COMMUNITY BASED DRIVEN PROJECTS AS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT HELPING THE POOR?

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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