public administration and development
Public Admin. Dev. 21, 149±157 (2001)
DOI: 10.1002/pad.155
POPULAR PARTICIPATION AND LOCAL
GOVERNMENT REFORM
ROBERT B. CHARLICK*
Cleveland State University, Cleveland Heights, OH, USA
SUMMARY
Does decentralization, and particularly the creation of democratically elected local government, broaden mass political participation and make local government more effective and responsive? Evidence from two African Countries that have `democratized' to varying degrees and through different approaches, this study makes two major points. First, although many of the
hypotheses and initial ®ndings of the Cornell Participation Project regarding the role of local organizations may still be valid,
they remain largely untested in much of Africa because local government reform has been so limited and so recent. Second,
in the limited number of cases where reform of local government has occurred in Africa, popular participation directed toward
these governments can make them more responsive. This is only true, however, under particular circumstances, notably where
projects with strong local and international non-governmental organizational support chose to link to local government as well
as to exert in¯uence over policy at other levels of the political system. The fear expressed by some `civil society' actors that the
focus on local government may be narrowing the opportunities of non-governmental associations to in¯uence development
policies is not con®rmed in these cases. Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE MID-1970S AND TODAY
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Cornell Participation Project (CPP) addressed the twin issues of whether rural
development could be more effectively promoted through the enhancement of participation on the part of intended
bene®ciaries, and how best to expand and render more meaningful that participation. One answer clearly seemed to
be through linking local-level actors horizontally and vertically to higher levels of the system, particularly to local
administration and government. In recent years there has been increasing scepticism that government could effectively improve rural well-being, and that popular participation could be broadened through externally supported
projects that `empowered' ordinary people. From this point of view participation could not be broadened until
people gained power resources ± economic wealth and numbers of votes. These factors in expanding participation,
moreover, could only be useful where national political systems became suf®ciently committed to democratic processes and sharing power with other levels of government to make mass voting meaningful.
The ®rst approach was strongly supported by the CPP that set the stage for the subsequent wave of development
theory rooted in the positive value of participation. The ®rst question to address, however, was `what is participation' in this sense. Although Cohen and Uphoff (1977) did de®ne participation broadly, they were careful to
exclude participation that only involved ratifying decisions and goals made elsewhere (Uphoff, 1985), leading
to the view that participation would be helpful if it translated into involvement with in¯uence. In recent years
the OECD and other actors have based their hopes for sustainable development on empowered popular participation (OECD, 1991). The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development clari®ed the meaning of
`empowerment' by de®ning it as `organized efforts to increase control over resources and regulative institutions
in given social situations, on the part of groups and movements for those hitherto excluded from such control'
(OECD, 1991, p. 5).
*Correspondence to: Robert B. Charlick, Cleveland State University, 3225 Hyde Park Avenue, Cleveland Heights, OH, 44118 USA.
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R. B. CHARLICK
At the same time, the focus of empowerment has been on decentralization of central governmental institutions
and on the need for popular participation and non-governmental local organizations to make local government
more effective and accountable. The very de®nition of local organizations, which the CPP developed, stressed
the opportunities which local people would have to participate meaningfully and to have their interests
represented by organizations, which would be accountable to them (Uphoff and Esman, 1974, p. 3). Local
government would be one such local organization that, linked on the one hand to other local organizations and
on the other to extra-local institutions, could provide the impetus for development. Clearly, local government
was not simply de®ned as `public bodies with speci®c legal authority' operating at the sub-national and
usually the sub-regional level'. The concept, developed by the CPP and adopted in the mid-1980s by the
United States Agency for International Development (USAID), was that local governments would be
understood as public bodies accountable to a `geographically-based local constituency', and that they would
have `substantial independence from central or local administrative agencies' (USAID, 1984). In the 1990s,
USAID and other donors gave still more normative content to this notion with its acceptance of the concept of
`democratic decentralization'. Democratic decentralization would involve the transfer of real competence to
the local level so that government could be responsive to popular demands. The best way to promote broadening
of participation and higher levels of responsiveness to popular demands would normally entail establishing
meaningful locally elected deliberative bodies. In fact locally elected councils have become the hallmark of
reformed or democratic local governments. Nonetheless, the CPP was quick to point out that enhanced opportunities for participation and the devolution of real power to the local level would not necessarily produce a pattern
of broad and open access as local elites could monopolize local government (Blair, 1974; Uphoff and Esman,
1974). Whether the reform of local government, therefore, actually expands participation, and whether that
participation produces accountability and responsiveness to a broader spectrum of rural people, is an empirical
question.
Part of the empirical question involves the conditions under which local government reform takes place.
As Esman and Uphoff pointed out two decades ago, national governments and elites are usually not enthusiastic
about the idea of devolving power. They will generally tolerate and even encourage local organizations only `when
they (the organizations) do not threaten the regime' (Esman and Uphoff, 1982). Often, however, national elites,
whether civilian or military, are deeply sceptical of the idea of democratic decentralization, even when a `democratic transition' has taken place in national-level institutions. One recent study of democratic transitions in Africa
concludes that even where there has been signi®cant democratization on some important dimensions, administration devolution and local government reform are usually not on the top of the agenda of elites (Charlick
et al., 1996).
What the impact of democratic decentralization will be both on popular participation and on the functioning of
local government must also be considered as empirical questions. Recent studies suggest that democratic decentralization has been associated with marked improvements in the ¯ow of information from the bottom up, improving the quality of projects and the performance of government, with responsiveness of government to citizen
demands and interests, and with increases in popular participation (Manor, 1995; Crook and Manor, 1998,
p. 271). They observed, however, that their limited data suggests that even if participation does expand with
the reform of local government, the opportunities for participation do remain very unevenly distributed and local
governments may not become more responsive and accountable to the rural mass (Crook and Manor, 1998, p. 280).
This problem appeared to be more serious in their African cases than it was in their Asian cases. In their two African cases (Ghana and CoÃte d'Ivoire) Crook and Manor found that local government did not appear to be responsive
to or accountable to public demands. Only 20±35% of the local people surveyed in these cases stated that these
governments `satis®ed their needs' (Crook and Manor, 1998, p. 283).
The remainder of this study examines the degree to which local government reform characterized by signi®cant
devolution of authority has actually taken place in two African cases: Mali and Guinea. Having established the
nature of the reform, we then turn to examining the impact of local government reform on popular participation
and on the effectiveness of that participation in terms of increasing the representative, responsive and accountable
character of local government.
Copyright # 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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MALI1
Mali may be the exception to the general rule in Africa (Charlick et al., 1996; Charlick and Wing, 1998). For a variety
of reasons its government has gone further than others in its public commitment to decentralization as an integral
part of its democratization and state reform process. The Mali case is also interesting because there the rhetoric of
expanding mass participation in local government has been most empathically and persistently articulated.
Mali's transition, which began in the late 1980s and erupted into a crisis in January 1991, was a product of both
elite intervention into a collapsing state and of mass agitation. The result was a Sovereign National Conference
that, while not nearly representative of the rural masses, did lead to an additional meeting of rural people called the
Etats Generaux de Monde Rurale, in which rural grievances were aired and the need to revive local government
was clearly expressed. The conference was followed by a 14-month transition under a military regime. During this
period a new constitution was drafted which af®rmed the principle that local government would be based on freely
elected councils. Subsequently, elections were held for the President, Parliament and Municipal Councils.
The process of creating local governments in rural communities, however, was much slower. Over a period of
several years a governmental Decentralization Commission, appointed by the President and charged with developing a plan for creating representative local government, organized the drawing up of new decentralized territorial units known as `rural communes', and developed legislation to put these in place. In an effort to be
`participatory' the Commission conducted regional and local-level hearings, called concertations, throughout
the country. In February 1993 a framework law for decentralization ®nally reached Parliament. A year later, in
April 1994, legislation was introduced to create communes that would be much larger than villages, but much
smaller than the existing administrative units: the arrondissements or cercles. These communes would, on average,
group about 11,000 people and would have elected councils of 20±45 representatives. The law was heavily
opposed by some regional authorities and bureaucratic interest groups. It was supported by a number of donors
and by a few civic Malien non-government organizations, such as ASARED (Association pour la Sauvegarde et le
Renforcement de la DeÂmocratie).
Even at this point, however, serious questions emerged as to how local government should interface with local
non-governmental organizations (NGOs). ASARED, for example, attempted to mobilize grassroots support to
lobby the National Assembly for provisions in the law that would recognize the status and role of these pre-existing
associations. ASARED and others, moreover, attempted to use this period to educate rural people about the entire
decentralization process, arguing that the of®cial Decentralization Commission hearings had been heavily planned
centrally and had provided little information and opportunity for local input. In 1996, implementing legislation
was passed governing the `territorial collectivities' ± communes and regions. This law provided for the assignment
of central government bureaucrats to the decentralized levels and for an ongoing role of the central state in overseeing the new units of local government. It did not, however, accord any particular role to the associations, such as
the Parent±Student Associations (APE ± Association des Parents d'Eleves), the Rural Community Health Associations (ASACO) or the cooperatives (the Village Associations ± AVs, and the `ton'). The legal status of these groups
remained uncertain as of June 2000.
In 1998 the Decentralization Commission began to plan for the training of local administrators (mayors and
®nancial agents) although no local or regional elections had yet taken place. This training was conceived almost
entirely in technical terms. While elections for 19 municipal communes (the majority of them in Bamako) were
held in 1998, elections for the 683 rural councils were not held until May±June 1999. There were a number of
reasons for the repeated postponement of elections until that time, including the reluctance of some of the regional
party leaders to accept the risks of their uncertain outcomes. The primary reason for the delay, however, was the
political crisis that emerged after many of the opposition political parties contested the fairness of the presidential
election held in the Spring of 1997 and their subsequent refusal to participate in the legislative elections. When the
1
The section is based largely on three reports written in the context of studies conducted for the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), and on unpublished reports of ®eldwork conducted in Mali in May, 2000.
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R. B. CHARLICK
rural communal elections were ®nally held a number of the `hard-line' opposition parties continued to boycott
them while others presented candidates either in their own name or as independents.
By January 2000 local governments began to be established, and in the spring and summer many of®cials and
councillors were being trained in managing local government, largely by NGOs sponsored by various international
donor agencies. It is clearly premature to render judgements on what the impact of this decentralization process
and creation on local elected government has been. In May and June 2000, however, it was already clear that the
existence of this new level of government had provided an additional and previously unavailable channel for a
variety of forms of local participation to be expressed. The training now being offered by NGOs involved not only
technical issues, but addressed issues of advocacy and lobbying as well. In the process, this training began to lay
the groundwork for some real political con¯ict between levels of government and between local governments and
quasi-governmental development agencies such as the Cotton Development Authority (CMDT), and the Of®ce de
Niger. Newly elected mayors were already talking about forming associations of mayors that could act as lobby
groups for local-level concerns.
How local government will deal with associational life, however, is still unclear. In some areas (Djenne in the
Mopti Region, for example) there are already indications that local governmental of®cials see themselves as closely linked to these associations. In some instances councillors and mayors have been drawn from `civil society',
associations, not only from those created by government programmes, such as the APEs, the ASACOs and the
AVs, but also from associations of merchants, ®shermen, artisans etc. In other areas (such as Kolondieba in the
Sissako Region) the dynamic seems to pit the politicians against village `traditional' authorities and urban leaders
who have begun to lobby the mayors and councils for more favourable tax policies. In many areas a struggle is
shaping up between the leaders of the old corporatist Parent±Student Associations and leaders of new school management groups formed in the context of projects funded and managed by such external NGOs as World Education
and Save the Children Foundation. This struggle is centering on public resources for the `community schools', as
well as for the `public' schools. This struggle entails the very de®nition of what schools and educational policies
local communes will support. It is not yet clear that the new associations formed in the education and health sectors, and the older associations formed to support cotton, rice and sugar-cane farmers, will have any role in local
government, whether they will attempt to in¯uence government at this level, or whether these governments will
attend to their interests and demands. The groundwork for political contestation over these issues at this level,
however, has already been laid.
Less clear is what will become of associations that were formed prior to the decentralization programme, but
that had de facto arrangements with arrondissement and regional-level government agents. This process has been
described elsewhere (Kante et al., 1994; Coulibaly, unpublished report (Annex to Kante et al., 1994), p. 58 ff.;
Coulibaly, unpublished presentation to USAID, 1995) with reference to the management of natural resources
including community forestland. According to Coulibaly, in some parts of Mali local associations dominated
by particular ethnic groups, such as the Ogokaana in Koro arrondissement, the Allamoudiou in Bankass arrondissement, and the Walde Kelka in Douentza arrondissement, developed rules and regulations to manage common
resources, such as forests, complete with effective sanctions. Prior to the passage of the decentralization law, some
local communities in Dogon country, notably the villages of Gueourou, Anakla and Youdiou, were able to conclude agreements between their association, the Ogokaana, a traditional `age organization', and territorial administrators for the co-management of forestry resources. As with the associations in the health and educational
sectors, this process was facilitated through the in¯uence an NGO supported by the international NGO, CARE.
In their writings on this Coulibaly and others feared that with the passage of the law on decentralization these
arrangements might be threatened by the fact that the law did not recognize `village structures', and that it recognized as the only legal partners of the administration the communal governments (see Coulibaly, 1994, Annex III).
On the other hand, recent developments by associations in other sectors indicate that associations in the natural
resource area may be able to use local government as another arena to forward their interests. A great deal hinges
on the eventual resolution of the proposed law on associations that will determine how free associations will be
able to operate and with what status. It will also depend on practical politics. If associations, with the support of
their national and international NGO partners, are able to forcefully bring issues to the attention of local of®cials
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and even to regional and national of®cials, decentralization in Mali may serve to strengthen the linkages between
local associations and the state, and may make government more responsive. There is already preliminary evidence
to show that this is beginning to happen in rural Mali. According to the most recent programme assessment survey
conducted for USAID in Mali, between one-quarter and one-third of the members of associations interviewed
reported that their association had contacted governmental of®cials to attempt to in¯uence them on an issue with
some success (Davis, 2000). As of the time of that survey most of these contacts were not at the level of local
elected government because these governments were not yet functioning. It will be interesting to note whether this
new level of government will become a focal point for association lobbying in the near future.
GUINEA
In many regards Guinea, although it has come a long way from the days of SeÂkou ToureÂ, must be considered to be
in the early stages of democratization or liberalization. One student of Guinean politics wrote in 1999 that the
country was a case of `political liberalization, with no fundamental change in the basis of rule' (Groeselma, unpublished report, MSI Inc., Washington, DC, 1999). Recent violations of human and civil rights, limited freedom of
the press, and three rounds of elections whose fairness have been hotly contested are indications that the current
regime has failed to consolidate and institutionalize important democratic practices and civil liberties. Particularly
disconcerting is the regime's weak commitment to the rule of law and to an independent, politically neutral and
merit-based civil service. So too is the limited degree of civilian oversight of the Guinean military, an organization
that is characterized by clear ethnic bias toward President ConteÂ's ethnic group, the Sousou. In addition, recent
trends reveal the growing politicization of the public bureaucracy and its direct involvement in elections. The
bureaucracy is characterized in one recent report as corrupt, exhibiting high levels of nepotism and ethnic favouritism (Wentling, 1998).
On one level there is little doubt that Guinea's unitary system of government continues the tradition of excessive
centralization, hindering nascent efforts at decentralization and the development of meaningful local government.
At another, decentralization in legal±formal terms of the political system is more advanced than in many African
countries. Decentralization was initially given a push by the 1983±84 drought and ®nancial crisis that resulted in
the vast expansion of NGO activities in all the countries of the region. This crisis resulted in the need to establish
reform policies to reduce the role of the state in the economy and in the provision of social services. When General
Lansana Conte and the Guinean military overthrew the SeÂkou Toure regime in 1984, it dismantled one of the most
comprehensive party-states in Africa. The destruction of the Toure regime was so complete that no formal structures were left in place to link the national government to communities. In December 1985 President ConteÂ
responded by of®cially committing Guinea to a policy of liberalization of the economy and decentralization of
the political/administrative system (Charlick, unpublished report, MSI Inc., Washington, DC, 1999a).
In 1991 the Conte government created local government in the form of the Rural Development Communes
(Communes Ruraux de DeÂveloppement, or CRD). It did so largely in response to demands by external donor agencies, NGOs and Associations of Sons of the Village that wanted some legal framework for working with communities on local-level investment. For some, this new policy marked a signi®cant decentralization of government.
Others, however, saw it as an effort to recreate and extend the old structures of central control, the `Revolutionary
Authorities', of the Toure era, at the local and arrondissement levels.
A number of facts raise questions about the nature of this governmental reform. First, elections have never been
held for local government of®cials (the CDR councillors). These elections have been postponed for more than 7
years. The only level of local government that has had direct elections is the District level, and in Guinea District
government has no legal or constitutional basis. Only one such election was ever held, and the elected District
representatives now serve despite the fact that their of®cial mandates have long since expired. The positions of
CDR councillors were simply ®lled by the District Council Presidents, and the head of the communal council
was then selected from among these indirectly elected communal councillors. In 1998 the Conte regime twice
proposed that District of®cials simply be appointed by the administration and no longer elected. Although the
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National Assembly rejected this proposal, it revealed a mentality on the part of the Conte government that renders
the entire notion of elected local government in Guinea today extremely tenuous.
Second, the autonomy of CRDs as local governments remains very limited, both by law and by emerging practice. The CRD presidents and the communal secretaries who support them are paid by the national government.
Communal secretaries are civil servants, appointed by, and accountable to, preÂfets. CDR presidents and councillors
have little or no training and they usually defer to the communal secretaries. This greatly reduces whatever meaningful participation in the local-level budgetary process that communal councils might be legally entitled to play.
Third, communal-level government has a generally bad reputation for managing the funds that it does collect. It
is widely acknowledged that local tax revenues collected by the CDRs are mismanaged and are often appropriated
by members and local notables. This fact has caused signi®cant resistance to pay local taxes on the part of many
villagers. The appointment of a civil servant (the communal secretary) to support the council and president has
been justi®ed in part as a reform measure to assure that funds will be managed better. This mechanism, however,
reinforces central administrative control over local resources, re¯ecting the long-standing French practice of oversight or Eutella. It does nothing to promote local accountability or responsiveness to local needs in the allocation of
funds by communal councils. In fact, funds seem to be used to ®ll in gaps in the budgets of preÂfets and sous-preÂfets,
including their need for funds to entertain visiting national governmental of®cials. This is despite the fact that
according to law sous-preÂfets have very limited discretion over CRD decisions. Old habits die hard, and ®eld investigation reveals that many sous-preÂfets continue to exercise considerable authority over CRD decisions in budgetary and other domains.
The impact of local government reform on popular participation in Guinea can best be understood by analysing
speci®c functional development programmes designed to improve rural health and education, and to better manage
natural resources. Apart from the issue of local government, two factors contribute to determining the level of
popular participation in these programmes. Historically the Guinean government and bureaucracy have been
highly centralized. Only in recent years has the Conte government been publicly committed to the deconcentration
of its technical services. This has corresponded to donor and international efforts to promote community participation and cost-sharing. The Bamako Initiative for managing health care services and costs is an excellent example of
this donor-stimulated cost-sharing approach. In addition, formal associational life in Guinea is also very poorly
developed, having been systematically suppressed by the Toure regime. Even state-controlled corporatist associations, like the Parent±Student Associations (in Guinea called APEAE) were suppressed and were only re-instituted
in the mid-1980s.
The situation now prevailing in Guinea is that each donor agency and project creates local organizational partners ad hoc. In the mid-1980s the military regime issued a series of decrees that legalized a range of associations.
Subsequent legislation passed in 1992 modi®ed some of these decrees, particularly with regard to the status of
cooperatives. These laws, however, do not seem to have fully entered into force, and there is a struggle going
on between various technical ministries and the Ministry of Interior's Decentralization Bureau over who will
recognize and provide oversight for these associations. Currently, given the weakness of institutions of local government, the confusion in the legal regime governing recognition and the relative strength of donor-funded project
authorities, most popular participation in Guinea today takes place through associations established and defended
by projects, and only indirectly, if at all, through local government. Two examples may clarify this point.
Since the early 1980s, USAID has sponsored a complex natural resource management project in Middle Guinea's Fuuta Djallon Highlands and in the protected Nialama Forest. Under this programme USAID's contractors
created Village Associations, sub-village functional committees and an inter-village co-management committee
for the forest. In this project care was taken to `involve' villagers from the outset in the design of speci®c economic
activities they could undertake with project assistance to help them generate more income. Despite this fact, interviews demonstrated that the participation of villagers was orchestrated by the project to ®t into speci®c project
phases and `systems' (sets of particular interests). The in¯uence that village participants have actually had
appeared to be very limited. On the other hand, there is some evidence that the project did assist villagers to
act on their own interests in several important ways, by encouraging them to form voluntary associations based
on common interests, and by assisting them to channel their interests and requests to local government, to the
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CRDs. Although some villages had attempted to lobby CRDs prior to the advent of the project, this behaviour
apparently increased through the efforts of this project, and people report that they now have more con®dence
to express their wishes at this level.
The most important growth in local participation, however, is generally acknowledged to have occurred with the
formation of the Inter-Village Forestry Management Committee. This committee, created entirely through the
efforts of consultants to the Project, apparently improved the accountability and responsiveness of forestry agents,
and enabled villagers to reduce the incidence of illegal `®nes' and the sale of permits to individuals to exploit
resources otherwise barred to community members. The external consultants, and not the villagers themselves,
established the principle of quotas for giving access to participation in this committee and its smaller Executive
Bureau. Quite possibly this approach may well have increased the participation of women. It may also at the same
time have seriously biased participation toward those who have a direct interest in the use of the resource, as
opposed to the general public. There have been other limits to popular participation through this structure. The
Inter-Village Committee still has no standing in Guinean law, and has been unable to get any of its recommendations of®cially adopted by the National Forestry Service. While the Project has attempted to link this committee to
the CRDs and Forestry Service, almost all of the communications and efforts to in¯uence policy have passed
through project staff, rather than directly from local-level participants to government.
The second example from Guinea involves the Rural Enterprise Associations in the Basse CoÃte region, managed
by CLUSA (the Cooperative League of the USA). This project, which began as an effort to `assist rural, groupbased enterprises to become sustainable, member-owned and democratically-operated businesses', had both economic and governance objectives from the outset (USAID/Guinea, 1998). The method that CLUSA pursued was to
work at the village level with existing pre-cooperative associations, called Rural Enterprise Associations (ERAs),
and to reinvigorate them and in some instances reconstitute them through participatory training. Initially, the training was designed to give the groups the ability to acquire and apply the skills that they needed to identify, evaluate
and implement viable economic activities. Soon, however, it became clear that these groups would have to be
linked not only to the technical services (mainly the Ministry of Environment's Agricultural Service, the SNPRV),
but also to the local governments (CRDs). In fact, CLUSA began getting requests from the CRD councillors to run
training programmes for them, largely because some of their ERA of®cers were active in district and CRD-level
government.
Training very quickly shifted from strictly business management and planning to training in rights and public
responsibilities. The results of this project in terms of popular participation have been impressive, particularly the
Guinean context. Case studies demonstrate that members of local associations (the ERAs) have been able to lobby
CRD councillors and presidents for speci®c budget allocations, and have participated in programme and budget
reviews that have made at least some CRDs in the region more transparent and accountable. In several instances
ERA members have been so displeased with local budget decisions by CRD of®cials and by their failures to live up
to promises for support that they have threatened and have actually withheld the payment of local taxes. There have
even been a few instances in which demands from the ERAs have resulted in the resignation or reassignment of
administrative authorities (NCBA/CLUSA, 1998).
While these are impressive levels of popular participation and involvement with local government they do pose
a few important issues. First, there is no doubt that CLUSA's intervention has been critical, not only at the level of
local government, but also beyond. The CLUSA project director directly lobbied Parliament and various ministries
to obtain favourable rulings on the legal status of local associations, and the Ministry of Interior on its efforts to
tighten up and centralize the registration process. Local associations and CRD of®cials have no capacity to do these
things at present.
Second, it is unclear how much local participation has been expanded by CLUSA's intervention. In some cases
it is evident that pre-existing leaders and notables stepped into the new roles in the ERAs and were already connected to or active in the local governments. Even our limited ®eldwork raised questions about whether ERA presidents really ran their groups or were ®gure-heads for more in¯uential villagers who were already well connected.
On the other hand, efforts by CLUSA to work with exclusively female ERAs may be having the effect of expanding
women's participation at least in local associations. Finally, CLUSA's work with the ERAs has produced very little
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in the way of new economic growth and savings, due in large part to the breakdown and utter capriciousness of the
public saving and credit groups. As of the time of our ®eldwork in late 1998, no ERA had received a publicly
funded loan, and several had lost their deposits in these institutions. As long as the economic base of villagers
cannot progress beyond a certain level due to the absence of reasonable opportunities to get sound technical advice
and credit, the sustainability of this entire approach to fostering participation must be put into question.
LESSONS AND IMPLICATIONS
The examples given in this article suggest that under particular circumstances local-level participation, including
participation in important development decisions, may be expanded. This expanded participation, however, has
had little to do with the governmental reforms, such as the creation of democratically elected local governments.
Instead it has been associated with particular circumstances.
First, it clearly helps to have local associations that are rooted in a social milieu and upon which new and
broader development tasks can be grafted. This circumstance may be fairly limited in many African societies today
because `social capital' ± the experience and trust in associating together ± has been so depleted that few if any
existing local-level associations can be found to become partners in governance. It is also clear that when local
associations do become partners and do constitute the basis of `mass' participation, they will not necessarily serve
the interests of all villagers, including the poorest and most disadvantaged. They may even operate to exclude nonmembers from sharing the bene®ts, as has been charged in the case of the Ogokaana in Mali (personal communication with Jesse Ribot). They may on the contrary serve the interests of a small number of people hand-chosen
to work with the project, to the exclusion of the broader rural public.
When `projects' initiate or create local associational partners these organizations initially have little social capital and function mainly as means through which individual villagers or village factions can obtain external
resources. It is rare for such associations to have any real impact on project design or implementation, however
well intentioned the goals of the project sponsors may be, and however `participatory' their methods. The example
of the Inter-Village Forest Management Committee in the Fuuta Djallon in Guinea stands out as an exception, and
one in which participation may actually have been expanded to include women.
Second, local associations are generally able to participate in development activities when they are connected
to an externally funded project, and when an international NGO or bilateral donor agency intervenes on their
behalf. Local governments in both cases have been weak, and only in the case of Mali have their of®cials been
elected in any meaningful sense of that term. In general, project staff see them as corrupt, inef®cient and dominated
by local notables whom they regard as being connected through patronage networks to the dominant national political/administrative faction. As a result, in the cases surveyed here, project administrators generally prefer to work
with deconcentrated administrative services, and at times even to intervene at the national level to try to obtain
policies which favour their local partners, bypassing or avoiding local governmental authorities as much as possible.
Third, as legitimate devolution of local government occurs it may pose serious problems for the participation of
villagers through their voluntary associations. In governmental systems as historically centralized as those which
still dominate the African landscape it is not surprising that national governments and technical ministries, as well
as national interest groups such as unions and student associations, attempt to limit the authority of local governments. They are even more reluctant to recognize the role of `local civil society' actors in the governance process.
The very decentralization laws that are eventually passed may ignore or even exclude these actors from playing cogovernance or co-management roles that in some cases they may have been able to negotiate in the past with
administrative authorities. It is notable also that in the cases examined laws governing the status and operation
of civil society actors have not yet been clari®ed.
Of course none of this is not pre-ordained. It depends largely on how national governments and their international partners conceive of local government. Unfortunately, local associations and even umbrella associations (or
popular movements) representing local associations are still very weak in Africa, and they are unlikely to be able
on their own to in¯uence this legislation and its implementation very much. Only in Mali does it seem likely that
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POPULAR PARTICIPATION AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT REFORM
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these legal issues will be resolved and that associations will be able to play meaningful roles in local-level decisions affecting their interests. In the short run, the main hope for the development of local associations and their
empowerment seems inextricably linked to the power and in¯uence of external donors and NGOs. This approach,
however, must be seen as a transitional strategy at best. External power cannot sustainably substitute for power
generated by these groups themselves. For these groups to gain power, however, the rural economy must be transformed so that villagers have the resources for political action.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Sponsors: Some of the research reported in this study was conducted under consulting contracts with Management
Systems International Inc. and Associations in Rural Development, Inc. and was written for the United States
Agency for International Development Of®ces in Washington, Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Bamako (Mali) and
Conakry (Guinea).
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