|
Planning
and Poverty Alleviation in Nepal
- Dev Raj Dahal
The information
revolution has challenged the concepts and paradigms, which
traditionally shaped the culture of centralized planning.
There is growing recognition of the sovereignty of people,
making them both shaper and creator of their own history.
This changed environment is pregnant with new possibilities
for direct democracy. In more general terms, the information-induced
associational revolution is opening the political space
for participatory development and redefining the whole system
of relations between the society and the state. Indeed,
technological and social change is so momentous and accelerated
that it is also generating newer types of risks and challenges
in the society without solving the old ones. Along with
the existing gaps in wealth, income and access to public
services, new gaps have emerged. For example, inequality
in access to information technology creates a digital divide
posing further problems for the leaders in their quest to
make the society a shared enterprise in the new borderless
world of information. This relative loss of leadership capacity
involves a corresponding loss for its support resulting
in institutional decay.
Paradigm Shift
The paradigm shift, induced by the information revolution,
is most obvious in the culture of planning-- from paternalistic,
centralized and top-down to participatory, decentralized
and bottom up. This has made a new form of democratic legitimacy
possible in planning decisions and exercise. Collective
decisionmaking by the members of society was finally possible.
Therefore, how can people use the benefits of the information
revolution to construct their own economic, social and cultural
model of planning that is mediated by indigenous needs,
knowledge and interests?
Planning is meant
to seek solutions to problems in public life or to supply
a rational foundation for specific forms of development
goals. It tries to close the gap between the normative ideals
of development and the empirical condition people are caught
in. In the developing countries, there is still a widespread
optimism about the capability of planning to shape the future
of human beings. This makes planning a visionary exercise
which serves as a systematic guide for action. A good planning,
in this sense, can be a rational tool for sustainable human
development. Good public policies and strategies springing
from a planning exercise aim to shape the course of its
progress that is both just and efficient. One might, however,
ask: Should human beings be subjected to the science of
planning, fads and models in the name of development? Or,
do people have the political choice to plan a course of
action, to meet their desired specific needs, in a manner
that is comfortable with the general human nature?
Planning is about
the choice of public policies, but these choices are not
infinite. Although public policies are public goods, the
questions regarding choice are essentially political questions
decided by the political class. For example, Who does the
planning? How is it done? Who sets the development priorities?
Who are the target groups or beneficiaries- which class,
region, gender or groups of society? Who bears the costs?
etc. It is also about the process that creates winners and
losers. The nature of the state, the ideology of the political
class and the allocation of power and resources are important
political considerations that affect the culture of planning.
Formulating fair and effective public policy in the glowingly
networked society is an enormous challenge and one that
would not be overcome just because planners have begun to
recognize the inherent complexities. They will be heading
in the right direction if they keep the national public
interest at the forefront.
The trade-offs of
the methodology of planning is also a political question.
It is again the political decision that determines whether
planning should be top-down or bottom-up, short-term or
long-term, sectoral or holistic and centralized or decentralized.
Bureaucrats and technocrats are only the means in the process
as they are the ones that respond to the incentives and
opportunities given by political leaders in policy implementation.
Politics cannot be replaced by science, however artistically
utilized. But, science can become instrumental in advancing
human welfare. Modern planning and policy making is not
a mechanical process designed by professional experts. Planning
requires more than scientific knowledge, as that scientific
knowledge is insufficient to coordinate the relevant knowledge
and power needed to make it serve the people.
Planning is, therefore,
a part of politics designed by its stakeholders to achieve
a cooperative mode of problem solving and gaining national
strength. A good planning is intrinsically public, or democratic,
and has a positive outcome for the poor. A good planning
helps to manage market failures by making alternative arrangements
for the delivery of essential public services. It builds
the collective capacity of the poor to liberate them from
the shackles of poverty and shape political and social opportunities
for their empowerment. In other words, planning provides
the basis for people to enjoy their legal and constitutional
rights. Therefore, an important objective of anti-poverty
programs is to develop the political capacity of the poor.
A sound planning,
thus, is a participatory process because it builds the stakes
of the poor in development outcomes, entitles them with
the ownership of polices and programs and enforces the corresponding
accountability. Ownership of programmes is essential as
it prevents the risks of polarization and guarantees the
sustainability of development. And, planning also supports
the coalition of the pro-poor and the poor and gives them
access to, and benefits from, the processes of the political
economy-- production, distribution, control and sustainability.
Since poverty means powerlessness, the politics of a successful
planning for poverty alleviation involves the political
will of the holders of power and authority in society.
The use of governance
for subordinating the state to the market forces has made
Nepal largely a subsidiary state where the poor subsidize
the rich, the periphery the core and the rural the urban
areas. The logic of 'market-friendly' planning has not only
perpetuated the core-periphery polarization but also made
development restrictive and exclusionary, keeping the majority
of the poor out of the whole process. The failure of planning
in Nepal to meet its objective of poverty alleviation has
also to do with the non-implementation of the often-inadequate
pro-poor policies. It is not so much the lack of resources
as is made out to be.
Planning is, therefore,
a medium of social justice that can congregate people around
the state and establish their participatory rights in the
use of political power for planning. There is a strong correlation
between politics and resource allocation for development.
If we look at the Nepalese electoral politics, we find that
Sunsari district gets more funds than the whole of Karnali
zone for development. Size of the geographical territory
or interest representation in planning and decision-making
can have an inverse relation with the transfer of resources
from the centre, if politics is not supportive. Application
of the same argument on the Dalits, the marginalized and
local government units make Nepalese planning more pre-rational
than rational. Consequently, planning has not been conducive
to the expansion of production for employment-generation,
poverty alleviation and social integration. This leaves
advocates opposing the victimization of the weak pleading
for universal values like democracy, human rights and social
justice.
Poverty Alleviation
Poverty in Nepal largely depends on structural factors,
especially on the modes of ownership, production and distribution
of productive assets, which have their own dynamics. But,
the dynamics is determined by the choice of application
of development policy by the political class. For example,
the declining forces of production in the country-- in agricultural,
industrial and service sectors-- can be attributed to the
wrong policy choices of the political class whose allegiance
and priority often oscillates, between the general masses
during elections and a specific comprador class after elections,
causing instability at the level of policy, planning, and
politics regarding poverty alleviation. The political class
has not been able to capture the middle ground of the Nepalese
political economy that stands between capital and labor.
Unable to confront
the main intellectual challenge posed by the dominant development
paradigm of the day and incapable of indigenising development
policy, Nepalese planners from the very beginning of planning
history have yielded to the power of exogenous knowledge
for national construction, regardless of its effects and
relevance on national and local life. The planning process
thus became not only dismembered from the Constitutional
vision, the public philosophy embedded in it and the social
contract that obliges the government to "protect the weak
against the strong," but also from the feedback of stakeholders.
One can easily detect the effects of the "revenue-oriented",
rather than "production-oriented", economic policies on
the polity, society and the people. On the lives of the
poor struggling to climb upwards, their consequences have
been lethal.
This suggests that
wrong policies mirror the motives and mentality of the political
class in power and the wrong instruments they use to foster
patronage politics. Many programs run by non-poor politicians--
like the Constituency Development Fund, B. P. with the Poor,
Ganesh Man Peace Campaign, etc-- are geared more towards
expanding their political constituency than alleviating
poverty. The political culture of the Nepalese political
class, that emerges from the aristocratic and feudal segments
of society, is more status-bound than entrepreneurial. Therefore,
how can the politicians be committed to invest the economic
surplus in Nepalese production, job-creation and social
integration?
Similarly, Nepalese
planners never acted on the principle that knowledge and
beliefs are socially located and socially constructed. The
whole process is rooted in the Western social science theories,
application tools and intellectual assumptions, which have
their roots in the Industrial Revolution. The planners,
therefore, have failed to grasp the diverse realities created
by the predominantly agrarian society of Nepal with its
myriad of hierarchies. As Nepalese planners took Western
knowledge in historically and socially neutral terms and
imposed it on the Nepalese society they, consequently, devalued
the existing local, practical knowledge gained from long
experience of trial and error. Critics point at the domination
of the planning commission by "non-organic intellectuals,"
to borrow the phrase of Antonio Gramsci, when they blame
the whole planning exercise for not only being de-contextualized
but also counter-productive to local development. On the
contrary, planning for poverty alleviation requires a great
level of indigenization and a high level of deliberation
and consultation with the stakeholders, not the perpetuation
of the idea of self-superiority. The National Planning Commission
has been staffed with numerous people with no record of
achievement and no vision of the task that suddenly befall
them. The culture of planning in Nepal is thus being overwhelmed
by enemies from both within and without.
After the onset
of the information revolution, the centralized state-centric
planning of Nepal was seen to be suffering from its inability
to innovate, adjust and deliver. When market-driven planning
finally replaced it, it too suffered from its own consequences--
increasing levels of poverty, inequality, dependency, ecological
degradation and rebellion. The primacy of market forces
over all aspects of social life has not only questioned
the legitimacy of planning, but also registered the failure
of governance in expanding the miniscule market, coordinating
the multiple actors of society and capturing the necessary
synergy for development. The general failure of planning
and its particular defeat in the battle against poverty
have given the planning commission of Nepal a chance to
re-examine its objectives, to revise its means and to reconcile
its traditions with the experiences and exigencies of the
Spirit of the Age. It is an Age that requires the use of
planning in process management, connectedness, relationships
and contexts, not turning the country into a scene of confrontation
and the people into a commodity to act as fuel for the fires
of geopolitical manoeuvres.
Beyond the Planning
Commission
Planning has to take into account the polycentric and
multi-level governance actors-- the state, the market, the
civil society and the international regime. The polycentric
system does not mean democratic, where public power is proportionately
distributed among the governance actors with the necessary
checks and balances. New governance patterns have replaced
the old hierarchical national political system by the dynamic
restructuring of competitive and networking forms of governance.
An increasing number of non-states, non-governmental and
civil society organizations are taking up public responsibilities,
changing the earlier dichotomy where the state is regarded
as public and the private sector as non-public. The state
is, therefore, facing an adaptation problem-- from its earlier
mono-centric problem solving mechanism to the polycentric
order. There is a problem of coordination and communication
among local, national, state, regional and global orders
and orienting these vectors of governance to the poverty
project.
This shows that
planning and policy making are no longer the prerogative
of the National Planning Commission (NPC). The regularity
of the Nepal Development Forum and similar policy dialogues
indicate that NPC has to share its policy regime with the
state, the market, the civil society and the international
regimes, especially the donors. The planning and policymaking
processes have, therefore, become more complex and interactive.
But, the sharing of the policy regime has not established
a culture of mutual accountability, for success or failure
of policies, regarding poverty alleviation. It has posed
difficulty in orienting planning towards pro-poor governance.
An incentive for collective action by the poor themselves,
from bottom-up, and support by friends of the poor, from
top-down and outside-inside, needs to be in place. Such
a system needs planning that is capable of linking the Nepalese
production and distribution of wealth and power to the objectives
of equity and justice.
(Based
on concluding remarks as Chairperson in GEFONT/ILO Seminar
on PRSP)
Source:
GEFONT
|
