For The Bohol Tribune
In This Our Journey
NESTOR MANIEBO PESTELOS
On the eve of the formal announcement by the United Nations, due to happen next month, about the adoption of a new set of global development goals to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it will be best for us in Bohol to revisit key issues and concerns about the MDGs and the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
The first issue is the question why bother at all about the SDGs, same query made about its predecessor, the MDGs, some fifteen years ago. The reality is that majority of the world’s inhabitants, particularly those who are poor and marginalized, are not even aware that these goals exist. They are busy grappling with day-to-day problems related to survival to bother about these global goals.
Millions out there who remain burdened by poverty and its attendant ills do not know, or they do not even care to know, these globally-defined aspirations, a result of an intricate process of consultations and consensus-building activities, paid for mostly by member-countries of the UN. The target clientele of poverty reduction programs , desperately but like most Filipinos, gleefully, hanging between survival and physical extinction cannot be expected to recite the global development goals much less explain the impact of such goals to their lives.
In 2005, while working with Habitat for Humanity International as regional manager for Southeast Asia, I chanced upon a video used by an NGO during briefing sessions on the MDGs. In less than five minutes, it showed what seemed to be wrong in the advocacy for the global development agenda: despite the hype and the expensive concerts beamed throughout the world in the initial years of the MDG advocacy, the message of what it intended to do was not received at all by ordinary people who were supposed to benefit from them.
The initial scenes show world leaders like Kofi Annan, Bill Clinton, and Francoise Mitterrand talking about eliminating poverty, hunger and disease presumably by pursuing the MDGs. Scarlett Johnsen says nations spend more for military weapons in three weeks than for poverty reduction programs for one year. Flamboyant singer Bono declares in typical histrionic fashion that this generation will be the first to see poverty eliminated, not reduced – mind you, on the planet. He is probably now eating his words if not the lyrics of the songs he composed during the period.
Madonna is shown singing while holding the hand of the Indian girl, now grown-up, rescued from illiteracy and poverty. This text is shown on screen while she sings: “Star power have been used to lobby for global poverty reduction. But despite all the publicity, many people seem not aware about the MDGs.”
To support this point, the video shows representatives of farmers, students, vendors, old people, the youth – yes, from all walks of life supposed to get involved and benefit from global pro-poor MDGs. Asked individually on what is meant by MDGs, five years after the global concerts and massive information campaigns held both nationally and internationally, the respondents say MDGs mean – hold your breath- a bird, a book, a TV show, a radio station, an airline, fertilizer, a bomb!
Someone says it is an acronym, which is quite obvious, while another mutters that it means Micro Dynamic Giraffe. Others seem to be stunned to have a response. One responded to say he has no idea at all what the global MDGs mean. Hence, this is the basic issue to contend with, in this task to make MDGs known by the very people who will benefit from this new development agenda.
I hope those who promote the new agenda will learn lessons from previous experiences in promoting MDGs as pro-poor development agenda
In Bohol, we used to interview applicants in projects and one question we asked was if they knew anything about MDGs. We estimated only three out of ten cases knew what the acronym means. This indicates that even in academic institutions, in colleges or universities, no systematic program had been adopted to create awareness about the MDGs.
These students, most of whom come from the poor, are potential agents to spread messages about poverty-related matters far and wide throughout the province. No wonder that when they do community volunteer work, they see everything except the faces of poverty and deprivation in the people they are supposed to help.
Later, in the course of our NGO work, we realized that perhaps the focus should not be on the acronym for the global agenda, that it may be quixotic for us to expect that the people should be reciting the goals and know the acronym as primary information to understanding the global agenda. It seems to us now that the best way to promote the global agenda, adopted supposedly as planning framework at municipal and barangay levels, is to just focus on the relevant needs and the expected services to be delivered to specific target groups based on local plans using the MDGs as framework.
Hence, the focus of so-called capacitation efforts from the national and sub-national levels is how to provide relevant technical inputs to enable the formulation of local plans based on specific needs identified through the use of the global development agenda.
In our opinion, localizing the SDGs should start with giving local partners the right to be creative in naming the SDG-based program at their level. While the world community has had almost three decades using and debating about what sustainability means in ecological, economic, cultural and social context, we must avoid the previous mistake of worshopping the people to death by too much emphasis on definitions rather than on actual identification of needs and what can be done at local government and community levels to address those needs.
It is also important that a consensus be created on whom to target first and the priority barangays or municipalities to assist based on mutually-agreed tools designed to produce an objective or politically neutral database on actual needs and priority groups or “poverty landscapes” deserving to get the bulk of external assistance.
Based on our experience in doing development work in Bohol and communities outside the country, which are relatively more disadvantaged than others in terms of geographic location, culture, political and religious affiliation, this initial planning task presents constraints which prevent a global development agenda to be carried out as basis for local plans and programs.
There is generally no capacity at subnational and local levels to technically assess the local development situation and realign plans, programs and projects from year to year according to the new requirements called for by changes in the situation of priority target groups or communities.
Pro-poor planning and targeting tools have multiplied to the confusion of the local governments. Rather than enhance the capacity to identify target groups and localities, facilitate the delivery of services to those most in need, the promotion of several tools make it impossible for local governments to establish a baseline as basis for tracking progress.
Aside from the proverbial lack of resources to address priority development problems, the available funds are misappropriated through corruption and political patronage. The other local institutions such as the Church, civil society and academic institutions are immersed in their parochial interests that they are prevented from being effective forces of hope and enlightenment to influence local decision making which affects the direction of resource allocation and local-level development.
The simple matter of documenting project experiences and extracting lessons is left solely in the hands of the planners and implementers without validation from academic institutions and other objective entities. Hence, what is called monitoring and evaluation in most projects has become an expensive and useless exercise to recycle planning assumptions and selective narration of milestones and accomplishments – or the benefit of donors and their partner entities. An objective assessment project experiences has become impossible to undertake.
Bohol reflects the situation of most provinces in the country as a whole and probably other subnational governance levels in the developing world. It is littered with the corpses of failed projects carried out more as pilot undertakings supported by external donors and in some cases, international agencies, who dominate the local development scene without regard to the local situation.
They promote their own tools, templates for planning and analysis without regard to local tools and initiatives previously undertaken and tested to determine who are the real poor and what pertinent services could be delivered to them within a predetermined time frame.
On the other hand, local government units and target poor communities lack the will and resilience to resist impertinent, redundant and wasteful tools and methodologies promoted by external agencies who backstop their respective advocacies with funds that local people and their local governments cannot resist. This is the insight that we now bring to this supposedly new thinking about localization as a strong feature of the new global development agenda.
In the previous column, I quoted UN Secretary-General Bank Ki Moon who says:
“It is often said that, like all politics, all development is ultimately local. As the world strives for a more sustainable path in the years ahead, particularly beyond 2015, local voices and local action will be crucial elements in our quest… it is crucial to preserve and nurture political spaces where local authorities can have an impact on decision-making at the global level. Local authorities have significantly increased their engagement in global processes. The inputs of local leaders and municipal planners have never been more critical …”
The message is given more specific content by UNDP Administrator Helen Clark:
“Many of the critical challenges of implementing the Post-2015 Development Agenda will depend heavily on local planning and service delivery, community buy in and local leadership; well-coordinated with the work of other levels of governance. Accountable local governments can promote strong local partnerships with all local stakeholders –civil society, private sector, etc–. Integrated and inclusive local development planning that involves all stakeholders is a key instrument to promoting ownership and the integration of the three dimensions of sustainable development –social, economic and environmental .”
In line with these policy statements, a consultation process involving representative countries and stakeholders have been conducted on Localizing SDGs these key issues and concerns:
“How will the Post-2015 Development Agenda be implemented at the local level? What local governance processes, tools, institutions, mechanisms, and other means of implementation are needed to achieve the future Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? How can the voices of local stakeholders be amplified and their inclusion in the intergovernmental processes be supported?”
I do not want to douse the enthusiasm of friends and colleagues who have become euphoric in reading these pronouncements. Nothing new with these issues actually. Our planners and development workers have wrestled with these key issues and concerns the past thirty years in this country and in most places in the developing world.
The task now is to revisit these experiences, make sure about the lessons learned from our collective undertakings as CSOs, NGOs and LGUs and use this learning as lens to evaluate the recommendations to be announced after the UN summit of 14 to 15 September this year.
Let us be resolute enough to address constraints more effectively in localizing the new development agenda. Let us have continuity in projects rather than have only pilot projects done in clusters over and over again.
We have had this way of doing development work for decades. About time we find the will to localize global agenda based on hard-earned lessons from previous experiences. Otherwise the pursuit of the new goals will be a grandiose exercise in futility. #BLDFsustainabledevgoals
NMP/06Aug2015/10.34 a.m.
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