By: Maria
Theresa Maan-Bešić
Sarajevo,
Bosnia and Herzegovina
October
03, 2008
There is a long history of community-based
forms of development. One important question on the effectiveness of
community-based and –driven development initiatives is the extent to which they
successfully target the poor. Evidence suggests that decentralized targeting
has not always been effective, especially in targeting projects to the poor
within communities. In addition, the evidence, while thin, suggests poor
preference targeting—the preferences of the poor have not been adequately considered
in project selection. Finally, political economy considerations and perverse incentives
created by project performance requirements also constrain targeting, although evidence
suggests that decentralized targeting can be made more effective by monitoring projects
to improve performance incentives.
Another important aspect of these paper is the
extent to which participatory development initiatives improve project quality
and performance. Here, there is some evidence that participatory projects
create effective community infrastructure and improve welfare outcomes, but the
evidence does not establish that it is the participatory elements that are responsible
for improving project outcomes. Few studies compare community-based projects
with centralized mechanisms of service delivery, so it is difficult to tell
whether alternate project designs would have produced better outcomes.
Community-based development relies on
communities to use their social capital to organize themselves and participate
in development processes, such as participation, community, and social capital are critical to
how community participation is conceptualized and implemented.
Participation
is the cornerstone of community-based development initiatives is the
active involvement of members of a defined community in at least some aspects
of project design and implementation. There are three mainstreaming of
participation made: Firstly, the
exercise of voice and choice can be costly under certain conditions which
involved real or imputed financial losses and participation may lead to
psychological or physical duress for socially and economically disadvantaged.
Second, an instrument for promoting pragmatic policy interests, such as
cost-effective delivery or low-cost maintenance, rather than a vehicle for
radical social transformation. Thirdly, belief that exposure to participatory
experiences transformed the attitudes and implementation styles of
authoritarian bureaucracies - governments or donors which the routinization of participatory planning
exercises into the work of public sector implementation agencies puts new
pressures on resources while leaving implementers unclear about the potential
gain to themselves from this new accountability.
Participatory projects are typically
implemented in a unit referred to as a community. Most of the literature on development policy
uses the term community
without much qualification to denote a culturally and politically
homogeneous social system. The notion of
community is problematic at two levels. First, defining the geographic or
conceptual boundaries of a community is not always straightforward. In many
cases, factional, ethnic, or religious identities may further complicate the
picture. Second, an unqualified use of the term often obscures local structures
of economic and social power that are likely to strongly influence project
outcomes. However, theres an evident studies have
shown that the uncritical adoption of the term community is particularly problematic for participatory projects
that seek to empower people who are excluded or without voice. The third
key concept in the literature on implementation of community participation
projects is social
capital. Literature from the following which entered the literature on
participatory development are :
1. Robert Putnam’s (1993) that social capital has been criticized on
many grounds, among them for not being concerned enough with issues of class
distinction and power.
2. Fine and Harriss in year 2001 ignoring reverse causality, with the
link going from wealth to more group activity.
3. Portes 1998 and Durlauf 2001
not recognizing that it can be destructive as well as constructive.
4. Putnam’s ideas has recognized neither the complex strategic,
informational, and relational choices that underpin the endogeneity of
community formation nor the fact that community is itself an abstract social
construct.
5. The World Bank have argued that social capital is less an original
theoretical concept and more an umbrella term that has facilitated the
insertion of social relations into the thinking of development institutions
dominated by economists.
However, the social capital has made such
powerful inroads into development thinking, through it's value as a Trojan
Umbrella as the best community participation projects already do. Notions such
as trust and norms are not generalizable, which means
that social capital has to be understood within its cultural and political
context from other authors mentioned on this paper. Thus, the capacity for
collective action cannot be divorced from a deep sense of the structures of
power within which the poor attempt to cope by Harriss 2001, Appadurai 2004, Rao
and Walton 2004.
In sum, precisely because community-based and
- driven development turns the pyramid of development mechanisms upside down,
by giving beneficiaries voice and choice, it cannot ignore the social and
cultural context within which beneficiaries live and organize themselves. One possible consequence is that
universalistic notions such as social
capital or community may
have to be viewed as deeply contextual and endogenous constructs. This implies
that terms such as best practice should
be retired to the archives of development, and much greater emphasis should be
placed on contextualized project design.
On other hand, evidence on the impact of
economic and social heterogeneity on project outcomes, and on collective action
capacity more broadly, suggests that the relationship is complex. While
theoretical work by economists has shown that economic inequality need not
constrain collective action, empirical work has shown mixed results. The targeting
of poor communities and poor households within communities is markedly worse in
more unequal communities, particularly when the distribution of power is concentrated
within elites. The role of social heterogeneity is more complex to measure.
Although, most econometric studies that have
attempted to devise measures of social fractionalization have shown that
fractionalization tends to inhibit collective activity, but there is also
qualitative evidence in the opposite direction. Even in the most egalitarian
societies, however, community involvement in choosing, constructing, and
managing a public good will almost always be dominated by elites, who tend to
be better educated, have fewer opportunity costs on their time, and therefore
have the greatest net benefit from participation. It is not clear, however,
that this always represents capture, in the sense of elites appropriating all
the benefits from the public good. It may be useful to distinguish between
extreme forms of capture, such as outright theft and corruption, and what might
be called benevolent capture.
However, when local cultures and systems of
social organization result in tight control of community decisions by elites,
malevolent forms of capture become likely. It is important therefore to
understand what types of checks and balances are most effective in reducing capture
and the systematic exclusion of the poor and of discriminated-against
minorities. The problem in assessing elite capture is that there are no studies
that look at an appropriate counterfactual. This remains an important area for
future work.
Several case studies suggest that the success
of participatory projects may also be affected by how well heterogeneity is
managed, by what resources and strategies are used to bring communities together, and by how effectively differences
are debated. The involvement of external agents creates competition among
different interests and incentives, and the success of projects may depend on
how these incentives are aligned whether by persuasion, ideology, consensus,
good governance, domination by greedy elites, or sheer hard work by a group of
altruistic individuals. This is another area where more research would be
useful.
The level of community cohesion, or social
capital, is also expected to improve the quality and sustainability of
projects. Some studies have shown an association between the level of some
index of participation and project effectiveness, but the direction of
causality is unclear. While community-based development seems likely to be more
effective in more cohesive and better managed communities, evidence also indicates
that better networked, or better educated, groups within a community may be better
able to organize and thus to benefit most from projects. There is virtually no reliable evidence on community participation
projects actually increasing a community’s capacity for collective action. This
is clearly an area for further research.
Several qualitative studies indicate that the
sustainability of community-based initiatives depends crucially on an enabling
institutional environment. Line ministries need to be responsive to the needs
of communities, and national governments need to be committed to transparent,
accountable, and democratic governance, through upward commitment. To avoid
supply driven demand driven development it is important that community leaders
also be downwardly accountable, answerable primarily to beneficiaries rather
than to political and bureaucratic superiors. Qualitative evidence also
suggests the importance of external agents, such as project facilitators, to
project success. Projects often work with young, inexperienced facilitators
whose incentives may not be aligned with the best interests of the community. Knowledge
of their impact on the success of projects is limited and requires more investigation.
This lack of evidence also relates to the question of how rapidly participatory
projects can be scaled up, because rapid scaling up may rely on especially inexperienced
facilitators.
Overall, since the success of community-based
development is crucially conditioned by local cultural and social systems,
projects are best done with careful learning by doing. While successful
projects in any context provide a tremendous learning opportunity, any
wholesale application of best practices in unlikely to be useful. In a similar
vein, key concepts that underpin community-based initiatives, such as participation, community, and social capital, must be
adequately detailed in a context specific manner. Case study evidence indicates
that any naive application of these notions by project implementers can lead to
poor project design and to outcomes that are at odds with the stated intentions
of projects.
Finally, it is important to realize that
community-based development is not necessarily empowering in practice. A less
fervent, and more analytical, approach by both proponents and opponents would
be extremely beneficial. This requires a long time horizon and programs that
are well monitored, to enable learning from mistakes, and carefully evaluated.
Little is known about the impact of community-based projects, argely because most such projects lack
careful evaluations with good treatment and control groups and with baseline
and follow-up data. This situation urgently needs to be remedied.
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