8th JPO Workshop - Dakar, 23-27 January 2006
Decentralised Governance and Development
e-discussion, week 1
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Question for week 1 (Monday, 28 November 2005):
There is an urgent need to localise the MDGs to promote basic infrastructure and service delivery to poor communities in rural areas. To achieve this, there has to be a greater understanding of how to most effectively and efficiently decentralise delivery responsibilities, taking into account the country's real constraints. Decentralisation reforms are envisaged to result in community governments, NGOs, CBOs and the private sector working together and owning the responsibility of delivering public services, with the idea that they understand the particular needs of local residents better than central ministries. What experiences, lessons, challenges, success stories, insights, or analysis can you share in this regard? Make recommendations for pilot interventions that could generate further lessons on the roles that local/community councils might play in the provision of services especially in the rural areas.
Contributions :
From Jochem Ramakers, Programme Officer
UNDP Timor Leste
Dear Fe and other colleagues,
Local government, above all, must be meaningful. Perhaps this sounds
like an open door, but many cases from across the world show that local
governments are often facing unfunded mandates, in essence rendering
them non-essential.
As you indicate, local governments should have relevant expenditure assignments
that are adequately resourced. Apart from this, the population should
have an adequate mechanism of exerting control over how these resources
should be allocated and managed. Other stakeholders such as civil society
organisations or the private sector can be important allies of local
government or can strengthen accountability mechanisms, but they can
also disrupt the democratic process by their lobbying initiatives. Lobbying,
although an intrinsic part of any democracy by definition tries to draw
attention to an interest that usually belongs to a minority. In my experiences
from Guatemala, Uganda and Timor-Leste, civil society and the private
sector can play widely varying roles; from supportive to disruptive and
from compromised (as potential local government contractors) to critical
(resulting in a difficult relationship with government).
In many cases, what often also seems to be underestimated is that a population
needs to learn to participate. Often we focus a lot of attention on building
the capacity of the administrative apparatus. It is not sufficient to
create a responsive local government if the population does not know
how to demand services of its local government.
A typical concern of central government when it comes to releasing responsibilities
and resources to lower levels is the capacity of those lower levels to
manage those responsibilities and resources. However, from what I have
seen so far, I think that the capacity of the lower level government
to deliver is often underestimated.
Pilot interventions can support the government in the development of
procedures for local planning, financial management and preferably local
procurement as well. The design of these procedures and regulations should
be backed up by adequate capacity development in their application. By
actually channelling block grants to the local level (donor funds, under
the pilot imitative), one can gain insight into the capacities present
at the local level and determine the appropriate (phased) assignment
of expenditure responsibilities. This way, one of the biggest obstacles
to decentralisation being the central government's fear of corruption
and financial mismanagement at the local level can be taken away. Local
governments can be assigned additional responsibilities and resources
according to their capacity and as they show over time that they can
handle additional responsibilities.
This may eventually result in an asymmetric local government system.
Although at first sight this may not seem the most logical way of "managing
a country", it may even seem to complicate things, I think that
an asymmetric local government system actually does more justice to the
various situations that local governments find themselves in: they all
have different resource needs based on delivery costs and level of development,
they may have different cultural or religious needs, they will have different
resource mobilisation potential etc. etc. One size does not fit all:
tailoring a local government system in such a way that each local government
is able to optimally respond to the particular development needs of its
population seems the best way to locally institutionalise freedom of
choice and therewith foster sustainable human development.
Introduction of MDG's in my opinion is primarily useful at a more evolved
stage of local governance. MDG's are particularly useful in the prioritisation
of local development investments but do require availability of statistical
data. Many local planning processes (more so the lower you go) are not
yet at a point where statistical data can be feasibly introduced in the
decision making process, let alone that in many cases statistical data
is not available or at least not captured at the local level.
Without wanting to make this email too long, here are some of my thoughts
and experiences. I hope that I have been able to provoke some of you
and I'm looking forward to an interesting discussion!
