DIIS Comment

Local government serves local communities best in Nepal’s shattered landscape

Yet it is ignored and bypassed by political leaders, aid agencies and Kathmandu-centric journalists

'Of all the ills that kill the poor, none is as lethal as bad government'.

The quote is from an article in The Economist 12/08/99 discussing the poor’s lack of access to clean drinking water, health services and similar in the developing world. Unfortunately it remains just as relevant today as 15 years ago and not least in Nepal in the light of the recent earthquake. Governance in a poor country faces many barriers such as paucity of resources, lack of technical capacity, poor information systems and not least inequalities rooted in the country’s social structures and practices. If compounded by the actions of donor agencies and the writings of a Kathmandu-centric media, the prognosis is not good.

Nepal is currently ranked 145thout of 187 in UNDP’s 2014 Human Development Index ranking. While an improvement on the 157thposition in 2013, it remains a fact that poverty in peoples’ livelihoods in Nepal continues to be shaped by factors of caste, ethnicity, gender, and remoteness. These compound the economic marginalisation and political exclusion so clearly present. Collectively they reproduce poverty for the many and wealth for the few. Development, inequality and the nature of governance are intrinsically linked. The Peoples’ Movements (Jana Andolan) of 1990 and 2006 were clear demands for changes to the form of government, as to how it should relate to its many constituents and the ways in which governance should be practiced. A popular desire for more inclusive and better managed development was a driving factor for both movements. The civil war from 1996 to 2006 is viewed by many observers as having similar roots.

In the context of the new disaster that has befallen the country, it is therefore important to note that while Nepal’s central government has struggled to re-establish itself in the post conflict years, the country does have limited, but functioning local government. Local elections may not have been held since 1997; elected councils have not been present since 2002; yet a system of local government administration with more than 40,000 ward citizen forums (WCF) at the base, not only exists, but has begun to deliver more inclusive development at the local level. Local planning now begins in the WCF and upwards through Village and District Development Committees; accountability is slowly being strengthened through annual independent performance assessments of every local government body with additional monitoring from local civil society; it is quite a remarkable progress in the context of the past two decades. Yet the view from Kathmandu is not positive towards local government, whether it is political leaders, central bureaucrats, international agencies or journalists; for the most part they ignore, bypass and/or criticize local government. Yet local government is critical to the immediate relief and the longer term reconstruction after the earthquake.

Slow progress since the 2006 peace agreement
To date the country’s political leaders have largely failed to meet the expectations of the Nepali peoples. Had the earthquake occurred on any other day of the week and at almost any other time of the day, the price of this failure would have been far higher. Children would have been crushed in collapsed schools, families caught in their falling homes in the evening or night. The scale of what is a bad disaster would have been far greater and the human cost far more terrible. The question now is: can government become better in its response to the earthquake, in delivering relief, providing humanitarian aid and then longer term sustainable and inclusive development including disaster resistant reconstruction?

When poverty presses a household to think in the short term it is the duty of government to plan for the longer term. It should regulate the quality of the construction, the location of the structure and the standard of services supplied, all according to national priorities that serve the welfare of the country as well as that of the individual. It should develop policies for more inclusive and sustainable development, mobilise resources, and implement the necessary programmes. However, when political leaders are most concerned with who gets their hands on the reins of power and the bureaucracy more concerned with preserving its own privileged positions in the government’s ministries and departments, development planning for the mid- to long-term suffers. Implementation of policy becomes secondary to the having a position in the upper echelons of the hierarchy responsible for policy. A further unfortunate outcome is that where the need to bring government closer to the people in order to strengthen the quality of governance has never been more apparent, the desire of those in central government in the capital is to centralize control and power. This is ‘Kathmandu-centrism’ at its most damaging.

The earthquake has served to focus and expose these processes and the tendencies at the moment include: (i) National political leaders wanting to control the flow and allocation of aid; (ii) bureaucrats wanting to administer aid and relief centrally; (iii) civil society being seen by these players as ‘outside’ of government and therefore to be controlled rather than encouraged; (iv) local government bodies and international observors to be at risk of ‘elite capture’, lacking technical capacity and management skills and therefore are to be mainly bypassed by central agencies, and (v) the national government must be seen to assert its sovereignty in the face of a flow of international solidarity.

Central government lacks capacity, donors lack coordination, but local government is present
The reality in Nepal is that neither the central politicians nor the bureaucrats have the information that could enable a clear oversight as to what is needed, where and by whom. Neither do they have the means to deliver in terms of a functioning infrastructure or air transport capacity that is capable of remotely meeting the scale of the need. In a similar vein, development agencies that seek to channel relief and aid solely through their own local delivery systems need to realize that they can undermine local government bodies by working in parallel. While such an approach might be effective in the short term, it is not sustainable in the longer term.

However, local government, in so far as it exists in the absence of local elections, still possesses a local capacity that national organisations cannot match. At district, municipality, village and ward levels there exist the elements for securing a degree of coordination and an existing planning system that has the potential to work across different fields and sectors in ways that single issue agencies cannot. In crisis, when central government is suddenly very distant, the importance of local government needs to be realized.

Central government and the political leaders and bureaucrats in Kathmandu do have a critical role to play, but it is to facilitate, mobilize, coordinate, and monitor the disaster response. Local government, in so far as it exists in the form of administrative and technical staff, needs to inform on the situation and consequent needs, to coordinate the relief arriving in order to reach all in their locality, and to monitor and report on progress. Here, the sourcing of relief is secondary; it is the inclusiveness of its delivery that is crucial. Central government guides relief onward from its point of arrival according to the requests received and the priorities identified. At the same time, it communicates with the international agencies on future needs identified through the national coordination and planning that the central government heads. Finally, it monitors and reports on progress, resource utilization and financial management.

Development partners and international agencies do have resources and skill sets that can alleviate the immediate effects of the earthquake on local populations, but in the longer term they will withdraw and local institutions will need to be in place, strengthened and responsible if sustainable and responsible reconstruction is to take place.

Reducing the politicization of resource allocation and promoting Disaster Risk Reduction
Relief, subsequent humanitarian aid and then development resources must be allocated according to need. These cannot be handed to politicians, whether national or local, and left to their decisions as to who receives and who does not. Neither can it be handed to multi-national, bilateral or non-government organisations as they lack sustainability and accountability in the longer term. In Nepal, basic indicators of need already exist for the allocation of grants to local government. For Village Development Committees these are (i) size of administrative area, (ii) size of population, and (iii) a poverty indicator. These were developed more than 7 years ago in order to prevent the politicization of resource allocation. It would be a simple step to add a level of damage indicator to such a formula, in fact assessments of the percentage of damaged houses in a village development committee are currently being undertaken. Likewise all local government bodies are independently assessed for their management of public finances. This same system, administered by the Local Bodies Fiscal Commission, can be used for the additional funds to the affected districts. Building on existing systems, where they work, is the best way forward.

Disaster risk reduction (DRR) must be applied to the construction of new buildings in the coming months and years. Schools, health facilities, other public buildings must be required to meet these standards by their responsible ministries and departments. Private property owners should be required to maintain certain basic DRR standards and housing for the poor should be aided with the use of top-up grants to secure a higher quality of structure. Again, it is a tried and tested approach used in the field of climate change mitigation and centering on local government to manage and administer. It will cost more in the short term and development partners must be ready to bear a significant part of this cost, but it will save lives and funds in the longer term.

While the human and financial costs of the earthquake are a terrible price to pay, the disaster might just serve to focus the minds of the government and its development partners on the need for a clearer, more focused and more sustainable development strategy. Effective and accountable government that reaches out to all its citizens and communities is vital and to that end the existing system of local government is one very important element to be supported and promoted. So let there be local elections, let the local government bodies have the resources to meet their responsibilities, and let the accountability mechanisms put in place facilitate the inclusive development that so many outside the Kathmandu valley seek. There will be more earthquakes, but Nepal can be better prepared.

Regions
Nepal
Local government serves local communities best in Nepal’s shattered landscape
Yet it is ignored and bypassed by political leaders, aid agencies and Kathmandu-centric journalists