As a part of the recent reorganization, the ADB has put in place new business processes that emphasize participation. Cedric Saldanha, Senior Director, Governance and Regional Cooperation Division, and a member of the ADB Reorganization Working Group, shares his insights on ADB’s accomplishments — and the challenges that it still confronts in the area of participatory development.
Why is participatory development so important for ADB’s work?
When we talk of participation, it’s often as if we are saying, “Hey—you there, and you there—we’d like you to participate in our project.” When we approach participation in this way, we come across as colonialistic, patronizing, and paternalistic. And in the process, we do a major disservice to the concept and cause of participation. We need to always remember—this is not ADB’s project. It’s the country’s project; it’s the country’s money; it’s a loan. So who’s supposed to encourage whose participation? This is the basic issue. Participation must, in essence, represent ownership by the country, the people—the local stakeholders of the project. If it remains “ADB’s project,” it is doomed to fail.
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What is the best way to build stakeholders’ capacities?
If a project is done in a participatory manner, it takes time because we must work within the stakeholders’ capacities. The great challenge is to use the opportunity not only to transfer financing and develop infrastructure, but also to empower stakeholders and enhance their capacities. Separating capacity building from mainstream project financing is totally wrong. If we are truly participatory in designing and implementing our projects, we’d be building capacity as well—meaning there would be no need for separate and discrete capacity-building grants. If we don’t work in a participatory manner, we’ll never build capacity, which is at the heart of development.
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What is the role of participation in the new business processes?
ADB is working to enhance participation in two main areas: with its external partners and within ADB. For external partners, the reorganized ADB and its new business processes emphasize partnership, delegation, and flexibility. ADB needs to partner more effectively with its major client—governments—and with the whole range of stakeholders within a country, from the private sector to civil society groups, as well as with other development organizations. This partnering is an area that has not been adequately cultivated and supported within ADB. In the reorganized ADB, the structure allows for substantial delegation to our resident missions, who are generally in a better position to work much more effectively with our stakeholders. The new business processes provide extensive flexibilities to staff in their approach to project feasibility studies and design. The revised country strategy and program process and documentation requires demonstrated participatory processes in the country strategy and program preparation and finalization.
Internally, ADB has traditionally been a “silo” organization with a major emphasis on vertical hierarchical structures. The new structure and business processes give significant prominence to horizontal, cross-departmental networks, teams, and com- mittees, which encourage a cross-fertilization of ideas throughout the organization, and accessing knowledge and ideas from all who can contribute.
Finally, the new processes also encourage stronger partnering with external networks in the donor community, to both contribute ADB’s knowledge and experience, as well as to gain from these external networks.
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How is improved participation expected to contribute to enhanced quality of ADB operations?
First, we hope to see greater country and stakeholder ownership of ADB-financed and supported programs and projects. Second, the enhanced interaction with stakeholders should better inform the design of projects and nonlending products and thereby ensure better quality and responsiveness to stakeholders’ needs. Most importantly, a more participative approach to its operations will greatly contribute to making ADB a better “learning” organization, and therefore a more effective contributor to the development processes of our DMCs.
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What are the incentives for staff members to pursue participation?
Participation is hard. It requires time, effort, and a lot of patience. The primary incentive for undertaking a participatory approach in our operations, in my view, is the enormous professional satisfaction that comes with seeing a program and project truly “owned” by the country and stakeholders, and thus knowing it will be effectively implemented. To be realistic, some disincentives also exist—the pressures of deadlines, the inherent difficulty of designing a project with broad participation, the constraint on resources. However, these are increasingly being realized and attended to by our organization. Operational departments have received a rather substantive net increase in resources consequent to the reorganization. The team approach to project design is also improving the situation.
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How will participatory decision making be improved within ADB?
With the establishment of sector and thematic committees, the “management” of ADB’s strategic directions is now not only with the Regional and Sustainable Development Department and the Strategy and Policy Department, but also with the committees that can and will substantially influence these directions. With the establishment of country and project teams, we will find shared leadership of these processes and products, very probably to the benefit of quality and responsiveness to clients. The committees, teams, and networks will pull in talents and knowledge from across the organization, which otherwise would remain untapped and wasted. I predict you will see a very different ADB a year from now, with a much enhanced degree of horizontal communication, learning, and team-based problem solving, all to the benefit of the organization and its clients.
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What is the relationship between participation, governance, and capacity building?
Participation and capacity building are facets of the larger issue of governance. Governance is a catchall word that some think covers too many issues: participation of stakeholders, which in turn makes government more responsible, accountable, predictable, and transparent; effective service delivery; effective law and order; and many other areas. Inevitably, governance must include participation and capacity building to deliver according to established public sector mandates. Participation is a powerful tool to build capacity. People learn best by doing, and gain even more when they exercise responsibility. If development projects and programs can depend less on consultants, and encourage the mobilization and use of local talent, this will inevitably have a major positive impact on local capacity. We should seek the day when ADB’s role is primarily that of a catalyst and provider of finance, with the bulk of leadership, design, and implementation responsibilities of development initiatives borne by the country’s stakeholders.
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How will resident missions’ roles change?
The role of resident missions is extremely important — and will increase in importance. Nothing can replace face-to-face interaction with our clients and stakeholders. The resident missions are in the best position to provide this interaction—not headquarter missions that fly in for two weeks and out again. Under the new business processes, resident mission staff members are always an integral part of the country team, and in a numbers of cases, the leaders.
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How will DMC stakeholders’ voices be strengthened?
When ADB assists a member, it develops — in partnership with government and other stakeholders, such as NGOs, private sector, and civil society — a country strategy and a program. A participatory approach in preparing the country strategy and program is now mandatory. Extensive thematic and sector assessments go into preparing a CSP. The contribution of stakeholders to this process is now considered essential and crucial. In designing projects, the flexibility given to staff enables them to use this for broader participatory processes. We now have social development specialists as core project staff in each regional department. One of their main responsibilities is ensuring projects take a participatory approach to accommodating stakeholders’ views.
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ADB’s safeguard policies (environment, resettlement, and indigenous peoples) have included participatory processes in them, but how effective has ADB been in implementing them?
ADB has been excellent at capturing the requirements of participatory processes in its policies. What has been lacking is an appropriate structure to facilitate implementation. The constraints of the organization structure before the reorganization did not allow for flexibility in implementing participatory processes. Also lacking are staff skills and a value framework that adequately recognize the importance of participation. The issue is not the policies — it is how to implement them. We’ve been striving to develop more effective structures and processes, improve skills, and bolster resource allocations to resident missions and operational departments in an effort to empower those who can actualize participation.
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How will participatory practices be taken into consideration in assessing the quality of ADB’s country strategies and programs, technical assistance, and loans?
The most critical aspect of quality of a development intervention is the sustainability of outputs and outcomes delivered. Such sustainability is, in large measure, contingent on the participatory approach and stakeholder ownership/leadership of the development intervention.
Ownership and leadership come with a clear commitment to tangible and monitorable goals and targets. ADB’s role is to help developing member countries in achieving the development goals and targets to which they have committed themselves. These are increasingly in the form of monitorable development outputs and outcomes agreed to with the country concerned. These outputs and outcomes then serve as evaluation milestones reflecting the effectiveness of ADB’s contributions.
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