Conference on Hunger and Poverty - Discussion
Paper 1.- (September 1995)
Empowerment of the Poor
Empowerment
...the replacement of a system of peoples' participation in public-initiated
development by one of public participation in people-initiated development...
Introduction
1. Poverty is a multi-faceted phenomenon, defined (and explained) as a situation in
which a person lacks the necessary capabilities and entitlements to satisfy his or her
basic needs and aspirations. From this point of view, the fight against poverty must
consist in establishing entitlements that will allow the poor access to the material,
social, and spiritual means to develop their capabilities.
2. Thus, it becomes necessary to focus on empowerment of the poor as the crucial
requirement for a sustainable solution to poverty and hunger. Empowerment is defined here
as the ability of people, in particular the least privileged, to: (a) have access to
productive resources that enable them to increase their earnings and obtain the goods and
services they need; and (b) participate in the development process and the decisions that
affect them. These two aspects are related; one without the other is not empowerment.
Access to resources
3. A key requirement for any escape from poverty and hunger is access to productive
resources. For the rural poor, land and financial resources are of foremost importance,
but technology, seeds and fertilizer, livestock and fisheries, irrigation, marketing
opportunities, and off-farm employment are also essential. The Discussion Paper will
present some of the major policy issues as they relate to the actual and potential role of
civil society and its relations with other actors. For brevity's sake, we will concentrate
on access to land and credit, while technology and extension services will be the topic of
another Discussion Paper.
Land
4. Enabling the rural poor to have access to land - whether through land redistribution
or resettlement, or through changes in the nature of the rights and duties that underlie
tenure - remains a crucial element in the quest to eliminate poverty and hunger. However,
for various reasons, the experience of agrarian reform during the last 30 years has been
less positive than had been hoped. Landholding is too deeply embedded in other social
processes - kinship, politics, religion, history, and often subtle forms of symbolism -
for land to be treated solely as a resource to be allocated. The vested interests of
politicians, bureaucrats, and local elites, have militated against implementation of
agrarian reform policies, even when written into law. Agrarian reforms have often had
unintended impacts, frequently including a worsening, rather than its improvement, in the
distribution of holdings.
5. Agrarian reform, then, seems to work only when a series of specific conditions are
met. It needs to be accompanied by access to technology, credit, and infrastructure
(markets, roads, health services, education, etc.). Successful land reform requires not
only committed public institutions, at the national and the local levels, but also strong
and committed organizations of the intended beneficiaries, that are capable of acting as
countervailing forces against powerful groups opposed to the reform process (indeed, these
organizations might have been the prime movers in putting pressure on governments to enact
land reform legislation in the first place).
6. However, this still leaves a number of important unanswered questions. First, how
to make agrarian reform work better? What can we learn from successful examples of
legislated land reform? What should be the role of civil society? Are there alternatives
to government-sponsored agrarian reform, e.g., cases of successful civil
society-originated improvement in access to land (or other productive assets)? What is the
record of "traditional" village institutions, for example, in this respect? What
about market-based agrarian reforms, currently advocated by the World Bank 1/?
Are there positive experiences we can learn from?
7. A second crucial question relates to the enhancement of women's access to land
- and for that matter to all productive resources. As a result of factors as varied as
population pressure, economic development, privatization, legal impediments, or separation
from their husbands, many women have been losing whatever access to land they had. Often
these women are heads of households: loss of land dooms them and their children to extreme
poverty. Given the patriarchal nature of most societies - and of most governments, aid
agencies, churches and NGOs - any change in this situation will in all likelihood come
about only as the result of organized pressure from women themselves. What are the
positive experiences we can learn from here? What should be the mix of community-based
solutions and legal reform?
8. Finally, the third important question concerns common property resources, so
important for the survival of the poor. How to stop common property resources from being
lost, due to "open access" practices or privatization? How to manage them
effectively, protecting their value, avoiding overuse, and providing equitable access to
their benefits? Clearly, the answers must involve the poor themselves, as well as the
local institutions with which they interact. What are the experiences with strengthening
community-based management and regulation of common property resources? Are
"traditional" civil society institutions better equipped for this task than
"modern" ones? Can the successful community-based management of forestry and
water resources documented in some cases be replicated elsewhere?
9. It is increasingly recognized that access to water - whether to drink, to
irrigate the land, to supply energy for industries, or to allow for fisheries - is in many
communities becoming as crucial and difficult to guarantee as access to land, in
particular when there is competition between use for livestock, crops and humans. The
management of water has been a crucial function of many states throughout history; in
other cases, important mechanisms of community management of water resources prevailed. As
a result of increased demand for water, as a result of population growth, expanded
agriculture, industrialization, and other factors, groundwater resources are being used
beyond their replenishable base. This strongly affects the poor, and in particular women,
civil society organizations and governments throughout the world have begun accumulating
experiences in providing sustainable and equitable access to water for local communities,
although research has sadly lagged behind on this matter. What emerges from these
experiences is essentially the same as in the case of land reform: the importance of
involving local communities and adapting solutions to the needs of the people affected;
the need to overcome sometimes powerful vested interests through organization of the poor
and the hungry; the importance of government policy, which in manifold ways affects the
outcomes in this field. Clearly, there is a need to become more aware of the necessity to
provide access to water for the poor and the hungry. Research and action are urgently
required.
Credit and Savings
10. With few exceptions, experience with rural credit to the poor has not been very
successful. Most commercial banks do not lend to the rural poor, but limit themselves to
the urban, formal sector. State-run development banks have typically been expensive,
loss-making, bureaucratic, and accessible only to the non-poor segments of rural society.
Foreign-aid funded credit schemes targeted at the poor have suffered from the same risks
of deviation to the not-so-poor, and have usually collapsed after the departure of the
foreign funds. State-run credit cooperatives have often left only bitter memories for the
poor, as clientalism, corruption and outright theft diverted the promised money. In short,
for the poor, access to credit has proven to be difficult, costly, and often ineffective.
11. From the positive experiences of IFAD and other organizations, it seems that rural
credit has a better chance of working if: (a) beneficiaries are involved in an organized
manner in its design and management; (b) the credit delivery system is physically and
culturally as close to them as possible; (c) collateral, credit disbursement, and
reimbursement mechanisms are flexible and adapted to the needs and capacities of the poor
(e.g., small loans, in cash or in kind, for productive or consumption purposes, with or
without physical collateral, and with possibilities for joint guarantees and non-monetary
reimbursement if necessary); (d) women have equal access to credit; (e) positive real
interest rates on deposits and loans are maintained; (f) savings functions are provided
together with credit; and (g) training is given to the leaders and members of the
community.
12. Civil society organizations have been particularly successful at setting up such
rural credit programmes. Sometimes this is their primary activity (the Grameen Bank in
Bangladesh; the Savings Development Movement in Zimbabwe), sometimes it is an added
service (BRAC and PROSHIKA in the same country, SEWA in India, and many African community
organizations). However, these programmes, even if successful, remain small - often, after
years of work, touching only 5-10% of the rural poor. To this day, the vast majority of
the very poor still lack access to (formal) credit that fulfills their needs.
13. Hence, the first question is how to expand these successful programmes, so
that they reach all the poor who need credit? This raises issues of expansion,
replication, or integration within government structures. The Grameen Bank has
systematically promoted flexible replication of its methodology throughout the world,
including the United States. A few governments, such as those of Nepal and Nigeria, have
followed along the path tested by NGOs and have developed national community-based credit
systems. The recently created Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP) chaired by
the World Bank, is devoted to promoting the same NGO-initiated model. How can NGOs
promote effective government-based expansion of their innovative credit schemes? What
would be the role of NGOs, and other civil society organizations, if governments and
international organizations take over? How to encourage the private banking sector to
enter the rural credit market?
14. A second important issue remains the one of the inclusion of savings in the
operations of credit systems. The promotion of rural savings has been largely neglected so
far; and where it has not, the savings have largely tended to flow to urban areas. Are
there experiences in which successful community-based savings programmes have been
created, and have managed to circulate money within the rural areas? Can insurance
functions, so important to protect the poor against calamities and to improve their food
security, be added to savings and credit systems? The most well-known successful rural
insurance systems are cereal banks, mainly in Africa and Asia.
15. Moreover, given the success of credit as a tool for the organization of the poor,
can these programmes be used as entry points for larger social change? Many credit
programmes involve the creation of lenders' organizations and, in so doing, increase the
self-confidence and capacity of mobilization of lenders. Can these organizations be used
to take on other activities? Interesting experiences may be noted where credit programmes
have opened doors to the abolition of dowry, supported the fight against landlords, and
promoted improvements in literacy or infant nutrition. All these have been initiated by
NGOs. Can, or should, they be scaled up? Or should credit schemes seek to specialize and
focus solely on savings and loans? Given that credit programmes work especially well with
women, should the empowerment of women be one of their explicit objectives?
16. Moving one step beyond, some have argued that credit is not as important to many of
the rural poor as is commonly held: the popularity of credit programmes is largely the
result of the attachment by the development aid community to externally-based financial
mechanisms. For those who hold this view, the issue of credit really distracts attention
from more important questions, related to the retention of surplus production by
households and communities, and to the general capacity of the poor to access market and
public institutions. Both these bring us to larger questions of empowerment, which will be
discussed in the next part of this paper.
17. No solution to hunger and rural poverty can be found without providing secure
and gainful employment to people, whether on farm, off-farm (handicraft, trade,
fisheries, etc.), or urban employment. Although this conference focusses largely on the
rural areas where the bulk of poverty and hunger persist (although urban poverty is
increasing), it is clear that there are many crucial linkages between urban and rural
areas, foremost through employment, trade and migration. In this respect, it is important
not to neglect the strategies of those forced into the informal sector. Informal
sector employment is a response to the constraints encountered by the poor, especially but
not exclusively in urban areas. The informal economy is situated at both sides of the
border of legality: the informal activities of squatters, cocoa producers, or unlicensed
street vendors, constitute strategies of survival in environments constrained by extreme
poverty and state regulation.
18. Finally, a lack of public infrastructure facilities, particularly of roads
and market outlets, may limit income-generating possibilities. As a result, even if
potentially profitable activities are promoted, or if credit facilities exist, people can
still be incapable of benefiting from them. The cost of providing such infrastructures is
usually vastly beyond the capacities of poor communities and local organizations,
necessitating state and donor involvement. As for maintenance, on the other hand, it seems
that communities are able and willing to take charge of some infrastructures if the latter
provide real benefits and if the people have been involved in decision-making from the
beginning.
Conclusion: Access to Productive Resources as a Process
19. Facilitating access to productive resources - ranging from land and water, to
infrastructure - for the poor is not a one-time event, but an institutional process,
requiring permanent adaptation to changing circumstances of power, economics, and culture.
Without the participation of the rural poor in the implementation of programmes, and
without the establishment of effective organizations of the rural poor that act as
countervailing forces to vested interests, it is unlikely that much progress will be made
in increasing the access of the poor to productive resources. Throughout the world,
organizations of civil society have initiated promising actions in this field - access to
land, management of common property resources, provision of credit and savings facilities,
access to markets, etc. They have clearly demonstrated that they have the potential to
play a crucial and innovative role in gaining access for the poor to productive resources.
Often, however, their actions have remained limited in impact, and unknown to people
elsewhere, struggling with the same problems. There is a need to learn from these
experiences, to see if they can be replicated and scaled up to reach the hundreds of
millions of poor and hungry people.
20. The role of the State remains crucial. Only national governments possess the
mandate and the resources to provide credit, market infrastructure, and other resources to
all the poor, throughout the country. Only governments can establish positive, secure, and
durable legal, administrative, and regulatory environments. Moreover, the financial,
fiscal, and price policies of governments are crucial to the success of any programme of
this kind: what good is credit, for example, if farmers cannot get renumerative prices for
their produce? The issue, then, is to ensure that the voices of the poor and the hungry
are heard by the State. This brings us to the next section, which deals with participation
and organization by the poor.
Participation and Organization
21. The level of community participation in development projects and programmes
(mounted by donors or governments) has increased greatly over the last decade: people, and
the organizations they form, are consulted during project design, involved in project
implementation, and asked their input in evaluation. Community participation is now
generally seen as providing several major benefits to project and programme managers,
especially in times of budget distress and structural adjustment. First, it can lead to
increased mobilization of financial and non-financial resources (labour, material,
information, etc.) by communities. Second, it can make for greater effectiveness in
planning and implementation of development initiatives, by adapting them to local
circumstances. Third, it can help to improve the maintenance of assets and infrastructure
through local resource contribution and management. Fourth, community participation can
contribute to local experience in providing local services, and hence stimulate the
development of other forms of local institutions. For example, successful local
participation in the provision of primary health care could be extended to other rural
development programmes. Fifth, it can enhance accountability and more equitable
distribution of benefits by making local administration accountable to a more
representative community.
22. The fourth and fifth points above go beyond the simple "beneficiary
participation in projects" to a bottom-up, self-help, approach, in which the poor and
the hungry, and their organizations, define and initiate their own development, where the
role of outside aid and governments is to promote, support, and strengthen their
initiatives. Consistent with this vision, David Korten defines development as "a
process by which the members of a society increase their personal and institutional
capacities to mobilize and manage resources to produce sustainable and justly distributed
improvements in their quality of life consistent with their own aspirations 2/."
This view also holds that poor people know more than the experts think, and are capable of
doing more, if given the chance. Hence empowerment is also defined as "a process of
conceding to disadvantaged communities the right to question and communicate alternative
options 3/." What is needed is to give the poor opportunities
to develop their own solutions, with outsiders in a support role. This vision amounts to
the replacement of a system of peoples' participation in public-initiated development with
one of public participation in people-initiated development - quite a reversal of the
normal development professionalism 4/, as well as of power
structures.
23. But participation in projects, or the creation of opportunities for self-help, will
remain limited and unsustainable unless there are possibilities and mechanisms for
participation in decision making and resource allocation, especially at the local level.
This is now generally recognized. The World Bank's Learning Group on Participatory
Development defines its object as "a process through which stakeholders influence and
share control over development initiatives, decisions and resources which affect
them." And the World Summit for Social Development stated that "empowering
people, particularly women, to strengthen their own capacities is a main objective of
development and its principal resource. Empowerment requires the full participation of
people in the formulation, implementation and evaluation of decisions determining the
functioning and the well-being of our societies 5/."
24. Hence, there cannot be empowerment of a group if it does not have the possibility
to participate in public life and decision-making processes. And its participation will be
permanently limited and threatened if the group does not gain certain entitlements and
generate certain rights. Participation includes both action and decision making. This
requires changes at all levels of society. National governments must create enabling
environments; local governments must provide opportunities for meaningful participation in
decision making; and civil society organizations must scale up.
Local Governance
25. Local government is a crucial institution. It is at the local level that people can
best define their priority problems and organize to deal with them. Moreover, the poor and
the hungry interact almost exclusively with the local government, from which they seek
services and support. Local governments are capable of providing public services,
mobilizing community resources, stimulating private investment, expanding rural-urban
linkages, adapting national development policies to local conditions, and investing in
local infrastructure. They can also be a crucial source of empowerment, by offering
opportunities for long-neglected citizens to participate in the local decision making
process, acting as a voice for local needs at higher levels, and providing adapted support
for local people's initiatives.
26. In the past, most developing country administrations were highly centralized:
orders emanated from on high and were relayed down to the field through layers of
national, regional, district, and local officials. Local administrations were simply the
lowest levels in these systems, and they were under strong central control. This top-down
way of doing things has failed in most countries. It has been expensive and inefficient,
contributing to the financial crises faced by so many developing countries. It has also
been heavy-handed and inflexible, allowing for very little input or supervision by the
local people themselves.
27. The failure of this centralized approach has led to renewed calls for devolution of
powers with more responsibility placed on local governments (as well as local communities)
to achieve a more effective and sustainable provision of services. This reorientation took
on greater importance as structural adjustment reforms cut down the size of the central
State, in both its financial and human resources, and in the extent of its power.
Increasingly, such initiatives are associated with those advocating improved local
governance and increased popular participation in the management of local affairs.
28. However, none of the positive attributes of local government listed above come
about automatically. Local governments in many instances are agencies controlled by local
economic, political, or social elites. Land reform legislation, for example, has often
been halted at the level of local government implementation, under the influence of
landlords and elite interests. Without effective supervision, local governments can easily
fall under the control of coalitions between bureaucrats and local elites designed to
serve minority interests and foster corruption. Moreover, most local governments severely
lack financial and material resources, as well as competent personnel that is respectful
of the needs of the poor and capable of satisfying them. Whether local governments fulfill
their potential will depend on the type of pressures and encouragements they receive from
above (central governments) and from below (civil society).
The Central State and Enabling Environments
29. The promotion of empowerment necessarily passes through the State. The State can
create an enabling environment that will allow the energies and creativity of civil
society to be harnessed to eradicate poverty and hunger. There are at least five types of
actions that the central government can take to contribute to this end:
i) the State can provide a general political, legal, and administrative framework
supportive of civil society initiatives;
ii) the State can strengthen local governments that are accountable to the people. It
can do so through decentralization and devolution of powers, and by issuing clear
guidelines for local government reform, such as introducing measures to achieve
cost-effectiveness, improve service provision standards, and increase transparency. The
State can set standards of performance and accountability for local governments;
iii) the State can help improve the implementation of local revenue reforms by
balancing reliability, efficiency and equity concerns and political and bureaucratic
feasibility. The State can facilitate revenue generation to support programmes and
infrastructures that benefit the poor and the hungry. The State can create mechanisms for
regional equalization, ensuring that poor regions benefit from a minimum of resources. The
State can devise tax laws that promote voluntary organizations;
iv) the State can collaborate with communities to provide services such as agricultural
extension, environment and natural resource management, human capital formation and
capacity building, etc., in particular where the private sector is weak; and
v) the State can facilitate local institutional development by providing economic and
social services such as investment in infrastructure and research to promote long-term
growth prospects in agriculture.
30. Of course, the State has other functions beyond creating an enabling environment:
the promotion of broad-based economic growth, the assurance of justice and public safety,
and the provision of basic social services. Recognizing these functions is not
incompatible with an awareness of the importance of civil society. Seeking to create
conditions for effective empowerment of the poor does not mean neglecting the State -
quite the contrary. It is at the State level that some of the most important conditions of
empowerment and development are determined. Hence the need for complementarity, a point
that will be examined later.
The Scaling Up of Civil Society Organizations
31. A key condition for empowerment is the establishment and strengthening of civil
society organizations acting for and representing the interests of the poor and the
hungry. There is abundant evidence that participatory efforts are ineffective when they
are pursued outside and beyond an organizational framework: participation has a collective
dimension. By pooling their energies and resources, the poor can increase their economic,
technical and political capabilities. They will grow increasingly self-confident, and
realize their abilities to innovate, invest in joint infrastructures, promote local
change, and participate in the decisions that affect them. No meaningful local governance
can be envisaged without organization by the poor.
32. Currently, hundreds of thousands of civil society organizations can be found in
Africa, Asia, and Latin America: peasant associations, neighborhood committees, people's
movements, alternative trade organizations, community initiatives, urban action
committees, intermediary or support NGOs, producer cooperatives, women's associations, and
consumers' organizations, filling the ranks of an "associative" or
"third" sector (as distinct from the "first," or public, and the
"second," or private enterprise sector). These organizations are increasingly
active in all sectors of life, whether income generation, enhancing the access of the poor
to productive assets, or the promotion of food security. They have different structures,
mandates, procedures, members, and visions: the organizations of civil society are
characterized by their diversity.
33. These organizations have great potential, and are already among the major promoters
of social change in many of the developing countries. However, they also have limitations.
They are intimately linked to traditional mutual help mechanisms and embedded in
collective social institutions of allegiance, alliance, religion, power, politics,
clientelism, money, and exclusion. In other terms, they are not necessarily or always
consensual, inclusive, just, egalitarian, or 'progressive' (as usually defined in the
development community). The challenge of securing rights for the least-privileged is by no
means solved by all civil society organizations. They often profit elites more than
others, or exclude minorities or women from their benefits, or are subject to debilitating
internal dissent between different power groups, or between 'free-riders' and those who
abide by the rules.
34. Moreover, civil society organizations often lack competent administrators and
technicians, or financial and material resources. In the case of intermediary NGOs, with
often unclear structures of accountability, their anchorage in local society and their
legitimacy can vary greatly, and potential for abuse exists. Many NGOs are highly
dependent on foreign aid, which often reinforces their already weak systems of
accountability to those for whose benefit they ostensibly exist. Finally, civil society
organizations are usually small, localized, and uncoordinated. They cannot control the
large-scale variables of development, at the level of national policies or of the
international economy.
35. Hence, one of the main challenges now facing these organizations, as well as other
actors sympathetic to them, is the one of scaling up, i.e., increasing their impact in a
sustainable and efficient manner. Doing so entails a variety of related but not identical
processes. Concretely, we can look at scaling up in terms of structures, programmes,
strategies or resource base 6/.
36. The first type is to be seen where a programme or an organization expands through
increasing its membership base (in the case of grassroots organizations) or its
constituency (for grassroots support organizations) and, linked to this, its geographic
working area or budget. This is the most evident kind of scaling up, equaling 'growth' or
'expansion' in their basic meanings. It can be called quantitative scaling up. It
happens when civil society organizations draw increasing numbers of people into their
realm.
37. A second type process finds a programme or organization expanding the number and
the type of its activities. Starting in agricultural production, for example, it moves
into health, nutrition, credit, training, literacy, etc. This can be labelled functional
scaling up. It takes place when civil society organizations add new activities to
their operational range.
38. The third type refers to the extent to which organizations move beyond service
delivery towards empowerment and seek to change the structural causes of underdevelopment
- its social, political and economic environment. This will usually involve active
political involvement and the development of relations with the State and the
international system. This process is often referred to as political scaling up.
39. Finally, programmes or organizations can increase their organizational strength to
improve their effectiveness and efficiency. This can be done financially, by diversifying
their sources of support, by increasing their degree of self-financing through
income-generating activities, or by securing the enactment of public legislation
earmarking entitlements within the annual budgets for the programme. It can also be done
institutionally, by creating collaborative links with other development actors, such as
governments and the private sector, by improving the capacity of the staff, or by adopting
flexible programming systems. This can be called organizational scaling up.
40. Some important questions need to be answered about scaling up. They concern,
most importantly, participation. How can civil society organizations move beyond
their original local constituency and have a larger impact while continuing to foster
participation? Will enlargement lead to "diseconomies of scale", top-heaviness,
and distancing from the grassroots? The second question raises the issue of external
funding and self-reliance. Can donor support be provided in such a way as not to
forfeit autonomy but rather to strengthen domestic institutional capacity? A further
question relates to what exactly should be scaled up - the benefits provided to the
poor? the civil society organizations working with the poor? the organizational
capabilities of the poor themselves? Some or all of these questions are likely to arise in
the process of scaling up, and answers to them will need to be found if effective progress
is to be made.
Towards Complementarity
41. We need to move towards a larger role for civil society in development, all the
while recognizing the contributions of central and local government and the private
sector. The combination of private, community, and public institutions of various types is
more likely to lead to development that serves the needs of the rural poor than an
exclusive focus on one type of institution. Concretely, there are three ways in which a
focus on civil society goes hand in hand with attention to the two other sectors of
society, in particular the State.
42. First, for civil society to function properly, it is essential that central
governments fulfill their irreplaceable role in the provision of basic social services
and, especially, the creation of an enabling environment. Civil society empowerment
cannot come about in the absence of conducive State policies. Indeed, better public
policies are needed to foster local initiative and unleash the energy of communities.
43. Second, as explained before, empowerment of the poor and the hungry requires
mechanisms for their participation in public decision-making and resource
allocation, especially at the local level. In other words, organizations representing the
poor should have the capacity and opportunity to influence the public policies that affect
them. This can be done through formal mechanisms of consultation and participation;
informal approaches, such as lobbying, advocacy, and networking, can also contribute to
this process.
44. Third, given the nature and scope of the problems facing the world today, it is
essential that partnerships are developed between civil society and the public
sector (and the private enterprise sector). Worldwide, experience provides evidence of
successful partnerships between governments and civil society organizations, and
convincingly shows that such partnerships have the potential to tackle complex,
large-scale problems in new ways, marshalling substantial resources in the form of
creative energy, community support, and a multiplicity of problem-solving perspectives 7/. Successful partnerships of this kind will strengthen governments'
willingness and capacity to foster enabling environments.
45. However, such a vision of the potential and actual role of civil society, and its
links with the contributions of other actors, is rarely met with in practice. The main
actors involved in the development process - civil society organizations, the State, and
the donor community - are generally not predisposed to pursue this partnership approach.
46. Many civil society organizations are distrustful of their governments, or have
conflictual relations with them. In many cases, from the point of view of the hungry and
the poor, the history of grassroots interaction with governments (and, often,
international agencies) is filled with broken promises, indifference, corruption, and
clientelism. Small wonder that new grassroots organizations are reluctant to deal with
governments, often defining themselves precisely through their capacity to "go it
alone." The first issue, then, is create on the one hand an environment that will
render future interactions between civil society organizations and governments different
from their past ones, and, on the other, governance structures that render governments
more accountable to the needs of the poor.
47. Government predisposition, policies, and practices are frequently at odds, or at
least vis-ŕ-vis popular participation. Fear of political abuse and civil strife, lack of
information about NGO programmes and functioning, past experiences of political conflict
with civil society organizations, or suspicion with regard to the consequences of social
engineering from outside, are often the source of government wariness. A persuasive
dialogue based on demonstrating and publicizing the net benefits of participatory policies
is required. IFAD experience has shown that in many instances central governments have
welcomed and embraced the suggestions of the Fund for ameliorating the conditions of
vulnerable groups through existing or newly established grassroots organizations.
48. On the donor side, there are now certain programmes which have been developed and
dedicated to the construction of the civil society and to the promotion of empowerment
processes - but not comparable to the massive intellectual and material resources devoted
to the public and the private enterprise sector (e.g., structural adjustment,
International Finance Corporation). Sectoral adjustment loans, for example, typically
accord only minor roles or none at all to farmers' organizations. What is required is more
forceful action, with ample resources and a long-term perspective and commitment, whereby
the strengthening of civil society is treated as a complement to and on an equal footing
with strengthening the public sector and promoting the private enterprise sector.
Conclusion
49. Improved access to productive resources by the poor is a crucial element of their
empowerment. It is not an event, but a process, subject to constant change and
constraints. To be successful, it requires: (a) extensive beneficiary participation in
design and management, preferably done by institutions close to the population (such as
local government); and (b) strong civil society organizations that act as socio-political
forces promoting and monitoring effective policies.
50. As much as access to productive resources, the poor need increased access to
decision making. This goes beyond the usual participation in projects, whether through
consultation, provision of labour or money, or NGO implementation. Empowerment implies the
ability of the population, in particular the least privileged segment of society, to
participate in the decisions that affect its livelihood. Empowerment requires structures
that provide for participation by the poor and the hungry in decision making and resource
allocation, especially at the local level.
51. All this will necessitate important changes by the State. The latter needs to
create an enabling environment, conducive to the creation and scaling up of civil society
organizations. It also needs to create structures of participatory local governance, where
the poor and the hungry are involved in the decisions that affect them. On the side of
civil society organizations, this will require a willingness to scale up, to develop
structures and procedures that allow for effective interaction with the State as well as
for improved accountability to the poor and hungry that they represent. This will require
democratic and professional management, processes of internal learning, an openness to
constructive dialogue, and a willingness to work with the State. Only then will true
partnerships between the public and the associative sector be possible, leveraging and
multiplying the resources available to eradicate hunger and poverty.
1/ van Zijl, Kirsten and Binswanger, Policies, Markets
Discussion Paper 1: Empowerment of the poor
Discussion Paper 2: Enhancing technology generation and diffusion
Discussion Paper 3: Combating environmental degradation
Discussion Paper 4: Preventing disaster and reducing its impact on
the poor
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