How does the Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS) challenge the conception of what aid is, who works on it, and who benefits from it? In the first part of the PLS mini-series, we profiled the hard yakka that is the daily grind inside Warrnambool’s meatworks. This episode we leave the factory gates and head out into the community to learn why the PLS is so m…

Foreign aid has traditionally occurred “over there”, so what happens when international development is delivered within our borders? This episode we take to the road and head to Warrnambool, a large country town in Victoria’s West, and the site of one of Australia’s more unusual and noteworthy aid projects: the Pacific Labour Scheme (PLS). In a bid…

The international aid set-up struggles to know how to work in countries that do not exist. Sometimes resources are poured into these places, and sometimes they are ignored entirely. But is splendid isolation from aid such a bad thing? In this episode we travel to Somaliland, the northern most segment of Somalia, to tell the story of a nation that w…

Across the Pacific, communities are labelled as vulnerable because of the threats posed by climate change. And what do international development programs believe is needed to address this vulnerability? Resilience. This is a memorandum of understanding the unreasonable expectations aid places on local communities to deal with what are really global…

The forest is a resource traditionally deemed more valuable dead, chopped down or transported away in trucks and boats. For decades, development donors and NGOs have appealed to the moral high ground, attempting to persuade the people who live in forest areas to safeguard it. But these people depend on forests to survive, so time and again, these e…

The Quran and the Bible are not widely regarded as gender equality documents, but in Indonesia, Solomon Islands, and remote Indigenous communities in Australia, these religious texts are being used to combat the very problems religious institutions often condone: gender inequality and gender-based violence. Faith and spirituality are deeply twined …

Can travelogues reach recesses of the mind and prompt reflection in ways that extensively footnoted aid reports cannot? We speak to aid worker and author of The Rising Tide, Tom Bamforth, about what he learned from journeys on boat, helicopter, scooter and rattletrap bus in the islands of the Pacific. In the argot of aid, we also conducted some key…

Aid is a darned sight livelier than that that is described in the bloodless language of official records and reports. So what do chlorinated phrases in development like capacity building look like when done right? We begin in Dili, Timor Leste, at Agora Food Studio, a restaurant set up by two slightly world-weary aid workers who found that they cou…

The Development Policy Centre's new podcast series premieres on Monday 1 February. Host, Gordon Peake, peers behind the bureaucratic curtain to tell the stories of the people and politics of international aid. Recommended reading: Read the fine print of Memorandum of Understanding's full corporate plan on the Development Policy Centre blog. Behind …