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Australia is not a generous international citizen: less than one cent of every dollar of federal spending is devoted to foreign aid (Development Policy Centre 2019). When Australia's comparative affluence [...]

This paper focuses on the 2022 general elections in Papua New Guinea, covering both electoral quality and election outcomes. Overall, the 2022 elections were very troubled. In parts of the country, serious violence and electoral fraud were major issues. In other parts of the country, polling was less fraught. However, some problems, such as the roll, were serious almost everywhere. In terms of election outcomes, one outcome – only two women won seats – was predictable. However, the election brought puzzling results too: in particular, incumbents were re-elected at the highest rate ever. And the largest party won a larger share of seats than has been the case in any election since 1982. Neither of the latter two results appear to have been a direct product of electoral fraud. Rather, the party outcome stems from a turn-of-the-millennium rule change. High incumbent re-election rates remain a genuine puzzle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a special issue of the Development Policy Review journal that aims to elevate the voices and perspectives of Pacific scholars on foreign aid and development issues in the region. The special issue was prompted by the low publication rates for authors from the global South in development journals. The articles in the special issue cover a range of topics, including power asymmetries in aid relationships, the importance of adapting aid to diverse contexts, the need for donors to listen to local voices, and the resilience of Pacific communities. The authors hope that this collection of articles will provide valuable insights and promote a better understanding of aid in the Pacific. [Extracted from the article]

Motivation: The Pacific is the world's most aid‐dependent region, yet available data suggest aid projects are less effective on average in the Pacific than elsewhere in the developing world. Purpose: This article examines the most likely explanations for lower aid project effectiveness in the Pacific. Explanations include poor governance, restricted levels of political freedom, poor economic performance, isolation, and small populations. Methods and approach: Three approaches to causal mediation analysis are used to identify which explanatory variables best explain why aid projects are less effective in the Pacific. Aid project effectiveness data come from a multi‐donor dataset of individual aid projects. Data on potential explanatory variables comes from a range of international datasets. Findings: All three causal mediation approaches point to the isolation of many Pacific countries, alongside comparatively small populations, as being the main impediments to project effectiveness. These findings hold even with a suite of project traits being controlled for and within an analysis in which all the key country variables of interest are controlled for. Policy implications: Project effectiveness in the Pacific appears to be primarily constrained by variables that cannot themselves be shifted (the region's countries cannot readily be made less remote or more populous). Improved project effectiveness in the Pacific will require donor practice to carefully adapt to the region's context. A structured process of donor learning will be needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's rise is ushering in a new era of geostrategic contestation involving foreign aid. In many traditional OECD donors, aid policy is changing as a result. We report on a survey experiment studying the impacts of rising Chinese aid on public opinion in traditional donors. We randomly treated people with vignettes emphasising China's rise as an aid donor in the Pacific, a region of substantial geostrategic competition. We used a large, nationally-representative sample of Australians (Australia is the largest donor to the Pacific). As expected, treating participants reduced hostility to aid and increased support for more aid focused on the Pacific. Counter to expectations, however, treatment reduced support for using aid to advance Australian interests. These findings were largely replicated in a separate experiment in New Zealand. Knowledge of Chinese competition changes support for aid, but it does not increase support for using aid as a tool of geostrategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Australia is not a generous international citizen in less than one cent of every dollar of federal spending is devoted to foreign aid. Topics include Australia's comparative affluence being taken into account Australia being an outlier by the standards of the OECD, the proximity ensure Australia dominates the aid landscape in the Pacific, and Australia gave nearly four times as much to the region as New Zealand, and nearly five times as much as China.

Donor country publics typically know little about how much aid their governments give. This paper reports on three experiments conducted in Australia designed to study whether providing accurate information on government giving changes people's views about aid. Treating participants by showing them how little Australia gives or by showing declining generosity has little effect. However, contrasting Australian aid cuts with increases in the United Kingdom raises support for aid substantially. Motivated reasoning likely explains the broad absence of findings in the first two treatments. Concern with international norms and perceptions likely explains the efficacy of the third treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]