New Asia Research Centre Director

Dr Hughes joined Murdoch in 2008 from the UK, as Associate Professor of Governance Studies in the School of Social Science and Humanities where the Centre is also based. She is an expert in international aid and post-conflict reconstruction with a focus on Cambodia and Timor-Leste and brings to the directorship an impressive record of academic research achievement, grant awards and engagement with policy communities.

Dr Hughes is the author of The Political Economy of Cambodia's Transition, 1991-2001 and Dependent Communities: Aid and Politics in Cambodia and East Timor. She is currently joint holder of an ARC Discovery Grant entitled 'The Politics of Accountability in SE Asia' and an AusAID Development Research Award entitled 'Achieving Sustainable Demand for Governance: Addressing Political Dimensions of Change'. She has presented policy papers to AusAID, the World Bank, the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, the UK Department for International Development, the Swedish International Development Agency and the Cambodian Ministry of Interior.

Dr Hughes graduated from Oxford and Hull, and lectured at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham. She has held visiting fellowships at the ANU, the University of Melbourne, and the Royal University of Phnom Penh, and has a long-standing advisory relationship with the Cambodia Development Resource Institute in Phnom Penh.

She takes the helm against the background of mounting Centre successes. These include an injection of over $1.5 million in new ARC competitive funding in 2009, raising the Centre's level of current ARC grants alone to $2.7 million. Ten 2009 PhD scholarships from various competitive domestic and international sources also lay foundations for an exciting new range of projects by emerging scholars.

Dr Hughes will continue as Academic Chair of the innovative Masters in Globalisation and Governance Program while taking up Directorship of the Centre.

Where are Indonesia's Regional Funds Going?
Jakarta Globe, 23 October 2009

Study finds regional budget often manipulated
Jakarta Post, 26 October 2009

Indonesia’s local government budgetary processes suffer from a lack of transparency and citizen participation. Local governments regularly siphon off public monies, often to consolidate political support by providing public works projects or other forms of largesse to supporter networks. This research examines both formal processes of budget allocation (existing regulations and procedures) and informal processes (patron-client relationships) and investigates how the political and economic dynamics between them produce particular budgetary outcomes. The research highlights how the lack of public involvement and accountability in the budget allocation process facilitates the dispensing of favours at the public’s expense, and suggests how misuse of budgets might be minimised by further governance reforms.

This study will provide a different basis for the assessment of Australian policy responses to Islamic radicalism in Indonesia. It will expose the social foundations of Islamic populism as a particular expression of political Islam and in so doing allow the Australian public and policymakers to understand the complex networks and relationships that generate and sustain Islamic populism, including its radical streams. It will enable an identification and differentiation of the social forces resisting or advancing democratic governance reforms in Indonesia. With this knowledge, programmes intended to help develop domestic pro-democratic coalitions to stem the rise of radical Islamic groups have a sounder social scientific base.

The Asia Research Centre is embarking on a new flagship project, New Modes of Governance in the Asia-Pacific, with the aim of identifying, analysing and assessing new modes of governance in the region. Researchers will investigate such questions as: What patterns are discernible in the way that public goods are being provided? What are the competing conceptions of the ‘public’ in the provision of these goods and can they be reconciled? What conflicts and coalitions of interest are involved in the competing notions of how to provide public goods? More broadly, what are the links between new modes of governance and political regimes? Are these modes fostering forms of political participation and accountability that converge with or depart sharply from institutions of representative democracy? And what are the implications of this – both for the region and engagement with it?