 Good afternoon everyone good afternoon. Good afternoon and welcome welcome back to our this is our last plenary session for the conference And it's great to see so many people still here and although people are still coming in please do come in We will make a start because of course we've got Lots of people watching us on live streaming. We don't want them to start surfing the web Ah Since this is last primary plenary. Let me encourage you to stay for the final Set of parallel sessions after this after the tea break and then your reward is the drinks at the end of the conference So please stay for drinks just outside. It's a lovely day And I should have also said right at the start of course We look forward to seeing many of you at the aid supplies conference, which is on friday Which is run by DFAT, but it is also here at the anu and it's a great You know development for us to have that conference put alongside this one and it adds to the whole occasion So that's something else to look forward to So people often ask me what the theme of the conference is And I always say well, it depends on the papers and the panels that people submit, right? It's a bottom up process but We do have a few themes that we try to reflect through the plenary sessions And if you've been at the conference, you would have noticed governance as a big theme through the wdr launch and then michael wilcox Address and then we had the theme around the private sector's role in development cooperation And then of course the australian aid challenges and proposals and now humanitarian aid And I guess that arises out of criticism probably a legitimate criticism that in past conferences We haven't really given enough attention to humanitarian issues and that's probably a More general critique that could be made of the development sector That if you're not actually involved in humanitarian aid, you really don't pay a lot of attention To it. I know that's certainly something that's true for myself And it's been a very steep learning curve Preparing to to chair this session. It's an ironic state of affairs because from the Public point of view it's the opposite when they think about aid they generally think about Humanitarian aid, but even there it's not quite right because there they tend to think about the earthquake or the cyclone Of course now we know most of the humanitarian crises are chronic crises and and caused by things like civil war And then we also have the category that are health related caused by pandemics But it's certainly an important part of aid It's about 10 of all aid goes to humanitarian and as my colleague robin davies has shown that's an increasing share over time and it's it's increasing because Of the humanitarian crisis that the world is facing which is that it's in a worse level since the end of world war two But it's not only the humanity not only the world is facing humanitarian Crisis, it's the system or the ecosystem responding to that crisis that is also itself In crisis and that's that's the title of the session the humanitarian system in crisis And I think there's widespread agreement The sector is facing or the system is facing a number of serious challenges. There's a huge funding shortfall It's not just the amount of funding. It's the nature of that funding, which is often short term But it's not only funding. It's also organizational Set up there's just been a scathing a functional review of ultra which is meant to coordinate humanitarian effort But the problems are not just within one agency. There's duplication Across the sector more and more players are involved but controversially so Especially when we think about growing military engagement Local actors are often marginalized by far far more powerful international players Compliance with international humanitarian law is weak making the situation conflict zones all the more difficult And tragic as we've seen played out in syria So it's easy to point to the problems, but what are the solutions? Well, if anyone has the solutions at surely this panel Although of course we hope they're not going to They're not going to agree on the solutions. That's the the point of bringing this panel together. So let me introduce The panel to you Starting with robin robin is the associate director of the development policy center and an honorary professorial fellow here at the anu Before joining the senate he had long center. He had long career with the australian aid program Where among many other things he managed australian response to the 2004 boxing day tsunami And last year he wrote a policy brief and an article for the guard in proposing a new global humanitarian fund Paul mcfund is the executive director of medicine soft frontier australia After working with international union agencies in africa in the early 90s. Paul joined msf in 1997 He's worked across central asia and latin america And in december 2010 moved to sydney to take up with the role of msf australia executive director Under his leadership msf seen strong growth as an australian NGO and he's also been a very strong advocate On humanitarian aid including on our blog Thank you very much Phoebe winpope is director of international humanitarian law and movement relations with the australian red cross She has had over 25 years experience in the humanitarian sector And has worked in complex humanitarian emergencies conflicts throughout africa the middle east and europe She has a phd in international law from elbin university Focusing on the role of the international community in confronting war crimes and crimes against humanity and genocide Uh, then jamie is buster is first assistant secretary and humanitarian coordinator with defat Before joining defat or ozade as it then was jamie worked for the un and for ngo's Including uh as the number two in caritas He joined ozade nine years ago and served as assistant director general for the african humanitarian branch minister counselor for development cooperation in south africa Before taking up his current position And then last but by no means least adam comrade scott Adam is an associate professor at the center for international security studies at the university of sydney And adam interestingly began his working life as a registered nurse Specialized in emergency nursing He went on from that to specialize in disease outbreaks and global health security And worked in prime minister and cabinet On pandemic preparedness before joining london school of hygiene and tropical medicine and then sydney university And he recently evaluated the response to the abola crisis. I'll ask him to speak about that later So we've got a great panel today And we're going to run this though not as a you know series of presentations, but as a q&a So as well as reading up on humanitarian aid i've been watching tony jones So i'm going to ask an opening question to each of the panelists who got five questions And give them a bit of a chance to make a sort of initial statement no more than five minutes And then i'll ask you know other other panelists, you know very welcome to respond Uh, but you know, I don't want fighting to break out as has happened recently on q&a Uh, so we've only got one mic And the government has one as well So you have to get a mic if you want to speak But at the end we will give you the mics and you'll be able to to ask questions as well Of course, you know, we can't hope to be comprehensive. So You know, we're not going to by no means be able to tackle all the issues But I hope at least we'll agree the issues we're tackling are very important ones Um, yeah, so jamie has the mic because I've told him I'm going to ask him the first question And uh, that's uh, because as a framing for this session We thought we used the world humanitarian summit World humanitarian summit held on 23rd and 24th of may Last year in istanbul Certainly a major event 9 000 participants from 173 countries And also of course controversial one with msf boycotting for the reasons I explained on our blog Uh, but jamie is best it was there representing australia along with the minister for international development And jamie you told me that you've gone from being a pessimist to a pragmatic optimist As a result of the world humanitarian summit. So why is that? David, I'm yep. I think uh, this is working. Um, yes, well look firstly I just want to sort of say that I think um, I couldn't agree more that I think holding this some Session now is really critical because I think we genuinely are at a really pivotal time for How the humanitarian Community how the international community Needs to both think and respond to the challenge we face today I won't sort of echo what steven's already said But obviously are the impacts of climate change in terms of those and sudden onset crises We've got more people on the move than we've ever had in modern history Access to many people is becoming more and more difficult and the targeting of humanitarian workers is becoming a weapon of War in many situations But we've also as mentioned got a huge funding shortfall, which I'm sure will be talked about a bit later But we've also I think on the positive side the way that humanitarian assistance is being provided and can be provided In the coming years is changing dramatically too. And I think with that comes real opportunities for the way The donors un agencies Local organizations and affected communities are able to ensure that assistance is Much more oriented towards the needs and decisions of people themselves who are affected by that and is much more timely and relevant To that than themselves But just on the question in terms of the coming out of the summit and and moving from a pessimist to a a pragmatic optimist I mean the reason I guess I was initially had a fairly pessimistic view on it was that you know the lead in many people Probably involved in the consultations leading in the world humanitarian summit There was a very strong commitment to ensure that there was engagement across the globe with with all different parts of The international community involved in humanitarian issues and and with that I think came this sort of frustration of complete sort of lack of clarity as to what this summit was going to deliver that it was very Foggy and and and broad and I think it was increasingly as people participate in the concentration process a list of all the problems That were being faced and I think with that there was a feeling well You know why is all these resources getting put into a global summit? With no real clarity as to what it's meant to really be trying to tackle and I think a view that The big issue is just simply working to get get dealt with So I think that was where You know I'm a self but I think I could speak on on on a number of other people felt Yeah, certainly pretty pessimistic about what the the summit was going to be able to achieve or deal into it I guess moving into sort of pragmatic optimist Partly that's probably just a bit more who I am than the pessimist but The other reason really I think is is to step back and it was two things Two things that sort of really led to the shift and then I'll talk a bit about since the summit what some of the things I think have been important come out but one of them I think is that the The weakness I talked about which was the huge consultation and participation of Of so many groups so many voices all these problems getting put on the table Was a flip side that it actually was the first time that we'd had a global Meeting around Humanitarian issues that actually brought all those perspectives and views to the table and and coming from a You know a humanitarian and sort of development sort of background that in itself is an important thing It is important to ensure that The humanitarian system which is often criticized is is not something which is something being done to people But is about actually hearing genuinely in understanding all those views and perspectives Even if you can't solve all of it So the consultation in itself and then the participation of over 9 000 was I think one of its strengths The criticism you'll hear many people saying it was all he feels the intergovernmental process We could have got much clearer agreements about what governments would be held accountable for and whatever else But you would have immediately excluded a whole lot of those That voice and perspective that needed to go forward and the second time is you know I've sat through too many pledging conferences on Somalia and south Sudan and Syria and and coming together for a short period of time To look at a certain issue and I think the summit tried to look at the broader perspective of What different types of crises we're facing today? And what does that mean in terms of how we fund them how we coordinate how we engage with Effective communities in a most effective way and I think from that came some important Important points. So I'll just finish with the last point to say what some of those I think are is Um, you know the former secretary of DFAT had this view about sort of incremental radicalism I think he might have even used it in his speech here a year ago And the view being that you need to have a radical often on if you need big change You need to have a radical agenda and I think that there's a number of things on the summit that has put the radical agenda out there But if the change is going to happen it needs a considered incremental approach to it and um, you know One of the big things that's come out for us is um, you know, there was a lot of commitments that came out But the grand bargain which you know to be frank as people have probably heard me So I wouldn't actually say I mean it's called the grand bargain because we need something political to go out there and say It's it's going to drive change. It's high-end admin reform. Frankly Um, but I don't say that in a negative way What it's got on the table is some very important things that need to be dealt with that have been on the table for far too long And I'll just talk about some of them. You know very quickly multi-year commitments Increasingly age governments and donors are now being held accountable to put a multi Australia's made the first time a multi-year commitment to the Syria crisis That's the first time we've ever done it to a protective crisis You heard the minister come out and make a commitment on sexual reproductive health and emergencies As a multi-year commitment on that we're looking at how we're going to be tackling some of the issues in terms of Iraq and sub-Saharan Africa and it's a shift in terms of how donors are collectively holding ourselves accountable for that multi-year commitments There's a very strong commitment on localization and a target about at least 25 of funding going directly to to support localization I think it's a fairly modest commitment, but if we get there, it's it's it's very significantly different to where we've been and then A big commitment around how we move to cash programming and this I think is a real shift in the way that we provide assistance So look, I'll I'll stop there Because there's a range of these could go into more depth that may come up later But hopefully that gives a bit of a Steven a bit of a Journey as to where I was, you know 12 months before the summit and now Great. Thanks a lot. Jamie. So a lot of positive things coming out of the summit any other panelists like to respond to that and give their perspective on what came out I don't want to really pre-empts the the question. I'm about to be asked It is very hard not to But I agree with much of what Jamie says. Perhaps that's controversial in itself But you know, I think the fact that that a forum was created that that encouraged the participation of so many people from so many levels Particularly local organizations that had up until then had virtually no visibility No platform through which to vent their frustrations about how they see, you know The international aid architecture trying to operate in their countries. I think was, you know, phenomenal And an important success and if I had to pare down the biggest failure of the world humanitarian summit For me, it's the fact that it didn't address the key humanitarian issue as far as I'm concerned and MSF is concerned that we face today And that is the fact that, you know, however you position yourself around You know, what is the scope of the term humanitarianism? What does humanitarian action mean? I think we would all agree that if we pair it down To the little nut at the center, it's responding saving lives alleviating suffering in conflicts and acute crisis And that's where we see the humanitarian Architecture failing and it's not failing since the world humanitarian summit It's been failing consistently for a quite a long period of time And this is a hugely important issue to address. This is core business And that core business was not on the agenda of the world humanitarian summit Nor was reform of, you know, key agencies like the un agencies that take a responsibility for the coordination and organization Of that key role, that key area So for us, you know, this is really what frustrated us most when we saw What the forum was actually finally going to represent and there was a lot of things that we felt were very Very, very well documented and very well Understood, analyzed and put on the table and we're going to speak to some of those now Certainly the issues around protection, the refugee crisis Even medical emergencies is an emerging issue But this core issue of can we, are we doing a good job of saving lives today? And you referred to Syria as a protracted crisis. I'd refer to Syria as an acute crisis It's protracted because there's no political solution But nobody's there, you know, and virtually nobody is there Because it's so acutely difficult to help those people in those extreme circumstances So for me, you know, to sum it up, those are the opposing views And it's not to undermine what Jamie said because I think a lot of what he said is incredibly valuable But is it going to address the core issues in so many countries Where increasingly there are less and less people There alongside the people in need Great, thanks Paul, other, yeah, Rob? Yeah, I guess my perspective on the summit is similar in some ways to yours Jamie was kind of better than expected, my expectations were sort of here and it came out maybe here So, you know, the consultative nature of the preparations probably resulted in a much stronger focus on localization And we would have got otherwise, I think that was positive I won't preempt what I'm going to say on money later, but I guess, you know, it was clearly a missed opportunity in one sense And I really have to wonder what would have happened if the summit, if the process had been led by Gatera's You know, I think he would have taken the opportunity that it presented to force some of that sort of architectural reform And institutional reform, particularly in relation to the Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs And that was a seriously missed opportunity And I have, I guess, one question for you So around the summit and afterwards, the former secretary general Did say something about administrative reform, you know, on the whole, not much came out of it on reform But he said that there would be a package of reforms, which he expected within five years would save a billion dollars per annum Which would then become available, of course, for allocation But that's not in the grand bargain, that's not in the grand bargain But he has said it and it's often quoted Now, if you take that seriously, that is a very serious commitment I mean, there's only about 12 or 13 billion dollars per annum going through UN agencies If they can find a billion dollars in efficiencies Terrific Is that remotely feasible, do you think? Maybe just quickly to flag, the point about sort of the missed opportunity Look, I agree with it, but I'm also, as the pragmatic optimist point is being With one summit, how many of those issues didn't get dealt with, I'll be very frank from our perspective We haven't given up on the critical reform of the architecture and the funding and the leadership It's something now that I think the summit's put a strong position for donors, local organizations So it's like to really drive what's needed We touched briefly on the functional efficiency review with Otcher without going into detail with that The reason that was done was because of the pressure that a number of donors had put on To really ask the hard questions around how are we effectively coordinating And saying coordinate in a collective way, humanitarian system, how are we dealing with Access, how are we ensuring protection, how are we better dealing with common needs assessments Et cetera So this is not off the table, if anything, I think we're at a pivotal point to really Push these issues and if there's any sort of opportunity out of some of the cuts Going to come out of the US administration or whatever else, these are going to have to be Looked at whether one likes it or not, it's going to be the billion dollar question Look, I think to be frank, Robin, it was put on there in the speech to be able to sort of Demonstrate that we need to, you know, that we do need some efficiencies that you weren't Acknowledged, isn't it? Whether they get there, I think, I think that Whether it's going to be a billion or not, I'm not the best person to ask But what I will say is that I think there are some real efficiencies to be found in the System collectively, because of the way that assistance can now be provided If you look at the overheads now to be able to provide cash programming to refugees in Situations, the costs of doing that in an effective way are, I think, you know, if you Look at the current UNOXO model, it's about 3% compared to in-kind, which is well over 30 to 40% of overheads to be able to deliver on that Now, I'm not saying cash is the answer to every solution, but it will increasingly be One of the critical ones. It begs a big question about what the mandate question is If you've got agencies saying, well, we'd live a food, we'd live a shelter, we'd live Education, et cetera, and we all need to have our own appeal and funding mechanism My view is that that game is changing, you know, it's going to be a big question Of what types of agencies do you now need to be delivering? What are their resources If they're no longer, their big logistical pipelines are no longer needed It's about how they're ensuring that is cash meeting the need And what niche issues are emerging that now agencies that are concerned about protection Or education in crises are complementing or supporting that So I think there's a real change about how this is going to be happening And I think with that, some big efficiencies will be found Go on to the sort of second question I want to, as Paul's intimated, we've lined him up next And the way I read your blog, Paul, is that one of the main reasons Perhaps the reason you didn't attend the summit was because you thought it was Blurring this distinction between humanitarian and development aid And indeed the final statement when the Secretary General sort of summing up The summit is, he says, the summit achieved significant commitments to transcend Humanitarian development divide while reinforcing the importance of respecting Humanitarian principles and space So what do you see as the problem with that? Surely for protracted crises, humanitarian and development actors do need to work together Yeah, thanks So I've got a few notes and I'll use the notes because I had so much that I wanted to say And five minutes, of course, it's not easy to do it And I think this will be helpful because I want to talk really about exactly what Jamie said The direction that's being set, is that going to help address at least what MSF sees As the response gap, the issue that we face in terms of acute crisis and conflict So I'm really referring to what I described as being the nut in the middle What do we absolutely have to do as humanitarians? And I'm not critiquing more broadly other medium-long-term approaches Where for sure there's a lot more that could and should be done To bridge the humanitarian development divide So the issue I have is clear, and I've stated it I think quite well So that we see a humanitarian system that's struggling It's been struggling for some time to deliver in acute conflict settings So there's a widening gap and in context where we're working today Where we have teams on the ground, the Yemen, the Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Lake Chad The Sudan, Somalia, Iraq We see a significant lack of adequate humanitarian response Is the humanitarian system fit for purpose to answer to the needs in these settings? Currently we would say clearly no And will that be addressed by trying to transcend the divide Between humanitarian action and development Which is the question being posed now I would say categorically no So for this core area, core business We don't see that the direction that's being set by the World Humanitarian Summit Is going to address some of the fundamental failings That were not put on the agenda And in fact we see the reverse We see this as an alarming trend That the focus is shifting away from in fact addressing that core business So it's less for us about the blurring of humanitarian and development action We really fear that the outcome of the summit Is about assimilating humanitarian action under other sectors And for that that's hugely problematic So to be very clear, and I think I tried to be at the beginning You know we're not an anti-development establishment We're not anti-localization We're not against resilience building You know in the appropriate place at the appropriate time In the right context and setting is absolutely essential And you know we certainly believe in building local capacity And empowering local organizations to assume a role In their countries in context So this is an essential way forward in certain contexts But we see that as hugely challenging in this area of You know acute crisis and conflict And the challenge there, you know pushing this kind of sector coherence We have to work together We have to have a one agenda approach Improve accountability Improve coherence and integration I mean it comes at the cost of agility and independence And that's what we see on the ground So again, you know we maintain this coherence debate And that's very much driving now Systems, processes and practices in the field It's an ironically varying coherent one So it's aiming, you know what this essentially means It's policy, it's structural arrangements That are strategically and structurally integrated In responses that bring the humanitarian development Political and even military sectors together To try and build long term approaches That will ultimately end need, a noble cause But this is a system approach And it doesn't necessarily align with the immediate needs Of people facing the most acute circumstances And what it risks doing is making humanitarians for example To be responsible for broad goals like ending hunger Rather than feeding people that are in front of them today And that for me is a huge issue And we witness this and we're documenting this And we have this document, this documentation is available to the public So we're undertaking an assessment of what we see As the failings of the humanitarian system And I say again that in acute conflicts, crisis settings of this nature And I'll just list a few of the things that we consider Should have been on the agenda for discussion And are now becoming increasingly challenging trends That we're faced with that will take us backwards, not forwards So when we see, you know, timeliness seems to be dropping In terms of its prominence and importance For effective humanitarian response A reliance on local actors is being pushed hard Through policy, criteria, requirements To receive funding, etc And that's fine If you have that local capacity In that list of countries I gave you We do not have that local capacity As do most other organizations You do not have access to that local capacity And where you do have local capacity It doesn't have the skills necessarily Or the resources to be able to assume the role You might want it to take So it's very clear for us And then they're inherently compromised From a neutrality perspective in conflict settings So it's not straightforward We see organizations shaping programs now To meet local capacity-building aims So this is in line with moving away from You know, direct action endlessly Being somehow bad or wrong And they're trying to build these aims With local capacity whilst they're openly admitting to us That that's how they're doing things in theory To satisfy the proposals that they've submitted And the accountability that they have towards them But in the meantime, with the additional resources they have They're deploying people from outside to get the job done That we witness clearly Indiffer in the late child crisis, for example And we see organizations that are now It's not new, but new and agency Stubbornly refusing to change policy and practice When a chronic situation shifts into an emergency one And again, Lake Chad, Nigeria, South Sudan, I mean, it happens all the time So you've got things like cost recovery programs A great tool to introduce into a certain setting at a certain time But they've been maintained above and beyond The immediate needs of hundreds of thousands of IDPs Who've just arrived because of a massive shift of the context Again, look at what's happening in Lake Chad today And organizations are refusing to change Their cost recovery model and provide free care Because it will risk impairing a model It took so long to put in place, et cetera, et cetera So, you know, we fundamentally, you know, the two things Cannot be compatible at the same time under certain circumstances We need to unpack that And, you know, we see organizations claiming You know, sectoral and regional response When they have yet to put the capacity in place And this goes perhaps to the question of funding And resource availability, et cetera But rejecting offers of support You know, it's always been territorial And we plant flags ourselves within our own organization So I don't remove MSF from that analysis But defending emergency program coverage That has not yet even been implemented Is something we increasingly see as a challenge Who's doing what and are they actually doing it or not So, you know, to sum up, working in conflicts It's difficult, it's dangerous, it's messy, and it is expensive And we see a sector that's becoming conservative Risk averse and cost obsessed We repeatedly see programs established where it's more Convenient, where it's easier to access a population Rather than where the greatest needs may be There's a growing emphasis on protection of staff Which, of course, is a duty of care responsibility We all have to own and assume But it comes before the humanitarian imperative To stay and deliver So we really see this risk aversion Formulating the way responses are made Rather than the needs formulating the type of response that's required And we see the growing drive of efficiency Which we're going to get into soon Being counterproductive in conflict You know, in conflicts you need to accept You're going to fail, there's going to be losses And you have to recover from them That's a reality So, you know, we don't have an issue with the existence Of an agenda for sustainable development Even if it's launched in a humanitarian summit Ending need, who can argue against that? But the absence of this agenda in the World Humanitarian Summit To address the current failings is what we have a real issue with So for us the challenge is we need to better reconcile Not abolish What are the fundamental differences In terms of methods, structures, cultures and objectives Between humanitarian action and development And yeah, we need to build better bridges And we need to determine that's nothing new I've been dealing with that for 25 years But this can't come at the cost of doing the core business Which is saving lives today Irrespective of what the political solutions are of tomorrow Well, I think you've stated that Your case very clearly And highlighted a number of alarming trends as you see them Provide other members of the panel to respond Sorry, I'd just like to ask a question To get you to expand a little bit more If I may, I think one of the interesting things Is this idea of an acute crisis But what we're finding is the acuteness is going on For such a long period of time And I know that for the International Committee of the Red Cross Who works in acute crisis all the time That they're 10 largest operations Today, they've been working in for 30 years So I just would be really interested in your thoughts About that protracted nature of the acuteness Recognizing that very core kernel that you were talking about And what that is And the changing nature of conflict And how that's impacting the capacity of Whether that's impacting the capacity of the humanitarian system To cope or whether it's other things Whether you think there's other things outside Acknowledging the fact that there's no sort of Humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems, of course Yes, so it's a really good question And it coincides with what Jamie said We can refer to Syria as protracted And we can also refer to it as one of the most acute conflicts That's ongoing today And so I'm not sure how helpful the term acute is anymore And you're absolutely right For us providing humanitarian A humanitarian medicine approach In contexts where we've been 20 years or 25 years Eventually we have to evolve beyond that And it's something we're committed to do as an organization So we're looking consistently at what we can do To actually help support Some kind of system building Even though that might be very, very, very marginal In a context like South Sudan, for example Where our budget exceeds the entire Our health budget exceeds the entire budget Of the aid system in the medical sector So to operate in Sudan without being In an entirely substitutional role today Is an impossibility, but we've been there Decades So it's not obviously not an easy one to answer But for sure it's something that we need to do And I think there are steps that can be taken to do that One of the things I would say that we're taking on As a responsibility now is to say that We have a responsibility to build the technical capacities Of health staff that are not in MSF And that's something relatively new We do it if we're working in a Ministry of Health Hospital And there are people alongside us And it's beneficial to overall patient care But to say that if we're in a country now For the next foreseeable 10 years Anything we introduce in terms of training To develop our own staff Many of whom are from that country We should look to expand to the health service at large So there are these things that can be done In certain contexts and times and settings And then the question around security Well, absolutely I mean we're working in an increasing number of contexts We're having a physical presence At least as international staff is becoming Almost impossible Without doubt You know, and Syria is another good example Somalia although we're returning to Somalia now Parts of Afghanistan I mean there are many contexts That are incredibly difficult to maintain a presence in But in our analysis That we rarely find that it's the external factors That are in fact what's prohibiting Organizations from potentially doing more Than is currently being done It's far more internal factors Which goes to how organizations have chosen To manage things like risk mitigation And how systems are approaching this problem On behalf of the sector And a good example to perhaps embed that Would be in our recently inventive protection of Civilian site in South Sudan And if any of you don't know what a protection of Civilian site is It's a fortified internally displaced camps It's fortified by the UN Unmiss in this case You know, and there You've essentially given the responsibility For security to effectively military personnel People with a military background So what they do is they separate the population Because it is a risk So it's about Cordoning off this population It's not a humanitarian population approach And then within that camp You cordon off the humanitarian sector And you put it in what you call a humanitarian hub And then you extremely fortify that hub And that is a model Of putting the humanitarian system Into a difficult and insecure context And MSF when I visited was the only organization That refused to be in that humanitarian hub And has its hospital actually In the camp And we faced daily challenges Negotiating that with UNmiss Who were in the process of excavating An even wider protection zone Between those people And those people who are providing assistance So you know, there are very concerning models And approaches which are in place now And there are far better models Within our ability to manage And getting out of that hub into the camp Is not beyond the capacity of most of the organizations there But they're not choosing to do that Jamie Yeah, look, I think A lot of the points Paul's highlighted in terms of The increasing issues that are emerging around sort of The risk the localization agenda may have On issues of impartiality I think I would agree with I think the issue around sort of Protection of staff and workers And that increasingly limiting access Again, I would sort of agree with I think where though I would come at a bit on this issue Around the humanitarian development stuff Is that I think A lot of what Paul said I think is Particularly on the harder side of the humanitarian side Which unfortunately facing increasingly today Which is the lake chads The South Sudan, the Somali As the Central African Republics The Syrias, etc But there's a large number Humanitarian situations are facing In terms of large refugee displacements In countries first asylum Natural disasters that we're dealing with Where I think for too long The architecture and the funding And the implementation lines Between humanitarian development agencies Has undermined Ensuring that affected communities themselves Are much more centrally involved In deciding how their support How they make decisions around their investment And I think we've been a Times donors and agencies have been a problem with that So I think you I'd agree with your point Very much more on the sort of Because I think part of the problem The humanitarian system is As Steven knows in the presentation Is that we too often sort of thrown it all together So whether it's a natural disaster Or a refugee situation Or a conflict situation We sort of all Same agencies the same responses are needed And I actually think we need Much more differentiated responses So in natural disasters Commitments in preparedness Localization investment Is pays dividends We know it does But we're not very good at it As I say to people I reckon we get a seven and a half Eight out of ten on response On the first sort of four to six weeks We get about a five or six out of ten on preparedness And we get about a three or four out of ten On recovery afterwards But the point being that I think I would agree with your point On the harder end side of it Though I think the problem we've had For too long is that we've had these schools Of architecture and coordination That's actually undermined The way many people in Facing humanitarian situations Experience their support and assistance And not to go on, but you look at refugees In someone like Lebanon or Jordan The services are delivered by government There has to be a strong understanding and commitment About what that localization agenda Is from a national level For what local organizations do What's the curriculum That needs to be provided etc But absolutely inside Syria The environment is completely so different So anyway I differentiated one Point I think is one that we've got a Same IHL principles But how it's implemented I think Has a different practice All right we're going to move on Because we need to keep going We've had excellent discussion Around the strengths and the weaknesses And you can judge for yourself Whether you're in the glass half Full or half empty Thank you even Paul said himself One of the strong areas Of the World Humanitarian Summit Was its emphasis on norms That safeguard humanity And on compliance With international humanitarian law Phoebe I want to ask you You're an expert in this area I mean how meaningful do you think this is Because I think many people would sense There's been an erosion in international law With war on terror The rise of non-state actors And more recently the refugee crisis Leading many western countries to take a step back So do you share that sense of erosion And if so what could be done to reverse it Thanks Steve and I to have a few notes Because it's a pretty big topic And yeah just help me get through Something hopefully a little bit meaningful So I think that we were really thrilled That there was a reaffirmation of that commitment To both the humanitarian principles And to an international legal order And rule of law that came out Of the World Humanitarian Summit I think it's encouraging to know That that commitment is ongoing We see at the moment A lot of people talking about The erosion of IHL So I wanted to just talk today Firstly about the erosion perception And I'm using that word carefully And secondly about the respect aspect Of the law And particularly around international humanitarian law Which of course is that legal framework That applies in armed conflict So around the erosion of IHL IHL in its substance Has probably never been stronger In the last in this century There's been 10 new IHL treaties That range from the involvement of children In armed conflict, the arms trade treaty Explosive remnants of war Protection of people and enforced From enforced disappearance A whole range of different IHL treaties Have been negotiated and ratified In the last 16, 17 years And this year most remarkably Possibly one of the most significant IHL treaties Is about to start being negotiated In just six weeks time Which is a ban on nuclear weapons So we sort of see this big strong commitment To IHL and what that looks like In lots of different ways The international tribunals And international courts are using IHL To produce judgments We know that more people are trained In IHL than ever before Whether they're arms bearers, weapons bearers State parties or non-state armed groups And according to ICRC Many more states have incorporated IHL Into their domestic legal regimes Than ever before So all of this gives us a really strong Legal foundation in IHL And I think it's really important to remember that And when we think about compliance with IHL And some of the problems that Paul has been talking about In that very hub and that hard of conflict What we know is that if IHL Is respected in armed conflict That we will have less civilian deaths That we can have properly functioning medical facilities That we can have potentially less displacement That we can have humanitarian access And ultimately less human suffering In times of armed conflict Which of course is the goal Of the legal regime in the first place So all of these things If they're in place and if they're functioning well Will serve to help prevent and alleviate suffering That happens in armed conflict And now when we get onto the solutions stage And some of the problems This is where I duck out So the solutions to this are really tough Because as we see the compliance issue with IHL Again and again is raising its ugly head And you know I'd like to just take a minute to remember Six colleagues from Syrian Arab Red Crescent And ICRC who were killed, targeted and killed just last week So it's a reminder to all of us how hard this work is I think though we also have to remember That what we see in armed conflict And the violations in armed conflict Is very visible in a way that it never has been before So 20 years ago or 30 years ago We didn't have mobile phones We had, you know, I travelled to Somalia With a satellite telephone Which was about as big as, you know, six coffins And it was just huge And that was all there was In terms of communications with the outside world So what people are seeing today Is much more extensive Than what we ever would have seen before And I think it's really important to remember that When we're thinking about an increase Do we have an increase in lack of compliance Or is it just more visible? I don't have the answer to that question But I'm just raising it In terms of what we need to do About the lack of compliance So more people are trained than ever before The law is stronger than ever before What we really need to start doing Is understanding why people break the law So just wondering how many people Ever speed in their car And break the law I'm currently on eight points So we have to really understand What that looks like And why you might do that Whether it's rushing to hospital With a sick child or whatever it is So we have not to be flippant Because obviously the violations In international humanitarian law Aren't a flippant topic But we do need to understand Why people are breaking the law We need to understand why Some non-state armed groups And some state military forces Apparently not putting in place Appropriate mechanisms and safeguards To abide by the law We also know from studies That Geneva Call have done That in some instances There are specific strategies That go against the law Even though the law is known So what we really need to do Is have a much better understanding About what restrains behaviour in war And ICRC has currently been doing A massive global study Looking at this issue And what it is that stops people from violating So I think that that's really key I don't think we have the answers to that If there's any PhD students out there Who want a good topic I think it's a great one And then in terms of what we can do At the moment I think We need to begin with the states That have all signed up We need to know to see to hear To have demonstrated a commitment To the compliance with the law Every time the law is violated Wherever it is, anywhere in the world We need to hear states say This isn't good enough It's got to stop And I don't think we hear that often enough And loudly enough Regardless of where the apparent violation Looks like it's coming from The second thing At the international conference Of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Where states and the national societies And the ICRC and the Federation All come together once every four years We agreed to work States recognize the imperative Need to improve compliance with IHL They're currently working on A process to begin the development Of some sort of compliance mechanism It's a long, hard process But something is there And we're really encouraging all states To step up and participate in this process And I'm glad to say that the Australian government Is at the forefront of that process States and international leaders Have to be strong advocates For the agreed legal regime And this means ensuring That characterization of events Is legally factual So in many instances Measures adopted And aimed at repressing terrorism For example, should be crafted So that they don't impede Humanitarian action And so that they don't misrepresent Events in a way that Makes certain armed groups Look as though they're committing crimes Which actually might be allowable Under international humanitarian law So humanitarian actors What can we do? We should have a much stronger A knowledge and understanding Of the legal regimes That exist in different circumstances There is a new compliance requirement In the ACFID code of conduct Around humanitarian workers Having training in IHL If they're going to conflict zones And fragile states And if anyone wants to know more about that As we at Australian Red Cross can help And I think that in terms of these Promoting speaking Not tolerating violations Wherever they occur Particularly when it's At risk of medical facilities Some of those very core principles Of the law And what that means Is going to be critical going forward And holding fast to the fact That the law is good We just need to respect it I think I'll leave it there Thanks All right Any responses? Yeah, more of a question I mean Are there circumstances where The way that aid is allocated Is likely to promote Infringements on international law So I'm thinking for example Of the case of Afghan refugees in Pakistan And donors are contributing to UNHCR To assist the provision of incentive packages For them to return to Afghanistan And UNHCR and donors have been criticized For that Because it may be that donors Are complicit in forced returns effectively So have you looked at those sort of situations Where the way aid is being used Is perhaps leading to contraventions? I think it goes to Having a really good understanding Of the legal frameworks that you're working in So refugees being forced back Across a border would fall more Likely under refugee law And the principle of non-reformal Which is also protected in human rights law And the The How that works And what needs to be put in place To protect some of those legal regimes And you know the problem with international law Of course is that it's only as good As the states that sign on to it And agree to it Over and above the customary law Which is accepted around the world And we see in lots of different situations Where the law is quite clear And states choose not only non-state armed groups Which are often accused of all the compliance issues But states also choose For whatever reason to go around it So I think it's a good example Of where people need to be well aware Of what the circumstances are And of what the law is And to try and work within that framework Laura, look, we're going to keep going Because I do want to leave some time For you to participate in questions I want to bring Adam in You've been very patient, Adam But you've done this very interesting research On the Ebola crisis And it seems to challenge the sort of standard position Of the humanitarian sector That the military should be involved in responses Humanitarian responses only as a last resort Or in exceptional circumstances Whereas your evaluation of the Ebola response Seems to come out quite positively On that military involvement So do you think we should be less cautious In embracing military As we think about humanitarian response Okay, to a room full of humanitarians Let's defend this, okay So I guess with any discussion On civil military cooperation And particularly with the role of militaries There's a whole bunch of caveats That need to be included Everyone's familiar with the Ebola response What you may not be familiar with Was that the outbreak actually commenced In December 2013 And only concluded in January 2016 Over 30,000 cases of Ebola cases were documented And verified And over 11,300 deaths were confirmed What we believe Is that the numbers were much higher than that If not double or triple, though Principally because When humanitarian workers And public health people arrived In affected communities Often times people would hide their loved ones Because all they saw of people Coming into the communities Was basically people dressed in spacesuits Taking their loved ones away And they never saw them again And so we saw a lot of The numbers are suspected to be much higher So what's the role of the military in this instance Well, as we all know It was actually rather interesting And highly unusual that It was actually MSF that publicly called For military intervention in Ebola In September of 2014 But importantly And that sort of provided a level of legitimacy To the arrival of military personnel In West Africa the following month But importantly, military personnel Were actually already on the ground in August Preparing and doing evaluations As to where they might be able to Assist and intervene So these were foreign militaries Obviously that I'm referring to here It's the first time that we saw Foreign military assistance being deployed Just purely for an infectious disease outbreak We've seen it obviously beforehand in Natural disease Sorry, natural disasters And disease outbreaks occur and militaries respond But this was the first time that Over 5,000 personnel were deployed Just to deal with an infectious disease outbreak Part of the problem though is Because this has been such a controversial topic Over many years Is that We haven't really come together as As communities to talk about What should be the role of the militaries In that type of environment And what we saw during Ebola was Foreign militaries engaging in a whole Variety of different activities And there was very little consistency Across the board in how they approached Their duties So we had some engaging in Constructing Ebola treatment facilities We had others engaging in education And whereas some militaries were providing Very high levels of medical care Other militaries refused to transport Patients or even biological samples That were suspected To be affected Or infected with Ebola Having said all that And a lot of the interventions that Militaries did Militaries like to pride themselves And the fact that they're First in and first out of any circumstance Obviously that wasn't the case this time But There were problems with the response And certainly some of the responses Were the length of time that it was taken To build things like the Ebola treatment units Now why was that the case Largely because the military forces Had been told by their governments That they needed to build them to European standards Whatever buildings had to be built To European standards And I had a British officer That expressed a considerable amount of frustration That he had to build a building That included snow loading And it took them some months to get them The British government to concede That snow loading perhaps was not required And Sierra Leone So there were problems, certainly But on the converse side of that One of the biggest impacts of having The military involved in this response Was the psychological impact I had people sort of say to me In Liberia, I led a team We actually went into the affected countries During the outbreak to do this evaluation And the report is available on my sender's website Under the publications If anyone's really interested in having a look at it But certainly one of the big benefits Of having the military involved here Was the psychological impact And people sort of described the fact That had the American military When they landed and just driven from The airport through to their base And never come out again It would have been a huge victory Because what it said fundamentally To the Liberians in particular For the US Was that America had arrived to help That someone really cared And it was just the visual impact Of seeing helicopters flying overhead Military vehicles on the roads And a whole lot of people in uniform That had a huge psychological boost It also had a huge impact On the NGO community And this was certainly something That I found personally quite upsetting When I arrived in these countries Up until the point that the announcements were made That the military were being deployed NGOs were fleeing in their droves Now this is understandable in some respects And some of the NGOs explained it to me In the respect that Ebola Is the deadliest disease on the planet We weren't designed We're here to do education programs We don't have the capabilities To respond to this type of thing So it's kind of understandable But they were getting directives From their headquarters in European countries Saying you need to get your people out Because we can't guarantee their safety And I had some NGOs saying to me Look on the off side On the other side of this outbreak We need to have a serious hard look at ourselves Because we had people lining up To get shot at in places like Syria But we couldn't get anyone to come to West Africa That was heartbreaking I guess personally For me because I kind of We always kind of like to think That the NGO community is there to help And that they'll do whatever it takes But obviously there are limits even so And this was something whereby The fact that the military were deployed It actually had a real demonstrable impact On NGO's willingness to accept the level of risk Of continuing to operate in these countries So yes I am a little bit more of an advocate But I have a number of caveats to that And I describe myself as a pragmatist When it comes to this In the sense that I think our goal should always be to save lives This was an instance where the military Played an important role It was a unique set of circumstances It isn't easily replicated And I don't think we can necessarily say There is a template That we can just simply roll out And see this happen again So I'm certainly not advocating that But one of the key problems that we've had As an international community When we talk about the role of militaries Getting involved in these types of activities Is we see the debate polarize at two extremes And we have the extremes And dare I say prior to this MSF Is sort of an example of this Whereby they refuse to collaborate Or be seen to collaborate In any way with the military Now they've got their reasons for that And I understand the concerns that arise And I don't dismiss those concerns lightly By any means But equally this was at least one context Whereby we saw the military play an important role And conceivably there are some more So a lot of the focus of the research That I'm doing over the next number of years Is looking at where are those red lines Where are the parameters Where we can have militaries involved And engaged in these types of activities And where is it What are the type of activities That they clearly should not be involved in Having said that The fact that I characterize myself as a pragmatist That is interpreted by some in the humanitarian community As me being pro-military And for me nothing could be further than the truth But I would rather actually just simply say Well let's look at what can happen in this space Let's have the conversation that we previously haven't Let's gather the data Because at the moment the evidence is not there Because we haven't bothered to do the research We haven't bothered to look to see exactly What does work and what doesn't in this space I have a problem in this regard With some of the guideline documents that have been developed And I'm not going to pick on international humanitarian law here By any means I am going to have a go though A little bit at things like the Oslo guidelines Which advocate that the military are only ever used As a last resort Why do I have a problem with that Well the definition as it currently stands Is far too wooly for my mind To my mind And it's also in my view somewhat western centric And I think particularly when you get out to some of the Country or many countries around the world The militaries aren't the last resort They're the only resort They don't have fire brigades They don't have ambulance services All they've got is a military And so when a disaster happens They have to send the military or it's no one And I think it's rather arrogant sometimes for western countries To sort of sit there And dare I say some of their NGOs To sit there and point the finger And say it's inappropriate for you to use Militaries must always be used as a last resort When that's the only capability that they've got So I'll finish it there Because I'm sure there's probably a few different bringer to use Thanks very much And I'm sure Paul want to speak But Jamie we didn't send the army To respond to the volacrisis Do you think next time there is one we might Um Geez it's through a curveball Thanks Stephen No look as you know there's a whole debate Around sort of Australia's response to the bolus And what goes into that What I would say just in response to your specific question Is um my view is that the I would agree very much With what's been said around it being fit for purpose Where there are plenty of situations Where the military can bring its capability And logistics needs that many others can't And we should be um open and clear about When we can utilize that In West Africa my view is um you know A bit like sort of international medical teams Urban search and rescue teams Often their best place to be deployed If they already have some relationships Understanding the context that they're operating in I think our military's much more um Has got that understanding ability within the Pacific And essentially South East Asia Sending Australian military off to West Africa Frankly I think probably would um risk The times of deployment and the understanding of that context I think wouldn't be appropriate when there's plenty of Potentially other militaries What I would say is I think developing regional models That can deal with potential sudden onset Or regional outbreaks and what militaries Might be in the best position to draw in on that Is I think a very sensible thing to do Yeah just just very briefly um Adam I I think I couldn't agree more with you I mean I think you've phrased everything very very well And I think we both agree that West Africa was An exceptional emergency something that we had never dealt With or experienced before and clearly You know when we called for military support It was because we we we know from experience That the military has a unique capacity To scale up massive logistics capacity Transportation communication And for this emergency uniquely An experience in skill in managing biohazard So chemical and biological warfare Is something the military are trained in dealing with And one of the biggest problems And the reason organizations were flooding Was not only the fears that they had It was because it just didn't have experience In dealing with you know the nature Of that particular threat that risk So just to say that you know we feel That military can contribute under certain circumstances And any means to save lives should be deployed If that saves lives ultimately and you know We work alongside the military very often In natural disasters it's another big area Where the military are very active But just to flag a couple of the challenges And this is where I'm sure you're looking You know a military approach is not a humanitarian one We touched on that earlier So it's not a people focused approach It's much more like you said fulfilling the policy You know is the government is the government sending The military because they want to Let them to carry out a humanitarian act Or is it more because they fear the risk Of this not being contained And presenting a risk on their shores You know it's very very different Rational behind this So of course you know that's the big difference In how you quarantine a country Versus how you actually save lives in that country And be part of a humanitarian response They're very rigid to deal with as you said yourself So it's quite difficult to coordinate Around things like a medical approach For example we found that challenging And a good example would be You know we realized that having full transparency Of what you're doing inside a clinic In other words you know it's not that easy To catch a bowler incidentally It requires physical contact So having open meshing Where you divide people But you can see them You can see what's going on And you're not killing people Or doing something bizarre behind a giant fence You know those are essential public health approaches To pacify populations So that they feel part of what's going on And of course that's not the instinctive approach Of a military You know it's protectionism Build fences etc So there are many areas that would probably Need to be broken down and looked at Great thanks Paul Now we've got one more issue to go in a way We've left the most important issue for last And that is the issue of funding There is this massive shortfall But there was a commitment at the World Health Humanitarian Summit For adequate and predictable financing To increase support for the SERF Which is the UN funding mechanism And there's also we've already mentioned The grand bargain Which is more efficiency for more funding So Robin I know you've looked into this issue Has the problem been solved Yes Yeah no not quite So on financing The summit interestingly did produce Several quite concrete commitments But none of those really related to the financing issue And the shortfall issue that Stephen mentioned Is this working? Seems to be cutting in and out So I mean the financing problem Has a few different aspects There's this quantity There's flexibility And then there's efficiency And there were commitments in all three of those areas From the summit And you know quantified time bound In a couple of cases I won't go through them But on the quantity issue Really the only concrete thing That came out of the summit Was a commitment to double the mechanism That Stephen referred to The central emergency response fund There's nothing wrong with doubling it But this fund is not in itself A very significant mechanism It was set up about a decade ago To support rapid response Financing and to provide funding To underfunded emergencies Those are its two main functions And when it was set up It was about 10% of the value of the UN's Consolidated global appeal You know it was reasonably significant at that time And it was worth around $450 million a year It still is 10 years later That's its annual financing target And it's now worth only a couple of percent Of the UN's global appeal each year So this year the UN is looking for Over $22 billion To support a range of operations Its own operations And also some of those run by NGOs And occasionally governments So in that context The surf looks pretty minor And doubling it doesn't look like a very big deal And you know In fact if you think about What the totality of needs are They're a lot bigger than what the UN asks for If you take into account What the UN actually gets If you add to that the shortfall Against what it gets Which is another $10 billion or so You add to that known private contributions To emergency operations You very quickly get to about $36 billion a year As a possible global requirement For humanitarian assistance So you know very big numbers So who cares about Either $450 million a year Or $1 billion a year And on top of that There are even questions about Whether the surf will be doubled There are agencies within the system There are NGOs who would rather That it were not Because they see it as a zero sum game It would reduce funding for them And the surf doesn't provide any funding Direct to non-government organizations Which is another issue So Robin tell us what should be done That's where I'm coming to Now the surf itself is a good idea It's a central response mechanism And what I proposed a year ago Several months before the humanitarian summit Which was something that had been proposed In very general terms by others But I made the idea a bit more specific Was that there should be a far larger Central emergency response mechanism Not managed by the UN itself For a range of reasons One of the problems with the financing shortfall That we face Which is around $10 billion every year Just in terms of the UN ask Is its credibility That number is put together by a series Of UN agencies They simply tot up their requests And they arrive at a figure of $22 billion And they don't get all of that That should be a scandal But it's a situation that's been Tolerated now for a number of years Why is that? Well there's a credibility issue And there's also a coherence issue A lot of money actually flows to operations Outside of the UN consolidated appeal And so there's going to be a natural concern That well maybe some of that money Is meeting the needs that the UN claims Are not being met So if you were to establish A global emergency fund A global humanitarian fund That was outside the system This would give you a number of advantages It would create a sort of independence So that needs assessments That were conducted by whatever organization Is managing that fund Could be undertaken independently Of the UN or any implementing agencies And it also provides a capacity To force efficiencies through the system If you have a fund which is a financing mechanism And not an implementing agency Then it can really focus on transferring resources To where they can best be used Anywhere in the system It might be transferring resources to UN agencies It might be transferring them to NGOs Whether international or local It might be transferring them to governments Or even in some cases the private sector And it also has a capacity to deal With some of those flexibility And efficiency issues as well And I won't go into that at the moment So what this really is Is it's akin to the global fund model The global fund for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria This is an entirely new organization It's established outside the UN system But it funnels money into that system But also direct to governments And other organizations as needed So that's the basic concept I think, as Jamie said to me earlier There are some political economy issues But we have seen a number of these funds Created in recent years The global fund that I just mentioned We've had GAVI We've had the Green Climate Fund And we now have a global fund for education So we've had examples Where political momentum has been created So I do believe that it's possible For this to happen And the last point is that these funds Because of the way they raise money Have a real capacity to raise additional money It's not just about doing business more efficiently If you have a three-year replenishment process Which is run in a very high-profile fashion With high-level political leadership You have the capacity to actually raise Vastly larger sums and grow the pie And, you know, as Stephen said earlier About 11% of AIDS at the moment Is allocated to humanitarian assistance And in order to meet that sort of 36 billion dollar need You would either have to take an 18% bite From the existing pie Or you would have to grow the pie By around 12 billion dollars And I think a global humanitarian fund Has more of a capacity to grow the pie Great, you know, I find the idea convincing I'm sure other panellists have views on it But we're going to go and take some questions now And then I'll invite the other panellists As you respond to the questions Also respond to any other points That have been raised That you haven't had a chance to So we've still got 10 minutes Please ask a question We'll surrender the microphones There are some lapel, Mike Hi, can I start? Hi, I'm Anjana from UTS Thanks, James Come to me on your list of fans If you have any Because you've highlighted localization So glad you've done that Following the Humanitarian Summit I come from Nepal And we've experienced this a lot During their recent earthquakes And I think it's very important to understand And implement a strategy That allows local leaders And local NGOs to work very closely With the international donor organizations Because the challenge that we have faced Is even after being in the grassroots For 25 years These local organizations Are not considered capable of implementing Change and implementing crisis In the grassroots Which is quite challenging Because the word, the term aid itself Is quite depending You know, it kind of gives a notion That we have to depend on someone So that's kind of another crisis For local leaders to become independent But what we have learned Is that a lot of donor organizations Try to bring different NGOs Into coalition In working and implementing Humanitarian relief on the grassroots So I think it's a very good idea To have a research around Is coalition an answer In these circumstances Is it work? Yes So a question for Robin So one of the issues that we see Over and over again In terms of humanitarian responses The lack of coordination And effective collaboration Between the various partners Whether it be NGOs, governments And UN agencies So with regard to the global fund What are your thoughts as to How to deal with the competition And make it I mean the existing competition Is as bad as it could be already So how would the global fund deal with That risk and mitigate it Thank you Beth Eggleston from Humanitarian Advisory Group How can we get humanitarian actors How do we increase their appetite for risk As well as those who fund them Thank you Alistair McKenzie Formerly of AusAid I was interested in Robin Davies Question about the circumstances where Aid allocation could infringe International humanitarian law And Phoebe's response About the importance of knowing legal frameworks Last week I responded to a Facebook post From a friend in Zimbabwe who said There's been another instance of Government interference with the Distribution of food aid Donors are holding up a rotten regime They're sustaining a rotten regime They are very hard hitting comments It's an age old situation But I find it difficult to see How international humanitarian law can really work In that sort of position And I wonder if any on the panel have views About whether new ways of delivery Or other reforms might actually Throw that question into abeyance Adam, this is a question for you My name is Anu Mankur I'm the Akvitsa Kondi To the Australian Civil Military Centre So I'm really interested in Your thoughts around Yes, I agree that they may be a role For the military in humanitarian crisis But does your research also look at How military needs to collaborate With civil society organisations? Ebola might be a unique crisis But very often civil society organisations Are on the ground far longer And will continue to be on the ground Far longer than the military is So are you also looking at those Points of collaboration and the tensions Where you might have different mandates But you're trying to address the same issue All right, we are running out of time So what we'll do now is go back to the panel One last time We'll start with Robin Just work our way around This is your chance to respond to any questions Any other comments from other panellists Make your very final brief remarks Robin Sure, so just to pick up on the question About competition and how a global financing mechanism Might help with that Or at least not worsen the situation I mean, I think in a couple of ways One as I said is that an institution That is purely a financing institution Does have a capacity to force some change Through the system by choosing where it puts its money So if it feels that the primary problem In country X is food WFP is likely to receive a lot more money In other agencies perhaps less Which simply reduces their capacity to compete Because they're less well resourced But I guess the other thing that it does Is if the money is going into a central mechanism Rather than directly to agencies That have very distinct rigid mandates You don't have such an element of supply-driven assistance Which we talked about earlier You don't end up with food or shelter Just because that agency got the funds from the donor So I think there's two ways in which it helps Yeah, that's a great question I wish it was so easy to answer Yeah, from my perspective, it's a range of things Of course cultural changes are required Principally, you know, organizations Need to set their own benchmarks I mean, they know their own capacities What they're capable of Or what they could potentially build on In order to be able to improve I think one thing for me Is that there just needs to be Acknowledgements and recognition From level of donor down to organization That we need at least among some core key agencies We need to focus on this as a specific expertise And it's not every organization That should be trying to assume High-risk management practices Or risk mitigation strategies It takes a long time It requires experience You know, you only build that into an organization Systematically and culturally over time But I think looking at some of the things That are preventing that happening Or making that more challenging And for me, that's the shift Towards more sort of a standard operating procedure Approach more towards, you know, as we've talked about This kind of one size fits all System approach in context Which we see consistently failing If you look at where humanitarian action Is being successful It's through adopting state avoidance practices Not through being guided by States, UN and systems In how you manage negotiated access Taking away the threat that by Negotiating with undesirables People who are on terrorist lists As an essential component of negotiating Taking away the threat somehow That your organization could be put under For these kinds of practices Absolutely essential And funding and investing in this Because it doesn't match an efficiency agenda It's heavily costly It takes a lot of money and time And patience And allowing for that And incorporating that as an agenda In and of itself into approaches In specific contexts Acknowledging that that would be A prerequisite to work in Somalia A prerequisite in kind of a short list Of context And it wouldn't be a surprise to see On a concept paper An investment in this area To support building, you know, that particular Capacity in that particular area For that organization But I don't think it's for everyone I think we need to focus on the organizations That have that Longevity, that internal capacity Who, if enabled, could perhaps regain Some of those skills Phoebe Thanks very much I'll take the curly aid and law question Which I think is and remains One of the big dilemmas So, and I don't really have an answer For it, to be honest When you think about the propping up A regime or delivering aid Or life and a humanitarian consequence Of not delivering aid And what that might look like And these trade-offs They're big, big kind of moral trade-offs So, I suppose from my point of view The most important thing is And, you know, it came out of the world Humanitarian Summit Is strengthening that global legal system Strengthening the rule of law Encouraging people to adhere To the laws that exist Which are generally speaking pretty good And holding people accountable And calling out violations And just being consistent And persistent in doing this Because if we give in to Not having a rule-based world Then everything goes to, you know Hell in a hand basket, really So, that's my only real answer I can't I wouldn't be advocating for a withdrawal Of aid at the expense of massive loss Of human life I think that that's too devastating So, the political solution has to be found To the humanitarian problem Jamie, I'll just respond to the question Nepal, and then I'll just come back On Robin's issue on the fund Look, I think one of the biggest frustrations I've seen in the past I think we're getting better at this But it's particularly in our response To a sudden onset crisis We have a very supply-driven approach Just like a light We either don't request Or the country doesn't request Institutional assistance Or they turn the light on And it just piles in Take Nepal, I think it was 100 medical teams It was over 70 urban search and rescue teams Most of them did very little to nothing And to be frank, at a time When we're facing shortfalls of funding Yeah, we can't afford to have That sort of resource mix So my view is we need to have A much more fit-for-purpose approach Where you've got countries understand What is available within their region They're not just saying we're requesting At their assistance, but we want This medical team, this engineering And this logistical capability And they're pulling in as they need And local organisations And that are part of shaping That sort of response And it's a graduated move out So I think this is a shift that we need To be looking at We're driving at the moment in the Pacific How we work with our Pacific partners Robin, just on the fund I mean, look, I think it's fantastic You put that out And to be frank, there was cheese around That there's some thinking being put out Put on this I, you know, as I said to you I mean, the reasons I think it's fantastic Give highlighted, but two that I would put there Is the funding models at the moment Like the surf is way over-oriented Towards sudden onset crises People will give money The public will give money If God's responsible The public won't give money If man's responsible And so, you know, we need to be freeing up We need to be mobilising More public funding for the sudden onset crisis And the surf at the moment Is two-thirds going to that So two-thirds that half a billion is going to that Just because of how the resolution was established So I'm somewhat at the moment Against a doubling of the surf Unless it changes about the parameters So I think the fund allows a much more sort of And the second reason I'm a big fan of it I think is because it drives away That point you just said Which is it puts incentives in place In terms of developing funding Based on what's needed Rather than agencies' own funding appeals And assessments being driven from that The reasons why I fear it's not going to work Is, and I won't go, for speed I'll go a bit Branding, unfortunately, you know Governments want branding acknowledgement And will need to deal with how do we get that? It's a real issue, as you know as well as I do Secondly, agencies, you will not get support You won't get support from when the agency is themselves So there has to be a driver Who's going to drive this? Maybe a couple of donors But I wouldn't say at the moment As a collective view on that You won't get the UN agencies pushing on this Because for them it's a threat, potentially And the final thing, as me as a donor Is two things One, there is a view that we want to have some decision About how funding is going And this becomes more difficult If we're putting a large amount of our money Into that fund And the final bid is if I was to achieve it I'd need to put all the core funding Out of War Food Program, UNICEF, UNHCR, OCHE Or a lot of it and put it into that fund Because at the moment I don't see us Doubling our humanitarian spend in the near future So it's about reorientating that And to get to that There's a lot of political economy Economic issues around it So I'm not what I want to call cold water on it Because I think it's a fantastic idea And we need it if we're going to get the changes In the incentives of how we fund things But there's some If it's going to happen I'm not sure who the champions on this are At the moment within the system And that's the issue we'd need to work through Great, thanks Jamie Adam, last word Last word, okay, very quickly Because everyone wants afternoon tea Sustainability of military involvement Has always been an issue And it's recognized on both sides I think one of the key problems though That we still seem to be confronting Which I still sort of whack my head Against a brick wall against Is the lack of understanding on both sides And it's not just the military here That's responsible It's also the humanitarian community And the NGOs They don't understand the military I feel a little uncomfortable speaking On behalf of MSF When there's an MSF representative on the panel But MSF when they produced their report After the Ebola outbreak Actually sort of said Like this was one of our problems We expected that the military Would have this biological capacity To respond to the crisis And what we discovered was that they don't And the reality was is that That was a capacity that A lot of militaries were training for Back in the 1990s And beforehand during the Cold War When biological warfare was considered a real risk It's no longer considered a real risk And 20 years later That capacity is no longer there Our Australian Defence Force Our capabilities to send personnel To West Africa to help with this Was almost nonexistent We have four C-17s To in order to get people over there And back again We would have had to have fitted One of these airplanes out And given the length of distances And all the rest of it It would have entailed Something like three different lots of crews And it basically would have taken An entire C-17 out of commission And there were other things going on at the time We don't have the capacity Even in Australia to sort of respond To these types of things And the attitude of the military personnel in Australia Is we don't really want to get involved in that From my experience of talking with them So I think there's a lot of work That needs to be done on both sides Of getting these different communities To actually understand each other And to be prepared To sit down and have that conversation And unfortunately we're still not there yet Alright thank you Adam Well we are out of time And I'm sure you'll agree with me That was a great discussion I really want to thank the panellists For bringing their expertise And if only Q&A was as good as this Afternoon tea New powerpoint I think there's only one powerpoint In the case of Steve So any that get I would think it's off the screen Well it was awesome That I turned it back on Yeah you alright? I would shut down Okay I'd shut down the system And start again Are we still talking about it? Yeah Yep We still got time Ready to tea break Four minutes left Just to stay positive Oh is this a thing to see? But is the actual computer Well that's yeah that's all done The only one I think you can shut it down I think using a laptop is best Are you doing your presentation? Yeah Yeah Now it's a laptop Okay how do you start it? Is it good? It'll be done really quickly Don't worry Kahala Video Is it video mode? Yep To the actual To the top of the To the top of the To the top of the Not far up So is that working? Video I'm in the middle of the screen So I normally use the theater You see the option And now the screen just turns blue And turns video And you can't fix it And it's like it's normally done Whatever it is like normal we do But now the image is going to video Like in a blue screen And you can't get it fixed We're gonna start the session now Where could be coding the program? It's just video It's just video It's just video It's just It's just giving me a blue screen This is video On the projector We did We did the system shutdown We did this And like a blue screen This is just super specific That would be Go to some set down or You said try and mobile Say some set down Try to set down everything Yeah Yeah Okay Thank you very much I'm sorry about the delay Partly technical Partly cognitive In terms of what time this actually starts But it's the last session of the conference So I'm sure you'll all be delighted To stay late into the evening Discussing all of the nuances with us as we go So my name is Debbie Isser And I am a lead governance specialist At the World Bank Based in Washington D.C. I've spent a fair amount of time In this region working with the team Several of whom are here On what we call the justice for the poor program And we're gonna hear From two of those projects But I'm also here in another capacity Which is as part of the team That wrote the World Development Report 2017 On governance and the law We're gonna try to bring these strands together So this session Beyond capacity building Sort of implies that there are some issues Around the way we approach Justice reform As capacity building projects And we try to bring together in this session A few important critiques around justice reform Specifically, but these are very similar critiques That we've heard of around governance And development more broadly So two of those are one The need to focus on function over form The critique goes that often what happens Is we look at the deficits and dysfunctions And the systems in the countries in which we're working What's wrong with them How do they veer from what we want them to look like And then we focus on fixing them Towards this best practice And there's been an awful lot of critique That rather than trying to get them Up to certain kinds of forms Trying to understand the functions that they play Given the context A second common critique Is the need to think and work politically And this comes in all kinds of varieties With literally a group called Thinking Working Politically DFID has looked at politically smart Locally led initiatives There's something called doing development differently Problem driven iterative adaptation There's a whole slew of acronyms out there All of which are trying to grapple with the fact That development practitioners have come slow To realize what everybody else knows intuitively Which is that all development is really political That development is a process No matter what you're doing in development That inherently creates winners Creates losers and is a contested process So power, politics These things are inherent to all aspects of development So these groups are trying to figure out Well, how do we do this What do we do about that And maybe the most common acronym around this PDIA Ends up focusing very much on process That we look at the process Through which we work in these kinds of places How do we work iteratively How do we avoid getting ourselves stuck In certain kinds of log frames And some of the critiques coming out about that now Is that it's kind of divorced the process from the content So what I want to try to do is bring some insights From the World Development Report Which I think tries to provide a framework That helps link some of these pieces together So deepening the way we understand linkages Between rules, power, politics, functions And ultimately outcomes So this is the one slide I just want to talk you through I'm sorry I have to do this Because we are just now launching the WDR 2017 So this is an opportunity to evangelize a little bit But this trying to break it down Literally into a one minute presentation This slide shows kind of the conceptual framework That is motivating the report So the first thing that's important to know Is what the report means by governance So governance first of all is not the same thing as government Governance is also not the same thing As a set of business lines That usually populate governance projects Like public financial management Or civil service reform Or justice reform But governance rather it's a process It's the process by which actors Those actors may be state actors They may be non-state actors Bargain over policies and their implementation So it's basically the process through which actors Are bargaining over the way rights Resources and responsibilities are allocated and distributed So important to that as I said Who those actors are They could be state They could be non-state Depending on the issue that you're talking about They could be a range of different kinds of coalitions Or different actors Whoever has the power Either de jure or de facto To be in the process of decision making The second important point is that The way the places those that Bargaining and decision making Happens is what we call the policy arena So the middle circle here And this is sort of a virtual concept There isn't a single policy arena If you were to think purely de jure You might say often it's the parliament Where that's where you're supposed to bargain Over different laws and policies But in reality depending on what the issue is That policy arena might be an informal place Where back room deals are made The policy arena might be sort of a hybrid institution It might be at different scales The real decisions might be made at a transnational level Or at a national level or at a local level So the idea of the policy arena is just that It's where it is that the actors with the power Are making decisions over certain kinds of things So now looking at the right side To conceptualizing this as a two level gain So on the right side here we have development outcomes And the outcome game is basically taking this policy arena As a given and then you play around here With policies, forms, different kinds of interventions Laws to try to get better outcomes Now in order to one of the things That I'm not going to go into this in detail But the report tries to look at What actually connects policies to outcomes And we argue there's these three C's That basically what policies need to functionally be able To do in order to deliver outcomes Is they need to provide credible commitment They need to enhance coordination And they need to enhance cooperation Now the problem is we can play around in this space And we see that we're not exactly getting What we want in the outcome sometimes And the reason for that is because Our menu of implementable opportunities here Is constrained by the policy arena to start with So we need to kind of look over at the other side At the left side around the rules game So what the rules game shows us is the way That the policy arena is structured Who's in there? What are the rules formal and informal That are governing the space in which policies are happening So the report points to three ways That the nature of the policy arena might be skewed With power asymmetries that in turn Then really constrain the ability to get to outcomes So this depends on who's in there What are their incentives? What are their interests? What are the rules of decision making? And what we see in a lot of places is that There's a big power asymmetry in there And it manifests in terms of exclusion In terms of capture In terms of clantilism And those are things that then will really constrain You come in with a form that you think is the right form The best practice and you realize that Gee, because of this nature of the policy arena We're not able to get to those outcomes Because it's not able to perform the functions Of commitment coordination and cooperation Because of the nature of the policy arena It's inherently exclusive It's going to exclude certain people It's inherently clientelistic Which means it's going to be favoring Certain kinds of private goods for certain kinds of people As opposed to long-term investment public goods Or it's captured by certain kinds of interests And not serving the needs of others So what this tells us is If you really want to change the outcomes You have to play the rules game You have to engage with the policy arena And deal with this left side And it's only through there that you start changing The incentives in the policy arena The interests and the players and the rules of the game That might then increase the menu of Implementable policies that come out on the other side One final thing I want to say about this And then I'll introduce the other speakers Is these arrows that you see Are indicative of recursivity So what's happening here This is highly endogenous framework So the policy arena in the middle of here Is determined by rules Those rules are formal and informal Which in turn determine kind of Who's in power and who's not At the same time development outcomes over here May also end up privileging certain kinds of people And feeding back into Who has de facto power in the policy arena So this keeps going So you can say, well the policy arena Is going to produce certain kind of outcomes It may be persistence So to the extent that you have deeply entrenched Capture exclusion, clientelism You might, the outcomes in turn Are only privileging certain people And the feedback loop is coming in with persistence Or you could say, well actually If you can get to an outcome that shifts Who has de facto power or resources Then that can potentially change the policy arena And the policy arena may then change The rules of the game about itself In terms of who's in Who's out What are the rules And it comes back through there So I know this is very abstract But I can be abstract Because we now have three specific case studies They're going to talk about this So the first one, Lisa Denny Affiliated with ODI in London Is going to talk about Myanmar And focusing really kind of on this first stage Of trying to play the outcome game And realizing that there are some constraints In the rules game But what happens when you're kind of stuck here And then secondly We're going to have David Craig With the World Bank talking about Papa New Guinea Which takes the framework a bit further Into examining A few case studies That illustrate just how it is that the rules game Really play an influence on the dynamics of Justice and service delivery And what are some of the questions that arise From that and dilemmas around possible interventions And then finally Doug Porter Also from the World Bank Is going to talk about Solomon Islands Where our engagement has gone a little bit deeper And is a little bit further ahead Trying to actually design an intervention That engages with the full dynamic of the circle So with that, Lisa All right, I'll just get started while we're setting that up So the research I'm going to talk about today Is drawn from, sorry I didn't realize I need to stay close to this So the research that I'm going to talk a bit about Is drawn from a project that I led In Myanmar for a program called My Justice Which is a four year EU funded justice program That's just getting underway Being implemented by the British Council The research was commissioned during their inception phase And it was trying to provide sort of information On what kinds of disputes and injustices People faced at the local level And how they went about resolving them So I'm basically going to sort of complicate some of our ideas About justice programming And why standard approaches that we often rely on Don't tend to connect with these realities And thankfully some of the other panelists Are going to talk a bit more about what we can do about that So our aim in the research was to try and build This local understanding And to try and map the pathways that people use To resolve their disputes So we spent five weeks in two different locations In Myanmar, in Yangon region And then in Mon State Conducting focus groups and interviews With men and women within the community separately With community leaders, political leaders, religious leaders Civil society organizations, trade unions And then also trying to speak with a number of minority groups So religious and ethnic minorities LGBTQ communities And also with sex workers Who are currently sort of criminalized within Myanmar So there's three headlines that I want to talk through today That are really about this issue of paying attention To functions and not to form So the first is there's no consensus On what justice means in Myanmar And that makes international efforts to sort of Strengthen justice Potentially difficult Second given this There's a need to understand the politics That shape those different understandings of justice And thirdly, there's no single pathway to justice So the providers that exist are hybrid And people move between them in different ways Which means that international programming Also can't really fall back on state building approaches So the first point There's no consensus on what justice means The Myanmar context was a particularly challenging context I found in which to research justice issues So we encountered resistance from community members To talking about sort of disputes and injustices that they faced In a lot of places we went people said There are no disputes or injustices here Now some of that stems from the usual stuff of You know people not wanting to talk to outsiders About sensitive issues Wanting to present you know a positive image of the community But it also highlights that many of the justice issues That we sought to discuss Weren't actually conceived of in that language As injustices or disputes By those people who are experiencing them So a lot of people would say You know there's no injustices or disputes here And yet later in conversation You know it would come up that there were widespread Experiences of domestic violence Debt and land disputes and these sorts of things So this highlights how there's not a universal understanding Or agreement on what we're talking about When we talk about justice And when we did get to the existence Of sort of real disputes or injustices As we might term them These weren't necessarily understood that way by communities So for instance we talked a lot with women About issues of domestic violence But that actually came up through conversation About the effects of alcoholism in the home for instance Similarly we talked a lot with minority religious And ethnic groups about the inability to get Identity documentation from the government But again that wasn't talked about As an issue of discrimination As I might think of it It was talked about as an administrative Or a bureaucratic hurdle and process So when we ask people about what justice Is a concept sort of meant to them We heard a wide range of answers So for instance we heard you know Justice is about coming to peace With issues yourself internally Justice is about law and order Justice is about two sides reaching an agreement And probably the most common one we heard Which is where the title of the report And my presentation comes from Is justice is about making big cases small And small cases disappear So basically justice is about Making issues go away So this diversity of meanings Attributed to justice And the tendency not to view What we might think of as justice issues In that way complicates efforts then By the international community To strengthen or reform justice Because there's sort of no agreed Starting point of what we're talking about So the second point then Is that in order to make sense Of these multiple understandings of justice We need to understand how politics shapes These different understandings So that any kind of assistance that is provided Is contextually and politically aware So for instance one factor shaping Understandings of justice in Myanmar Is the political history of the country So under the military government Justice was formally understood at least In a very sort of top down law and order way Focused on stability Enforcement of laws to protect the peace So reporting disputes in that context Was seen as a real sort of a front To social order and hierarchy And as a sort of disruption of the status quo Justice has also been thought of traditionally As criminal justice As something that's applicable to criminals And to people who've done something wrong Not to law abiding citizens So when we spoke with women for instance And asked them about their perceptions of the police One of the things they often said to us is Well we don't know anything about the police Because we're a law abiding citizens The only people who know about the police Are criminals So this law and order approach to justice Also means that the rights protection functions Of justice that we might think of Are not necessarily associated with the term And haven't been emphasized And there's therefore not a sense of the law As an avenue for protecting rights Or asserting rights It's rather about punishing wrongdoing Another influential factor has been The historic and continued politicization Of the judiciary So the police and the courts Are the least trusted institutions in the country And as a result people don't view the services That are sort of attached to those institutions With positive connotations And so there's something to be avoided Rather than embraced And finally there's also important Socio-religious dimensions That shape people's understandings Of justice issues So there's a sense in which injustices Or disputes are understood as calmer As something that people should endure And resolve within themselves And not report to sort of External third party providers And this is partly because Understanding sort of enduring injustice Is seen as a payment for past life debts If you go and report an issue to somebody You're not paying off that past life debt And so that will then accrue And bring worse calmer in future In the same way people who are seen To have harmed somebody Or committed a wrong against somebody It's assumed that their own calmer Will lead to some sort of difficulty For them in future life And again that sort of means That you don't have to bother reporting Because fortune and calmer Is already going to deal with them So what this means is that People's personal experiences of injustice Are thought of as something that sort of Almost deserved an inevitable consequence of fortune That has to be endured Rather than something to be sort of externally reported And resolved And that can manifest in quite a low demand For justice as a result So we did end up hearing about a range Of what we might think of as disputes Or injustices We heard about issues related to discrimination Land, debt disputes Labor disputes Violence against women and girls Drugs and then sort of public order issues Of theft, murder But we didn't get to any of these issues Necessarily by talking about justice They were things that came up In other ways of conversation So the third point then Is that in addition to there being No clear consensus on what justice means There's also no single pathway to resolution So dispute resolution providers are hybrid And people sort of make decisions About how to move between them Based on a range of often identity factors So when we first asked people about How they went about resolving a dispute There was initially quite a clear pathway That emerged So by far the most common response People gave was to not report This depended on the issue a little bit So cases of murder and child rape For instance were seen as things That would routinely be reported But other cases, not the case Where people do report The preference was routinely for resolving issues At the lowest level possible So that might be at the household level At the neighborhood level Or perhaps at the village level Very few disputes would ever go Beyond the village level And for women in particular They had virtually no experience Of or engagement with the formal justice system So the police and the court system So interestingly what people described to us As the sort of agreed process Was very consistent across Quite different parts of the country And this is what it looked like So basically you have your experience Of a dispute or injustice A number of people as we say Don't report at all If people do report They go to this first group Which we refer to as sort of justice brokers So these aren't people who adjudicate Or arbitrate on a matter themselves But they're kind of the people That you'll go to to share an experience With often all they're doing Is providing sort of a listening ear They might give you some advice But the matter generally won't go any further In some cases those people will say Actually I think we need to report this Which generally goes to the ward Or village tract administrator That's the person who is meant to mediate Although in many cases we find they also adjudicate And then from there it can go up through The formal justice system Starting with the police and onwards So we were very surprised of course That there was this sort of consistency Across the places we were looking at So we then sort of ask people Okay so this is what you're meant to do When you resolve a dispute What about what you've actually done When you face a particular dispute How have you gone about doing it And when we ask that A much more complicated picture started to emerge So then when we get this sort of Extensive people's experiences We start to see the plurality Of the range of providers much more So you have also you still keep All these brokers that were there before You have the administrators You have the police and the courts But you also have the ethnic armed group courts You have the border guard forces You have members of parliament You have trade unions You have religious leaders Thanks And so here again the preference is always For resolving things at the lowest level possible And that means that there's generally very little appetite For getting to any of the sort of formal justice providers That are saying the government courts Or even potentially the ethnic armed group courts Although there's some variation there So what influences people's decisions About how to navigate this map First of all people said to us That the main thing that drove their decisions About where to go was a sense of custom Of what's the agreed process for doing things So the pull of the usual way of doing things is very strong And that could even sort of be If people didn't trust particular providers So there were cases where for instance People didn't trust their local administrator But they would go to them Because that was the agreed process And what you were meant to do People also noted that you'd go to different providers For different kinds of disputes So for instance the trade unions You would sort of go to specifically for labor disputes And then there were also considerations Around the seriousness of the consequences Of a dispute So if there was damage to property Or a person for instance Then you'd be more likely to report Slightly higher up the hierarchy Than necessarily at the beginning But diving deeper One of the things that we found Was the most common factor In determining where people went Was related to sort of trust in And shared identity with a justice provider So if you're an ethnic minority Living in a contested area for instance You're much more likely to use The ethnic armed group courts Muslims and Hindus similarly Were much more likely to use religious leaders Than they were perhaps the administrator system People also talked about The perceived effectiveness Of a provider mattering So again people might actually trust Ethnic armed groups more But if they lived in an area Where they felt that actually The ward administrator was the person Who could make a binding decision Then they might say Well actually we'd really prefer Go to the ethnic armed group court But unfortunately we think That we have to go to this person And then after that There are a range of accessibility issues That come up So the usual things we think about In terms of geographic accessibility Affordability Linguistic familiarity But these things actually kind of came After a lot of these other considerations Which is interesting Because so often in programming We focus on a lot of those accessibility issues The only people who appeared To factor in issues or considerations Of fairness into their decision making Were groups who were discriminated against So women who felt that they couldn't Get a fair hearing against men Religious minorities Muslims and Hindus Who felt that they couldn't get a fair hearing Vis-a-vis Buddhists And sex workers Who felt that their criminalized lifestyles Meant that they wouldn't get a fair hearing Against anybody else So unfortunately these considerations Of fairness didn't lead people To sort of pick particular providers Over others It actually acted to force people Out of the justice system entirely They basically felt that there was no provider Through which they could get a fair outcome And so it would simply choose Not to report at all And we saw the least level Of reporting amongst those discriminated groups So this much more complicated picture Means that there is a whole universe Of dispute resolution practices That international programming has to grapple with It also means that it can't fall back On state-centric approaches But has to find ways of understanding this plurality If it's to be relevant to people's lived experiences Recognizing when and why people rely On these different resolution providers So where does this leave International sort of rule of law or justice programs? As I said at the beginning Thankfully some of my colleagues Are a little bit further down the line In terms of thinking about what this looks like In terms of programming But I'll just mention three things That we sort of spoke with this program About in terms of shaping How they're going to undertake activities So the first is that Usual approaches like having campaigns To promote knowledge of the law Legal processes that are available Helping to people to access the formal justice system Through things like legal aid and so on Those are all well and good But if the laws and legal processes Just reinforce a kind of law and order Approach to justice Or if they help people access a justice system That's inherently discriminatory And leads to people The highest bidder is sort of winning Then it's not particularly transformational While it's obvious that there are low levels Of understanding of justice As we might think of it And the law And this might suggest that we need To improve knowledge and awareness of rights There's a need for caution In how we go about doing this Because concepts of justice in Myanmar Are informed by this sort of strong law and order connotation And sort of rub up against these ideas Of the importance of dealing with problems internally If we simply go around sort of raising awareness Of justice and the law There's a danger that we actually reinforce Those ideas of justice Rather than sort of critically engaging with them And opening up discussions And that I think potentially risks doing harm So we suggest a better place to start Rather than sort of going in and trying to sort of Talk about the importance of justice and the law Is actually to start by brokering local conversations About the meaning of justice And sorry, that threw me off in it in a moment About the meaning of justice And what role it can play in society The second point, and I'll just close on this one Is that many of our access to justice tools Have emerged from this kind of state building discourse Mainly from post-conflict contexts Often in African contexts And the aim in a lot of those places, rightly or wrongly Has been on improving the state delivery of justice And there's been some attempts perhaps to integrate Or harmonize other forms of law But it's primarily about state provision Myanmar is not a state building context It's a contested state context And any justice programming needs to make sure That it engages with the equally contested ideas Of justice that go along with that And I think here donors need to be aware That their decisions about who to engage with In programming, who not to engage with Are deeply political And have ramifications for the ongoing political negotiations That are still playing out in Myanmar So I'll leave it there because I realize I'm out of time And look forward to discussion afterwards Thanks But you just, which one is it? Okay, okay Lovely Well, some of you are trying to think about There's a little doubt in the polls And the doubt that there is a way of doing that Is there a way to do it or a order? Yes, so basically what you have If you're in my position is that you have a whole toolbox Or toy box or whatever it is of ideas And things that you need to learn to think with And so that's what my little effort this afternoon Is somewhat towards I'm going to take a framework of questionings That we've had used in J4P work Justice for the poor, the World Bank program in the past And try to make that speak a little bit To the kinds of issues that come up in the WDR 2017 Especially the double loop diagram that Debbie Put up earlier on I've spent a lot of time thinking about institutions And I recognize that this particular diagram I think has got some legs It's going to be well worth learning How to think with this diagram And to analyze problems in terms of that I think it's going to be much more useful For example than the old kind of triangle diagram That said there's a short and a long route To good service delivery One was a direct kind of process Between the citizen and the services And another one went via the governance reforms That changed the whole system This double loop system is really interesting And I hope to show you a little bit Of how we might be able to use this in a couple of ways One to do some analysis of situations One to look at, see a particular local situation Through this lens And secondly to kind of make some diagnostic decisions About where would you engage What would be the kinds of context That this analysis would make you choose To engage with or not And to do that I'm going to take you To a couple of places very quickly In Papua New Guinea Which are sites of law and justice Urban safety and security So there's a justice thematic That runs through all of the presentations today And these are sites that are seen as so insecure That basically aid agencies can't go in there Often because they're sites of profound institutional deficit The police don't go in there They're unstable places, unsafe places They're ruled by rogues and gangs And there aren't local capabilities That you might be able to build on in these contexts So quickly and Debbie and others You'll recognize some of the things in here They may have a slightly different usage Than is officially described But basically this idea in the WDR You have to focus on the functions And not the forms themselves And we're looking at the function here Of providing safety and security In these particular contexts Markets and local settlements Inside Papua New Guinea The analysis that we're used to doing We look at the underlying conditions In terms of the political economy Who's got power in these situations And who hasn't Who are the dominant people Who are the marginal people What's there institutionally What's actually working in those contexts What are the rules that are working there What is the rules game that's there And how does it work And then how does the rules How does the particular rules that are there How does that enable a good kind of Exchanges within the policy arena That thing in the middle Where the rules are applied And negotiated within Pats within commitments Within coordination and cooperation Kinds of arrangements And are those arrangements That emerge in that middle bit Are they kind of inclusive and adaptive And enable new entrants And other people to come in and contest them Or are they about exclusion And about capture and clientilism So these are core elements Some of you will be familiar with the 2017 WDR's core analysis Who was actually at the event on Tuesday night, the launch Okay, just okay Well, I'll bear that in mind Okay, and then finally What's the outcome What's the outcome game in these situations And then who are they good for And then given that kind of analysis Where should agencies choose to engage You've got a choice about that And this analysis can help you make that choice Okay, so first of all, we'll go to a market In Sabahma and Papua New Guinea Sabahma is a famous place in Papua New Guinea It's been known for a long time As at a very notorious site of Urban difficulty It's one of the famous settlements In Papua New Guinea right alongside Calgary Which was the original site of the emergence Of rascal gangs in Papua New Guinea's urban context And Sabahma had a market And this is a picture of the Sabahma market in 2011 Every at 5 p.m. every day That market is incredibly heavily subscribed To thousands of people in there Purchasing essentially Beetle nut and cigarettes But a whole lot of other things that go along with that So this was a notorious site And a lot of Clients of law and order issues associated with that Holdups on the road here outside People using the market as a place to come and go from In terms of In terms of harassing people And relieving them of their possessions And also the harassment of the woman vendors who are there So after quite a dramatic intervention Run by the Essentially by the MP Out of a particular institutional modality that he had We had a dramatic transformation in this context And that transformation has persisted I was there late last week And in that context you would see Not just a sort of an ordered situation Involving local and safe situation Involving local sellers But also the people who sold the beetle nut And who were seen as the main problematic People had been brought back into that site And they were able to trade safely too In this context Which was a real transformation over time So can we think about that within a A bit more of an institutional and WDR kind of framework Forgive the number of words on this slide There might speaking notes But So one of the crucial things in these contexts That the WDR argues for is that you need to be able to Institutions that are chosen need to be able to adapt They need to be able to move and change and learn As the situation moves and changes around them And in this situation you had a local MP Who was prepared to take on this issue And challenge of security in this context In a new kind of way And he's using a modality that people in Papua New Guinea Are kind of scared about too He's using a thing called the DSIP Or District Services Improvement Program money Which is basically it's a constituency grant Some people call it a slush fund that the MP gets to use And MPs are notorious for using these slush funds To on their own pet projects And the thinking is that they're distributing it to their constituencies They don't combine with the province They don't combine with other people to make these things happen The MP in this case was able to do some quite remarkable things I think in terms of making things coordinate And making this DSIP funding arrangement work for him So what he did is he got hold of the control over the market management situation And took control of the Moresby Marketing Board And brought that in under his DDA So he's got incredible executive flexibility to do that Using this particular institutional modality Using this particular kind of rule situation And then what he did is he got involved with the local leadership So local leadership were there These are people who are church leaders Who are former sporting leaders Who are people who have some background in law and justice Perhaps they may have been a policeman, a community policeman in that context They may be a church leader They may be a village court magistrate And he recruited all of these people Under this DDA arrangement And on very, very tight contracts Really a kind of, you know, patronized them And brought them into the market situation So that they were making a contribution To the governing and safety of the market People came to the market They saw these people, they were there And their behavior improved accordingly They knew that their activities would be monitored And they would be seen by the people who were there And that had an effect on them In terms of the way they acted in those contexts So this is an example of how the MP Chose in that situation to engage And to take advantage of the opportunities And to adapt them in that kind of context And he learned as he went along So initially what happened is he chucked all of the Buai sellers, the Beedlenut sellers out onto the street Where they sat across the street Things were quite safe and secure inside the market The function of safety and security inside the concession Of the market was maintained But outside the market where half of the people Who lived in the market and worked in the market So worked in the market were trading Was really unsafe and was subject to a rating by the police Subsequently he's let them back into the market And that's really improved the market And you've got a new kind of situation now Where the market is economically more viable But it's also safe in that kind of context So you could be critical about this You could be critical about the way that he engaged these people He's a little bit clientelist in the way he engaged the leaders But basically he managed to adapt And produce a capable enough modality of security And stability within this market context In the long term there may be some challenges And that he may not be around forever But so far it's sustained And it'll be interesting to see what happens next Now, this is a context of law and justice That I've been spending quite a lot of time in Both in Port Moresby and in L.A. It involves a particular rule or institutional form of mediation Which is performed within a, if you like, a policy arena Or a central kind of situation Where cases are heard and by local courts That are composed of, again, of various local leaders Drawn from across the communities And they are generally able to produce outcomes Which are pretty good With some caveats that we'll talk about in a minute So the mediation processes are quite simple In the sense that they involve someone who's been chosen And trusted as a mediator This is somebody who, you know, people can choose who they go to In a Papua New Guinea settlement context So they'll only go to people who deliver reliable kinds of results In different ways And it's one of those, you know, good systems, I think Where a good person can get to the top But they also find expression in this thing called the committee Right? And the committee is Where a whole lot of different leaders get together And they're mainly men up to now There's a couple of women involved in this particular committee situation here In lay But they bring together the authority of the different ethnic groups They form a pact Yeah, they form a, with multiple leaders from different ethnic arrangements And together they deliberate on cases and come up with solutions Which generally kind of help with, I've done, I'm running out of time So I'll speak quickly through this So broadly, because this system, you know, it enables new leaders to emerge And become part of these committees Or become part of these court structures It does adapt It adapts, if a new ethnic group turns up within a settlement They can be included in that situation And even in the course of a particular hearing You'll see new voices and new leaders emerging into this context To express their view and to be heard So it's a forum where they can enter And where they can change the way these arrangements work At the same time, they come up with a kind of a pact Between them And if you're a woman And typically the cases are brought to these committees And these village courts are mostly brought by women They're mainly related to family situations Yeah, can be a little bit daunting This is the patriarchy here And woman committee members are only just beginning to emerge Really into this context Now, how do you, as an aid agency, how do you engage in this context? Is there something you can do to support these people or not? How would you choose to engage? Would you choose to engage through the DDA, the District Development Authority As we saw might work in the market situation? Well, in this case, not so much Because what happens is that the District Development Association Get their funding in very uneven dollops And then they distribute it according to It gets kind of captured how the distribution works And it's distributed along clientelist lines So money coming out of the DSIP or the District Development Authority And into these complex and interrelated local Ecologies of justice really produce extraordinary disruptive effects So you really don't want to be engaging with the committees And through the same modality that worked in the marketplace situation So the takeaway there is that this is an adaptive system Let it stay adaptive, let it be adaptive Don't go through the DDA If you want to do something that will strengthen this You can actually work through the village court system And strengthen that Okay, I'm just about done And bring in new actors around that through the different committees there So that's a kind of a And what I think JFP kind of close local research Processes enable you to do is to be able to be in a position Where you can see which of those choices you would make Which of those choices are going to have good rules games And good outcome games at the end of them in that situation So thanks very much Okay, as we said at the start This is another case, another story That reflects perhaps a few years further on In researching, engaging, discussing, trying out different sorts of approaches And as you can see Solomon Islands And it's in a rural context And as we'll see that's quite significantly different There we go, there we go Okay, now the significant difference in this story Is that it involves the classic modality of approaches That is decisions have been made by people To invest in certain approaches To try and deal with particular kinds of problems It's not a research about which you might speculate What would you do if you had the opportunity to do it And this project is sometimes called the community officer project You see it has a longer title there It's modest in scale and size It's working in a couple of provinces McKerrer and as we'll see Rembell distinct In many significant ways It's been going for a couple of years The important thing as I want to show Is that it's about trying to influence both the rules game In WDR terms And the outcomes game And it's trying to do that in a way that engages Policy arenas both at highly localized And multiple sites In ways that recursively impact at the national level And it's building on a tradition of quite a bit of research And engagement in the past Now these questions you'll see are immediately recognizable Of those that David has went through There's a cascade of approach here It doesn't begin as Debbie said With measuring up a local circumstance In terms of what's missing or what should be there Against formal institutions But it's trying to understand what's there How does it work Who's involved What kinds of authority And what are the distributional consequences Ask the conditions How you might shift it And then thirdly This cluster of questions that we will talk mostly about in this In what ways can you engage in these contexts Without also dealing with this question of risks Now the time I'm not going to go through that in detail I want to make four points here And the first one is that the Comparing these two contexts Makira and Rambel In Solomon Islands You find that the underlying patterns of disputes And conflicts are extraordinarily diverse Okay So if you look at one level That one up in the left hand corner there There's a weighted average of degrees of The intensity of disputes and conflicts within villages And that's organized on a ward basis That information there So you know by and large it looks much the same But if you start to unpack that You'll find conflicts around land distribution For example are quite closely related to The incidence of logging Not surprising Or that in Whereas in Makira In Rambel In Rental Islands You find a great deal of disputation Around loge mining And associated disputes Of land It whereas across in Bologna Issues are more related to social order Including family domestic violence sorts of issues The second point is that how systems for handling These kinds of conflicts work What's there How it happens Very extraordinarily As also So I'm not going to go into the detail of this So these these biographs here For I was showing a colleague of these recently And he said to me I've never seen such asymmetric forms of government That are Governments that are reflected in these graphs So just briefly As you can see one is about substance abuse Another domestic And one logging There are six or seven of these These are just examples Patterns of resort In the In the Who is involved in the star graph You'll see the household The elder groups Chief Chiefly authority Church And external authorities in the form of policing This is obviously a gross simplification But it is to illustrate a point That in this case under Patterns of resort Relating to substance abuse You'll see obviously here in Makira The overwhelming significance of chiefly authority Whereas across in In Makira Church, police, elders, household Are variously involved Different ways of putting authority together To handle this kind of dispute You move across by contrast to the logging situation Between these two two provinces In aggregate You will see the overwhelming reliance On chiefly authority in Makira Just over there in Ranbel Again A much wider range Of Systems of authority here Being brought to bear Being as we say Stacked together To create durable solutions or responses And the third point So what works at the limits of the state's presence Here we are talking in situations These two island provinces At some remove From the centers of state inside power What seems to be working here is Where there is a local capability To stack together multiple forms Of what we call horizontal authority By that Back to your point Is local form I think you referred to local authority But in significant ways What sometimes a dispute What makes it stick What makes these things If you like, endure as agreements over time Is the extent to which they can articulate For what we call horizontal authority The most obvious case here is police Police in power Third party Third party Third party So this is the kind of context we were thinking Now what then would Greatly facilitate That kind of connection And along came The notion of the community officers This is the fourth and final point Community officers were introduced In each of these provinces They were selected by community But they were embedded as part Normally of the state structure Province Under province rules Who resourced them Remunerated financing and so on And their obligation was To facilitate These various forms of horizontal Mobilization of authority around disputes And where it was relevant and related to the dispute The vertical authority as well Now I will talk in question and answer time About the different kinds of disputes Where that works And then others where it simply doesn't But that was what it was about But apart from the fact that they had The common title of community officer Or those common understanding of what their functions were They differed in every other respect Meaning what they are doing locally The content of how they function Is being driven by local context Yeah Locally defined On the basis of some of the analytic work we've been doing But also dialogue with the local authorities That are hosting them Now the striking thing they make this remark Is from a community officer in Reynolds We are looking across the range Of other community officers We're all surfing different waves here But we're on the same sea This struck me as a lovely remark About adaptive institution It relates at a national policy arena In terms of the structure and character Of public authority State forms of public authority To this remark from For many of you will know It's only used At the height of the tension Who said whatever comes out in the future As a stable form of public authority In terms of state power State characteristics It's gonna look different It has to look different in different places Meaning highly adaptive functions And forms of institutions In a place like Solomon So those last three points That I've got flexible and adaptive and so on These are the things that are enthrasing me And are those that are engaged in at the moment It appears to be an institution Community officer Described on the left-hand side there This is able to cope with extreme diversity Both in context The circumstances are working in In some cases open combat with mining companies In other cases Low level chronic conflict and domestic violence But not in others In situations where the patterns are resort Meaning how are these kinds of disputes Are being resolved The sorts of authority that are being stacked together To handle those circumstances Very different Even within one ward Two neighbouring villages Different circumstances The second point here is that This looks like something to me That is trying to nudge both the rules game And the outcomes game Rather at the same time So appreciation has been recorded From community, from local elites and so on That there is immediate measurable benefit In certain kinds of disputes As a result of this kind of institution But see it happening at the national level too Some attraction has happened Meaning both this attention to a very localised policy arena Local level disputes involving often very few In number of individuals Is being heard and impacting in discussions At the national level National policy arena about for example The structure of the state in the future At what level of formal public authority Should regulatory functions be reassigned In order to reinforce the need for vertical authority To be present to back up the local deals That are being tried to be brokered Through local authorities This last thing about handling risks then Big deal for the World Bank But also for all of these discussions Is to say all institutions one way or another Are exclusionary The concern of the current arrangement Is that they tend to exclude Of course the vulnerable there Woman and youth All institutions are subject to capture Of one way or another In fact the community officer Must be socially captured If the thing is going to get traction Which is Krishna what kind of What kind of capture And likewise clients Elizabeth These systems are having to easily be So is it a final clue We're not going to need it Um these As David described in situations where The relationship between the centre And individual households and villages Is governed through things like Constituency development funds This DSIP in the Papua New Guinea case Then it is a predominantly A clientelistic relationship With vertical authority This kind of highly monetised Short term deal making through clientelism Is inherently hostile to these sorts Of local institutions But on the other hand Unless there is that connection Clientelistic relationships These local institutions won't work either So that box those last three sort of points There are things of continuing intrigue It is the case in some areas of rental If there's a couple of cases Where one of the community officers Has gone off to work for the loggers You can imagine the kind of disrespect And disablement that's going to come from that There are other cases where A chronic conflict around for example The distribution of disaster assistance Is there no longer People saying this is staggering How did this happen Can you attribute this To this intervention modality Or might there be another circumstances That would have favoured that outcome anyway Well of course we don't know We discussed that Thank you very much Okay thank you to the speakers We have about 20 minutes for Q&A But before we get to that I just wanted to raise a couple of points That I think came across all of the presentations So the first one is the point of function over form I think they all kind of looked at that In each of the cases We're talking about very different forms That were both studied and used And thought about in terms of how They could produce functions I mean ultimately these were all about Justice and security And yet we talked about markets We talked about local governance And community institutions And we talked about a whole range Of other kinds of justice providers So the point is focusing on the outcome Of justice How do we understand the different kinds of forms That might be more functionally able to get that The other one is the focus on power And not just capacity So the idea that you just kind of Trying to capacitate institutions By providing a lot of inputs Awareness, strengthening institutions More people, more money Is going to ultimately hit against the power constraint Because what is that doing then In terms of the nature of power The way power is going to still constrain Your ability to achieve something No matter how much capacity you put in it Or the way that you might be actually Reinforcing power dynamics By negative power dynamics by doing that The third point is How does one engage in the policy arena And I think one interesting point here Is that you do whether you like it or not So there's no such thing as really trying to Create a sort of intervention that avoids the policy arena Because one way or another You are engaging that policy arena So just struck by what Lisa said about in Myanmar If you want to just come and sort of Promote ideas of justice You might be actually reinforcing these notions of Law and order and military rule Fourth point Scale The question of scale That when we're talking about these policy arenas In some of these cases we were looking at A very micro level But I think the last presentation in particular Was really sort of showing how these Local dynamics have to also be understood In the context of national dynamics And how these different scales relate to each other And then Yeah, and then finally The point of the discomfort of engaging With institutions that are problematic You know what do you do There's capture, there's clientelism There's exclusion, what does one do Do we not engage, do we try to engage How do we think about But by ignoring them I think the important point is These are still providing capability It might be clientelistic It might be exclusive It might be captured But they are producing outcomes They just might be not the outcomes That we're looking for And the question is How does one engage with these institutions To try perhaps through this Recursive feedback loop To influence the way That the incentives are structured Around the policy arena And who was there to try to open them up A bit more towards better outcomes So with that The floor is open Thanks Hi, I'm Christina Simeon I'm a PhD student at the ANU And my research focuses on Myanmar And rule of law assistance So my question is for Lisa That was a great talk Thanks so much And I really like your report And I find it quite sort of funny That you say that there's no consensus About what justice means So when I was conducting my field work Donors were saying There's no consensus of what rule of law means So we should use the term justice instead So everybody was very nervous About saying rule of law And there were directions from the UNP And everybody should talk about justice And then obviously justice Is not a term that works very well as well And now it seems like more lately People are talking about trust So let's talk about trust building Instead of justice So I find it quite interesting And I want to ask Why do you still continue to use Those sort of development models Why do you insist on entering a setting With a preconceived model Which is in this case justice And even, I mean, you recognize that You should not promote it Because you know There might be bad connotations Using the concept But just by calling a program My justice, you're still promoting justice So why do you keep on doing that And why don't you enter a setting And just look at things Completely from the bottom up And try to make sense of what matters And what people need I know in the Myanmar case There might be Buddhist concepts That you could use So yeah, my question, thanks Great question Maybe we'll take a few Before we respond Any other questions now? Everyone's tired, huh? Yeah I found the circles And the way that they describe Is rules, rules games and outcome games The recursive link seems to be undugged In your presentation It struck me very forcibly You know, we get this stuff About changing the rules And we get the Adrienne left Which is about the games within the rules But what you seem to be describing Is actually playing the game To change the rules Is that right? Because that's what I think Is the interesting stuff Around how that happens Because it seems to be We tend to get stuck In one of the other boxes As opposed to understanding And I guess we're all gonna Have to go around doing this from now on But is that what's going on? Thanks Thanks very much, Christina So I guess the first thing to say Is in terms of the program itself I mean, we sort of don't have Much control over that I mean, it had its name Long before we were contracted To do the research And it is a justice program And I suspect that they're not gonna Change the name of that For EU reasons and whatever else In terms of our research So I mean, so I guess in terms Of the general framing I mean, we were contracted To do a piece of research That was looking at local experiences Of justice Now what we found very quickly When we started talking with communities Was asking people about justice Was not a useful way in at all So in a lot of the interviews And focus group discussions What we ended up doing Was just having Long conversations about life In the community And through that Sort of problems that people faced Would come about And we sort of Of course, with all the language Difficulties as well We were working across sort of Three different languages In the places where we were working We had to have sort of Translations of a whole variety Of terms from justice To trust To problem To case And you know, so on But I guess the only other thing I would say is that While I agree that justice Is not necessarily the best framing I don't take such a relative view That I don't think you can talk about The quality of local Understandings of dispute resolution In terms of how Rights respecting discriminatory Impartial and so on they are I mean, it is certainly the case That for instance women Would prefer to have Justice We call them Justice mechanisms available That serve them better Serve their interests better In whatever way they might understand That similarly religious minorities Absolutely feel that they would Like to have access to a dispute resolution system That they felt was fairer So I think that you can start to talk And in the report we try and talk about Those things of more non-discriminatory More rights protecting Sort of approaches Whether you call them justice Or anything else I'm pretty ambivalent about myself A good question And it then causes reflection As to exactly what's being said here In this context I think the first point that Debbie's already made Is that this dichotomy Between playing the rules game Versus the outcomes game is a nonsense And I want to Just a couple of examples to illustrate And I hope to answer your question A very typical thing is that You see in donor programming And perhaps the most classic example Is very often a thing called Community driven development here In which in immediate aftermath of conflict This kind of reasoning Becomes quite paramount The imperative is to get outcomes Developmentally relevant outcomes Whether it's from the point of view Of buying the piece Or responding to humanitarian crises And so on And for the meantime The rules game is too contested And we will stovepipe alongside it We will bypass Most of the evidence said There is a Surely there is a case For doing that In certain circumstances But never imagine You're not impacting on the policy arena You're not impacting on the nature of Local elite debates For example And very often In many countries we've seen Where these sorts of modalities persist Then it months or stunts Elite incentives To engage in their own obligations Being responding to citizen entitlements And servicing them Different example comes from here From Renault Now As I mentioned in one part of Renault In four of the wards They are blessed with Indonesian bauxite miners Who are rapacious And beyond monitoring We are at the extremes of the state It's incapable of monitoring The actions at this level So many of disputes Of domestic violence For example Can track back to the distribution Of mining royalties For example within the household And people are saying We've got to get on top Of this conduct of the miners And they took to one direct action And shut down a lot of the mining equipment Interesting This was in discussions In a sense facilitated But not promoted by the CEO And in other cases too They said And we need to start monitoring Or making sure this monitoring Compliance of the agreements is done To which the province says We have no assigned mandate This sits with the central ministry So debate starts With the local folks With the provincial leaderships To say Well de facto Let's do it And alongside it A discussion goes on in the centre That says Well would it be possible Given that we're going to think about this issue When it comes to reviewing Of the Provincial Government Act Let's on a Executive order sort of basis Assign Imagine assigning those functions For the moment To the Rambel Provincial Government And let's see what happens Wow I mean This is an outcomes focus Recursively impacting Straight back on the rules of the game It's a wonderful example I think Hi My name's Gobi I'm from the Asia Foundation's Office in Timor-Lest A lot of the issues that you Mentioned Lisa In Myanmar are very similar to To Timor Especially with regards to Say community policing And the local justice mechanism You mentioned that in In Myanmar there's low capacity For formal justice And a poor understanding Of the meaning of justice Is there in addition to say Brokering conversations about justice Is there potential to Create a new space That incorporates the standardization Of justice through the formal system While also ensuring trust Is carried by the local justice system Good afternoon My question is for Lisa I'm Dennis Rendell from the Philippines I'm just wondering How you chose your The respondents in your In your field work I'm now for sure that Myanmar is a multi-ethnic nation And I wonder if Affiliation to a certain ethnicity Influences Or affects their perception of justice Thank you The first question is for Lisa and for Deb I was just wondering, you know With this new approach I was just wondering what kind of Feedback or what kind of Blowback have you been getting from You know, folks who've been dealing In a more In the old I don't want to be negative about it But like, but in the previous You know, sort of way I was just wondering like How have you encountered You know, that kind of criticism And for Doug and for David I was just I'd like to ask you to just kind of Speculate or hypothesize You know, what would this be like At the national level In Papua New Guinea or Solomon's Is there any application that you see Knowing that both countries are extremely Amazingly diverse And scaling up is by nature Extraordinarily difficult But I just wanted to hear Your thoughts on these These separate issues, please It's just a very quick one Around I mean, clearly the Sort of focus on these Dynamics at the kind of Micro-local level Are incredibly insightful And revealing of How things actually work And how Parma works at that level But I'm sort of really wondering Whether or not There isn't a sort of risk Of the Bineries that we seek to get away From in relation to Distinctions between the sort of Local, provincial, The national, the state, the non-state Might not be sort of reinforced Through some of this analysis And in the process we omit the extent To which the state itself Is fundamentally informalised And becoming more informal In the nature of its operations And how these sort of local dynamics Actually seek into the state And the language, pathways At that level as well Is this on? Yeah, okay All right, let me start with the easier ones So on how we sort of picked Local respondents So the study was undertaken Jointly between ODI Who I was working for And Safer World Who have a national office Based in Myanmar And they had a network of Local civil society organisations That they then tapped into In Mon State and Yangon region Certainly in Mon State Most of the people that we spoke with Were Bema And that was sort of definitely something That we highlight in the report In the more contested areas It was much more heavily Mon And the number of smaller groups as well In Yangon region There was obviously much more ethnic diversity But I'd say, I mean, the thing that we Have emphasised in the report Is that given the diversity Across different places in Myanmar Having looked at only two regions of the country These can only be snapshots And, you know, the findings would undoubtedly Look different if you were working in Other regional states as well So unless you could sort of get much Greater geographic spread You just wouldn't be able to give A kind of national perspective, I think In terms of this question Of how people responded So, I mean, in terms of the My Justice programme They were really keen to engage With this kind of research I mean, they commissioned it Because they want to avoid What have sort of now widely understood Some of the pitfalls Of more conventional justice programming So, and that's why this was sort of Done in their inception phase While they're designing their activities That's still an ongoing process So I can't tell you what Those activities look like yet And whether they will, you know, Successfully avoid this stuff or not So, you know, I think that remains to be seen And on the typical question About, you know, working with state And local and how that goes I mean, the first thing I'd say And this was my fault for saying this Quickly at the end I mean, I wouldn't say that people Have a poor understanding of justice People have different understandings of justice And I would say they do have a limited Understanding of the content of the law The rights protections available Onto the law, even though those aren't Solid in all cases And the concept of rights More broadly as we might think about them So my sense is that you can work on On local dispute resolution practices Whatever they are and improve those aspects Without necessarily reverting to, you know Just working through the formal state system And assuming that that's the thing that has to work As not to say that I don't think you should work on the state I think, obviously, that's going to be an important part Of the justice picture in Myanmar's future But I think it's a long-term process And the process of trust building That's going to have to go on Between citizens and the state more broadly Means that I think in the foreseeable future And possibly forever Engaging with the justice providers That people actually use I think is equally important So I don't see this as an interim step That gets to eventually state supremacy I think we're actually just talking about Different ideas of how disputes are resolved That might continue alongside An improved state justice system as well I want to get to your grapple With your very difficult question, I find But to do so, it would help me to respond To the point that Sinclair is raising About these binaries Particularly binaries of scale You know, local, province, national Whatever the case may be And I think I will say that Your concern is the Flex of casualty of the speed With which I was presenting For example, it is easy to read What's referred to there as horizontal authority As something which is entirely local As you know, as there's attributes Of state presence appear in all manner of form Whether it's just a rubber stamp On a piece of paper or a badge That is carried by official Or the reputation of someone that's retired From the state service in the past And, of course, vertical is by no means State only in its form In fact, as you've observed in your work For the most part, public authority Is exercised through blended but predominantly Non-state forms of institution And I think that we're wanting to Convey the same sort of point Now that's relevant, I think, to I hope I'm understanding you're right About the implications, national level implications And again, perhaps moving a bit fast But that remark that was boxed on the last slide From a gentleman called Tony Hughes In his life in the Solomon Islands Is exactly what I think is the Profoundly significant implication The notion of an asymmetric state Say that how it appears at different levels of scale And that means basically in different geographies Would be fundamentally different And may it may necessarily have to be so If it's to accommodate the sort of underlying diversity That's expressed in the early slides To show diversity, whether it's in Geography, economy and history Or how it manifests in the nature of what is Let's call them local regulatory failures Or issues And therefore the kinds of authority That's going to need to be instituted For example, it's only some parts of the country However far forward you look It will be afflicted with incredible difficulties Of regulating transnational miners It doesn't mean, therefore, that you want to have A fully-blown capability at all levels of the state Across all, all over the country To deal with that kind of situation Likewise, you could work your way through All sorts of state functions And be thinking about it in the same way So it's not going to There is no possibility that the state Could look the same anyway All over the country Because it simply does not have the grunt To do that The political and the authority And the resources to do that Why are you feeling about it? The consequence of discussion so far And of course this is with one brand of elites They tend to be national politicians Or permanent secretaries So this is a really interesting implication For what we're seeing From this very early stage of the project To that extent, I think it's I'm most excited by the value In helping Solomon Islanders To have discussions that they have been Busting to have Since the 1920s, essentially They've been talking about this issue Do I get to your point? So in terms of the national level And what the implications are At that level for allocating functions And responsibilities down In public opinion, it does seem to me That there is a real problem of state reach Especially, do we need to say that? At all levels So into the province, into the district And you get below that and things get really grim And to walk around inside a settlement In Port Moresby or in Lay Is to hear a constant litany of complaint That no one from the state has ever been anywhere near them For a long, long time And it's not just that the state is dysfunctional When it reaches down And inept or expensive or other things It's also that it's often predatory So for a while, you know, the last couple of generations A couple of decades when the state arrived in a settlement Was in the presence And this is a bit odd, isn't it? In the person of a policeman Who's non-salary recurrent budget was not being funded And was probably using the badge to live off In that kind of context So you come to a situation Where you have to make choices about How to engage at that level And I do think that there is a mechanism there Which is a service delivery mechanism It's a local justice service delivery mechanism That does reach down pretty effectively Into communities I'm talking about the village court And the village court is a quasi-state institution That is often locally elected And has a range of statutory powers But it also is able to deal with Very everyday disputes very quickly And around that village court You get this whole ecology of other Village court magistrates themselves doing mediation But also them training up other people Having their own, they call He's my committee, she's my committee People who are coming up underneath them The idea of the individual as a committee Coming up and starting to take on these roles And pull together forms of local authority And then the law and justice leaders themselves Who may be village court magistrates Or who may be committee members Are developing a thing Which I add up there on the slide Which I should have explained Is a pass and blow leader man Or leader Mary So it's the fashion, the way of working The legal usage if you like Is becoming something which is acknowledged As not just a legal justice kind of form But also a political form So a leader man has a whole range of characteristics Which are different from the big man or the chief They don't have to be financially powerful But they certainly have to be able to talk And create consensus and adjudicate And create law and justice things So you're getting this adaptive response To the absence of the state And recolonizing this absence of the state And it's not just leader men There are some leader Mary involved Which I think may have some basis Going forward in terms of filling the gap That they are filling the gap Between the edges of the state And local forms of authority Okay, thank you, just very quickly As a nice sum up, I'll try to address your question Which is what do you do about criticisms And there's any number of ways that can go But I guess I would focus on the difficulty Of the institutional environments in which we work Which is one of the hardest And the common refrain coming out of the WDR Is, and I think this happens with many WDRs That are global, have to be a certain level Of conceptual abstract is Okay, that's all interesting and fine But how does this change what I do tomorrow? And so the need for institutions to have recipes To have things that they can just sort of apply In program So I think that's one of our challenges And I guess one of the ways I try to think about that Is applying the WDR framework To changing the policy Or another of the institutions in which we work And in fact, you know, I've noted those who have been engaged In thinking, working politically In political economy and TWA, whatever And DFID and DFAT who have been doing this for quite a while Have been thrilled that the WDR came out And I realize a large part of that is because It helps them make the arguments within their own policy I mean, there's a certain weight of the WDR And the World Bank saying these things Even if they've been saying them for quite a while To help convince their own masters and institutions Changing their incentives to kind of get with the trend Changing their preferences about what the evidence shows So, you know, hopefully we will make some headway Into changing the way our institutions work Thank you very much Thank you everybody for a great panel