Local resource management

Evaluation covered the period 8/82-1/87 and was based on site visits, interviews, and document review. The project"s emphasis on testing experimental strategies for the rural poor has had the effect of subverting its stated goal of reaching a wide range of poverty groups through decentralized, participatory development efforts. In fact, USAID/P and the National Economic Development Authority"s (NEDA) Project Management Office (PMO) have retained an excessive degree of control, and while many subprojects have been implemented, most have been aimed at a limited number of poverty groups. In line with recent policy changes by A.I.D. and the GOP, the project should shift from experimental to proven methodologies. Project management should be restructured as well, both to simplify the overcomplex administrative arrangements that have evolved and to further decentralization. Provincial governments should be responsible for managing all local project activities; NEDA"s regional offices should provide technical direction; and the PMO should continue as primary advocate of local resource management. Despite its administrative problems, the project is making reasonable progress in strengthening local self-help capacities. Its use of a performance payment system has in particular served to enhance provincial planning (this system should be utilized more widely by A.I.D. to link financial incentives with institutional behavior). In addition, the Community Project Fund has proven a flexible means of implementing income-generating and other beneficiary-initiated projects; a similar mechanism for funding provincial and PVO projects is recommended. Project attempts to increase local revenues should now focus on the real property tax, collection of which could be increased through better tax mapping and related operations. The project teaches that: (1) ambitious experimental projects are vulnerable to changing policies, and should receive only limited funding; (2) projects requiring complex interagency coordination must specify how this coordination will work; (3) if the importance of institution building is not understood, projects tend to be assessed in terms of more traditional and easily measured criteria; (4) mini-bureaucracies created by externally funded projects preclude institutionalization of innovation and work against sustainability and replicability; (5) the lower implementation responsibility is placed within a bureaucracy, the greater the chances of benefiting the poor; and (6) changes in attitude and perceptions must occur at all levels, not just the implementing level.