Book Review
Professor Dev Raj Dahal
Kathmandu, Nepal
The value of sustainable human development appears most distinctly when it is contrasted with the destruction of nature, culture, ethics and politics by the application of abstract economic theories and praxis that prevailed so far. The paradigm of sustainable human development is, in this sense, completely free from the tradition that led to the decline of human elements in social and physical sciences. This paradigm is clear and logical; its ethics is completely intelligible, and does not involve the use of any dubious concepts, and methodology. Its essence is that the interests of human beings are roughly identical with those of the nature’s renewal and resilience. Human element of public management becomes a cause for the synergy between the ends and means of development as well as for restoring the capacity of societies to shape economic institutions in consistent with the social and cultural priorities of peoples.
It is by no means clear that an increase in economic efficiency in separate units of society – individual, corporation or the state serves the interest of human beings, since it exonerates economic life from the social and cultural matrix thus making the government unable to interact with its citizens. Efficiency, in this sense, reflects nothing but only the fighting quality of the units. If development is equated with economic efficiency, then the governance becomes an artificial life devoid of democratic values and human feelings.
Sustainable human development, therefore, sets out to cleanse the prevailing fallacies, slipshod reasoning and muddles that threaten the life-support system and cease to inspire an institutionalized way of life ensuring people’s access to livelihood, dignity and meaningful participation in society. Does sustainable human development mean complete turnaround of the model of development that is variant of a statist, inward-oriented regime or just an attempt to forge a balance between it and the neo-liberal agenda that dominates today’s development discourse? Is it irreversible process requiring a paradigm shift or a short-term prescription for protecting public sector?
The book frankly admits that development assistance has so far neither dealt with the livelihoods of the masses nor the question of ecological and cultural sustainability. The development prescriptions have been resolved more by ideology than by concrete interests of the recipients concerned, thus nagging the very rationale of development cooperation. (p. XI) The book clearly sets out that the function of development cooperation is to function as a subsidiary of government toward setting “the stage for equitable and sustainable development.” How is this achieved? Obviously, the answer is: by embedding economy in social relationships, blending market efficiency with social compassion, and building a new model of national and global governance to serve the growing aspirations of people.
How does this formulation differ from the classical questions of political economy regarding the universalization of human needs except perhaps the addition of two new elements- the gender and the environment?
Certainly not. Still, the dilemma is: if governance refers to the exercise of political power to manage a nation’s affairs, its notion of sustainable human development is grounded in the framework of prevailing social order. So does the public sector management that is submerged in the sphere of national laws and institutions and also in the autonomous sphere of civil society aiming an ideal form of the stage of development. Moreover, “Public sector management interventions tend to be conscious of the process, preferring methods that encourage beneficiaries to be initiators of development, participants in the process of development, and carriers and transmitters of skills and knowledge, rather than passive recipients.” (p. 53)
The book falsifies the dominant economic thinking that market economy and downsizing of government are important for development. For this, it offers a number of justifications: first, empowerment of the periphery is possible only when public sector organizations at the center are reasonably managed.
Development means building human capabilities for their culturally accepted participation in social creation. Second, rapid economic growth causes risks for human beings and environment and, therefore, powerful government is needed to defend the citizens, the consumers and the environment. Third, economic growth should be sustainable. Equitable distribution of the fruits of economic growth is essential in order to reduce poverty and inequality and create social capital necessary for what the book calls “opportunities for voluntary association, reciprocity, and altruism.
” Equalities of opportunities are the keys to a vision of the human condition that promotes the common interests, popular participation and decentralization of global public good, rather than using them for the advantage of a few.
The book out rightly rejects the techno-centric world view of development “imposed from outside by the powerful industrialized countries on poorer and weaker countries.” (p.6) As development crises are multi-faceted spanning from food shortages to environmental and institutional decay, debt burden, and declining per capita income, they pose enormous challenges to public sector management and development cooperation alike. The book, therefore, argues that such crises can be checked by applying governance in such areas as initiating reforms in the economic systems, eliminating poverty, encouraging social integration, improving agricultural performances, providing employment, protecting the environment, and slowing population growth. What are the foundations of governance and what are its underlying interests?
The heightened interest in governance springs from five factors: the perceived success of the market economy, tendency to link economic development to democratic and accountable government, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of state sectors owing to fiscal crisis, corruption in statist countries, and ethnic challenges to nation-building. (P.18) According to the book, the role of the state is to establish necessary infrastructure and provide social services to the needy as well as to create law and institutions in order to protect property rights necessary for encouraging production and investments. Still, public management does not become sound if indigenous cultural and development practices are discounted and ordinary people, women and poor are treated paternalistically. A sound governance springs from the popular desire of political leadership who expresses a national vision and who is strengthened by all the sectors of society including civil society.
The book elaborates a number of attributes for sound governance, such as political legitimacy and accountability, freedom of association and participation, a fair and reliable judicial system, bureaucratic accountability, freedom of information and expression, effective and efficient public sector management, and cooperation with voluntary organizations and civil society. These attributes are closely tied up to a transformational leadership – a leadership which is capable of mediating between power and wealth and revitalizing the management of public sector organizations. In the changing context of market environment, the role of public sector lies in supporting private enterprise and empowering local communities in a dynamic, flexible and pro-active manner.
The relative importance of the state or the market for governance lies on cultural and cost factors. For example, the rational choice model that worked in the West does not necessarily fit with the non-Western societies because of their reliance on group value, rather than individual. East Asia, as the book puts, symbolizes a model where state and market became complementary to each other in augmenting economic growth. The USA and Hong Kong represent a model of market maximalism, while Japan, South Korea and China represent state maximalism. The success of the Japanese private and public enterprises is due to institutional culture regarding the state and the market. In transition countries of Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa state minimalism has been practiced as an agenda of achieving macroeconomic equilibrium. Its key components are inducing competitive markets for goods and services, factors of production and foreign exchange earnings; encouraging private sector activities, changing the ownership pattern and restructuring productive activities in order to satisfy market needs; reforming the state; trade liberalization and liberal political environment for good governance. (p.32)
An assessment of public enterprise performance reveals that many enterprises did not have clearly defined goals. Some suffered due to the lack of autonomy and authority for the managers while the others for a lack capital and profit, management, over bureaucratization and politicization. As we find, the logical means available for market-based public management is privatization. This is the basic tenet of structural adjustment program initiated by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and major industrialized countries. The UNDP has also embraced this concept and, accordingly, set up a special division for the private sector and the Interregional Network on Privatization to disseminate information and experience about privatization. Despite some merits in privatization especially in matters of incentives and efficiency, the process has been resisted by those affected, such as trade unions, political parties, senior management, ecologists, human rights groups, feminist organizations, etc. The socially and economically deprived people who are the victim of this policy found sufficient reasons such as price hike in public utilities, social services, and health and, therefore, opposed this policy.
The book suggests a number of issues critical to the development of private sector: removal of state monopoly and bureaucratic hurdles, availability of finance to the private sectors, reasonable flexibility to the employer on labor policies, price control, import-substitution, and modest tariff rates for products to promote competition, efficiency and product quality. It does not suggest the suitability to replicate of the East Asian Miracle.
Yet, some of its lessons particularly in the fields of education, institutional design, industrial promotion, creation of pilot agencies for strategic planning, establishing the autonomy of state before societal forces and forging a new equation among free markets, democracy and human rights are found to be useful. The essence of public sector management is that it satisfies the conscience of the community without infringing individual rights. The positive feature of public sector management ought, as far as possible, to carry out welfare measures, not to become an adjunct of state itself, but of independent sphere to cover those areas where market and the state do not attend.
The public sector management to governance, as the book claims, espouses people-centered development process in organizations. The conventional method of public sector management interventions involves reforms in public service training, downsizing and cost-containment while the modern method involves institution-building, and strategic management. In this context, the intra-organizational issues of public sector management approach of the UNDP cover a number of areas, such as civil service reform, accountability, institution building, leadership and vision, strategic management of both human and non-human resources and training about management and development-both quality and indigenous. In the same way, the inter-organizational mechanisms include the process of decentralization of power to facilitate the institutions of NGOs and civil society to participate in sustainable human development.
The notion of decentralization explicitly problematises the view of the state as an artificial construct representing executive power and, therefore, the need to devolve decision-making power to the lower units, thus establishing local self-governance. This model extends institutional basis for the inclusion of people in political life and purports to break the administrative monopoly of power by ensuring that decision-making are publicly accountable. The book identifies a host of conditions for the success of decentralization: a strong national identity with the capacity to endure any power balance, necessary political will, responsive governance, well defined roles and responsibilities of the various actors concerned, establishment of conflict-resolution mechanism, and highly capable leaders and managers to execute decentralization strategy.
The book sees NGOs and civil society as people’s institutions, which help them, participate in the state and market forces. Interaction of the government with these bodies sets the context of legitimacy and mutual understanding. Especially civil society helps to cope with the challenges of social integration associated with social capital (p.86), addresses the problems of basic needs in the totality of human beings’ subjective and objective existence and builds links across the border for international cooperation and self-development of the people. The benefits of NGOs are that they have comparative advantage in fostering people-centered development based on participatory approach, accountability, transparency, flexibility and accessibility of the local community to local development projects in a cost-effective manner.
The role of UNDP, as the book states, is to “improve human conditions” by promoting a vision of “ societies built around people’s genuine needs” based on people-centered world order – an order rooted into five pillars: human security, sustainable human development, partnership between the state and the market, national and global governance and a new concept of international cooperation. The mandate of the UNDP centers around promoting global peace and development and, therefore, emphasizes “economic and social development of all peoples.” The General Assembly resolutions and the UNDP Governing Council decisions have clearly defined its mandate in “building national capacity for people-centered, environmentally sustainable development and in aid coordination, national planning and execution.” (p. 98)
Its leadership within the UN family of agencies not only establishes its centrality but also its collaboration at the country level as well. Its guiding principles and processes involve program approach to technical assistance based on impact assessment of sustainable human development, ownership compatible with self-reliance, interface between North-South and South-South, funding assigned to reflect the interests of stakeholders and capacity building in the domains of program assistance. The practical procedures for implementing these points, however, remain and mostly at odds with the demands of power relations and established interests at the national and global levels.
The management domain of the UNDP appears comprehensive and includes the regional and global perspectives. Equally pertinent guiding principles are sustainability, innovativeness, process consultancy, capacity building, inclusiveness and empowerment, balance between upstream and downstream interventions, technology adaptation and integration, and program monitoring and evaluation. But, above all, the UNDP’s vision of sustainable human development calls for solving the challenges of poverty alleviation, employment generation and social integration. If the UNDP is to be credible in the strategic domain it has to maintain operational and strategic involvement at head quarters, and strengthen the substantive capacity of field offices and build a system for information retrieval and storage. It seems plausible -and, to many even self-evident- that the improvement of the great masses of the people is, in the end, what sustainable development is all about.
The book is based on the international institutional explanation, especially that of the UNDP. Yet, the question is: how does it reflect the domestic interests of the developing countries? Will it draw a consensus? Can it offer anything to non-market societies unless one rediscovers the state as an instrument to regulate the disembodied market? The book is a useful document to understand many development concepts and strategies being executed by the UNDP in developing countries.
# A book by United Nations Development Program (2001), New York: UNDP, 1995, pp.
130 and reviewed by Professor Dev Raj Dahal.
# published with the straight permission from Professor Dahal. Thanks the UNDP and Professor Dahal: Ed. Upadhyaya. N. P.