Promises to improve the quality of services through "decentralisation" are regularly made by successive authorities in Bangladesh. These attempts so far have met with little success - mainly because government officials have used resources meant for local development and welfare to bolster their support from rural elites. Lessons can be drawn from what went wrong in relation to the upazila system, the most comprehensive attempt so far to strengthen local democracy. Although these lessons are mainly in how not to decentralise local government institutions, they also point towards ways to provide services so that they truly benefit the poor.

After nominal and ineffectual attempts at reform by the first two governments of Bangladesh, yet another new decentralisation policy was introduced there in 1982. It turned existing administrative units into new democratic upazilas, with more power to allocate resources according to local needs. Although dismantled by the government elected in 1991, the upazila system was innovative and certainly seemed to have the potential to deliver more resilient local democracy and better services. But local authorities were, if anything, less responsive to local needs, unrepresentative of the population, and unable to mobilise local resources.

Work by researchers from the Universities of Manchester, UK and Dhaka, Bangladesh shows what the holes in the upazila strategy were, and suggests why this promising approach did not work. Noteworthy drawbacks were that:

• upazila officials preferred to put resources into infrastructure projects (bridges, irrigation) because such projects gave rise to more opportunities to extract bribes and gain electoral advantage from the conspicuous evidence of achievements they left behind
• given more power and resources, the new local governments became arenas of political conflict. Service delivery slumped and funds actually became hard to use up
• underhand "tendering" and unsupervised control over resources enabled officials to divert resources to their supporters, and corruption deepened
• poor rural people found it harder to gain access to resources: paid middlemen became the main channel for dealing with officials.

The researchers note key lessons arising from these wrong turns, including the following:

• policy-makers in Bangladesh have used decentralisation in many instances to cement political bonds with rural elites rather than to promote the welfare of the masses
• as a result, power was devolved half-heartedly, and central government kept overall political control. Constant political instability also meant that very little in the way of genuine democratisation was ever attempted
• "decentralisation by default" resulted from these failures, as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) filled the void left by poor services, also prompting promising new collaborations between government and NGOs for better service delivery
• the NGOs are now beginning to take on politicising roles: poor and marginalised people are increasingly being elected to office, and heard in local political forums.

Source(s):
"Central-Local Relations and Responsibilities in Bangladesh: Experiments with the Organisation, Management and Delivery of Services", ESCOR Research Project

Funded by: Department for International Development, UK

id21 Research Highlight: 1997-Dec-09

Further Information:
D. Hulme, N. Siddiquee
Institute for Development Policy and Management
University of Manchester
Crawford House
Precinct Centre
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9GH
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 2800
Fax: +44 (0) 161 273 8829
Contact the contributor: idpm@man.ac.uk

Institute for Development Policy and Management