Administering rural development: Have goals outreached organizational capacity?

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230060307
Published date01 July 1986
Date01 July 1986
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, Vol.
6,287-308 1986
Administering rural development: have goals outreached
organizational capacity?
JAMES
S.
WUNSCH
Creighton
University
SUMMARY
In
a
comparative analysis
of
15
rural development projects the author finds five problem
areas in their administration: project economics; design and location of infrastructure; design
of
project technical outputs (‘software’); support services; and maintenance and management
of infrastructure. All but one of the projects reviewed were severely hampered by one
or
more
of
these problems. The author suggests that these problem areas are caused by three general
patterns: disjunction between project designers and managers’ working models of reality and
reality
in
the field; goal conflict among diverse agencies involved; and the simple technical
complexity of the rural development task. The author concludes by noting these three
patterns are found throughout developed countries as well as the less developed, but may have
more severe consequences in the less developed because of the absence,of organizational and
social redundancy to catch, correct and circumvent these perhaps unavoidable features
of
centrally administered, complex projects. Fewer, but more organizationally enriched,
projects may do more for rural development than the current pattern where many donors
each design many projects, overwhelming at times the organizational capacity of less
developed countries.
INTRODUCTION
In the Philippines an irrigation project charges fees farmers cannot pay for its water.
In Indonesia concrete and steel irrigation gates are unused while farmers dig cut-
aways to reach channels. In Sudan
400
million dollars are spent to irrigate land for
export cotton while corporation-fixed prices paid
to
tenants are insufficient for them
to
pay corporation-set
cotton
production costs.
In
Senegal rural health posts
systematically decapitalize themselves because medicines are incorrectly priced. In
Ghana
a
programme in agricultural management training requested by the Ministry
of Agriculture withers because the Ministry’s field personnel refuse to implement its
programme, demoralizing its alumni. Are these problems random and idiosyncratic
to these projects,
or
are
there underlying patterns which explain them?
If
so,
why
do
those patterns exist? Can anything be done about them,
or
have rural development
goals come to exceed organizational capacity?
Professor
Wunsch
is
Associate Professor
of
Political Science at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska
68178,
USA.
0271-2075/86/030287-22$11.00
0
1986
by John Wiley
&
Sons,
Ltd.
288
J.
S.
Wunsch
RURAL DEVELOPMENT
During the
1970s
most of the donor nations and international development
institutions substantially shifted their development focus from urban-industrial
strategies to a focus on rural dwellers, agriculture, and equitable growth. In the
United States the ‘New Directions’ mandate from Congress; in the World Bank,
Robert McNamara’s leadership; in the European Economic Community, North-
South negotiations culminating in the Rome Conventions, all had these effects.
Willy Brandt’s work leading the ‘North-South’ Commission and the writings of
such exponents as Edgar Owens and Robert Shaw helped reformulate public opinion
on these issues (Chilcote,
1984).
Today the donor nations and institutions focus on expanding agricultural
production and basic rural services, and increasing rural incomes as the basic
strategy for ‘third’ and ‘fourth’ world economic growth. Reasoning that the rural
areas are the repositories of the bulk of less developed countries’ natural and human
resources, the rural development strategy emphasizes the need to expand food
production and rural incomes to avoid costly food imports, to build basic
production to support light industrialization, and to build rural markets, broaden
employment opportunities, reduce overkbanization and urban unemployment,
and strengthen integrated economies instead of ‘dual’ or ‘enclave’ economic ‘growth
without development’ (Owens and Shaw,
1972).
RURAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS
This paper will focus on the organizational feasibility
of
the rural development
strategy. Simply put, can it be done? Where are there problems and what can be
done to resolve them? The paper is based on secondary analysis of
15
internationally
funded development projects. USAID was involved in all
15,
though at varying
levels. In some it was a relatively minor funder (less than
5
per cent) while in others
its involvement exceeded
50
per cent
of
project cost. All but one project were
implemented during the
1970s.
The exception, the Comilla Project, was included
because it was essentially
a
rural development project in its goals and strategies,
because the very minor USAID involvement in it makes it a good control case, and
because the long time period since its completion allows more perspective in its
evaluation.
Information was, in
11
of the cases, gathered from a series of ‘Project Impact’
evaluations performed by USAID between
1979
and
1982.
These evaluations were
unusual for the AID system because their explicit purpose was to gather reflective
insights on what were usually completed projects, rather than to evaluate projects
in
progress and fulfil more diverse intra- and inter-bureaucratic purposes. These
evaluations were instead part of
a
special,
post
hoc
general evaluation programme
initiated by the Agency Administrator, and employing unusually strong AID-
academic-foreign national (host country) personnel. The resulting evaluations were
unusually comprehensive, critical, and implicitly comparative in approach and
analysis.
The other four projects are analysed through other sources. One, Comilla, has
been subject to substantial study, and three were routine AID evaluations which
were unusually useful in content and analysis.

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT