Local Control Versus Technocracy: The Bangladesh Flood Response Study.

• Author: Leaf, Murray

Introduction

Since 1947, development planning in South Asia has evolved into a battleground between alternative visions of society; government and human. Is democracy a luxury only wealthy nations can afford, or the best way out of poverty? Does development depend primarily on introducing technologies, or on building institutions? Is it a matter of injecting large amounts of capital, or of building systems of effective management. Does it require greater central control or more local organizational capability? Do low educational levels and general poverty require that development priorities be decided by an administrative or technocratic elite, or does control by an insulated elite assure low levels of general education and continuing poverty?

In Bangladesh, conflicting answers to such questions frame the opposed positions in a life-and-death argument concerning the problems posed by the annual cycle of winter droughts, cyclones, spring storms and summer floods. Although the climatic cycle constrains and supports virtually all productive activities, it also regularly causes tens of millions of dollars of damage and take hundreds and sometimes thousands of lives. Since 1988 most of this discussion in turn has focused on the Flood Action Plan. There is no better example than the Flood Action Plan of the ways development plans in South Asia are repeatedly distorted by the concerned national and international agencies, to the point that they perpetuate the poverty and dependency they should be working to end.

In 1987 and again in 1988, particularly disastrous floods were followed by insistent public demands that the government of Bangladesh should "do something," but there were no mechanisms by which the public could refine this demand into specific proposals. However, donor governments and agencies expressed a willingness to help. In 1988, Danielle Mitterand, the wife of Francois Mitterand, then-president of France, visited Bangladesh's flooded areas. Shortly thereafter the French government submitted a proposal to the Bangladesh government to construct a prototypically centralized, capital- and technology-intensive solution: a comprehensive System of embankments to contain all the major rivers. The French did not, however, offer the necessary funding.

According to a preliminary study, cited by the World Bank as a "pre-feasibility" analysis, the cost was expected to run between $5.4 billion and $10.2 billion, followed by annual maintenance expenditures ranging from $540 million to $890 million.(2) Social costs, according to the study, would include, "expropriation of 19,000 to 21,000 hectares that would affect up to 180,000 people." In addition the study noted that, "in the large set-back solution, about 5 million people living between the main embankments and the bank would not benefit from flood protection and might have to be relocated behind the shelter of the dykes."(3) In other words, 5 million people would be displaced as a result of the French flood prevention plan.

The expected benefits of the French plan were the reduction or elimination of annual losses caused by floods that presently cost about $140 million, as well as unspecified "agricultural benefits, including improved cropping patterns, and a likely improvement in the rate of growth."(4) Although not explicitly stated, the implication was that such benefits might eventually outweigh the costs. However, there are many reasons to doubt this. The existing agricultural system in Bangladesh is closely adapted to the cycle of inundations and is unquestionably productive, supporting one of the highest rural population densities in the world. No rain-fed system and few irrigation system could achieve as much.

Funding for the French proposal proved elusive. The apparent expectation was that a large part of the expense would be covered by Japan or the United States. However, neither country was inclined to agree. The Japanese government sponsored a study that recommended little or no physical intervention and instead favored an increase in Bangladesh's institutional capacity for flood preparation and response.(5) Americans, well aware of the growing financial and environmental costs of the levee system on the lower Mississippi, were inclined to view a similar undertaking in Bangladesh (under even more adverse conditions), as either impossible from the outset or almost certain to lead to a losing battle with nature, requiring ever-increasing international assistance. The response was neither to endorse nor oppose the French plan, but to stay engaged and assure that solutions would be constructive and responsive to genuine needs in a cost-effective and sustainable way.

The government of Bangladesh could not manage a coherent response. Like the other more centralized governments in South Asia, it is fragmented into distinct and largely autonomous ministries, each intent on protecting its prerogatives against the others. Individual ministries made recommendations to strengthen their own flood-related programs, but there was no move toward cross-departmental or interdisciplinary planning. The Ministry of Irrigation, Water Development and Flood Control, which would have overseen the construction, was strongly in favor of the French scheme. With heavy foreign assistance, the Ministry had already constructed a substantial levee system throughout the country that would have been greatly reinforced by the French proposal.

Although Bangladesh had an elected government at the time of the proposal, it was too unstable and its mandate too weak to unite the ministries at the national level, and no local agency had the power to coordinate them at a sub-national level. The government was controlled by the Jatiyo Party, under General Hussain Muhammed Ershad, who narrowly won elections after a period of martial law. Evidently recognizing that none of the national parties had a political base outside the major cities, Ershad was in the process of implementing a limited decentralization.

Historically, the main level of local administration had been the zilla, or district. Ershad had instituted elected bodies at the upazilla, or subdistrict, and was assigning them significant control over local use of national development funds and related matters, such as the management of local market squares. Since there were about eight sub-districts to each district, the devolution was significant. However, authority--like the funds--clearly traveled from top to bottom. Partisanship and corruption were considered normal in awarding local contracts, while at the same time neither the zilla nor the upazilla bodies had any power to control the actions of the local staff representing the various ministries.

A solution to the impasse was found in mid-1989, when the government of Bangladesh asked the World Bank to prepare a Flood Action Plan by coordinating the activities of the donors to conduct necessary design and feasibility studies. The Plan was endorsed by the donors and the Government of Bangladesh in January 1990.

The Flood Action Plan involved 26 distinct planning projects to be undertaken from 1990 to 1995:11 main studies--focused on engineering plans--and 15 supporting studies. Sponsors included a wide array of national and international agencies. Among them was the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). One of these studies was the Flood Response Study, the only one of the 26 aimed at seeing the flood regime from the perspective of household and local organizations.

Day-to-day coordination of the component studies and assessments of the Flood Action Plan was placed in the hands of the Flood Plan Coordination Organization (FPCO). By agreement, this was to have been an "interdisciplinary" body, drawn from all relevant Bangladesh government ministries. In practice, it was entirely subordinate to the Water Development Board of the Ministry of Irrigation, Water Development and Flood Control. Thus the responsibility for assessing the feasibility of the French plan against other possible alternatives was given to the Bangladesh implementing agency and the international funding agency that were most inclined to favor it, not for what it would do but simply for what it was: a large-scale, capital intensive construction program.

The distinction between main and supporting studies in the Flood Action Plan implicitly referred to a long-standing argument over "technical" (top-down and technocratic) versus participatory" (bottom-up and consumer or client-oriented) approaches to irrigation and water control design. The main studies by and large shared technical assumptions, while the supporting, studies generally shared a participatory perspective.

The World Bank generally leans toward the technical orientation; USAID toward participation. South Asian governmental engineers lean towards the technical perspective. Social scientists--who generally become involved after systems fail to perform as designed--lean toward participation, emphasizing that technologies cannot work if they do not fit the needs and capabilities of their users and that, very often, the intended beneficiaries have crucial site-specific knowledge that the technical experts lack. In grouping the studies as they did, the participating agencies in effect agreed that in this case priority would be given to the technical perspective. If the proponents of participation had anything to add, they would have to convince the engineers and not the other way around.

Aims of the Flood Response Study

The Flood Response Study; like the other USAID projects, had a simple premise: In order to understand the effects of the changes in the flood plain environment, it was necessary to know how the present array of human activities was adapted to it. The document that controlled the study was the Terms of Reference, agreed on by the Bangladesh government and USAID.(6)

The Terms of Reference specified four major...