SOCG309 PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Timothy Chan Han Ye, BSocSc Class of 2017
The dirty secret of international development is that it often does not work. This course explores the many hurdles that governments in developing countries face in their quest for development. It also provides examples of alternative methods that some key stakeholders have adopted to overcome these challenges to development. Impediments to development are not one-dimensional; they often involve various facets of society including governments. This course fosters thinking beyond top-down approaches that many governments of developing countries take in trying to achieve development, to varying degrees of success or failure. Students taking this course would be engaged in a holistic and empirical approach to developmental problems.
Here are three interesting concepts that were featured in the course:
Empowered Participatory Governance (EPG)
Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre (Brazil) involved ordinary citizens who were engaged on issues of budgeting for public utilities such as road and sewage management. Unlike representative democracy, direct democracy in the form of EPG allows people from different strata of society to participate in the decision-making that affects their community. EPG involves the devolution of decision and implementation power to local action units that involve ordinary citizens and public officials. These stakeholders are empowered with decision-making and implementation powers, allowing them to create solutions that are appropriate and relevant to the problem that they are familiar with. More commonly, most states would have administrative bodies or bureaucracies that tackle these issues from a top-down approach. While there might be merit in this approach, every so often they produce solutions that are not appropriate in addressing the issue.
The Anti-Politics Machine
The anti-politics machine speaks of the depoliticization of development. Actors like the World Bank view development as a technical issue divorced from politics. However, the outcomes of these development projects can produce political outcomes. In the example of Lesotho, in which international development projects built basic infrastructure such as roads, administrative centers, and police stations, these outcomes served to extend command and control of the national government in an otherwise remote area. These are instrument effects: Unintended effects that result in what turns out to be an exercise of power.
“Democracy is possible only if there exists a fairly strong institutional separation … of the realm of politics from the overall system of inequality in society”
This is a quote from Capitalist Development and Democracy by Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens that echoes through all the readings that we did for this course. This is because this is something that I think many people overlook. If the realm of politics is entrenched in the system of inequality in society, it will only serve to perpetuate and recreate inequality, to solidify the dominant position of the elites in society, which would make it hard for democracy to exist. This is because less powerful groups in society will be disadvantaged in making their claims in the public domain, and democratic mechanisms such as elections can do little to change the advantageous position of the elites in society. This goes beyond the appearance of politics to the root of how politics work even in 'democracies' where the reality is less democratic than people imagine it to be.
Concluding Comments
In a nutshell, the impediments to development are multi faceted. This course reveals how it is myopic to look only at government institutions and politics as the solution to problems that developing countries face. Development highly interlinked with the circumstances that it is being implemented in. Therefore, it requires a holistic approach. Successful case studies of development cannot just be transplanted to a different context to serve the same purpose, as it would likely not achieve the same results.
This is a course that is a rigorous exercise of intellect. It broadens the experience of students with theories and case studies that can be considered cutting edge in political sociology. For students who have a passion for development or who aspire to work in NGOs, this would be a thoroughly educational experience in getting knowledge that is relevant and applicable. In my summer internship after this course, I saw attempts to replicate projects that existed in one country to serve the same purpose in another. This was done to varying degrees of failure as the context was somewhat different. While working on these projects, the ground-up approach allowed me to tackle obstacles that could not be eliminated by administrative fiat. I can testify that the challenges that were discussed in this course are very real, and that the theories that students will learn will be very applicable in tackling these challenges as they are theories that are practical and have real-world applications.