The Building of “Monuments”: Power, Accountability and Community Driven Development in Papua Province, Indonesia

Abstract

Community Driven Development (CDD) is an aid delivery strategy that emphasises community control over planning decisions and investment resources. In light of convincing articulations of this approach, CDD programs have evolved and expanded rapidly within and outside the World Bank’s development agenda. While the CDD narrative remains appealing, a growing body of evidence suggest that CDD programs deliver less than promised. While agency-sponsored research argues that CDD is generally pro-poor and improves the effectiveness of infrastructure development, other studies highlight the gap between CDD narrative and CDD practice. While CDD provides the state with new technologies and methods to deliver aid, critics suggest CDD programs are frequently captured by elites, generate struggles over access to program resources, and weaken local capacities for collective action. Furthermore, CDD systematically shapes communities to fit with a governance reform agenda without addressing asymmetrical power relationships. While offering valuable insights, such examinations of CDD programs are limited to the analysis of donor narratives and village-level studies. These studies provide inadequate analysis of how complex CDD practices work across scale in diverse social conditions and institutional environments, and overlook the possibility that other actors might change CDD processes and adjust the distribution of benefits. Based on qualitative and ethnographic field-based investigations of a CDD program in Papua Province, this thesis considers three questions: How do actors work across scale to control CDD policy, to change CDD processes and to shape the distribution of benefits? How do diverse social relations and institutional environments influence the ability of actors to shape community development? How do actors’ strategies of control effect the alignment between the substantial policy objectives of CDD and field-level outcomes? To answer these questions, this study develops a framework for analysing power and accountability, situating CDD within a broader developmental perspective. This framework is applied to analyse the processes whereby actors secure the compliance of others, the systems that regulate the behaviours of actors, and the responsiveness of actors to accountability mechanisms. First, the thesis argues that, as the program moves down the administrative scale, the CDD program narrative is reinterpreted in line with the power and interests of key actors at each level. In the process, actors change CDD agendas and policies, transforming CDD’s decentralised and participatory mechanisms into an approach more focused on meeting administrative standards of success. While this approach can improve financial accountability, it leads the program to over-construct village infrastructure. Although in half of the cases examined, the CDD program construct under-utilised “monuments” while neglecting the activities that facilitate village development, in a limited number of cases facilitators use their individual capacity and experiences to contest central authority and support the interests of community groups. Second, the thesis argues that the processes and the institutions used to promote public administration reform limit CDD agendas and shift CDD policy away from its decentralised and participatory objectives towards meeting administrative criteria of program success, reinforcing upward accountability and providing the means to strengthen the centralised power of political authorities. Finally, this research calls into question the use of rigid public administration reform or governance mechanisms, suggesting that the over application of these approaches strengthens centralised power and moves the program away from its participatory objectives. Nevertheless, the thesis concludes that positive outcomes remain a possibility were the CDD system to provide a range of conditions and mechanisms to avoid capture, to encourage facilitators to use their discretionary power to facilitate meaningful village development, and to deliver through an agency committed to substantive objectives.