Implementing Rural Development Projects

Lessons From Aid And World Bank Experiences

Elliott R Morss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429716959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book deals with problems frequently encoun-tered by agencies, managers, and technicians who try to implement large-scale development projects. Specifically, it focuses on the implementation problems associated with projects sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and the World Bank in developing countries. Some historical background on how implementation problems became a focus of concern is presented below. Development assistance on a significant scale started with Marshall Plan aid to reconstruct Western Europe following World War II. [1] In that case, the donor (the United States) asked not to be part of the process that determined how the money was to be spent. Instead, the United States asked the West European countries to establish their own priorities for assistance (which they did after a considerable amount of inter-country negotiation).

1
Coping with Political, Economic, Environmental, and Institutional Constraints

Jerry Van Sant and Paul R. Crawford

INTRODUCTION

Experienced project managers are usually aware of their own limitations, and most have a reasonable understanding of the constraints that impede their implementation efforts. Correctly, they classify certain constraints as environmental because these constraints reflect pre-existing conditions in which the project must operate but which are not susceptible to direct management control. The constraints on any given project include a mix of national political and economic policies, adverse conditions affecting the area and population served by the project, and institutional weaknesses and rivalries.

Although these constraints may be largely beyond the control of project managers, recognizing them and developing strategies to deal with them are appropriate management tasks. Unfortunately, these constraints tend to be inadequately addressed in both the design and implementation of projects. The results are inappropriate strategies and severe implementation problems:

• The objectives of a development project may be at odds with prevailing political priorities. Assisting the rural poor is probably one of a number of competing government priorities. The low priority accorded rural development in routine decisions may lead to neglible administrative support for, and poor coordination of, project activities.
• Sometimes governments address economic problems such as balance of payments deficits, unemployment, and high inflation in ways that adversely affect the implementation of development projects. For example, domestic price ceilings imposed to improve exports may lower incentives for farmers to adopt agricultural innovations, or restrictive monetary policies may limit the access of small-scale farmers to credit.
• Factors in the immediate project environment such as polarization within the community, past unfavorable experience with government services, seasonal labor patterns, and ecology of the project area may lead to unexpected responses to project initiatives.
• Institutional factors such as roles of local elites, incentives for civil servants in important support roles, and decision-making patterns in the project management structure may significantly influence the degree to which project managers are able to achieve performance targets.

Dealing with these constraints is an important and necessary step in project implementation. For various reasons, however, managers and staff in many development projects adopt a fatalistic approach: they carry on with those functional activities that they can control and avoid the environmental factors, even when these factors pose a serious threat to the project's success.

The thesis of this chapter, and others in this book, is that simply accepting these problems with resignation is unacceptable. Although they appear in a wide variety of forms, the problems are generic to the process of rural development and have caused many projects to suffer precisely because they have not been addressed. Thus, the argument begins by examining the nature and causes of the environmental constraints that typically arise in complex development projects and then describes techniques that may be used to alleviate them.

DEFINING THE PROBLEMS

There are four categories of problems that project designers and implementers should address: national politics, macroeconomic policies, the local environment, and institutional factors. Each category is discussed below.

National Politics

The pursuit of broad political objectives can easily override efforts to initiate development. Typically, government priorities include:

• Achieving self-sufficiency in the production of critical goods such as food, agricultural inputs, and certain consumer items;
• Maintaining low food prices in urban areas to limit discontent and reduce the attractiveness of imported foodstuffs;
• Pursuing international goals, such as increased national stature; and
• Winning or maintaining the support of certain ethnic or political groups within the country.

The contradictions between these political priorities and development goals have been manifested in many ways. For example, the Government of Mali's drive to achieve self-sufficiency in basic food grains and agricultural inputs had an adverse impact on Operation Mils Mopti, a project aimed primarily at increasing millet and sorghum production. To maintain low domestic food prices for urban consumers--a political imperative--the government set the official prices of these grains at only 60-70 percent of production costs.

In response, a parallel market for food crops developed and thrived, involving substantial illegal exports to neighboring Sahelian countries where prices were as much as 100 percent higher. However, it was chiefly the large-scale farmers who were able to export their grain and profit from this opportunity. Small-scale farmers continued to sell most of their surplus to the Malian government at low prices to meet production quotas imposed upon them.[l]

Sources of Pressure. In general, political pressure to keep food prices low comes from two sources: urban workers, and employers who, when their workers are faced with rising food costs, are forced to pay higher wages. Since governments themselves are major employers, and frequently sponsors of industry as well, they tend to side with urban consumers, workers, and industry in seeking ways to restrain price increases for basic foodstuffs.[2]

The principal exception occurs when an elite group engages in the production of a particular food item. In these cases, usually involving export crops, the government is unlikely to depress prices.[3] This favoritism, of course, rarely benefits the rural poor, who are usually on the short side of discriminatory policies.

The basis for discrimination is not always urban-rural. It may reflect the political domination of one ethnic or cultural group in a society. Groups in remote geographic areas with atypical ecological features may miss the benefits of government services oriented toward the majority. In Indonesia, for example, dryland areas such as Timor and Madura receive little attention in national agricultural research and extension programs, which are oriented toward rice-producing irrigated areas.

These problems are compounded by the risk that resources allocated to achieve program goals will be reallocated to serve pressing political purposes:

Although individual officials may have the best of intentions, political realities may dictate that redistributive policies are implemented effectively only when they do not threaten interests whose support is essential to the regime. It is, moreover, unlikely that many redistributive policies would meet this criterion.[4]

Conflicting Objectives. Political influences are often subtle. High-level government support for a donor-assisted project may mask the real objective— increasing to a maximum degree foreign exchange inflows to the economy. A related problem may arise in projects working through the decentralized management of a ministry or national planning body. National support for decentralization may reflect a genuine belief that local decision making is responsive to beneficiary interests. Or, paradoxically, decentralization may be spurred by a desire to increase central political control. Since decentralized authority is rarely accompanied by real local control over resources, decentralized projects can be used to augment a centrally directed bureaucratic presence at the grassroots. At the opposite extreme, decentralization in a context of fragmented political power may increase political conflict and paralyze implementation.[5]

Political support can cause other problems it it is expressed as pressure for quick results. Governments may press for rapid, expensive service delivery systems that cannot be sustained with local resources. This happened in Jamaica, where the Second Integrated Rural Development Project (IRDP II) employed a soil conservation technology whose costs were out of proportion to its total budget. Only 4,000 farm families lived in the area, and total project expenditures (including cash subsidies to attract farmer participation) averaged $6,500 per family. To replicate this technology for all of Jamaica's estimated 150,000 farm families working in similar hillside conditions would have cost more than $900 million.[6]

Strong, visible political support for development projects may undermine project implementation through:

• Articulation of multiple or ambiguous goals;
• Emphasis on short-run, measurable results;
• Inhibition of normal processes of feedback and learning;
• Pressure to spend money without critical self-examination; and
• Insulation of projects from external critici sm.[7]

IRDP IX in Jamaica illustrates the additional hazard posed when a change in government transforms political visibility into a liability, especially in a politically charged atmosphere. After the change of government in late 1980, several key staff, including the director, were transferred from the project, while many new, superfluous junior staff were added to the rolls. [8] This sort of political tampering causes disruption, insecurity, and reduced morale. The project is usually the victim.

Macroeconomic Policies

Developing countries have historically been faced with serious economic problems. Resource constraints, coupled with fluctuating terms of trade, have led to balance-of-payments problems, exacerbated by policies that maintain officially overvalued exchange rates. Resource constraints have also slowed domestic economic activity, resulting in unemployment, inflation, and an excess of demand over supply. Often governments choose, or are forced, to address these problems in ways that adversely affect the implementation of development programs.[9]

Macroeconomic policies can affect development: projects in many ways, for example:

• Domestic price ceilings imposed to promote exports may kill the incentive for farmers to adopt agricultural innovations;
• Import tariffs or quotas, designed to foster domestic production of fertilizers, chemicals, and farm implements, may increase production costs and lower incentives to produce;
• Restrictive monetary policies may limit the access of small farmers to credit; and
• Tight budget restrictions may reduce the government's ability to assume critical recurrent costs.

Pricing Policies. The price ceilings imposed by governments for political reasons may have a variety of economic consequences that work against the rural sector:

• Agricultural production and investment may be curtailed;
• Food imports may be increased;
• Black market trade, both domestic and foreign, may be encouraged; and
• Patterns of urban modernization and rural stagnation may be extended, thereby accelerating the rate of migration to urban areas. [10]

However, price floors are sometimes imposed to insulate the farmer from short-term market fluctuations and to provide an incentive to increase agricultural output or adopt new production practices. Although guaranteed prices can play a positive role, they must be well planned and administered, and coordinated with other subsidies; if they are not, they create additional problems. For example:

Ad hoc price policies which are often adopted by specific projects or programs as a reaction to unanticipated crises are usually dysfunctional, causing, among other problems, considerable income discrepancies among food and non-food crop producers, even within program areas.[11]

Inconsistencies between national pricing policy and project-specific pricing arrangements also tend to limit the adoption of new technologies and divert scarce administrative resources into dealing with the problems of marketing agricultural surpluses.

Import-Export Policies. Policies intended to promote exports or restrict imports, although possibly beneficial to the manufacturing sector, can worsen the terms of trade for subsistence farmers. At the least, the demands of international trade may focus disproportionate attention on progressive farmers who produce cash crops for export, at the expense of those who produce staples for home consumption.[12]

In Sudan, the deteriorating balance of payments has led the government, with the encouragement of international donors, to concentrate its human and financial resources on the export-oriented agricultural sector, particularly irrigated cotton production. This has decreased the resources available for small-scale farmer development projects in the country's rainfed areas.

In Mali, an attempt to boost production under Operation Mils Mopti was seriously hampered by the government's ban on the imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• 1 COPING WITH POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND INSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINTS
• 2 DEALING WITH INSTITUTIONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL REALITIES
• 3 PERSONNEL CONSTRAINTS
• 4 TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE SHORTCOMINGS
• 5 DECENTRALIZATION AND PARTICIPATION: CONCEPTS IN NEED OF IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGIES
• 6 TIMING
• 7 INEFFECTIVE INFORMATION SYSTEMS
• 8 DIFFERING AGENDAS
• 9 SUSTAINING PROJECT BENEFITS