Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque and Dr. M Abul Kashem Mozumder :
For sustainability and equity participation to obtain access to institutional format boundaries of individual ownership and entitlement must be recognized. Inclusive governance has been described in general terms. The individuals have to be persuaded for reflecting the common interest. So inclusive participation lies in social development sectors, economy and productive sectors.” But many problems of resource depletion and environmental stress arise from disparities in economic and political power. An industry may get away with unacceptable levels or air and water pollution because the people who bear the brunt of it are poor and unable to complain effectively. A forest may be destroyed by excessive felling because the people living there have no alternatives or because timber contractors generally have more influence then forest dwellers.”
Social systems should recognize some aspects of this interdependence and enforced community control over agricultural practices and traditional rights relating to water, forests, and land. This enforcement of the ‘common interest’ did not necessarily impede growth and expansion though it may have limited the acceptance and diffusion of technical innovations.
Local interdependence has, if anything increased because of the technology used in modern agriculture and manufacturing. Yet with this surge of technical progress, the growing ‘enclosure’ of common lands, the erosion of common rights in forests and other resources, and the spread of commerce and production for the market, the responsibilities for decision-making are being taken away from both groups and individuals. This shift is still under way in many developing countries.
In most countries, the people express growing disillusionment with their governments, complaining about lack of responsiveness and accountability on the part of public officials. The relationship between people “and their governments is increasingly characterized by a lack of legitimacy or a governance crisis. The effectiveness of both vertical and horizontal accountability mechanisms has proved limited. In this context, social accountability mechanisms allow citizens to access, use and analyze public information, voice their needs and opinions and demand accountability beyond elections”
Participation is the revealing aspect of development administration. Almost everyone view participation as participation in community organization, participation in the project cycle, participation in local organization, participation local government institutions.
Participation in the project cycle, most particularly within the implementing institution itself, involves popular participation in planning, implementation, output, and evolution stages of the project cycle. It may even entail participation in administration itself as reoriented bureaucracy assigns high priority to opening itself to increased participation.
Participation in the local organizations involves participation in the whole range of local institutions such as Local Governments, Co-operatives, Social Organizations and Public Bodies with a special concern for the consequences of success, for examples, Associated Development Agencies in Bangladesh (ADAB), Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC).
Participation in local government institutions (LG) is meant to promote genuine socio economic change through such institutions. There is a long history of such participation in the sub-continent with a rather not very encouraging success. Professor Haque alludes to the autonomy of the local institutions for development and governance. They include:
a. Autonomy of local units of government and independence from direct and day-to-day control of government and other hierarchical local government bodies.
b. Legally recognized geographical boundaries of such local governments.
c. Corporate status of local government and power to secure resources for performing their functions.
d. Institutional character of local government units and control of local people over then
e. Reciprocal, mutually beneficial and coordinate relationship between central and local governments.
There is considerable factual evidence from different parts of the Bangladesh society that the benefits of development are concentrated in a segment of rural population and are not shared by all. If participation in development is measured in terms of distribution of benefits the peasant masses remain non-participation and do not receive the benefits they accept. As Myron Weiner notes: “Most of the benefits from government policies do not reach the poor (peasants) … the policies pursed have nowhere led to greater economic equality and a lessening of concentration of economic power.” Capitalistic concentration has been increasing under capital-intensive development program. “This sort of development by its nature eliminates those who lack or fail to mobilize the minimum resource base”. “This pattern is related to the distribution of wealth, power and status in the socio-cultural environment”.
Peasant participation in development to which most attention is directed in recent years is the distributive aspect of rural politics. The locus of decision-making in the peasant community economy is a small coterie of elites consolidating power and wealth in their own hands. The current increasing phenomena of inequality, poverty and pauperization of the peasant in the rural areas of developing nations in general and Bangladesh in particular indicate that existing socio economic and political institutions controlled by the elite structure (ruling structure) are not capable of ensuring equitable or at least fair distribution of benefits of development. These institutions coupled with diverse rural development projects serve the interests of the elite group. The masses of peasants continue to be deprived of their due share in political and economic power.
The organization forms assumed by the ‘institutional arrangement’ can be critical of facilitating or constructing bonafide peasants participation in development and creation of power, position and privileges. The ‘institutional arrangement’ itself is adapted to the prevailing structure of rural economy and society. As Saul says “Institutions cannot be viewed or addressed independently of their structure that maintains them and influences their activities.”
Participation not only indicates participation in the development activities of the community itself but also in areas of activity that the people share with other communities. Given the interdependence of the peasant communities under the impact of modernization, the importance of organization in increasing people’s involvement and initiative is admittedly great. The operating organizations in and outside the village include informal political body (traditionally sanctioned) cooperatives, recreational club, youth club, women association, union parishad (grassroots government), various committees, rural courts etc. Many of these organizations involve the participation of people belonging to a number of villages as members. In some organization membership is restricted and in some it is wide ranging. Membership in various committees is closed and limited to the higher echelon of the society. Apart from the upward movement along organizational linkage people participate in various rural development projects as beneficiaries. Some model farmers in South Asian villages have received useful orientation from the rural development institutions as trainees. They are partaking in the activities of the projects as mobilizes and change agents. This level of peasant’s involvement as beneficiaries and trainees in recent years is a manifestation to the tremendous increase of social mobility.
It should not surprise if the rural development programs have a tilt in favor of the ruling class on whose support they are dependent for their proper implementation. The generic feature of the rural development experimentation is the fact that development activities are biased towards the ruling class whose cooperation is considered a sin-quo-non-for fulfilling the twin objectives of growth and societal integration. As a result the issue of rural poverty, inequality, and exploitation remain sidetracked in reality. In the study areas patronize resources in the rural institutions dominated by the ruling elites are responsible for lopsided participation in development, elite conflict and the lack of growth. Likewise they tend to generate wrath suspicion and discontent among the dispossessed. There has been overlapping of the elites in all decision-making institutions (village council, cooperative, union parishad, and various development committees). They decide upon diverse development issues and grievances maintaining liaison with the development officials who are giving extension and promotional services. In the process of manipulation the proportion of rural elites making use of extension services and obtaining access to other resources of patronize keeps on remaining high. As the distribution of resources meant for development projects is routed through the elites, the cases of corruption and misdistribution are obvious.
Governance by implications involves input from service oriented promotional activities within the organizational context. It demands an orderly institutional arrangement with built in mechanism providing genesis for social mobilization.
Local governance is a part of overall governance. The local government system in Bangladesh operates at three levels: metropolitan, urban and rural-local. The potentials of local governance can be realized when local participation assumes importance in (a) planning and implementation of projects (b) supervision of educational institutions, hospitals and other government financed units (c) mobilization of support for new initiatives like campaign against dowry, child labour etc. (d) enforcement of laws regarding gender discrimination, violence against women, environmental protection (e) mobilization of resources in the form of taxes, fees, tolls etc. (f) holding LG institutions accountable to the community (g) sensitizing the community making it vigilant and active ensuring transparency and responsiveness of LG institutions.
Post-war development theories were dominated by the idea of development as economic growth and material well-being. With it came a strong focus on the state: The belief that growth and prosperity would come if the market was left on its own had been shattered by the Great Depression and mass-unemployment of the 1930s. Furthermore, the apparent success of state planning in the early years in the USSR led to a rethinking about the role of the state in the economy.
The European Recovery Programme, an aid programme for Europe, allowed reconstruction of war-damaged industries. In most Western countries, growth picked up rapidly and was driven by the state and the industrial sector. The path of growth was assumed to be a linear one: State intervention and aid would encourage savings and investment for technological innovation. The resulting increase in productivity would absorb the workforce from low-productivity sectors (agriculture) to the industrial sector and thus accelerate industrialisation and fuel growth. Progress in this model was – and to a large extent, continues to be – measured in terms of growth in the size of national economies and per capita income.
The end of colonialism and the foundation of independent nation states reinforced the notion of development as growth and modernisation. The rapid recovery of post-war Europe had led to widespread optimism and the firm belief that the newly independent states could copy the example of Europe’s reconstruction. Emulating ‘modern’ Western societies, so it was believed, would lead developing countries out of poverty and allow them to catch up with the developed world. It was widely assumed that development could only happen if traditional values were replaced with modern ones.
(Dr. Md. Shairul Mashreque is former professor of Chittagong University and Dr. M Abul Kashem Mozumder is Pro-VC of BUP).
