The compartmentalisation and resulting shortcomings of many specialised government line agencies are in contrast with traditional NRM institutions that are "holistic", and, although at other levels often "specialised" (section 2.4.(i)), cross-sectoral. Land, water, and health, for example, are concerns informally handled by customary leaders used to consult each other regularly to discuss the problems arising until an agreement is reached on how to proceed (section 2); including, if necessary, a call for government or other "outside assistance"[77].
Rural development and NRM requires a high degree of policy fine-tuning to different local conditions. An advantage of traditional institutions is that they are genuinely local, and that they may also be, as in Mali, present at higher up levels of government. Conversely, in many countries, below a certain level there is absolutely no official representation of the state. In both Mozambique and Yemen, the lowest state representation is the district, in Mali, the rural commune. In any case, it is never the village[78], which does not have legal personality. But it is precisely at this level that we normally find the traditional institutions that could sustain genuinely community-based NRM.
Yet, due to a mix of historical, cultural and socio-political circumstances, the social capital embodied in traditional community leaders should sometimes be "tapped" only with great care, as much of that capital, although grounded in traditional networks of mutual assistance and solidarity (section 2.4), is also nested in clientelistic relations among kinship groups of unequal social status. Policymakers and development managers need to be aware of the pros and cons of giving a (more) prominent role to traditional and neo-traditional leaders in envisaged initiatives, and of the implications of making them (again), consciously or against their intentions, intermediaries between government (and international development agencies) and civil society. Although this may ensure local patronage and increased "ownership", it may under certain circumstances work against the long-term goals of promoting the "thickening of civil society" (Fox, 1996) that would push for democratic and forward-looking local governance, and increased participation in political development and economic progress.
On the other hand, the conventional run-of-the-mill approach of creating new local development and NRM committees engenders a number of problems, above all in terms of local social legitimacy. These committees will legally (not necessarily in fact) replace all or at least part of already existing, traditional organising practices. The latter are not usually acknowledged by those putting the ‘modern’ committees in place, let alone are they studied, understood or built upon. The trick, then, is to improve existing committees: concerning group decision-making, for example, there are clear advantages in anchoring mechanisms in the locally derived spectrum of legitimacy discussed above (section 4). The unanimity rule applied to most local NRM concerns, and upheld by traditional community leaders (section 2.1), means that ultimately decisions need to be based on consensus. Rather than resting on notions derived from the exogenous concept of democracy, the gradual achievement of consensus is based on endogenous procedural norms.
Yet, the norms linked to traditional institutions and leadership should be scrutinised as to their genuineness and legitimacy, and the problem of causality (the "chicken-and-egg" question): traditional authority may at times be the precise reason why certain traditional norms have become such in the first place (Le Roy 1996), and may no longer be discernible as an arbitrary injection into the collective consciousness (see, e.g., the discussion of modern versus traditional tasks in Mozambique, section 3). Where they persist, objectionable traditional practices that discriminate against certain population groups (section 2.5), for instance, against women, or in relation to the descendants of former slaves, are less likely to be problematic in areas of relative ethnic homogeneity. According to Bruce (FAO 1999b), "it seems likely that the negative elements of community organization of resource use are more vulnerable to development itself, than to our well-meant attempts to outlaw them or require that they be abandoned as a condition of collaboration with such institutions" (72). Thus, the question to accompany an endorsement, however informal, of customary decision-making by "outsiders" should be: consensus at what price?
Nelson and Wright (1995) remind us that "Before attempting to shift power in a system it is important that the basis of existing and future institutional arrangements are well understood" (13). More specifically, Bonfiglioli (1997) finds that "in the specific context of development initiatives or of political-administrative decentralisation, the balance among the different dimensions or configurations of authority is often destabilised and their more or less coherent integration destroyed[79]" (pers. comm.).
In conclusion, bearing in mind the issues to investigate beforehand, and the caveats discussed above, it can be postulated that more often than not, a much increased role of traditional structures in decentralisation and NRM programmes would indeed be beneficial and appropriate, especially on the grounds of sustainability. In the long run, this would contribute to adapt some of the concepts contained in the colonial construct of the nation-state to new forms and institutional arrangements. The latter may be much closer to the organisational culture, life-world and knowledge systems of a majority of diverse and heterogenous population groups (especially the rural poor), thus enhancing their political and economic participation. To achieve this is difficult but not impossible, but it requires that a great deal of sensitive and often complex issues are looked into.
The human right to self-determination should ensure that the democratisation process, a development objective by itself, does not overlook the important traditions and organising practices of people whose livelihoods were sustained by their agricultural and natural resource base long before the advent of national governments and rural development programmes, and will in all likelihood continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Diminishing state interventions in rural areas in conjunction with persisting selected market failures have resuscitated and/or increased the role of certain traditional institutions such as chiefs, sheikhs, councils of elders, etc.
Fieldwork has shown that the significance of this hypothesis is much constrained by the fact that in the specific rural areas under review, the presence of the state has historically been very thin, so that there has not been any noticeable diminishing of its interventions as a result of government restructuring. The extent to which an increased role of traditional structures has been determined by market failures is very difficult to disentangle in causal relationships, so that it would make more sense to speak of selected "institutional failures".
Lundin (1999) finds that: "Traditional Authorities in Mozambique have always been present in their communities of origin, acting often "under cover" in community life. If anything has contributed to the reinforcement of their role, one could point to the fact that the state has not yet managed to provide services to the rural areas, schools, hospitals, law and order, and so on. However, even if the state will be able to eventually fulfill the role of facilitating development and market mechanisms to structure commercialisation, it is likely that traditional authority will persist in its capacity of community leader. It is an important part of the cultural universe of Africans; the structuring of the personality of an individual is in a certain way related to this authority. Thus, it is more likely that the role of traditional authority will be re-arranged within the social dynamics of community life, with greater, the same, minor, or even without contact to the modern state"[81].
In Mali, the experience of the village-hamlet creation process has pointed to an increased role of certain traditional community institutions, particularly those involved in land management and conflict resolution, legitimised by their symbolic link to, and power over, the territory. In many rural areas, these could be termed "neo-traditional", not so much because of their re-emergence within territorial restructuring programmes, but in the sense that the gradual, historical super-imposition at the village level of modern structures "on top of" traditional ones has encouraged the latter to reinvent and adapt themselves in order to be able to participate in the modern institutional setting in one way or another. Their control of rice plantations, for example, provides customary institutions with new forms of customary leadership. This is so much so that the traditional loan principle is increasingly regarded as a risk, due to the fact that the borrowers after a few years claim rights of inheritance, invoking national legislation, by which all land belongs to the state, and calling into question the rights of the lender. The emergence of commercial rice cultivation and sedentary breeding (milch cows, draught animals) show that the new forms of cohabition are rather more conflictive[82].
If traditional community institutions are integrated more meaningfully into decentralised rural development initiatives the net benefits outweigh the net costs, provided that their role is formalised to the appropriate extent, clarified, and endorsed by all stakeholders involved.
Regarding this hypothesis, Lundin (1999) finds that: "[In Mozambique] a certain measure of integration at some sectoral levels exists already, for example in the case of agricultural extension, health, and the work of the NGOs. But it is diluted in the personal attitudes of people and the attitude of the established power holders present in the different zones of the country. There exists no formalisation of this integration in laws, decrees, or sectoral directives. As far as such formalisation is concerned, any potential step to be taken in this direction should be carefully considered beforehand. Traditional authority is an institution that is legitimised in community settings, in the sphere of a community civil society of an agricultural base. In case that this instrument of legitimation is transferred from a civil to a state level, this authority would lose its intrinsic assets and would probably become frozen in time. It would thereby gradually lose its value of representation of civil society in the niches that it occupies at present, this representativity being its most important quality in interactions with the state, NGOs, and so on"[83].
Although the case of Mozambique is instructive with respect to the inclusion of traditional institutions in decentralisation policy, it would seem too early to allow for a qualified assessment of this hypothesis. The integration of traditional structures into decentralised rural development initiatives has until present only been observed on a relatively minor scale, and this only fairly recently. By taking local development plans and regional policies as a starting point, an assessment of the benefits and costs of such an articulation will depend on the objectives to be achieved. No generalisation can be extrapolated from the present research findings as such, but locality-specific examples have been given to illustrate which points of the state-civil society interface need to typically be investigated.
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[77] Increasingly, for
example, traditional leaders appeal for help from GO and NGOs to deal with
AIDS. [78] As writes O. Dubois (1997): "In Francophone West African countries, the village does not represent a government level. It is never recognised as an administrative level, i.e. with legal power to negotiate contracts, enforce laws, carry out financial transactions, and so on78" (page 6, emphasis added; see also section 4 above). [79] He continues: "It is what has happened in many West African countries (like Niger), for instance, where the "trade-off" between the chef de guerre and the chef de terre within the same tribal groupings was ignored by the colonial administration (and, subsequently, by the independent states and by development programmes). In other situations, for instance among the touareg nomadic pastoral societies like the kel tamasheq in Mali and Niger, the complementarity and 'rapport de force' existing between caste-like groupings, such as the ineslem (religious élite) and imajeghen (warriors), was misunderstood. Among the nomadic fulbe (fulani), on the contrary, the charismatic and functional role of 'pastoral guides' or 'senior scouts', in charge of looking for good pastures for the herding/migratory group, has too quickly been translated into political terms" (pers. comm.). [80] Originally there were three research hypotheses. The one dropped mid-way, after extensive discussion, is the following: "Until present the objectives of decentralisation have not been achieved because of the "seizure" of decentralisation measures by local élites, a shortcoming that can be seriously redressed only in as far as innovative and judicious ways are found to appropriately integrate traditional institutions". In its most naked form, this hypothesis postulates that decentralisation has simply replaced the urban technocracy with the rural aristocracy (or, even, theocracy). In sum, in the countries under review, decentralisation processes have predominantly been confined to urban areas, where the authority of the type of traditional institutions discussed here is weak, or else, where they have included rural areas in any significant way, rural traditional institutions have to varying degrees found to be part of that élite themselves. [81] Translated from Portuguese by the author. [82] Thus the behaviour of the bellah and peul transmigrants (foulane criabé) and of the dogons is viewed badly in the areas receiving them. Their reputation for clandestine felling of trees is a source of conflict. The urgency of this situation implies that the practice of "disguised share-cropping" and the complaints regarding the loans made in the framework of the land use and settlement plans of Sourou valley, constitute sources of frustration for the immigrants (who lend the land). Also, the persistent spreading of rumours on the possibility of nationalising the land under these land use and settlement plans (following the example of the Office Riz and of the Office du Niger) add to a climate of mistrust. [83] Translated from Portuguese by the author. |
