministries are often pretty low status in many of the countries we're talking about and their political clout is not very strong and then if we add to that the need to work collaboratively across with a one health approach and then take Nick's issue about defence I guess we've got some challenges but Barbara let me hand it to you first a lot of very big questions where to begin sort of a question in my head let me just start by talking about the issue of the health system in relation to health security I think it's become a bit of a commonplace since the Ebola epidemic to say oh the Ebola epidemic showed how much health systems matter but I think underneath that commonplace there's a lot of different interpretations of what we're talking about there so I think what most people are reading by that is Ebola happened and there weren't any lab based, there weren't any lab systems, there weren't a public health function that was able to respond to the emergency I think my point is that the lack was actually much bigger than just the absence of the ability to immediately respond to a major factor and I don't want to to underplay that but at the core is that the relationship between the population and the health system is fundamental in the processes that go on around the emergence of a new disease so going away from Ebola for a moment in the SARS epidemic in China what happened when SARS emerged the international teams were invited to come and help the Chinese solve the issues and the immediate thing they asked was where will we find the people who are suffering from this new condition and the Chinese had to say well actually it's not very clear where we'll find them you won't find them in hospitals or in primary care facilities or even necessarily in private sector facilities because people are used to the idea that they just won't get what they need from those systems and that they'll be impoverished in the process of trying so for example there were studies that showed that people with TB would try and get a diagnosis to get over the hurdle that would give them access to the free TB services in multiple places where they'd be charged for x-ray after x-ray well of course what we need is a sputum test and when their money had finally ran out they might eventually get the sputum test which was cheap which is why they were never getting it or they might never get anything and people had completely lost faith with the health system so when they were suffering from something new they were simply to a large extent sitting at home and there wasn't an easy place for the intervention the emergency response to find them and kick into action to a certain extent that's true in Bola in West Africa as well that people were going to traditional healers to local quacks to a very dispersed range of places rather than to the public health system because there simply wasn't that trust and faith that you're ill you go to a health facility and you get some kind of response that isn't going to impoverish your family so that kind of fundamental the health system just has to work at least that most basic level is a precondition for being able to do anything and so that broad strengthening from the bottom up and being able to offer people the basics of what they need has to be in place before anything's possible and many people credit that that SARS experience with the Chinese becoming interested in seriously reforming their health system and investing the resources that they have since done to the point that should there be another one I think the story would be very different in China you would find people unfortunately predominantly at hospitals rather than at the primary care system but you would be able to find them so that raises that relates to a lot of the other questions that the layers of issues that Helen has then added to that one I think is this issue of the weakness of ministries of health I think it's not just that they have a low status is that there's a vicious circle there between having a low status and being weak nobody wants to go and work in a place that has a low status who ends up there I think the collaboration with ministries of agriculture and relatedly with issues of trade and economy that emerge from new zoonotic outbreaks changes that to a certain extent because those are much stronger and more respected ministries Robin was certainly raising some issues in his opening comments about some of the conflict between the agendas of those agencies but again there clearly is a common agenda once you've got an Ebola or SRs that everybody needs that problem dealt with quickly so I think ministries of health are in a position to be strengthened and I think perhaps some of the other things I said already embed some of the issues of the private sector it may be an important resource for people especially where the public system fails them and in that case there needs to be mechanism strategies for co-opting them to be part of the submission that's always very difficult to us another set of different agendas reconciling their motivations and incentives with the motivations of the of the rest and potentially they're not so motivated by the public good you know they may be making good money out of it but you know this issue of potential conflicts and incentives actually mobilise so I guess Barbara you from what you're saying this is where universal health coverage, social insurance etc has such a key role to play and once we have an Ebola epidemic it's actually too late then well it's not too late but then the cost both in human terms and economically is huge I mean SARS was estimated to have cost globally something like 54 billion to get it under control again and I haven't seen a recent figure globally about Ebola but it devastated the health systems in those three countries most impacted so then Robin with the one health approach how do we translate the rhetoric into action I mean it's one of the things you're working on with the regional health initiative I mean how do we what's Australia's role which is the question what's Australia's role in trying to facilitate this broader collaboration yeah and I'll come to that but just to I think Barbara's point is really good it's possible to be way too glib about the relationship between universal health coverage and health security you hear a lot of people saying is it just two sides of the same coin but it depends what you're doing about health security if you're helping countries to occasionally stand up a capacity to detect a very rare disease and deal with that that sort of health security but it's definitely not the flip side of universal health coverage if you're helping them across a broader front with I guess the more endemic diseases that we talked about and thereby helping people to start to trust their health systems you know you're using those systems then maybe the story starts to be true on one health I guess there's a relatively easier part and then you know a really almost intractable part so at the global level Nick talked about the WHO led joint external evaluation process which is all about assessing countries capacity with their preparedness essentially to deal with epidemics and pandemics it's WHO led but it does have a veneer of one health about it does look at cross-sectoral collaboration separately there's a process led by the World Animal Health Organization to assess the so called performance of veterinary services it's kind of similar but it's been around longer it's not as public now the relatively easier part I'm not saying it's easy we'll be bringing those things together so that there are objective balanced assessments of countries capacity to prevent, detect and respond to outbreaks across both the health and the human and animal health sectors that's already a big job but when you come to country level I don't think there's an easy answer for countries that are most familiar with there is essentially no interaction between health and agriculture ministries and you really have to be I think opportunistic to find points of connection one possibility that was raised with me in a recent discussion was around health information systems I won't go into the details but there is an interesting health information system that's been developed in Indonesia with a strong support which is believed to be generalisable to the human health sector and something like that if both sides see value in the system that kind of thing can bring them together but at the moment the best we can hope for is I guess the outbreak response protocols at least bring them together very quick drill together as we saw with Agen influenza back in the mid 2000s I think that the point of health information systems which I really want to get Amanda back or maybe David can cope about how you balance human rights and privacy with data systems and tracking etc but I wanted to ask you Nick given that law enforcement is in public health your area what do you see is the role of law enforcement regulation playing here and what do we do in countries where there's a weak system I think Dr Tedros said that health security is only as strong as the weakest link and I think the West African experience is probably a good example Yeah sure I think just to sort of backtrack to that answer the context of health systems more generally and the need to strengthen health systems of course absolutely completely agree with where I think it kind of gets a bit away from me is that how can we have a security of health system or a strong health system in the absence of an enabling environment in which that can function and the people that are often most in charge the people often have direct influence over an environment where you're trying to access services etc etc are the people that the law makers the law enforcers the natural extension of the state the visible, the uniform services being the natural visible arm of the state charged with keeping law in order providing an environment where people can access what they need to access and I think to kind of answer the question there's two two kind of points one point is that in terms of Australia's role and donors more in general there's an unwillingness or a hesitancy or a caution to engaging with law enforcement particularly but also militaries of course because essentially at the end of the day of public health human rights people don't trust them necessarily often rightly if you're running the global fund for example you're dealing out millions and millions of dollars there is no where within your structure that says you're allowed to give money to police reform yet we know from the HOV world particularly amongst key populations that we're never going to get to sort of zero cases unless we can kind of arrest the arresting if you know what I mean like if we can halt the arresting if we can halt the bribery if we can halt the corruption if you can halt the diversion of people in the criminal justice systems the only way we could do that is through a direct investment in law enforcement reform so from that perspective I think if we want to achieve a truly enabling environment for health security we have to kind of engage in this sort of question around reform of law enforcement and I think that's it's a tricky question there's no easy answers we're starting to see the need to at least to at least do that I'm not sure if that answers the question a little bit no no it's an interesting one I have to say wearing a previous hat of mine I think the global fund does fund was funding into education now because with girls there's a huge whether it would fund through into law enforcement I guess there's another whole step yeah and I think you'll see some you'll see some funding for sensitisation workshops for police but I think are sensitised and this gets to the science of an enabling environment funding a sensitisation workshop run by human rights activists for police isn't necessarily going to get the job done with police running a discussion with police around how an engagement on this issue from a health perspective will actually address your indicators of interest such as crime such as perceptions of trust in policing etc etc I think is potentially a kind of a clever diplomatic way to go with police around how health and what we can learn from public health research around methods and epi cost effectiveness and modelling around how we apply that to some of these other sectors we want to influence now I think that's a really important point are the two necessarily incompatible I think what you're saying is it's how you approach it so for instance in Australia with the HIV epidemic that's exactly what we did working with police so we were able to get in needle syringe exchanges it took us a long time to get condoms in the prisons but you know it's how you approach it I think is what you're saying yeah and public the mandate of law enforcement is public safety which is only one word away from public health they're really quite similar constructs and to bring it back to Australia in the context of health security in the context of disaster response and resilience you speak to police around the country and they will tell you that in the moment of crisis a whole of government will kick in and it will work in the crisis to get there yeah and then so how do we apply that in western Myanmar I think would be a question for how we approach health security so I was going to take further and I was going to ask Amanda so David well let's see if she's available Amanda are you there yes I can hear you oh great okay we just can't see you Amanda so that's great that's fantastic I might fake this what do you stay here just in case so Amanda have you been able to hear the discussion today you've been dropping in and out so I have to apologise I've missed most of it alright okay so perhaps if I can just encapsulate it we're talking about I guess how you balance enforcement regulation etc with public health interests and are they this is just the last end of the conversation but where I wanted you to comment on was then how do we balance human rights and privacy for example in the need to have robust surveillance data to have contact tracing where does data protection and storage fit in when we're looking at national data sets etc and I know this is something that you've put a lot of thought into so would you like to comment on that yeah I mean I think it's an interesting dilemma that we obviously saw first hand during the Ebola crisis and where we saw it work best is where we were able to negotiate how quarantine and engagement with communities occurred and I think you know we saw some very good examples of how communities were able to negotiate how contact tracing and quarantine would happen in their communities and that has to be built on trust before the event occurs we saw some very bad examples in Ebola as well and unfortunately that led to a number of deaths and so this engagement prior to epidemics occurring is really important but also can be adjusted during the crisis with the right engagement structures so when we had a pre-discussion Amanda you said that operational use of data is not so developed it's academics who tend to use big data sets did you want to elaborate on that so can someone be closer to the microphone oh sorry when we had a pre-discussion you made an interesting point about the fact that the use of data sets and big data is quite well developed by academics but it's not so operational I think that's not so developed did you want to comment a bit on that could you hear that question yeah you asked me about the use of big data operationally yeah I think it's been an interesting discussion where there's been a lot of focus by a number of groups including the last and others on how data sharing should occur but that's been very much focused on how academics can get access especially modeling and vaccine research teams can get access to that data quickly but I think one of the challenges really is how we share that data in real time at operational level but still be aware of data protection issues and I mean the examples that we discussed the panel was receiving between 9 and 10 spreadsheets every day with patient names, locations and phone numbers just on Excel spreadsheets shared through normal email channels was really the only way that we could match dead body management data with contact tracing and case management data at scale and so more work really needs to be done on how we implement good data protection policies at operational level as well as the focus which has been very much on research access Yeah I mean I think it's something we struggle with and we struggle with it even in Australia to have data sets and data sets that talk to each other and it can be done if you look at polio the micro following and surveillance was extraordinary but it was also extraordinarily expensive and very stand alone so it seems to me we've got a long way to go there I don't know whether Barbara or Robin you want to comment on that I think there's a number of issues in infectious disease always about conflicts between the individual human rights and individual interests with the public interest and I think this is a special case of that and we went through a lot of the debates around that in relation to HIV and I think these same debates are coming back now and so we had waves of some countries that wanted to isolate and lock people with HIV up into separate spaces of course there's a whole history of that kind of thing around leprosy as well and while the issue of data is a little different from that it's not quite so extreme I do think we have to have great pause before we share those names and phone numbers in a willy-nilly way just because of some putative greater public interest in researchers having the opportunity to use the data to some ultimate end that may benefit local populations but which may be a long way down the line I just note that as the polio eradication enterprise sort of begins to wind down a lot of people are wondering what to do with this infrastructure and proposing that it be used for for example malaria elimination in other places and for this region the malaria elimination agenda for the Mekong is front and centre we've got countries with relatively low rates where elimination is a realistic prospect by 2025 so we may face this question how do we support I guess very fine grained data collection systems in the context of elimination and we've got to remember the government's own this data and not always willing to either make it public or share it with each other at a regional level so our desire to have bright flashing lights on screens will not always be satisfied Nick do you want to come not too much other than to say my disclaimer here is I'm not a uniform services person at all actually I really am a public health human rights person I just got forced into the security sector area not by choice forced and I think the point around data is always an interesting one in the context of the security sector the security sector often has different types of data I mean military research outfits have extraordinary access to extraordinary data their ability to share that or not share that is kind of up to the politics of the day and I think that's what people get a little upset because it does feel like the securitisation of health or it feels like national interest or national security or national intelligence so of course with Barbara on this the greater good for the greater number as long as there is some kind of line in the sand where that greater good is not a harmful good I don't think you need to apologise Nick we've talked about the need for greater collaboration I think it's great I think when you start talking about engagement with militaries and whatever there is a real sort of tension there and so I've built that acutely as I've gone on in the last few years and there's a recurring word which I don't think anybody will be surprised at which is trust trust is actually going to be fundamental to achieve this and trust doesn't happen overnight it's actually earned and built isn't it so you've got the long game yeah no absolutely Amanda did you want to comment on that no it's okay sorry the conversation is really dropping in and out so I won't okay David yes please you might need to turn it on I'm not really a panelist either so I just wanted to make one point about well the data point is interesting so people have raised the example of HIV as a foregrounder for some of the discussion about health secure and I think one of the important things that came out of our response in Australia and in other countries in the region was the involvement of communities so for example with data in HIV or confidential information it was a community that pointed out and it was a community that actually was subject to the uses of data so either good or bad building trust in health security I think is essentially about talking with communities as well I just wanted to make that point because I might not get the chance again well actually it's a good segue into what essentially is the third theme or the third question which was communities vulnerable to pandemics or other threats to their health help shape the solutions and what lessons can be drawn from existing intersectoral collaboration and for example between law enforcement and public health and I was going to ask you Amanda if you can hear you had lots of experience working with communities how do we support communities to be actively involved but also to acknowledge and support be acknowledged and supported as key players in the global health security agenda for instance yeah I mean I think the challenge for us is to find ways to support different types of communities so I think at the moment we're quite clear on how we can support rural communities and that's really in terms of engaging with the leadership structures and using local solutions that have been there for quite some time and adapting those to the different risks and really engaging them not just in communication and being a receptor of information but really involving them in the prevention detection and the response I think the challenge for us is how we engage urban communities and other types of communities such as vulnerable groups or other clusters of people I think it's a real challenge for us as we move forward with the last four or five big epidemics that we've suffered post Ebola including the yellow fever and Zika the plague in Madagascar was really how to engage whole communities at that urban level and I think we don't have a good solution for that yet yeah thanks I mean I think the point that you made and you made in our earlier discussion was that we need to move beyond risk communication to communities is it just about telling communities about the risk to actually have them actively engage and how important their active engagement is and I think that the point you make about we've tended to focus on rural communities and I do want to ask you Nick a question about border issues but I think that increasingly it's the big urban communities that also huge risk areas I mean there's a massive urbanization right across the world and within those urban communities and particularly within some of those very large slums access and trust and minority groups etc are a huge huge issue I would think do you want to comment further on that Amanda? Yeah I mean I think one of the things we've been really focused on is social cohesion and how difficult it is to work with communities where that trust between community members or communities and governments broke down and so we've been working on a way to try to collect some of that before the outbreaks occur so we can look at improving our response in real time and adapting interventions based on community references and I think there's a lot of secondary data out there about how communities work, languages, conditions etc that we don't have access to in real time and I think there is work to be done there in the preparedness faith about how to better engage with communities and how to adapt our interventions to the different contexts including those large urban slums simple things like MISIC maps project where we don't have the ability to contact tracing urban slums because we don't have street names or house locations and working with a group of digital volunteers through the Red Cross to map and collect data around urban slums so that when we do have a case or contacts to follow up we're able to find people in those communities and enter those communities in the right way without having to knock on lots of doors and asking lots of people for an individual which does break down that trust and again is a data protection issue so there's a number of new ways that we're trying to tackle this and I think the data readiness work and the missing maps project is a big step in terms of engaging and understanding communities before outbreak because I would think there's a big role here for CSOs and NGOs because many of those those big urban slums for instance people have had very bad experiences with government services and are not going to be trusting of them so CSOs have a huge role to play there but Nick moving then back to the rural areas and border areas the communities and the people who manage those borders are often the same people so just as Amanda was talking and transporting myself back to places like the Golden Triangle and other sort of porous formal or informal border crossings across Mekong particularly if you really think about those areas you don't think about there's the community health centre just up there on the left just past border control you don't really think about that you think about that's the casino right there that's the drug trafficking route that's the money laundering piece there's the human trafficking work going through there and there's the people that kind of facilitating it all and then your point around the NGOs and the people that kind of know what's happening on those areas as well so it's these are really complex tapestries of course that's why border are often described as hotspots epidemiologically I think the question is what are we trying to what are we trying to what is the surveillance what are we looking for how do you prepare how do you get ahead of epidemics what do we know is coming down the pipeline how do we therefore prepare whether it's customs or border or your local health worker to understand what they're meant to be looking for and I think when you look at sophisticated approaches in developed countries whether it was SARS or even when there's a threat of a respiratory illness or respiratory epidemic you walk through airports there's screening which are often run by customs or border so highly technical easy to use applications are obviously continuing to emerge how we engage with those sectors to act on them is a question and I certainly don't have all the answers but I think by understanding that there's a potential there then we can take the conversation from there Barbara and Robin do you want to comment on that community, the role, how you actively engage and then also there's a question about how you bring it to scale or is it all just community by community I think what I'm liking about this conversation is that we're not seeing community as the problem and I think especially during the Ebola outbreak there was a huge amount of old culture which is often people's work talking about irrationality and funeral practices and so on and there's a deep rationality in how communities respond to things that may not be apparent to some recent migrants to those communities so there's some interesting work related to the Ebola outbreak in Uganda in the early 2000s Barry Hewlett who's quite a well-known American anthropologist I imagine a number of people in the audience know his work quite well and he did some understanding of how the Atcholi people in northern Uganda who were at the centre of the Ebola outbreak respond to illness and they have a very rational set of processes of working out what kind of illness they're dealing with and then responding accordingly so when a few people get sick they tend to use the traditional medical practitioners in the area and they'll do the things that they normally do which often work perfectly well for people and then when they find that those processes are not working and that the disease is becoming more widespread they reclassify it as the kind of disease that needs a different kind of approach and their approach then is to isolate people to warn people of neighbouring diseases in the area to limit the contact between those people and the villagers and have only older women that's interesting because it's something about the status of older women be the ones who will come and bring them food and water and so on but really a set of processes that are very akin to good public health practice in relation but those are never the stories that you hear about the idiots, the insistence washing all the bodies and so on but I think there is a lot of deep bedded long derived rationality in how communities behave and if we can tap into that there's a lot of solutions as well as potential for some conflicts and in terms of the conflict one of the things that also come out of the variable analysis is the way that people respond to things like bodies being disappeared by European Americans whatever to be carefully disposed of and often of autopsy translated into other stealing our bodies and our body parts well of course just look at it in that point of view and don't be surprised that your bed is in the way that you might imagine it would be so again I think a lot of things about just really understanding where people are coming from recognising that solutions are there not and that proper engagement of the kind that Amanda's been talking about will actually source those solutions and not just throw up the barrages of problems Robin we'll go up on the question about scale which I think is really interesting and the voice of God might want to say a bit more about that That's your Amanda So the sort of the standard reflex operationally for a donor agency is okay we'll fund some NGOs probably Australian ones to work with their national counterpart NGOs to do some training in six districts and that will include some training for trainers and they will fan out you know clearly that's not going to get you very far So I think to do anything effective you've really got to build relationships with nationally networked NGOs in a vast country like Indonesia they might be the massive Islamic organisations or certainly the Red Cross societies across the provinces so I think you're sort of obliged to create relationships with less comfortable partners and it takes a long time to build relationships of trust with those massive organisations that don't really have much to do with the external funders I want to open it up to questions but there were two things, two points I want to put to the panel before we open it up one is that we haven't had much comment on the role of the private sector and the second which is sort of different but it doesn't relate to the private sector is the role of gender strategies in health security I mean if you look at HIV for instance in sub-Saharan Africa infection amongst women and gender is a huge issue so to just make quick comments on private sector and gender they're different Okay let me pick up on gender in particular I mean obviously everything is gendered and when we talk about almost anything that we talk about we ignore the gender dimensions we ignore what's going on let me just give one health security example during the avian influenza outbreak in Southeast Asia at the beginning of the 2000s the Vietnamese in my view with some very advanced thinking wanted to compensate farmers for declaring sick birds early so that they come forward with their sick birds before they have an impact with others poultry industry is a gendered industry like all industries women tend to be the keepers of small flocks of poultry the household level flocks the larger the flocks the more men are likely to be present in the industry clearly also there's a poverty gradient along the same along the same axis so the poorest people have just a few chickens keep them in their house wealthier people have larger flocks and very wealthy people are likely to be present so guess who was most successful in securing the compensation for declaring sick birds and guess who was the successor and this has now become quite a big political issue in Vietnam that makes it difficult to even talk about the compensation system because it has such an inextricable gender discriminatory effect even though obviously it's thinking and planning is really ahead of its time just one example but really I don't think there's anything you can talk about that doesn't have that kind of gendered and equity oriented dimension to it yeah private sector well I did say a couple of things about the private sector earlier on in terms of health providers and if we're talking about the private sector in health provision one of the tensions in the whole terrain is that people use the private sector more and more as the public sector fails to the extent that if the public sector is providing a decent response to people's needs for health care and it's going to be cheaper because it's subsidized otherwise there's nothing very public about it and incidentally the reason there isn't much of a private sector in China is because the public sector is effectively a private sector that is charging people for services and and therefore isn't it and it's barely subsidized traditionally for a long time that is the case so it goes back to the things that I was saying at the beginning about a poor quality, poorly trusted public sector is a significant problem for any kind of intervention to manage a response to a new epidemic may even be at the roots of the emergence of an epidemic if it has emerged because people have not been identified early and the level of the level of disease in the population has got to a much higher level than it would have done so we get the private sector being important in that context and in that context it therefore becomes very important to engage because it's dispersed we don't tend to have just a few large private sector providers we have lots of small ones in most of the countries that I'm talking about in that context you have conflicts of incentives and motives you have degrees of reluctance to data share reluctance to information share even but clearly you need to find a solution to those problems because that's where you're going to find the people who need the intervention and the public can use the intervention to overcome it on either of those yeah so one thing we haven't talked much about really today is I guess the medical research side of things which will be the subject of a separate session tomorrow so I won't labour it but this is an area where I think there are big questions about what types of products are most relevant for a population and particularly with CV treatments some specifically to benefit pregnant women or women in general and so making choices about what products are given priority is part of a gender issue and likewise on the private sector side clearly this is an area where the private sector plays a huge role and when the private sector really has been I guess the the clinical research capacity to really help the public sector make progress on the development of new vaccines, drugs, diagnostics and I think the product development partnership model that we are supporting through the health security issue has proven very successful it's a very interesting model which will be more about tomorrow so just to focus on I guess the product development connection with the gender is particularly important very quickly just in line with the kind of interest that I've been sort of speaking about very really limited analyses of the impact of creating more for example police more female police the limited analyses would indicate that you get better, more rounded police forces that are better able to deliver services and be better community policing partners which would make them therefore better in response to health security so a gender perspective from services and a caution around private sector but again through the lens I've been looking at and that would be the privatisation of prisons and the provision of health and the provision of health services into prisons through private sector and the do you lose the ability to govern what they would look like and does that impact on health security just a couple lenses there Good. I'm going to actually now open it up for questions, comments, yes there I'm easy I don't have to really take that on No you're right John I mean it's a long standing issue it's something that's been urged by the AMA again I think at the beginning of last year and the position has been that we have a distributed state model so I won't go into that but I'll talk about the centre just briefly so the centre for health security is not intended to have an internal research capacity you know we're a small group we'll be thank you we'll be 16 or 17 people at full strength and we're really we're managing an investment initiative you know we're managing the investment of overseas aid in the range of things now some of those things will involve supporting Australian research institutions and we've spent a lot of time in the first three months getting to move those institutions so there'll be plenty of research to get supported through this initiative none of it will be conducted internally that's just not the model CDC is a very hard model to replicate even on a scale down basis it's hard to imagine any government at the moment being able to take on the budget commitment of establishing the CDC no matter how desirable most people would think that to be done you mean credibility or authority I mean in terms of authority it's like any other part of the aid program we have the authority invested in us by the Australian government and of course we need to gain our measures agreement to go in certain directions and we are doing that but with that authority we can go to partner governments we can go to multilateral organizations and I guess negotiate around the investment that is also it's really no different from anything else in the aid program I don't know if there's anybody from the department here I mean whether we should have a CDC or not has been a long debated issue that keeps coming up I think John as a brief statement that's not to say that we don't have within Australia national surveillance systems data collection across different diseases it's dispersed and as you know it's public health is primarily a state responsibility but we do have national systems and we have a lot of work that goes on in different centers for the institute etc so I don't think that we're without in house knowledge it's just it's not concentrated within a national CDC but I think we should move on unless you can I just say that one of the central things that a CDC would have to do of course is to be studying new diseases which are coming along all the time and otherwise we're simply dependent on other countries that seems an extraordinary situation for a wealthy country like Australia to be in thank you other questions yes thank you very much Joel Megan from University of Sydney thank you very much for the panel very interesting discussion I guess what struck me about it is talked about health security encompassing health systems and agriculture and law enforcement and animal health and community development and gender and the private sector and we could certainly add things like environment and water and land use and ecology and so on at what point does it become unruly and hard to maintain support within government within the community for an initiative that starts to then encompass everything so I just want to comment on that as our definitions expand Robin do you want to start would you have been grappling with this now? yeah and in fact your university is hosting something I think at a week or two around planetary health which is precisely that all encompassing concept so you tell me yeah there are a lot of issues to grapple with and I suppose the temptation is to scuttle to the other end of the spectrum and just focus on building laboratory capacity and rapid response teams and so forth and you have that is really tempting but you do have to find a little ground that I kind of agree I mean I want to really make the point that it is far too tempting to go the other way and take a reductionist approach and say let's just focus on one little bit of the problem and the fundamental point is that all these issues are systemic and that's why they cross all these boundaries and that if you're dealing with a systemic issue then what you need to do is to understand the interrelationships between the components without necessarily thinking that you can deal with all those in one fell swoop and by mapping and understanding the interrelationships between things focus on what's most important and we just don't do that we do all the reductionists let's do this little bit and that little bit and yet we know nothing about some really huge issues at the core of some of the big problems that we do so for example in the area of antimicrobial resistance I understand that we know almost nothing about the use of antibiotics in agriculture almost nothing there are a few estimates of how much antibiotic is going into different countries' agricultural systems that somebody did on the back of the envelope and everybody repeats and says you know as if this was somehow the truth of the matter and we have no systems apparently of going to the roots of where the antibiotic is coming from understanding by which roots they're reaching different kinds of animals understanding anything about the markets in which antibiotics are effectively being traded or why they're being traded the implications for livelihoods of farmers if they were reduced or increased or anything and therefore we have no idea whether or not antibiotic use in the animal population is the key issue in antimicrobial resistance or not we just don't know and nobody seems interested in finding out but lots of people are interested in finding out all sorts of very detailed things about this germ or worm and how it's working its way through that animal and you know so what if we don't know what we can do about it so I think we're complete idiots wandering around this world of understanding interconnectedness saying oh it's all too complicated let's just see what we can do happens everywhere all the time very frustrating if somebody thinks about the big picture and wants to see things happen that are more logically embedded in that so the system is understanding Nick you were wanting to say something thanks Barbara just quickly to add to what's being said the construct that the health security centre could guarantee not only Australia's but the region's health security with its budget over three four or five years is kind of perverse anyway right so it simply wouldn't be enough to be able to get across all these things and I think that's kind of what you want in a health and all systems or a health and all society or a global health or a planetary health is that health should be one of those sort of apolitical things that we can engage with the US with the Cambodians, with the Myanmar with the WHOs, with the UNODC and I'm on equal terms that we, the collective Australian will contribute to this part of it you guys will contribute to that part of it and together we will find some sort of common mechanism for communication and information sharing that will make the world a better and more health secure place so it kind of by definition if we if we go reductionism is bad if we can keep the big picture up there then that will naturally promote what is happening in a globalised world already which is you know sharing of information and communication that should be Thanks More questions? Yes Thank you my name is Yamagata Economist Japan Society for International Development I have a question on the comparison between the concepts of health security and universal health coverage Japan pushed the concept of universal health coverage with some resources and health coverage in this sense included both health services as well as health insurance I found the difference at least by a weapon military issue is not in the concept of universal health coverage but I want to listen to you what did the difference, criticism on universal health coverage in comparison with the concepts of health security Who would like to respond? Well let me kick off I think it's a huge question and again it's another where do you start one I think Robin already talked about this notion that one is the other side of the coin to the other if you have universal health coverage you'll have health security obviously there's a yes and no to that but everybody if everybody got excellent health care a lot of health security issues would be much diminished but they wouldn't disappear but everybody having excellent health care is a very long way down the line for a lot of countries in this region and we have to have a more moderate version of what universal health coverage might be constituted as so in a relatively low income country or one of the few low income countries left we need to be talking about a relatively restricted package of care that's dealing with the most important conditions that people are likely to suffer from and really addresses the things that people spend a lot of money on so protects them from the impoverishment that having health problems often results in for family that still leaves huge holes and just to give an example of the kind of holes that it leaves we saw a bank report on antimicrobial resistance about the dangers of universal health coverage for even greater and less controlled use of antibiotics and so a universal health coverage that doesn't address the use of antibiotics in its expanded access to health care could make that particular problem even worse and so I think there are many sort of issues like that where they're really not just the other side of the coin and need a lot more sort of separate consideration of the different ones I'll just add I think both concepts can be variously interpreted and some people will think about coverage almost in the insurance sense so true universal health coverage will guarantee the robustness of the system in the face of the threats I just think about it in terms of basic service delivery so it depends which concept you have whether there's any sort of tension there there was an international working group on financing health security a couple of years ago in fact Peter Sands led that and they had a go at creating this concept of universal health security which was meant to be the flip side of universal health coverage that it didn't take on Nick, do you have any comments? No, okay, Mary who do you have to hand up? I have something cheerful to say that's okay because we've talked a lot about tensions but one of the positives for instance between one world health and agriculture and human health but one of the positives is a lot of our cures for human health come from the animal sector because we share those diseases river-blinders, ochre-saciasis insecticides that we use for our bed nets they come from pesticides so I think there's a real opportunity not just to say we're competing for farms but it's so much cheaper to adapt to their product for humans and it is to start from scratch so that's the first thing and then in the same positive note what kind of positive note to do with defence I'm interested that we always talk about health security in terms of health systems that's the common way that public health responds to it and we talk about detect and prevent and respond but of course they need tools to detect with a diagnostic you prevent with quarantine but also with vaccines and the reason we're not talking much about Ebola is because we now have an Ebola vaccine more than 90% effective that's why it's not part of the epidemic preparedness initiative anymore so we need systems but we need tools as well and one of the places that quite good research comes from is of course defence they spend absolute, a certain word here on bioterror on malaria, things like leash because American soldiers in the Middle East more than got leash than got shot so there's a real opportunity I think to look at can we share our R&D with the private sector with defence and remember that the system is only as good as its tools and the tools are only as good as the system and I kind of always put them both in and that's why I'm so glad the centre has got an R&D focus which I know surprised some people but I think it's a real positive so that's my Pollyanna contribution that's great I think we can all do with some Pollyanna-ish so thank you Mary that's excellent other questions? went up the back there can we have to call in today soon Jackie Mundy, independent I'm just interested just to hear a little bit more about how the centre of the regional security initiative is proposing to sort of follow a health systems approach given what we know that strong and resilient health systems are the underpinning of health security plus all the lessons and the evidence that's come through from HIV and other single disease programs how too much of a focus on a single disease risks undermining and distorting the health system so in several parts so support for health systems research which I think many people in this audience are aware of will be providing quite substantial support, $16 million over three years for Australian institutions to conduct health systems research with a focus on the energy to help us understand some of the constraints and then you can break a health system into some components that will be a workforce element there will be a laboratory element there will be a surveillance element and so forth and will be working on all those levels but first talking to governments over the next two or three months about exactly where they see the gaps looking at WHO assessments in terms of where they see the gaps and then looking at the Australian end and thinking okay where can we actually do more than others to help fund these gaps so I don't know if that's a health systems approach but that's certainly the approach we're taking I guess your point is this disease specific quite deliberately the focus is I would say almost disease agnostic we are as Barbara said in the space of infectious diseases but the question is more what can we effectively do to build preparedness and in many cases that might be through action on existing diseases okay I think we need to quick question okay if you don't mind why don't you ask after because what I'd like to do is summarise what I'm going to do is is ask each of the panel members to make one or two comments about what are the key messages you wanted to get across today and what do you think is a key step moving forward so I'm just going to go across the panel so I'll start with you Barbara okay so for me the point that I think I was probably most vehement about and that I wanted to make sure it came out of my comment to Joel's question about is it all too big I think we do have to understand the systemic of the issues that we're facing and the interrelatedness I think we have to avoid reductionism and I think we have to in understanding those connectedness connectednesses home in on those things that are going to make the most impact across the network the things that connect the hubs in the network if you like Thanks Robin Yeah I guess I'll just go back to the several balancing acts I mentioned at the beginning I guess the message is that we have substantial resources at our disposal and the reasonably clear mandate but you know we know it's going to be very hard to avoid some of those traps around the way what we're doing is presenting around I guess going to the easy end of the spectrum in supporting certain types of epidemic preparedness so we're doing our best to juggle those various walls to balance as best we can so that we have an impact on problems that are besetting governments now while also improving their preparedness for the future of the world Thanks and I would it be true to say someone made the point that there's no way Australia can or should provide all the solutions to whatever's needed in the region and that's not your approach as I understand it is to yes work out where the key difference is but also the countries to work out how you complement each other Is that a fair summary? Yeah correct and we haven't talked about the place of the other big international actors in this area that we're putting a lot of effort into figuring out how our resources can be blended with those of the American Government, the Asian Development Bank and others to amplify the impact Key message pretty sort of obvious one for me is can we find a way to engage with the security sector more generally in the context of health security by doing so we would respond to recommendation 3.1 from the joint external evaluations public health and security authorities are linked during a suspected or confirmed biological event to get to that point we would have to have trust, we would have to have dialogue I would be advocating seriously for national level dialogues with customs, military police particularly in the context and obviously with health to try and understand what is the capacity of the various actors in various places that we can then work with our partners the ADV the US etc to work out how we then program in and build the capacity of the security sector to build a collective workforce in the context of health security Thanks Are you still there? I am, I'm hanging in Thank you very much I know it's extremely frustrating to be at the end of it, not even a picture but at the end of a phone with a huge audience here the question I put to the panel I don't know whether you heard it if you could just summarise what was the key message or messages you wanted to get across in this discussion as a way forward Yeah, I mean the key message for us the key role the key role of communities and civil society in supporting governments to really achieve health security and not shying away from some of those more difficult contexts where epidemics really pose the most significant risks and where those health systems are the weakest and I think the second main point for us is really what Robin was saying was not just focusing on those emerging infectious disease those outbreaks that we're struggling with on a day-to-day basis that are still really getting the best of us in a lot of locations Okay, that's great and thank you very much for persisting with this and I just wanted to thank all of the panel for a great discussion and thank you Helen Thank you for a great sharing Yes, great sharing Thank you No, thank you everybody