Bottoms-up development is a myth

Development from below, bottom-up development, bottom of the pyramid approach, grassroots development - these are some of the phrases planners coined, decades ago, to support an alternative development model for poor countries.

These have especially gained currency in Kenya as we build up to the 2022 general elections. Implicit in these phrases are assumptions about what is wrong with the dominant development paradigm, popularly called the "top-down/trickle down" approach.

The top-down model failed, critics opine, because the institutions created to foster development from the top have themselves become the greatest hindrance to development. The primary target in this criticism is the state, but others are blamed too. For example, market institutions, such as large private firms, are criticised for taking advantage of various types of state protection which make them capital intensive and inefficient. Established political parties are criticised for seeking power by manipulation of the poor and collusion with the army and the elite. Trade unions are chastised for protecting the interests of only the "labour aristocracy", and for being incorporated by the state into "the system"

To initiate broad-based development, the alternative paradigm suggested a different arrangement of actors, issues, values, and modes of action. In contrast to the top-down model's central objective of industrialisation and economic growth, the bottom-up model advocates for rural development and distributional issues. Instead of the state-administered, large-scale infrastructure projects that are central to the employment-generation strategy of the top-down model, it advocates small-scale, bottom-up projects that should directly involve the urban and rural poor in income-generating schemes.

Poor families

Typically, these projects should target small groups of poor families who have neither an asset nor a steady source of income. These families are to be provided subsidised credit for starting small enterprises. These enterprises ranged from non-agricultural activities in rural areas to low-cost wage goods production and various service provisions in urban areas. These activities are expected to generate profit, savings, and investment at the bottom, thereby eliminating the need for income to trickle down through the market hierarchy.

The bottom up approach is touted to have political dividends as well. The income generating projects are to lead to the poor's empowerment by making them self-reliant. Also, these projects organise the poor into small solidarity groups, which are to help them break from the traditionally exploitative relationships with middlemen, local money lenders and landlords.

The solidarity groups are justified on the ground that the mainstream political process controlled and manipulated by the state, the official political parties, elites and in some areas the army, is not responsive to the poor's needs. Hence, the poor need to organise themselves, not as another political party that could be coopted by the system but as small autonomous groups. Some argue that these groups could act as democratic cells culminating in a new system of self-governance.

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Although self-governance and economic self-sufficiency of the poor are the cardinal principles of "development from below" the proponents argue that to achieve this objectives, the poor needed assistance from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) at least in the short run. Why? It is argued that NGOs are particularly appropriate agents for fostering development from below because their organisational priorities and procedures are diametrically opposite of those of institutions at the top. Unlike state and market institutions which are driven by the need for social control and profit, NGOs are interested primarily in building resilient communities.

Besides, the argument goes, in their community building efforts, NGOs, unlike the state, rely neither upon coercive forces nor adopt profit seeking mechanisms, as is customary for market institutions. Rather, NGOs rely solely on building solidarity bonds in civil society. And this solidarity is nurtured through decentralised and participatory decision making supported by voluntary local efforts.

Now, NGOs have been implementing bottom-up projects for the longest time and numerous projects have been implemented in Asia, Africa and Latin America. What is our collective understanding of their effectiveness? Do they, indeed, generate income and employment at the bottom? Do they empower the poor?

Although the approach is distinctly anti-state in orientation and is based on the premise that as agents of development from below NGOs should avoid working with the state and other dominant institutions at the top, in reality, the experience of relatively successful NGOs indicates that they work very closely with the government and market institutions. This observation suggests a reconsideration of development strategy from its preoccupation with either "trickle-down" or "bottom-up" development.

Indeed, it indicates that just as development does not trickle from top down, neither does it effervesce from the bottom. Action in any one domain, however well intentioned, is not adequate for broad based development.

Non non-governmental organisations

Development requires a synergy between efforts made at the top and the bottom, a collaborative effort among the government, market institutions and NGOs which utilises the comparative advantage of each type of institution and minimises their comparative disadvantages. As such, only the government can create the policy environment necessary to maximize NGO effectiveness and the administrative machinery for large scale implementation of projects and policies. Although NGOs lack this ability, their comparative advantage lies in their ability to reach citizens who are beyond the reach of the governments bureaucratic administrative procedures.

NGOs are also good at ensuring citizen participation by engaging them in learning environments, as opposed to the rules driven, hierarchically structured, institutional setting common to government projects. Market institutions provide a third kind of strength to development efforts: unlike the government and NGOs, they heighten the sensitivity of development efforts to the preferences of consumers and producers and inject a sense of market discipline in the organization of development efforts.

If, indeed these three institutions have distinctly different strength which are complimentary and can create a synergistic effect, why do they not cooperate more often? To understand why institutions cooperate we need to go beyond the notion of comparative institutional strengths, and analyse what motivates state, market and NGOs to sometimes cooperate and, at other times oppose one another. This requires more insights than the popular understanding that the state is interested in coercion, the market is driven by profit motives and NGOs are motivated by community needs. Not that these are incorrect observations: they are one dimensional and, also lack the understanding that institutional interests change based on the specific problems faced by each type of institution at specific historical conjunctions.

The key task facing development planners and leaders who care to transcend the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy is to better understand how institutional interests of the state, market and civil society change and under what condition these varying interests may coincide creating a synergy of development efforts.

- The writer teaches in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Pwani University.