 I'm Arthur Wesley, the Dean of the College of Aging and Pacific, and I'm really excited that, I woke up this morning really excited that this was the 18th of August because I've been looking forward to this day for a very long time. The genesis of this day was, I believe here we were at breakfast one morning and we started talking about some of the great benefits of the ANU. Some of the great benefits of the ANU is that we have remarkable breadth and depth of expertise and yet we're a relatively small institution both in numbers and in physical size. We started talking over breakfast about wouldn't it be great if we were to take advantage of those two great benefits and start to talk to each other about research and perhaps foster some collaborations across college lines. And of course one of the great barriers to doing that is simply information. We're aware that there are people in other colleges and they're likely to be doing great stuff. We often hear about them when they win prestigious awards and do wonderful things and speak on the television and radio but we don't really have a systematic way of finding out what each other does and what we have expertise in and so the idea of the college showcases came up. Days that were half days that would allow people from other colleges to come along and listen to the research expertise of people in each of our colleges. So I was really happy and excited that the other teams allowed cap to go first. So we've got a really interesting program designed for you this afternoon. We've decided to put on a number of discussions around particular research themes within the College of Asia of the Pacific. Security, sustainability and resilience, culture and identity, development and finally governance. And we've asked two or three people from across CAP to come along and talk about their research in these particular areas. So we're going to start off with security because here in CAP we realise that the more scared people are the more business we have and so it's good to put people on their wits first off. What we're going to do is we're going to ask each of our presenters to speak for about three minutes or so and then there will be time for the audience to engage in discussion and ask questions. Before I ask the first of our speakers to come up I will let you know that when we're outside having a cup of coffee or having something to eat over lunch there are some posters up there. We've invited our PhD students to put up some of their work on posters so please do have a stroll around and have a look at those posters there may be something there of interest to you as well. So to the theme of security unfortunately our third speaker is unwell today so we've got two presenters on security Roger Bradbury from the National Security College and Cecilia David from Bell School so without further ado Roger if you would come up and tell us about sleepwalking to law. Thank you. Do I need to be mic'd up? Yeah, did you want to have a microphone? Okay, yeah I'll just take that. Okay. Right, yeah good. It's not too complex I hope. I can go to the front. Yeah, it didn't work. So if you want to hit me the next line please. Okay, sleepwalking to war. This is a piece of work that I'm doing with Chris Barry from Strategic and Defence Study Centre at SCSC. Chris, some of you might know is the former Chief of Defence Force and he's a really beautiful Chief like to work with because he knows how to scare people and drum up business to the college. And we're also doing this work with a young scholar over in the College of Engineering and Computer Science for me, through Bushnell. Now our problem is that we're looking at is why are countries sometimes, or ensembles of countries why do they sometimes sleepwalking the war? We know from the First World War situation that this appears to be what happened. Why do they do things that are inimical to their long-term interests? And we decided to have a look at this. History is very important but there's nothing like modelling and simulation to look at a larger a larger universe of possibilities. History has a very thin stream of what happened looking at modelling and simulation about what the states might do, gives you a larger feel to look at the problem in a slightly different way. So we looked at it, so we take both together. And what we did is we built a thing called a nation-based model of an ensemble of states. These nation states are autonomous in the model. They allow, they can have values, they can have strategies. They can change their strategy over time based on whether things are going well for them and also they can copy what other states do. They can watch what seems to work for other states and do that. In other words, they develop their policies and strategies based on their past experience and what appears to be happening around them. And we let them interact. We give them an urge to grow, to grow in wealth. We allow them to compete with other states and we allow them to cooperate with other states. In the limit competition becomes war. In the limit cooperation becomes peace. So they live in the sort of world where we know states live in. And we look at particularly two particular kind of settings for their strategies. Their policies and how likely they are to go to war and their forward-leaning now and their risk aversion. How much they calculate the cost and benefits of war. So let's look at what happens. Can we have the next slide, please? Okay. So when countries believe that war isn't costly, you know, another way of looking at that is when countries have forgotten the costs, the real costs of war. This is what happens. They're willing to resort to war. I think we may have missed a... We can go back one. We may have missed a picture. Here we go. Good. This is what happens with an ensemble of states when they've forgotten the cost of war. What happens very quickly as they change their strategy in relation as they watch what other states are doing and so forth. Over time their hawkishness grows very quickly but it stays constant and their risk aversion drops very low and it stays constant. When you're in these positions they're very resistant to change and some people would say that there are parts of the world today that are like that. They're highly hawkish and they're not very risk averse. They've forgotten the costs of war. Okay, so we drill down on this and looked at, next slide please, and looked at what happens between pairs of states to see whether we can find the de-escalation part away from that setting and what we did was compute the likelihoods for each point in a space which in each point in a space is the strategy of country one versus the strategy of country two and to see whether there are parts for them to get out of this de-escalation trap. So let's have a look. We coloured the space for war, peace and standoff. So these are the next slide. This is the sort of strategy space countries find themselves in. Red means they're very lucky. The probability of them going to war is very high. And here when hawkishness, when risk aversion is very low, the bar at the top and risk aversion is very low, there's almost nowhere the state can be which doesn't leave its next step to be warred. Move on, and we'll finish this very quickly. I'll show you. If we change the risk aversion level a little bit, we suddenly start to see that green is a peaceful domain. Even if you're up and even if you find yourself up in the warlike domain, you can make a few steps and you can find somewhere where there is a peaceful solution to your strategic dilemma. So this starts to be an opening up of the strategic options space where the states don't have to go to war. Once risk aversion, once you start to calculate the costs of war a little better. So let's take it to the next one. And suddenly we're starting to see the chances of war getting pushed to the perimeter as risk aversion goes higher and higher. And in fact at the top, a new domain of just standoff which is like the Cold War that both countries are both highly hawkish and the risks of war so much that they standoff. So that's also a stable point. And if we go to the final one, we start to get into a region when risk aversion is high, countries can find a place which is peaceful and or even when their hawkishness is very high that they're still calculating the cost of the arm again, they can find a standoff place. In other words, they can find a position which is an option space for all your strategies taking my position in there which allows you to live this way. Roger. Thanks very much. APPLAUSE OK. Next we have Cecilia J. who is going to talk to us about human protection and human reform in the changing world of the world. Thank you. Well, I don't know if I still have my extra minute. No? I'm telling you. OK. So having entered on peace I'm going to try and continue with that theme from a different angle. So my research is addressing United Nations conflict management reform and the protection of populations in armed conflict and also mass atrocities. So what's the challenge? Today there are 50 armed conflicts worldwide. 65 million people displaced by armed conflict. Some 100 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. So we've got a massive problem on our hands. So what I argue is that the challenge is huge but this report card hides a lot of important progress that's taking place among international organizations and states in response to human suffering that's needed to strengthen international architecture of managing and resolving violent conflicts. My research has witnessed the emergence of what I'm calling in my research the international human protection order which is characterized by distinctive features in terms of the normative framework that underpins increasingly robust and assertive protection practices in conflicts such as in South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. So my research tells a slightly different story about the challenges of developing effective international human protection norms and it's conveyed through accounts of international hypocrisy and failure. These are very real shortcomings of the international community. However, through interviews and with international policy makers and case study research on local conflicts I'm tracing the implementation of human protection norms across the UN system to show how the implementation process itself is generative of significant institutional reform and how it's also creating new avenues to strengthen international moral legal and political accountability. It traces the channels through which the UN is responsive to successes and failures in protecting local populations and it shows that while this is still constrained by the heavy weight of state interest and geopolitics the normative agendas are party instrumental in shaping international practice and catalyzing institutional reform that is constitutive of the broader evolution in international order. Understanding the origins, process and direction of UN conflict management reform is significant for countries like Australia that consider the global rules-based order. It's vital to its interest in global stability, peace and security. I don't have the answers to human suffering in conflict and I believe that this ultimate is still rests with the willingness of states to find political solutions to our conflict. My research does show the importance of the creativity of diplomats and international policy makers to reconcertualise norms of human protection linking them to concepts such as justice, human rights and the resilience of society. My research shows that addressing big security problems in international relations requires police strategies for diplomatic negotiations for advocacy and for translating high order principles into the operational guidance of those who are on the front line. So this work requires creativity and imagining possibilities for global justice in places where they haven't existed before. And I hope I'll stick to my three minutes for Q&A. OK, thanks Assyria. Come and job me down the front. Now here we have an opportunity to ask questions and engage in discussion. Does anyone in the audience have any questions? Matt? I've got two part questions for Professor Roger Radger. First is Donald Trump and Achela Small. But the second one is more serious but well maybe less serious but I'll say too. I'm having trouble with the idea of a risk aversion because it seems like a recursive concept where it's already an evaluation but you're using it as a barrier. So presumably it's part of the calculating to calculate what the risk actually is and then somebody is looking at that and then calibrating their sense of what the risk is based on that. Donald seems like it's both plugged in and then ran out. If we could go back a couple of slides I can show whether Donald Trump is going to wipe us out. That one, yes please. That's a really good question. Don't overthink this because these are very high level abstract variables to claim and what we're seeing we're seeing hawkishness sweeping up nationalism and as a processing states that has a high emotional content say you're rattling you're sort of playing all that sort of rubbish which we're starting to see in a lot of countries around the world. And we're seeing that as a variable that's strongly influenced from outside because you can't be seeing less hawkish in some situations than your hawkish name. We're seeing risk aversion as more an internal calculus where as you say you calculate the risk and then you calculate the risk of whether you take the risk. And we're seeing that as a thing that's a more rational process and has to do with internal policy settings and it has to do with policy makers talking to and talking the political class down an arch when they're getting a little bit hogger of a collar. So we're seeing one is a rational thing to some extent and one is a more irrational thing. So it's sort of an interesting issue and if you look at this one here you've got to let's just say that both let's call this the US country one and country two called Korea for example just for example and you can see that if risk aversion is low, this is uniformly low for both so it's not the most satisfactory graph to describe what you're talking about. Even when it's high you can find one country at least can find slices through there which allow it to move. If you think of this as a space, an option space and if you think that policy gets made in increments very hard for the inertia of bureaucracy to make a 180 degree term in policy in one go but they make steps and change their policy in steps and the problem in First World War is that in that whole red domain no matter what policy steps they made they still couldn't be going there but here there are steps you can take which are relatively small steps across this space that you can get you away from the war up to standoff or even in this now that's a book. Those policy options are available whether they're going to be taken up by President Trump or KJU isn't another issue but I think the important thing where we think we're showing is that that space it's not a uniform red landscape there is, if you start to calculate the risks, the real risks you've got some opportunity to walk back to you. I'm wondering, I guess I need to state that the risk aversion can be changed for the government in the industry beyond just the other sectors of the area. Yeah, good point. Chris Chris and I came to this because Chris was really concerned that we've had this unparalleled long period of relative peace in the world through the Cold War where we had standoff and then through bad wars but not involving the whole populace that both the population and the elite have forgotten about war, they've forgotten about people going off to war and coming back dead in huge numbers. So we're trying to think how is it that if you've forgotten the real cost of war if your risk aversion has changed to low risk aversion because you don't think war was that bad then how do you make a more realistic assessment? Part of it is through a free and democratic process where people start to remember where people start to tell their elected leaders and part of it I think is for the memory inside the policy apparatus to somehow assert itself with the political class without short-term memories but it didn't work so well in Iraq it didn't work so well in Vietnam it didn't work so well in half in three or four other places that we really should start to think about the cost and that should penetrate into your consciousness when you're making decisions about whether you go to war or not I don't think Mr Trump takes has that view but I don't think he's that risk-averse I think he's sort of in a bad place and KJU I don't think is similar they live in a bubble they don't see they don't see the real costs the real costs of of native warfare and we're talking about native warfare here not just skirmishers remember in the first war when it broke out the leaders on both sides were so confident they said the troops would be home by Christmas unbelievable and yet one little factoid that I give to my students in when we're talking about how politicians and policy makers should be very, very careful of these things in the battle of the song 30 km front the British lost 20,000 people dead in the first day and that whole battle of the song had one million casualties unbelievable and that was in 1918, 1917 and that was the troops coming home for Christmas they came home alright in Carthage so how do you test your idea in a way that could have been somebody outside academia yes good point and how do you envisage applying this in the real world so we can show it providing value I think we can I think we can map real situations in historical plans on some of these on some of these maps where this is the qualitative place where country A versus country B where it was before the September 4 and this is where they moved to and this is how they were able to get out I think we can show that but that's a second break and how will this be applied for practice I think the thing if it just brings home the message that risk aversion properly calculated risk aversion is one of the things you've got in the kit bay to help you make better policy and if you don't do that countless properly you can make horrendous mistakes how we convince how we can automate the back that's a good question what's your plan to do with that I'm just as simple as it is I'm not trying to convince anyone I'm just trying to say this is the way it is I've put it to you that that approach is no longer acceptable that we're not here just to fear us about things we're here to deliver value to the community that's paying for this I think the way it is through engaging policy makers and showing them this stuff that's one way but the most important thing is to establish the reality of this and put it that way there's nothing like true things new true things being out there in the environment to help the bay that doesn't work with the climate change we've got that panel it's coming Raghav he's ruining it for me thanks very much for two excellent presentations I think with an economist perspective what you have said one is and I'll just raise two points the first is that first is a question of criminology for an economist uncertainty is different from risk this is going back all the way to the 1930s you said computing risk risk coercion or risk or whatever now if you do that then the 19th definition is that risk cannot be quantified what can be quantified is uncertainty and you can attach probabilities to different states of the world and use that to compute the possibility of something happening so I would raise that point with you that economist would have that issue with this second point is that there is a the this governance state that you have low or high is just given it is not evolving and that is not a dynamic phenomenon it doesn't change over time these states are either risk-awards or they are not risk-awards and different states of the world need to conflict or a cold war different combinations need to conflict a cold war or peace whereas in the 80s I don't know if you are aware of this literature there was a big literature in economics called catastrophe theory which actually I think it is a mathematical theory but which was modeling the possibility of reporting into deep recessions and that catastrophe was defined as getting into deep recessions and I think that maybe I don't know the details of your work maybe there is some presently learned from catastrophe theory or the kind of very good points thank you for the risk-aversion isn't a binary it is a continuous value so is tortuousness and what we are actually doing is we are measuring life in those states every point is a likelihood is the point of every point in that space is this value of risk-aversion versus this value of this value of tortuousness and from that and the computer or the SLA somehow can so I am using risk in a common part it is not in a theoretical way I like the other catastrophe theory I think in two dimensions perhaps a third you could imagine some of those structures would look like both catastrophes driven by two dimensions I could see that coming out quite nicely that would be that would be sort of an analytical solution where we are trying to do a simulation but I could see the we could also see even longer processes we could also see stable in the cycles and things like that but yeah this is early days thank you Terrence I have a question for Celia normal confusion the topic I am going to be interested in in my question is what is the the most curious to which community you thought the confusion of norms was most important so is it confusion of norms across politics or is it confusion of norms across different aspects but how does it relate to nations yeah thank you for that question so my interest in norms actually came from my interest in atrocity prevention and looking at when states commit atrocities at a very local level that this language in the norm diffusion literature was assuming that norms would somehow diffuse from the international level down to the state level and become internalised by states and the longer I looked at that I started to get frustrated with these frameworks thinking security sectors rule of law institutions the kinds of institutions within the state need to reform in order to achieve atrocity prevention goals were not going to internalise these norms because the way they were articulated at the international level really blocked a translation of what an international norm of atrocity prevention might look like in terms of security sector reform or very localised practices so I am trying to look away from the norm diffusion model and I am playing around with socio-illegal approaches to looking at how do norms practice in function to affect institutional reform so I am looking at the way states, international policy makers so bureaucrats within the UN obviously as a focal point for these human protection standards have been very creative in reconceptualising norms to be able to target a different audience if that makes sense so I have been still early days but tracing progress through the Human Rights Council for example where they have taken the language of human protection norms responsibility to protect and they have said what does this mean for the Human Rights Council well this means that we are incredibly effective in doing early warning all the work that we do on human rights protection is actually it is going to capture atrocity prevention much better than the toolkits and frameworks that we have so you have these institutional sites throughout the UN changing their language and their concepts according to where they are so there is variation within the institution and what I am finding very interesting is the way that this is opening up new ways of thinking about international accountability accountability of the international institutions the multilateral organisations working methods of the Security Council and so on accountability of states do they have to mainstream and report to the international community on their practices and what could this actually mean accountability within the states specific agencies within the states so I am playing around with these concepts to kind of move past this norm diffusion models which I find the international relations focus on socialisation and the diffusion process doesn't incorporate the legal perspectives whereas the legal perspective looking at the process of legalisation likewise is not capturing the social elements of how these norms based on legal principles and moral principles actually function in practice and so I am trying to bring in this legal perspective the socio-legal perspective to try and push it out a bit further So would you sort of argue that there are laws on their own if the international laws are the enforcement mechanism that is wrong will only get traction that they are enforced by the normative changes Yeah and so by looking at international human protection norms that may have a legal backing but are not laws per se they are actually norms we find ourselves in that difficult position where you don't have strong accountability mechanisms for it So how can we be creative in thinking of holding states and actors to account on the norms that they are advocating without blocking them into some kind of tough compliance mechanism which might have the opposite effect What are the criticisms of humanitarian responses to activity and unevenness of those responses I'm just going to give you a research is demonstrating the factors that contribute to which emergencies are responded to when international laws are likely to be one of the most effective in terms of having an international response and whether you are sort of moving towards being able to provide more explanation as to what activity that happens Yeah, so I think a standard international relations response to that question would be it's all about politics and it's all about state interest and I do agree to a large extent that is how international relations works So what I'm trying to find here is dig into some of the nuance where we could get very pessimistic about the limitations of state interest or we could think how can we be creative in circumnavigating these structural factors that are going to just be a part of life. So what I'm doing in this next book project, I haven't got the case studies all laid out yet, but I'm doing a series of case studies referred to some of the Central African Republic, South Sudan Democratic Republic of Congo I'm also looking at Sri Lanka and Libya and I'm using a socio-legal approach on transnational legal orders so using recursivity as a concept of how international community responds to the local and how those feedback loops then affect an expansion of the normative, of the norm-making process of the international level So through those case studies I'll then be looking at how international actors do respond not just to successes but mostly to failures and how those feedback loops then start to change the mandate of the institutions and how they respond so I think what this project is doing is not going to be an answer to selectivity because I think that's how the international system functions and that's the reality of it but I think if we want to make some kind of progress so I was also being the optimistic realist is if you want to make some kind of progress then you have to think how do you navigate and so can navigate these kinds of fixed obstacles and be creative about the kinds of practices you can institute around those Okay Thank you very much Senior and Roger We will now move on from security and we're going to move towards sustainability and resilience So we have three speakers under this theme. Thank you both We have Sharon Bessel and Frank Josso from the Crawford School and we have George Carter from the Health School So we're going to start off with Sharon who's going to tell us about the individual deprivation measure ensuring the no one's behind it Can people hear me? I'm speaking without a mic Do I need the mic? Leave the mic I've had these two spots so I'll have the mic Okay, so this is research that I'm involved in with Janet Hunt who is from Pater at CAS and team at the Crawford School Helen Sutch, Mandy Yepp and Frank Barlow So the individual deprivation measure began with research that came out of an Australian Research Council grant and is now continuing in a new phase This is funded by DFAT But what was the problem that we were trying to address in developing a new way of measuring poverty and a new way of measuring poverty based on a new way of conceptualising poverty So we know that inequality is a serious problem We look at some of the figures around the top 1% only 48% of the world's wealth and that presents a whole range of issues about that large percentage of the population who have much less wealth But what we need to be particularly concerned about, we I do, is this group that are at the very bottom The group who are at the very bottom Those who continue into living poverty Those who are in what he thought to describe as the bottom billion The sustainable development goals have opened up a new agenda about how we think about development, about how we think about poverty measurement and how we think about the ways in which we approach development and eradicating poverty And so the sustainable development goals have adopted the language of leaving no one behind of ensuring that we're not simply going for the low hanging fruit as we might have in the past It's possible to increase poverty rates in countries by moving those people who are just below the poverty line to just above the poverty line and to look as though we're achieving something And of course we are What's more challenging and what the sustainable development goals agenda focuses focuses our attention on is those people who are at the very bottom Those who are most difficult to move above the poverty line This idea of leaving no one behind But at the moment with the measures of poverty that we have it's very difficult to know who the one is or who those groups are who are at the very bottom It's very difficult to know what factors are keeping them in poverty and how their poverty is playing out We know quite a lot about income based measures of poverty We know enough about multidimensional poverty particularly for those groups who are in the deepest poverty We also have a significant global gender data gap Years after we started talking about gender equality within the global development agenda we still have very few ways of conceptualising and measuring poverty that are genuinely sensitive to gender And so one of the major focuses of the international community in the wake of the adoption of the sustainable development goals has been how we feel the global gender data gap how we think about poverty and how we measure poverty in ways that are genuinely sensitive to gender and don't assume that women and men experience poverty in the same way So we began our research and we continue to imagine what might be achieved if poverty were measured based on the dimensions that matter to people in their everyday lives So poverty measure for good reason has been defined by experts but what do people who experience poverty on a daily basis say is important to them And that's what might be achieved if we could genuinely measure not just the material but also the non-material dimensions of poverty which is so important to those people who experience poverty every day What might be achieved if we could move beyond the household We still use the household most commonly as the unit of analysis We assume that income or other assets access to services are spread equally within the household We assume that the poverty of women and men are the same And that's what might be achieved if we had a way of measuring poverty that could reveal the different individual characteristics that shape the way in which poverty plays out So not just the way in which poverty impacts on women's lives but for example on older women living in rural areas of a particular ethnic group What might be achieved if using the language of the SDGs which is really not much more than rhetoric at the moment What could be achieved in which the one who is being left behind So what we are aiming to do with the individual deprivation measure is to bring some of these imaginings into reality The individual deprivation measure is based on participatory research that was carried out with 2,000 people living in poverty across 18 sites in 6 countries It has 15 dimensions of poverty which are identified through that participatory research and also our reviews of current measures of poverty and the literature around poverty measurement and people's experience of poverty And most importantly it measures at the individual level And so once we understand the way in which poverty plays out across each of these dimensions at the individual level we are able to aggregate up to understand the way in which different social groups experience poverty and to understand the way in which these dimensions come together not just to add to the experience of poverty but to compound the experience of poverty constraining and in many cases destroying people's lives So the individual deprivation measure program in this second phase is a partnership between the Australian Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Civil Society the International Women's Development Agency in Melbourne and the ANU And what we are aiming to achieve is to provide a tool that gives policy relevant data at the local and national levels but also contributes to the agenda of the sustainable development goals by giving us a means of identifying who it is that's being left behind in what ways and how we can respond Thank you Next we have George Carter George is with the Bell School and he's going to talk to us about Pacific Islands, OMSI and consensus in climate change negotiations Thanks George Can you hear me from the back So although so although Pacific Island nations produce less than 1% of greenhouse gas emissions these countries are at the front line of current impacts of climate change whether it's extreme weather events climatic events such as cycles, droughts and ocean acidification but very much we all know about sea level rise and this vulnerability of these countries also makes the question are they just passive observers in international relations business, international climate change negotiations My PhD I'm a PhD candidate in Europe and you look at the engagement of Pacific Island countries in international negotiations I try to unpack their work through the different negotiators and their work within international negotiations This particular myth asks how do you negotiate I mean how do you research this and 2015 presented me with a unique experiment in the making of consensus of the making of Paris Agreement So what it is I follow Pacific Island countries as a negotiator for Samoa into every forum So I use principles of process tracing and ethnography as a negotiator in all these various forums both in the formal UNCC in the ADP process ADP process in the making of the Paris Agreement but also regionally in the Pacific the different forums that are available and to see working with prime ministers ministers working with negotiation technical negotiators, private citizens in every these forums how they make the decisions but very much the concept that I look at is the idea of consensus this very idea of building and making consensus and so the process the research itself took me in 2015 from Samoa, Papua New Guinea Fiji, Paris Pupon and New York What does the research address in the following challenges So I look at the essential idea of processes and models of consensus in every of these forums there are different ways of how consensus is made consensus is not we all agree is when countries or states agree not to disagree so there are different models of how consensus is made within these forums but also the process and the strategies that states use to force some forms of consensus So it's about small states' multilateral engagement specifically Pacific Island countries and their interactions with other coalitions from other parts of the world and are also within the wider UN system it's about regional governance it's looking into how Pacific countries make the decision making in particular climate change within the Pacific I also unravel geopolitics of the small they are small of the small it's the internal cohesion of Pacific Island countries it's about Australia and Samoa's relationship it's about Papua New Guinea and it's not a unique it's not a region where everyone agrees there are differences and internal cohesion issues within the geopolitics of the small it's about multi-actor delegations and multi-level negotiations as I've said for Paris 345 Pacific Islands from 14 countries' points of negotiations missed 38,000 negotiators all of these 345 are a mixture of island leaders academics, media private citizens, private businesses who are all forced into these small negotiations so it's about unpacking how these multi-acted negotiations but also what I also like to bring is the use of global political ethnography fast-paced research going to forums for one week or two weeks and multi-cited and trying to paint a picture not just in one unit but it's a series of consensus in the making of in this case the Paris Agreement to finish off these are some sites you're looking at Pacific Island Development Forum and how their form of inclusion and voluntary consensus model and it's about looking to the relationship of Australia and New Zealand and the rest of the Pacific through the Pacific Island Forum and its consensus is made whereby although discussions are made right throughout a three-month process the ultimate decision relies on 16 men going into one room and no women to make the final decision it's also unpacking how Marshall Islands and its proactive engagement of bringing in the European Union and the United States and also some countries from the like-minded group to work together on the issue of two degrees long-term temperature goals it's also about unpacking how Tuvalu pushed the United States in the very last stage of the Paris Agreement on the issue of loss and damage an issue that I mean something that's hardly about highlighted within the Jaime literature and most importantly for me and how how unique 2015 was for me was the formation of the Pacific Island SIDS Coalition that did not exist before that but you see now a regional a negotiated body which to this day continues on from the focusing on Pacific climate change issues at the UNFCC level Thank you Thank you George SIDS is Small Development States Alright and now we have Frank Upso who is going to talk to us about how Asia and Descartes Thank you Michael I think I spotted one of your slides in his capacity as negotiator for Aelsis or Tuvalu This follows on in a sense from your presentation because if the world wants to minimise the risk of climate change that could turn out catastrophic for Pacific Island states and many other countries then we need to decarbonise we need to take the emissions out of economic growth some of our work is about understanding what are the ways to do that in economic policy sense so what we look at is economic growth and in China's case just as an example we've seen economic growth continue in a pace over the decades the growth rate has slowed but it's still an enormous amount and added every year so what does it do to greenhouse gas emissions in this case carbon dioxide emissions well for a long time there was almost one to one coronation between increases in economic activity and increases in output of carbon dioxide very bad news indeed but over the last five years or so we've seen a significant decarbonisation of those two variables in China so that's what we mean by decarbonisation of ultimately retaining economic growth but taking away the leakage to increase in greenhouse gas emissions and we can compute the ratio of the two variables and what we want to see here is intensity emissions intensity of GDP declining over time we can look at that for a number of companies and in the Asian region the picture that emerges is actually a relatively positive one I think I'm not doing anything with my clicker you're doing thank you for that I'm just randomly clicking and sometimes something happens so next click and then on one and a few more so we've got the labels China on the left over the period 2000 to 2010 we've seen a decarbonisation of about 6% per year of the period 2011 to 2016 we've seen a decarbonisation of about 6% per year so there's been a great set that we need to see globally over a very long time over decades to come in order to decarbonise the world economy without damaging the prospects for economic growth to develop so China in the last five years is sort of a model of what we need to see globally keeping in mind that China's economic issues are still growing because the economy is growing so fast then we decarbonise that ratio other countries in Asia these are the six largest emitting countries in Asia labeling is not perfect but what you have here is China India, Japan, South Korea Indonesia and on the right Australia all rates between 1% and 3% reduction of carbon intensity per year and the good news all of these six largest Asian emitters except India that ratio of decarbonisation has actually improved all the time it's on an accelerating decrease in the carbon intensity of these economies very good news indeed the bad news is that we actually need to increase that substantially the question we are asking is what can be done to underpin faster and sustained reduction in decarbonisation the slides completely buggered up because it's not all about technology the things that we are looking at are actually not visible on the slides let's just black out the slide what we are interested in is the interaction between technological trends and the economy structural change and regulation policy societal change what I mean by that is we've seen enormous change in the cost of low emissions technology clean tech in the archetypal example of solar cells just ten years ago it was sort of an exotic technique that you would use only with massive subsidies or in very specialist applications now it's becoming mainstream it's becoming a real competitor for coal-fired energy generation in developing countries it's a revolution still we're not necessarily going to see white square and exclusive uptake of those clean technologies without policy instruments those need to be well designed and they need to fit the regulatory and economic frame China again is a wonderful study that we are working on China is on the way to introducing a marketplace instrument and emissions trade and steam but in the context of an energy system that's still very much command and control and they two don't go very well together and then finally social change all of this sort of massive change in the energy sector also means significant social change it means change to regional outcomes so coal communities in particular all the installations that rely on fossil fuels in a world that decarboniser will see their fortunes playing while other regions and other sectors will rise it's not the first large-scale industrial transition that we've seen we know from past experience that ultimately it can work out well but the world is bumpy and the social issues involved are significant and as a result of those frictions of course you see on occasion very difficult policies arise kind of researchers and tremendous opportunity for interdisciplinary research spanning all the way from the ingenuity in science through social science and economics and actually into the humanities as we talk about societal responses thanks very much so panellists could you come and join me I'm sure there's lots of questions Chandra we'll start with you please come several presentations a few years ago Oxpand came up with an index called multidimensional hybrid index now it's available I think for the last two years in the human neurosurgery index as well this is just for my knowledge how is your industry say individual deprivation measure deferred from that index the second point coming is that policy importance of an index depends on the analytical logic behind that as well as the way when you're operating there now to measure an index like you you need detailed household or survey data when I look at the human development report the Oxpand index they have produced only about 60 countries but the latest year for which data are available is a 2017 because household survey data are hard to come by in that context wouldn't be better from college point of view to go for a second test indicator that means to develop an index can be implemented using readily available data in that context when I compare all these indices I do not find that much gain by going beyond the old human development index I try to overlay the human development index with this Oxpand index for the available data they are nice and co-related is there any additional gain by going for this soft page that might come in and I have a comment on the science presentation when I look at the experience of all these countries to refer to one of the important structural change has been shipped from creative production to its services sector in all these countries now do I think that the structure of the ship has contributed I think it does have contributed to the Lord rather than regular stream missions Thank you Chandra, it's a great question the multi-dimensional poverty index has actually been developed by the Oxford Human Development Centre the Oxford Centre for Human Development and Poverty which is based at the University of Oxford and led by Sven Alkear rather than Oxfam and it is very closely based around the HDI and Alkear has worked very closely with the March Ascend and so you write those two things reflect one another and essentially the MPI was just moving a little further from the HDI and replacing the component of that measure around living standards moving away from GNI to per capita to a list of ways of proxies for living standards the individual deprivation measure is in some ways quite different from the MPI probably the major difference between the two is that the MPI does rely on existing data so it uses existing household surveys and other surveys that are available that's a huge strength because the data are there and so it's possible for the countries that collect the data and it's only three dimensions so for the countries that collect data around those dimensions an MPI can be calculated and there's scope within the MPI for some adjustment to make it nationally appropriate what we're doing with the individual deprivation measure moving away from existing data and we think that's a benefit but we know that it's also a constraint because it means that you actually need to collect the data our critique has been that most data that are already gathered are gathered in ways that have not been sensitive to gender and so in order to move beyond the constraints of existing data we have no choice but to actually collect the data so the IDM is based around two surveys, one at household level but one at individual level where we have a questionnaire that collects data on each of those dimensions and so we see that as the main difference we know that will be a constraint in terms of uptake but the governments that we're beginning to work with so we're beginning to work in Indonesia at the beginning of discussions in South Africa there's a recognition that particularly if we want to respond to poverty in a way that's gender sensitive then we may have to seriously think about how we move around existing data and how we collect data differently so I think that's the main difference with the MPI and we see great value in the MPI but we think we're contributing something beyond that both in terms of gender sensitivity and the number of dimensions that we're looking at Structural change, Chandra exactly right so in China structural change has delivered much more change in the last five years than targeted regulatory measures China invested massively in cement plants steel plants and so forth for its own infrastructure that is beginning to come to an end and that's what we see in the data and so going forward, regulatory measures will likely be more important That's how it indicates something policy, what technology, what kind of trend might introduce more health to improving both how to reduce the GDP over and come up with new measures So the research that and this is not just myself, this is a whole number of people at Crawford school and through the college who are working on these types of issues and the questions that we tend to be most interested in is what is feasible economic policy and regulatory design to facilitate those changes in a way that is desirable for society of all and typically that means in a way that does not compromise the opportunities for economic growth and development and so the question is where are the technological opportunities and where can that change be facilitated in an economically beneficial way So do you think your research can be an indicator to use the ratification of research for science and other processes? Oh yeah, look this research is very applied, so just to give you an example a few years ago we let the Australian part of a multinational study into decarbonisation of individual national economies and that was a mapping out of technological opportunities to get to a very low emissions point by the middle of the century and we took that analysis out into policy circles governments, oppositions state and federal governments and into business and into industry as well I think we can safely say that helped facilitate a dialogue about these issues that was a much more positive one than the usual mud slinging over carbon taxes bad and these kinds of things So I think that's actually an extremely valuable role that we at the universities and in the college can play in helping different players in the debate who often have very opposing viewpoints and interests to come together in thinking about proper research and analysis that lies behind the issues that are squabbling over So yes, very applied and very targeted Jenny and then Mira Thanks, two questions one for Sharon Do you think that your measure may eventually be used as the way assessing the effectiveness of policies and guarantee policy interventions and what do you have to do to get to that point And then a question for Frank Do you find that your or what are the risks the messaging that you have as a result of your research being taken to simply reinforce ideological positions So one reading of what you've shown us is we don't need to do anything it's all fine, it's headed in the right direction So there's a risk of our complacency It raises a really interesting question for policy related research You can either just take view that we were hearing earlier you do the research and put it out there they take it or they leave it or you engage with the nuanced interpretation that draws out the implications from it and if you don't do that there's always a risk that the research gets taken in a different way Thanks Jenny When we first began this research and we thought that the most one of the more valuable purposes of it would be being able to compare across countries so having the score so we can calculate up a country score or a score for women or a score for men and that relating to Chandra's point is kind of in the same space as the HDI so being able to do some kind of global ranking in comparison As we've moved forward with this research we actually think that's perhaps the least valuable part of it although there is a little appetite for that we think we hope it will be policy relevant and we think that where it is likely to be most policy relevant is the nuanced kind of information that it gives about particular groups in particular dimensions and so that has the potential to be quite valuable in informing policy because where do you need to target what kinds of interventions and potentially allowing to track progress over time of particular interventions for particular groups in particular places so it's the next step we're doing an IDM study early next year in Indonesia we're piloting at the moment and we've spent quite a lot of time doing stakeholder engagement so we're hoping that we will be able to work with local governments in the districts where we gather the data to then work through what the data means in local context but also how it can be used in a policy sense and then to work with those local governments to track how they've used it if they use it and how valuable it's been as a way of trying to test whether it is policy relevant as we hope it will be Jenny thank you for the important question there in terms of the framing and the context and I should add that this kind of research takes place in the context of a lot of research that is basically complete dormant glue so keeping temperature rise to two degrees or even well below two degrees, one and a half degrees as per Paris agreement is widely seen as a pipe dream within that though what I'm personally most interested in is to ask the question how could it be done how might it be possible and when you look back at projections made 20 years ago about technology about rates of change about clean take up take right then the mainstream projections were far too pessimistic compared to what actually happened so I think we can make the case that there is a kind of pessimism bias in much of the analysis because it tends to extrapolate out and tends to discount the possibilities for structural breaks and paradigm shifts and so I mean to an extent that's a professional choice to make to engage in the kind of research that asks the question so how could this be done is the statement yes we can just justifiable so that's I guess the choice I make in focusing on this type of research okay last question Miura I share your skepticism of accessing data which has been collected with no gender sensitivity or even using the household as a unit and not the individualism so in this spirit of the work that you are doing I was wondering what it actually means to experience poverty because one can understand experiencing hunger or malnutrition or hopelessness but when one talks of experiencing poverty that's already an abstraction and I was wondering in that abstraction there is some of the biases of the addressing data already slipping because we are calling it poverty and not looking at the individual factors some of which might be missed some of which might not be factors in the experience of poverty thank you it's a great question and we have struggled and continue to struggle with some of those issues we decided we took the decision to call the measure the individual deprivation measure rather than the poverty measure which is one of the reasons that you are articulating in part because we didn't want to go head to head with the multi-dimensional poverty index so there was a pragmatic thinking so those conceptual issues I think we have not completely clarified but I'd also say that we grounded this in participatory research but as participatory as that research was designed to be it also had the biases of the research team and the researchers we recognise that one of the important things we think about the way in which this measure pushes some of the debates is by including the non-material dimensions of deprivation or poverty depending on the terminology that you want to use so for example when we did the participatory work people talked very powerfully and particularly women talked very powerfully about the importance of social relationships and the way in which if one was excluded from relationships of support then poverty was deepened and often poverty meant that people couldn't engage in those relationships of support because you couldn't reciprocate so most measures of poverty or deprivation don't pick up those non-material measures which are about income but are not only about income they're about social relationships and inclusion and exclusion and stigma and so where we've tried to push some of the definitions around poverty and or deprivation is around those non-material elements and suggesting that it's very important to capture those as well because responding to material needs may not be enough particularly in situations of of deep social hierarchies of deep patriarchal structures and of deep social stigma Alright, could you please join me in thanking George, Sharon and Frank Thank you So in the 2017 Global Corruption Barometer put out by Transparency International shows that about 69% of people in India were involved in corruption if we add in some who didn't report their involvement and deduct some of those who just had to be corrupt because it was a matter of life and death we still end up with a number like 700, 750 million people in India all of who that's to give you in relative terms 25 times the population of Australia more than double the population entire population of America including Trump and his family all living in India being corrupt Now either we've denigrated an entire culture or at least a large part of it is ethically dubious or we question the categories with which we such as those of corruption with which we investigate and try to understand this culture its past and present I chose to do the latter My research examines the way in which we use the categories with which we attempt to understand and make sense of the world around us The interesting fact about a lot of these categories that we use so comfortably like nation, democracy, corruption civil society is that they all have a past they all are a product of roughly 17th to 19th century and what else was happening at that time this was a time when a large part of the world was colonized which is that is to say that the experiences of a large part of the world that was colonized was not taken into account when coming up, when presenting categories that we now assume are global universals that we assume universally applied to societies around the world and then it's no surprising that we run into trouble If we actually take another example that of nation there is no nation you don't find nation in nature nation is just a category that we posited as a response as a description of one historically contingent form of human community formation and it stands to reason that different parts of different people different historical trajectories would culminate in different kinds of community formation and the very fact that a large part of the world large percentage of the world talks of itself in terms of nations is the imperialism of categories at work so my research attempts to uncover or understand the ways in which these so called universal categories are not only a product of colonialism but actually the way in which they don't work so we end up having very strange debates about how India is not yet a nation it's just celebrated its 70th anniversary as an independent sovereign region but we sort of say it's not yet become the national sensibility is gone or not something's not quite right and there's reason for doing that to continue with the example of the nation the Gandhi who is ironically called the father of the Indian nation he rejected the idea of the nation for him he said well if we want to speak of India as a nation we don't need to reject colonialism we don't need to ask the British leave because they do a nation so well and sadly then he was called the father of the nation so there's some problem there's a great imperialism at work in the very discourse and in the way terminology that we use to understand these cultures again to continue with the example of the nation the Indian army song is the army song of the Indian nation is written by the national poet of Pakistan so clearly the idea of the nation is very weak at best now what happens when we use terms like nation to understand these cultures to understand these regions is we end up with a kind of vague estimation where we might say yes it is a nation but also not a nation it needs to become a nation if it develops certain sensibilities it would become a nation or it's very much on its path to becoming a nation so my research begins to investigate or investigates these ideas and why they do not make sense within context outside of the ones where they emerge sometimes they do but often they don't and so what do we do to understand a large part of the world for which we don't have a language to understand and describe it well it's easy we just start to excavate ideas, languages categories from within that then can build up slowly to a lexicon that would provide us with a coherent language to understand and describe the past and present thank you we next have Matt Tomlinson who is going to talk to us about how you speak with today thanks Matt Michael this is on okay how many of you have seen ghosts that has to be found I'm not here to talk about seeing ghosts but hearing them talking to them let me start with your existential attention I know many of you will have read that title and said you don't you can't why are you closing this section please do note the subtitle if you ask risk why does this question matter for social science I've just started a project this is very new so if it sounds under fear it really is but here's what I'm working with I'm working with spiritists in Australia spiritists are a group famous associated with the Victorian era harbour sands people would host have mediums in their home tables and tiff and spirit knockings would be heard those three sisters there are the fox sisters they were actually Americans and they are held to a start of the modern spiritualist religion spiritualism quickly took off across America it was the era of a lot of religious fermented revival it then took on very strongly in Britain and then into Australia and in Australia the longest the very longest existing spiritualist church in the world is in Melbourne today Australia has about 11,500 spiritualists nationally so not a larger religious group but probably not as tiny as you might have imagined the reason I'm looking at spiritualists is to understand bigger issues including first change in understandings of the afterlife on working on this project is a sociologist that he can be named Andrew Singleton and he and I have been talking about this because a lot of the ideas and spiritualism began with in the mid to late 19th century have become more commonplace in a lot of us real life the old classical Christian understanding of heaven and hell is not something that most people subscribe to anymore but the generic sense of a benign space after you die where you might be reunited with your family in some way is quite commonly subscribed to by many Australians and in fact is the fruit of spiritualism so part of our motivation in setting this up is to say historically sociologically culturally that we think spiritualism has punched above its weight the second reason is changing understandings of the family I'm an anthropologist I study kinship I don't think I'm knowing how I'm living when I say that all societies imagine spiritual worlds and when you look at them from an analytical distance you notice that those spiritual worlds have strong connections with the actual lived social worlds so one of the things that interest me in particular is the way that as family structures are changing in Australia and as new forms of sociality and mobility are opening up across the whole society generically the vision of the afterlife seems to be constricted so as our actual expansive possibilities take off more and more the afterlife is described in the space of your family and friends so there's a great historical transition so when the fox sisters started modern spiritualism they were starting by knocking there were sounds knocking on tables some invented codes of communication but the people they were speaking with Benjamin Franklin the famous American adventure in venture and patriot Benjamin Franklin showed up at all those early sayances people like that don't show up Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deacon was a spiritualist he doesn't show up in sayances your grandparents do the third reason is I'm keen to keep pushing this idea of religious thought in a secular age many people will describe an overwhelmingly Australian culture I think that's a big statement I think there are a lot of ideas that we can fairly call religious that underlie a lot of the ways people think about how metaphysics works so the power of positive thinking may sound like a business technique but in fact it's a new age idea that's coming from the sense that you yourself your soul can cultivate an energy that's going to change what's around you I think spiritualism is very much a part of the generic ideas that many Australians have about unseen worlds I'm not saying that Australia doesn't have deep pockets of secularism but I'm saying that the pockets of spiritualism may be deeper in life than we realize so the key results are pending because I'm just being done it is making a difference my research I hope because it is about a deeply cultural response to a universal process I can't emphasize this enough every society treats death as a recessive sort of ritualism every society does that not every society holds hands not every society wants to speak to their grandparents and their best friends from long ago and I want to understand what's distinctly Australian at the present moment in the practices of spiritualists and how they articulate with larger social formations thank you fascinating and sweet and stuff now we have Jane Ferguson who's going to talk to us about the tribes of Sivana Rumi thank you welcome to Royal Orchid Service now you'll notice that a lot of cultural anthropologists they like to wear the ethnic clothing of the people that they study so in this case I'm donning the vestments of a baggage handler or a ramp service worker known disparagingly by cabin crews as a ramp rat so alright, go back to my scripts a little bit so anyway, so much ink toner and ether have been spilled on the aviation industry by techno geeks and apologists for globalization so my research based on fieldwork in Myanmar and Thailand is essentially asking the people who actually operate this vest with a simple network and for example, I have been doing fieldwork on the Tantami, the Thai political movement known as the Yellow Shirts and their seizure of the Bangkok airports in 2008 from the point of view of airline workers themselves and interestingly in this book Aerotropolis the authors, they write in a perverse experiment, P.A.D would prove how critical the airports are to Thailand's economy by wrecking both the tourists noticed first and the people who worked in the airport noticed second somehow so anyway what I learned talking to customer service who are on duty during the stage I learned how the last flight departed with neither catering cabin service nor ramp service I learned how collaboration across sectors could still get the plane out in siege conditions as one gauge told me taking over the airport was easy think about it they only entered the service road and the departures hall and then the whole airport shut sectors would have to choose to stop working so there are airport workers who agreed with the protest or wanted an excuse not to work many Thai airways flight attendants in solidarity with the yellow shirts joined the siege one called the takeover Am Nan Wat or temple merit making festival there was a stage food and stalls sold snacks and t-shirts with the proceeds going to benefit the P.A.D large donations would be announced for example one flight attendant they wouldn't say so but I knew one of the main sponsors was a Thai Airways pilot and he contributed a million baht it was amazing because pilots are usually so stingy these experiences teach us some important lessons in logistical sector interdependency and improvisation as well as about action and solidarity within aviation the technical is cultural and political the Thai Airways have a good atmosphere to enjoy the comfort while traveling thank you for your attention we hope you enjoy and have a pleasant flight wonderful stuff okay come and join me up here folks now are there questions from the audience excuse me yes please hi my name is Jane I was interested in whether any of the people that you interviewed actually thought that the operation of the airport was a act of terrorism which was a political and legal discussion at the time and where their sympathies might have laid on that question the workplace has been on development by the P.A.D. yes in fact one of the gate agents that I had interviewed was of the yellow shirts but wanted it to be less violent I talked to three people who were on duty when some of the bombs went off on November 25 and so yes indeed there were people that were very frightened about it and then also within the workplace there's people of different political solidarities who did not like the yellow shirts one bit I mean what's interesting is it goes along with ideas of class, nation, royalism you know all of these other things the point is a lot of the reports that I read about it in the international news would only profile people who were political actors or tourists and not giving airport workers the possibility that they would be politicized or have political opinions themselves I've got a question for Mira Mira it strikes me using the corruption example that one of the reasons we think corruption is a bad thing is because we we associate it with an ultimate goal which is that it actually detracts from national economic wealth and economic performance so to an extent the categories you're looking into are you kind of looking at the reasons they've become categories the ultimate you know the ultimate causes of the formation of those categories no you're absolutely right that you know it is not a condemning corruption per se but what then it engenders if you want but again taking a step back we realize that when people are complaining about corruption they are not entirely certain what I mean they are of course voicing some discontent but that discontent that there's a gap between what is theorized as corruption what is understood as corruption and what the complain of the people is so for example sort of pre pre liberalized pre economic liberalization in India one of the most sought after commodities was alcohol imported alcohol which you couldn't bring into the country there was quotas so anyone who traveled out of the country would try to smuggle in and that would be the correct term more alcohol than they were allowed customs officers knew this and they would take one bottle and let you go with the rest and then these same people would say customs officers are very corrupt so is that sort of a condemnation of corruption or is that a voicing of discontent with the economic policy so when we try to look at it as corruption we miss the various kinds of discontent that is being vocalized in this amorphous category of corruption so in 2014 there was a large anti-corruption march in Delhi and I was there and I was talking to some of the people who were all up in arms against corruption and I said absolutely we must fight against the linemen and you know the auto rickshaw drivers so corrupt and they got really uncomfortable but you know these people they're not paid much and it's okay if they ask for a little more money but the corruption that we are talking about is the rich businessmen and the politician so then again it's not really corruption that is a problem problem is with the political the problem is with the bureaucratic and we miss analyzing or understanding this and we miss diagnosing it as corruption so which is where the category needs to be investigated dismantled and maybe reformed as something else but this one doesn't work so the category conceals rather than would be absolutely Steve I like your conceptualization what I didn't get is why there should be anything peculiar or distinctly Australian sounds like the sort of thing that one can hear in the States right well this is true and I'm not 100% sure and I am going to spend very brief periods in the US and the UK just talking with spiritualists there to see if I get an initial sense I should say spiritualism as I understand it is very much a product of these three countries I mean there's French versions too so French spiritism but I'm thinking especially Australian spiritualism is coming from American and UK spiritualism so I don't know that it is distinct from that what makes it distinct though from other traditions is it's turned into a hyperverbal performance what interests me is the origins of spiritualism there was a lot about tangible manifestation and you know there was a lot of fraudulent so mediums would dip their hands in phosphorescent paint and then you know sort of stick it out like this in the air but that doesn't happen anymore at least to not to my knowledge what you get now and what interests me about this formation which is similar to some kinds of shamanism but again it's purely verbal here mediums go into a very light trance in which in their mind they're having a dialogue with the spirit they're getting information and on the one hand they don't want to over interpret it but on the other hand they have to make it into a message that can be communicated to the human audience so it's kind of a hinged dialogue you have a mental dialogue which can come through various sensations but ultimately in the mind that then gets turned into an actual give and take dialogue so one of the things I'm doing is recording the services one of the most fascinating things I've found is you know the popular image of spiritualists is that they're all frauds and the mediums are all cynical and I'm quite sure there's really not the case with the mediums practicing in Canberra they wholeheartedly embracing this and believe that they really are communicating and what they do we were talking earlier about strategic risks they speak in ways that are exceptionally prone to failure so the idea of performing TV media will come up and say it's the old woman with me her name begins with an M and someone in the background will say my grandmother's name is Mary and I'll say thank you so much and then I'll deliver a message you know that spiritualists in Canberra do not do this they will say this I'm with a man, he died in his sixties I think of a heart attack but he may have also had another problem he walked with this light suit he was very fond of colorful clothes he really liked dresses very brightly he smoked a pipe but not very often and I think that he loved going on boat trips there's so much specific detail that you can imagine a million ways it can fail and here's what's interesting it often does fail and audiences often have a degree of skepticism even as they're committed to the larger visible that you can communicate with the dead the question is that's not my appeal you're talking about so I think there are very distinct features and a lot of them are actually linguistic there's a linguistic performance of how you convey an idea of a spirit I probably overstated when I said it was specifically Australian but I do think it's the western spiritualist the idea of spiritualism is the idea of a task to go against I spent a bit of time in the Kupala where we find there were great sites of past members who are obviously lying there and people who sort of the development who are the centers of those people still believe that the spirit never seems to go away the person who's still there is this an interesting cultural thing we're just looking at here the idea of a weird person we think those things can go either way that's something important to be about thank you very much almost all of my previous research was in Pacific islands and especially in Fiji and I don't dare tell Fijians about this project because the strong Christian impulse there would be to say why are you talking to demons you shouldn't be doing that in Fiji the dead are around they linger and they're very much in place they're in specific places in Fiji too there's a lot of drinking of the beverage kava every day and there's a sense that that automatically puts you in touch with the ancestors so in Fiji it's almost like it's too easy to have the dead around and as good Christians you kind of have to cut them off to a certain extent in spiritualism the idea is yes they're very much all around but you kind of have to work hard to get them in touch with you I think that's totally true and the difference here though too also is there's different engagements between Christianity and spiritualism in Australia as I understand it again my research is just beginning there are some groups that very much try to combine both but the group I'm working with is very much against that and very strongly says we are not Christians and we think we're misrepresented by Christianity and we think we're doing something completely different question for Jane are airline workers in general pro-globalization do they even think about globalization as something that's necessary to their livelihoods perhaps not in those terms I mean also like for example flight attendants would be interested in the work conditions the union labor struggle for them how their lives are structured according to the times that are dictated by their employer also if the employer is able to get another route further afield that if that means more flying better flying what kinds of conditions like for example Tyreways used to operate a Bangkok to Newark a non-stop flight but it was just too long of a duty day for some of the flight attendants that they said oh it's just too exhausting too far so they do very much think about globalization and the reach that the transportation enables them but also it's very real to them because it's very tangible in those aspects because it directly affects their livelihood their health their job etc yeah other questions or issues people might have please join me in thanking Jane yeah thank you okay we now move to development and we've got a really interesting group of people to talk to us about development all from the school we've got Paul Burke Terence Wood and Keone Yat and Paul's going to start off by talking about energy subsidy reforms in Indonesia thanks Paul using my quiz yeah traffic jams traffic jams if you have been to Jakarta or to another Asian mega city you would probably be familiar with this public scene it's sitting in a Jakarta traffic jam that I thought of the research idea for my current research some countries maintain large fossil fuel subsidies what that means in the case of road transport is that gasoline and diesel have been available at a very low price below the cost of supply production and supply what happens if you have low price petrol surely one of the implications is that you're more likely to have traffic jams in Indonesia in 2013 and 2014 there were some very large reforms implemented by presidents SPY and Tokoi overnight on several occasions they increased the potential price to try to reduce spending on fuel subsidies for example on 22nd of June 2013 president SPY increased the price of gasoline by 44% overnight for an economist like me this is a perfect opportunity for research because it's a big change in a price and I was interested in one question what is the effect on the traffic in this research we use data from an Indonesian toll road company for 19 roads in Indonesia on the number of vehicles using the roads we were interested in what happened after the fuel price went up we found and concluded that the fuel price reforms have led to a substantial slowing in the growth in traffic numbers in Jakarta and elsewhere in Indonesia as well so as of today we estimate that on the roads in our study there's around 10% fewer vehicles on the road than would have been the case if the reforms had not gone ahead that can lead to quite large differences in the slowness of traffic can we click we also extended the research to look at electricity so as of the very moment one of the biggest reforms going on in Indonesia is large reductions in electricity subsidy spending previously gasoline plus electricity subsidy spending was about 20% of Indonesia's budget that's a lot of resources going in providing cheap fuel and also electricity so at the very moment prices for electricity are being made up for different types of consumers across Indonesia so they have gone up for industry and for business and other groups as well this year prices are going up by 20 households so currently as of this year for 20 million households the price of electricity is going up by 100% this year quite large price increases we have researched the effect of this fuel price of this electricity price change in terms of electricity efficiency what's the effect on how much electricity consumers are using we find that there's a reduction in electricity use or an improvement in energy efficiency as a result of the price reforms it makes more sense for us to turn off the air conditioner in the spare room when we're forced to pay the non subsidised price for electricity if electricity is very cheap then we might live at the air conditioner right we can see the effects of the reforms in the data and our research has been trying to estimate accurately what the effect has been Indonesia's energy subsidy reforms have most likely been pro-poor in nature and there are several reasons for that one is that poor households have been exempted from their electricity price increases another is that the revenue saved from the reforms have been used in some protocol ways for example direct transfers to low income households also it's important to remember that previously most of the benefits from the fuel and electricity subsidy reforms were going to the relatively well off the aim of our overall research is to provide evidence on or evidence to justify the movement away from fossil fuel subsidies and towards attacks on fossil fuels fossil fuel use so for example in the case of road transport moving away from fossil fuel subsidies and towards the fuel excise does make sense from several points of view it's much better for the overall fiscal balance of the country it can help to reduce emissions and also put the country on to a greener development trajectory and also we find that it helps to reduce traffic jams as well we're looking to continue this research so other energy subsidy topics in Indonesia for example perhaps kerosene or LPG and also to look at other countries as well so I look forward to any conversation or ideas that any of you might have on that thank you very much okay, next we have Terence Wood Terence is going to talk to us about can information change public support for aid thanks Terence do you need this I might actually does it click or work or are we just close to the okay okay I'll juggle a bit so without this you can actually hear me by the microphone I understand I might start that way at least I'll pick up the microphone I meant to paste it at some point in this talk so in 2013 when the Abbott government started slashing the aid budget most Australians were supportive of the actions that they were taking the relationship between public opinion and foreign policy certainly isn't a straightforward one but there's reasonable evidence to suggest that public opinion plays some role in shaping high level aid policy and so ever since 2013 aid supporters have been faced with the challenge of trying to win around Australians to the cause of foreign aid one way of increasing Australian support for aid might be to provide them with information the average Australian knows little about aid maybe they'd feel differently if they just knew a little bit more and this is where my research comes in I tested the impact of information on views about aid using survey experiments and I'm going to speak about two of these experiments today each experiment had a control group who were asked a very basic question they thought Australia gave too much or too little foreign aid and each experiment also had a treatment group which was asked the same question but which was provided with additional information and the logic of survey experiments is such that the aggregate difference in responses between the treatment and control groups tells us the effect or the impact of the additional information that's been provided in the first experiments treatment people were told just how little Australia spends on foreign aid as a share of overall federal spending so it's less than one cent in every dollar not a lot and we provided people with information on this fact we thought the logic behind this experiment was most Australians when they're asked actually can overestimate how much aid Australia gives by a significant degree we also know there's a correlation between overestimation and the desire to see aid cut to make the amount of aid that Australia gives more are more likely to be people who think that Australia gives too much aid we know that from other research and so the logic of the treatment is simply that if you correct people's misunderstandings surely they'll update their views in the second experiment I gave the treatment group a comparator I contrasted recent aid cuts in Australia with increases recent increases in the aid budget in the United Kingdom the logic here is that knowing about more international norms in the form of another relevant country's actions might affect opinions I thought the first experience of war at work I thought the logic was impeccable I'm a New Zealander however before commencing with the second experiment I did reach out to my Australian colleagues and they assured me that the average Australian these days doesn't care at all about what goes on in the United Kingdom so this is an amateur anthropology I did it and I came away from it fairly confident that the second experiment would not work naturally I was wrong so here we see the results of the first experiment telling people aggregate responses in both the control and the treatment groups in the first experiment were more or less the same so telling people just how little aid Australia gives has almost no effect on their views about how much aid Australia should give on the other hand contrasting Australia with the United Kingdom had a substantial effect so the share of respondents who thought Australia gave gives too much aid fell by 12 percentage points and the share of respondents who thought that Australia does not give enough aid rose by a similar amount what does this mean well the practical lesson to be taken away from this for aid campaigners is that they shouldn't naively assume that the provision of correct information will be enough to change people's views about aid on the other hand they shouldn't give up on engagement making use of information because it turns out that people's views about foreign aid aren't entirely impervious to additional information and people aren't entirely resistant to changing their views on the basis of additional information more theoretically in terms of political psychology the appeal to norms was efficacious where facts alone failed this isn't new however the normative community in my work was an unusual one the international community and this is a new finding of relevance to our understanding of the psychology of international relations so that's all I have to say happy to take any questions you might have thanks very much Terrence now we have the only guy who's going to talk to us about connecting politics and economics for development thank you Michael good afternoon all of you my work is on how does politics underpin successful development now the reason we look at politics is because we accept in general that we need government to coordinate and in many cases government even leads development policy making now a government that is strong enough to lead policy making to make sure that all of us abide by policies would also be strong enough to confiscate your wealth at any time so the question is not really why do we need government but rather how do we keep government in check and in that regard I want to look at East Asia and ask well what does experience tell us we often times think of East Asia in very foreign terms especially the government we have strong governments who are very enlightened and I think the epitome of the enlightened government would be Singapore many of us have a great indifference about Singapore in the sense that in terms of a country this is not foremost not cutting any barriers in terms of democracy very well so I'd love to tell this story about Singapore about 20 years ago and probably even before then and maybe slightly after that on election day there's no nonsense played by the book government and whom we know is more than happy to throw the book at you government every election day on the day itself you'll see unlicensed street vendors all over the country and not a police in sight and I always ask that is what the East Asian experience tells us about the roles of government and what is that governments are kept in check by the rules of the game and expectations of how citizens behave given that it has a set of choices that it will pursue and so the interaction model here is like a chess game now this strategic interaction between government and citizens actually explains why governments appear strong citizens seem content and complacent yet we see room for progressive political change that continues to spur economic growth now this research is important and the findings are relevant because it provides a more theoretically founded position relative to what we call modernization theory which is this is how countries develop and democratize it is more robust than the development state theory and of course the most recent iteration of this is the Asimoglou and Robinson inclusive and growth model inclusive state and growth model more importantly for my own purpose it shows how citizens can influence and engage politically in east and south east Asia and where government accountability can be built even in countries that we think are autocratic and of course it explains why democratization and when democratization will occur in these countries and for the benefit of those of us who still have this indifference about Singapore explains why Singapore succeeds in terms of future research this strategic interaction model tells us why corruption matters and how it matters it tells us why political trust matters and I particularly moved because recently I'm hearing people tell the same story we're focusing too much on institutional building and not enough on economic growth and my theory actually tells you we need to focus on institutional building and of course the future research purpose is to bring political trust back into policy making in east and south east Asia so that we have this outcome called policy capacity thank you thank you Fiona and I have our panelists up the front here ask the audience if you've got any questions about those very different very fascinating presentations are they a question for Terry Tim McGrath my question goes to your selection of the UK as a comparator and what actually how I disagree with your colleagues by the way I think the Australians have a tier relevance with the UK but I wonder really how does that relevance and that that comparison change with the US or the US or elsewhere or if you go to the other extreme and say someone like Russia I don't know what their figures are I wonder how the impact of the comparative country will play out in your story yes so that's absolutely the right question to be asking and when I chose the United Kingdom I chose a country that had a track record which was really significantly different from Australia's in recent years so there was a striking contrast were I to compare Australia to my own personal preferred country of contrast New Zealand wouldn't have done much because New Zealand is equally tight fisted when it comes to giving foreign aid the other key thing about the United Kingdom is that there is some historical connection that is maintained in some ways you could have compared Australia to Sweden which is a very generous aid donor but my guess is that the average Australian could care less what Sweden is doing I mean that's what I thought about the UK initially too and until I was proven wrong so maybe I could be proven wrong with Sweden too and that's a way that I could take the research of the future but as a starting point I wanted to compare it or it seemed both sort of conceptually relevant or normatively relevant to the average Australian and also one which provided a striking contrast aren't you I have spoken one to foreign aid in the first part of your presentation you found that when petroleum and diesel products in places and producers is quite close to the point it's quite more interesting finding is that whether this should lead to common power losses in the production process because of delays and congestion is that much more important than this quite obvious one for two parents you said in your experiment you asked correct question I'm not quite sure whether you asked correct question because whether UK is given aid at what extent compared to you is not at the heart of the debate now that's a big debate about whether foreign aid helped or in the growth process in these countries a lot of people believe that massive amount of money has created corruption and it has been pro-development and due to development pro-development therefore the correct question you should have asked is whether a health development process in these countries could have been a different view simply because thank you very much we studied the effect of the fuel price changes on the number of vehicles using these roads partly because that was what we had available as you know when we find a good data set we need to use that one but also traffic jams are important for our lives as well as being important for production activities so maybe your idea really is a separate paper I agree it would be a good one to look at once again another good question just as a sort of broader starting point for everyone else in the rest of the room whether aid fosters or impedes development is something that has been studied intensively now for many decades and we've actually come to a very conclusive answer on this it depends but when aid is given well and given with the right intentions there are many examples of it producing very large dividends for human welfare so in my opinion it's a cause worth supporting at least supporting the supporting aid when it is given well and when it is given intelligently with respect to your question had we not had I not got a result from the UK treatment and that might have been a potential explanation for why the treatments that I was providing weren't having any impact on people's views and that was because perhaps people's views were first and foremost informed by their views about the efficacy of aid however the fact that the UK treatment was efficacious suggests to me that views about the efficaciousness of aid almost certainly cannot be the sole driver of people's views about whether Australia should give more or less aid as it happens I've also conducted some cross-sectional work looking at drawing on data from public opinion surveys where the dependent variable is supportiveness of aid and the independent variables include a variable where people are asked whether they think aid works or not and what we do find is we find some correlation between beliefs and the efficaciousness of aid and beliefs and views of whether aid should be increased however the coefficient or the magnitude of the effect or the association is actually less than many of the other variables than it is for many of the other variables that we include in our equations so the impact of having an academic education the impact of our political ideology actually have a much larger impact on the probability of believing that Australia should give more aid so I think efficacious probably views about the efficaciousness of aid probably have some role in shaping people's views about whether they think Australia should give more aid but it's not an all-determining effect by any means Archie so my question is for the second speaker I'm sorry I forgot your name I was afraid to ask you about it yeah so so the nearest and not that I've got the situation you described is the pricing on tobacco has been found to be a very effective mechanism for reducing tobacco consumption but sorry yeah but in recent years the defining trend of tobacco consumption has followed and in fact there's some evidence that the impact rates are increasing so I'm just wondering and that's probably because of some kind of acculturation to a new pricing regime and people seeing that as the new norm would you expect to see something similar when it comes to pricing of fossil fuels in Indonesia in other words would the intervention effect eventually decline so that's my first question and my second question relates to the design of the study was it a big use of control design or how did you accommodate underlying temporal trends and other temporal dynamics to actually ease out the effect of your intervention so the first question we expect and based on the literature as well that the long run effect would be bigger than the short run effect because over the long run there are more adaptation opportunities as well we can move closer to our workplace as just one example it's possible as you say that the effect could disappear but really we think that the long run effect would be bigger but remember as well that at the same time there's many other things going on the population is getting bigger incomes are growing so these are other things that are actually pushing up traffic growth so our finding actually is that there are 10% vehicles fewer vehicles on the road now than there would have been if the reform hadn't gone ahead but still today traffic jams are worse than ever those two statements are consistent because at the same time there are other things going on and then you asked about controls we don't it was a nationwide change in the fuel price so it's not a nice control experiment situation but we control for a lot of other things going on and time trends and things like that I can send you the paper we do lots of other checks but it isn't a shock that affected all of the roads at the same time so it's a situation in which we have to include lots of controls in our statistical analysis and it's difficult to control for everything but we try our best to do that yeah thanks very much just to have a couple of questions one is for parents and one for Paul parents I'm just I'm just quoting what Chandra asked is that the development the picture has really said that if aid is effective then at least the economics community is in support of aid so my question is the people whom you are interviewing or for your study do they know that aid was effective or not or questions simply asked are you in favor of more aid or are you in favor of less aid so do you tell them that in this kind of situation aid was effective in this kind of situation aid was not effective that's the question for you and for Paul I think the I think the analysis is used to take into account what happens to the revenue once the the property is over how the government spends the revenue and also I'm sure that the prices don't go up for the poor but how do you identify the poor for whom the prices are not going up so the other questions so another way perhaps of trying to respond to this line of questioning is to just emphasize that these are survey experiments there was a large sample of thousand people run by a public opinion polling company which is representative of the Australian population knowing what I do from some of the other work that I've done I am fairly happy to concede the point that probably most of the people who responded to these surveys are not at rest of the latest economic literature on aid effectiveness I don't actually hold that against them but I think it's fair to say that a lot of our respondents would be fairly ignorant as to the real evidence about the effectiveness of aid conducting here is a survey experiment and because we've got random allocation we can more or less assume that the knowledge of aid efficacy is equally balanced in both the control and the treatment groups that's why I'm confident of the efficaciousness of the UK treatment it's something that I'm testing which is independent I guess you might say of the debate about whether aid works or not but what we've found compared to Australian's comparative ignorance when it comes to aid a comparison with the United Kingdom seems to have a significant impact on their support for Australian giving aid as I said before I think if people's views were entirely determined by their views about the efficaciousness of aid this treatment wouldn't have worked and also as I said in my earlier response to when we've done cross-sectional regressions where we've included beliefs about the efficaciousness of aid as an independent variable in the regressions we find that there is a relationship between beliefs about the efficaciousness of aid and support for aid however the magnitude of the coefficient for that particular variable was actually less than the magnitude of the coefficients for some of the other variables that we include including political ideology so in terms of what shapes Australian's views about whether they support aid or not efficaciousness is probably there but it's not the sole determinant by any means Thank you for the question, Rucka Indonesia's electricity subsidy reform program I think is one of the most successful perhaps anywhere in the world in terms of previously in Indonesia if there were large fuel price changes or electricity price changes there tended to be protests on the streets for this latest round then there haven't been such protests and part of it has been due to the government's strategy they're on twitter they go and are meeting with student groups in advance of the reforms and providing the facts to them and one very important part is that the electricity price increases have exempted the poor and how that is done in practice is all residences with the smallest electricity connection in terms of the volt ampere connection size they are all exempt from any price rise on Indonesia's list of the poor they have a list of poor households and you can join the list if you classify it and can prove that you are deserving to be on the list those people are also in the lowest tariff group so they have been exempted from any price increase and you also asked about how the revenue is being used the revenue savings are just in the general budget they just go back to the general budget they have allowed for some increased spending on infrastructure and some additional pro-poor spending activities as well but it's all just back in the budget so it can be hard to exactly say where every single rupee has gone in our analysis we've discussed that but in general they have been trying to spend that money in a fairly pro-poor type of way I'm going to use the last question to ask Fiona does your research and modelling allow you to determine why some of your countries that you study have broken out of the so-called middle income trap and made it to that high level of development while others tend to stay stuck in the kind of middle income trap levels of development in the models but primarily when the government understands that if it fails to demonstrate accountability in that chess game and then so if it fails to do that and it makes unilateral decisions then citizens do not abide by whatever policies they have and as a result it's easy for those policy policies to fail so there's that's the big difference between those that succeed and therefore my question to you is would you predict that China will break out of the middle income trap so China has a real problem because of the fact that their current president seems to be abandoning the accountability model whereas prior to that they were starting to increase informal accountability but not under President Xi Jinping yes okay ladies and gentlemen please join me in thanking Terrence and Paul okay folks we now come to our last theme which is governance we have sellers from across the college who are working on governance issues unfortunately one of our panelists has withdrawn from the last minute four and a half minutes each it is four and a half minutes each the really bad news however is that this is our only very badly gender imbalanced panel on the I refuse to serve in a panel without another woman actually gender equality so we're very lucky to have Tim LeGrand from the Crawford School and Jeremy Yuda from Tim's going to start things off by talking about shared sovereignty in the English thank you I'll use my lecturing voice and hope I'll do the trick good afternoon folks my research is concerned with the broadening processes and diverging processes of globalization and the dilemmas that are presented by globalization particularly security dilemmas through the modern state I'm riffing off Audis Huxley's book Brave New World because he looked towards the future of society and how technological change was going to transform the way in which humanity lived and how we bred and how society and economics functioned and I think it's a bit of a stretch but it gets your attention hopefully that we are living in an era where the technologies of society are transforming not only the questions of governance but the way in which governance proceeds so the background to my research looks at how we live in an era of what I call the global local dilemma the states is set up to preserve and pursue the public interest, the interest of you and I in a given domestic polity I use how for our governments on the basis that they will pursue our interests yet increasingly globalization presents our politicians and our civil servants with annoying questions of pursuing and achieving the public interest that's because we see these technologies of globalization pushing forth new processes so travel, finance, trade, communications these things cross borders increasingly we see the idea of collaboration even in academia now as not just localized to those in our corridor but those in our country or even those overseas this is propelled by particularly ICT communication technologies and these are technologies which provoke new ways of thinking about the state and how it can administer itself in particular we see security challenges emerge out of these dynamics and so we ask questions like how do we govern cyberspace how does the government ameliorate the threats of cyberattacks emanating from sovereign entities overseas or even just criminals overseas we ask how do we start to stop terrorism, international terrorism that derives from Middle East or from other countries so just today the effects of an international terrorism how does government here affect what happens over there given its implications for us today so these are a new breed of policy and governance challenges transnational threats they exist and are emanate from beyond our shores, beyond the reach of our government and yet reach into the state and affect what we do on a day-to-day basis so I call this the global local dilemma and this is my research challenge that I set myself is how do states and how have states start to rethink the way they do business to address these transnational dilemmas I've only got one slide so you can stare at this for the next two minutes so my research looks at particularly one cohort of states who have a long historic and cultural relationship what we might call in inverted commas the anglosphere and you can see from the flags which countries these are Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and the United States my research looks at how these states collectively are starting to consolidate their resources and their powers, their capabilities to resolve these transnational problems particularly where those transnational policy problems affect the five countries collectively thank you for all that is that all you want to know so my research has found identified so far 32 networks of elite policy officials from these five countries who've consolidated their decision making powers and their their resources to address transnational problems and I'm going to draw your attention to just a few of these today because I've only got a few minutes as you can see on that bottom we've got some emblems these are taken directly from networks concerned with security questions they've got their own badges that's how to my density they've assumed as transnational policy bodies we have the border five who are concerned with the five countries border protections we see felling five eyes law enforcement group that's a policing agencies of the five countries the ministers from the five countries who are represented here so you see Jeff sessions at one end and we see Brandis and Dutton somewhere to the left because they're roughly equivalent roles and this is them earlier this year in a meeting collaborating on on cyber terrorism in particular the question they're addressing actually was encryption and and security now crucially these arrangements are not formalized believe it or not they're not set in stone as a treaty or as a contract these are actually based on memoranda of understanding mo use or what I called and I quote a non-formal grouping at official level is how they describe themselves these are enormously powerful and influential networks I'll take the immigration network the five country conference as an example because you may have actually already encountered this network in action if you have used your passports to cross the border of Australia Canada New Zealand UK US anytime in the past five years you will have been succumbed to their grand information exchange scheme intelligence exchange whereby travelers transiting any of the five country borders are visible to the other four countries so this includes things like biometric data your own personal individual traveler data what what you're carrying with you if you're flag up any particular risks is the intelligence sharing network of the five countries immigration network which is unparalleled worldwide today they say this is to do with combating transnational policy problems like identity board human trafficking people smuggling bogus marriages cash transfer and fraudulent visa services these are transnational collective action problems which unilaterally the countries can't resolve themselves and so they form and have formed this network to resolve them collaboratively so why does this make a difference to society today well I think that this research really starts to highlight an area of government action which is actually quite opaque these are informal networks they do not report to parliament there's no official presence for you to go and look at and a website to explore their actions they are an informal grouping so they don't receive the oversight and the scrutiny of our parliaments and legislatures important for our transparency understanding of how policy proceeds that we do see how decisions are made in these networks affect us as the public and it follows from that I think that it gives us an insight this research gives us an insight into how security laws are made today they're not just predicated on our national unilateral domestic interest but actually multi-lateral collective interest across several sorencies or what I would call the shared sovereignty of the Anglosphere thank you very much indeed thank you very much last speaker of the day but certainly not least is Jeremy Euter who is talking to us about cops and sniffles heard around the world great thank you thank you all for being here when a disease epidemic happens no state can handle it on its own it necessarily requires cooperation among a variety of different governments in order to effectuate some sort of response that is going to be able to address this disease epidemic despite this fact actually achieving that cooperation is incredibly difficult and so what my research focuses on is this question of under what circumstances do we facilitate this international cooperation among governments on global health governments under what circumstances does it happen and what sorts of incentives do we have in order to try to induce this sort of cooperation in happening and part of the reason that I'm interested in this is looking at this building right here and this building is actually the ground zero of global health governance in the 21st century and this building is a hotel metropole in Hong Kong it's a relatively unremarkable hotel has decent reviews on TripAdvisor but the reason that this hotel is so important is that on February 21st 2003 Dr. Liu Jin Lun checks in because he's going to attend his nephew's wedding in Hong Kong later that weekend checks in he's been kind of busy because he's been treating cases of this atypical pneumonia in Guangdong that he's been seeing checks in, next day he starts to feel bad, checks into the hospital and unfortunately he ends up dying about a week and a half later in the hospital that's a sad story but why does this matter because because our good doctor here ends up being one of about 800 people who dies from and one of about 8,000 cases of what comes to be known as SARS and at this point we don't actually know when the doctor falls ill and dies we don't actually know what is important about SARS but here's why this is so important it's not just that he's actually deaf it's that on his floor other people get sick and these other people who get sick they travel and so you can see here where they travel we can actually trace about 75% of the spread of SARS back to that one hotel because other people on the floor contracted the illness and then because of globalization and the ease of travel they went to places like Vietnam and Singapore and Canada Ireland and back and into the people's republic of China like all over the place and so now we have a transnational global health issue a brand new disease that we have to do something about crossing these international borders we need cooperation but governments are resistant they fear that there's going to be encroaching on their sovereignty they fear that they're going to have trade restrictions placed on them they fear that they're going to look weak and so this is at the heart of the issues that I'm trying to look at what is it that makes for cooperation to happen in these circumstances how can we try to encourage how can we try to encourage this sort of cooperation and my research finds that we actually do have some effective carrots and sticks we do have ways of trying to encourage this sort of cooperation using various governmental mechanisms but also by expanding out the range of who gets involved in these issues moving it beyond just governments and trying to get cooperation on a number of different levels so that's encouraging that gives us some reason to think that something positive might happen but at the same time bringing all of these these actors together essentially turns us into an exercise of cat hurting we're trying to get a whole bunch of different actors at different levels with different agendas to try to come together somehow and this is where we end up in that situation where each actor may be acting individually rationally but for the collective good that was a good outcome and so this is the sort of problem that we find ourselves in excuse me now when we're looking at these sorts of issues and when we're trying to understand what's going on with this there are two reasons that this is so important to try to understand this sort of dynamic and these sorts of incentives one has to do with the fact that we know disease epidemics are going to happen we don't know when, we don't know where we don't know what but we know that future disease epidemics are going to happen and so what we need to do is to try to put these systems in place ahead of time and to not make these systems disease specific but to make them overall resilient the other reason that this is so important is because of the the Trump administration and that's because the United States historically has been the leading funder of global health governance in the world and the steps that we've heard so far from the Trump administration is that there will be a reduction in that funding so if there is a reduction in that funding that's available to support these sorts of global health governance systems what we need to do is figure out again it's all the more important that we figure out these sorts of cooperative strategies that we can use so that we can prevent the next SARS or the next Ebola outbreak from getting so large so at the end what I would say is that I find myself optimistically pessimistic about the international community's ability to do these sorts of things we do see that there are these abilities we do see that there is this sort of shared mindset about the importance of doing this but we also tend to see that we don't learn very well from past experiences and it sometimes feels like we're reinventing the wheel each time one of these disease epidemics happen so like I said we know that these disease epidemics are going to happen in the future we know we're going to have to cooperate since the 6th do we have to try to induce that cooperation thanks Tim come on up here anyone have questions Matt thanks it was a great presentation I've got two questions for Mary first just a really naive epidemiological question why did that guy spread it all around the world and all those other cases he treated in Hong Kong didn't also explode out the second question is you're talking about the global system but isn't that kind of what medical engineers are already doing isn't that emerging organically outside of the states sure, sure so to the first question we don't really know and that's one of the issues that has come up is there are these events or these individuals that seem to really promote the spread of a disease in the same way with the recent Ebola outbreak we can trace about two thirds of the cases to about 3% of the people who actually got sick we don't know exactly why that is and with SARS it's even more complicated to figure out because we haven't seen it anywhere now for 13 years and so there's a lot that we don't know and that actually is part of why it's so important to try to get these systems going it's because a lot of times what we're facing now are these new epidemics we haven't seen these sorts of things before so your guess is as good as mine as to what happens specifically with this case on the second yes we definitely do see some of this happening already with medical NGOs we saw this in the response to Ebola and to a lot of the other outbreaks but we can't necessarily rely on NGOs to take care of this and NGOs themselves medicines en frontier was incredible in the response to Ebola but they said we don't have the capacity to keep doing this that fundamentally these are things that we expect states to do to provide this sort of public health we can augment that we can provide some of that emergency on the ground assistance but we can't be your actual public health system and so I think that's where where the medical NGOs have to be a part of this conversation I think that's part of where the cat herding comes in is because a lot of these systems have been very government focused and they haven't thought well how do we bring non-governmental organizations how do we bring philanthropic organizations or private businesses or these sorts of entities into this conversation because we don't really have great structures of national politics for incorporating non-governmental actors into this Robin Thanks very much My question is also for Jeremy Everyone agrees that there is very likely to be another major pandemic but there is such variation in the character of pandemics in terms of vectors and effectiveness and incubation periods and when we talk about being prepared isn't the risk that we're like some sort of being prepared to fight the last war aren't we just preparing to fight the last pandemic and maybe it will not be prepared to fight the next one Absolutely and that's why I said that one of the things that we really need to focus on is building resilience as opposed to anything that's disease specific because you're absolutely right If we put all of our energies into fighting the next Ebola outbreak we're going to miss the other things that are going to pop up because we have no way of knowing what the next outbreak is going to be In order to try to deal with this some of the things that have received a lot of attention has been building stronger surveillance systems so we can try to identify get that information when a new cluster of some sort of disease pops up or something that is unexpected pops up building these surveillance systems but also making sure that those surveillance systems have a wide coverage because we don't want to have these sort of epidemiological black holes where something could foment and something could come to spread rapidly The other thing that has been looked at and has been debated has been to build more reserve capacity So one of the things that you'll see now with the World Health Organization is they don't actually have that many personnel and we don't really have that many medical personnel at a moment's notice when something does break out so that we can have people that can go out to these sorts of places. So there's been talk about essentially having a rapid ready force of epidemiologists and public health workers on an international basis to try to to try to mobilize in response to something again sort of a broad sort of response as opposed to being specific to an influenza outbreak or some other disease but also building up financial reserves so that the World Health Organization at least has say a hundred million dollars in the bank that they can draw on to start a response. They don't have to go out and ask everyone for money and then wait to be able to start a response until afterwards So there are some efforts that are trying to excuse me, try to get around that finding that last epidemic response and trying to say well what can we do that would be broadly applicable in these sorts of circumstances Fiona Is a network particularly robust given that it's informal is a network likely to grow given that it's excluded most of its European allies and what would formalization of that network look like? Thank you Fiona It's a pretty stable network it seems across the there's 32 that I've identified across government not including the security ones and the variance tends to be actually downwards so there's five or four or three minimum but I think in 80% of them it's all five countries are seated together. Actually I tell a lie in one network in social services Ireland is included and that's a network directed at absence parents so parents who go overseas and don't pay their child support so those five countries plus Ireland identify themselves as having quite a common problem because apparently absent parents will go to a country where they speak English so the common denominator is the comparable economics keep comparable cultures language economic development and I think so far that's seen over the networks have really merged in the past 20 years actually I should have said that in my presentation and they've stayed quite stable so far as just those countries do I see them growing I think actually not in the foreseeable future and I think particularly in the security networks the reason is because they share a common security framework already the five eyes network which is a much more the military security oriented networks from that gives the artifact of shared security protocols upon which they already they derive in these new networks the same protocols around secrecy and shared what's called five eyes only security classification which if anyone's seen the Snowden leaks is all over all of those documents five eyes only and so I see them stable for the moment I don't see any prospect for them expanding thank you for your question Terence So to my own guess that begs the question why is this stability like why is such a strong path for pregnancy because like language is such today they don't seem that different in any way that I can think of and I can probably name a number of other European countries who will be at least as trustworthy as I've been doing so what is it Well the research is derived out of interviews actually so I look into this through interviews with officials and the word they keep coming back to is trust that frankly those are just they collaborate with those countries and I ask them why not others and they say well we trust each other like there is a implicit trust between those five countries which has evolved over the years institutional relationships that predate these networks in which there are continual succumbents between officials of these countries so it's a very rare Australian senior official for example who's not had a succumbent in Canada UK, New Zealand, the US and vice versa it's a culture I think a cultural thing that frankly these are there's a mutual recognition that we are like one another and rightly or wrongly you might you know the normative element to this is another question is this something that we want you know that these five countries exclude others but certainly I think the stability that I've seen in the interview data is certainly around that idea of we trust each other implicitly while the spilled blood element certainly comes into it that there is the long standing five eyes relationship cultivates that security collaboration already and that just spills over into this more domestic policy oriented networks yeah well I mean you can see the idea of the Anglosphere those who advocate the Anglosphere you know they say the sun never sets on the Anglosphere and the strategic importance of that on the military alliance side was that we could eavesdrop around the world 24 7 using the network of five disparate countries which actually cover the globe quite conveniently for them so in terms of the intelligence value of that initial military collaboration it was certainly invaluable yeah yeah I've not thought about that actually actually how that affects their relationships with other alliances and other countries certainly an interesting question one of my thought of they're saying the whole concept of the Anglosphere to be seen by the fairly progressive concept I'm wondering is there a stronger appetite for it with with governments of different political persuasions for this kind of thing I mean I conservative governments more in favour of this kind of thing than progressive government governments pretty much yeah well you look at the debate after Brexits in the UK and the conservatives the pro-Brexites were pretty forthright in saying that we need to re-establish our stronger links with the Anglosphere and so that you know Boris Johnson was out here not long ago spruiking this idea of why do we have visas between our countries we're so similar we're so alike partly it is a regressive mindset throwback to the glory days of empire for the British certainly not sure the Australians see it quite that way but certainly I think that there is a political edge to this which is neoconservative certainly but also it's institutional here these are led and cemented by institutional relationships of civil servants the ministers you know come and go civil servants who underpin these relationships stick around so in that respect it's an institutional persistence as well So I've got a question for Jeremy so Jeremy you started off with SARS in 2003 and my history is not great but I seem to remember that bird flu and then swine flu came quite soon after that but then we don't seem apart from Ebola I guess which was seen very much as a West African thing we don't really seem to have had a pandemic you know sort of broadly spreading pandemic for a while have the governance processes kind of started to wither away in that that hiatus or have they been growing ever since I mean what's the trajectory yeah I think that I would probably call it more growing if you look at SARS prompted a number of reforms within the global health governance structure and within the World Health Organization so it helped to finalize the changes to the international health regulations which mandate which diseases governments need to report to the World Health Organization and the circumstances under which the World Health Organization can declare something called a public health emergency of international concern which essentially says we are really going to mobilize as many of our resources as possible we are going to try to bring attention to this what we have seen over the over the time since the international health regulations have come in is that we've seen four of these declared so we've seen them around things like like influenza we also saw it with Zika in the lead up to the Olympics in Brazil that was one but then we also saw it with something like polio which is a disease that is close to being eradicated but they thought that it would make sense to try to make it a public health emergency of international concern to try to get that international attention to get over those last hums of where vaccination hasn't yet been able to take place for a variety of different reasons and I think what is happening now is that there is a lot of going back to look at some of these regulations that were established in the aftermath of SARS and trying to say okay now that we have almost a decade let's see what's been effective and maybe what we didn't really do all that well so for instance a lot of the emphasis on surveillance came out of the post SARS response but there is no money for it so there is now a mandate that each state has to have this robust international disease surveillance system ready to go at all times that can communicate with the World Health Organization 24-7 but there is no money to support that so that's going to be if you've got a country where just funding basic public health is already an issue you're talking about some real challenges in terms of the budgetary strategies and so maybe now there needs to be some sort of funding mechanism or some sort of way of trying to promote this or looking at other sorts of ways of trying to do this surveillance so it doesn't need to be state run surveillance can we use some other sorts of private actors to try to augment this or try to make sure that we have some overlapping coverage those are the sorts of issues now so we're fortunate that we haven't necessarily had another SARS level type event where we've got multiple countries and thousands of cases of a brand new disease but we're still trying to figure out exactly how to make this sort of system work especially because to kind of go back to what Robert was saying we don't necessarily know what the next thing is going to be and so it's a lot of speculation. Yeah I just had a follow up question about the issue of surveillance because I know like the flood attendants' unions had fought back against the routine spraying of disinfectants on the aircraft coming into Australia from overseas because a lot of people were getting allergic reactions and respiratory illnesses and this sort of thing I mean what about the issue of human rights and you know what do we give up when we get sprayed we get monitored we're talking about the perspective of global cooperation and World Health Organization that is all for the common good but you know this is the case in which people would be disproportionately affected by this kind of job sort of thing. Absolutely and that's sort of the flip side that I didn't really get a chance to go into is that this does raise a whole lot of human rights issues and it goes back to you know Foucaultian notions of biopolitics and the role of the state in trying to extend its reach by going into something that can look relatively benign but the question is you know how far does this go and what sorts of issues are out there. One of the things that they have tried to do at least so far within the international health regulations is to say that states aren't supposed to impose more burdensome requirements than the WHO recommends and that's to try to get around the imposition of say forced quarantines which have often been used historically as you know for public health purposes but often are just used as a way of getting rid of political opponents or to replicate existing societal prejudices that exist. So there have been some efforts at that. One of the areas that there's been some work on I've done a little bit on this is looking at what sorts of rights people have to try to appeal these sorts of decisions. So and again we saw this with the Ebola outbreak where there was Casey Hickox who was one of the nurses who had been treating Ebola in West Africa, came to the United States and the governor of New Jersey tried to put her in forced quarantine. She was expressing no symptoms and was complying with all sorts of medical departments and she ended up suing the state of New Jersey and eventually ended up winning. That's a pretty remarkable case but it's also kind of an extraordinary circumstance. So one thing that still hasn't been worked out yet is what sorts of opportunities people would have for making some sort of appeal to some of these sorts of surveillance issues. And how proactive this surveillance is is it just about okay well the doctor has noticed there's been this cluster of this disease happening in this area that's something that needs to be reported or does it need to be something that's more proactive and going out and actively monitoring people ahead of time. Those are some of the tensions that are still trying to be worked out. But you're absolutely right this raises all sorts of human rights issues that haven't necessarily been addressed adequately yet. Thanks. We can probably squeeze one last question in. Does anyone have any burning issues? Steve? Just for tip with verification it sounds like the 5Is intelligence sharing was the first of these arrangements and 31 others have grown up around it. Yes the 5Is arrangement was established in 1956 I think. You've got a 44 40-odd year gap before these domestic policy setting networks emerge. In that hiatus there's the cold war and then the security collaborations you see start to pop up around the emergence of international terrorism. The other domestic ones I think start to pop up once you see the emergence of digital governments. So as I said the technologies of globalisation provoke some of these problems but also the technology of globalisation provides the capabilities of these networks. Intelligence sharing, information sharing is possible through the electronic networks that were invented around the late 1990s. I see both of those things are sort of propelling the domestic security policy networks we see. Okay, please join me in thanking Jeremy and Tim. So folks that's the showcase for today. I want to thank each and every one of the presenters who came along and spoke about their research and really admirably kept time I have to say. And I want to thank all of you for coming along and for giving up your afternoon to listen and to engage and to discuss some of these issues. We are looking forward to the other colleges showcases also maybe going to all of them and do please tell your colleagues who couldn't make it today about what you've heard about if there's anything that you think came up during any of these presentations that you think a colleague who couldn't be here might be interested in. Do let them know and do let them know about the person who presented on that. So what's left now we've got some drinks and some nibbles out in the foyer. Do please join us if you can. Otherwise we look forward to seeing you at the next showcase we'll be right back tonight. Thank you.