Judicial reform in Asia: case study of AusAID's experience in Papua New Guinea: 2003–2007

Abstract

This case study evaluates the experience of Australia's aid agency (AusAID) in supporting bilateral judicial reform in Papua New Guinea through its Law and Justice Sector Program between 2003 and 2007. It marshals and evaluates a substantial body of new evidence from the Asia-Pacific region, which has been relatively under-studied in the academic discourse to date. The question to be addressed in this article is: what does the actual evidence of practice tell us about the nature and effectiveness of judicial and related legal reforms in Papua New Guinea? This case study adopts a documents-based, inductive, qualitative methodology to gather findings from the available evidence of reform endeavours. The structure of this article comprises three sections: an introduction to this empirical case study; the body of evidence provided, including background, findings and analysis; and conclusions that highlight their significance to two key issues relating to the purpose and evaluation of judicial reform endeavour. The evidence of practice provided by this case study is significant in supporting a number of key propositions. First, it reveals the still evolving nature of the judicial reform enterprise. Second, it demonstrates that AusAID has created some ‘results’. Third, it remains much more difficult to find any evidence of ‘success’ owing to the continuing conceptual fuzziness in the purpose and goals of endeavour, and the continuing lack of systematic monitoring and evaluation. Fourth, there are some tentative indications of an emerging capacity to demonstrate developmental effectiveness. In sum, while the Papua New Guinea experience conforms in many ways to the global literature, it highlights the incubation of a potentially paradigmatic shift in developing performance monitoring and evaluation capacity.