Latest Development policy Podcast Episodes

MoU PLS: Steak-holders speak

Memorandum of Understanding - June 15, 2021 14:00 - 39 minutes
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 h...

MoU PLS: Migrant labour by no means cut and dried

Memorandum of Understanding - May 24, 2021 14:00 - 33 minutes
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...

MoU Somaliland: State-ing the obvious

Memorandum of Understanding - May 03, 2021 14:00 - 39 minutes
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 s...

MoU resilience: A climate for change

Memorandum of Understanding - April 12, 2021 14:00 - 39 minutes
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 ...

MoU carbon: Money grows on trees

Memorandum of Understanding - March 22, 2021 13:00 - 38 minutes
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 de...

MoU religion: Converting sacred texts

Memorandum of Understanding - March 01, 2021 13:00 - 36 minutes
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-bas...

MoU travelogues: Aid beyond the tarmac road

Memorandum of Understanding - February 15, 2021 13:17 - 35 minutes
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 Pa...

MoU food: An entrée to development

Memorandum of Understanding - January 31, 2021 14:26 - 32 minutes
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 sl...

Trailer: Memorandum of Understanding

Memorandum of Understanding - January 27, 2021 01:51 - 3 minutes
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 cor...