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Inclusive Planning and Allocation for Rural Services
Doug Porter and Martin Onyach-Olaa
- Participatory development
- Background
- Service decision trees
- The limits of front-end participation
- Local accountability: representative and direct participation
- Leaders, technicians and more inclusive decisions
- Capacity versus performance in inclusive planning and allocation
- Summary
- References
- Background
The authors draw on experience from Uganda’s commitment to decentralization. This commitment is transforming the way services are planned and financed; new associations between local governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and private sector agencies are being created. Much attention has been focused on the adoption of various techniques—such as participatory rural appraisal (PRA)—through which direct and intensive forms of participation can be encouraged in decentralized planning. This trend is critically examined and potential consequences are highlighted. A broader concept of accountability is outlined to illustrate a more inclusive approach to planning and allocation for more equity and sustainability in rural services.
Sloganeering about "participation in development" no longer goes without challenge. Tallying up the once-hidden vices of participation alongside its known virtues, a recent review concluded that participatory development is an "essentially contested concept". (1) Yet it is clear that the delivery of sustainable, equitable and affordable rural services is helped if service users are involved in choices about priorities and delivery options. They tend to be more prepared to invest their own resources and sometimes, though not as often as hoped, this involvement makes those services more accessible to vulnerable sections of the population (Cernea 1985).
In developing countries it is often argued that this kind of participation is constrained by the representative political process. The distance (political, economic and social) between elected leaders and their constituency is simply too great for voices to be heard and participation to be effective. Special measures are necessary. In response, it has been agreed that intensive community consultation techniques (such as found in the PRA toolbox, made popular by Robert Chambers and associates) can greatly improve the quality of local service planning decisions. Most donors now insist that these techniques be adopted and many are supporting networks, training programmes, manuals and guides to help install them in routine planning practices in developing countries.
Two issues are being debated in countries like Uganda, where participatory practice is promoted by a host of NGOs and government agencies. One is about cost effectiveness. Given limited resources, pragmatic local leaders ask whether the return on intensive participatory planning justifies the investment? Advocates of participation answer with a resounding "Yes". But the evidence is less tidy and unequivocal. It is not clear where it is best to invest scarce resources in the many decisions that need to be made in identifying and responding to service delivery needs. Where should participatory entry points and veto points be created in the planning and delivery process? Advocates of participation seldom give clear advice. A second issue now arising is whether current approaches to participation in planning actually divert attention from other, more pressing problems in ensuring that services are not just well planned but that resources are sensibly allocated and delivery is appropriately regulated and sustained.
We try to put this debate into a broader context. When asked to define participation priorities, advocates tend to focus narrowly on the technicalities of a planning process. Their concern is to maximize participation when community-service users identify needs, then rank investment options among competing possibilities and assemble these in the form of community plans for action by higher authorities. In contrast, we illustrate the many other points in the process, possibly more significant, where things go wrong and, ultimately, where the actual delivery of services is determined.
Our second concern is more fundamental. In many cases the techniques of participatory planning are becoming absorbed into the routine administrative planning process. While some advocates of these techniques applaud this, we think this sells short the potential contribution of these techniques and, more importantly, it can have negative impacts on the quality of the process of allocating resources wisely to competing priorities. This approach can weaken the political relationship between leaders and their constituencies. Increasingly, the administrative apparatus of planning stands between leaders and constituencies. Constituents’ political demands become administratively disciplined at the same time that the administrative and technical organs of local government become politicized. We argue that the key is not participation in planning, but creating an accountable, inclusive process within the broader frame of political representation at all levels and stages in the service planning and delivery cycle.
We suggest that participation be regarded as part of a broader process of inclusive planning and allocation. Accountability is the key to inclusive planning and allocation. Accountability of politicians to their constituencies is the main reason for popular participation. Accountability of technicians is also essential to ensure that the range of design, engineering, fiscal, environmental and other technical factors are competently brought to the attention of politicians. And finally, inclusive planning and allocation requires accountability between different levels of local and central authorities responsible for regulating, enforcing compliance and setting the policy framework. (Top)
These observations draw on experience gained through the District Development Project (DDP) in Uganda since 1996. Uganda’s turbulent history since independence in 1963 is well known—coups in 1966 and 1971, the war with Tanzania in 1979, the protracted guerrilla struggle 1981–85 and victory of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in January 1986. Less well known is Uganda’s radical experiment with democratic decentralization since 1992, one of the few instances of classic devolution on Sub-Saharan Africa. (2) The DDP is part of the far-reaching changes occurring in the way development services are planned and financed as a result of decentralization (Villadsen and Lubanga 1996).
The project tests participatory planning and decentralized financing procedures under the 1997 Local Government Act. The Act empowers local governments with responsibility for a wide range of services—in fact, central government ministries, by and large, are left with responsibility for policy development and for regulating and providing technical guidance to local governments. Although still underresourced, there is a commitment to devolve a major share of the national budget to fiscally, administratively and politically autonomous local governments. There are problems as well: the new rules of the game are unfamiliar, some central ministries resist devolution of their powers; there is conflict, corruption and mistrust among different levels of local government and their constituents. But there is also a surprising amount of innovation and creativity.
To take decentralization further, the government has defined two key tasks for the DDP. First is the need to improve the capacity of local councils to plan, finance and manage the delivery of services to their constituencies. Second, there is a pressing need to develop a system of incentives and sanctions to promote accountability and establish a clear link between taxes and transfers received and services delivered. The DDP is therefore piloting different approaches to decentralized planning and financing for rural services.
Formulation of the DDP began with an analysis of how services were currently planned and produced. Communities, local councillors, contractors, NGOs and community-based organizations were therefore asked to help construct service decision trees by talking through (in a structured way) each step in the process. Lively debates ensued about the rules of the game and how it was played. This led to talks about how it could be improved before significantly greater amounts of funds became available through decentralization. For three months, across five districts, we moved back and forth over the following kinds of questions:
- • How were
investment projects identified and prioritized, who was involved
and with what effect?
- • How were priorities designed, costed and appraised?
- • How were decisions made about who would own the investment if many different agencies were contributing to creating and maintaining the service?
- • How were designs and bills of quantity produced and checked when facilities needed to be constructed or rehabilitated?
- • What were the different arrangements for involving contractors or local fundis who hired them, who decided to hire them and who monitored and supervised their work?
- • How were arrangements made to ensure the ancillary services (such as the drugs for a health clinic, the health workers who were trained and assigned to work in the facility and others) were made available? (Top)
The rough and ready "service decision trees" revealed interesting, sometimes surprising insight into how business is done at the local level. We learned the following:
- • The formal
versus the actual way of doing business. While
the formal rules of the game (for planning, appraising, budgeting
and delivering services) are the same across the country, there
is an extraordinary range of local practices. At various times,
in the same locality and for the same sector of service, rules
were observed for part of the process, at times they appeared
to be flouted, at times a mixture of rule and local arrangement
was applied. Practices were not often changed at will, but it
was clear that the mix of local history, politics, traditions
and skills are crucially important in how local governments,
community organizations, informal leaders, contractors and so
on actually worked to plan and produce services.
- • Linear versus iterative planning and allocation. Although planning and production of services is typically described in terms of a series of linear steps, actual practice is more typically iterative where steps are often missed and earlier decisions are constantly revisited and changed. For instance, appraisal of proposals or designs rarely occurred as a single event, but were often continuous once the cost implications of a prior choice became known, for instance, people often moved back to change the early choice. Sometimes design standards were altered, the scale of investment was increased or decreased and burning priorities constantly changed. The volatile and itinerant political process of planning and investing in services was in constant tension with the administratively defined, linear and forward-moving process defined in statutes and regulations.
- • Community service provision and transfer funding. A large share of the resources needed to establish and maintain local services came from outside the local government sector, from community contributions, external donors, local politicians and other elites. We learned that the bulk of services was created and sustained by communities, with next to no involvement of local councils. We also learned that, in addition to taxes, community contributions sometimes funded significant parts of the local authority mandated to deliver the service. School fees, for instance, were often "trapped" at the district level, to cover the gaps in funds available for keeping the district education office functioning.
- • More exclusive decisions once the need had been prioritized. Not surprising was that many people were excluded from decisions, and often the wrong priority was funded. Less expected was the realization that as the process progressed from establishing priorities to appraisal, budgeting and delivery of services, decisions were made by increasingly fewer people and according to more exclusive criteria. Consequently, local priorities were often radically reshaped as they moved through the hands of councillors and technicians towards final delivery. Decisions tended, therefore, to become increasingly parochial, ignoring wider ramifications and consequences, and less accountable.
- • Participation and priorities for improvement. Most people wanted greater say in how investment priorities were decided. But more were concerned with what happened once the list of priorities had been decided, regardless of whether they had been directly involved. In other words, more people were concerned about the fact that the technical quality of decisions was often poor. (3) They were annoyed that what was often defined as a technical issue was often a political judgement. And irrespective of whether their priorities had been accepted, local people were often more concerned that leaders and technical staff (of local governments, NGOs and community-based organizations alike) tended not to be accountable for their conduct once decisions were made.
All this varied by sector. Some investments were easier to handle than others. Some kinds of investment were more accessible to scrutiny by the community and they tended to go off the rails less often than others. Under some arrangements, complaints were fewer and satisfaction was higher.
Yet in all this diversity we began to question four key aspects of the approach that lie behind the push for more participatory practices in service planning and delivery. First, like many similar programmes, we had assumed that it would be most important to ensure community access to the front end of the planning process, when needs were assessed and priorities set. This was clearly misplaced. As one market vendor said to us, "It doesn’t really matter whether it’s the roof that’s improved this time, or that drains on the edges of the market are given priority. The priority is less important than what they actually do on the ground".
Second, the planning and production of services is conventionally understood as a linear, step-wise and unidirectional process. This is clearly at odds with the procedures employed by local people in most situations to meet their service requirements. By implication, if the intention was to support local capacities for delivery of services, it took little foresight to realize that much of what was currently offered in planning manuals, training and retooling exercises would have little value. And neither, perhaps, did it make sense to focus scarce resources on instilling this technical, rational approach in the minds of the administrative organs of local councils or NGOs. This has been a major focus of capacity building efforts for more than two decades. In few cases did we find that the administrative cadres of local councils or NGOs were not reasonably well versed in the rudiments of planning discourse. In fact, in Uganda, as throughout East and southern Africa, there is a marked contrast between the administrative staff and political leadership. On one side is a reasonably well-trained administrative cadre able to rehearse (but seldom apply) the litany of good planning practice. They sit at some distance from local leadership, often alienated, completely apart from the administrative process and frequently determined to free themselves from the restrictions they feel it imposes unreasonably. Our third realization, therefore, was that pushing for a PRA-type process to be installed in the local government planning process would probably backfire. It could further politicize the administrative organ of councils and place technicians as interlocutors between local communities and their leadership.
It therefore seemed that large parts of the kind of capacity building delivered in decentralized or participatory planning and financing programmes was ill-suited to needs. Undeniably, technical skills could be enhanced usefully. But of more significance were the political skills of bargaining, compromising and assembling the many social, technical, financial and other factors necessary for leaders to make wise decisions throughout the service planning and delivery process. Quite clearly decentralization has heightened political contest at the local level, and the devolution of development funds under a programme like the DDP quickly over-stretches the political skills of elected leaders. This realization underpins the emphasis here on inclusive planning and allocation procedures. However, while new skills are needed, the keystone to this approach is not capacity, but accountability. This requires sorting through the nests of sanctions and incentives that bear on the performance of political leaders and technicians both at local and higher levels.
Accountability is evidently many-sided, but the fourth thing we realized from these consultations was that accountability among different levels of local and central government was at least as important, if not more so, than the accountability of leaders to constituents, the concern that preoccupies the contemporary clamour for participatory planning. We say more about these points below. (Top)
The limits of front-end participation
During our consultations, most communities articulated a long list of many and varied needs. People were concerned that priorities were often determined by the boys in the backroom and then shot down by politicians and leaders when presented to the expectant mass as their real priorities. They wanted a wider range of priorities to be considered. But people seemed less concerned with the actual need that was finally decided on than they were with the problems that arose following this decision. This led us to wonder whether the opportunity cost of one priority over another was lower than we assumed. Perhaps the opportunity cost of the litany of problems that occurred following the decision on what was to be the immediate priority for action was higher. Certainly more anger was expressed about mismanagement of resources, failure to honour commitments, poor coordination and so on, than ever arose about whether one priority or another was agreed to.
This contrasts with conventional thinking about participation, which focuses on planning, and, within this, narrows to discussion of the best approaches to encourage direct community participation in the early steps in the process. Why is this? One reason is perhaps the legacy of the 1970s tradition of development, where special prominence was given to the production of plans (national, regional, community, project) and to the central role of technicians, particularly planners. (4) In rural service planning the approach is a linear process. First, baseline studies establish the local situation, understood in terms of how many people have access to what services: ratios of doctors to population, ratios of school-aged children to enrolled school pupils, the density of roads in relation to agricultural potential and so on. Service deficits are then identified by comparing the "local actual" against the nationally (or internationally) prescribed standard. It is then a simple matter to identify requirements and produce the plan.
Many volumes of reflection on the unhappy 1970s and 1980s experience (when plan-based approaches to rural development reached their peak) have shown how elaborate district plans, comprehensive databases, land use potentiality studies, resource endowment studies and the like, all produced at great cost, were consigned to a dusty neglect (for example, Porter, Allen, and Thompson 1991; de Valk and Wekwete 1990). Decisions by local leaders avoided priorities established in this way because they had other ideas about what needed to be done, about what were pressing priorities and how the resources should be used.
In today’s jargon, there was a "disconnect" of three kinds: between the plan and the allocation process, between administratively calculated needs and politically articulated demands, and between modernist ideas about what planning should involve and how matters have tended to be decided locally. Local leaders routinely judged that the plan was wrong, technically confusing, or outdated and that it tended to take decisions away from them, decisions they appropriately judged to be theirs to make. As local leaders, as they said then and repeat today, they had the "pulse" of local priorities. Needs and demands were often not the same thing.
Much has changed since development practice was gripped by the monetarist-inspired policies of the 1980s. The issue is not the plan but the allocation process. Private market forces are believed to be the most efficient allocators of scarce resources according to demands. Administratively defined and plan-centred definitions of how development should be organized have been set aside. But not quite. Since the initial rush of enthusiasm, it has been realized that implementing market-friendly policies requires a state that is capable of creating inclusive and politically durable arrangements with a host of nongovernment interests—consumers, community organizations, NGOs, contractors and other private sector groups—to deal with market externalities and promote equitable service delivery. Termed "good governance", this nesting of private-public, state-civil society relations is said to be best achieved through decentralization.
Ironically, the contemporary emphasis on decentralization and participation shows how development policies travel along many paths in many directions. Both concepts have visited development previously, but they shifted away from popular attention in the 1980s. Now they have returned, not to where they had been before, but nevertheless pulled in part by lingering influences from the past. In the remainder of this article we illustrate how this is occurring in recent attempts to improve decentralized, participatory planning in service provision, the unintended and negative consequences of this, and how it might be averted in future practice.
We noted earlier that our view of inclusive planning and allocation was underwritten by a three- sided concept of accountability. Our comments about participation and decentralized service delivery are organized around this concept. First, relations of accountability between political leaders and their constituency. Sometimes local leaders are popularly elected, most often they are not, and in all cases and for many reasons their relationship with the citizenry is highly contested. (5) Second, relations of accountability between political leaders and their staff, including administrators and technicians responsible to reliably advise decision-makers to promote what we’ve called inclusive planning and allocation. These relations are also vexed due to historical biases in favour of administrative and technical fixes, as well as more enduring tensions found worldwide. Third, relations that are often not discussed in terms of accountability, but increasingly are understood as the key to successful decentralization and local democracy. Rather than understanding decentralization purely as the devolution of power to lower levels of public-private decision-makers, it is clear that a strong centre is as important as an empowered local-level organization bound to its constituency. (6) (Top)
Local accountability: representative and direct participation
How to get leaders to listen to the voices of their constituents, to make decisions that balance both parochial and general interests and then to stick with the decision once made—all this has been a major concern of public administration and popular democracy. It has evidently surprised many development agencies that bringing local leaders to account has become even more problematic with the devolution of key powers and responsibilities to local governments. Perhaps this surprise reflects the mistaken tendency to see the local space of politics (in contrast with the national scene) as tending toward harmony, common interest and relatively easy compromise. It may also be the result of a long-running hostility to local representative government and to local political leaders. This hostility supported the dismembering of local governments during the 1960s, when development policy favoured strong central states as the engines of change and condoned almost three decades of neglect and incapacitation of local government.
For these and many other reasons, the tendency in rural development practice has been to devise techniques to achieve administratively what is judged to be difficult through local official political processes. Planning procedures in this light are often seen as a way of putting fetters on local political leaders to discipline them, to make them accountable through administrative means. The central difficulty of this approach has been how to establish the legitimacy of a planning and allocation process that effectively sidelines and limits the involvement of political leadership in the representation of local needs and priorities. The special privilege given to administrative practices in decentralized planning and financing has, as a result, faced three problems: how to tune administratively defined needs and priorities to local preferences, how to provide a measure of legitimacy to the list of priorities and plans for action that eventually must be served up to officials for endorsement and how to make sure the leadership is accountable to the subsequent recommendations of the technical administrative professionals?
The increasing popularity of participatory rural appraisal among all shades of development professionals is in large measure explained by these problems. First, PRA promises direct access to needs (within the limits of what is judged as administratively reasonable by the agency directing the process). Second, it offers the authority of having spoken to the people and is in practice becoming an essential support to the administrative cadre in their contest with political leaders. Third, in the best-case PRAs, it offers the veiled threat of direct action by a newly empowered community in the event that leaders choose not to adopt the results of direct participation. In short, techniques of direct participation (and PRA is only one of a range on offer) provide political legitimacy to the first steps of an administratively dominated process.
However, these strengths of direct participation are also problematic. As we learned during the service decision tree consultations, the more acute problems of performance and accountability arise later in the delivery process—in appraisal, contracting and supervising, not to mention sustaining the service over time. Second, and far more important, this understanding of participation confuses the question of accountability. It intends to politicize the administrative cadre (be it employed by NGOs, the local government or departments of the central state) in the mistaken belief that it is they who should be directly accountable to the citizenry. Not only does this ensure the continued contest between administrators and technicians and elected local leaders, it also locates the administrators and technicians between the leadership and their constituency and thereby dilutes the most important relationship of accountability intended by decentralized governance. (Top)
Leaders, technicians and more inclusive decisions
Relations of accountability between professionals and elected leaders have received little attention in discussions about improving the quality of rural service delivery. Not surprising, if quality is understood to be primarily dependent on the degree of match between social preferences and planned priorities, it makes sense to focus attention and resources on what we’ve termed the "front end" of the planning process. But local experiences show time and again that social preferences are only one aspect of producing a quality decision—technical and financial considerations are often deservedly paramount. At other times the managerial feasibility and risk of different options must hold sway.
The devolution to local governments of responsibility to balance these factors and to negotiate among the interests these factors reflect has been considered a panacea. Unfortunately, the focus on the administrative resolution of the problems that arise in balancing and bargaining has tended to misconstrue the direction of accountability between professionals and official leaders. We argue that the techniques developed over the past decade to support direct participation have much to offer in redirecting this relationship and realigning the administrative cadre to become more accountable to elected leaders. This, however, requires that we understand these techniques, such as in the PRA toolbox, in a different way. Their relevance is not in providing the stamp of an unassailable, once-and-for-all "truth" to local needs and priorities, as tends to occur when the results of PRA exercises are incorporated into local plans. Rather, their potential lies in their use as an aid to thinking, to transparency, to inclusiveness, in the many decisions that need to be made by political leaders as a proposal moves from early prioritization through to delivery of the service.
The crucial need for inclusive planning and allocation is to introduce more creative ways of ensuring that the technical, administrative and financial dimensions of decisions are included alongside social demands and political priorities. Much attention has been given to opening up local-local dialogue. This is the focus of PRA practice. We suggest that the political process of formal, institutional politics needs also to be opened up and made, as defined earlier in this article, more inclusive and accountable. Many local leaders will agree that their meetings need to be opened up. Others, of course, are keen to ensure that curtains are pulled around official meetings. But, by opening up, some local leaders suggest a different twist to accountability by agreeing that decisions need to account for the many social, technical and other factors necessary for quality service outcomes. In this view, professional staff, the employees of the leadership, are accountable to politicians in both old and new ways. Well established, though often neglected, is their responsibility to ensure that timely, appropriate and accurate information is considered. New is a broader understanding of their responsibility to introduce skills and techniques, through which a range of possibilities, other interests, other implications are included in decisions that just tend to be taken, under normal procedures. Rather than mistakenly seeing themselves as torchbearers for the community in a contest with political leaders, administrative cadres become accountable to facilitate an inclusive planning and allocation process and accountability between leaders and their constituency.
For observers of local political meetings, the needs are obvious. Most leaders tend to go to sleep as the chairperson moves, item by item, through an overpacked agenda. Their attention may come alive when their particular interests are at stake. On the positive side, meetings are energized when the pro-forma process is disrupted by an unusual turn of events, by an unexpected or novel way of approaching a decision. In this sense, the quality of the technique used to engender novelty is of little importance—introducing a SWOT analysis, a pair-wise ranking or a GAP assessment is energizing the first, second, and maybe third time, but once it becomes routine, any technique becomes just another box to be ticked.
The impressive tool box of participatory techniques developed for local dialogue about needs and priorities could easily be adapted for use in the political process where appraisal occurs, budgets are allocated and arrangements are made to contract and deliver services. In best practice, PRA techniques are more useful as instruments for enhancing dialogue. By simply introducing a novel approach, humour or a different angle to a problem they can help achieve a profoundly different outcome to proceedings. Sometimes this includes introducing the "Ah, ha!" element into decisions, where the obvious question can be asked about who is to benefit from a decision, who will lose out and where decisions are made more transparent. It can also mean awareness about the long-term implications—financial, social, environmental—of a decision about to be made that would otherwise be neglected, not for any malign reason, but because issues may not have been thought about that way.
This article was in part prompted by a concern about how the participatory approach of the conventional PRA-style methods could be scaled up. It is often imagined that with greater institutional capacity, with more resources and time, the intensive planning dialogue at the community level will become routine. In Uganda there are 847 subcounty governments and many times more village level councils—the smallest mandated planning unit. Inside each is a wide array of associations of interests by virtue of gender or class, proximity to a watercourse, an access track, a field or valley. All have particular attributes deserving special planning consideration. The imagination of 10,000 village PRAs is fiction. It wrongly perceives priority issues in service delivery. It undermines key relations of accountability that must be strengthened in rural politics. It wastes resources and discredits the potential contribution such techniques could make to inclusive planning and allocation for rural service delivery. (Top)
Capacity versus performance in inclusive planning and allocation
The case studies of how particular services were planned and delivered in rural Uganda affirmed the importance of vertical accountability in producing quality outcomes. The responsiveness of leaders to constituents is undeniably important, as is the contract of accountability between professionals and elected leaders. But these relationships seldom determine whether enduring arrangements are made for equity, quality and sustainability in service delivery. The quality of local planning processes, the observance of service design standards, the thoroughness of appraisal, financial management, compliance with the audit, contracting and other procedures all depend on the relationships between higher and lower authorities charged to set standards, to regulate and enforce compliance and to encourage good performance. As one astute local official remarked, "Decentralization and centralization are two sides of the same coin".
Ugandan government officials acknowledge that decentralization and local democracy implies a fundamental reorientation to central government. It must move from a command and direct relation with local governments and develop a monitoring, mentoring and regulating function. But achieving this has been elusive. Clearly, under decentralization new skills and capacities are required in central and local authorities to apply standards, to follow procedures and to ensure more participatory or technically competent decisions. But the results of the popular focus on capacity building often fall short of expectations. In part, this is because capacity-building efforts frequently emphasize inputs at the expense of outcomes. And judgements about required inputs tend to reflect externally driven perceptions of needs. The earlier mentioned example of linear, step-wise planning is a case in point. It is fair to say that all planning implies elements of a step-wise rationality: where it makes good sense to have a project adequately appraised before resources are committed to detailed design work. But capacity-building programmes have ambitions that seldom stop at this point. Instead, they often aim at the wholesale replacement of existing ways of doing business locally. Many local governments and central ministries have bookshelves crowded with comprehensive planning and other manuals that have been untouched since the day capacity-building courses ended.
Unless there is a change in approach, these problems are likely to be exacerbated under decentralization. Central government no longer has control over the kinds of levers previously used to command the performance of lower-level authorities, even if this was a rather proforma compliance. Under conditions of decentralized governance, the central government must find ways to encourage adoption of its priorities, such as observance by local authorities of national policy on poverty or issues such as HIV/AIDS, just as local governments (and lower-level communities) must find new ways to attract transfers of additional resources from the centre. In many if not most instances, capacity is not the issue here. Rather, it is devising a compact of association between the centre and local governments through which vertical accountability is encouraged by sanctions and incentives.
How to achieve this was discussed extensively with local governments, NGOs and community organizations during design of the DDP, resulting in a number of innovative measures. A central point is that clarity about rules and procedures for decentralized planning and financing is important. However, it is not sufficient. Transparency must be linked with incentives that promote good performance of the wide range of actors included in the process and sanctions when the various actors do not comply with agreements. To support vertical accountability, sanctions and incentives are agreed between central and local government so that each regularly assesses the other’s performance and villagers and community organizations are involved in judging the performance of lower-level local governments. Performance is measured by questions such as: Were local plans honoured in practice? Do plans and budget decisions recognize the needs of different groups in the community? Was there adequate awareness about the rules, the amounts of funds transferred, the responsibilities of local officials and the rights of citizens? Were audit requirements met?
Making this system workable will of course take time and may depend on many events beyond the ability of communities or governments to exert influence. But the crucial point is that there is less concern with the inputs (that is, the procedures adopted to prepare a plan or budget) than in the quality of the outcomes achieved. Also important is that the results of these accountability assessments are immediately translated into incentives and sanctions—in short, the availability of development funds to local governments and community. By specifying the terms of the relationship between the centre and local governments, between local governments and constituencies, a multisided basis has been created for accountability. If the central government fails to deliver on its obligations—for instance, to prepare cost-effective service standards in primary health care or to ensure that audit services are provided on time—it is poorly placed to insist that local governments should be accountable for their performance. Similarly, unless local governments demonstrate performance, both upward to the centre and downward to their constituencies, they are aware that there is little prospect of attracting transfers of funds from the centre or encouraging payment of taxes or fees for services delivered. (Top)
Participation is an essential requirement in improving the quality of rural service delivery. But where quality is understood to imply judgements about technical feasibility, financial viability, assessments of risk and managerial complexity, in addition to social preferences, the focus on direct, intensive community-level participation in the planning process is clearly limiting. Competent decisions and accountable performance is required from a range of actors, some of whom have been systematically sidelined and often alienated by conventional approaches to participatory planning.
In many respects Uganda stands apart from many countries. Its courageous commitment to political, administrative and fiscal decentralization in many ways matches the extraordinary strength with which ordinary Ugandans survived 20 years of coups, war and lawlessness. But issues raised here about participation, accountability and performance are not unique to Uganda. Here, as elsewhere, it is true that special arrangements often do need to be made to ensure that the voices of marginal sections of the community are heard. But frequently the techniques used to stimulate participatory events distort the relationships of accountability between leaders and the public and between leaders and their technical advisers—which is essential for long-term local democratisation.
We need to think more like the fox (darting around, seizing opportunities, looping back) than the tortoise (plodding along a straight path) in rural service provision. For what is characteristic of successful cases where rural services are provided is not that the planning cycle is slavishly followed, or where technicians finally learned to apply sophisticated techniques of identifying needs. Rather, successful experiences are found where local leaders and people are able to cope with the unpredictable and the unexpected, and are able to turn back, review and change what they previously thought to be the obvious answer. This requires skills for a flexible, non-linear and essentially political process, in which, as the Vietnamese say, "fences are broken", and the rules are nudged a bit in the interests of representative local governance. (Top)
Endnotes
(1) Day (1997). Various critical commentaries on the participatory ideology are well illustrated in contributions to Sachs (1992) and Crush (1995). (return)
(2) Uganda’s decentralization corresponds to Mawhood and Davey’s (1980) five principles of classic decentralization. (return)
(3) This included a host of problems—poor assessment of options and risks, poor-quality technical appraisal and design, poor costing and the like. (return)
(4) Leonie Sandercock (1998) provides a helpful, critical review of this legacy. (return)
(5) A recent article by Robert Kaplan (1998) develops this point particularly well. (return)
(6) This is the main contribution of Judith Tendler’s (1997) book on decentralized governance in Brazil. (return)
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De Valk, P., and K. Wekwete, eds. 1990. Decentralizing for Participatory Planning? Avebury: Aldershot.
Kaplan, R. 1998. "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" Atlantic Monthly 280 (6): 55.
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