Accountability in development

Angst and anxiety has gripped the development sector in Pakistan, with increased restrictions on the flow of money from international donor agencies. Around 27 INGOs have recently been asked to close down their operations and leave the county.

In the face of mounting criticism on what was termed as the “unilateral and unequivocal actions of government”, the INGOs submitted appeals that urged the government to revisit the decision and revoke the notification. As a result, the interior ministry has allowed these INGOs to continue their operations for six months till their appeals are reviewed and a final decision is made. However, it is evident that the development sector is likely to face further restrictions and more INGOs will ultimately have to leave the country.

A few social development experts believe that the space for civil society organisations will be squeezed further and the heydays of NGOs will end. However, one thing is clear: that the claims made by many INGOs of grassroots engagement have gone unnoticed as there is no grassroots resistance against the actions taken by the government.

This proves that foreign-funded INGOs and their local partners have failed to build solid foundations of a vibrant civil society to resist the unilateral ban on their activities. The development role played by these INGOs has been overshadowed by an anti-West political narrative that could mobilise people far more easily than the theory of rights-based sensitisation adopted by other NGOs. Poverty has been exploited by religio-political and nationalist groups as a conspiracy of the West and non-locals and resulted in powerful indigenous narratives of fanciful shortcuts to social change.

This locally-embedded narrative of political change was so powerful that it dislodged the sophisticated and techno-savvy discourse of transformation put forth by many NGOs. While there have been some competing narratives formulated by local and national NGOs through community-driven models of social change, their sustainability has been a cause for concern. Building local organisations through social mobilisation has been an effective tool to galvanise local resources towards change. But its effectiveness has yet to be seen as a countervailing force to traditional institutions.

Development experts in Pakistan have provided a wide range of perspectives on the role of NGOs. Most of them see development as a long-term process of engagement that aims to bring about behavioural and socioeconomic change in society. Some of them are critical of the borrowed notions of development from the West.

Ayesha Khan, a senior development economist, provides an insightful perspective of social development as a process of socioeconomic transformation. She believes that development is an incremental process that is firmly rooted in the contextual reality of existing institutions, the system of governance and the policy framework. She adds that: social development is not an exotic, archaic and stagnant system of predefined notions; it is rather a set of practices to unleash the human potential of freedom and [recognise] a world of possibilities”.

Izhar Ali Hunzai, a senior development expert and former CEO of the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) suggests that “we must adopt a new model of hybrid local organisation as a platform [to synthesise] tradition and modernity”. According to Hunzai, eurocentric development models are dismissive of the enormous transformative potential of indigenous knowledge and local wisdom. Development is essentially “a process of transformative engagement and co-creation of value”. Hunzai adds that: “local organisation is vital but it must not be seen as [a] mere mirror image of modern interest-based institutions. It must…[provide] a space [for the] expression of local aspirations and [the] fusion of modern innovative ideas and indigenous ideals of change”.

Pakistan has traditionally been one of those countries where the activities of NGOs are never questioned. This has resulted in the growth of social development entities. Despite all their development work, NGOs have always faced criticism from different political groups in Pakistan over moral issues and genuine ideological matters.

Moralists have always been critical of NGOs because, according to them, NGOs propagate Western values. They believe that NGOs are conspiring to pollute the minds of the educated youth in Pakistan. The moralists include religio-political groups, cultural chauvinists and evangelists. The more radical groups have also targeted these Western-funded NGOs for hiring women.

However, a more coherent ideological critique of NGOs in Pakistan has been levelled by progressive political groups within the country. For these groups, the larger INGOs and NGOs provide an alternative discourse of development that, at times, absolves the government of its responsibilities to provide basic social services. These political groups are of the view that NGOs have assumed a quasi-government role by bridging the gap of social service delivery where the government has failed to reach out to people who are in need of assistance.

Successive governments in Pakistan have, therefore, treated NGOs as their allies and as agents of depoliticisation that help them avoid accountability towards their citizens. As intermediaries between the government and citizens, NGOs have helped defuse popular anger through piecemeal development programmes.

Although such critical perspectives about the role of NGOs carry weight, there are countless instances where their empowerment programmes have brought about political consciousness among the marginalised segments of society. There have been many integrated rural development programmes that seek to transform the subjugated roles of women through rural organisation. Therefore, it wouldn’t be fair to make generalisations about the role of NGOs as depoliticising agents.

There are also some deep-rooted historical perspectives about the role of NGOs in Pakistan. These perspectives are being evolved into a coherent critique of the development sector. Most of the critical perspectives are being directed at the large-scale poverty alleviation programmes. But it must go beyond them as well. Poverty alleviation programmes in Pakistan, which have been funded by the World Bank, have been unable to achieve the objective of reducing the poverty in a sustainable manner. The effectiveness of these initiatives needs to be discussed at public forums.

The Writers Forum of Development Journalists has recently started investigating the effectiveness of social development programmes in Pakistan. This will be a major breakthrough to improve the institutional accountability of taxpayers’ money spent on social development programmes. We must provide an objective assessment of the development sector to enable the government to devise a transparent framework of the regulation of development funds.

The accountability of these large-scale programmes may go beyond the issues of funds allocation and the effectiveness of the poverty alleviation framework and involve an intra-organisational accountability survey of such institutions. This survey must also be applied to INGOs where expatriate staff members receive higher salaries than the local employees with equal professional competence.

The Writers Forum has to play a pivotal role in bringing about transparency and accountability by highlighting the critical issues of the development sector. It must highlight the issues of the poor in Pakistan, who deserve to be the real beneficiaries of social development programmes. The forum must also help the government devise an efficient regulatory framework to facilitate the development sector instead of imposing a blanket ban on NGOs.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in Islamabad.

Email: ahnihal@yahoo.com