Malin Hasselskog, School of Global Studies
Opening Note: This is a discussion of Malin’s doctoral thesis. Malin analyzed development interventions in three Cambodian villages. She theorizes how development assistance is an instance of intervention.
Development Assistance
- An intervention is something introduced from the outside and including materials, expertise and values.
o This implies an interference with prevailing political/ cultural/ economic systems.
o The aim of development assistance is to change. For example, donors may believe that gender equality is better than gender inequality and seek to change unequal practices.
o Intervention leads to good and bad outcomes. Malin’s thesis is not, necessarily, a severe critique.
- Why study this?
o This should be studied to determine what is possible to achieve through intervention.
- There is now a tendency for donors to demand more detailed control of development assistance projects.
o This is seen through detailed project cycles.
- LFA (Logical Framework Approach)
o This system facilitates detailed project planning.
o LFA includes different outputs and indicators to verify goals and outcomes.
o This points towards donors wanting more detailed control over projects.
- Budget Support
o In this instance, the recipient state is free to use donated money as they see fit in the state budget.
o This indicates less donor control.
o Few states qualify for this kind of intervention.
o In practice, the recipient state is not actually free to spend the money how they want. There is usually an advisor and if the state does not use the money appropriately, it can be withdrawn.
- Development assistance is based on the idea that intervention is just and possible and that it is right to change a society.
o This idea builds on certain assumptions on roles of actors in societal change.
o This concept reflects social change as technical where assistance works independently of the context in which it is implemented.
o This concept implies that external experts can design effective interventions and local people will behave in certain, predicable ways.
- However, this does not actually happen.
o Local communities have their own unique dynamics.
o When something new is introduced, it is localized and/ or adjusted to the local setting. This occurs through the interplay between the community and actors/ money/ materials in development assistance.
- This is common sense but development assistance is still designed as predicable/ manageable/ implementable.
- Today, many argue that donors still attempt to implement assistance “blueprints” rather than collaborate with local partners.
An Example of a Major Development Program in Cambodia
- Malin studied a case of development assistance that is widely perceived as successful.
- This program was called Carere/ Seila and is a major governance program in Cambodia facilitated by the UN (Carere) and the Cambodian government (Seila).
- This program was implemented in the early stages of the “governance era” in the early 1990s and was considered very ambitious.
- The program was initiated and designed by donors working with the United Nations.
- The goals and underlying views of the program included:
o Participatory development lays the foundation for peace.
o Partnership is vital to success.
o Democracy, accountability and representation should be promoted. This entailed changing people’s view of the state.
- The program is implemented in the following ways:
o The program established a rural development structure at every level of governance.
o Village Development Committees (VDCs) were formed and were composed of elected participants.
o Local Development Funds (LDFs) were established and provided money to the commune to be used for local development allocations decided by a Local Planning Process (LPP). This sought, in part, to improve relations between villages and communes.
o When projects were authorized by the commune, villages were asked to provide some cash and labor.
o This program was emphasized as a policy experiment in selected areas in Cambodia.
o The overall aims were democracy, improved relations between the people and the state, poverty alleviation, peace, etc.
- The Cambodian context was challenging for this projection because:
o Cambodia is traditionally hierarchical.
o Local, political culture is one where villagers avoid contact with local authorities. This is because villagers have had negative experiences with authorities.
Ratanakiri Province
- This province is located in the northeast corner of Cambodia.
- The province primarily composed of ethnic minorities or Highland People.
- Apart from Ratanakiri Province, the rest of Cambodia is quite homogenous.
- The relationship between the locals and the authorities is worse here than in the rest of the country.
- Material living standards are lower than in the rest of Cambodia.
- This is an extremely challenging context for development assistance.
Tera Village
- This village is in a remote location.
- There was a road constructed to the village through a food for work program initiated by Carere/ Selia.
- Carere/ Seila also provided the village with buffaloes and emergency assistance.
Implications of Implementation in Terms of Participation and Empowerment
- Participation and empowerment were essential aspects of the project document. In her research, Malin asked: was it successful?
- Villagers were given buffalos for wetland rice cultivation.
o This was problematic because villagers did not grow wetland rice and as a result, had to move their village to a location near the river.
o The villagers said that “development called us down and asked if we wanted to have buffalos and grow wetland rice.” The villagers perceived this is a demand to move their village and grow wetland rice.
o This had been attempted several times before as previous governments and development projects sought to move the Highland People to lower ground. Thus the Highland People in Tera Village had been moving away from the forest and towards the river for decades depending on the political regime.
- When Malin asked Carere workers why the villagers were given buffalos, the workers said that the people asked for buffalos in order to grow wetland rice.
- The Highland People adopted the Lowland view of development which was to settle in one place with houses built in rows and grow wetland rice.
- The villagers felt no sense of influence over the development process.
- The villagers expected that they might have to move back to the forest again even if the authorities didn’t want them to do this—but when Malin was conducting her research, the villagers were still awaiting official permission to move.
o The villagers thought they would have to move because it was difficult to grow wetland rice where the new village was located.
Implications of Implementation in Terms of Poverty Alleviation
- Agricultural yield was far less in their new location, primarily because not enough rice was produced.
- Animals were eating the villagers’ crops.
- The villagers no longer had access to forest products such as potatoes.
- There were not enough fish in the new location.
- Domesticated animals were dying more often.
- Thus, it is not surprising that, villagers overwhelmingly perceived their lives as better in the old location.
o This was because food security and self-sufficiency had decreased.
o The village was now less egalitarian with increasing tensions between the young and the old.
o There were also growing gender disparities.
o Women were most negatively affected.
- The villagers didn’t move because they hoped things would improve and that their workload would decrease.
- The villagers felt that they had better access to healthcare in their new location because they were closer to a medical clinic.
o However, people said that they were less healthy.
- The villagers also had better access to informal education.
- Finally, the villagers had daily access to the local market. Whereas before, they went to the market once or twice each year.
- Furthermore, the villagers wanted to live in a settled village. This was odd since most villagers did not live in the houses in the village but in houses near their fields.
Implications of Implementation in Terms of Democracy and Decentralization
- Technically, the VDC was elected but villagers had no sense of electing them.
- Under the new system, the knowledge possessed by the elders decreased in importance.
o This was because traditional mechanisms did not, necessarily, apply to the new location of the village and fields.
o Young men felt that the elders couldn’t make any important decisions.
- The Lowland lifestyle was very much promoted in the new location.
o This lifestyle was especially promoted by the communal chief who distanced himself from the Highland way of life.
- Villagers were integrated into the market economy and dependent on external input from the central government and aid agencies.
Conclusion
- This was a well-intentioned intervention with unintended outcomes that were a result of local implementation.
- Nevertheless, this intervention is widely considered a “best practice”.
No comments:
Post a Comment