DECLUTTERING DEVELOPMENT

For The Bohol Tribune

In This Our Journey

NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS

Now that the world is about to embark on a journey to achieve milestones under the banner of Sustainable Development Goals, the question foremost in the minds of many people in Bohol is how do we best prepare for the new global agenda to get the most benefits from it. In our view, the first step is to declutter the development landscape and do away resolutely with slogans, frameworks and so-called empowerment tools which will weigh us down rather than help us pursue, say SDG No. 1 – End poverty in all its forms everywhere.

This begs the question that we know with a degree of accuracy which prescription or technical advice works and does not work to help us bring down poverty incidence in our province. Hence, we must first focus on our situation, get the lessons right from previous plans and projects and determine the approaches, strategies and tools that can best address local poverty and its attendant ills, malnutrition, infant mortality, illiteracy, unemployment, to name a few, with focus on the most marginalized and disadvantaged among the people,  in ways that also protect the environment, foster economic growth  and further enhance local culture and values.

 Quite a mouthful, doubtless an effect of donor-powered inputs, but is this not what sustainability mean in the end?

If we cut through the verbiage, the pursuit of the SDGs, as far as Goal No. 1 is concerned, will require that we know - pause for breath - who are the poor; what are their priority needs; where they are located; which services are already reaching them; what are their sources of livelihood; and how can we help them sustain and improve their income sources to enable them “to liberate themselves from the constraints of underdevelopment.”

This last phrase has been our favorite for decades. We have cited it in countless proposals as part of efforts to squeeze grants from external donors. Just an aside: we have been doing these proposals for more than half a lifetime along with other project planners the world over hoping we can contribute to pro-poor development on this our planet gradually being diminished by all kinds of violence, ecological abuse and on the whole, by bad governance in most nation-states. And yes, in most cases, we all end up a victim by projects badly planned and implemented.

In the final analysis, efforts to localize the SDGs and benefit local communities and households will be through projects expected to be relevant to the lives of the people. These projects are supposedly created by supportive policies and relevant plans resulting in adequate administrative and funding support that will make possible effective multi-level governance.

This collaborative process starts necessarily with a common database which functions as baseline to serve as initial basis for identifying policy gaps and prioritizing interventions to identified problems. Later, it serves to establish the impact of such interventions to the actual situation of households and local communities.

With 17 goals and 169 targets, and presumably hundreds of indicators for both progress and impact monitoring, the new global development agenda will run the risk of overwhelming local government units and their partner NGOs and People’s Organizations with requirements to conduct surveys at community and household levels for activities undertaken in support of each of the 17 SDGs. The world will do nothing but conduct surveys!

As early as this stage, technical inputs are needed from the National Government through the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) to provide timely guidelines on how to facilitate database building in support of the new development agenda which advocates for localization in the pursuit of each of the 17 SDGs.

Let me repeat here what localization means according to a UN Report on this issue:

“Localization refers to the process of defining, implementing and monitoring strategies at the local level for achieving global, national and subnational sustainable development goals and targets. This involves concrete mechanisms, tools, innovations, platforms and processes to effectively translate the development agenda into results at the local level.

“The concept should therefore be understood holistically, beyond the institutions

of local governments, to include all local actors through a territorial approach that includes civil

society, traditional leaders, religious organizations, academia, the private sector and others. We firmly believe, however, that a strong and capable local government provides the fundamental leadership role to bring local stakeholders together.”

As I noted in a previous column, lessons could be learned from localizing the MDGs done in Bohol where a project on localization was implemented in 2005 or five years after the launch of the MDGs. The project was carried out by the Action for Economic Reforms (AER) in partnership with PROCESS Bohol, the Provincial Government of Bohol, Social Watch, La Aldea, and Novib, a Dutch NGO.

European Union provided the funding, The project was implemented in the municipalities of Tubigon, Bilar and Jagna. NEDA Director Erlinda M. Capones said in her message published in the project report, Making a Difference, Localized Monitoring System on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), The Bohol Experience:

“The essence of localizing the MDGs is to build ownership and empower people to better articulate their local needs under the umbrella of an internationally agreed development agenda. Involving the local government, civil society organizations and donors provides a solid basis for sustainable dialogue and a broad-based ‘constituency of support’ for greater policy coherence, resource mobilization, and capacity building. This process of localization will respond to the inherent danger that even if the targets are achieved, the inequalities within a nation across people and places would still persist.”

Her idea reflects basically the same thought expressed by current advocates for the localization of the SDGs, the global agenda for the next 15 years starting in January, 2016:

“Building upon the successes of many localized sustainable development initiatives, the progress towards the MDGs will be determined first and foremost by progress at the local level. In this regard, local actors will need national and global support to develop and strengthen their capacities and generate resources to realizing the MDGs…”

The organizers of the activity hope that the Bohol experience, in localizing the MDGscould be replicated in Tagbilaran City and the other municipalities aside from Tubigon, Bilar and Jagna. For his part, AER Coordinator Filomeno S. Sta. Ana III says: “Our best hope, grand ambition it may be, is to see Bohol’s experience replicated across the country.”

Well, to our dismay probably, neither expectations happened. I believe that this non-event should be the starting point in devising strategies for the localization of the next global development agenda. I have proposed in a previous column that the academe in Bohol, take an active hand in reviewing previous experiences in localizing the MDGs and systematically draw lessons for doing the same for the SDGs.

One area of interest will be the use of several tools at local level to establish the MDG database: DevInfo, Bohol Info, Local Poverty Action Plan (LPRAP) or its advance version Poverty Database Monitoring System (PDMS), MDG Planning Matrix Software, AER MDG Open Source GIS Toolkit.

Later, outside this localization project, DILG promoted the use of the Community-Based Monitoring System (CBMS) while DSWD had its National Household Targeting System (NHTS) both used to establish poverty databases at municipal and local community levels.

I recommend that the academe in Bohol take an active part in this proposed assessment of database tools used at local levels as initial activity for the localization of the SDGs. Of all the institutions here in Bohol, these universities and colleges have the potential to be objective (read: politically neutral) in doing the review of the poverty planning and monitoring tools. They can eventually assume the role of overseeing how the harmonized tools can be used by the Local Government Units, CSOs and all those involved in the planning, implementation and monitoring the SDGs.

The academe can collectively establish an Institute of Governance, Development and Culture to ensure periodic and systematic decluttering of development advocacies and tools and thus achieve the often elusive continuity of policies, plans and programs in support of an international development agenda. Then we can proceed to build a case to get a significant share from the UN allocations if we succeed to show that the project concept will be pertinent to Bohol and other provinces in the country.

This idea was first thought of years ago upon the retirement of Atty. Nitz Cambangay from PPDO. He was serving concurrently as BLDF Vice Chair and shared our vision to establish an entity that could address the lack of sustainability in plans and programs for which vast resources are spent by the Government and its development partners from year to year, from one development decade to another.

When he passed away, the dream vanished with him. Let’s see if we can get support to revive the idea in this era of the SDGs. For comments, email: npestelos@gmail.com #SDGsbohol