embedding empowerment in the entire development process). In addition, all scaling up should be tailored to local cultural contexts. Scaling up is often driven by the success of the pilot program;
skilled leadership and management at local, regional, or national levels; and/or outside forces such as donors. For LCDD to be scaled up from a pilot project to a national program, political commitment is needed to ensure that power actually shifts from the top to the bottom. Central institutions and sectors must be aligned with LCDD concepts, administrative and fiscal decentralization must progress, and a government’s own fiscal resources, both local and national, should eventually become the main source of support for LCDD programs. This requires a reform of the fiscal system in many countries. Political will is not enough to ensure success. Diverse
stakeholders have to be brought together to build a consensual space around the core LCDD concepts and platform, and governance incentive systems have to change concretely. It is important that stakeholders be able to present solid evaluation data and use them in consensus building, and they must recognize that consensus building is a continuous process that involves stakeholders at each level: national, provincial, local, and community. Stakeholder analyses conducted at regular intervals and for each level provide crucial information needed for building and sustaining consensus.
Factors needed to sustain scaled-up LCDD
A number of factors are critical to ensuring the sustainability of LCDD efforts:
• Growing facilitation capacity: As programs scale up, the facilitation agency has to have the reach and skill set to match evolving community needs and institutional capacities. It is important to consider costs, skills, and motivation in this evolution. To reduce costs, training teams of facilitators from the communities themselves is often introduced.
• Building accountability systems: In the empowerment model of community development, the primary accountability is to community members, and communities have to be trained in appropriate accountability processes, including procurement, disbursement of funds, accounting, and reporting to their own members. Community leaders and local program managers are also responsible for reporting to higher levels of authority and are subject to the possibility of audits. Different LCDD programs have experimented with independent monitoring and audit committees, as well as encouraging independent journalists to report.
• Creating good monitoring and evaluation systems: The goal is to develop a true learning organization. However, the state of monitoring and evaluation in most LCDD programs is poor. A World Bank review found that only 5 to 10 percent of projects had sound evaluation plans. On the other hand, the availability of solid evaluation research data enabled Indonesian stakeholders, for example, to make a strong case for scaling up and consolidating many different programs into one national program with one source of funding. Overall, the lack of convincing impact evaluation results that can prove convincingly the superiority of the LCDD approach is one of the reasons that the merits of LCDD versus sectoral development programs continue to be debated.
Conclusion
The LCDD approach can be utilized in almost any country, but the design and management of programs will differ according to the country and locality. During the diagnostic phase, stakeholders discern the best strategic fit among the country and community context, the locus of management responsibilities, and the flow of funds. Experience in Africa shows a progression of institutional complexity and institutional sustainability. Through policy reforms, decentralization, and capacity building over the course of 10 to 15 years, institutional arrangements in many cases have moved away from separate, “silo” programs toward programs fully embedded in national and local government structures. This is both a reflection, in part, of LCDD approaches already taken and a positive trend for future LCDD activities.
For further reading: P. Barron, CDD in Post-Conflict and Conflict- Affected Areas: Experiences from East Asia (Oxford, UK: University of Oxford, 2010); H. Binswanger-Mkhize, J. de Regt, and S. Spector, Local and Community-Driven Development: Moving to Scale in Theory and Practice (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2010); V. Rao and G. Mansuri, Localizing Development: Does Participation Work? (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012); R. Shotton and M. Winter, Delivering the Goods: Building Local Government Capacity to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals (New York: UN Capital Development Fund, 2005); World Bank, Community Driven Development,
web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/ EXTSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/EXTCDD/0,,menuPK:430167~pagePK :149018~piPK:149093~theSitePK:430161,
00.html; World Bank, International Conference on Community-Driven Development and Rural Poverty Alleviation, Beijing, China, October 2009: Proceedings (Washington, DC: 2010); World Bank, The World Bank Participation Sourcebook (Washington, DC: 1996).
Hans P. Binswanger-Mkhize (
binswangerh@gmail.com) is a consultant based in Tshwane, South Africa. Jacomina P. de Regt (jacominaderegt@
gmail.com) is a consultant based in Washington, DC
www.ifpri.org
Copyright © 2012 International Food Policy Research Institute. All rights reserved. Contact
ifpri-copyright@cgiar.org for permission to republish.
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