Catholic Relief Services Manual on Partnership Relations

Introduction - a Development Handbook

If you have been reading along here at all, you realize that I have a bit of an interest in just how we are helping "developing nations".  I've been putting forward the idea that we have it somewhat wrong, and that there is a better way, something other than "projects" and "missions".  It has been somewhat difficult to find good examples of exactly what I am talking about.  Even the noted Jeffrey Sachs does not have a lot of examples where I would agree with the approach.

But, amazingly to me, I've just stumbled on a "handbook" on how to do this - and it is not brand new, by any means.  It does not have a date, but it must be after 2006, as that is the latest reference in it.  The first few pages are the "Principles of solidarity based partnerships".  The words are chosen with care.  These are partnerships, and they are focused on solidarity.

From Helping to Solidarity

The next short section is on moving "From Helping to Solidarity".  It explains just what this means, and why it is important.  The principle author of this part is one Mike Haasl, of the local diocesan office here in St. Paul.  He points out some of the traps that we tend to fall into when we think of "helping" others.  He asks us to consider this relationship much more like a marriage - it is equal, we both contribute; it is negotiated carefully, and we are in it for the long haul.

The CRS publication is here:     CRS Manual on Partnerships

Cost of Short Term Missions

Further on in the manual, there is an extensive reference to an article by Jo Ann Van Eng, "The Cost of Short Term Missions".       Cost of Short Term Missions

This problem is a regular debate within the organizations that I am familiar with.  We really want to send people to these other places to help out, to do things, to be of assistance.  But these kinds of trips are rarely economically justifiable from that perspective.  Even medical mission trips are rarely cost effective.  If we spent all of those travel dollars on local resources - that would likely reap larger returns!  In fact, in many, many cases, the "mission" group is not a positive experience for the local community at all.  Everyone loves to do these, and they are life changing experiences, but the impact on the ground is more often negative than not.

This article explains some of those problems in considerable detail.  It offers recommendations on how to do these "missions" more effectively. And, fundamentally, it points out that the real benefit of this kind of investment is in the travelers themselves. It includes excellent suggestions on preparation and conduct to achieve this end, avoiding the negatives of the typical "project" or "mission".

 "I suggest we stop thinking about short-term missions as a service to perform and start thinking of them as a responsibility to learn. Let's raise money to send representatives to find out what our brothers and sisters are facing, what we can do to help, and how we can build long-term relationships with them."

"Short-term missions are expensive. They spend money that third-world Christians could desperately use. But short-term missions can be worth every penny if they mark the beginning of a long-term relationship. Money invested in learning about the causes of poverty in developing nations--and what can be done--is money well spent."

Other Information - How To, Orientation, etc.

Besides these insightful contributions, the CRS manual is full of information on culture, on exercises to alert people to cultural values, and how to prepare people for these adventures.  It is just excellent!

The U.S. Culture 

There is another reference in the document to "American Values" and the work of L. Robert Kohls on this topic.  I have a bit of a problem with anyone that identifies "American" as being identical to residents of these United States of America, but I can overlook that!  He does a nice job of identifying the values that most U.S. citizens carry about in their heads as givens for all of human kind. I've been talking about those a bit as well.  You can find his article here:  L. Robert Kohls on The Values Americans Live By.

That's about it for now.  I am working on some other things - but it takes my brain a while to work these things out.  Stay tuned.  What did you think of these?

We are all in this together – Red Green

This has been my mantra for some time.  It’s a phrase that the great Canadian philosopher Red Green used on his show.  The basic idea is that human kind is a social animal, and we are all living in one social, economic and environmental reality.  Whatever happens to one of us, affects all of us.  The Christians among us made this a kind of dogma – “we are all God’s children”, or the “mystical body of Christ”, and stuff like that.  The ties between us are sometimes remote and tenuous, but they are real.  When a crime is committed in Minneapolis, or Chicago, or New York, it affects my quality of life – just a bit.  When a kid grows up in Tanzania without an opportunity for education, we all lose that person’s potential contribution – and it could have been amazing!  They might have come up with the cure for cancer much sooner.  My buddy Ned once had the brightest kid in Tanzania at his door, because he could not afford to go to school.  Ned helped with his books, and made an huge investment for the rest of us.

That is also a small part of why I am messing around with Nicaragua in various ways.  It is the nearest, poorest place, where we have an opportunity to really change things.  We could all reap large returns from their contributions to our social and economic fabric of life.

Well, now there’s proof!  Really!  Scientific proof that we are all in this together!  It is explained in this recent blog entry by Jared Bernstein.  He points to evidence in psychological and economic and environmental studies that it actually does work that way.  It’s a pretty easy read.  Here’s a quote:

“So, yeah, I think there’s an argument here for economic “altruism” by which I mean we all ultimately do better when we engage in social and political behavior that looks beyond short-term, narrowly concentrated profit maximization based on supply-side tax cuts, offshoring, deregulating markets, hacking away at gov’t spending, public goods, the safety net.”

http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/the-science-behind-were-in-this-together/

All right, it’s no rigorous scientific study that will persuade our politicians and economists.  And it is a long way from a fundamental cultural value that shapes all of our decisions. 

But that type of cultural value seems to be in the heads and hearts of most Scandinavians, as they generally seem to pursue this approach to life more than the rest of us.  My theory is that it comes from centuries of surviving in the climate where they live, learning to depend on each other. And they had the distinct advantage of never being part of the Roman Empire – or the Holy Roman Empire.  They don’t have this hierarchical mindset that sees the leader, the deity, or the king in charge.

I think Minnesota used to be a leader in the nation in this regard, precisely because so many of those Scandinavians migrated here.  Hey, it’s rocky and cold – it looks just like home!  Definitely WITT and not YOYO.  (Look it up!)

CAFTA and Sugar Beets - it's complicated

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away - wait - that's a different story.  This piece is about sugar beets and CAFTA - it's economics and fairly complicated, but it does demonstrate one of my basic life principles - "We are all in this together".  Thank you, Red Green.  It's about how the sugar market works between here and Central America.  Or, who is paying whom for what.
(I am going to the Red Green show here in Minnesota in May, thank you very much, my lovely wife.)

I suspect you use some sugar, one way or another.  It turns out that you and I and all U.S. consumers are paying about $1 billion more for our sugar each year to help out domestic sugar beet farmers.  And by that investment, we are preventing about 140 new jobs in Central America, and potentially many others in other parts of the planet. It's like reverse foreign aid or something. How does that work exactly?

A long time ago, years, literally, I was in Nicaragua, and an economist there was explaining CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Act.  He  gave us an inside look at how this would affect Nicaragua.  He was agin it!  The conservatives here, the classical Free Trade people, were all in favor of this because it lowers barriers to trade.  Trade is good.  The U.S. sells a bunch of stuff in Central America - appliances, electronics, and food!  If you shop in the market in Managua, the rice and corn from the U.S. is cheaper than the local product.  Technically, that's a good thing.  It lowers the cost of living for anyone that depends on rice and corn to live - which includes most Nicaraguans.  However, in this case, it also affects the Nicaraguan farmer, because it depresses the price of their product.  And since most farmers there are doing it basically by hand, their productivity is not wonderful, and they are stressed to earn a living with all of this international competition. They also represent about 30% of the population, versus less than 1% here.

My economist friend looked at all of Nicaragua's exports, and the only one that would be significantly benefited by the free trade act was sugar.  He figured that Nicaragua could produce and ship more sugar to the United States at a competitive price, and thus create more jobs.  He guessed it would generate about 140 new jobs in all of Central America.  Of course, the U.S. sugar industry, mostly sugar beets, also realized this.  So they lobbied Congress hard to put in place a sugar price support.  Whatever happened to free trade?  OH, I'm sorry, it's NOT a tariff - that would be illegal.  It's a "price support".  Oh, and that is basically FREE, that is it does not cost the government of the U.S. anything - just the consumers of the U.S.

You can read about it here in the Star and Trib for March 11, 2012.  Star and Trib article 

So, to enhance free trade, and benefit all, we don't mind damaging the farmers in Nicaragua, but we will not damage the farmers in the U.S.  The consumers in both countries are paying for this directly, without the overhead of government collecting and paying out taxes.

Does not seem fair to me.  We have a lot of price support programs exactly like this  We, you and I, through our federal taxes, pay some farmers a price floor, which, in effect, drives down world food prices - thus benefiting consumers around the world, and damaging farmers around the world..  See this article on all of that:  Wikipedia on Farm Subsidies.

You and I, my friend, are paying $20 Billion a year to subsidize the most productive farmers in the world.  We started these payments back during the depression, when the U.S. farmers were seriously hurt by falling prices.  That was a LONG time ago, in another galaxy.  And most of that money is not going to the small, family farm, but to the large, industrialized operation.

I must be missing something here.  Why are we doing all this?  Because of the agricultural lobby?  Is agriculture a major defense industry now, that we all are paying billions to protect it from foreign competition?

So you see how this works.  We are all in this together.  You and I are paying both sides of this one.  Our taxes hold up the prices which raise the price of our food.  I don't think it's a win / win, here or in Nicaragua.

If you have any insight into this, I would appreciate being enlightened about it.  Thanks. I've asked our fearless elected leaders about this one.  I'll let you know what they respond.  My cursory searches on Google failed to turn up any one that would actually defend this policy.  There must be someone that can explain this.

Economics Is Way Too Complicated

Simplified Economics

I am sitting here at my desk reading this talk by Paul Klugman, published today in his blog at the New York Times.      http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/economics-in-the-crisis/

It is a LONG and complex analysis of the failure of economists to predict and help solve our current financial crisis – which started back in 2008.  I would love to understand this – but the article is way too long, way too complex.  The thought occurred to me, if I find this too complex, how the heck do our policy makers and decision makers ever deal with this stuff at all?  Obviously they do not, thus the mess we are in!  Is there any way to help them?  They typically will lay their hands on one economist that they like and trust, and do whatever that person espouses.  Or, even more likely, they just do what FEELS right.  I don’t need no bleeping economist!  It’s like going to the doctor.  I know what ails me – that highly trained physician is just postulating theories any way.

What FEELS right comes from their gut, their FAST BRAIN, and as I have learned recently from Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, that is dangerous at best.  Our gut, our instant reaction works pretty well for dodging the spear, or sizing up a potential adversary on the path, but it is lousy at complex things.  And our SLOW brain, the one where we actually think and process stuff, is really slow, and gets tired.

Laying your hands on ONE economist is fraught with problems as well.  What if he is an Austrian, and espouses that the benign good will of human kind, totally unfettered by any controls, will eventually produce all the wealth we can imagine!  Or, worse, if he espouses a highly controlled, centralized approach that does what our intelligent leaders think is best, and totally ignores the ignorant rabble who are actually making decisions on the ground– what do they know?!  Those are the two extremes, by the way, Libertarianism and Communism. Most folks fall down somewhere in the middle – but they rarely all agree.

I understand a lot of Kruggman’s article, but it is a long piece, and damned complicated.  To simplify it GREATLY, it seems that one school of thought on the two coasts (salt water people) split apart from mid-America economists (fresh water people).  The folks in the middle of the country, the “freshwater” school, so derided the coastal folks for so many years, that the fresh water ones actually stopped teaching the “other” approach to economics – Keynesian, etc.  Instead of a review of the various schools, they just taught the right one – theirs.  So, when a crisis appeared that a Keynesian prepared, model in hand person might understand, the middle of the country folk and their heirs – their students – had never even seen that model.  He calls it the IS-LM model.  It has something to do with high deficits not necessarily leading to high interest rates, because of some boundaries of low interest rates, a lack of full employment, and a liquidity trap.  See – that makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

I tried to explain this a bit to my lovely wife, and she says, I don’t really have time to listen to all of that, especially since I have very little influence on it.  My guess is that our fearless political leaders are likely to respond in the same way.

I think Kruggman is saying something very important, but the audience who should actually hear it, are never going to read it, and if they do, they won’t get it.

A Better Way?
There has to be a better way!  In some realms, really complex ideas can be explained by a popularist.  Think George Gamow and One, Two Three, Infinity.   If you are unfamiliar with the book, look it up at Amazon.  George had a way with words, and he basically explained Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity so that a high school kid could grasp it.  Thanks, George.

But the problems of Economics are more complex than physics and relativity.  It involves dynamic human beings and institutions that are constantly changing.  Faced with a crisis, we need to understand  something right now in order to make a concrete decision about how to respond to an economic crisis.  We can’t really expect our law makers to drop everything and go sit in a room and read a book to figure out how to get our economy running again.

Well, how about this, an “instant poll” of economists.  We have this wonderful engine at our finger tips – the internet.  What if we had a worldwide forum of noted economists, and our fearless leaders could pose questions to them?.  Like, say, “Does lowering taxes on the wealthy generate more wealth and lower deficits” – answer, yes, no, maybe, or “I dunno”.  Give the experts a day, and send a report to the requester, showing the percentage of economists that choose which answer.  Heck, publish the report so that the world can learn what is being asked and what our best experts are actually thinking!

We need a couple of things to make this work:

1. A respected institution willing to host it.  University of Chicago?
2. A way of vetting the economists who can take part.  All Nobel Prize candidates, noted authors, peer reviewed, etc.  I can see a board chaired by Martin Wolf of the FT!
3. A genius at posing questions properly for multiple choice answers that economists can grasp.  The problem is that every economist has at least 3 hands:  on the one hand you can say x, on the other hand it is y, and then again it could be z.

What say you?  Can you see this applied to other realms?  How about a standing poll of what voters actually think about issues.  What issue is more important:  contraception, gay marriage or unemployment – choose only one, thank you very much.

Klugman's Results
If you are still with me, there are a couple of quotes from the end of the article which are actually quite understandable, and interesting:

“What happened, in fact, was that to a large extent policy makers ended up going for economic doctrines that made them feel comfortable, that corresponded to the prejudices of men not versed in economics.  Thus, it’s normal to think of the economy as a whole as being like a family, which must tighten its belt in hard times; it’s also completely wrong. But lacking any clear message from the economists about how and why this is wrong, it became the common standard of discussion in America, where both Republicans and, alas, President Obama became very fond of the statement that the government should tighten its belt because families were tightening theirs.

It’s also normal to think of economics as a morality play, a tale of sin and redemption, in which countries must suffer for their past excesses. Again, this normal reaction is wrong, or at least mostly wrong – mass unemployment does nothing to help pay off debt. But absent clear guidance from the people who are supposed to explain that economics is not, in fact, a morality play, moralizing became the core of economic policy thinking in Germany, and hence played a huge role in European policy more generally.

Finally, government officials who hang out with businessmen – and almost all of them do – naturally tend to be attracted to views that put business confidence at the heart of the economic problem. Sure enough, belief that one should slash spending even in a depressed economy, and that this would actually promote growth because it would have positive effects on confidence, spread like wildfire in 2010. There were some economic studies used to justify the doctrine of expansionary austerity – studies that quickly collapsed under scrutiny. But really, the studies became popular because they suited the prejudices of politicians, prejudices that would have been totally familiar to Herbert Hoover or Heinrich Brüning.”

I hear Fast and Slow at work again.

The Trouble With America

If you have been reading along here at all, you know that I have been worrying about every country EXCEPT the grand old U S of A.  I just came across a really fine article on the United States that I have to share with someone.  Why not you!?

I have this little e-magazine thing on my iPod called Zite - it monitors what I actually read, and it offers up things that I might be interested in.  It works!  This article popped up to the top today.
America: The Best Country in the World at Being Last -- How Can We Change That?
http://www.alternet.org/story/154367/ 

Generally, I try to read both sides of issues, so it would not bother me if this was conservative or liberal - but it turns out to be NEITHER.  I could not find any bias in it, other than being incredibly optimistic.  The author correctly describes some of the major things wrong with this country where I live.  (Since spending time in Central America, I do NOT refer to our nation as America.  We are one part of North America, thank you very much.)  After a masterful description of these problems, he then presents an amazingly hopeful forecast of how we can overcome this, and continue to be the greatest nation on the planet. Here's a brief quote to whet your interest:

"In the end it all comes down to the American people and the strong possibility that we still have it in us to use our freedom and our democracy in powerful ways to create something fine, a reborn America, for our children and grandchildren. We can realize a new American Dream if enough of us join together in the fight for it. This new dream envisions an America where the pursuit of happiness is sought not in more getting and spending, but in the growth of human solidarity, real democracy, and devotion to the public good; where the average American is empowered to achieve his or her human potential; where the benefits of economic activity are widely and equitably shared; where the environment is sustained for current and future generations; and where the virtues of simple living, community self-reliance, good fellowship, and respect for nature predominate. These American traditions may not prevail today, but they are not dead. They await us, and indeed they are today being awakened across this great land. New ways of living and working, sharing and caring are emerging across America. They beckon us with a new American Dream, one rebuilt from the best of the old, drawing on the best of who we were and are and can be."

I found that stirring and hopeful.  I hope it works out!  And I hope it comes soon enough that I can live to see it!  How can I help?

This is actually the first of two articles.  I await the second one.  It is also a preview of a book -
America the Possible: Roadmap to a New Economy, by James Gustave Speth.  He seems to be a lawyer, but don't hold that against him. Some of my best friends  . . . .

What do you think?

Participatory Development - Problems in Groups

The first part here is a book review - if you are focused on the Problems in Groups issue, please skip ahead to that heading.

Book Review - Culture and Public Action
I just read this book on culture which was very disappointing, but it had one chapter on participatory development which I found very interesting.  The focus is on primitive tribes, but there are similar problems in the communities which we are fostering in Nicaragua.

The basic problem with the book is that it is very "scholarly".  It cites numerous published works and studies, but never really shares insights and stories.

Another problem is that it uses a very broad understanding of culture.  When we are dealing with development issues, I think the best definition of "culture" is as "world view".  It is the set of implicit values and judgments that people make about "how things work".  The book includes things like music, stories, dance, costume, etc. Thus, some contributors say there is NO relationship between development and culture.  In the broad meaning used, I would certainly agree.  I don't think a culture needs to change its music, art, etc., in order to develop.  But they would need to change things like the caste system of India - which is a "how things work" view of life that is very limiting.

In this perspective, the authors also undervalue the power of culture.  They seem to see it as something that is very malleable, and that people can choose to ignore.  They would benefit from exposure to the work of Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations, Software of the Mind.  Culture in this sense is not conscious - it guides judgment and thought from within.  It is the "software" of how we make judgments.

The book mentions Harrison and the culture and development school, but it casts them as extremists that view  culture as fatalistic allowing no hope of change.  I think that is a misreading of that school of thought.  Harrison does understand the power of a world view, and he is very much working on how one can change that.

One other redeeming thing about the book - damning with faint praise - is the chapter by Amartya Sen.  He is a Nobel prize economist, and his book, Development as Freedom, is really excellent.  His main contribution is to clarify what "development" should mean in this context.  It is not about acquiring things, or wealth, or power.  Development should be primarily focused on providing the basic freedoms required for every individual to develop to their full potential - in whatever area they choose.  The goal is the full enrichment of human lives, including art and poetry and music, as well as science and engineering.  My view is that as long as one human being cannot achieve her or his full potential, we are all deprived of their contributions.  And we are all made richer when one small child in Africa or Nicaragua can achieve their full potential.  As my friend Red Green would have it, "We are all in this together". Of course, the basic pre-requisites here include adequate food, shelter, education, health care, etc.  And that does require a level of wealth, for good or ill.

Book Chapter Available
The one chapter from the book that has good insights is actually available on the WWW.  The original PDF is gone, but Google has retained a "PDF view", which can be turned into a Google doc.  I really want to encourage you to read the original, as it has a lot of wisdom about how groups work in a social structure that is somewhat foreign to us.  You can find it here:  Participatory Development.

The Problems in Groups
What follows is an attempt to extract the highlights from this chapter.

After many hours in group discussion in communities in Nicaragua, I think this chapter has finally given me an insight into what exactly is going on.  I often see what I would term "childish" or "petty" interactions among individuals in a community.  I try to ignore them, but I always wonder just what is going on here.  In my world, their actions would be seen as "not mature."  In their world, they are the normal survival mechanism when you are dealing with group interactions.

On p. 12, the article points out that the role of elders in these societies is regarded as something akin to natural law - there is no way to change it.  This group, the "elite", has the power to ignore or violate decisions made by the group.  They can take over or capture the resources which are intended to benefit the whole group.  In African tribes, the "elders" is a very formal position.  In Nicaragua, it tends to be more a positional or historical thing where the "leaders" are not so formally designated.  In one example, a leader decided that he could make better use of the group's computer than the newly elected chair of the group.  Since he was a "leader" in their eyes, he could keep the computer without anyone raising a public fuss about it.  Everyone knows it is a problem, but no one can raise it publicly.

Group agreement is difficult to achieve in these social structures.  The normal mode of operation of groups in this "pre-urban" world, as the authors characterize it, is by group consensus.  The authors point out that the "pre-urban" group function is actually a cultural thing, which survives even in an urban setting.  In this type of group, majority voting is almost unthinkable. Disagreement is seen as threatening the very social fabric of the group, so it is to be avoided at all costs. Secret ballots would be even worse.  Any difference of opinion is seen as dissension and disruption, not as a way to achieve agreement.  This is especially true if the "elders" or leaders are not all in agreement.  In that case there would be no hope for the group to reach a binding decision.

Any dissension is seen as distrust, not as a normal path to a democratic or majority agreement.  The other side is also true - if there are personal animosities or history between individuals, these will be manifest as dissension in other areas.  This type of social structure cannot easily separate their "public" self and their "private" views when it comes to making group decisions.  The idea of a democratic process with majority rule does not have a strong underpinning in their social rules.

People of lower ranks, be it from age, or gender, or wealth and position, find it very difficult to speak their mind in group discussions.  As a result, they may just pay lip service to the discussion, and not support it or actually work against it. The time and energy required to achieve group consensus is also an illuminating discussion.  See page 15.  When I am in a group discussion in Nicaragua, it always strikes me that it takes an enormous amount of time and energy to gain any agreement and common understanding.  The group finds it painful to voice a disagreement, or to consider an opposing view as almost an insult.

The paper describes the difficulty of applying sanctions to group members who do not follow group rules. Exclusion from the group is very difficult and must be avoided at all costs.  It is seen as a very serious thing which actually puts the group at risk. .  Even serious malfeasance, such as embezzlement, may result in the person being removed from their position, but they will not be excluded from the group.

On page 16, the authors reflect a bit on how this type of group discussion is different in "modern" societies.  In these "tribal" or "pre-urban" societies, the group is seen as a closed entity.  Harmony is essential and discord is to be avoided at all costs.   The "pre-urban" groups tend to place the entire emphasis on the personal relationships that must be maintained within the group in order to keep it alive and functioning. In "modern" societies, the group is open to the larger world, where there are abstract and impartial rules which can be brought to bear.  Decisions can be made in these groups that are very difficult and delicate, but which do not threaten the group's very existence.

Quotes
Here are a few quotes that I thought you might enjoy:
---------------------------------
p. 17
By placing heavy emphasis on the virtues of highly personalized relationships, the economic theory of the community tends not only to overstress the effectiveness of decentralized group-based punishment mechanisms, but also to ignore the potentially perverse effects arising from invidious comparisons among community members. As a matter of fact, when people continuously interact in close proximity to each other, they have a spontaneous inclination to look at the situation of their neighbours or acquaintances to assess their own situation. When social and economic differentiation is low, such as is observed in tribal societies, constant comparisons, by thus arousing jealous and envious feelings, create a highly charged emotional climate that can easily lead to the implosion of the group. To counter this ominous threat, tribal societies have evolved egalitarian norms and standards of values that compel or induce enriched individuals to share their surplus with their brethren. This is done on the ground that solidarity is the cement which ties all the members of the community together and enables them to survive in the long run. As a rule, generosity and hospitality are highly praised behaviours in traditional rural communities and successful individuals therefore gain social prestige and esteem when they redistribute their surplus.

p.  18
Private wealth accumulation is actually perceived as an anti-social behaviour precisely because it is an attempt to break away from traditional solidarity networks. According to Guy Hunter, we are dealing with “levelling societies, in which attempts by equals to gain individual advantage are constantly suspected and bitterly resented”. At the root of this suspicious atmosphere is the “fear that the fundamental security of the village will slowly be lost if one individual after another can reach a platform of prosperity from which he might not need the help of the community and could therefore excuse himself from helping them”.

p. 21.
The picture of traditional lineage-based societies that emerges from the above discussion is bleaker than the one usually found in many popular accounts. Rather than idyllic ‘village democracies’ whose members interact in a free atmosphere of trustful cooperation based on well-accepted social norms, they appear as repressive societies where mutual control is constantly exercised, suspicions are continuously entertained about others’ intentions, inter-personal conflicts are pervasive, and a rigid rank-based hierarchical structure governs people’s life. This is what Bourdieu has called the ‘objective truth’ of these societies, one that is not allowed to come to the surface precisely because it could destabilize the village’s socio-political order.
------------------------------

There are many other insights and stories in the following pages (pp. 22 ff) that seem to me to be more limited to the African tribal mentality.  I would encourage my friends with an interest in Africa to read those more closely.

There are also warning words (p. 30) about the rapid development of opportunist NGOs to take advantage of the funds newly available to these efforts, without necessarily engaging in the participatory development that would benefit the society.

Community Based Development - Participatory Development

I just finished reading this book:  Culture and Public Action, edited by Vijayendra Rai and Michael Walton 2004.  I was hoping it would give me some more concrete insights into this initiative for community based development in Nicaragua.  Unfortunately, the book tends to be very scholarly, so that it is primarily an overview of many other publications.  The actual information contained in it is pretty meager.

One chapter did stand out a bit:  Chapter 10 talks about "participatory development" or "community based development".  It was authored by Anita Abraham and Jean-Phillip Platteau.  I managed to find a publication by this pair on the WWW which has about 90% of the same content.  But the original PDF to which it refers is no longer available.  You can read it if you look here:  Google Doc on Participatory.
Google provides its stored view which you can also store as a Google Doc.

It is a similarly dense academic treatise, but it has a couple of very interesting points that I believe relate to our Nicaraguan experience.

Small Communities
On page 5 of the paper, the authors stress that this approach, community based development, almost requires a small community.  There is often a strong tendency for some participants to cheat and appropriate resources for themselves.  They see a small community as being able to control this problem by means of social pressure, which only works in a relatively small group.

“In the light of the above, the community institution can be defined as a group small enough to allow good circulation of information among its members who interact more or less continuously over infinite or indeterminate periods of time. In a repeated game, however, there exists “a profusion of equilibria” (David Kreps) and cooperation is just one possible outcome. Therefore, for a community to succeed in achieving cooperative outcomes, the expectations of its members must also converge on a cooperative strategy. This implies that they are willing to give cooperation a try in the initial stages of the interaction process, because they believe that fellow members are likely to be similarly predisposed. In short, trust must prevail among them. Then, if everyone is bent on punishing people who behave in a ‘nasty’ manner, and expects others to do likewise, an efficient equilibrium where all members cooperate continuously gets established.”

Tribal Structures Have Particular Problems
The authors glean a lot of information from some community based development projects in Africa.  My friends in Africa might gain a lot from reading those sections, but they do not appear to be useful in rural Nicaragua.  If anyone needs a copy of the original paper – I can send it. There are a number of stories in there which are very illustrative of the problem.

This Approach Requires Time and Patience
The other interesting thing I found was the judgment of the authors that this process tends to take a fair amount of time.  One must build up the capacity of the group to the point where they can function well enough to make decisions. It takes a lot of resources to get these changes in place, and the funding agencies typically must show results in a shorter time frame.   I think this is the case with our “initiative”.

I apologize for the long quote which follows – but I think the above is a brief restatement of the problem as the authors intended.  I just want to provide this for documentation in case you cannot retrieve the full paper or the book.

“In a sense, that much is reckoned by the designers of the participatory approach: in so far as endogenous processes of rule and norm evolution are bound to be slow, capacity-building programs supported by external agencies have a pivotal role to play. What seems to be harder to admit, however, is that the changes required are of a revolutionary rather than evolutionary nature. Considerable resources must therefore be engaged if significant results are to be achieved and, in a number of important respects, the changes will necessarily be slow. This is because what is at stake is nothing less than a radical transformation of deep-rooted institutions, values, beliefs and practices that have the functioning of traditional rural communities entails increasing costs as economic opportunities expand (with the result that the value of time rises and new risk diversification possibilities become available), land scarcity increases, and education becomes more widespread. Therefore, if one wants to use them as partners in a participatory approach to rural development, it is necessary to ensure that they are duly adapted for the purpose. For example, new rules and practices, such as majority voting, secret balloting, or the use of anonymous inspection or evaluation procedures, must be put into operation so that enlarged and, perhaps, more heterogeneous groups become viable and thereby apt to exploit scale economies and risk diversification opportunities, benefit from skill complementarities between different categories of persons, manage funds in a more effective manner, etc.”


“Institutional support to rural communities and groups therefore appears as an essential condition for a successful participatory development program. The key problem here is that governments and big donor agencies need rapid and visible results to persuade their constituencies or supporters that the approach
works well. To achieve these results, they have sizeable financial resources at their command that they want to disburse within a short time period. The temptation is great to spread them widely so as to reach as large a number of village communities as possible. Yet, the scarce factor is not financial capital but a particular kind of extension personnel, namely institutional organizers (sometimes called human catalysts or facilitators) who are willing and able to assist rural communities and groups without taking initiative and leadership away from them. Unfortunately, capital and institutional organizers are not substitutable factors."


"Confronted with this hard dilemma, donor agencies have the tendency to maintain their ‘diluted’ approach, which implies that they downplay the task, and minimize the cost, of institutional support to target communities. It is revealing, for example, that lack of capacity-building, especially the building of organizational skills at community level, and lack of ‘ownership’ of the projects by the beneficiary groups, are among the main limitations of the World Bank’s social funds program. As a consequence, the program remains too much driven by a supply-led approach rather than being responsive to the needs of rural people as a participatory approach should be (Narayan and Ebbe, 1997). Underlying this situation lies the aforementioned dilemma. As pointed out by Tendler, indeed, enhancing ‘demand orientation’ and community participation in social funds’ programs would require a significant increase of the social funds’ agency presence in the countryside in terms of time, personnel, resources and effort. Such a change would nevertheless compromise some of the social funds’ “most acclaimed strengths their ‘leanness’ and low administrative costs” (Tendler, 2000: 16-17). Note, however, that a heavy presence in the countryside of the separate agency that administers social funds is unlikely to be the right solution to the problem of ‘ownership’ of projects and community participation."


"The method often used by donor agencies to circumvent the problem of scarcity of institutional organizers operating at the level of rural communities actually consists of asking these communities or specific groups within them to ‘elect’ leaders. For a reason well explained by Esman and Uphoff (1984), however, such a solution is bound to produce perverse results and to be self-defeating :


“The most prominent members are invariably selected and then given training and control over resources for the community, without any detailed and extended communication with the other members about objectives, rights, or duties. Creating the groups through these leaders, in effect, establishes a power relationship that is open to abuse. The agency has little or no communication with the community except through these leaders. The more training and resources they are given, the more distance is created between leaders and members. The shortcut of trying to mobilize rural people from outside through leaders, rather than taking the time to gain direct understanding and support from members, is likely to be unproductive or even counterproductive, entrenching a privileged minority and discrediting the idea of group action for self-improvement” (Esman and Uphoff, 1984 : 249).”

AMEN.  Sorry about that.  It seemed important at the time!