CHAPTER 1
Participatory development: an overview
The demise of many authoritarian regimes at the end of the 1980s coincided with a refocusing of official aid. Since the mid-1980s, donor agencies had been undergoing a series of transformations. Development ceased to be seen in terms of large-scale projects; instead, international financial institutions promoted stringent economic adjustment as the key to growth and poverty alleviation. The failure of structural adjustment programmes to produce the anticipated results led to another change in direction as donors started to call for the modernisation of government systems and structures.
Many of the planning disasters of the past are now attributed to a failure to understand the prevailing economic and political context in developing countries. Ignorance of local conditions leads to a lack of commitment on the part of the intended beneficiaries. A welcome feature of the new approach to development is the focus on the local context and the poverty profile in recipient countries. Never has so much information been collected about and from the intended beneficiaries of aid — the 1.3 billion women, men ,and children who are living below the line of absolute poverty in developing countries on $1 a day. Techniques such as rapid rural appraisal, beneficiary-impact assessments, and stakeholder analyses have generated a mass of documents and guidelines. But how are the data being used? Have they altered the development priorities of donors and governments?
'Participation' as a formula to remedy past failures has been enthusiastically endorsed by most of the world's governments, traditional international financial institutions, and bilateral donor agencies as the most effective instrument for delivering development. This enthusiasm may be related to the fact that 'participation' is a nebulous term which does not impose any specific set of obligations on donors and governments. In truth, while aid levels were high, the absence of local commitment to achieving success or support for a project's aims was frequently disregarded by planners and donor agencies. But throughout the 1980s, community leaders, in partnership with NGOs, began to protest about the damage wrought on the lives and livelihoods of local, usually poor people, by ill-conceived internationally financed infrastructure projects. Their protests, allied to environmental concerns, led to the realisation that strategies for sustainable development had to become more inclusive.
Public participation is a continually evolving concept. It may be broadly defined as an opportunity for citizens and public and private organisations to express their opinions on general policy goals or to have their priorities and needs integrated into decisions made about specific projects and programmes. It allows members of civil society — but particularly the poorest — a chance to discuss development plans with representatives of government and donor institutions. It includes the possibility of appealing against governmental decisions and proposing reasonable alternatives to those in power. It has increasingly been seen less as a particular development tool in the context of specific projects and more as an essential component of the démocratisation process, which helps to improve the competence of individual citizens to exercise their right to participate in political life, and also helps to increase the responsiveness and accountability of public administration and government to the public. Increasing public awareness and concern about development — particularly from a social and environmental perspective — has been one of the most important driving forces for increasing public participation.
International human-rights standards have long recognised the right of individuals and communities to be involved in the formulation and implementation of policies, programmes, budgets, legislation, and other activities. The right to participation is clearly connected to all human rights, but is specifically applicable to the realisation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration, issued at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, also recognises that environmental issues are best handled with the participation of all concerned citizens. It is recognised that effective participation requires access to information about development and environmental initiatives held by public authorities or donors, or even by private companies.
Oxfam has supported many campaigns for fair treatment for the victims of development: from Brazilian Indian communities, decimated by disease during the road-construction programmes in the Amazon, to tribal people in India, threatened with destitution when dispossessed of their traditional lands to make way for large hydropower schemes. For Oxfam, participation is not simply a way of making aid more effective, but an essential prerequisite for recognising and safeguarding fundamental rights. It is also a means of making aid locally accountable. But if it is to be more than a token gesture, decisions on the scope, nature, and mechanisms of participation cannot simply be imposed by donors or governments; they must emerge from a process of negotiation with local people.
This chapter attempts to summarise the evolution of ideas about participation in the context of the policies of official donors and multilateral development banks. It examines some of the problems and contradictions with the prevailing trends in aid, and assesses the work of official aid institutions and non-government organisations (NGOs) to promote participation.
Trends in official aid policies
Whether development is led by support from Official Development Assistance or by means of private-sector investment, it is unlikely to succeed if it does not incorporate the lessons learned from the campaigns against bad or inappropriate development. High-profile campaigns have publicised the negative impacts of grandiose development schemes that have failed to put people first. As a result, changes in the approaches to development projects have been formally adopted by most major donors, and criteria to inform the implementation of projects have proliferated. The World Bank's Operational Directives, approved by its Board of Directors, are designed to protect the rights of people involuntarily resettled, of indigenous peoples, and of the environment. Environmental impact assessments are required for projects liable to have serious environmental or social impacts. While such standards and guidelines are never fully complied with, they are a measure by which aid interventions should be judged.
The development of standards and good-practice procedures has, of course, been a response to increasing demands from NGOs and citizens' groups for greater openness in development decision-making and for active participation in deliberations that affect people's futures. There has been a realisation that knowledge is power. NGOs have successfully campaigned for the adoption of public-information disclosure policies by multilateral agencies. Consultations with NGOs on policies and projects are increasingly common. An important landmark in the drive for accountable aid was reached in 1993, with the establishment of the World Bank's Inspection Panel — the world's first complaints mechanism for project-affected people. Yet, in spite of these gains, correcting mistakes and redressing the negative consequences that aid interventions may cause to individuals and impoverished communities remains as problematic as ever.
The end of the Cold War
Popular participation is after all democracy at work at the grassroots level.
It is hardly surprising that the impetus for a new aid compact started to be widely endorsed by major donors with the ending of the Cold War. It was not that the concepts of accountability and participation were entirely new in development debates, but that some of the old, less acceptable motives behind development assistance were thought to be a thing of the past. In a speech to the donor community, at a meeting of the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris in December 1990, Wilfried Thalwitz, a Senior Vice-President of the World Bank's Policy Research and External Affairs Department, set out the new approach:
The end of the Cold War offers an historic opportunity to shape a new, more people-oriented pattern of world security and development.... The World Bank has learned from its experience of development that popular participation is important to the success of projects economically, environmentally and socially.
Coupled with the ending of superpower rivalry in the developing world was the unpalatable evidence suggesting that aid transfers had failed to reduce poverty, particularly in areas of the world like sub-Saharan Africa, where, in the view of the World Bank, 'Underlying the litany of Africa's development problems is a crisis of governance'.
Across the world donors came to accept that a pre-condition for successful development efforts was the existence of an appropriate policy environment. Recipient countries were made aware that aid would no longer be automatically provided: in future, flows would depend on their capacity to manage resources effectively. Their record on promoting democracy and respect for human rights would be taken into account. Baroness Chalker, Minister for Overseas Development in the UK government, declared in 1991:
Aid cannot be given in a policy vacuum. Aid ministers are responsible to their own parliaments and people, just as other spending ministers. If we believe our aid is not going to be used effectively to help those for whom it was intended, I am duty bound to ask how its effectiveness can be safeguarded. If it cannot be, I have to question whether it should be spent at all. Our resources are finite and neither we nor recipients of our aid can afford to see them wasted. Some might call this conditionality. I call it common sense.
The new world order emboldened political leaders, and not just those from industrialised countries, to speak out about human-rights abuses and corruption in developing countries. New types of conditionality, requiring governments to instigate political and institutional reform, were grafted on to the existing economic reform packages. But donors' reactions to human-rights abuses have been inconsistent. Since 1990 donors have suspended aid on grounds of human-rights violations and/or interruptions of the democratic process in over 20 countries. Most of these suspensions have been short-term; not all donors agreed to the suspension. It has become clear that the donors are usually willing to act in this way only against the weakest economies, where investments and access to lucrative markets are not at risk. Development NGOs argue that unless transparent criteria are used and proper safeguards put in place, such actions can do more harm than good. There is always a risk that, by enforcing economic sanctions or suspending aid, the donor community may be imposing a collective punishment on an entire population, damaging the interests of the poor, and — as in the case of the sustained embargo on Iraqi oil sales after the Gulf War — sometimes even violating international standards on human rights.
The move to 'good governance'
In response to the limitations of the conditionalities adopted in the 1980s to promote structural adjustment and economic reform packages, the World Bank, whose statutes forbid political considerations to affect its operations, started to emphasise the need for 'good governance' to ensure the sustainability of development programmes. The World Bank defined governance as 'the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country's economic and social resources for development'. The Bank's traditional concern with sound development management now extends beyond the capacity of public-sector management to the rules and institutions which create a predictable and transparent framework for the conduct of public and private business. The Bank sees accountability for economic and financial performance as a legitimate and necessary objective of its work.
The Bank's recipe for good governance, which is broadly supported by all donors, includes a range of measures: from strengthening accounting in the public sector to devolving financial power to local authorities. At the policy level, good governance is a method of assisting governments to improve the transparency of budgets and public-expenditure programmes. At the project level, it encourages beneficiary participation 'where appropriate' and the selective use of local NGOs to enhance service delivery. It seeks to promote legal reform, training the judiciary in business and economic laws and encouraging the use of alternative dispute-resolution mechanisms when legal systems are overburdened.
To many observers, however, this definition was unduly narrow. There are signs that the World Bank itself is rethinking the long-term implications of the stringent retrenchment of central government and the rapid introduction of measures to reduce the operations of the State which have undermined the broader conception of good governance. These conditions were heavily promoted in developing countries as part of the World Bank/IMF adjustment loans for debtor countries, in a drive to improve efficiency and cut costs. In its 1997 World Development Report, the World Bank acknowledges that recent reforms have tended to emphasise economic fundamentals to the exclusion of the social and institutional basis needed to ensure sustained development and to avoid social disruption. 'Development — economic, social, and sustainable — without an effective state is impossible. It is increasingly recognized that an effective state — not a minimal one — is central to economic and social development'.
Defining participation
Governments which fail to respond to the needs of minorities and the poor do so at their peril.
A key component of the good-governance formula is participation. For donors, participation is still relatively new as an explicit policy. But the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) traces its origins to the small-scale community-development projects of the 1960s and 1970s. With the growing realisation that many aid initiatives were simply not sustainable, donors have attempted with varying degrees of success 'to operationalise' participation.
According to the World Bank's original definition, popular participation is the process by which people, especially disadvantaged people, influence decisions which affect their lives. The term 'popular' refers not only to the absolute poor, but to a broad range of people who are disadvantaged in terms of wealth, education, ethnicity, or gender. Participation implies influence on development decisions, not simply involvement in the implementation of benefits of a development programme or project. By 1994 the emphasis had shifted: the term 'popular' was dropped; instead of a focus on the poorest and most disadvantaged, the Bank expressed its concern to work with a wider range of 'stakeholders', defining participation as 'a process through which stakeholders influence and share control over development initiatives and the decisions and resources which affect them'.
In January 1991, the World Bank issued a list of Bank-financed projects 'with potential for NGO involvement' — inviting NGOs to contact Bank staff to explore possibilities for collaboration, though it warned that NGO involvement would normally require the agreement of the developing-country government concerned. In an oddly non-participatory touch, the Bank indicated what role it expected the NGO to play in some projects: from fostering private schools in Madagascar to assisting in the design and monitoring of the implementation of a Natural Resource Management Project (PLANAFLORO) in the State of Rondônia, Brazil.
The Bank announced that it had embarked on a process of 'learning better how to promote popular participation, learning from some exceptionally participatory Bank-financed projects'. While Oxfam and many NGOs questioned both the extent to which the Bank was already promoting participation and the characterisation of some traditional top-down projects as 'exceptionally participatory', the process has produced valuable research and resulted in some positive developments. In 1996, the task-force set up to oversee the work, the Bankwide Learning Group on Participation, produced its report. In a foreword, James Wolfensohn, the Bank's President, claimed that the report presented 'the new direction the World Bank is taking in its support of participation, by recognizing that there is a diversity of stakeholders for every activity we undertake, and that those people affected by development interventions must be included in the decision-making process'. The aim of participatory approaches was 'to produce better results on the ground, improve development efforts and more effectively reach the poor'.
