Administering to the Poor (Or, If We Can't Help Rich Dictators, What Can We Do for the Poor?)

Administering to the Poor (Or, If We Can't Help Rich Dictators, What Can We Do for thePoor?)Author(s): John D. MontgomerySource: Public Administration Review, Vol. 40, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1980), pp. 421-425Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Society for Public AdministrationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3110195 .

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FROM THE PROFESSIONAL STREAM 421

implications. The technicians defined the problems and thereby imposed values. Unwittingly they erred and helped defeat their own intents. They were used, these experts, these wise men; but they were enthusiastic parties to the process as well as victims of ingenuous approaches to ill- defined problems.

Lessons have been learned from the experience in Iran

and elsewhere. In the American foreign aid program there are better mechanisms of problem-defining than before. Large, insular administrative solutions are not being laid on vast and murky problems of development as they were in Iran. They probably will never again be offered-unless, of course, some oil-rich potentate should happen to insist.

ADMINISTERING TO THE POOR (OR, IF WE CAN'T HELP RICH DICTATORS, WHAT CAN WE DO FOR THE POOR?)

John D. Montgomery, Harvard University

T ime does not always treat kindly the attempts of large, rich states to "help" small or poor ones. Even when they succeed, trouble may be in store. Neither capital aid nor technical assistance is an unmixed blessing to the re- ceiving society. And because the purposes of both the giver and the receiver are too complex for easy appraisal, judg- ment on their experience should look to the future more than the past.

The benevolence of even the most charitable individuals is suspect today; how much more so is the good will of governments, whose obligations are to their own citizens and not to those of other states? If rich governments decide to aid other countries not just to curry favor but in the hope of improving the international setting, they have to engage in collaborative activities that are either mutually beneficial or that provide a fair trade to each partner. Finding suitable benefits and tradeoffs is therefore a prime task of development diplomacy. The choice of ends often involves ex- changing long-term, high benefits for immediate, but small gains. That is the first, though not the only, crucial decision. if the wrong programs are chosen, as in Iran and Viet- nam, it is not necessarily beneficial even when they are well executed. Failure there may be attributable in some mea- sure to poor administration, but surely the decision to use development assistance to prop up unsavory regimes was more responsible for the outcomes.

The greatest successes in foreign aid have occurred in the presence of two features: a political context of mutual purpose, in which both parties could think of long-term goals, and a sophisticated calculus of the benefits that could be appropriately expected by each partner. The reconstruction activities after World War II were relatively easy because they did not require interventions in an existing social or economic order, and they could take place within a context of harmonious purposes among American and foreign political actors. Another collection of success stories could be written of the Point 4 transfers of technology, which improved agriculture and industry in the less developed countries, brought both the benefits and costs of the Green Rev- olution and of competitive, small-scale industry to Asia, and increased the flow of international trade. It is true that

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1980

these silver clouds had dark linings: premature urbaniza- tion that accompanied industrial development; dissatisfac- tion with the pace of change and the inequities that accompanied it; and declining terms of trade in international transactions. But much worse results attended the ex- travagant and misguided efforts of the Kennedy-Johnson- Nixon-Carter era to use foreign aid to foster "stability" directly by improving central administrative sub-systems and sacrificing developmental goals in the interests of national security. Thus, even when successes came, as in the propping up of regimes in Vietnam and Iran for a decade or so beyond their just merits, they looked so much like failures when it was all over that they discredited the entire enterprise of international assistance.

Discredited or not, international assistance will continue to be a diplomatic option; the alternative of abandoning it no longer exists. Many world problems transcend both the national boundaries and the national resources of indi- vidual great powers. For the moment, policies and programs to deal with planetary ecology and unclaimed global resources are opportunities for which technology exists but not the political will. And beyond these technological challenges lies a more serious mutual concern for which even when the political will exists, the technology is weak; the rising incidence of poverty as an international concern, which has both immediate and long-term consequences for modern statecraft. International poverty alleviation is an especially challenging problem of technical assistance because governments have not served these needs very well even in the case of their own citizens. Moreover, whatever techniques they have developed for this purpose have not yet begun to dominate programs of international assistance, though recognition of their importance is rising. It is only recently that the United Nations, the U.S. Congress, the World Bank, and a cadre of national leaders have be-

John D. Montgomery, professor of public administration at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, is author of Technology and Civic Life, and other studies of development administration.



42P PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW

gun seriously looking for ways of relieving poverty without diminishing the prospects for the rest of society. They still need to develop for that purpose a set of principles of development administration that can serve those citizens who have remained beyond the reach of the market and of nor- mal government operations.

Applying these principles will not be any more sensitive in an international context that our late unlamented efforts to build up secret police forces or strengthen the hands of tax collectors in developing countries. But it will draw on experience not nearly as well established in the tradition of western public administration, and therefore it poses somewhat greater risks of failure to the governments involved. Still, at least those engaged in developing technical assistance programs to deliver benefits to the poor can be proud of their efforts if they succeed, as they never could have in Iran or Vietnam. And even if they fail, the situation is not likely to be worsened by their efforts. Thus, success in the atavistic objectives pursued in Iran is more to be dreaded than failure in efforts to alleviate the burdens of poverty. No one will demand an accounting before an international tribunal even if such interventions occasionally reach the wrong target.

I.

Administering to the poor means superimposing a new set of problems upon the still imperfect administration of other government programs, for which conventional assistance in public administration may still be required. These special problems of human resource development may be grouped into six categories:

1. They involve new styles of projects' design and management. Traditional development projects aim at providing a good or service to the general public; they succeed if they generate more revenue, or more income or wealth, than they absorb; they are designed to take advantage of state-of-the-art technologies, and they are best implement- ed when they are more or less self-operating; they involve standard governmental roles; and they are considered ra- tional so long as they continue to produce a return on the investment. As the accompanying table suggests, none of these familiar characteristics applies to "new-style projects."

2. They must deal with the "cognitive distance"' that separates administrators from the public. One of the most intractable problems in administering to the poor is the dif- ficulty that administrators have in perceiving their needs, and the corresponding sense of remoteness that these isolated groups feel from the government. There are physical and geographical reasons for this cognitive distance; the very poor often live in parts of the cities where the government officials do not go, or on farms far from the road where their vehicles cannot travel. And there are social distances as well, springing from differences in education and culture, class interests, and personal life styles. These distances cannot be traversed by good-will alone. The cognitive elements can be addressed through training and special job assignments: even the general bureaucratic reluctance to work on these difficult problems can be reduced through changed incentive structures in the administrative system. But there would still remain the sacrifices that these assignments impose on the families of the administrators involved-remote locations lacking in health and education

Types of Development Projects

Type l* Type 11*

1. Expected Beneficiaries General public demand based services Special publics, i.e., groups in special need

2. Nature of Major Decisions Pre-project concentration; investment Recurrent; feedback analysis oriented; benefit cost analysis

3. Type of Expertise for Engineering, service technology, Social sciences including economics Project Design economics

4. Primary Task of Develop suitable routines for Develop procedures for maximizing Implementation continuing service and impact public use and responses

5. Organizational Structure Government agencies, parastatals, Government agencies, supplemental utilities, commercial enterprises paraprofessional staff, voluntary

agencies, and organized special publics

6. Basis of Evaluation Continued provision of services at Progress in meeting changing special acceptable cost public needs

*Examples: Type I: Roads, power stations, dams, school buildings, community centers, radio and TV facilities. Type II: Family planning services, pre-school nutrition programs, adult skill development programs, community development,

small farmer production activities. Mixed programs/projects: National nutrition programs including manufacture and distribution of supplemental foods, rural

electrification through cooperatives.





facilities and other amenities taken as the entitlement of members of the civil service, for example. On the part of the special public itself, the distance is not diminished by any of these policies. Its distrust of the government, a pro- duct of the generations as well as of personal experience, is encountered even in countries whose regimes are rated lib- eral, democratic, and concerned. Dealing with cognitive distance on both sides of the social gap will require time and conscious effort, and when neither are abundant, changes will be required in the whole administrative approach to poverty.

3. They are likely to require numerous small-scale projects as well as wholesale economic approaches to poverty. The current preference of planners and donors for large- scale activities is not capricious: they economize on scarce design and administrative resources by reducing the number of enterprises to be monitored. Even the initial costs of gaining project approval do not diminish much when the dimensions of a program are reduced (one version of Par- kinson's law holds that decision-makers' attention to projects occurs in inverse proportion to their dimensions). Apart from these administrative considerations, there is the inevitable fact that large projects are more impressive and therefore produce greater short-term benefits to politicians than do activities of humbler proportions. But experience in dealing with poverty has not encouraged the belief that a few large-scale interventions will suffice. Where direct transfers are possible through social security programs or food stamp programs, a nationwide system based on uni- form eligibility criteria may serve even special publics, but where resource constraints do not permit wholesale redis- tribution, efforts on behalf of the poor have to be targeted to those most in need of specific government services. Such targeting requires, in addition to a diagnosis of needs, a large number of small projects capable of reaching isolated groups. Multiple projects require major changes in the procedures used to choose, design, implement, and evaluate public activities.

4. They depend on peripheral, as well as central, administrative resources. Centralized administrative systems cannot cope with the numerous small projects required to elicit response from hard-to-reach disadvantaged groups. But if governments are to rely instead on decentralized systems, they must apply new standards of performance in the field. Yet changes in performance at peripheral posts are hard to achieve; they do not necessarily follow reforms at the center. Improvements like civil service reforms and centralized purchasing innovations among the new member states of the United Nations have probably improved efficiency in many central agencies, but in field offices their in- fluence is negligible. "New-style" projects will require far- reaching changes in the behavior of local officials as well as central bureaus. They are the ones who will have to identify special publics in need of the new services, manage small local efforts with whatever administrative resources are available, and design, implement, and evaluate programs using the new standards and procedures appropriate to "Type II" projects.

5. They are slow-acting remedies. It takes longer to train


teachers than to build a school, and still longer to achieve full adult literacy or to eliminate pre-school malnutrition. Programs with such social objectives cannot be measured by their physical accomplishments alone; criteria of success requires analysis of community behavior. Relative to the funding involved, and the size of the public served, human resource development projects are administration-intensive and time-extensive. They call for styles of organization that conventional management theory applies to projects like a massive irrigation system.

The implications for international donors and development plannerrs are disconcerting: a longer time frame for project support, more experimentation with sustained but unconventional operations, and a willingness to provide funding for recurrent costs as well as start-up investments to prevent premature cessation of activities in the event the political commitment of the host government erodes. These requirements are sufficiently different from those of most development projects that willingness to provide them may be considered in itself an early indicator of the commitment of a government to human resource development-as well as a predictor of the prospects for its success.

6. They require the use of unconventional administrative resources. The characteristics already described suggest the need to extend the reach of administrators to remote or otherwise isolated areas, and to special publics who are un- likely to seek them out for assistance. These kinds of human resource development services almost inevitably require intensive relationships with the public because they involve changing attitudes and behavior, which in turn calls for specially adapted educational activities, a supportive or reinforcing attitude, and a quick reactive posture that mon- itors and accommodates changing public responses. But hierarchic, formal bureaucracies are not well suited to play- ing that role; apart from the costs of enlarging them sufficiently to perform the needed services, their inclinations, established procedures, and comparative advantage lie in the directions of standard routines that can be applied to the public at large, not to the exceptions. Centralized bureaucratic systems do have a role to play in reaching special publics, but it lies in developing new, unconventional administrative resources rather than in direct service to the poor.

Perhaps the greatest role bureaucracies can plan is to find ways of extending their own reach: to recruit, train, super- vise, and deploy paraprofessionals; and to use their knowl- edge of legal requirements for the management of public resources to mobilize local self-help efforts in the urban and rural slums; to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of voluntary groups willing to work with the poor; and, most important of all, to help organizations that already exist among the poor, giving them guidance in their own internal management, arbitrating among rival claimants when necessary, and providing them with information about the resources that might be available for their own further development. They can also act as links between these informal organizations in the field and the political and administrative leadership at the center, to the benefit of both.

All of these extensions of the administrative system have



424 PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW

been employed in poverty and human resource development programs, and when they succeed, they can provide services that could not come from traditional bureaucracies. But these administrative resources are hard to develop and harder to manage, and while they add to the effectiveness of development administrators, they do not simplify their lives.

II.

No administrative system would find it easy to deal with all of these problems simultaneously. Individually these six problems could be addressed by changes in public policy or administration without necessarily affecting government performance very much. Projects can be designed for more emphasis on citizen response; longer commitments to project funding can result from agreements between governments and international donors; small projects can be gen- erated locally and supported under national plans; improving administration at the periphery is a slow process but a natural consequence of training and better procedures; even changing administrators' perceptions of the needs and capacities of the poor can be brought about as the bureaucratic system structures itself to respond to them. Each of these requirements is individually possible, though difficult. The real problem is that major improvements in human resource development efforts will not occur until all of them are addressed successfully. It is the combination of these problems that calls for radically different approaches in administering to the poor.

The trend toward centralization is centuries old.... But the trend to centralization has to be merged with an outwardflow of authority if the emergent problems of social development are to be addressed.

Yet addressing each of these problems separately would introduce contradictions and incompatibilities that could not be reconciled by incremental or marginal improvements. For example, redesigning projects so that they enlist a positive response from each of many special publics is an administration-intensive operation in itself. In conventional systems it would call for more expertise and wider uses of performance incentives than are usually available for public services; yet the larger a bureaucracy grew to re- design projects and administer personnel for these purposes, the more self-contained it would become, and the greater its cognitive distance from the poor. The more small projects there were in the system, as required by the mission of reaching special publics, the more difficult it would be to maintain long-term commitment to all of them and to control the quality and equity of their operations. The greater the extent to which the administration relied on local par- ticipation, the greater the strain would be on the periphery of the administrative system itself-which is the element least qualified to bear the weight of innovation. In short, trade-offs among the policies required to "administer to

the poor" include the need for response-oriented investment, which calls for administration-intensive projects; the use of small-scale projects, which require administration- extensive approaches; the reliance on peripheral administrative resources, which threaten the professional standards of central management; the need for longer time frames, which requires the highest degree of professionalism and at the same time reduces the discretionary capacity of local administrators to respond creatively to changing project needs; the use of informal organizations as an aid to administration, which challenges the authority of both central and peripheral managers; the call to reduce the cognitive distances between government officials and the poor, which requires closer contact between these elements-a condition that becomes inoperable as projects multiply in number the use of intermediaries increases.

the vision of using foreign aid to administer to the poor is developing a strong appeal in the international agencies. ITheyl... are somewhat more tolerant of long-term objectives than is the U.S. Congress or domestical- ly-oriented presidents.

The solution most likely to provide the flexibility necessary to weigh those trade-offs involves decentralization of decision-making. The purpose would be to make better use of locally chosen authorities supplemented by the field offices of the responsible national agencies. Such decentralization is political difficult, and sometimes impossible, but it is also a pre-condition to most of the other remedies. Only when development planners are prepared to share decision- making authority over details of project design, siting, and implementation, while retaining responsibility for program priorities and major funding allocations, is it possible to mount a large number of projects and engage field staffs and civic organizations in development activities. Decon- centration also gives central authorities a longer time per- spective than their engagement in project minutiae would allow if they retained these functions for themselves. It does not, of course, reduce the cognitive distance between central authorities and special publics, but it provides an incentive for peripheral administrators to do so, since they would have to take responsibility for project outcomes.

Transferring major developmental policies to local juris- diction also runs counter to the intuitions of national planners; and indeed, much of the experience with local government reinforces these perceptions. Certain (but not all) pro- vincial and municipal affairs are inefficiently managed nearly everywhere, and it is only to be expected that a nation's best talent in politics and administration is drawn to the center. The trend toward centralization is centuries old, dating from the triumph of the nation-state over the feudal principality and the walled town. It is a necessary antidote to the conflicting local interests and priorities that impede national development. But the trend to centralization has to be merged with an outward flow of authority if the emergent problems of social development are to be addressed.





For these is no such incompatibility of purpose between central and local programs of human resource development as there is in other matters of intergovernmental relations like highway construction or the maintenance of standards in education or public employment, matters about which local and national leaders are often in conflict. Decentrali- zation is a safer bet in Type II programs, where improve- ment benefits both levels of the polity, than in Type I activities.

Effective decentralization is not achieved by a single act. It requires a carefully planned sequence of authority-transferring decisions. These decisions can follow several alternative courses, beginning with either the elimination of review procedures for releasing funds for projects already agreed upon, or with assignment of responsibility for developing projects to be funded automatically within defined fi- nancial or substantive limits. A third course, to increase the resources available locally by enlarging the tax basis of municipal or rural governments so that they can carry out the desired programs on their own initiative, is not very often available in less developed countries. Either of the first alternatives involves central funding and therefore requires new procedures for control or audit: decentralization usually involves simplifying these procedures, making them less onerous administratively, or granting more discretion politically. Both involved risks, for both donor agency and host government.

III.

The dimensions of these new programs call for equally drastic changes in international assistance policy. Perhaps the U.S., a declining superpower whose national leadership faces other urgent demands, can no longer provide the model for other donors to follow. The fact is that the po- tentialities of foreign aid have not interested American presidents very much in the past two decades. If the re- trenchment in foreign aid continues, there are not likely to be in the 1980s the kinds of fully-staffed, fully confident U.S. field missions that advised the Vietnamese and Iranian autocrats in the 1960s and 1970s: those particular mistakes will not be repeated.

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On the other hand, the vision of using foreign aid to administer to the poor is developing a strong appeal in the international agencies.3 Their directors, investors, donors, and national constituencies are somewhat more tolerant of long-term objectives than is the U.S. Congress or domes- tically-oriented presidents. World Bank and UN experi- ences have reconfirmed what the U.S. should have learned long ago about the vulnerability of prestige projects and elite-oriented development programs to subsequent political challenge. For their part, governments in the less developed countries, too, have been experimenting more than they get credit for with new organizational approaches like those described in this article: new ways of managing irrigation, urban land reform, and integrated rural development, for example, that permit at least some of the national investments to reach the poor. But these experiments are not yet systems. Their implications for national and international policies are only beginning to emerge.

Administering to the poor is a function that requires a powerful political commitment, even to the point of self- denial by both politicians and central administrators. The self-denial is, however, only apparent: what they relinquish are functions that they have never been able to discharge very effectively. The approach suggested here requires political and administrative leaders to take on a new role in building institutions capable of serving special publics that cannot be reached through conventional means. But the payoff is good: it is now generally agreed that when all members of a society can gain access to services that are required for the collective development of human resources, performance in both economic and political spheres im- proves. That fact should provide the dominant guidance to development administration in the 1980s.

Notes

1. The term "new-style projects" is now used by World Bank economists to describe poverty-oriented activities.

2. The phrse was coined by Robert Chambers. 3. The World Bank's third annual Development Report (August,

1980) considers these dimensions in its review of human resource development programs.

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Administering to the Poor (Or, If We Can't Help Rich Dictators, What Can We Do for the Poor?)