Scaling Up Community Driven Development

1. Scaling Up Community Driven Development Theoretical Underpinnings And Program Design Implications Hans Binswanger and Swaminathan Aiyer

2. The Nightmare Scenario • Find a successful community boutique, decide to scale it up • Design, negotiate a project, draft operational manual • Set up project unit, new staff often not involved in design • Project starts, runs into a bottleneck, grinds to a halt • Mission sent, problem solved, start again, runs into next problem, grinds to halt • After several cycles the program is discredited • Willingness to finance scale-up is gone, even if logistics eventually worked out

3. Outline • Why is scaling up so difficult • Theoretical underpinnings and design implications • Program design and program tools

4. Why Is Scaling up So Difficult

5. Total or Fiscal Cost Is Too High • Some community boutiques are intrinsically not scalable: • inputs, technology and facilitation too costly • Too many intermediaries • Most money used up in program management rather than frontline work • Low fiscal transfer efficiency

6. Hostile Institutional Setting • No decentralization • No willingness to devolve power and money • No empowerment

7. Co-production of Investments, Outputs and Services • by many different stakeholders at many different levels • community workers, local government officials, NGOs, the private sector, technical specialists, sector administrators, program managers, politicians and aid agency personnel • Three sets of co-production problems • Differences in values of co-producers • Assignment of functions to actors and levels not clear • Incompatible incentives

8. No Scaling up Logistics • Inadequate development of operational tools and procedures • The flow of funds has not been worked out • No information strategy and training logistics • No pretest at scale of district or province

9. Theoretical Underpinnings and Design Implications

10. Bargaining Model of Participation (Becker) • Bargaining will lead to decision and outcomes that will benefit all stakeholders or pressure groups if • All pressure groups have correct and equal information about consequences of each option for all stakeholders • All pressure groups have equal lobbying power • All decisions have to be evaluated against a single aggregate budget constraint

11. Some Design Implications Following Directly From This • Participatory appraisal and planning methods need to be generalized to ensure all stakeholders have information • Facilitators, technical agents provide knowledge to stakeholders on demand • Grants to communities, local governments not to be earmarked • Earmarking only when there is an un-surmountable information/participation constraint • A radical departure from current foreign assistance programs • Communication, communication, in all directions

12. These Ideal Conditions Would Ensure • Absence of Elite Capture • Inclusion of marginalized groups • Competition among members of the elite ensures they work for the common good, and not just for themselves • Accountability for financial resources • Economic, Fiscal, Environmental SustainabilityOf course these ideal conditions are never fully met, but program design and implementation need to constantly work towards them

13. CDD Is Not a Project • Empowering Communities with resources and authority to manage their own development • CDD Implies four major changes • Development communities • Developing and empowering local governments • Reforming the Central State • Reforming the sector agencies

14. What Do We Want to Scale Up? • Real Participation • Improving Accountability • Technical Soundness • Fiscal, Environmental, and Social Sustainability

15. Fostering Real Participation • Devolution of authority and resources • Using principle of subsidiarity • Assured flows of fund • Authority to raise own resources • Participation in planning, appraisal, implementation, operation, and maintenance • Co-financing by communities and local government • Improves accountability and reduces fiscal costs

16. Essential Conditions For Empowerment and Scalability • Provide Authority and Money to Local Governments and Communities • Serious commitment at the top to shift power to the bottom • Brazil it came from the State Governors, in Mexico from the Federal government and later the state governors • Learning by doing at all levels

17. Cost Effectiveness • Overall costs, no matter who pays them • Will not be cost effective if you have too many intermediaries, or too many highly paid public sector workers, technical specialists • In none of the above project there are intermediary NGOs, only facilitators and technical agents who are hired by communities • In Brazil several layers of government intermediaries eliminated in 1993 • Use of local village or community technicians rather than civil service or NGO staff

18. Fiscal Cost-effectiveness • You can reduce fiscal costs by mobilizing more co-financing from communities or local governments, and from user charges • Communities and local elected officials provide “free” management services, labor, labor, materials, and finance • Will only happen if communities, local governments fully empowered, and regard the funds received from outside as their own

19. Mobilize Latent Capabilities • Mobilize organizational and management capabilities at the community, local institution, and government levels • Mobilize technical capabilities already present in traditional specialists, retired or underemployed people with skills, in local institutions, or local governments, NGOs • Mobilize and energize the private sector

20. Program Design and Program Tools

21. Clarity of Functions, Proper Training, Learning by Doing • All involved in co-production need to know what to do, how to do it, and have the tools and training • Decide on allocation of functions to levels and actors • Provide Operational manuals and tools for each level and function • Insist on simplicity of procedures and rules, reduction of steps, overlapping functions etc • Facilitate learning by doing and interchange of experience at each level and among levels

22. Program Design and Diagnosis • Design elements and tools assembled solutions which practitioners have found • Community design elements and tools • Scaling up design elements and tools • Decentralization design elements and tools • Sector-specific design elements and tools • Ensure complete assignment of functions to actors and levels

23. Systematic Approach to Diagnosing and Design for Scaling up • Reducing economic and/or fiscal costs • Overcoming adverse institutional barriers • Overcoming problems associated with co-production by • fostering a common culture and vision among program participants; • assigning and describing program functions and tasks to different actors and levels; and • providing incentives compatible with program objectives • Designing and field-testing the operational manuals, toolkits and scaling-up logistics

24. To Avoid the Nightmare Scenario Proceed to Logistics Test • Use crackerjack team to scale up the program in one district or province only • Design and/or amend operational manual, implementation tools, training programs, and logistics manual as a learning by doing process • Produce a field tested operational and logistics manual • Expand to other districts and provinces, translate into different languages and adapt to local settingsResearch results

25. Research Project on Scaling Up • Mexico, Indonesia, Burkina Faso: Large multi-sectoral programs within a movement of decentralization • Uganda: 4 different community and district empowerment/capacity building projects in a strong movement of decentralization • Kerala: Demand-driven community water supply project in a consistent decentralization and empowerment context • Benin: Several empowerment projects with inadequate decentralization and attention to scaling up • Zambia: National program at district and community levels, but inadequate decentralization, empowerment and linkages

26. Key Results • Conceptual framework has stood up well • Insufficient links to, and depth of decentralization hampers scaling up and program quality: Zambia, Benin • Clear assignment of functions, strong linkages, facilitation and technical support, participatory and independent external monitoring are essential: Indonesia, Kerala, Mexico, • Most of the specific scaling up tools have been validated

27. Tensions Inherent in CDD • between a more holistic and more targeted approach: Kerala versus Mexico • between working with more organized community groups and bringing marginal people into the process: Kerala • empowerment without linkages is rather meaningless: Benin • empowerment of communities and of local governments doesn't necessarily mean good linkages: Zambia

28. Emerging Concepts That May Be Universally Applicable • capacity-building ladders (Zambia) • Scale up local government capacity, with more funding and responsibility, using a clear graduation system • cascading training plans (Kerala, Indonesia) • incentives/rewards for local governments (Zambia, Mexico, Indonesia, Uganda) • Quantitative evaluations are possible (Uganda)

29. Much Progress Many Lessons to Apply and Scale UpAs National Programs, Not As ProjectsStill More to Learn