Chars Organisational Learning Paper 3
Chars Organisational Learning Paper 3
The Voice-responsiveness Framework: Creating Political Space for the Extreme Poor
March 2004
Acknowledgements
This set of five papers originated from the design of the Chars Livelihoods Programme in Bangladesh. They have been written by the core members of the design team. They are not individually authored because the team as a whole developed the ideas and approaches contained within these papers. However, each paper does have a main author(s) as listed below.
The papers represent the collective experience of many people involved in the design process and have benefited from their comments, advice and inputs. In particular we would like to thank Professor David Hulme from the Chronic Poverty Research Centre at the University of Manchester for his insightful and helpful comments on earlier drafts. We would also like to extend our gratitude to Ajay Close who edited our papers with great patience and care. As ever these papers represent the views of the team.
Finally our thanks must go to DFID and to the former Sustainable Livelihoods Support Office for making the writing of these papers possible.
We hope that they help to contribute to the wider debate of reaching the extreme poor in difficult environments.
Ursula Blackshaw ‘Sustainable Rural Livelihoods and the Chars Livelihood Programme: Progression or New Departure?’ Chars Organisational Learning Paper 1
Mary Ann Brocklesby ‘Planning against Risk: Tools for Analysing Vulnerability in Remote Rural Areas’. Chars Organisational Learning Paper 2
Mary Hobley ‘The Voice-Responsiveness Framework: Creating Political Space for the Extreme Poor’. Organisational Learning Paper 3
David Barton and Mary Ann Brocklesby ‘Integrating Social Protection, Livelihood Promotion and Enterprise Development: Lessons from the Char Livelihoods Programme Design’. Organisational Learning Paper 4
Ursula Blackshaw and Mary Hobley ‘Building Bridges between Design and Implementation: Designing the Chars Livelihood Programme’. Organisational Learning Paper 5
Table of Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4
GLOSSARY 7
1 INTRODUCTION 8
2 THE PROBLEM CONTEXT 9
3 THE CONCEPTUAL UNDERPINNINGS: CITIZENSHIP, VOICE, CHOICE AND RESPONSIVENESS 11
3.1 The Need for a Framework 11
3.2 Citizenship 11
3.3 Voice 12
3.4 Choice 12
3.5 Responsiveness 13
3.6 Political Space 13
3.7 Voice-responsiveness Principles 14
4 WHAT IS CITIZEN-BASED PLANNING? 14
4.1 Citizen-based Planning Process 14
5 VOICE, POWER AND OPENING SPACES 17
5.1 Challenging the Deep Structures 17
6 RESPONSIVENESS INTERVENTIONS 23
6.1 How to Build Responsiveness? 23
7 REPOSITIONING SERVICE PROVIDERS FOR RESPONSIVE DELIVERY 24
7.1 Union Parishads Linking Voice to Responsiveness 24
7.2 Repositioning NGOs 27
8 CONCLUSIONS 31
REFERENCES 35
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1. This paper describes the principles and mechanisms underpinning a framework which enables poor people to access opportunities to improve their livelihoods and develop security to become social actors and claim their rights. It draws on empirical experience from the Chars Livelihood Programme design but it describes a set of mechanisms which are based on a generic understanding of the principles involved in building security and agency for the extreme poor – ‘voice’, ‘responsiveness’, ‘choice’, ‘citizenship’ and ‘political space’.
2. The voice-responsiveness (V-R) framework encapsulates these concepts and provides a practical way forward for implementation. It is one of the two underpinning mechanisms of the Chars Livelihood Programme (CLP) which, over the lifetime of support, aims to bring about sustainable and fundamental change in the ‘deep structures’ and to empower char-dwellers as citizens and producers/consumers. The CLP is specifically concerned with reforming the governance environment in the chars in the widest sense, adopting a rights-based approach to empowering char-dwellers as citizens. This means creating mechanisms and institutional capacity to enable char-dwellers to demand services, and to allow government to respond effectively to those demands, during and after the end of the programme. The V-R framework has two elements: local mechanisms for citizen participation in planning and decision-making and for more effective service delivery by local governments; and national mechanisms for ensuring that chars’ demands and needs are identified and addressed by policymakers at the highest level. The citizen-based planning process focuses on creating and enlarging political spaces in which the extreme poor and their proxies (for example journalists, NGOs such as Transparency International Bangladesh, local radio) can voice and secure their demands.
3. At the local level, the voice component involves development of a bottom-up planning, decision-making and accountability mechanism to ensure that char-dwellers’ demands and needs are articulated. The programme will pioneer new social mobilisation techniques to help poor and vulnerable char-dwellers engage with this mechanism. The responsiveness component is concerned with building the capacity of elected and non-elected local government (Union Parishads and Upazilas) to identify and respond to the rights, needs and demands of char-dwellers by establishing a planning and accountability cycle and providing funds for local service delivery and infrastructure improvements. Capacity-building will assist the institutions to better understand and discharge their roles and responsibilities.
4. Why focus on mechanisms rather than targeted activities and outputs around livelihood benefits? The governance environment in the chars is a significant obstacle to achieving shifts in poverty outcomes. The problems of weak governance are acutely felt in remote rural areas and until they are addressed the poor will continue to face a number of major barriers which prevent them from claiming rights and ensuring delivery of appropriate services to meet highly differentiated and diverse livelihood needs. This acute experience of governance failure led the design to address a number of issues:
· the importance of understanding both formal and informal relations;
· the complexity of power relations, which affects people’s capacity to obtain access to resources and to constrain others’ access;
· the high risks attached to the poor challenging these political spaces either in person or through their proxies;
· the importance of understanding poverty in a dynamic and differentiated way;
· the importance of being able to respond to these dynamics with appropriate services and forms of social mobilisation;
· the need to link the development of effective voice to appropriate service delivery response; and
· the time required to effect any kind of transformation.
5. Based on the analysis above, it was concluded that building the voice of the poor as citizens, building responsive service provision (NGO, state and private) and creating opportunities for greater accountability and transparency will lead to improved livelihoods for poor people. Which leaves the fundamental question: ‘how do subordinated people make the transition from clients to citizens?’ (Fox, 1994)
6. The voice-responsiveness framework was developed in answer to this question. It provides the underpinning structure for the CLP to address the barriers to moving out of poverty, and is based on the assumptions that state agencies will only operate in a poverty-sensitive way if:
· there is consistent pressure from organisations and institutions with hierarchical lines of accountability (through effective articulation of voice); and
· there is sufficient internal incentive to respond.
7. It is clear that simply extending existing packages of project interventions across the chars will not lead to sustainable and positive changes in wellbeing for the poor unless these two conditions are met. The V-R framework links the voices of poor char-dwellers to responsive institutions through:
· understanding the power relations that determine capacity to have a voice, to exercise choice and to claim rights;
· developing the capacity of poor and vulnerable char-dwellers to voice and claim their rights;
· changing the nature of institutional relationships and partnerships so that institutions can both respond to demand and be held accountable for their response; and
· building the resources and skills to plan and deliver relevant services (especially health, education and social protection to reduce vulnerability) and infrastructure (especially flood protection, roads, water and sanitation).
8. A need to broaden analysis and action beyond issues of empowerment and social action was identified. Of equal importance is the way service providers currently respond to demand, their capacity to alter the nature of that response in future, and developing local government to achieve responsive and democratic interactions with its constituents. In rural Bangladesh many current interventions either provide support to mobilise poor people and develop their ability to voice their demands, or provide support to more responsive service delivery. Few programmes provide support to both elements, and rarely are they connected through the interface of local government.
9. Attention only to demand leads, at best, to a scattering of small gains, where responses are determined by lack of accountability, entrenched patron-clientism and limited resources. At worst, the situation of the poorest appears little changed, with a significant number remaining unable to claim their right to effective services and support.
10. The definitive question for the development process is whose voice, and whose demand? Voice is in itself an expression of power and brings its own risks, particularly when new voices are raised which challenge existing power and patronage structures. The uncritical assumption that creating opportunities for the poor and building their capability for voice will lead to poverty elimination is naïve. A careful understanding of the existing power relations is needed, along with the opportunity to start to change some of them.
11. So far decentralisation processes have been used to establish alliances with the local power structure and to maintain the status quo. They have not been used to devolve power or to build a polity based on openness and accountability. The assumption that a process of decentralisation (and strengthened local government) will lead to a new set of opportunities for the poor is contested by evidence from the chars and elsewhere. This has led to the design of a framework which explicitly recognises the weakness of decentralisation processes that do not tackle power relations.
12. There is a long-term potential to change the relations of power, by building poor people’s capabilities for social action through appropriate livelihood support and through social mobilisation that develops their capabilities to have a voice. But such long-term change is only possible with action to build responsive service delivery and governance structures which support openness and transparency.
13. Many of the individual activities encompassed by the voice-responsiveness framework are already familiar. What makes the CLP approach distinctive is its insistence that this mechanism will be used to determine the development activities which are required, allowing empowered communities and their local (and national) governments to plan, manage and account for these activities. The V-R mechanism, linked to the livelihood-enterprise mechanism (described in Paper 4) provides a fundamental tool for shifting the ‘deep structures’ and relationships which inhibit the development of more secure livelihoods for poor people in the chars.
GLOSSARY
Gherao spontaneous protest in which a large number of people besiege an institution to gain redress after a perceived injustice
Gusthi patrilineage
Mastaan hired thugs
Samaj residential brotherhood, also the Bengali term for society
Shalish traditional form of dispute adjudication
Union Parishad the lowest and only democratically-elected level of local government, consisting of 13 members
Upazila administrative unit below District
1 INTRODUCTION
“space is a social product…it is not simply ‘there’ a neutral container waiting to be filled, but is a dynamic, humanly constructed means of control and hence of domination, of power’ (Lefebvre 1991:24)
1.1.1 In this series of papers the principles, methods and mechanisms for addressing extreme poverty in Remote Rural Areas (RRAs) (Bird et al, 2003) are explored. Empirical evidence from the design of the Chars Livelihoods Programme (CLP) is used to argue the case. The CLP is a large-scale (£47 million over eight years) multi-sector programme of support for up to 6.5 million people living in the remote north-west riverine Chars region of Bangladesh. Its central plank is a conceptual and operational framework aimed at enabling poor people, including the extreme poor, to improve their livelihoods and develop security to become social actors and claim their rights. The programme seeks to involve public, private, NGO, and CSO sectors to deliver interventions which make a positive impact on the livelihoods of poor and isolated rural households. This approach emphasises strengthening the political capabilities and social solidarity of the poor as the driver for more responsive, accountable and demand-led service delivery.
1.1.2 This paper describes the principles and mechanisms underpinning the framework and draws on empirical experience from the CLP design. The mechanisms will become contextually specific through implementation, but they are based on a generic understanding of the principles involved in building security and agency for the extreme poor. As Wood and Davis (1998) put it:
‘Both the top-down technical fix aspects of the contemporary good government agenda and the bottom-up social mobilisation route (through the organised poor) to improving governance are necessary conditions for achieving good governance linked to poverty elimination, but neither alone are sufficient conditions. The resolution of the good governance problem has to be through a combination of both strategies; and in particular the social mobilisation route has to exist to enact (through the muscle of organised voice) and give the intended meaning to the former.’
1.1.3 Improvement in the livelihoods of the extreme poor needs to emerge through a process of building the voice of the poor as citizens, generating responsive service provision (public and private sector, including NGOs), providing livelihood opportunities which offer the chance to build secure relationships not entirely dependent on patrons, and creating opportunities for greater accountability and transparency. At the heart of these changes is the question of how to shift the patron-client system that pervades all aspects of the chars social and institutional structures, while ensuring that the patronage system – the poor’s survival network – is not destroyed prematurely.
2 THE PROBLEM CONTEXT
2.1.1 Issues of governance are widely recognised as central to many countries’ problems, inhibiting poverty reduction. This is particularly the case in Bangladesh (Siddiqui, 2000; Sobhan, 2001; CPD, 2002; Landell-Mills, 2002). The ways the formal institutional structures are supposed to operate are very different from the way in which they actually operate. The problems this causes are more acutely felt in remote rural areas, which tend to suffer more extreme forms of failure in governance than are experienced in more connected or urban areas (although urban areas, too, contain relatively ‘remote’ environments in terms of access to services or responsive government or other agency support). Data gathered from the various participatory and institutional assessments in several areas of Bangladesh (Westergaard, 2000; Bode, 2002; Chars Livelihood Design work; Devine n.d.) have drawn attention to the social and political barriers to poverty elimination, particularly for the chronically poor. These include: