Insensitive Government, Conflicting Donor Agenda, and Emergent NGO Initiatives at the Grassroots
Bihari Krishna Shrestha
Nepal scholar
Donors in Nepal’s Rural Development:
All major donors around the world have been assisting Nepal in multi-sectoral large-scale rural development projects. During the Panchayat days, they mostly followed the policies of the government which themselves were steadily evolving, although without much success in effectively making a dent on rural poverty. The donors included Switzerland, USA, UK, Canada, Germany, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, etc. Many of them, including USA, Germany, EU and the Netherlands are still supporting on-going rural development projects. Several donors such as UNDP, DANIDA and USA are also supporting other activities that generally have implications for rural development in the country.
Except for the road infrastructure development undertaken by various projects, funded by several of the aforementioned donors, most of those projects are remembered for little else. There are very few exceptions such as the Palpa Development Project (1979-1995), funded jointly by the G1’Z and HELVETAS, which is credited not only for the the environment-friendly roads built in the district but also for having “laid the, foundation” for enhancing popular awareness and the massive promotion of community forestry and erosion control activities that took place subsequently in the district.
While the stated objectives of most of those projects have been poverty alleviation in the distrcts, they have accomplished very little in that field. To begin with, there was very little information and experience in those days in the country in terms of the methods of reaching the poor and alleviating their poverty in the rural areas. The closest the projects came to the people was through the institution of user groups most of which, however, failed to acquire the same legitimacy and effectiveness that their traditional counterparts enjoyed. Little effort was made trying to build these institutions.
Not that departures were not attempted. When the Second Phase of the World Bank-funded Rasuwa Nuwakot Rural Development Project was being designed in 1983-84 under the auspices of APROSC, the consultants decided to adopt poverty alleviation as the central goal of the rural development project and, inspired as they were by the exemplary performance of the Tupche SFDP in Nuwakot at the time, recommended for the massive expansion of the Small Farmer Project in the two districts. But the whole idea went down with one stroke of the pen by the then callous advisors of the Bank whose ears were tuned not to the needs of the people they were ostensibly assigned to help, but to the self-serving and unaccountable bureaucrats in the government who at the time obviously told the visiting “dignitaries” that they could not run such a big SFDP program in the districts. That was obviously enough for the Bank officials who’s only stake in the exercise, as seen from the Nepali perspective then, was to lend more money to Nepal. Therefore, the Bank put together and implemented more or less the replication of the failed First Phase program and spent more of the borrowed money. But today, there is little trace of the more than 20 million dollars that the Bank lent and spent for the so-called rural development in the two districts. But at some point, every cent of the loan will have to be paid back to the money lender, for which the whole of this country including those who are poor and undernourished will have to further tighten their belt.
Most donor-funded rural development projects have been designed by in-coming advisors, of the concerned donor agency itself, who do not continue to live in Nepal to monitor the results of their implementation and see for themselves the follies they ended up. The government for its part tended to accept anything that was offered for two reasons.
First, most donors habitually included some mundane attractions in the project package to attract the personal interest of the concerned bureaucrats to ensure its smooth endorsement by the government.
Secondly, the Finance Ministry has perpetually remained under compulsion to take care of its balance of payments problem caused by serious trade deficits year after year. The unstated motto under which the Ministry functioned has been: Money coming into Nepal in any form cannot but be good for the country. The Ministry officials knew that hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted on failed projects, but they seemed to be constantly terrified by the prospect that any search for more effective options on their part could result in more delays in the already slow flow of donor money into the country. Donors knew this and therefore, most of them blatantly took them for granted. Thus, while Nepal’s map continued to be dotted by what are basically donor enclaves of so-called rural development projects, their performance is anything but monitored by the government. Most donor officials themselves are doing very little to make that happen in the country. They are content, as long as their bosses are so, too, in their own headquarters abroad.
A Tale of Two Donors in Rural Development in Nepal:
Even in the present situation, donor-funded rural development interventions remain quite significant. Donor discretion in the identification of proper strategies continue to constitute a very important factor in strengthening the local development process and poverty alleviation in the villages. What follows is an examination of three kinds of donor-funded interventions in Nepal that have direct relevance for local development at the district and grassroots levels.
Interventions for Strengthening Decentralized Planning in the Districts:
The local UNDP office has been implementing programs for strengthening decentralized planning and implementation in Nepal at the district level for over a decade now. The earliest project NEPI83IOO1 was implemented in 1985 which was followed by NEP/99/009.
It was called Strengthening Decentralized Planning and ran for several years from 1988 until it was followed by its present version, a three-year, 1.3 million dollar intervention called Participatory District Development Project (PDDP). The objectives of the current project are long and ambitious, and include the creation of a database, planning and monitoring system along with other capabilities in the DDCs, developing “capabilities to lead the formulation of the district development plans” by mobilizing line agencies, etc., establishing a “participatory development unit” in each of the DDCs, and consolidation of “conceptual and operational linkage with sect orally oriented projects supported by the government, donor, and other agencies -especially those supported by UNDP” (UNDP, 1996:16-17).
In support of those objectives, the PDDP has provided the services of a UNDP-funded Planning Advisor and a team of locally recruited staff on different subjects such as agriculture, engineering, social development and communication to each assisted DDC to make the latter a “more professional organization” (UNDP, 1996:25). The staff are expected to support the four Plan Formulation Committees of the DDC namely the Agriculture and Irrigation Committee, Forest and Industrial Development Committee, the Local Construction Committee and the Social Development Committee. The basic premise of the assistance has been that these professionals would generate sufficient analytical information on related sectors and feed them to the members of the respective committees so that the latter can take a more informed and rational decision regarding the planning of programs under each of the subject heading. It is further premised that UNDP will support the DDCs at the rate of 100 percent of their cost the first year and 50 percent the second year with the DDC taking over the responsibility for the entire costs thereafter.
By all accounts this is a typical donor-focussed project in Nepal. To start with, it fundamentally misrepresents the history of the decentralization pursuit in Nepal when it claims that “the project entitled Strengthening Decentralization Planning in Nepal (NEP/89/009) supported the government in the formulation of a basic framework for decentralization and local government that exists in Nepal today” (UNDP, 1996:2). The author/s of the document were obviously not sufficiently informed of the fact that the history of decentralization in Nepal predates the UNDP effort by several years, and seem to have been carried away more by a search for their own legitimacy and distinction. Apparently, they were also oblivious of the fact that one of the UNDP’s own documents (NEP/88/009) made an observation that ran counter to their aforementioned claim. Recounting the events of the promulgation of the Decentralization Act in the early Eighties, that document recorded:
“Meanwhile, HMG went ahead in 1984 with the full-scale implementation of the Decentralization Act. As expected, substantial progress has been made in many fronts, but the process has not been all that smooth. In general, however, it may be said that a much improved understanding exists of the process and aims of decentralization among government officias, political authorities, and donors. This understanding has lent a new degree of clarity to the shape which decentralization is taking in Nepal “ (UNDP, 1986:7).
Sadly, also, the Project document also heralds the enactment of the three VDC, DDC and Municipality Acts in 1991, for which the earlier UNDP project has provided some funding to basically fill HMG’s budget holes, as “milestone event”, whereas in effect it was those very documents which, as discussed earlier, had sounded the death knell to the provisions of the Decentralization Act of 1982.
Based on what has been observed of its workings in the four districts of Rupandehi, Kavrepalanchok, Syangja and Kaski, the Project can be compared with a patient suffering from brain tumor inside his head who, however, is being rubbed vaseline on his feet. As one of the four District Presidents put it, “if the government were sufficiently serious about decentralization, its own effort would have been sufficient to accomplish it.” He complained that the current situation in terms of the DDC’s rights and duties has reduced it to being a mere “Recommendation Committee” with nobody paying heed to its decisions. No government staff stays and works in the Service Centres and the government has been treating them with such comfort and hospitality “as if they were its sons-in-law.”
The project has also been supporting the DDCs from its DSP days for the holding of what they call llaka-level planning meets i.e. multi-sectoral planning sessions in each of the sub-district Ilakas each year which are to be attended by the VDCs in the Ilaka, the DDC leaders and chiefs of the line agencies in the district. This innovation itself was first made by the Local Development Officer of Kaski in 1992. Earlier during the Indian embargo against Nepal, he was working as the LDO in Bara district, and the Home Ministry then sent senior officials to different terai districts, including his, to hold meetings’ with the local people at the Ilaka level to assure and comfort people against the affliction that the Indian government was perpetrating against the people of Nepal. He had found such meetings quite effective. Therefore, he decided to replicate the method for the purpose of district planning in Kaski.
The LDO persuaded the DDC president and line agency officials to go to the Ilakas to interact with the representatives of the VDCs therein. The DDC unfortunately lacked some “tea money” for those assemblies and therefore, the LDO requested the visiting DSP Advisor (who happened to be in the district at the time looking for something to do under his project) if he could fund the meetings. A few hundred rupees for each meeting was the only contribution of the project towards this innovation. As novel as the exercise was, the participants were quite excited by the experience, especially when the VDC representatives for once had the opportunity to identify their own needs and projects (Shrestha, Avanindra Kumar, 1996). Getting wiser by that much from the Kaski experience, the Advisor made provisions in his project for such Ilaka meets and handed on to other districts also to do the same, except that Kaski’s innovative role was never acknowledged by the project. It was brandished as the advisor’s own innovation, and those who knew of this plagiarism did not challenge him because of other attractions such as fellowships his project represented.
The Project-appointed Planning Advisors in the DDC themselves have been languishing in the sub-optimal use of their services because they have been of little consequence in influencing the planning process in the districts. As indicated earlier, the planning system (or the Jack of it) in the districts is conditioned by the larger frame conditions which at present does not require any integrated planning at the district level. Even in regard to the resources allocated by the DDC alone, over the years it has only become politically expedient and imperative for the DDC to distribute them equitably among all the VDCs in the district. Therefore, the advice of the Planning Advisor to adopt planning discipline was bound to fall on deaf ears.
It would have required a major transformation in the larger policies of the government to undo the damage done to the Decentralization Act and to streamline the planning process at the district level. While the government itself has shown little imagination and initiative in this respect, the UNDP officials, although masquerading as “Decentralization Advisors”, stayed away from the much-needed advocacy interventions, but, instead, indulged in things that they could do more easily – drawing red herrings on the problem. One DDC President himself had an interesting observation to make about the change of the project title. He said that “since they could not actually achieve decentralization, they had to conceal it by changing the title of the project to PDDP.” The sadder part of this attempted innovation which was basically the result of an individual LDO’s personal steam and initiative to start with, has been that this practice has already waned in the very district where it had seen the light of the day. As is evident, the top-down planning process of the line ministries did not have room for the projects identified at the Ilaka meets. Therefore, the VDC and DDC officials, having been increasingly frustrated by the futility of their similar earlier exercises, have lost their initial enthusiasm in these meetings.
A well-informed, objective and dispassionate evaluation should have easily brought it out. But the one mounted by the UNDP in 1995, instead, branded it as “the most important innovation” and characterized the whole UNDP project with such superlative terms such as “Successful Strategy”, “Modest Cost”, “Increasing Relevance”, “Strong Performance” and “Startling Initial Success” (Huntington and Upadhyay, 1995:16; 28-29). Given the progressive deterioration of the decentralization situation in Nepal, it is mind-boggling to think of how the evaluators could have arrived at such conclusions. The evaluators consisted of an expatriate professional, a first-timer in Nepal, who was brought in for two weeks and was teamed up with an official of the Project’s Implementing Organisation, none other than the National Planning Commission Secretariat.
However, the fact that the exercise was dubbed as an “evaluation” apparently provided the degree of legitimacy considered sufficient by the Project bosses to continue to perform their activities including the llaka-level workshops and to keep themselves employed in the process. The Project funds allocated for these activities, coupled with the on-site coaxing and cajoling by the UNDP-employed Planning Advisor in the districts provide the necessary impetus for the obliging district officials, who, thanks to UNDP assistance, continue to waste their time and energy on the routine performance of these rituals. The only benefit as perceived by some DDC Presidents has been that with this UNDP facility, they have the resources to bring the district officials to the Ilaka meetings to explain their programs to the elected officials at the grassroots.
Regarding the assignment of additional staff to the Plan Formulation Committees, it is another naive and futile exercise to which the UNDP has subjected the poor DDCs. In a top-down planning process, the Committees have little planning role in the first place and most line agencies do not need and possess any factual data on the district situation in their subject matter areas. Thus, as has been already seen in a district or two, the UNDP appointed staff would have sufficient difficulty in coming up with the necessary analytical information on the sectoral planning needs and, more so, to have the DDC members make use of them to change the priorities and programs of the line agencies in the districts.
For the DDCs themselves, that in recent years had to shed what glory there was during the Panchayat days, the assignment of this large team of UNDP-supported officials seemed to bolster their public image to a certain extent. But for the HMG-appointed Planning and Administrative Officers (PAO) of the DDCs, who for the past several years have been languishing in under-employment as far as their planning functions are concerned, the addition of these almost half a dozen extra staff only aggravated the PAOs’ situation further. At present the administration in the UNDP-assisted district suffers from a triangular confusion—the mutual relationship between the government-appointed Planning and Administrative Officer, the UNDP-appointed Planning Advisor and the UNDP appointed professional staff for the Plan Formulation Committees. There exist no formally worked out procedures to make the confusion clear in the DDCs. Incidentally; the professional support staff have been given the remuneration and benefits “equivalent to that of Gazetted Class Ill Technical officer in the government”. This in effect confers on them a status equal to that of the government PAO and makes coordination between the two sets of officials even more difficult.
Only one thing is clear: they all reported to the Local Development Officer.
Text courtesy: Social economy and national development, A NEFAS publication 1996: Thanks the distinguished author and NEFAS: Ed. Upadhyaya.