Daily Archives: January 7, 2016

Do host governments necessarily “do development” better than foreign donors?

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A common complaint you hear against donor-driven development projects is that they are typically at variance with local priorities; and make no attempts to work along the grain, or build upon existing systems. It turns out that governments in developing countries aren’t any different.

Take the example of the slum upgrading project in the infamous Kibera slum in Nairobi:

A keen look at the Open Street Map for Kibera and Mathare Valley before the NYS initiative started reveals the existence of services such as education, health, water and sanitation points. In Korogocho, Mukuru, Mathare and Kibera self help groups had emerged even before NYS Initiative start to earn daily income from activities such as urban farming, garbage collection and water delivery services. It is a fact that most toilets are not connected to the main sewer and private clinics are either not registered or managed by quacks, while illegal power connections abound.

The NYS Initiative would have scored big by establishing connections with already existing services providers in poor neighbourhoods by either improving their capacity to offer quality and affordable services to the urban poor or by trying to create an enabling environment for slum entrepreneurs to be part of formal and legal business entities. It is a mistake to assume that  there are no service providers within poor neighborhoods. Poverty and lack of basic services is an urban reality which has motivated the establishment of civil society groups to initiate health, education and income generating activities for women and youths as a supplement to government efforts in meeting its obligations. No government in the world can be able to solve the complex community problems of the poor by itself.

And there is an interesting twist to this story…

Experience from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and the Urban Poverty and Slum Upgrading Project funded by the World Bank might be instructive. The project has some similarities with the NYS project in terms of targeting poor neighborhoods but was able to achieve more success because it worked more closely with local communities and partnered with Dar es Salaam Municipal Council officials from conception to implementation and monitoring stages, a situation which is totally lacking with the National Youth Service projects. The NYS Initiative seems to be a duplication and competition with the mandate of mandate of Nairobi City County.

I do not know about the veracity of the claims about the Dar slum (and I think the NYS budget is fully domestic — after the initial Chinese boost) but right now it’s hard not to feel like Tanzanians are doing everything right; while Kenyans are perennially running around in circles. The Mara Derby is on.

Read the whole thing here.

What should we learn from knowing the UN Library’s most checked-out book?

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Mark Kersten over at Justice in Conflict writes:

The most checked-out book was entitled Immunity of Heads of State and State Officials for International Crimes.

Then adds:

This isn’t exactly great news for proponents of international justice and, in particular, the principle of universal jurisdiction.

Weirdly, the UN Library sort of bragged about the book on Twitter – despite the institution’s mission to, you know, fight global impunity. As Hayes Brown rightly chirped: “…Guys. Why would you brag about this [-] this is not good.” There is a silver lining, though. Clearly diplomats are taking international criminal justice seriously and evidently some (rightfully, we should add) see it as threatening. Like it or not, the possibility of heads of state being prosecuted for international crimes is indelibly part of the world of diplomacy.

The institutionalist in me agrees.

Do we want to live in a world in which world leaders do not care about the rules, and therefore do not bother to check how to circumvent them? Or a world in which leaders respect the rules enough to invest in getting their way but within the rules?

I am reminded of a point my adviser David Laitin once made in his class on political culture — that rules by themselves are never final, but are constantly re-litigated and renegotiated during implementation. In other words, that at some level rules exist to define the acceptable scope of (re)negotiation over implementation.

At first this point may seem obvious. But you will be surprised how often rule-makers imagine they can legislate their way out of problems without giving any consideration to the political economy of implementation.