Symposium strengthens capacity for local governance

A symposium looking at ways to strengthen the capacity for local governance opened in Delft on Tuesday 26 September with a recognition that this is a vital area to achieve sustainable water supply and sanitation.

Sustainable Water Supply and Sanitation: Strengthening Capacity for Local Governance has been organised by IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre and UNESCO-IHE, Institute for Water Education and is attended by 50-60 professionals from NGOs and agencies in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Opening the Symposium, Maarten Blockland deputy direct of UNESCO-IHE, said: “Capacity development is a key activity in the water sector. It has been on the agenda of UNESCO-IHE and IRC for 15 years or more and we have seen it rise to become a prominent issue on the development agenda. Capacity building is a very powerful concept it brings institutional development, organisational development and human resources
development together in one all encompassing framework.”

Intermediate level

Lodewijk de Waal, chair of the board of IRC, said: “There is a large amount of knowledge

available and the problem is how to make this usable, to distribute and to combine it with the day to day wisdom of individuals and communities. You cannot do this without capacity building on the intermediate level.”

Jan Ubels, senior strategy office for capacity development SNV, The Netherlands, and a keynote speaker, congratulated the organisers on focusing on this critical level. “Intermediate level capacity is a huge issue there because it is there that a service environment for local people to realise effective services is really made – that is not done at policy levels or at micro levels.”

Ubels told the Symposium that capacity development was different in different places and situations. A positive tone was needed, because things do start to work, but change happens slowly because “human systems and society don’t change easily”.

Capacity is an emergent process

He saw capacity as an emergent process that is not only about performance but about self renewal and survival. It is about relationships and how organisations function in their environment.

He quoted a case study from the north east of Ethiopia where a local NGO started to work on education and health with a mobile schools approach, training ‘teachers’ who were only two or three grades ahead of their pupils. This successful approach was scaled up by bringing together NGOs and Government. It was adopted by Government at district and provincial level, although they had to change their educational qualifications and financial systems. When these things started to change, the approach began to reach substantial proportions of the population.

In Northern Kenya too there was a process of renewal and change, as councils asked beneficiaries for their views and then brought councillors and staff together to discuss these sometimes critical responses. Councils gained self-confidence through this process and felt able to tackle disputes over water with neighbours, creating the basis for an inter-council forum covering 12 councils. This now deals with water issues and with public safety and tourism and the forum is starting to be replicated in other areas of Kenya.

Key elements

Cooperation and accountability are key elements. Attitudes and values change as people come together to focus on their roles. Sharing knowledge and joint learning are important, but so is local innovation. “Getting the policies right is very, very important but it is not the thing that makes development. Development is made by local actors that go after their ambitions, try to solve their problems that fight their struggles, that is where development is made. Development is not made by policies and institutional frameworks.”

However, he warned against seeing capacity development as a miracle ingredient. The intermediate level is very complex and there are many agencies involved, especially where decentralisation leads to conflicts on mandates and legitimacy. It was necessary to work with multiple actors, rather than one organisation.

“Capacity development happens by facilitating and unfolding rather than by being implemented. Systems of this complexity don’t change by implementing one strategy, and they don’t change in a very unpredictable manner.”

“Capacity is like water. When it is there you can see it shine and many things seem to flourish but when you want to get hold of it, it seems to slip through your fingers and when you don’t have it, it is very difficult to get.”

But he turned this paradox, saying “It cannot be bottled and it cannot be put into a reservoir.” So perhaps it was more like gardening: “It is a living process and the plant grows as it decides to grow and if the weather changes your crop may be in danger. As a final problem, you may not be the owner of the garden.”

Gain insights into capacity development

Jan Teun Visscher, a former director of IRC, talked about the need to gain insights into capacity development and to support small service providers of whom there might be 8 million around the world. Sustainable services meant having good legislation, adequate support and adequate orientation.

It was important to distinguish between the policy making level and those who support services providers. “The service providers do their daily job build new systems and do the running of those systems and they really provide the water for people, but they cannot do that without the adequate intermediate and national level function being taken care of.”

Several actors operate at more than one level. Government bodies may act both as providers and as controllers. NGOs have a tendency to set up parallel structures. Actors often overlap and in the real world there is always a confused picture.

Local governance fulfils crucial functions such as planning and organisation, strategic decision making, resource allocation and tariff setting. “Crucial to tariff setting in my experience, is the involvement of communities themselves because they have to pay the price every day and if they are not prepared to do that you will not have a sustainable system. This is an important role where local governance can do a good job.”

Presenter Bernard Akanbang from Ghana

The Symposium is also discussing country level case studies, and issues such as corruption and citizens’ engagement which impact on local level governance and capacity at the intermediate level.