June 23, 2008	Monday	Jamadi-us-Sani 18, 1429

THE Local Government Ordinance, 2001, has introduced the concept of Public Community Partnership (PCP) for development at the grassroots but it has not yielded significant results over the last six years. Why an excellent approach to governance has failed to deliver ?

This article attempts to identify the gaps in implementation and suggests steps to improve things.

According to annual report 2006 of Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE), a consortium of various international donor agencies, 6127 union councils and 30,143 CCBs were operational and its beneficiaries were estimated at 5.25 million people. Each CCB benefits an average of mere 175 citizens. Nor there is a reason to rejoice on the success of the CCB plan which serves a micro niche i.e, 5.25 million of 165 million people.

DTCE and other funding agencies in their reports have put some success stories like ‘Streets of Gold’, ‘Thar Is Thirsty No More’, Against All Odds’, Mussarat Need Not Sell Vegetables Any More’, The Green Revolution of Khan Gul’ etc. But these are the sporadic activities and results dramatised under attractive titles in typical NGOs’ styles. These success claims are not subscribed by the other sources. In a survey conducted by Britain Department for Development in 2005, it was found that a quarter of union nazims and councillors did not know what CCBs were?

Another research undertaken in the four districts (Multan, Sukkur, Turbat and Malakand) by IPF in collaboration of HRCP in 2007 revealed complete dissatisfaction of the people over the CCB’s performances.

According to a study, people in Multan district lamented: “In principle, CCBs were meant to enhance the communities’ ability and competency to rationally identify issues, articulate vision and challenges, and plan their human, institutional and financial resources to improve social service delivery and to enhance their own empowerment in the process. In reality, these have proved lofty goals”---- “Besides lacking the capacity to devise development schemes, citizens have not found the environment of the local government officials conducive to their involvement in the development process.”

In Sukkur, the general impression was that Tehsil and district nazims had not allowed setting up of Citizen Community Boards. Researchers found that most poor people in Turbat were not aware about how CCBs could be formed or how to achieve empowerment through them. Some CCBs were formed by the front men of a politician for enhancing their power and incomes. The views of the people of Malakand were not different.

Though the devolution plan is an excellent package for empowering the community at the local level and developing partnership with the community for development projects, there are gaps in its implementation. The obvious gaps can be summed up under the three broad headings as: (a), lack of broad-based consultations with stakeholders; (b), inadequate propagation of the system and, (c), lack of awareness and capacity of councilors, nazims and community members.

a. Consultations: The most important task which the then government was supposed to undertake before launching the new local government system was to have a broad-based consultations at all levels of governance with stakeholders, which was not done. Thus there is lack of political will on the part of public administrator, politician and communities themselves to undertake community developments.

b. Propagation: For such a revolutionary programme of public participation, aggressive propagation of the ideas and systems should have been be undertaken on regular basis before and after its implementation. The research showed that in the four districts even the councillors, and nazims did not know about CCBs, what to talk about the communities’. As a university teacher, I could hardly find anyone who had even the general information of CCB’s concept and practices.

c. Awareness: To form a CCB, there is a need of paperwork. Even where significant numbers of CCBs have been formed, writing a project proposal and generating 20 per cent of the total project cost is not an easy task for community members. There is a need to launch aggressive training programmes for nazims, councillors and CCB members. Though, some funding agencies, public sector training institutions and local NGOs started training and awareness programme, but those were very late interventions and on a very small scale in comparison to the need.

How to make the system more beneficial?. There is a communication gap between the creator of the system and its stakeholders. There is a need to inform stakeholders that CCBs can share the burdens of politicians, extend support to public administrators in designing their own destiny. Once the message is through and the concept is clear, the CCB stakeholders could start owning the system. It is equally important to arrange capacity-building programmes in collaboration with the three tiers of the local governments.

Conclusion: For the last 60 years, various development philosophies have been tried with a varying degree of success and failure of which there are numerous examples. For the sake of the learning for a social developer, it is important to analyse and find the secrets of success and failure of development projects.

Now it is no secret after the failure of SAP and other government-owned projects, that the development at the grassroots can not be effective without the community’s active participation in those projects.

On the basis of past experiences, Pakistan opted for the decentralisation of power with a provision of community participation in the local development through CCBs. According to the provision of CCBs in LGO-2001,the community at the local level is encouraged to become partners of the government at the grassroots’ development. A CCB can identify, plan, develop and implement the development projects for which it will get matching grants up to 80 per cent from the local government as a PCP project.

CCBs is an excellent support institution for local government, but in last six to seven years, it did not function well. At least, the independent researchers do not verify the claim of the previous government and other funding agencies for devolution plan. The reasons behind the ineffectiveness of CCBs are numerous but still there is a time to make up for the gaps which were left over by the creator of this system before it is too late, as there is no substitute of community empowerment for local development.

At the same time, the working together of community and the government is a delicate task. It is important to understand the different cultures prevailing at both ends. Therefore, choosing the right projects is essential to initiate a successful partnership, extending commitment for the new working environment is a prerequisite and last but not the least, patience is a cross cutting quality in PCP, as after all processes take time to materialise.