Managerial roles for social development management
| Published date | 01 April 1985 |
| Author | Derick W. Brinkerhoff |
| Date | 01 April 1985 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230050205 |
PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND DEVELOPMENT, Vol.
5,
NO.
2,
145-156 (1985)
Managerial roles
for
social development management
DERICK
W.
BRINKERHOFF
University
of
Maryland. College Park, Maryland
RUDI KLAUSS
Academy for Educational Development, Washington D.
C.
SUMMARY
The configuration of roles needed for effective management
of
social development is
discussed and compared with that needed for conventional development project management.
It is argued that while the managerial skills associated with more conventional projects are
useful to social development managers, social development management places greater
emphasis
on
entrepreneurial behaviour and attention to both analysing and influencing the
environment external to the organization. Facilitating the creation
of
local-level capacity also
requires strong interpersonal skills. The extent to which social development management
skills can be trained for is discussed, with an illustration from Sri Lanka.
A
combined skills
training plus
job
rotation approach to preparing social development managers is suggested.
The need to modify organizational structures and incentive patterns in order to effectively
support new management skills is highlighted.
INTRODUCTION
There has been a growing shift in the development community away from thinking
about development in terms
of
optimal allocation
of
available physical and
monetary resources to achieve targeted economic growth rates towards seeing people
as development’s central focus. This people-centered conception does not ignore the
need, for example, to raise agricultural productivity, provide employment
opportunities in rural
or
urban areas,
or
build infrastructure. However, it takes as
its starting point local people’s knowledge, capacities, aspirations and desires, and
places development activities in the service
of
bettering people’s lives in ways that
best suit them. People become both the means and the ends
of
development.
Evidence increasingly suggests that interventions taking this perspective have
a
Derick Brinkerhoff is on the staff
of
the University
of
Maryland’s International Development
Management Centre. He is currently advisor to the Ministry
of
Planning in Port-au-Prince, Haiti through
a joint arrangement with the
U.S.
Agency
for
International Development (USAID) and the
U.S.
Department of Agriculture (USDA). Rudi Klauss is a field co-ordinator
of
a USAID-funded project
being implemented by the Academy for Educational Development (AED) in Zimbabwe. An earlier
version
of
this article was presented at the American Society for Public Administration Annual Meeting,
New York City, April 1983. The views expressed are solely those
of
the authors and should
not
be
attributed to USAID. USDA
or
AED.
027 1 -2075/85/020145- 12$0 1.20
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by John Wiley
&
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