Community Development Sixty Years of Global Experience

1. Community Development Sixty Years of Global Experience Portfolio Committee on Provincial and Local Government 19 September 2006 Hans P. Binswanger Institute for Research on Economic Innovation Tshwane University of Technology

2. The major intellectual and political battles over the last 60 years • How to help and/or empower poor communities and people • Who is in charge of planning and execution • Who controls the money • Productive projects: Via cooperatives, communities, or individual projects?

3. Three different approaches to communities • Service Delivery Approach: Government or other service providers consult communities and beneficiaries, adapt their services and deliver them through their own staffs • Intermediary model: Government or other facilitators work with communities, but take a strong management approach, including selection of projects, technology, construction, and financial management. Communities co-finance projects and run and maintain them • Empowerment model: Outside facilitators help communities in diagnosis, design, and execution. Communities manage funds, contracts and implementation

4. Three different approaches to local development

5. Local and Community-driven development • The emerging consensus • Integrated local development is a co-production of communities, local governments, government sectors, and private organizations • Roles need to be properly defined, and actors need to be fully empowered to execute their roles, in particular with finances

6. Where did this consensus come from? • Mahatma Gandhi as an advocate • He would have said that he believes in holistic development, not just income • Sector-specific approaches • Community Development in India • The Comilla Model • Area Development programs: 1970-1990 • Community-driven development, Social Funds, Local government approaches

7. Sector-specific programs are the oldest approaches • Irrigation, health and education bureaucracies • Agricultural research, extension services, forestry departments • Agricultural credit institutions, often replaced by micro-finance institutions • Rural engineering departments, housing departments, water supply…

8. Do sector-specific programs serve the poor? The global record of sector-specific programs to serve the poor, vulnerable and marginalized is miserable • They rarely reach into deep rural space or informal settlements • They tend to service the better off members of the community • They are rarely accountable to the users • They are often corrupt

9. Community Development in India • 1948 pilots of S. K. Dev, advocating a holistic and integrated approach • Key elements: Diagnosis, planning, empowerment, community development workers in each village, coordination at the block level (like rural municipality) • Mobilization of the communities and poor people’s own resources

10. Scaled up nationally in less than ten years • Managed by a special ministry of community development • But reality departed from the ideals: • Block development plans developed by technicians • Program transformation to a service delivery approach by central agencies • Little community empowerment, NPO and local government involvement

11. More on India • Community development program achieved little until 1970, at which time the program and the ministry was disbanded • It was to be replaced by • Technology-driven approaches • Sector–driven service delivery, and intermediary approaches • A plethora of programs for special target groups

12. Elected local governments created in the late 1950s • But not empowered with fiscal resources, therefore achieved little • New thrust towards decentralization came back only in the 1990s • Now India is moving towards the co-production model, but lagging behind in the empowerment of communities and local governments financially

13. The Comilla Model in Bangladesh • Akhter Hameed Khan, and the Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development, starting in 1960 • Same elements as CD in India, emphasizing a holistic development, mobilizing the strengths and resources of the poor • Plus a lot of emphasis on institutional basis for local development, technology, irrigation, and cooperatives, more elaborate coordination mechanisms at local level

14. Scaled up nationally (from 1970) • via the Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), • eventually replaced by Bangladesh Rural Development Board (BRDB) • that became a large centralized bureaucracy, using the service delivery model • Absence of local government involvement, little community empowerment

15. More on Bangladesh and India • Despite shortcomings, these countries have achieved significant development of infrastructure, food self sufficiency, rapid economic growth • But they are still lagging badly in poverty reduction, human capabilities, and social development

17. Productive projects have always been a problem • Less successful, less sustainable than infrastructure projects • Often supply-driven, fail because of lack of markets • Cooperative and/or community enterprises have an enormous record of failure, all around the world • The reasons are largely conflicts over incentives to work, consume and share profits • The variant of labor-managed have also done poorly • Some cooperatives do well in provision of inputs, marketing, finance, and other facilitating role • Individual enterprises do best

18. The (Integrated) Area Development Approach: 1969 to 1995 • Inspired by Comilla model • Emphasizing holistic area development, community autonomy, role of local government, NPOs and sector specialists to achieve programs designed locally/communities

19. Hundreds of such programs were designed • Funded by World Bank, AFDB, DBSA, IFAD, bilateral donors • Most of them, reverted to planning by technocrats, used the service delivery or intermediary models, ignored any local government which might have helped, and suffered enormous coordination problems • They did best on delivery of infrastructure, but failed on most other objectives • Income growth often not achieved because of lack of technology • Few viable institutions left behind The approach was abandoned around 1990

20. The Coordination Problem • There is a huge diversity among poor areas, poor communities and poor people • No central agency can even keep track of this heterogeneity or design and implement development programs • Even when plans are developed locally or by communities, central agencies rarely can deliver on them individually in a service delivery mode, much less so in a holistic integrated approach • The tree major approaches we discussed all developed the so called stove pipe model to delivery of programs, and then attempted to coordinate the stovepipes locally, such as your development nodes • All attempts at such coordination failed

21. Land Infrastructure & housing Inputs Resettlement Advice Overhead Components and costs of a typical land reform project

22. But government programs are fragmented into stove pipes(LRAD, CASP, RDP housing, MAFISA, Land Bank, Khula, AgriBEE, LandCare, AgriSETA, etc.)

23. Lessons from this review • Strong ideals and strategies of holistic and integrated development degenerated upon scaling up • Centralization, disempowerment, inability to coordinate and integrate • The programs did not strengthen the institutional framework for local and community-development • They did not devolve functions and development resources to communities and local governments • They lost their social objectives, and instead were often captured by elites • NGOs have rarely graduated beyond the service delivery and intermediary model

24. Overcoming the legacy of failure

25. Local (Government) Development Funds • Pioneer: United Nations Capital Fund, now being generalized • Bottom up planning starting at communities, each of which lists its priorities, complemented by priorities at local level • Selection of projects in open district development committees in the presence of community representatives • Financed out of a fungible fund held and managed at local level • South Africa has implemented this model in the local development grant • But it is requiring much too complex panning, usually done by consultants rather than the communities and local development committee

26. Community-driven development: (CDD) (over a hundred programs around the world) • Communities are in charge of the choice of project and its design, choice of technology, the money to execute the project, their contributions to the project, the contracting and financial management • Communities are coordinated at local government level, have access to professional facilitators, and the technical resources of the sector agencies. They may use their money to buy additional technical services • In the best programs communities get a budget based on per capita and other norms, and allocate it to their projects in their development plan

27. How is CDD done? • Diagnosis, planning, integration, and monitoring usually done via PRA techniques • They get training in financial management and planning • They learn mostly by doing • The communities have to co-finance the projects in cash, labor, or local materials

28. Recent impact evaluation of Brazil CDD program Over 250000 communities reached, over 300000 community projects, at a total cost of about 10 billion rand Mostly focused on essential priorities such as electrification and drinking water, but also productive and social projects Communities achieve projects faster, cheaper, at the same or better quality as intermediary or service delivery approaches, sustainabilility of projects is fairly good

29. Impacts in Brazil Access to infrastructure and quality of housing has increased Child mortality and incidence of several communicable diseases have declined All household assets have increased, but increase is not statistically significant Productive projects do less well than infrastructure projects There has been a very quick and large increase in social capital at community and local levels, and that capital does not depreciate

30. The recent synthesis: Local and community-driven development (LCDD) • It is a co-production: of communities, local governments, sector agencies, the private sector and NGOs • Coordination at local level • The money and authority does not flow in stovepipes: They are devolved to local governments and communities • Local governments and communities are held accountable for use of funds and for achieving their own and mandated development objectives

31. Implementation of the synthesis is a huge challenge • Lack of trust in communities and local governments • Exaggerated planning expectations • Many political battles about control over money and other resources

32. Weaknesses and future challenges for LCDD • Communities, local governments prioritize infrastructure first, followed by productive projects, rarely social projects • But they are not that good at productive projects because they find it hard to link to broader markets and input supply systems • A CDD approach to delivery of welfare services and social safety nets does not yet exist • only fragments of responsibility are devolved, such as selection of beneficiaries, and requirements to contribute labor and food