The Feasibility of Bottom-Up Development Issues
So first of all a very quick explanation of the Bottom-Up approach, so that you have something in your minds while I talk about Top Down.
For reasons that I’ll come back to later, its actually not that easy to give a quick definition of Bottom Up Development, but I’m going to try, so here is an imperfect definition that I’m not to be held to.
Bottom Up Development aims for the mobilisation of an area’s natural and human resources, in order to satisfy the needs of the inhabitants of that area, with decisions being made and power exercised at the lowest possible level at all times.
Probably the key point to bear in mind there is the emphasis on low-level decision-making. – I suppose it’s a bit like subsidiarity in that way.
OK, so in order to properly understand the Bottom-Up Approach, its necessary to understand it roots and what it grew as an alternative to – which is the traditional Top Down Approach - >also known as Development from Above.
Broadly stems from neo-classical economics, though in my opinion it carries a bit of modernisation theory to it. The basic tenet of the Top-Down Approach is that development in a relatively few dynamic sectors or geographical clusters, will spread, either in an induced or spontaneous way, to other areas. This is basically the idea that benefits will trickle down to the rest of the economy. Such strategies tend to be externally oriented, urban and industrial in nature and are criticised for often involving government decision-making without consultation of the local people.
The Top Down Approach has its own roots in a move away from balanced growth theories, which essentially held that every activity was to expand in step with all the others.
Unbalanced growth carried significant advantages over this style of development, most especially in that it provided for greater scope to induce investment. The rationale also held that with limited resources, it doesn’t make sense to try and sprinkle developmental investments thinly over a regional or national territory and so advocated “growth poles”.
It is close to the idea that a rising tide raises all boats.
The success of top-down development hinges on the trickle-down effects, such as new markets for the poorer areas’ agricultural products and raw materials and the diffusion of technical advances, outweighing what are known as the “backwash effects”, such as migration to urban areas and the flow of what capital there is in the hinterlands to the growth centres.
Unfortunately, experience would appear to show that the backwash tend to outweigh the trickle-down or spread effects. To a certain extent, success breeds success, and investment seems more secure in the established growth poles and the poorer areas just get left behind.
In order to aid the flow of trickle-down effects, Top-Down strategists have advocated the removal of social, cultural and institutional barriers. Inevitably this leads to an erosion of cultural diversity and, it can be argued, represents the subordination of cultural and societal values to economic ones.
Consequently, and we’ll be hearing more about this side of development on Alan’s topic, one of the heaviest criticisms of the Top Down Approach is that it fails to take into account the diversity of aspirations and value-systems which may exist between cultures, and instead imposes a uniform unconsultative notion of development.
So, just to recap – Top Down Development strategies place stress upon a few dynamic sectoral clusters and upon urban-industrial growth as the key to more generalised regional development.
Now I’ll move onto the alternative to this Bottom Up Development.
As I mentioned earlier, it can be difficult to pin down a definition or even specific description of Bottom-Up Development. One reason for the lack of as coherent a framework as Top Down possesses, is that it would need to be supported by a variety of disciplines, not just economics, and this necessarily adds to the difficulty. However, a more significant reason is that there may not be only one strategy of development from below. Instead, alternative strategies need to emerge from and be adapted to the requirements of different cultural areas. Bottom-Up Development needs to be closely related to specific socio-cultural, historical and institutional conditions of the country and region concerned. However, we can say that the basic objective e of bottom-up development is the full development of a regions natural resources and human skills. With this in mind Walter Stöhr offers eleven essential components for bottom-up development strategies, some of which tend towards the radical.
As I said, Stohr’s eleven components drift towards the radical and at some points read like a manifesto. This raises an interesting point about bottom-up development. It has been argues that bottom –up development is not a policy, but an ideology. Rather than a rigid set of policies, it is a way of looking at development. This is similar to the discussion last week about World Systems Theory being a perspective. There can certainly be no doubt that Stohr drifts into the realm of ideology and as we have established, the fact that policies of bottom-up development have to be created to suit the situation, certainly lends weight to its classification as an ideology.
Ok, finally now, I’m going to look at the feasibility of Bottom-Up Development.
I think the first thing to look at here is what we mean by feasible. Do we mean that a bottom-up initiative has to be successful and then it’s a feasible option? If that’s the case, that leads us to another problem, how do we then measure what success is? Does an initiative have to survive for two years or ten? Does it have to raise X amount of people’s living standards to the level of Y? Or do we mean that bottom-up development have to replace top-down development as the dominant paradigm?
If we consider that BUD has to compete with and aspire to replace the Tope Down approach, before it can be considered successful, then it has a hard fight ahead. TDD has been the dominant approach for forty years and has helped to cement centralised decision-making processes. It has naturally created vested interests which would strongly oppose any devolution of power to regional and local units. Indeed, it could be argued that due to the relatively artificial construct of many African states, centralised decision-making has been a necessary component of national unity and any moves to mobilise individual communities would be regarded with deep suspicion, for fear of encouraging ethnic secessionist tendencies.
Sergio Boisier lists three factors which render large-scale BUD unlikely:
So, we can conclude that with the entrenched position of the top-down approach and initial obstacles to the implementation of a comprehensive bottom-up strategy, BUD is unlikely to ever replace the Top Down approach.
But this does not mean that substantial benefits cannot be reaped from bottom up initiatives. There have been numerous bottom up initiatives that have palpably benefited the communities in which they started and provide shining examples of a successful bottom up approach, with one of the most famous being the Grameen Bank. Founded by Muhammed Yunnus to provide capital to the poor in Bangladesh, it now works in 35,000 or Bangladesh’s estimated 60,000 villages, and employs 14,000 people. The Grameen Bank is an excellent example of utilising regional resources for the benefit of the people in the region, and its model is now being replicated all over the world.
However, there are still dangers to be aware of with even smaller-scale bottom up development. IN attempting to incorporate local culture and build upon traditions, care must be taken that local elites are not re-enforced or exploitative groups established. This hints at a perilous underlying question for Western advocates of BUD. If a local community is to choose its won path of development, it may choose one which jars with conventional Western morality, for example, perhaps through the use of a caste structure. It would be grossly hypocritical to prescribe locally decided development initiatives, but only the ones that we say are suitable. This is a thorny moral issue for development theorists and one that is often left unspoken.
Perhaps the best way to utilise bottom-up development initiatives is in tandem with the top-down approach. Chung Tong Wu noted how effectively this strategy was utilised in rural China. Regional decision-making and self-reliance were contained within national support systems that were flexible enough to allow adaptation, adjustments and experimentation sympathetic to local needs. This twin approach seems to be the most rational. As a region or sector will do well or not depending on how it can respond to changing conditions and its own ability to utilise its resources, bottom-up development strategy can be said to leave things to chance to a certain degree. The alliance with more defined, centralised policies and support can help to remove some this element of chance.
In conclusion, who can assess the success and thereby the feasibility of a BUD initiative? An outside view of a society’s development may be different from an assessment made by the society itself and indeed, the values a society olds may change. However, BUD provides a community with the opportunity to adapt an initiative to suit their values or needs as they change. The ultimate success of such an initiative can only be judged by the community in question itself. It may be that it is a success in itself, to mobilise a community to strive together fro their own benefit in a manner as they see fit.