Failures of top-down development planning

International development is not working. Externally defined expert-driven plans continue to override the reality of the local context and intervene in ways that are either irrelevant or damaging. This chapter examines iconic strategic planning approaches: big push thinking (Millennium Villages) technically driven programming (Green Revolution), good governance programming, and rights-based approaches, and concludes that lasting results have been elusive because our approach to development is rooted in flawed assumptions.

Keywords: planning failure; top-down development; big push; Green Revolution; good governance

http://dx.doi.org/10.3362/9781780448510.001

Defining development 'problems'

Across the world, people and nations are facing huge challenges. Our climate is changing and temperatures are rising, principally as a result of human activities. This affects water supply, food production, health, and peace. Mitigation and adaption will be required at local, national, and international levels. Increasing urbanization is creating unprecedented concentrations of deprivation whose hallmark is poverty and social unrest. Whole cultures are being threatened by powerful new governance systems, with ancient systems such as pastoralism now facing an uncertain future. War is becoming more prevalent, with social and political unrest in the Middle East spreading at an alarming rate. Pandemics are becoming more common, with new diseases and new resistances. Water scarcity affects more people than ever before. The need for development interventions that enable humankind to meet these challenges is more critical now than at any time in our history.

Development organizations have tried to bring about lasting and sustainable change to improve people's lives. Vast sums of money are spent on reducing poverty, promoting rights, stimulating economic growth, reducing inequity, reversing environmental damage, and promoting good governance. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – Development Co-operation Directorate (2014), in 2013 almost US$135 billion official development assistance was spent, yet much of this has had minimal impact on the lives of marginalized people and those living in poverty.

To make improvements happen, development practitioners and investors analyse poverty, try to determine its root causes, define causal pathways and design interventions to fix these. Linear intervention logic is used to offer solutions that address critical problems in the causal pathway and thereby reduce or reverse bad effects. Impact is seen to be a direct result of intervention. Like other contemporary commentators such as Ramalingam (2013), we will argue that this does not make sense as change happens through far more complex processes. By failing to understand how change happens, development interventions are likely to be ineffectual or damaging.

A central feature of all development programmes is the definition of problems that need to be fixed, and the positioning of technical solutions to address these. Viewed by experts, development issues occur within a defined and subjectively bounded domain. Boundaries are set by ideological frameworks that determine what is seen to be beneficial and what is not. Over time, development agendas change. In the years since the Marshall Plan, they have evolved to cover food production, industrialization, good governance, human rights, democracy, basic services, free markets, peace and security, gender equity, and much more. Now there is particular focus on creating security, economic growth, more food, and sustainable energy while apparently antithetical narratives such as mitigation of environmental damage are growing simultaneously. At the beginning of this century, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were enshrined by the United Nations as a unifying mantra.

Consensus on what constitutes progress has changed as global discourse has meandered through new philosophies and ideologies, and the world experiences new events. We will refer to the ideas that bound and shape development investment and intervention as 'development frameworks'. Viewed through these frameworks, issues that do not present themselves as a problem are deemed contextual, in a process that shapes development programmes by what they exclude. In other words, issues that cause human misery are only identified as issues to be addressed when they are seen as a problem within these frameworks.

While working to improve access to drinking water and sanitation services in towns around Lake Victoria (see Chapter 4), we came across repeated examples of onerous and difficult procurement bureaucracy practiced by the government and by a large international infrastructure investment programme. We heard stories of how this was preventing people from accessing basic services, was causing bankruptcy among local small businesses, and was incentivizing corruption by municipal leaders. This was consistently cited as one of the most severe development problems being experienced in these towns. They described predatory practices by municipal officials and project staff that were justified as being necessary in order to comply with procurement standards. When evidence of this was presented to project managers, they were obdurate. World Bank procurement standards that framed both municipal and project practice were sacrosanct. They resisted evidence, and could therefore never be part of the problem. Project leaders seemed blind to act.

Development problems are articulated as technical issues because the armoury of fixes used by the development industry is largely technical, and there are strong vested interests in keeping it that way. This process of 'technical rendering' (Murray Li, 2007) takes wider political issues and reframes them as technical problems. This effectively depoliticizes questions that are being asked and removes politics from the analysis. Where there are power imbalances, solutions offered tend to be aimed at helping people to adjust (e.g. focusing on technical inputs to improve capacity for the poor to adapt) rather than actions that would support activism to overturn inequity.

Problems are usually defined as being a 'lack of' something. This presupposes the solution. A lack of schools can only be fixed by building schools. If instead, the problem was framed as 'children are unable to go to school', then a range of other causes become possible. In Afghanistan in the 1990s, while school facilities were indeed sparse and inadequate for quality teaching, it was the policies that prohibited education which undermined primary education. As we shall show later, local action by parents became the basis for sustainable change. Problematization defines issues within frameworks, renders these technical, and offers pre-cooked technical solutions.

Development interventions are rooted in the principle of trusteeship that is based on the claim to know how others should live, to know what is best for them, and to know what they need (Murray Li, 2007). Programme designers determine the causalities that give rise to poverty and design interventions on this basis. The trusteeship principle separates those who need to be developed from those doing the developing. Tania Murray Li describes this as becoming over time a structure of 'permanent deferral' where subjects are 'destined to become rights bearing individuals, but (remain) always too immature to exercise those rights'.

A good example of how these frameworks shape intervention was revealed through the Institute of Development Studies' (IDS') recent work supporting the Participate Initiative. We carried out a review of 84 participatory research programmes, and supported 18 primary research projects with the poorest and most marginalized in order to generate messages to feed into the post-2015 debate (Leavy and Howard, 2013). The first substantive finding was that the poorest and most marginalized were more concerned with how development was delivered, than what development was delivered. They said that there were already schools, hospitals, justice services, loan schemes, and so on but they didn't get access to them because they faced social and institutional discrimination. The research revealed that the poorer people were, the more interconnected the issues became, and that one problem could not be solved without solving another. This required a different form of development. This conclusion was met by the UK Department of International Development (DFID), as if it was an interesting but marginal issue. But 'tell us what are the priorities of the poor and most marginalized', they said. 'Is it education or health or what? The Voices of the Poor research told us that security was important so what is this research telling us?' Because the whole framing of the post-2015 process was pre-constructed around sectoral goals, the only questions that could be asked related to which sector goals were more important and why. For the poorest people all of these issues were important and fundamentally interrelated. The problem articulated by the development industry was not the problem that they faced.

A brief review of development interventions

There are many critiques of international development. William Easterly in his provocatively titled book The White Man's Burden reviews case studies from the record of development assistance (Easterly, 2006). He notes parallels between the ways in which colonial powers operated and contemporary development assistance. Both claim their actions as being necessary to bring about beneficial order to less-developed peoples. Easterly points out that, in practice, they do nothing of the sort. He describes planners who design ambitious schemes such as structural adjustment programmes and good governance systems, and leverage national government counterparts to comply through conditional funding and expertise. He observes that they focus on top-down reform processes that are based on theoretical arguments that are not supported by evidence. Easterly concludes that development should be home-grown and that the West should assist this at the margins and disavow itself from its utopian beliefs that it can transform national systems.

In a similar vein, Dambisa Moyo in her book Dead Aid argues that development aid has created dependency and has enabled higher levels of corruption in ways that have harmed public accountability and sustained poverty (Moyo, 2009). She offers examples that show why local businesses are unable to be competitive and survive in the wake of vast donations that fill their markets with products that could have been locally made. She concludes that foreign aid perpetuates poverty. She cites literature that indicates a negative relationship between aid and savings, and a correlation between foreign aid and unproductive public consumption. Cooksey and Kikula (2005) observe that in Tanzania, district plans do not deliver outcomes. Traditional top-down planning approaches that lead to district plans 'have no relevance to the felt needs of the grass root communities. Instead such plans indicate what the district officers think the grass root communities need. As such there is poor ownership of not only the process but the outcome as well.' Claudia Williamson's wide-reaching review of literature on foreign aid concludes that foreign aid does not deliver intended results, and controversially suggests that 'it may be more beneficial to the development process if large-scale, top-down government-supported aid agencies are eliminated'. She notes how private actors spontaneously emerge, adapt to local conditions, tap into decentralized knowledge, and rely on feedback mechanisms for success. What these authors have in common is their depiction of top down aid failure. While we do not share all of their political positions or the solutions that they propose their critique of what is actually happening strongly resonates with our experience of aid programming.

Development interventions and the achievement of scale

Considerable attention has been paid to ensure that international development interventions achieve impact at scale. Jeffrey Sachs in his book The End of Poverty argues that extreme poverty can be globally eliminated through carefully planned development aid (Sachs, 2005). The desire for scale sees poverty as being a huge problem for which cost-effective solutions are required. It is rooted in a core assumption that with good planning and organization, success can be replicated and enlarged.

As noted earlier, over time various philosophies have guided the form and nature of development interventions. Despite changes, they have consistently adhered to intricate planning models. Post-World War II reconstruction plans inspired global development players to adopt successive multi-year national plans to implement structural readjustment. These were interventions targeted at the level of national policy that aimed to change the fundamentals of low-income economies, and achieve effect at scale. The planning models that accompanied these efforts have persisted in different forms. Poverty Reduction Strategic Plans, integrated development planning, and most recently Management for Results all subscribe to logical framework thinking.

Embedded in logical framework thinking is the belief that fundamental change happens because of carefully planned and coordinated action. Equipped with a comprehensive overview of the system that they wish to change, and sure in the knowledge that this remains predictable over time, planners pull levers on systems that they perceive to operate like a machine. This belief of the 'world as a machine' is prevalent across development programmes, and we see planning terminology including expressions of dashboards, inputs, outputs, reengineering, levers, and so on. The shortcomings of mechanical models in business are well summarized by Peters and Waterman (1981) as being heartless and abstract, focusing on things rather than people, as devaluing experimentation and fostering a climate where mistakes are abhorred, and denigrating the importance of values. The mechanistic view of the world is the tip of the iceberg of a bigger assumption, namely that complex systems are predictable and static, if only sufficient analytical time and effort can be expended on studying them. The imperative of development planning has been to secure a sense of certainty in space and time in order to build long-term plans. It is attractive to donors and international organizations because it offers a sense of control and accountability. The value of financial control and contracting has de facto become a higher order value than the achievement of sustainable change. The requirement for accountability in delivery has incentivized the definition of outputs as opposed to more complex outcomes.

As Williamson (2009) notes above, managing development through highly detailed and rigid plans has not led to sustained alleviation or eradication of poverty in low-income countries, yet reports abound that suggest that progressis being made. These indicators of progress often relate to the logic that we define, and not to the reality of change. If we say that better farm income is contingent on increased fertilizer use, then increase fertilizer use can be reported as an indicator that increased farm income is on its way to happening. Reported success is being defined on the basis of what is being measured. John Hendra of UN Women notes that 'What matters gets measured, and what we measure is what ends up mattering' (Hendra, 2014). This is problematic because it is self-referential. The delivery of development goods does not lead to the results that are desired.

In Tanzania, the presence of water pumps in rural areas does not correlate with actual water supply. A mapping exercise by SNV in 2008 showed that only 57 per cent of all rural water points in Tanzania were working (SNV, 2010). Data collected showed that most of these installations had been designed and implemented in a top-down manner, with little or no involvement of water users. There was no sense of ownership amongst communities and water points did not reflect what people wanted or were willing to pay for. Ramalingam (2013: 103) reports that: 'In the opening pages of the 2012 report that announced the MDGs had been met, the qualification was made that some of these improved water sources may not be maintained and therefore may not in fact, provide safe water.'

He goes on to say:

there is nothing said about water quality, available quantities, reliability, time spent on accessing and using water facilities, functionality of the water source and the cost or sustainability of the sources. One sobering finding is that much of Africa's water supply infrastructure is failing owing to a lack of maintenance; estimates are that some 50,000 water infrastructures across the continent are in a state of disrepair.