Final evaluation of the clean urban project : contract no. 497-C-00-98-00003-00

CLEAN Urban's greatest achievement was to adapt successfully to constantly changing circumstances and priorities. In the process, the project facilitated release of a major loan from the World Bank in support of the Social Safety Net program (SSN), and generated numerous proposals for creating jobs. At the national level, advisers provided extensive policy guidance on decentralization, winning USAID recognition as a donor leader in the field. At the local level, CLEAN Urban made a significant impact on attitudes to citizen participation in the planning process and put mechanisms in place to facilitate this. Making these adjustments required considerable ingenuity and close collaboration between USAID and the contractor, but strained the project and blurred its objectives, creating disjunctions between the center and the field and between field components. Shortening the project from 4 to 3 years also undermined institution-building efforts. The participatory planning component achieved major advances in developing a model for strategic urban planning, known as PDPP. This has since been approved for use by the Ministry of Home Affairs and is being increasingly applied by local governments. In terms of sustainability, CLEAN Urban had greater impact on local residents than on planning officials. The PDPP model, still in its infancy, is heavily focused on participation in planning and has little to say about implementation and management. Results are not commensurate with the effort involved, and the contribution of the city fora appears marginal. PDPP plans are strong on physical infrastructure, but weaker on strategic issues and do not adequately reflect community concerns regarding health, education, and security. Although designed to produce medium-term development plans, PDPP is used mainly as an instrument for preparing annual budgets. CLEAN Urban achieved its biggest impact through policy assistance to central government ministries, especially by placing advisors in key departments involved in decentralization. Advisors contributed critical inputs to the SSN program designed to create jobs, and later in support of fiscal and administrative decentralization. Their assistance resulted in an impressively long list of laws, regulations, and ministerial decrees. Project efforts to link policy assistance at the center with local government capacity building in the field yielded mixed results. Assistance was provided to municipal corporations, but few went far in implementing guidelines. Assistance to local governments with medium-term development planning produced better results, but involved much more effort. Strengthening local capacity requires intensive, extended effort. Although the Padat Karya component never accomplished its ultimate goal of creating many jobs, it succeeded impressively in the more immediate task of rapidly generating proposals for labor-intensive employment in physical infrastructure works. It also achieved success in recovering small loans made under SSN programs and in recycling them to new borrowers for income-generating activities. Padat Karya's monitoring of household incomes provided valuable information to SSN planners. USAID's motive was to create jobs quickly in response to the economic crisis. But funds materialized late in the day, few jobs were created when they were needed, and many unemployed either went back to rural areas or joined the informal sector. This suggests two lessons. Since new programs take time to set up, it may be more effective in times of crisis to support programs already in place. Rather than relying on short- lived infrastructure projects dependent on government, it may be more effective and quicker to support people's own initiatives in running microenterprises. Coordination proved difficult. The one exception was a highly productive collaboration between CLEAN Urban and Germany's SfDM project which undertook a ground-breaking needs assessment for strengthening local government capacity for decentralization and produced a framework to address these needs. Recommendations were accepted by government, and donors are using the framework as a basis for planning their own activities. Otherwise, there was little interaction with other donor programs, and there is little prospect for such. Coordination with Government of Indonesia (GOI) was plagued by the constant reorganization of GOI agencies that accompanied the quick succession of three new Presidents. The same was true in the field, compounded by the merger of local government with local offices of the central government. Constant staff turnover undermined efforts to build local capacity. Within CLEAN Urban itself, effective coordination between the three components -- whose integration into a single whole was circumscribed by the project's use of a performance contract -- was a constant headache. Despite this, some degree of informal coordination was achieved at the grassroots level.