Articles > David Westendorff

Uneasy Partnerships between City Hall and Citizens
David Westendorff, UNRISD

Background and Introduction
When the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, Habitat I, was held in Vancouver, Canada, in 1976, the design and implementation of programmes and policies to address the problems of housing and human settlements were seen to be the almost exclusive responsibility of governments. At that time, it was still generally believed that rapid urbanization could be slowed and its negative effects mitigated. Contrary to these optimistic projections, urbanization has continued unabated in many parts of the world. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the majority of the world’s population will be living in cities, and by some estimates that proportion will increase to two thirds by the year 2025. The number of mega cities (cities with populations over 8 million), which are often characterized as “ungovernable” as a result of the seemingly intractable nature and concentration of social problems they encompass, grew from two in 1950 to 21 in 1990. Sixteen of these are in developing countries. By the year 2015, the number of mega cities is expected to reach 33, with 27 in developing countries.

Today civil society plays a crucial role in finding and implementing solutions to the problems of urbanization, and it appears that this role will only grow in the coming decades. People’s organizations, such as community-based organizations (CBOs), grassroots movements and volunteer groups at the very basis of civil society, see no future in permanent confrontation or competition with the state. Rather, they want a responsible and competent state at all levels - one that is responsive and accountable to the needs of all people. In many countries, achieving this will require reforms that strengthen local governments in ways that enable them to become better partners with local communities in implementing bottom-up development strategies. And, for such reforms to achieve optimal results, civil society organizations at the local level will have to be strengthened as well.

To address these needs a joint project was developed by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) and the United Nations Volunteers Programme (UNV): Volunteer Action and Local Democracy: A Partnership for a Better Urban Future. The goal was to identify the successes of, and constraints on, collaborations between CBOs and volunteer organizations, on one side, and local governments, on the other, in designing, implementing and evaluating social and economic policy at the local level, and to use this information to initiate and inform a dialogue among local actors about concrete ways of enhancing future collaborations of this kind.

This was the second UNRISD-UNV multi-city action research project, and was undertaken as both a follow-up to the World Summit for Social Development and as a contribution to the Habitat II conference held in Istanbul in June 1996. Provisional findings of some 20 case studies conducted in Chicago, Johannesburg-Soweto, Lima, Mumbai, and S„o Paulo, along with related research in East St. Louis (USA), Ho Chi Minh City (Viet Nam) and Jinja (Uganda), were first discussed at an international workshop in Kumburgaz, Turkey during the last week in May 1996. These preliminary findings were then synthesized and presented at Habitat II. Since then, a process of dialogue and action research continued in most of the cities, and this is reflected in a number of the studies that have been finalized as late as this year. Additional work was also conducted in six Chinese cities in 1997, drawing on earlier VALD studies and collaborators in addition to those from the Chinese government and academic institutions.
This article is divided into three sections following this introduction. In order they review the focus and methodology of the VALD project, its preliminary findings dating from Habitat II, a synthesis of the overall findings of the project concerning factors tending to hinder effective collaborations between local authorities and community and volunteer organizations, and, finally, some recommendations for local authorities interested in enhancing the quality of their collaborations with community and volunteer organizations.

Project Focus and Methodology
The collaborations that the project sought to document were those demonstrating an active, non-exploitative partnership between agencies of the government operating at the local level and community organizations. In such relationships the community, through its volunteer and civic organizations, exercises its right to participate in decisions concerning the allocation of resources at the local level. Community members are not merely purveyors of free or below-market price labour or materials in return for services or complementary resources from the state. The relationships they seek, rather than creating political or economic dependencies (as often happens in participation-as-subcontractor schemes), are partnerships that create skills, knowledge and the capacity to organize effectively among community members, and open channels for democratizing information and decision-making processes at the local level. Such relationships are termed “non-co-optive” or “enabling”.
The project made a strong effort to engage key actors at the local level, and especially government authorities and community organizations (together with their supporters elsewhere in the local civil society) in a dialogue on how to improve the possibilities for such “enabling relationships”. The project used the Habitat II conference as a pretext for initiating these dialogues in a set of large cities on four continents.
Preliminary Findings and Recommendations Presented at Habitat II

In each of the project’s core cities (Chicago, Johannesburg-Soweto, Lima, Mumbai and S„o Paulo) draft case studies and overview papers were completed during spring 1996 and discussed at each city’s “City Meeting”. The findings and recommendations from each of these meetings are synthesized with the main findings of the case studies and overview paper. These draft “City Case Studies” were then discussed in Kumburgaz, Turkey (27-30 May 1996), resulting in the preliminary findings and recommendations presented at Habitat II:

• Community-local authority collaborations exist in all the cities surveyed. However, the picture of collaborations with local authorities painted by community organizations and their interlocutors is a sobering one.
• The genuineness - or degree of partnership - that characterizes these collaborations varies greatly from city to city and between collaborations within cities. CBOs and local associations remain too weak and disconnected to propel change; instead, they are “takers” or “implementers” of policy change initiated from above.
• True power sharing relationships between community organizations of marginal or vulnerable groups and local authorities are, in fact, rare. And those partnerships that appear to be genuine may turn out to be less than that on closer examination. The direct impact on policy formulation by community and volunteer organizations is extremely limited. Governments still appear to play the dominant role in promoting change. They are followed in importance by NGOs, which have the capacity to lobby upward and organize downward, while accessing external resources that allow them some independence from domestic power brokers.
• Many of the most positive collaborations appear to depend on the support of sympathetic officials, often in high places. Others often mask clientelist relationships and practices. Even democratically elected urban administrations supported by progressive political parties are not immune to such practices. In either case, the lack of institutional supports that buttress democratic state-civil society relationships - such as legal structures, administrative regulations and norms protecting and promoting the rights of communities to organize themselves and to participate in decision-making; the existence of strong community organizations; broad access by community organizations to information influencing decisions affecting life and livelihood, and the like - hamper the development of genuine partnerships between local authorities and vulnerable or marginalized groups.
* Even where strong community organizations do exist, collaborations with local authorities often begin a process of co-optation or demobilization from within the organization. Efforts at advocacy, community organizing and consciousness raising formerly undertaken by the community group may deteriorate once the organization becomes saddled with responsibilities for delivering and managing “public services”. New and very different responsibilities often reorient the priorities of small organizations away from their original constituency.
• External forces also erode the basis for community action and genuine partnerships with local authorities. Economic restructuring has impoverished many communities, lessening the health, leisure time and confidence individuals and families need to organize themselves. At the same time, the prevailing ideological climate reinforces sentiments against demands made by the poor on the state. In many cities, the poor have been characterized as part of the problem - a burden on the city and the rest of its residents, rather than a symptom of inegalitarian social and economic systems. In this scenario, it is becoming easier to manipulate and divide disadvantaged groups with identity politics. Failing to establish and maintain internal cohesiveness, communities are less capable of negotiating with local authorities from a position of strength.

The less-than-positive assessment of the impact of community organizations on policy and on resource distribution does not deny that the experiences covered in these studies had many positive side effects. The collaborations clearly benefited participating individuals and organizations and, as pilot projects, they provided some useful lessons.
Recommendations for enhancing the environment in which genuine collaborations can grow were outlined in three broad areas: institutionalization, capacity building and resources. Among the points highlighted were the need for constitutional and legal structures to protect and promote partnerships between local authorities and community organizations; capacity building for CBOs, NGOs and local authorities, including training and regulatory structures to help them develop and maintain internally democratic practices; reorienting the education of planners, architects and urban management specialists so that participatory action-research (PAR) with community organizations becomes a standard operating procedure; locating and allocating resources at the local level to make it possible for community organizations to assume responsibilities in decision-making with local authorities.

Since Habitat II, research, dialogue and analysis in the project cities has gone well beyond these initial findings and recommendations. Because of space constraints, the rest of this article focuses only the major factors found to be hindering collaborations between community organizations and local authorities, and a few crucial recommendations to help cities make internal adjustments to promote genuine collaborations in the future.

Factors Hindering Effective Volunteer Efforts in Collaborations with Local Authorities
This section of the report consists of a summary of factors that hinder the establishment of effective collaborations between community organizations and local authorities. These are divided into six general categories of factors:

1. External Social/Political/Cultural Environment
2. Conditions and Attitudes of Local Authorities
3. Structure of Collaborations
4. Roles, Functions and Attitudes of Intermediary Organizations
5. Capacity of Volunteer Organizations
6. Capacity of Individuals (Volunteers)

None of the individual collaborations studied were affected by all of these factors, nor were all characteristic of the project cities. But multiple constraints were the rule for all collaborations and cities. This should not be surprising. If it were otherwise, there would few challenges to improving governance at the local level. The project suggest, however, that the challenges are many and occur at a variety of levels, from the individual to the macro-society.

The factors ‘hindering’ collaborations are not matched by a list of those ‘enhancing’. The positive scenario is easy to imagine, and is also readily available in many forms, including the action agendas of the major UN Summits, international covenants and the charters of numerous international bodies promoting good governance, the numerous guides to partnership and participation in development projects and programmes produced by international agencies, etc.

This list is provided to help organizations engaged in grassroots interventions in low-income urban settings. Its chief use is as a check-list when considering the feasibility of intervention, and at what level. The list should also encourage the development of indicators of progress for intervention in urban areas. Over time, has the environment changed to be more or less hospitable to collaborations between local authorities and community organizations? In what way? What do the key actors need to do to promote such change?

External Social/Political/Cultural Environment
A fractious party-political environment, resulting in frequent changes of leadership in municipalities, can retard the evolution of positive interaction between community groups and local authorities. On the one hand, policies encouraging genuine participation in grassroots level decision making can be easily undone, or on the other, civic (volunteer) impulses can be diverted to serving clients (particularistic interests) versus those of the larger vulnerable community.

Traditions of clientelism die hard, even in formally democratic states and cities. Political leaders and non-elected members of urban authorities still derive popular support from such practices. These, of course, work against truly civic volunteer contributions because their chief aim is to maintain the power of an individual and system that supports her/him rather than to promote well-being of the larger group.
Macro-economic policies and/or administrative reforms that radically increase the role of market forces in daily life can expand or contract opportunities for volunteer action in urban communities. The imposition of structural adjustment policies were seen to stimulate some forms of organizing for survival that in the short run accomplished the purpose. But there is also evidence that too much competition between individuals and groups can have negative impacts in the long run. Organizations of survival have neither the resources nor the outlook to create, plan and organize activities that change inequitable social structures.

The lack of administrative rules and legislation protecting and promoting collaborations with volunteer groups and other civil society organizations are a major hindrance to effective participation of grassroots actors in urban decision-making. In only one of the cities studied was such legislation on the books. However, the implementation of the legislation remains stalled 5 years after promulgation. Authorities are therefore able to treat civic participation as a discretionary, rather than mandatory, area of governance.

Decentralization is expanding the latitude of cities to adopt policies to enhance social integration in the local space. This occurs primarily by leaving to the local authorities the setting of social policy and, to an even larger extent, its implementation. While the capacity to implement such policy is in question because the resources needed to implement them may not accompany decision making autonomy, the city allocate certain economic activities to enhance the status of poor and/or marginal groups. Opportunities for this were found in solid waste collection, environmental protection and housing provision. Unfortunately, the authorities were unwilling to explore these possibilities to their logical extension and important advantages to the poor were lost.

In all the cities of the study, there appears to be a willingness (at the level of action, if not rhetoric) to back away from the role of mediator of the public good. Market mechanisms are given much greater sway than would be expected from the recent history and politics of the city.

The rapid expansion and differentiation within the NGO sector, coupled with the increasing ‘marketisation’ of their roles, especially as service contractors, has created great confusion about and solid resistance among local authorities to working with NGOs. Local authorities have expressed legitimate concerns about the representativeness, accountability, governance structures and ambitions of many NGOs, CBOs and other CSOs.

Communities with a strong tradition of mutual assistance have a better chance of developing the local organizations that can effectively interact with local authorities in efforts to improve urban living conditions. Conversely, urban communities comprising large numbers of migrants of diverse origins have more difficulties organizing themselves, or being organized with the help of external agents (e.g. NGOs, religious groups, municipal agencies, etc.)

Violence and insecurity stemming from the increasing prevalence of extra-legal force and intimidation tactics diminish the capacity of communities to organize and pursue collective social goals. Public institutions, churches and all manner of volunteer organizations suffer the threat of arms. Individuals who would otherwise participate in public-spirited activites resist the impulse in order to unnecessarily sacrifice their lives and their families’ well-being.

Conditions and Attitudes of Local Authorities
In none of the cities studied did there exist a strong tradition of incorporating community and volunteer groups in significant decision-making processes. In practice, ignoring grassroots actors was closer to the rule.

The relative impoverishment of local authorities (as compared with central and intermediate governing bodies) appears to exacerbate sentiments of envy and distrust toward civil society groups, who are often seen as competing from resources that would otherwise go to the local authority.

Non-transparent behaviour and restricted information flows characterize most of the local authorities - even those considered open to community participation - in the study. This continues to disempower volunteer action across the spectrum of urban governance.

Corruption and/or lack of internal accountability within local authorities permits positive action taken by one branch of local authorities to stymie or block positive change brought about by other branches in collaboration with community groups.

Local authorities are inclined to take an instrumental view of participation, i.e. to welcome it when the community and volunteer groups provide labour, material inputs or, simply, the faÁade of democratic decision-making that allows an otherwise top-down project to go forward. Even the most ‘participatory’ local authorities fear too much genuine participation.

The exceedingly low level of fiscal and administrative capacity of local authorities often prevents them from being able to join as effective partners with community and volunteer groups. They may neither know how to interact or work with community groups nor have any significant material resources they can bring to the collaboration.

Decentralization in new democracies or newly democratised municipal entities, when combined with weak local government capacity and a willingness by the local authority to back away from its role as mediator of the public good, can result in highly undemocratic governance.

Despite the high-level of women’s contribution to the collaborations studied and women’s dominant role in the management of low-income communities, traditional forms of sexism and class bias diminish were evident in the local authorities and, were likely to have reduced the positive impact that women could have been having in their communities.

Structure of Collaborations
Partnerships - relationships in which the partners take genuine responsibility for achieving one another’s objectives — were absent in the study. All cases selected for analysis were chosen because they were perceived to represent partnerships. None, however, came close to this ideal.

Related to the previous point, power imbalances usually favour local authorities and/or, secondarily, intermediaries such as NGOs. In no cases have the community organizations been able to ‘drive’ the agenda. Some instances did exist where community and volunteer groups were able to block a proposed action for some time, but none could do so permanently.

Local authorities are often less stable ‘players’ than community participants. This results from changes of political leadership, administrative transfers of important decision makers, internal reorganizations or major shifts in policy. Mutual trust and established collaborations are often sacrificed when key contacts in local government are lost. This has a high cost to volunteer organizations because they must continually convince and persuade new functionaries of the value of collaboration and joint decision-making.

Collaborations are too often based on relations with a sympathetic politician or bureaucrat. Such personalized interaction/collaborations are fragile, at best, and clientilistic, at worst.
None of the collaborations studied contained formal procedures for record keeping, monitoring or evaluation. As a result, data on the conduct of the collaborations had to be acquired from a variety of non-systematic sources. This lack of formal institutional memory not only makes the analysis of the collaborations more difficult and tenuous but also results in lost opportunities for building on past experience.
Roles, Functions and Attitudes of Intermediary Organizations1

Intermediary organizations such as Nongovernmental Development Organizations, grassroots support organizations, voluntary agencies associated with church groups or international NGOs and certain collectives of academic and professionals are crucial actors in all of the cities in this study. They often serve as conduits of information and/or mediators between local authorities and grassroots urban organizations. These institutions also provide training, contacts and, sometimes, direct financial support to the community level organizations. At present, it appears difficult to conceive of CBOs and other grassroots volunteer organizations of vulnerable groups carrying out effective collaborations without the support of such intermediaries. At the same time, the following observations can be offered about the roles of such organizations:

As mentioned above in the section on the general environment for CSO-local authority collaborations, the rapid expansion of NGOs in development work has also given rise to some doubt about their motivations, competence and commitment to civic action. Many NGOs have become service providers or social sector consultants, leaving behind - if they ever had them - orientations toward empowerment or advocacy for the poor. This is not entirely surprising as in many cases, especially in formerly authoritarian countries, funding for the opposition groups dried up when democratic governments came in. These organizations either dissolve or find ways to survive, the latter often by selling services. Some of these same NGOs lost their top cadres to the newly democratic governments, putting further at risk the ideals these organizations professed in the era of opposition.

Some intermediaries are more successful than others in promoting and accompanying institutional development and autonomy in urban grassroots organizations
Unfortunately, there are simply too few intermediary organizations capable of undertaking large scale organizing and capacity building of autonomous volunteer organizations in the vast slums and bidonvilles of many of the world’s megacities.

Capacity of Volunteer Organizations
Volunteer organizations, such as neighbourhood associations, community based organizations, mother’s clubs, housing cooperatives, etc. typically draw their strength and material resources from within, i.e. their members. Thus an organization’s strength has much to do with the capacity of its individual members (see next section), its access to information and capacity building (see previous section) and the possibility to exist and develop in a democratic way (i.e. without stifling regulation or repression from the government or inhospitable local forces). In all the cities studied this last condition was met. The grassroots organizations also typically had access to strong, civic-minded intermediaries. The capacity of the members was a problem, however, especially individual’s ability to remain in a state of mobilization over the long term. The constraints acting at this level are described in the next section.

Internal democracy is an acknowledged ideal for both NGOs and CBOs. For many of the grassroots organizations covered in the case studies, such ideals were sometimes more honoured in their. This does not mean that the organizations did not have democratic impulses or goals, rather that adverse conditions - such as changes in leadership, external political forces or internal corruption - did at times divert the organization’s trajectory.

The urban poor are rarely a homogenous lot. They can be highly stratified even in their vulnerability. This shows itself in the attitudes of different groups and in the community organizations that serve separate subsets of the poor. Among groups with different ‘vulnerability profiles’ residing side by side, the most vulnerable will not necessarily benefit from the efforts of the groups representing the less vulnerable. In practice, relations between the groups can be highly conflictual. Such circumstances reduce the possibility of effective approaches to resolution of problems affecting both groups.
In politically fractious environments, and even when party politics across the spectrum have been completely discredited, volunteer organizations may become targets for capture by ‘political bosses’ or leaders with political ambitions.

Community organizations of the urban poor can rarely access by themselves information needed to protect themselves and/or their neighbourhood. Nor are they adequately prepared to interact publicly or in private with local authorities or to develop independently the kinds of analysis of the urban economy that will sway private developers or city agencies to protect the rights and interests of members of the low income community. In these situations it is crucial for grassroots organizations to have access to reliable information and analysis from NGO or research institutes.
The internal strength of community and volunteer organizations can be enhanced effectively if, in addition to access to strong intermediaries and information, they learn to ‘organize themselves to learn’. This means becoming participants in action research, whereby they collect and analyse in progressively sophisticated ways the information needed to become effective advocates for change both within their community and in the larger society.

Capacity of Individuals (Volunteers)
Individuals in low-income communities who because of the objective conditions of their lives have highly restricted mobility, chronic health problems or extremely limited mental functions will not be able to take an active role in public life. This is not unexpected. Nevertheless, this is a burden imposed unequally on the poorest populations. To this must be added the burden of violent or disaffected youth, criminal elements and others who have been excluded from more positive social intercourse. A higher incidences of persons in these categories increases the number of ‘non-participants’ in civic activities, as well as the burdens on those who might otherwise want to contribute, or contribute more.

Related to the previous point, women who are often the primary managers of ‘informal’ urban settlements share this burden disproportionately. This is a limiting factor on their ability to participate as fully as they would want, and to acquire special skills that may advance overall volunteer contributions of women.

In many low-income settlements, existing efforts by women to contribute have been undermined by the attitudes of their male partners/spouses and fellow community members. Women are still, in general, not granted equal status as civic actors in the community. The persistence of men’s unemancipated attitudes negatively affects the volunteer contribution in many communities.

Youth have proven to be invaluable volunteers and civic actors when structures (organizations and activities) exist to channel their efforts. They are also among the most vulnerable members of society. Longstanding precarious economic and social conditions are clearly alienating many young people from taking up civic action.

Recommendations to Local Authorities for Enhancing the Effectiveness of Collaborations with Community Organizations
The previous section offers a litany of factors that impede the establishment of fruitful collaborations between local authorities and community organizations. To improve the impact of such collaborations, all of the actors and institutions cited could usefully change certain aspects of their attitudes, behaviour and capacities. The full responsibility for promoting and compelling such changes cannot be placed entirely on local authorities. They can, only with great difficulty, bring about changes at the macro-level, despite their increasing influence on social and economic conditions within their sub-national regions. It may also be argued that it is not inherently the responsibility of local authorities to redress the weaknesses of community organizations within their geographical purview. Nor would it be wise to suggest that the local authority must improve the basic element of the community organizations — the individual — by intervening inside the family to change patterns of relations or cultural practices that disproportionately benefit some members to the detriment of others. But there are areas in which local authorities can make important contributions, and these are the focus of this final section.

These recommendations are those of the author, based on his understanding of the case studies, overview materials and interaction with the main participants in the project over the past several years. The recommendations are, in effect, based on comparing and contrasting the conditions, achievements and challenges that have been reported on in total. As such, these recommendations are generic, and hence apply everywhere and nowhere. Any attempt to apply them should be accompanied by a review of the individual studies in which recommendations are set clearly within local contexts. Limitations of space prevent further discussion of how international organizations, national governments, community organizations, international NGOs can support the kinds of changes needed to bring about more fruitful collaborations between community organizations and local authorities.

One of the main conclusions of this study is that local authorities play the determining role in urban grassroots development, or more correctly, in fostering social cohesion and development in cities and towns. But to be successful in these efforts they must ally themselves with community and city-wide institutions of civil society. Cities willing to do this may begin by examining the extent to which they:

• Make publicly available in timely and easily accessible forms information concerning public budget decisions; investment and urban development plans; records of internal discussions on infrastructure locations, designs and technologies, and administrative and political boundary changes.
• Allow substantive participation of community organizations in the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and investments that significantly and differentially affect groups within the city.
• Support open dialogue between local authorities and civil society organizations (and among the latter) on these issues.
• Provide a competent, motivated and politically independent liaison service within the urban administration to to respond to and inform CSOs on issues of concern to the public.
• Promulgate and implement legislation and administrative regulations that institutionalise these characteristics of openness to CSOs, regardless of the change of important political or executive personnel within the local authority.
• Promote awareness of the concerns of CSOs and a capacity for working with CSOs among employees at different levels of the urban administration.
• Train CSO liaison personnel to understand the concerns of women and children, as they already play important roles as grassroots managers of low-income urban communities.
• Commit to acting as mediators of the public good, in which promoting and protecting the dignity of life for all residents is the first priority in decision-making.

Implementing even this short list of recommendations, which will necessarily have to be adapted to widely varying local conditions and histories, will require additional resources, new ways of thinking, and more autonomy for local authorities. This is happening in many cities, but not nearly enough. And the threats to progress already made loom ever-larger: political and ethnic conflict, environmental collapse, increasing disease burdens, the scourge of drugs, disintegrating local economies, etc. It is therefore necessary to bolster reforms within local authorities with external support - not just monetary but moral, intellectual and legislative. National governments, other local authorities, international cooperation and local and international civil society, citizens and business all have a part to play in this effort.

Note:
Readers’ may send their comments on this article or details of their analyis of collaborations between local authorities and community organizations to the author at westendorff@unrisd.org