Click on “Editorials”, to the right, for excerpts from this interesting article–which is brief in itself.
Fourteen Brief Points on Democracy and Development at the Grassroots
Fourteen Brief Points on Democracy and Development at the Grassroots
The following are excerpts from an interesting article.
Opini�n Sur
By Ram�n Daubon, Vice President for Programs at the Inter American Foundation
… we shouldn’t expect those who’ve devoted their lives to the wrong way of doing foreign aid to come out and admit they’ve been wrong all along. … Hence I propose a primer for new practitioners, based on fourteen basic thoughts and a checklist.
1. Traditional “development assistance” has not worked
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2. Institutions matter
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3. But institutions need to be legitimized
… This self-reinforcing cycle—performance depending on trust depending on performance─happens with institutions at all levels of public life, from the national to the neighborhood. The challenge for development assistance is to find the right level at which to jump-start that virtuous circle.
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4. Community-driven development is where the rubber hits the road
… People live at the local level; their most pressing issues are typically local. Principal donors are thus beginning to focus their efforts on creating spaces at the local level in which such acting can take place, places for people in local public life.
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5. Whether to be top-down or bottom-up: that is the question
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6. The issue of scaling up and scaling out
… It is on the power of coordinated self-help practices, the “art of associating” that impressed Tocqueville in the 1830s, on which countries like America were built. … In effect, the process of development becomes one of re-defining relationships within and between such groups. Those reformed relationships call for and support reformed public institutions to mediate them. …
7. We need a different way to think about power
Ultimately, the core problem of underdevelopment is the unequal distribution of power. When power is evenly distributed politics and markets work more fairly and income and wealth assume fairer distributions. Yet, inversely, redistributing income will not by itself re-distribute power. North Korea probably has a flatter distribution of income than most developing nations. And we define power not only as the capacity to coerce or force, but as the capacity to make things happen. The crowds in the streets of Kiev in December 2004 showed power, yet they had no guns or tanks. Power is also the capacity to affect one’s own life.
8. Such empowerment requires owning the context, the whole set of circumstances
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9. A “community” is not a place; it is the relationships that define it
… A community is an aggregate of relationships, surrounded by constantly changing circumstances. … Traditional development assistance is destined to fail first of all because it is designed to serve a reality which will have changed by the time the assistance reaches its destination. But more significantly, it fails because it is directed at the circumstances and not at the relationships that generate the circumstances. …
10. A democratic community can adapt to circumstances
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11. A democratic community is a deliberative community
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12. The greatest generator of information is openness.
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13. But this is just a theory…
There is always a theory. What we call development “practice” is based on the theory of six decades ago. … Sixty years of practice under that theory has little to show for its effort. … Because poverty is not the lack of things; it is the lack of power to change the circumstances that generate the lack of things. And those circumstances remain─in essence─unchanged. But the required power cannot be simply given to the poor; it has to be encouraged and resourced.
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14. So, here’s a checklist for donors and activists for a citizens’ political process
a. Who IS and who is NOT in the conversation? The more diverse the conversation, the more complicated it will be. The more complicated, the richer the options. The richer the options, the more the choices. The more the choices, the better the decision. A diverse, complicated conversation will therefore be much harder and conflictual, but it will generate more knowledge and will produce a more solid commitment to the agreements that are made, no matter how unimportant they may initially appear. Those small, committed agreements, few at first and later by the thousands and millions, will form the bedrock of sustainable governance.
b. Look for themes and patterns rather than causes and problems. Look for the simple underlying pattern and the clear organizing principle beneath the surface complexity. Focus on relationships─economic, social and political─and their components: identities, expressions of authority and power, interests, perceptions and stereotypes, and patterns of interaction of the groups involved.
c. Trust the power of the organizing principle and let it loose: combine some expectation of acceptable behavior with the freedom available to individuals to assert themselves in unplanned ways.
d. Give it time. Simple-minded ideas are designed quickly, even when they are complicated. Lasting ones, even if simple, must emerge at their own pace.
Plan the global, but let the local free. Everywhere in nature, order is maintained in the midst of change because autonomy exists at local levels. A system can manage the global demands for change when it has built into it internal freedom of motion at the local level. The local level shouldn’t be waiting for instructions, but rather constantly innovating, guided by a shared organizing principle of self-reference—not knowing where its next step is.
“Caminante no hay camino—se hace camino al andar” (“Traveler, there is no path; the path is made by walking” –Antonio Machado)