Al-Tufula Conversation

Norbert Goldfield, M.D.

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• Community energy can be neither bought nor coerced. It is internal. Outsiders and outside resources are crucial to it, but their role is to stimulate commitment and practical alternatives, not to do the actual work.

• Technology, training, incentives, and regulations expand possibilities; good sales pitches stimulate curiosity.

• And when successes appear, other communities can learn from them and achieve their own.

• For this outward radiation to proceed, government must create an enabling environment, experts must assist with ongoing technical breakthroughs and education—and both government and experts must relinquish control as capacity grows among multiple communities.

• Guidance nurtures hope by adapting, using, and sharing benefits.

Principle One: Three-Way Partnerships

• Community energy seldom mobilizes by itself.• Communities need help from officials, who can adjust

policies and regulations, facilitate cooperation among factions, and channel essential resources.

• Communities also need help from experts, who can build capacity and skills by training, introduce new ideas and techniques, and help monitor change, ideally bringing multiple perspectives—academic, business, and nongovernmental—to the process.’ Progress comes from collaborative bottom-up (community), top-down (officials), and outside-in (experts) activity, with no one sector deciding that it alone is “in charge:’

• The principle of the three-way partnership denies the central importance of a charismatic leader with a vision and the capacity to mobilize and organize people behind it.

• Charismatic leaders are hard to find, and even harder to replace. Charismatic leaders often start out on track but stray as others stop checking their missteps; after this they become arrogant. In the very complex situations of community development, a single leader does not bring together enough diversity of perspectives.

• The three-way partnership avoids these pitfalls. It can use a charismatic leader if one is present, but it must be vigilant lest this one individual take control. There are exceptions to this rule: in emergencies, construction and engineering projects, professional accreditation, and other focused development work, a single leader is the preferred, and more efficient, solution.

Principle Two: Action Based on Locally Specific Data

• Action must be grounded in objective local data. Lacking such data, participants will base decisions on transitory shifts in opinion influenced by who talks most convincingly or is most powerful at the moment. Decisions not grounded in local data often are isolated from the people; they are made by officials who tend to be out of touch and out of date, and the experts’ thick reports are usually based on earlier studies done elsewhere and on deductions from theory. Focusing on local data, community members, with guidance from officials and experts, can blend practical local realities with the best of worldwide understanding.

Principle Three: Changes in Community Behavior

• People can come together in partnerships and can agree on objective data, but to achieve lasting results they must also change their behavior.

• Most members of the community can start simply by gaining new skills.

• Those in positions of power—community leaders, officials, or experts—have to learn to share power. This means giving up exclusive control, shifting to guidance that empowers rather than fostering dependency.

• This shift is difficult, but when officials and experts demonstrate humility community enthusiasm becomes contagious. This feedback loop sets new expectations and standards for everyone. As one change supports another, social pressure builds, and those who do not cooperate may be bypassed or overrun by the momentum.

Our field experience indicates that three activities are so important that they become principles for successful social

action:

• Forming a three-way partnership of community members, officials, and experts

• Basing action on locally specific data

• Using a community work plan to change collective behavior

• Communities, whether through ambition or through romanticism, often overestimate their capacity, believing that they can do more than in fact they know how to do. Overconfidence in community capacity is especially common when several community members perceive themselves to be experts on a subject and want to press their neighbors forward.

• Experts bring much that is good, but they may also bring problems: ideas that are inappropriate, outside priorities that override local priorities, an emphasis on professional prestige that distorts local vision, pet hypotheses or experiences that are not transferable, definitions of development or theories that do not fit local realities, and, most commonly, a tendency to prescribe ambitious blueprints for social action. Sometimes experts are engaged because they are available rather than because they have the skills needed. Inappropriate advice by experts is often the reason development efforts fail.

Robert Chambers (himself an expert) after decades of field observations has identified

three traps that experts must avoid:

• Professionalism: they become more concerned about their own roles, embedded beliefs, and personal advancement than about local needs.

• Distance: they often work from offices outside the community, rely on secondary data, and are socially apart and professionally arrogant.

• Power: their identity as experts leads them to try to control local processes and to exaggerate their own role rather than educating and empowering community members and leaders.

• Business is a central player in development. Because of the important role business plays, it is often assigned the role of a separate, autonomous actor. But business is not a separate partner.

• The surest way to convert risk into probability of success is to base action on locally specific, constantly updated data. When local people can gather accurate information about their perceived problems, natural resources, culture, geography, and financial parameters, the local groundedness of their action makes success more likely, and their shared ownership of that knowledge galvanizes them to work together.

• Localized data are the functional opposite of opinions. Opinions can be passionate and convincing, yet also totally wrong.

• Existing data can provide a starting point. Traditionally data came from government or academic statistics, but often such information relates only to certain sectors or is out-of-date.

• Community data-gathering is often not impartial. If one party controls the data, the process may be used only to confirm the party’s opinions.

• Officials can use government data to reinforce their power and influence communities’ decisions.

• Experts are prone to take data out of the community and use it for their own professional advancement, making it sophisticated rather than simplifying it to help local people make decisions.

• A further problem is that in the past fifty years increasingly rigorous procedures for data collection have evolved, and now primarily serve increasingly sophisticated research purposes that have their own justification.

• Local people, officials, and even experts from other fields now find data collection and interpretation confusing. Practical decisionmaking demands a return to simplified data systems.

But any method used, even if it cannot build from facts, should incorporate the following features:

• Community members should perform at least part of the data collection themselves, using simplified methods they understand. Only then will they trust the findings and act on them—and typically the cost will be less.

• Data collection should be ongoing in order to monitor progress and to provide clear evidence over time of what is working.

• The community’s perspective of its own reality should holistically balance economics, social needs, natural resources, and aspirations—and not be controlled by one sector.

Direct Action with Communities

• At the community level the wide variety of tasks that experts perform can be grouped according to the annual cycle of seven steps.

• In Step 1—in creating the coordinating committee—an expert group can help bring factions together, facilitate dialogue, train community members, or assume temporary leadership of the committee to help local leaders develop their own capacity. One coordinating role may be to establish linkages among professional associations, businesses, civic groups, religious communities, and part-time residents.

• In Step 2—identifying past successes—experts can point out achievements that may not have been recognized as successes by putting local experience in a larger perspective of needs and failures. One special parallel task here is to bring together new resources from within communities (such as business, religious, or entertainment sectors) that can make unique contributions to social change.

• In Step 3—studying successes elsewhere—experts naturally have access to wider experience and know relevant places and successful programs that can be visited. They can organize and lead study trips to such places and can provide technical skills that assist in adapting these outside experiences to local conditions.

• In Step 4—Self-Evaluation—experts have a specially vital role in gathering data, providing assistance in setting priorities, identifying solutions that are within community capacity, selecting the appropriate key indicators, and training workers in assessment skills.

• In Step 5—Effective Decisionmaking—experts will be central in helping to move from objective data to dialogue for community- based decisions. The tasks here involve first helping the community analyze the results of the assessment, then working that information through a causal and functional analysis, and facilitating maximal collaborative discussion to create the annual work plan.

Cont

• In Step 6—taking action—experts can provide a constant source of technical help as surprises come up. Without flexible and swift help, action is likely to halt as a result of early frustrations.

• In Step 7—monitoring activities to provide midcourse corrections— experts are particularly well placed to observe social change in the community objectively. While communities are good at anecdotal monitoring, they typically lack objectivity. Most particularly, communities will not automatically look at the two central criteria of equity and sustainability In these areas, experts can fill an outside- watchdog role to make sure that change is beneficial to all and does not slip into resource exploitation.