Development workers in the Pacific are all too often faced with the dreaded catch-all term of ‘vulnerability’, and the issue is all too quickly put to bed with the need to create ‘resilience’. It is therefore a pleasant surprise when discussion moves beyond the hand waving and take a closer look at the issue.

An interesting and well-communicated piece of research on household vulnerability has come out of a joint effort by researchers from RMIT University, Deakin University and Oxfam Australia. It offers up insights from extensive surveys of households across Vanuatu and Solomon Islands, looking at the shocks they face, how they are managed, and what government can actually do to build resilience.

These videos nicely sum up their findings:

Solomons Pidgin:

Bislama:

English:

The findings are also written up in PDF format here.

What we learn is that households do find ways to cope. In an environment where shocks are so regular and the state offers so little support, communities across Vanuatu and Solomon Islands have actually become adept at coping. However, as the paper indicates, coping is just that; it leaves little space for improving living conditions.

Public policy has an important a role to play in supporting rural communities.

The report offers a number of recommendations, many seen before. These include infrastructure development, better access to overseas labour markets and to domestic credit. Unfortunately, for each of these policy recommendations, the institutional backdrop has been left out, perhaps intentionally. As with a lot of well-intentioned advice, policy makers are left asking, ‘Okay, but how do we actually do this?’

Over the last decade, numerous combinations and permutations of these proposals have been suggested, and few actual improvements made. The reality is that, at present, such advice is not falling on fertile ground.

Not to denigrate this specific work, it’s an unfortunate fact that, in too many policy areas, we appear to be caught in a cycle of re-diagnosis and policy prescription, with a glaring absence of actual policy delivery. This is why advice all too often feels lifted from a template. To break this cycle we need to reintroduce the institutional context and appreciate what ties the hands of even those most able and driven civil servants.

Resilience and agriculture

If we were to pick one area in this resilience story, agricultural policy would be an appropriate place to start, not least because this sector provides livelihoods for the majority of the population. In this work we find several recommendations from focus groups, including the need to ‘plant more, grow more and sell more’, to find new markets, to reduce dependence on imports, implementing price controls and for government to support farmers when faced by crop failure or natural disasters.

So, to reintroduce this institutional context, we are looking squarely at the ministries of agriculture, the agricultural extension services, and the marketing boards. It is here government policy can be shaped and where, importantly, the experiences of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu start to diverge.

As happens so often, behind the policy failures we find institutions that are struggling to serve their purpose. This is most strikingly true in Vanuatu.

Agricultural extension services, an arm of ministry of agriculture, are designed to advise and provide support to farmers. Yet, when we stroll through the grounds of Malekula’s extension offices in Lakatoro, one of the copra producing[1] centres of Vanuatu, we are confronted by the realities facing the front line of agricultural policy. We find an almost empty, rundown outpost residing in significant acreage, where a much larger organisation once stood, with the remaining officers struggling to work on a skeleton budget and scant communication or monitoring from their parent ministry.  This is not unique to Lakatoro.

Likewise, government and public alike appear to have forgotten the original role of the Vanuatu Commodities Marketing Board (VCMB), an institution meant to provide support for prices, coordination and to find new opportunities for farmers. Copra subsidies are no longer based on good policy or planning, but instead have become entangled, perhaps inextricably, with politics. The VCMB appears to now see its role purely as collecting revenue from exporters and, perhaps more worryingly, has become a symbol of government failure and corruption.

This was not always the case. It was two shocks to the institutional capability of the government that put to bed the Ministry of Agriculture and agricultural extension services as effective institutions of policy delivery. The first was the fallout of the 1993 civil service strike and second was drastic downsizing in the wake of the ADB-sponsored Comprehensive Reform Program of the late 1990s.

Unfortunately for the Vanuatu government, this means it must first struggle to rekindle the embers of institutional life, driving reform and resources back into the sector, before it can hope to support these aspects of resilience in rural communities.

In contrast, institutional development in Solomon Islands took a somewhat different tack. Post-conflict Solomon Islands, with the institutional support of RAMSI and in line with a shift in the development policy thinking, fixed their gaze on the agricultural sector. As a result, detailed plans and assessments were published but, more importantly, resources were sent in this direction – including donor grants – to deliver on these plans.

The institutional fire appears to burn somewhat brighter in Solomon Islands. However, weaknesses within agricultural sector and policy making still exist. Given a sufficient level of attention, we potentially have a lot to learn from each other’s experience of delivering agricultural policy and building these institutions. A review of major donor interventions in agriculture supporting capacity is reportedly in the pipeline – we wait in eager anticipation.

This latest piece of work on vulnerability offers us some interesting insights into vulnerability in the region. But to make headway on their list of policy recommendations for building resilience, including those outside of agriculture, we must first shift our focus and resources to those institutions that are designed to deliver them.